The Hebrew ethical well is not mere valediction but…

The Hebrew ethical well is not mere valediction but an audacious attempt at continuing speech from fathers in the grave to children in a reckless world.

— from The Air Traffic Controller (God)

In the book

Of the three, the last is the one I most want you to audit honestly — look at how much of your time you actually give to it, because it is the foundation of the whole fortress, the support system that holds up everything else. Let me leave you, then, the way the fathers of our people have always left their children — not with property, but with a charge, the kind of ethical will that is really just a father's voice trying to keep speaking to his children after he is gone. My days have taught me their hard lessons, and time itself has been my reproof; take, then, a father's admonition, offered from a heart that loves you — for who will ever be as tender to you, or teach you out of as much goodwill, as the one who raised you? — The Air Traffic Controller (God)

An ethical will has never been a lawyer's document for dividing property. It is something older and stranger — as one writer beautifully put it, an audacious attempt at continuing speech from fathers in the grave to children in a reckless world. Behind it sits a question no hired hand can answer for you: who will ever be as tender to you as I have been, who will take my place to teach you out of love and goodwill? — Legacy / The Logbook (Legacy/Epilogue)

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