Why do people die?

In a purely physical sense it is usually easy to ascribe a cause of death: indeed, every death certificate is required to state the cause (or causes) of death. But Jewish tradition has long concerned itself with death in quite different ways. For one thing, it recognises a form of spiritual death, excision of a person's soul (sometimes referred to as the nefesh or neshamah). For another, on the premises that (i) no human being is devoid of sin and (ii) sin is a factor in the date and manner of a person's death, we recognise God's role in determining how long each of us should live and how we die.

There is a principle in :Pirkei Avot that one should judge other people on the basis of their merits (being don lekaf zechut: Avot 1:6). While this is of primary practical importance in evaluating the conduct of living people, there is every reason to apply it to judging the dead as well.  When a person dies, we cannot in general assess whether this is a punishment for misconduct or an acceleration of the process whereby a righteous person is united with his posthumous reward for good conduct. There are of course exceptions, such as when the Torah itself spells out the fact that a person has died for a particular reason (eg Korach, Kozbi and Zimri, the meraglim), but for the most part we must acknowledge that God, in His inscrutable wisdom and with all the facts before Him, is the sole possessor of an explanation as to why any person should die in a specific way, in any given time and place. Our task therefore is to try not to think to ourselves "he got his just desserts" or "he got what was coming to him", but rather to remember that every human is created in God's image and with the potential to do as much good as harm: we can only ever see a fraction of a person's actions in their lifetime and, if we cannot judge them fairly, we should at least try to give them the benefit of the doubt if we can.