Address Important Ethical
Issues in an Ethical Will

What ethical issues are you concerned about? Do you wish to preserve a family tradition or an aspect of your culture? Are you concerned about some cause in your community or in the world? Do you hold important moral values and principles that you would like to share with others? Your Ethical Will can help you ensure that your spiritual legacy has a lasting impact. The ethical will is an excellent way to discuss ethical issues in a way that will profoundly enhance your life and the lives of those around you.

You need not wait until your last days to harness the benefits of writing an ethical will. Getting started now can help stimulate important discussions of ethical issues with your family and friends and go a long way toward fostering mutual understanding and improving relationships. Making a personal legacy statement through composing an ethical essay or ethical letters, writing memoirs, or creating a video ethical will can help your loved ones understand what you deeply believe and what leads you to act the way you do.

Your ethical will can address ethical issues in any field of life where you play an important part: your family, your career, your community, your social organizations, your circle of friends, or your nation, religion, and culture. An ethical will might be private, addressed only to a small number of people close to you; or you can prepare an ethical will that speaks to the general public and seeks to reach out to many people in an effort to make a difference.

Take some time to ponder the ethical issues you care about and put your thoughts into some lasting medium: a written personal legacy document, an audio recording, or a video ethical will. If you take care to preserve your ethical will by purchasing quality paper or a high-quality DVD, your ethical values can last and affect people for decades and centuries to come. Consider making multiple copies of the ethical will and keeping backup versions on computers or on the Internet.

The ethical issues expressed by Theodor Herzl in his ethical will inspired the founding of Israel decades after Herzl's death. Other Hebrew ethical wills from the Bible, such as Jacob's final words to his twelve sons, shaped the entire course of Jewish history for centuries afterward. The moral values and spiritual legacy expressed in your ethical will can animate the hearts and minds of others generations into the future.

You need not write your ethical will all at once. If you have a busy schedule, just take fifteen or thirty minutes each day to think about the ethical issues you would like to address and how best to express them. Write a little bit at a time; it will add up over days and weeks. And don't hesitate to add to or revise your ethical will after you finish the initial version. As you experience changes in your life and come to new realizations regarding crucial ethical issues, share what you learn in the ethical will!