By Cody Ellerd

If you’ve written your will, then you know what will happen after you’re gone, to your house, jewelry and other objects of value you’ve collected over the years.

But what about the rest — things you’ve learned and important values you hope will live on among your loved ones after you die?

As people think about the legacy they will leave, there is a growing interest in supplementing the financial will with an ethical will — a non-legal record of your values that you hope to leave to younger generations.

“Passing on our wisdom is as important as passing on our money,” said Don Armstrong of Jewish Family Service. He is conducting an upcoming workshop on writing ethical wills this week at the Jewish Community Center.

Writing an ethical will not only communicates important things a person hopes will be remembered about them, but gives them a sense of their own lives in terms of how much they’ve grown and gained, said Armstrong, JFS’s director of aging & disability services.

Each will’s content is unique to its author. It might include anything from an important lesson learned in life to specific burial instructions.

Although Jews and people older than 50 are the primary authors of ethical wills, the practice is by no means limited to these groups. It is also popular among evangelical Christians and Muslims, said Armstrong, who encourages people in their 20s, 30s and 40s to think about starting a will that they can revisit and add to as they grow older.

Landmark events in the life of a couple, such as the birth of a child, present a good opportunity to write ethical wills to clarify values as the couple enters new life phases.

Julie Zander, a personal historian who helps people write ethical wills, created her own in June as a letter to her two children, ages 10 and 4.

“As an older mom with young children, I want to know that if something happens to me, they’ll still be able to find guidance from me by reviewing the values I cherish,” she Zander, who is a 45-year-old Catholic.

“Although life may seem tough at times, and you may falter and wonder why you bother at all, know that God has a reason for the troubles you’re enduring,” Zander wrote in her ethical will. She admonishes her children against turning to cigarettes, alcohol, material goods and food for comfort, or to suicide as a way out.

The tradition of ethical wills can be traced back about 3,000 years to the Hebrew Bible, in which Jacob’s blessings are recited to his sons. The Christian Bible refers to ethical wills as well, in John, chapters 15-18. Armstrong said that they became very common among European Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages.

After a modern decline, there has been a renewed interest nationwide in the practice, Armstrong and others say.

Dr. Barry Baines, the medical director of a Minnesota hospice program who also runs a Web site devoted to ethical wills, said that when he started his site in 1999, he averaged around 70 to 100 hits per day. He is now getting between 900 and 1,000.

Many theories are offered to explain the growth. One reason for interest by Jewish people may be that early in the last century, as many Jews came to the United States, they tried to acclimatize and become “good Americans,” said Armstrong. “Now that we’re comfortable being American,” he said, “people are going back to becoming good Jews.”

Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum of Mercer Island’s Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation suggested that part of going back to tradition entails seeking out practices that have application in today’s world, such as creating ethical wills.

Another possibility of a more universal and secular nature is that there have been large events in recent history, such as the World Trade Center attack, that have caused people to stop, think and focus on what’s most important. Baines reports that visits to his Web site, www.ethicalwill.com, doubled after Sept. 11, 2001.

“Typically it comes back to family values,” said Stacy Allred, a Merrill Lynch estate planner in Bellevue who has her clients write ethical wills. She said that when she asks her clients, most of whom are extremely wealthy, if they had to choose between passing on their money and passing on their values, the values win. In helping her clients craft their financial legacies, she has found that clarifying ethical values makes estate planning much easier.

Allred said her six-hour “values retreats” often move people more than they expect.

“Have a box of Kleenex ready when you’re doing an ethical will. It’s emotional and important,” she said.

This cathartic way of establishing a legacy is something that Allred said is really catching on. While one popular means of incorporating values into a financial legacy is to establish a foundation for a particular cause or charity, writing an ethical will is a more intimate act that carries important messages for loved ones.

Also, the technology age has made the creation of an ethical will easier than ever. It can take the form of a video, DVD or printed document. Desktop publishing allows for easy reproduction and distribution to the will’s recipients. There is even software available that guides people through the process of writing an ethical will and offers different templates and preservation options.

Armstrong said that he hopes his Mercer Island workshop, which is open to Jews, non-Jews and people of all ages, will continue to fuel interest in ethical wills. If response is high, he would like to go beyond the basics covered by the workshop and create a class that will carry people all the way through the process to publishing and distribution.

“Anybody can do it,” Armstrong said. “It’s very universal.”