Jeremy Rosen
Life After Death
Summary
The concept of death is a universal aspect of human existence that becomes increasingly relevant as people age. The perspective on death varies among individuals, with some fearing it, some accepting it, and others focusing more on the challenges leading up to death, such as illness and infirmity. Jeremy Rosen explores the idea of death from various angles and eventually draw conclusions about how to approach it.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Yes I think there always was existential anxiety about death, but I don’t think that is essentially part of an authentic Jewish way of looking at life. A lot of people do feel angst because we’ve been influenced by the Christian notion of hell, purgatory and death.
Yes, it is. I think that we should accept that we live in a physical world but the function of religion is to get us to think about these other spiritual dimensions. I do not like to claim only a rational perspective, because I think that misses so much art of life, which is why I do believe one needs to combine the rational with the spiritual.
I’m sure it was at some stage and that many people intended it to be a kind of a threat. After all, that’s what the Torah keeps on saying. If you keep God’s commandments, everything will be fine. The truth is everybody used to use and still does use bribery as a way of getting people to behave.
We should be good because it’s the right thing to do. If some people need God to nudge them, that’s a different matter, but ideally, we do it because it’s the right thing to do, either as a Jew or as a person who doesn’t believe in God.