S

andburg had it mostly right, we gather 
from Rabbi Benjamin Blech’
s com-
pelling new book, Hope, Not Fear: 
Changing the Way We View Death (Rowan 
& Littlefield Publishers). To Jewish mys-
tics, death is a promise, not a mockery, 
writes the rabbi. What happens to our dead 
selves — to our souls, anyway — is poetic, 
romantic even. This life is only a prelude, 
says Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), the 
anteroom before the afterlife.
Blech is a scholar, a professor of contem-
porary Jewish issues at Yeshiva University, 
but, in a conversation at his West Side 
apartment, he tells us, “I did not intend 
this [as] a book for scholars.
” Rather, at 139 
pages, without footnotes but with seven 
additional pages of suggested contempo-
rary readings, this slender but splendid 
book is conversational, an introduction 
to the subject for the ignorant (which is 
almost all of us). 
Death is almost never mentioned in 
classrooms or heard from pulpits. Most 
traditional Jews interviewed for this article 
doubted or didn’
t know if a dead per-

son was capable of hearing, though both 
Talmuds, Bavli and Yerushalmi, say the 
dead can.
The 85-year-old Blech writes with the 
excitement of a blind person suddenly able 
to see the aurora borealis. On every other 
page, it seems, he discovers Jewish ideas 
about death that are “fascinating,
” “remark-
able” and, after all, what is more fascinating 
and remarkable than being convinced that 
death is not the end, that our consciousness 
and souls survive?
“I intended this book to be helpful to 
people, all people,
” says the rabbi. The 
Torah itself is strangely coy about the after-
life, though hints are sprinkled throughout 
the Bible. The siddur is more explicit: The 
Amidah (Shmoneh Esrei), the only prayer 
recited morning, afternoon and night, 
states definitively, five times in the opening 
paragraphs alone, that God is “the resus-
citator of the dead,
” the One who “restores 
life,
” keeping His fidelity “to those who 
sleep in the dust.
” 
The preface to every chapter of Pirkei 
Avot states: “
All Israel has a share in the 
World to Come.
” Most prayer books 
include Maimonides’
 “Thirteen Principles 
of Faith,
” including the unambiguous affir-
mation: “I believe with complete faith that 
there will be a revival of the dead.
”
Blech, who writes a weekly column for 
Aish.com, and is the author of the New 
York Times best-seller The Sistine Secrets: 
Michelangelo’
s Forbidden Messages in the 

Heart of the Vatican, tells us, “To under-
stand death is to enter a realm that of 
necessity requires faith as a guide.
” Despite 
differing theologies, most religions, he says, 
“have somehow come to very similar con-
clusions: There is life after this life.
” (Hope, 
Not Fear has been endorsed by leaders of 
Yeshiva University, St. Peter’
s Seminary and 
the Islamic Center of Long Island).

RETHINKING DEATH
Religion and science may seem to be com-
ing at death from different directions, says 
Blech, but doctors who didn’
t believe in an 
afterlife are being forced to rethink that as 
medical advances have proved increasingly 
able to revive patients thought to be dead. 
“
At a medical conference in Houston, 
doctors told me there was a new hospital 
rule forbidding doctors, during or after 
surgery, from kibbitzing or telling jokes 
because there were people who ‘
died’
 for 20 
minutes, no heartbeat, no brainwaves, who 
were able to repeat everything the doctors 
said” — and the ‘
dead’
 didn’
t always appre-
ciate the doctors’
 wisecracks,
” Blech said.
Patients of almost all religions with near-
death experiences, a term that wasn’
t even 
used until the 1970s, “shared common 
experiences that were inexplicable and uni-
versally consistent,
” Blech says. 
In 1975, Dr. Raymond Moody wrote 
Life After Life, a book exploring what the 
near-dead described: a cessation of pain; 
an onset of peacefulness; an out-of-body 
experience, such as floating over one’
s own 
body; going through a “tunnel”; a mag-
netic, spiritual light force; a review of one’
s 
life; meeting relatives or mentors who were 
already dead (but never seeing a person 
that was still alive); a surge of love. 
In Israel, one of the newspapers did a 
big story on Moody’
s book in its weekend 
edition. After Shabbos, said Blech, a radio 
program featuring the then-chief rabbi of 
Tel Aviv was fielding call after call: What 
about that book? Is there any validity to it? 
Blech said the chief rabbi replied, “Not only 
does it have validity, this is what Judaism 
has been trying to teach the world for 
thousands of years.
”
In Genesis, the rabbi adds, “the first thing 
God created was light, but the sun wasn’
t 
created until Day 4. That first day’
s light 
was not light as we know it. Some say it was 
the [Heavenly] light we see when we die.
”
In Exodus, says Blech, “Moses asks to see 
God, who answers, ‘
Man cannot see Me 
and live.
’
 In other words, you will see God 
[when you will live no more].
”
Blech cited the eulogy given for Apple’
s 
Steve Jobs by his sister. Just before Jobs 
died, she said, he looked at his loved ones, 

28 January 17 • 2019
jn

continued on page 29

JONATHAN MARK SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

books
arts&life

“Under the harvest moon,
 when the soft
 silver
Drips shimmering over
 the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
 comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend who remembers.
”
— Carl Sandburg

New book by Rabbi 
Benjamin Blech 
challenges common 
ideas about death.

Other Side 

of Dying

The

KOREN PUBLISHING JERUSALEM

Benjamin 

Blech

