Jeremy Rosen
Life After Death
Summary
Jeremy Rosen discusses the inevitability of death from a range of different positions and presents his conclusion as to how we should deal with 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.
Well, yes, it is, we’re built the way we are. We can see how we slowly deteriorate after our process of growing, and therefore I do think that we should accept that this is the world we’re living in. We live in a physical world and we should look at the physical world. My problem is that I believe there are other dimensions and there is more than just the physical world, and the function of religion is to get us to think about these other spiritual dimensions which are much less tangible and much more unstructured, but still play a part, just as emotions play a part in our lives and in our relationships. And therefore, 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 I’m sure many people intended it to be a kind of a threat. After all, that’s what, in a way, the Torah keeps on saying. If you keep God’s commandments, everything will be fine, and if you don’t, things will not be so fine, because the truth is everybody used to use and still does use bribery as a way of getting people to behave. They use it in different ways. But yes, people do try to bribe. Every parent tries to bribe in some way to get their child to behave. And most of us, in fact, behave very differently if there’s a policeman standing around. So in a sense, you could say God plays that role of the policeman.
Well, yes, the way heaven is used and hell is used, those terms are Christian terms. We don’t use ‘em in the same way and we mean something very different to what traditionally the Christian world meant by it.