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Confronting Mortality

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Confronting Mortality BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS Destined for greatness Confronting mortality The latest Churchill biography manages to be both engaging and scrupulously researched Rabbi Benjamin Blech has penned a personal refection on being diagnosed with a fatal disease • NEVILLE TELLER • ALAN ROSENBAUM HOW CAN you know when your hroughout his long life, Winston Churchill was con- time is up? (Jeff Durham/MCT) vinced he was destined for historic greatness. At 16, hat do you do when told you are going to die? he predicted to a school friend that he would one day Six years ago, Rabbi Benjamin Blech, a “save London and England from disaster... in the high best-selling author, columnist, lecturer and position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the Talmud professor, was informed that he was Tcapital and the Empire.” suffering from cardiac amyloidosis, a fatal and Half a century later, on May 10, 1940, just as Hitler was un- Wincurable disease. Blech, who had been a communal rabbi for leashing his blitzkrieg on Western Europe, events propelled almost 40 years and had helped congregants with their predic- Churchill into 10 Downing Street as Britain’s prime minister. In aments, now had to deal with his own personal crisis. Hope, Not his war memoirs, he wrote: “I felt as if I were walking with desti- Fear is his eloquent and personal response, in which he discusses ny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this his views on the fear of dying, death, life after death, and evi- hour and this trial.” dence for the existence of an afterlife, drawn from biblical, med- In Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Andrew Roberts achieves ical and anecdotal sources, and Jewish mysticism. the rare distinction of producing an eminently readable book While Blech explains that this book is not intended to be a underpinned by scrupulous academic scholarship. It is an ab- specifcally Jewish response to the subject but, rather, his own sorbing read – a complete, documented account of an extraordi- personal refections, Jewish readers will appreciate the numer- narily rich and historically signifcant life lived to the full. ous talmudic, midrashic and kabbalistic sources that are cited It was the British class system, Roberts believes, allied to Chur- throughout the book. chill’s innate resilience, that provided the wherewithal to over- At the outset, Blech explains that an awareness of death can come a desperately unhappy and emotionally deprived child- spur people to spend their time wisely. Understanding that we hood. Churchill was born into the aristocracy – the grandson of will all die someday is not morbid, he writes, but liberating, as the seventh Duke of Marlborough – and, as Roberts puts it, had it frees us from being enslaved to the less important things in the “unconquerable self-confdence of his caste.” Perverse by life. He cites various Jewish traditions that serve to remind us of nature, and almost totally indifferent to what the world thought this eventuality, such as the wearing on the High Holy Days of of him, Churchill sailed through, or rose above, a myriad of per- the kittel, the white robe which is similar to the white shrouds in sonal and political disasters. which the deceased are buried. He also quotes the well-known Not the least of these, of course, was the fact that as he became Talmudic statement attributed to Rabbi Eliezer, “Repent one prime minister, Britain faced the imminent prospect of invasion day before your death.” When his disciples asked him how they and defeat by the Nazis. Somehow Churchill managed to ral- could possibly know when that day would come, he replied, “For ly his colleagues, and eventually the whole nation, and imbue that reason we must live each day as though it were our last.” them with his own courage, resolution and self-belief. WINSTON CHURCHILL (Yousuf Karsh) Blech points out that the belief in an afterlife has long been a Roberts, himself a founder member of the international part of Judaism’s oral tradition. Friends of Israel Initiative, is perhaps more alive to Churchill’s Turning to the Bible, he notes the lack of acknowledgment of “philo-Semitism,” as he puts it, than other biographers have ing, he devolved Iraq and a newly conceived Transjordan to the an afterlife in the text. Some explain that this was because it was been. As a young man on the brink of his parliamentary ca- charge of Arab emirs. Carving Transjordan out of the area previ- patently obvious to those living in biblical times that there is reer, Churchill refused to subscribe to the well-nigh universal ously known as Palestine was problematic, since the League had an afterlife. Others explain that the omission was purposeful, to more controversial and problematic extension of this belief, antisemitism of his peers. On the contrary, says Roberts, back- mandated Britain to create a national home for the Jewish peo- illustrate Judaism’s emphasis as a religion of life, rather than a mentioned by Blech, is that the numerous returnees to faith of ing his assertion with facts and fgures, he was an active Zionist ple in Palestine as understood at the time. death cult, which was common in ancient times. this generation (ba’alei tshuva) may be the reincarnated souls of then, and remained so throughout his life. Nevertheless, Churchill stood staunchly by his belief in Jewish To buttress the belief in life after death, Blech presents the the six million who perished in the Holocaust. Churchill was elected to Parliament for the frst time in 1900. self-determination. phenomenon known as near-death experience, in which indi- While some Jewish authorities believe in reincarnation, it Returning a national hero from the Boer War because of his dare- “It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a viduals close to death, whose heartbeat and brain activity had would have been useful to mention that there are numerous re- CHURCHILL: WALKING devil exploits, recounted to the nation in his newspaper articles, national center and a national home in which they might be ceased, reported experiencing out-of-body experiences while spected rabbinic authorities who did not consider it to be an ex- HOPE, NOT FEAR WITH DESTINY he stood for Parliament as a Conservative. Three years later, out reunited, and where else but in Palestine, with which Jews for they were clinically dead, including feelings of serenity and pression of authentic Jewish belief, such as Saadia Gaon, Rabbi By Rabbi Benjamin Blech By Andrew Roberts of step with his party on several issues, he changed sides and three thousand years have been intimately and profoundly as- warmth, meeting deceased relatives and friends, and detach- Joseph Albo and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Rowman & Littlefeld Viking moved across the House of Commons to sit with the Liberals. sociated?” he wrote. ment from their body before being “called back” to life in this Miraculously, Blech has lived for six years since receiving his Publishers 1,152 pages; $40 On the day he did so, Churchill published a letter in The Jew- world. Blech cites these reported experiences as proof that there diagnosis of terminal illness. As a result, he devotes the book’s 168 pages; $32 ish Chronicle, The Times and The Manchester Guardian, explaining THE UNITED STATES recognized the new State of Israel on the is indeed some form of existence after death. While he acknowl- fnal chapter to the fve major life lessons that he has learned the particular issue that lay behind his change of allegiance. The very day it was created – May 14, 1948. Britain’s Labour gov- edges that the evidence to date is anecdotal, he mentions var- since then. He discusses the power of faith, which is the most government’s Aliens Bill was intended to restrict the immigra- ernment waited a full year before granting recognition, but ious studies that support these claims, including reports from powerful medicine we have; the power of purpose, which is the tion into Britain of Jews escaping from pogroms in czarist Rus- Churchill himself, speaking to a Jewish audience in New York previously skeptical doctors who themselves had NDE experi- need to identify what we can contribute to society; the power of sia, and Churchill refused to support it. He believed the policy in March 1949, said “I was for a free and independent Israel all ences, which indicate that there is some type of spiritual exis- optimism, which he writes “is nothing short of a divine com- was an appeal to prejudice. through the dark years... so do not imagine for a moment that I tence beyond this world. mandment”; the power of recognizing the miracles that we wit- Roberts believes Churchill’s affnity for the Jewish people have the slightest idea of deserting you in your hour of glory.” Blech describes his understanding of heaven and hell, explain- ness daily; and the power of prayer. stemmed from his father, who had had a wide circle of Jewish Churchill returned as prime minister in 1951 – a national hero ing that since Judaism posits that there is no corporeal existence “Prayer,” he writes, “doesn’t come to change God. It comes to friends, and both admired Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s frst but, at 77 and after several strokes, well past his prime. Roberts after death, God’s heavenly rewards will provide recipients with change us.” prime minister to have been born Jewish. Churchill applaud- described it as his “Indian summer premiership.” He saw the some form of indescribable happiness. While for Maimonides Hope, Not Fear is liberally sprinkled with quotations and tales ed the Balfour Declaration, which, issued in November 1917, 25-year-old Elizabeth crowned queen in 1953, and fnally hand- sharing the radiance of the Divine Presence meant the joy of from Jewish sources and includes many quotations and aph- expressed Britain’s support for a Jewish national home in what ed over the reins of government in April 1955.
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