Rating: 
Summary: The blind leading the visually impaired
Review: How should one respond to a Jew who suddenly "discovers" that Judaism speaks of a soul which survives death, encompasses reincarnation and recognizes the existence of telepathy? Hello!? Good morning!? Welcome back!?And if that Jew is a rabbi? From the book's opening chapter, in which Elie Spitz describes his fear of being called gullible and foolish for telling colleagues at a 1996 "Sermon Seminar for Rabbis" in Los Angeles that he now believes in the survival of the soul, the reader doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. The extended account of how he came to such a "radical" view begins with a journey through California's "New Age" religions, complete with its mediums, get-in-touch-with-your-inner-wholeness retreats, mind readers and channellers. During this time, the author gets kindergarten-level exposure to truths that Judaism has recognized and explored in depth for millennia. He receives "bona fide" messages from dead grandparents, hears weird and amazing tales of near-death experiences and wittnesses proof of telepathy. In all this, Spitz, notwithstanding his professions of scepticism, reveals himself as an "easy mark" -- and why? Because these "revelations" are coming from the very citadel of secular humanist culture! It is only when he decides to look into the "traditional" Jewish sources -- as if the wisdom of countless sages accumulated over dozens of centuries could be assimilated and judged in a matter of weeks or months -- that Rabbi Spitz displays anything resembling scholarly reticence. But even when the overwhelming evidence he encounters in his superficial overview convinces him that immortality of the soul and reincarnation are indeed traditional concepts in Judaism (so "open minded" is he that he even considers (gasp!) hassidic sources) he concludes that, yes, the age-old tenets of Judaism are confirmed and validated by the flavor of the week in the "golly gee whiz" cultural marketplace where he lives. His discussion of biblical and Talmudic references reflects a not-surprising Conservative confusion as to whether God made man or man makes God, and a typical arrogance in placing his own group's 300-year-old "modern and post-modern scholarship" on the same level as the "pre-modern" teachings that are rooted in the Revelation at Sinai. A typical passage: "A faith in survival of the soul adds greater urgency to living our days meaningfully, which is aided by like-mided friends. Just as our soul needs a body as a vessel of expression, so our body and soul gain from the grounding and reinforcement of a religious community and the tools of a particular, coherent tradition. Adherence to a specific religion is not the end of the religious journey, but a home from which to interact in the larger world. .... As inheritors of an ancient heritage, Jews are members of an extended family in pursuit of holy living. When we live with a faith in our people's covenant, we gain purpose. When we respond to God's call we serve as God's partner in completing creation.... As soul work gains importance, Jews will look to find tools and community that are offered by Jewish involvement." Considering the spiritual emptiness of his environment, the naivity of his questions and the superficial nature of his "proofs" one cannot be surprised at the decidedly obvious nature of his conclusion: "Live now, gratefully and responsibly." Yes indeedy, all you brothers, sisters and highly evolved beings! Judaism's kewl! Judaism's hip! Judaism's, like, WOW! Here's the proof!
Rating: 
Summary: I Couldn't put it down!!
Review: I have begun to get interested in the afterlife, after reading some of Sylvia Brown's books. Since I was Jewish, I wanted to really know if the soul survives death. This book is a must-read for any person who is intrigued by the possiblity of life after death. I found many of the things said in the book correlated with the ideas of Sylvia Brown and Gary Zukov. The author delved deeply into the many facets of afterlife, and includes his own personal experiences, which are really interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction to Jewish Views of the Afterlife
Review: I was moved to write this FIVE STAR review after reading the review of Gershom Gale, which was highly critical of this title. Following is my view of why this book is a valuable addition to the libraries of those who wish to know more about various concepts of life after death from a Jewish perspective. Rabbi Spitz's book is meaningful for many, precisely BECAUSE Rabbi Spitz comes from a rationalist background that is highly skeptical of the notion of life after death. Like many contemporary readers, Rabbi Spitz has begun to question a worldview that embraces the purely empirical at the expense of the metaphysical. Rabbi Spitz's questioning has led him to explore the teachings of traditional Judaism on life after death, and he finds much to embrace and admire therein. Rabbi Spitz's journey mirrors a journey that many Jews and non-Jews are undertaking, and his candor and scholarship deserve plaudits. People of all faiths will find this book provocative, and the book is particularly useful for Jews who were brought up in a secular tradition, but who wonder if the soul survives death. If you are building a library about spiritual beliefs on the concept of life after death, or a library on the diversity of Jewish beliefs on this subject, buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Written with complete candor and impressive scholarship
Review: In Does The Soul Survive?: A Jewish Journey To Belief In Afterlife, Past Lives & Living With Purpose, Rabbi Elie Spitz writes with complete candor and impressive scholarship about his belief in telepathy, near-death experiences, communications with those who have died, past life regression, and reincarnation as being within the scope and compass of Jewish tradition and teaching regarding the continuance of the soul beyond a physical death. Rabbie Spitz examines all the arguments, pro and con, regarding these issues from a thoroughly Judaic perspective. Enhanced for the reader with an appendix presenting a comprehensive view of what Torah and Jewish scholars throughout the ages have had to say regarding the immortality of the soul, Does The Soul Survive? is informative, challenging, at times controversial, but thought provoking and firmly grounded in Jewish scholarship.
Rating:
Summary: Written with complete candor and impressive scholarship
Review: In Does The Soul Survive?: A Jewish Journey To Belief In Afterlife, Past Lives & Living With Purpose, Rabbi Elie Spitz writes with complete candor and impressive scholarship about his belief in telepathy, near-death experiences, communications with those who have died, past life regression, and reincarnation as being within the scope and compass of Jewish tradition and teaching regarding the continuance of the soul beyond a physical death. Rabbie Spitz examines all the arguments, pro and con, regarding these issues from a thoroughly Judaic perspective. Enhanced for the reader with an appendix presenting a comprehensive view of what Torah and Jewish scholars throughout the ages have had to say regarding the immortality of the soul, Does The Soul Survive? is informative, challenging, at times controversial, but thought provoking and firmly grounded in Jewish scholarship.
Rating:
Summary: Meaningful Book on the Subject of the Afterlife
Review: It was early on a Sunday morning. My father was in Seattle, lying in a hospital bed, recovering from open-heart surgery. I was in Southern California, at the synagogue where I work, opening up the building for religious school. The sanctuary at our synagogue, when it is not being used for worship services, becomes a multipurpose room. A special family learning experience was scheduled to take place in it that morning for students and their parents. As I opened the sanctuary doors, anger flowed through my veins when I saw that the room was not set up the way it needed to be. Did I forget to give the custodian directions on how the room needed to be set up? Or, did the custodian just mess up? I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, and began moving chairs and tables. Sweat started dripping on my forehead. In the corner of the room, I saw my father sitting in a chair dressed in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. I immediately walked over to him and engaged him in a conversation, which was really an argument. For some unknown reason, I did not inquire about his health but felt the need to talk with him at that particular moment about a painful childhood memory, a memory that I was surprised to remember. A few hours later that same morning, as I walked into my office, the phone rang. It was the baby sitter who was with our children. She said she had an emergency message, that I needed to call my brother immediately. My brother was not home. His wife answered the phone. She gave me the message. My father died that morning. When I tell people about the conversation I had with my father that morning, they respond in one of two ways. They think I was either hallucinating or that I actually encountered my father's soul. That week, my thoughts centered on my father's condition. The combination of mental exhaustion (from worrying about him,) physical tiredness (from being up early in the morning,) and anger (at the room not being set up correctly,) led my mind to imagine a mystical encounter. On the other hand, there is an idea of Gehenna (Hebrew for "hell") in Jewish tradition. Unlike the Christian notion of eternal damnation, Gehenna is only a temporary state. At death, the soul departs from the body and goes to Gehenna, a process of purification where the individual confronts his or her sins and atones for them. After this real Yom Kippur, the soul then either returns from Gehenna to the world in another life (reincarnation) or goes to heaven to be with the Divine. Perhaps our encounter that morning had something to do with this mystery. Since this experience, I have engaged in many conversations about the afterlife. I have become open, in these discussions, to the possible belief that our souls are eternal, that our souls existed in a previous life, and that our souls will be transferred into another life after we die. Elie Spitz, the spiritual leader at Congregation B'nai Israel in Tustin, California in his new book Does the Soul Survivie? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives, and Living with Purpose agrees with this possibility. He recognizes, as a practicing pulpit rabbi, the potential comfort that belief in the afterlife and past lives can provide. He feels, in his heart and mind, that this belief is true. Throughout the book, Spits searches Jewish tradition for evidence about the eternity of the soul. He interprets the possible existence of the soul's eternity in various Biblical texts and analyzes the type of afterlife and previous life existence of the soul that is presented in various rabbinic and other post-biblical literary sources. He also shares personal experiences that validate to him this existence. To find evidence that a soul could have a previous life, Spitz meets with Dr. Brian Weiss, a Columbia University and Yale Medical School graduate who is chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami and author of the book, Many Lives, Many Masters. Weiss has become famous using therapeutic techniques of hypnosis to get individuals to speak foreign languages that they have never learned, to describe areas of the world that they have never visited, and to share personal accounts of previous time periods that historians later believe are authentic. Weiss's evidence is not only documented in his research, but observed and experienced first hand by Spitz. Spitz, in recollecting about various life experiences and through hypnosis conducted on himself, comes to the belief that his own soul occupied a previous life. The detail in which he can describe that previous life, and how that previous life influences his existence today, is persuasive. The evidence that Spitz shares about the afterlife is equally persuasive. In gathering this evidence, the author and his wife encounter James Van Praagh, a psychic and best selling author who's works as a medium communicating with the souls of the departed goes well beyond the realm of mere coincidence. In the ending of the book, Spitz shares how his belief in the afterlife has benefited him as a pulpit rabbi. He shares a first hand account of how he was able to comfort, in a hospice situation, both a congregational member before she breathed her last breath and her loved ones who observed that last breath. Without a belief in life beyond this world, he would never have possessed the resources at that moment to console. "Faith," Spitz writes, "in the survival of the soul might lead to magical thinking, the belief in an ability to defy reality and an unrealistic holding on to departed loved ones. But when responsibly approached, faith in the survival of the soul can also be an important source of affirmation and comfort. Like love, such faith is dangerous but no less real." In Does the Soul Survive, Spitz does a masterful job demonstrating how this subject can be approached in a responsible manner and how affirmation and comfort can be extracted from that approach. Elliot Fein teaches Jewish Religious Studies at the Tarbut V'Torah School in Irvine, California.
Rating:
Summary: Meaningful Book on the Subject of the Afterlife
Review: It was early on a Sunday morning. My father was in Seattle, lying in a hospital bed, recovering from open-heart surgery. I was in Southern California, at the synagogue where I work, opening up the building for religious school. The sanctuary at our synagogue, when it is not being used for worship services, becomes a multipurpose room. A special family learning experience was scheduled to take place in it that morning for students and their parents. As I opened the sanctuary doors, anger flowed through my veins when I saw that the room was not set up the way it needed to be. Did I forget to give the custodian directions on how the room needed to be set up? Or, did the custodian just mess up? I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, and began moving chairs and tables. Sweat started dripping on my forehead. In the corner of the room, I saw my father sitting in a chair dressed in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. I immediately walked over to him and engaged him in a conversation, which was really an argument. For some unknown reason, I did not inquire about his health but felt the need to talk with him at that particular moment about a painful childhood memory, a memory that I was surprised to remember. A few hours later that same morning, as I walked into my office, the phone rang. It was the baby sitter who was with our children. She said she had an emergency message, that I needed to call my brother immediately. My brother was not home. His wife answered the phone. She gave me the message. My father died that morning. When I tell people about the conversation I had with my father that morning, they respond in one of two ways. They think I was either hallucinating or that I actually encountered my father's soul. That week, my thoughts centered on my father's condition. The combination of mental exhaustion (from worrying about him,) physical tiredness (from being up early in the morning,) and anger (at the room not being set up correctly,) led my mind to imagine a mystical encounter. On the other hand, there is an idea of Gehenna (Hebrew for "hell") in Jewish tradition. Unlike the Christian notion of eternal damnation, Gehenna is only a temporary state. At death, the soul departs from the body and goes to Gehenna, a process of purification where the individual confronts his or her sins and atones for them. After this real Yom Kippur, the soul then either returns from Gehenna to the world in another life (reincarnation) or goes to heaven to be with the Divine. Perhaps our encounter that morning had something to do with this mystery. Since this experience, I have engaged in many conversations about the afterlife. I have become open, in these discussions, to the possible belief that our souls are eternal, that our souls existed in a previous life, and that our souls will be transferred into another life after we die. Elie Spitz, the spiritual leader at Congregation B'nai Israel in Tustin, California in his new book Does the Soul Survivie? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives, and Living with Purpose agrees with this possibility. He recognizes, as a practicing pulpit rabbi, the potential comfort that belief in the afterlife and past lives can provide. He feels, in his heart and mind, that this belief is true. Throughout the book, Spits searches Jewish tradition for evidence about the eternity of the soul. He interprets the possible existence of the soul's eternity in various Biblical texts and analyzes the type of afterlife and previous life existence of the soul that is presented in various rabbinic and other post-biblical literary sources. He also shares personal experiences that validate to him this existence. To find evidence that a soul could have a previous life, Spitz meets with Dr. Brian Weiss, a Columbia University and Yale Medical School graduate who is chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami and author of the book, Many Lives, Many Masters. Weiss has become famous using therapeutic techniques of hypnosis to get individuals to speak foreign languages that they have never learned, to describe areas of the world that they have never visited, and to share personal accounts of previous time periods that historians later believe are authentic. Weiss's evidence is not only documented in his research, but observed and experienced first hand by Spitz. Spitz, in recollecting about various life experiences and through hypnosis conducted on himself, comes to the belief that his own soul occupied a previous life. The detail in which he can describe that previous life, and how that previous life influences his existence today, is persuasive. The evidence that Spitz shares about the afterlife is equally persuasive. In gathering this evidence, the author and his wife encounter James Van Praagh, a psychic and best selling author who's works as a medium communicating with the souls of the departed goes well beyond the realm of mere coincidence. In the ending of the book, Spitz shares how his belief in the afterlife has benefited him as a pulpit rabbi. He shares a first hand account of how he was able to comfort, in a hospice situation, both a congregational member before she breathed her last breath and her loved ones who observed that last breath. Without a belief in life beyond this world, he would never have possessed the resources at that moment to console. "Faith," Spitz writes, "in the survival of the soul might lead to magical thinking, the belief in an ability to defy reality and an unrealistic holding on to departed loved ones. But when responsibly approached, faith in the survival of the soul can also be an important source of affirmation and comfort. Like love, such faith is dangerous but no less real." In Does the Soul Survive, Spitz does a masterful job demonstrating how this subject can be approached in a responsible manner and how affirmation and comfort can be extracted from that approach. Elliot Fein teaches Jewish Religious Studies at the Tarbut V'Torah School in Irvine, California.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing and Insightful!
Review: Rabbi Spitz (a member of the Conservative movement's law committee, so he's no wacko) weaves a fascinating personal narrative throughout this insightful and thoughtful look at the possibility of soul survival. He shows how he has learned from his own experiences, and the experiences of his congregants and other rabbis, that there IS life after life. Not only well written, but persuasive. Most important, I think, Rabbi Spitz shows how belief in the afterlife can show us how to live more profound lives today, in the here and now.
Rating: 
Summary: Important Book, but Missed Opportunity
Review: Rabbi Spitz has given us a sincere, openminded account of his exploration into the immortality of the soul. It brings together the Jewish point of view on soul experiences in a very personal, thoughtful way. I hope that it introduces Jewish people to the subjects of reincarnation and the afterlife in a rational and convincing manner. However, it fails to explore the experiences and the findings of the Jewish-Christians of the beginnings of Common Era (A.D.) and thereafter. There are many books written that introduce Christians to the concepts of reincarnation that would have been helpful to Spitz's study. For any who would read further in the exploration of these matters, the most profound study of reincarnation is the Karmic Relations lectures of Rudolf Steiner, available through the Anthroposohic Press. Steiner is compatible with Kabbalahistic practioners. Among the most prominent followers of Steiner were Orthodox Jews.
Rating:
Summary: Important Book, but Missed Opportunity
Review: Rabbi Spitz has given us a sincere, openminded account of his exploration into the immortality of the soul. It brings together the Jewish point of view on soul experiences in a very personal, thoughtful way. I hope that it introduces Jewish people to the subjects of reincarnation and the afterlife in a rational and convincing manner. However, it fails to explore the experiences and the findings of the Jewish-Christians of the beginnings of Common Era (A.D.) and thereafter. There are many books written that introduce Christians to the concepts of reincarnation that would have been helpful to Spitz's study. For any who would read further in the exploration of these matters, the most profound study of reincarnation is the Karmic Relations lectures of Rudolf Steiner, available through the Anthroposohic Press. Steiner is compatible with Kabbalahistic practioners. Among the most prominent followers of Steiner were Orthodox Jews.
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