In the third edition of Jewish Views of the Afterlife, Rabbi Simcha Paull Raphael walks readers through the Jewish tradition of the afterlife while providing insights into spiritual care with dying and grieving individuals and families.

Dying is not a moment at the end of life, but instead a path lined with opportunities to reflect, explore, and contemplate. In an insightful guidebook on the meaning of death, Rabbi Ariel Stone shares spiritual commentary, Jewish stories, and other writings that provide information and inspiration about the process of death as seen through the prism of Jewish learning and culture. Through stories of those who have gone before us and a step-by-step process that addresses the spiritual significance of death, Stone offers ways to think, feel, and wonder about death while inviting the dying to overcome fears and view the end of earthly life as an opportunity to repent, reflect on the influence we have upon others, and find peace as our light merges with the eternal light. The Alef-Bet of Death: Dying as a Jew? is a valuable guide that teaches the meaning of death in the Jewish tradition while offering clarity, light, and comfort to those walking the often vague and dark path to dying.

Jewish rituals customs and teachings that honour the dead and comfort the living are explored by a broad spectrum of contemporary writers who recount their own experiences at times of loss and grief. A helpful sensitively complied book that provides both guidance and solace.

This account of the traditional customs that are practiced when a Jewish person dies provides an anthropological perspective on Jewish rites of mourning, and explains the cultural meaning behind Jewish practices and traditions.

Jewish customs and traditions about death, burial and mourning are numerous, diverse and intriguing. They are considered by many to have a respectable pedigree that goes back to the earliest rabbinic period. In order to examine the accurate historical origins of many of them, an international conference was held at Tel Aviv University in 2010 and experts dealt with many aspects of the topic. This volume includes most of the papers given then, as well as a few added later. What emerges are a wealth of fresh material and perspectives, as well as the realization that the high Middle Ages saw a set of exceptional innovations, some of which later became central to traditional Judaism while others were gradually abandoned. Were these innovations influenced by Christian practice? Which prayers and poems reflect these innovations? What do the sources tell us about changing attitudes to death and life-after death? Are tombstones an important guide to historical developments? Answers to these questions are to be found in this unusual, illuminating and readable collection of essays that have been well documented, carefully edited and well indexed.

Death is the ultimate transformative experience. For Jewish communities, the ways this is dealt with—shaped by millennia of custom and belief—do more than routinely follow a set of prescribed practices; they provide an opening to a series of traditions compelling in their profound beauty and power. In Jewish Rites of Death, Rick Light presents both a practical, informative guide to these practices and a compendium in which local volunteers who bring the blessings of these traditions to both the deceased and the bereaved write of the immeasurable enhancement their own lives have gained from them as well. As the personal stories of author and his contributors make clear, the prayers, the physical actions in preparing the dead for burial, and the intentions of the heart involved in Jewish death rituals open a unique window on the fine line a soul passes over between this world and the next. Those choosing to involve themselves with the crossing of this boundary tell in Jewish Rites of Death of feelings, thoughts, inspiration—and maybe even a little wisdom—that result from their shared experiences. Jewish tradition teaches that death is not taboo or hidden; it is simply part of the cycle of events that constitute a life. In its deepest sense, this book offers basic and eternal truths on what it really means to be human.