Rabbi Robert Orkand

To mark the 100 th anniversary of the birth of Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Zachary Leader, professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton, has published the first of a two-volume definitive biography.

Hardly a week goes by without news of religious extremists committing atrocities against people of other faiths in the name of God or some other holy cause. As a result, “religion” itself has been put on trial.

Matti Friedman was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces at 20, along with 19 other young recruits, and sent to a border outpost in Lebanon called Pumpkin Hill, which he describes as “a forgotten little corner of a forgotten little war.” Israeli casualties of Hezbollah guerilla attacks were code-named “flowers,” hence the title of his new book, Pumpkinflowers A Soldier’s Story (Algonquin Books, 2016).

I know I’m not alone in wrestling with my own mortality. I was asked these questions many times during my rabbinic career as people aged and as loved ones died – but never did I think they related to me personally. Now I find myself looking for answers to these questions, and I’ve found answers in Hillel Halkin’s After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition.