Background on One Jewish Folk

I was on winter break, at home in Tampa, when I received a letter from my sister in Israel.

My biological father had remarried, as had my mother, before I was four years old. He met his wife in Israel and started a family. By the time I was six or seven, my stepfather wanted to adopt my brother and me, change our last names to his, and prevent my father from having any visitation with us. This attempt failed, and visitation was arranged. I do not remember how many visits we had in Texas, nor how many times he came to Ann Arbor, but they did not last long, for before we moved to Tampa in 1985, he had already settled in Israel.

Since he had started having children, I knew I had three brothers and one sister. That letter from my sister contained some surprising information: I now had a total of six brothers and three sisters from his second marriage. My older brother and I decided that we wanted to go to Israel together. However, the only time we could do this was at the end of August, and we could only go for two weeks.

In the spring of 1994 I was enrolled in a Philosophy of Religion course. I was the only non-philosophy major in the class, and the only Jew. The text for the class was a single book, an anthology of great works of philosophy on three topics: God, the Problem of Evil, and Life and Death. We read a large selection of works on these subjects.

In class I was one of the few people who held that if one believes that without God there would be nothing, and if God is Good, then there could be no evil as we know it; that evil was really our faulty perception. This was a hard position to defend, and in class all the major arguments against it were brought. I, however, held my ground.

For the paper, we could choose any subject we had covered. I wanted to write about the Jewish belief regarding death and dying. Ever since my grandfather had died, and I had that experience in my freshman year, I had wanted to find out what the religion had to say about this complex problem. Like on all subjects, Judaism has an amazing amount to say about death and dying, but in Oglethorpe's small library, limited to English texts, I did not have many resources available.

I wrote a ten-page paper about what our religion has to say about death and dying. I was a little nervous turning it in, and I wanted the professor to read it first. I will never forget his response: "Mr. Rosenthal, you write very well for a science paper, but this is not science, this is philosophy. Make less sense."

In the end, I wrote an impassioned letter about what I thought about death and dying, and received an A on the paper and in the class.