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Six years ago, Rabbi Benjamin Blech, assistant professor of Bible, was informed that he was suffering from cardiac amyloidosis, a fatal and incurable disease. The book he has written about this experience, Hope, Not Fear: Changing the Way We View Death, received in the New York Jewish Week by Jonathan Mark, associate editor. Marks calls it a “slender but splendid book” and notes that Rabbi Blech comes to his understanding that souls not only have a consciousness but that they can communicate with the living “with the excitement of a blind person suddenly able to see the aurora borealis.” Alan Rosenbaum, in the Jerusalem Post, also wrote , calling the book an “eloquent and personal response” to the fact of the death that he and all humans face. “To understand death,” said Rabbi Blech, “is to enter a realm that of necessity requires faith as a guide...There is life after this life.”