Life After Death

assembled Israelites on Mount Sinai manifest perfectly this love of law and an ordered society. Judaism emphasises the duties and responsibilities which are needed to balance the rights of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke. It also insists on justice. In the Book of Amos, and the other prophetic writings, this theme of justice is returned to again and again: "Let justice roll down like a river, and righteousness as a never-ending stream". And yet the Jewish people have themselves rarely been dealt with justly.

The Sanctity of Life From Judaism springs our Judaeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, the importance of individual and collective conscience, the requirement for personal and communal responsibility, our accountability before Man and God. This special genius, these momentous insights, have been the staple fare in civilized societies ever since they were first revealed through the Jewish people. Yet the jealousy and vilification which have affected generations of Jews often at the hands of at least nominally Christian people - has been extraordinary, sinking to their ultimate in the destruction of the Holocaust, the Shoah. In the nightmare kingdoms of the concentration camps, the Jews faced extermination. But they also renewed their covenant with God. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman said before he was killed: "The fire which destroys our bodies is the fire that will restore the Jewish people". Our own British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, sees in the persistence of faith, even amidst the greatest adversity, the long-term ability to conquer evil: "The Jews of faith, who were able to sanctify death in the Holocaust, turned out to be the most determined to sanctify life after the Holocaust" (Faith in the The Future, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995).

The Culture of Death It has become unfashionable to speak clearly of good and evil. Everything has been given a relative value. Yet who can doubt that out of today's culture of death spawned by thirty years of abortionism - must spring a new culture of life. No people have better cause to understand the consequences of the collapse of responsible citizenship, and what happens when society loses the concept of right and wrong, than the Jews. Times of monstrous inhumanity do not come about all at once: we slip into them gradually. People often ask, "Where was God at Auschwitz?". Yet in every situation we could ask the same sort of question as we consider the scale of contemporary ills. We are each given the gift of free will to choose for life or death, right or wrong. The more appropriate question is to ask: "Where was man during the horrors of Auschwitz? And where have we been over the past thirty years as five million British children were killed?". Through our indifference, we can all too easily drift into a culture which sanctions death, and overturns all belief in the sanctity of human life. The purpose of this book is to consider the effect which legalised abortion and eugenics can have on society and its attitudes, and how we can re-establish a respect for human life.