The Jewish Afterlife

by Professor Solomon
http://www.professorsolomon.com
srivi soioxox
:
The Jewish Afterlife
T
ui ;iwisu coxciiriox oi ax airiiiiii uas
evolved over the millennia. Originally, the dead
were thought to descend into Sheol, a dark and
gloomy underworld. There they continued on as refaim, or
shades: listless beings who were barely conscious. Sheol was
a repository of soulsa Realm of the Dead that was bleak
and monotonous. The Book of Job compares a soul enter-
ing Sheol to a cloud fading away.
But as the Jews fell under foreign rule, they came into
contact with new ideasand selectively adopted them.
From the Persians came the concept of resurrection: a belief
that the body would be reconstituted at the end of time, ris-
ing from the grave to its reward or punishment. And from
the Greeks came the idea of an immortal soul: a spiritual
essence that was independent of the body. Jewish thinkers
combined these ideas and added a monotheistic perspec-
tive. On a Day of Judgment, it was now believed, God
would raise the dead; reunite them with their souls; and
judge them. As the prophet Daniel declared: And many of
them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some
to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting con-
tempt.
In this new scheme of things, the dead wound up in
either Paradise or Gehenna. (Sheolno longer needed
had been shut down.) Paradise was envisioned as a celestial
Garden of Eden. Its residents ate from the Tree of Life and
basked in the glory of God. Gehenna, on the other hand,
was a fiery pit. Some rabbis deemed it a place of annihila-
tion, where the souls of sinners were consumed by fire.
Others, such as Rabbi Akiba, were more sanguine. They
saw Gehenna as a place of punishment: miscreants would
be purged of their sins by its fire, then admitted to Paradise.
For two thousand years this view of the afterlife remained
central to Judaism. Maimonides, the medieval philosopher,
:
listed it as one of his thirteen Articles of Faith. And to this
day, Orthodox Jews believe in a World to Comea glori-
ous destination that awaits the righteous.
But other Jewsof a more rationalistic benthave
rejected the idea. Our present difficulty, writes Rabbi
Eugene Borowitz in Reform Judaism Today, is that the
notion of such a substance as a soul is no longer intellectu-
ally tenable for most modern thinkers. While paying lip
service to a belief in immortality, many rabbis have felt
obliged to redefine it. We survive death, they allow, but in
some plausible fashion. We live on in our descendants. Or
in our accomplishmentsthe ramifications of our deeds
our influence on others. (Insofar as the good we do while
we live bears fruit after we are gone, writes Rabbi Mor-
decai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism,
we have a share in the world to come.) Or in the memory
of those who knew us. Or as a part of Nature, to which we
return. (The energy and chemical elements from our bod-
ies go into the soil, writes Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn,
where they help make flowers grow.)
Confronted with these new brands of immortality, a con-
sumer might justifiably complain. The product would seem
to have been denatured and rendered innocuous. Thats it?
Thats our reward in the endthat well be remembered?
That our molecules will be recycled? That well become part
of a flower? To such a fate, even Sheol would seem prefer-
able. True, the inhabitants of that underworld were listless
zombiesmere shadows of their former selvesresidents
of the bleakest of rest homes. But at least they were still
around!