Frank and Ed were lifetime friends who shared a love of baseball. They played together through youth and professional teams. After retiring from the game, the two friends bought season tickets for adjoining seats. Frank became ill and was on his death bed. Ed came to visit and made Frank promise him to come back and tell him if there is baseball in the afterlife.
Shortly thereafter, Frank died. A day later, he appeared to Ed who wanted to know whether there is baseball in the afterlife? Frank replied, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that there IS baseball after death. The bad news is that you’re pitching next week.
Ten years ago, on National Public Radio, correspondent Nina Totenberg casually commented that "Jews don't believe in an afterlife.” Radio talk-show host Michael Medved, an observant Jew, was stunned. "I almost crashed the car.” Her statement is “a slander to all believing Jews everywhere.”
Who was correct? Both. As my recently deceased teacher and friend, Rabbi Byron Sherwin observed, survey data of North American Jews shows that most do not believe in an afterlife. Yet, a survey of the significant texts of Judaism reveals that every important Jewish religious thinker, from the Talmud to today, has presented belief in an afterlife as a fundamental feature of our faith. Judaism affirms belief in an afterlife. Sixty percent of North American Jews do not.
Human beings have always wondered whether this life is the end. Is death the end of all that I am? This is an intense personal and theological question. Will my life, its substance and its meaning, be destroyed by the inevitable death that awaits me?
I will often jokingly mention that Rabbi Google is a source for Jewish information. Google recently articulated a protocol to plan for afterlife. This is how it is described:
“Not many of us like thinking about death—especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die.”
Franz Rosenzweig became one of the most significant 20th century Jewish philosophers after his almost conversion to Christianity was deflected by a Yom Kippur experience. He attacked the history of philosophy as an attempt to “distract us from its [death’s] perennial dominion.”
In contrast, Judaism never avoided the inevitability or the reality of death.
The first human being is told: עָפָ֣ר אַ֔תָּה וְאֶל־עָפָ֖ר תָּשֽׁוּב.
You are dust and to dust you will return.
During Sukkot, Kohelet reminds us:
לַכֹּ֖ל זְמָ֑ן וְעֵ֥ת לְכָל־חֵ֖פֶץ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּׁמָֽיִם. עֵ֥ת לָלֶ֖דֶת וְעֵ֣ת לָמ֑וּת
A season is set for everything: a time to be born and a time to die.
Throughout these Days of Awe, we return to the powerful and poignant prayer, Unetaneh Tokef:
מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת. מִי בְקִצּוֹ וּמִי לא בְקִצּוֹ מִי בַמַּיִם. וּמִי בָאֵשׁ
Who shall live and who shall die? Who in their time, and who not their time? Who by fire and who by water?
As we age, the reality of our own mortality impinges on us. We begin to ask, where are we going? What’s next on our journey?
When people are called to the Torah, they recite a berakhah which begins with the six words that initiate all berakhot (as I discussed on Rosh Hashanah). The blessing continues:
וחיי עולם נטע בתוכינו ~ you [God] have planted within us eternal life.
Notice the biological reference. As a seed implanted within us, God has given us the potential for life after death. Rabbi Byron Sherwin, whose studies of Jewish ethics will be the basis for my adult classes this year, wrote, our “task in life is to nurture and to develop this seed.”
This belief is not a way of escaping the joys and responsibilities of life in this world. It is an invitation to imbue life with meaning that will outlast our years on this earth. William James put it, “Spend life in a way that will outlast it.”
Many our our prayers and practices presume a belief in another life. In the Amidah prayer recited three times each day, God is praised for reviving the dead:
מְכַלְכֵּל חַיִּיםבְּחֶסֶד, מְחַיֵּה מֵתִים בְּרַחֲמִים רַבִּים סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים, וְרוֹפֵא חוֹלִים
וּמַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים וּמְקַיֵּם אֱמוּנָתוֹ לִישֵׁנֵי עָפָר, מִי כָמוֹךָ בַּעַל גְּבוּרוֹת וּמִי דוֹמֶה לָּךְ,
מֶלֶךְ מֵמִית וּמְחַיֶּה וּמַצְמִיחַ יְשׁוּעָה, וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים.
You sustain the living through love, and with great mercy give life to the dead. You support the falling, heal the sick, loosen the chains of the bound, and keep faith with those who sleep in the dust. Who is like You, Almighty, and who can be compared to You? Sovereign, who brings death and life, and causes salvation to flourish.
What is the nature of olam haba, the World that is Coming? I imagine it to be a dimension of existence that transcends the boundaries of time and space. I once spoke at a hospice training program about this subject and said that we have speculation and hope, but no experience. The priest sitting at my side, smiled and said “we do.”
While Judaism has a strong belief in afterlife, we have a broad bandwidth of what we believe about life after death. We often speak about the subject using metaphorical and suggestive language. Our spring prayer for dew that enables plant life to survive the summer heat in Israel is a delicate analogy to eternal life.
A few years ago, on our Path of Abraham mission to Jerusalem, one of our participants, an American Orthodox priest, spent Shabbat afternoon shopping for his burial shroud. He purchased two others—to give as Christmas gifts to some friends.
We also have a tradition of preparing our garments for death. In Kabbalistic teaching, every deed we do during life weaves a stitch in a heavenly garb. A good deed weaves a beautiful stitch. A bad deed weaves a botched stitch. Each person is cloaked for eternity in an outfit prepared from our deeds. A stylish outfit takes on a moral meaning.
The moral quality of our life on earth is perpetuated after death. The deeds that affect other individuals and our community survive us. Life in this world helps us develop our spiritual, moral and creative capacities for the next step on our journey.
We have different ways of conceptualising life after our death. “Our deeds are our memorials” teaches the Talmud. We live on by our impact on others. Fifty years ago, Sandy Koufax sat out a game of the World Series. Fifteen years ago, Joseph Lieberman stopped campaigning for Vice-President to observe Shabbat and Yom Kippur. We remember their deeds with pride in our heritage.
Naming a child can perpetuate an identity. When our grandson was given the name Amichai Menashe, there was sadness and joy at the new life that would carry on the name of Josette’s parents.
Children and grandchildren perpetuate more than DNA. They have the potential to continue our values and wisdom, our deeds and dreams. Just as Avraham carried on the journey of his father, our children can continue some of what we have begun. They link the past and the future, providing a biological and a spiritual form of continuity. As Neil Postman once observed, “Children are the living messages we send to a time that we will not see. “
In another view of the afterlife, the body dies and the soul survives. Another analogy offered by Rabbi Sherwin: For a caterpillar, the bursting of the chrysalis or cocoon means death, but for a butterfly it means a radically different type of life.
I understand belief in afterlife as a response to a passion for justice. Justice unavailable in this world is provided by God in the World to Come. I refuse to believe that the Jews who were shot and gassed have the same ultimate end as the Nazis who murdered them.
Belief in the immortality of the human soul became significant when our ancestors faced martyrdom. The Eileh Ezkerah prayers that we shall recite tomorrow during musaf remind us that people sacrificed life for important principles, but also because they believed that their souls would endure.
Faith in the physical resurrection of the body became a core belief of the early rabbis and, through them, became central to Christianity. To those who doubted, the Talmud rhetorically asks: If those who never lived can live, why can’t those who once lived, live again?
One of the most personal and beautiful of all blessings is recited early in our daily morning prayers:
אֱ-לֹהַי! נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה . אַתָּה בְרָאתָהּ, אַתָּה יְצַרְתָּהּ,אַתָּה נְפַחְתָּהּ בִּי, וְאַתָּה מְשַׁמְּרָהּ בְּקִרְבִּי, וְאַתָּה עָתִיד לִטְּלָהּ מִמֶּנִּי, ולְהַחֲזִירָהּ בִּי לֶעָתִיד לָבוֹא .
My God, the soul that you have placed within me is pure. You fashioned it. You breathed it into me. You preserve it in me. You will take it from me, to return it to me in time yet-to-be… Praised are you, who restores souls to lifeless bodies.
According to this prayer, resurrection occurs not only in the eschatological future but each morning as we awaken.
We act out tehiyyat hametim on Yom Kippur. This is a day when we leave behind our bodies, as if we were preparing to die. Some dress in a kittel, similar to a funeral shroud. At the end of Neilah, we recite the threefold deathbed declaration of faith: Sh’ma, May the Divine Name be blessed and Hashem alone is God. It is as if we are prepared to die. Then the shofar sounds, the call for resurrection of the dead, and we live again, for another year, typically going home to eat.
Though resurrection is not widely embraced today, even by many who believe in an afterlife, Michael Wyschogrod, a sophisticated philosopher, made a strong case for its intellectual possibility. This belief affirms the spiritual significance of the human body. Without the body, the soul would be mute; spiritual life would be unspeakable. Stephen Schwarzschild argued that this belief also teaches that each person is precious to God in his or her individuality, that without individual self-perpetuation, there can be no communal continuity.
I am also drawn to the national rebirth of our people. In 20th century Europe, we experienced the valley of dry bones that Ezekiel portrayed so long ago.
I was set down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. [God]… said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?”I answered, “O Eternal God, you know.”Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Eternal. … I will cause breath[a] to enter you, and you shall live…. and there was a rattling noise and the bones came together, bone to bone…. there were sinews on them, and flesh…and skin …but there was no breath in them….
“Prophesy to the wind, … and say … breathe into these slain, that they may live.”I prophesied …and breath came into them, and they lived… Then [God] said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’…Thus says the Lord God: I am going to … bring you up from your graves … and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. … I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I … have spoken and will act.
You have the opportunity to support that national rebirth when you give tzedakah to UJA or purchase an Israel Bond. I’ll have a bit more to say about that later.
Recently, a woman in her upper 90s who had outlived all her peers and had dementia was dying. She was babbling to her daughter and then, suddenly, she said in a very clear voice: Together. Was she speaking about being together with her loved ones? I don’t know. But my experience over many years is that the yearning we have for reunion is very great.
Rabbi Elie Spitz, discusses near-death experiences and previous lives in his book, Does the Soul Live On. The notion of gilgul neshamot, the transmigration of souls, is not only found on stage in “The Dybbuk”. It is a powerful part of kabbalistic teaching. Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, the great-grandfather of my teacher, believed that in a previous life, he had been a kohen gadol. When he led the Musaf service on Yom Kippur, instead of saying “Thus did the kohen gadol say…”, he would chant
“כך הייתי אומר ~ thus did I say”.
Harry Wolfson once compared the different beliefs about souls to clothing. You can get one bespoke, made exclusively for you. You can receive a soul off the rack, one like many others, or you can get a second-hand soul. If you receive a used soul, let’s hope it was treated well by its previous owner.
Another mystical idea is that just as our bodies return to the earth, so our souls return to the root soul of all life. We are like drops of water that return to the ocean, absorbed in the totality of existence.
On Yom Kippur, we devote time to our personal quest for meaning. On the journey, we are often attracted to the ephemeral, the fashionable, the transient. But our mortality can be an invitation to morality. We can be attentive to what endures, to what transcends, to what will survive us. What we do in this life effects our ultimate journey.
On a day when we deny ourselves food, let me offer another image, one I first heard from Rabbi Louis Jacobs. After death, a person was brought into a room where starving people sat at a table. Each person held a spoon that could reach the food; but the handles were too long, making it impossible to feed themselves. So, the suffering in hell was terrible. In another room, identical to the first, the same table, the same food, the same long-handled spoons. But in heaven everyone was happy and well-fed. Why are these people happy when the people in hell were so miserable?” “Simple," God replied. "In heaven, they have learned to feed each other."
Rabbi Sherwin offers a mercantile metaphor: how a person lives life is the most important investment one will ever make on the ultimate “future options exchange.”We are given an opportunity to create words andacts that will endure. We can perpetuate ourselves and the institutions we value. After shul today, we can go forward to make“life in the here and now more meaningful, more beautiful, and more saturated with significance.”
Faith affirms life as a pilgrimage toward eternity, and draws us to the belief that God did not breathe into individual souls and personalities only to have them dissolve into oblivion at the time of our breath leaves us. We are all on this journey. Breathe deep.
http://squach.blogspot.ca/2004/06/npr-says-story-by-legal-affairs.html
http://www.npr.org/series/230697113/what-comes-next-conversations-on-the-afterlife
Byron L. Sherwin,Faith Finding Meaning: A Theology of Judaism.
Byron L. Sherwin, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/06/jews-and-the-world-to-come
Elie Spitz, Does the Soul Survive?: A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives & Living with Purpose
