Judaism and the Afterlife
JEWISH PERSPECTIVES ON THE AFTERLIFE
I am a fan of many books by M. Scott Peck- The Road Less Traveled, People of the Lie, and other works. So when I ran into a remaindered copy of his novel, In Heaven As On Earth, I snatched it up. Unlike his other works of non-fiction, this book is a work of fiction set in, of all places, the afterlife. Peck creates a credible vision of a world where we transition from our lives in bodies to a state of conscious energy. He describes the greeters who join him on the other side as guides and resources. There is still a sense of sleep in this other world, and upon awakening it is a shock to discover that there is nothing one has to do! For many of us, this surely feels like heaven- no to-do list! What activities in our daily lives might we miss, and what are we ready to forego? On the list of things he misses- feeding the cat and making a cup of coffee. Not missed- flossing and exercising.
Eventually he travels beyond the confines of his own space and finds himself in a hall, where he is drawn into another room in which a woman wallows in self-inflicted misery. Her version of purgatory includes intensive group therapy. (The therapy is not the purgatory, that’s part of the healing process.) Hell is a trash can in the hall, filled with millions of souls who compete in an endless business venture. Each soul appears like one small rock and oozes a sense of misery.
What was especially fascinating about this version of hell is that there is no rest, no Shabbat. That is Peck’s definition of hell! No wonder that in Judaism, Shabbat is called a taste of the olam ha-ba, the world to come. In the Jewish understanding of hell, even the souls in hell get a reprieve on Shabbat, which is part of what makes our observance of Shabbat so critical. When we rest on Shabbas, the souls in hell rest. We should extend our prayers at the conclusion of the Sabbath, the tradition suggests, so that the respite of those who suffer can charitably be extended.
Some say that observance of Shabbat in this world protects us from Gehenna, from punishment in the netherworld. By providing time for Torah study and an opportunity for reconciliation with God and others, we have the chance to score points in heaven. Observing Yom Kippur in this world is also considered an antidote to punishment in the world to come.
The themes of the Kaddish prayer itself, the prayer we recite upon the death of our loved ones, are plumbed in intimate depth in Leon Wieslthier’s five hundred eighty five page tome, Kaddish, an emotional journal of his year saying kaddish twice daily for his father. Wieselthier combines his personal reflections with an exhaustive scholarly study of the history of the prayer itself. One reviewer suggested that only about four people had actually read the whole book, and I’m not one of them, although I read almost all of it. It is very slow going, but very worthwhile. He remains faithful to his obligation to say kaddish twice daily with a minyan, observing that, “The angel of death is the best sexton ”, even when finding a minyan and getting through the service is challenging.
Wieslthier wryly comments, “Is there any torture greater than sitting in shul helplessly as the cantor prolongs the prayer with all his might? Oh, the things one does for one’s dead!”
Back to our friend Peck. When he is ready to leave his small, green room, his deceased son appears to serve as his spiritual guide. You’ll love his answer when asked, how he fills his days in heaven, “A lot of committee work. It’s fun.” I’m sure all our hard-working shul volunteers are groaning right now- heaven? committees?!!! Let me go to you know where!
It is his wife who shows him heaven, a place where he is overwhelmed with an almost unbearable sense of gratitude. However, since one cannot exist forever in sheer contemplative bliss, he asks her, “Does everyone in heaven work in committees?” “Naturally.” Since it seems that there’s no escape from volunteer work, even in the next world, you might as well get used to it and practice volunteering for committees now.
Peck’s book was a quick read and most intriguing; the nature of the afterlife is a universal human concern. At the High Holiday season, we especially focus on our own mortality and the extreme transience of our own existence. On Yom Kippur, we recite yizkor, remembering our deceased loved ones, and we wear takhritim, shrouds, foreshadowing our own demise. We wonder what our tradition teaches regarding the world to come, the olam ha-ba? “Human fears”, writes Rabbi David Wolpe, “are two: the uncertainties of life and the certainty of death.”
“Some years ago, the City National Bank of Binghamton, New York, sent flowers to the management of Binghamton Savings Bank, congratulating the latter upon the opening of its new facilities. Unfortunately, there was a mix-up, and flowers intended for a funeral were mistakenly sent to the bank with a card that read, ‘Deepest Sympathy.’ Later, an embarrassed florist called the bank to apologize. However, he confessed that what really worried him was that the bouquet intended for the bank had been incorrectly delivered to the funeral. It carried the message, ‘Congratulations of your new location.’”
That we live on in some form is taken for granted in Jewish tradition, though many Jews are unaware of these teachings. Our souls are thought to gradually move from the place of burial to the next world during the period of shiva, the first seven days of mourning. There can be no sense of accountability for one’s actions and no justice in the universe, according to the Jewish conception, if the wicked are not ultimately punished and the righteous not ultimately rewarded. There is a Yiddish proverb which states that, “Every person knows that they will die, but no one believes it.” Belief in an afterlife is a strong motivation to refrain from those actions we might otherwise try to get away with, acts that no one on earth would ever know. Knowing that God sees and knows, knowing that, as we imagine today, our book of life is open and written in our own hand, encourages us to choose the right.
Heaven
The Jewish view of heaven includes, according to at least one source, “eating and drinking, and. . . joy,” at least for the righteous! The Talmud offers the opposite point of view, “In the world to come there will be no eating or drinking or procreation or business or jealousy or hatred or competition, but the righteous will sit with crowns on their heads feasting on the radiance of the Shekhina, the Divine presence.” So, whether we will be embodied or not in our next life is open to interpretation.
According to the midrash, there are special gates to enter into heaven designated for those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and clothe the naked, for those who look after orphans and those who engage in acts of lovingkindness. And, the students among us will be pleased to know that many rabbis envisioned heaven as a giant yeshiva with study as our only focus.
Gehenna
The Bible does not offer a well-developed concept of hell, referring only to “Sheol”- the netherworld, the place one goes when one is gathered unto one’s kin. Sheol is not associated with punishment; every living being, regardless of moral character, goes down to Sheol at the time of death.
The place of punishment is called Gehenna, and it is developed extensively in later Jewish thought. Some suggest that although God did provide Gehenna’s fire in order to insure our obedience to the Torah, that God’s mercy precludes its actual use. We are supposed to learn from this teaching to practice mercy towards others in our own lives, made, as we are, b’tzelem elokim- in the image of God.
An argument for the reality of Gehenna is based on the tradition of the mourner’s kaddish. A deceased soul is being punished for favoring the rich when he worked as a tax collector. His punishment consists of chopping wood all day long. After his death, he visited Rabbi Akiva, and told the rabbi that he would be released from Gehenna if his son, whom he’d left behind on earth were to lead the congregation in the Barkhu and the congregation would answer, “yehi shmey rabba” in the kaddish. Rabbi Akiva finds the child, teaches him, and, lo and behold, the soul of his father is released. By the son’s actions, he demonstrates why his parent deserves mercy- the tax collector raised a son who is an observant and faithful Jew. “The son”, in this understanding, “is not the advocate, the son is the evidence.”
An Italian kabbalist describes the power of the kaddish thus, “It is already widely known that the kaddish has the power to extinguish the fire of Gehenna and to subdue the strange and hostile forces. With the power of the kaddish, the son rescues his father from the grip of exteriorities and gets him into Eden. . . And with every kaddish he freezes hell for an hour and a half.”
Even those who do remain in Gehenna get a reprieve, as I mentioned, on Shabbat. In his studies, Wiesltier found this vision of Shabbas in the netherworld, “On that afternoon the souls are made to stand by a gleaming fountain of water that flows at the entrance to the garden, and they rinse themselves in the water to cool their bodies from the fire”
By contrast, he also quotes a description of the ongoing punishment of the wicked during the other six days of the week, “Six months in the heat and six months in the cold. For a start, the Holy One inflicts them with an itch. Then he moves them into the heat, whereupon they say: ‘Is this all there is to God’s hell?’ So He takes them out into the snow, whereupon they say: ‘Is this all there is to God’s chill?’ (So he moves them into the heat.) In the beginning, they say wow and in the ends they say woe.” On which Wiesltier comments, “An itch! Hellish indeed. (The Jews among whom I grew up always confused an annoyance with a torment.).” I’m hoping for the more benign Chassidic version of hell, which suggests that God will merely take us one by one and tell us what our life was really about, so that we come to understand the good and the bad we did, and this will be our heaven and our hell. Frankly, having to confront all of our wrong and foolish decisions sounds like punishment enough!
Perhaps the most graphic description of the torment of the wicked is that proposed by Immanuel ben Solomon in the 13th century, “We journeyed thence and lo, there were pits full of serpents, poisonous and flying, hundreds and thousands of lions and leopards were dying, and round about angels of death with their swords were plying, and torrents of mighty waters in floods were lying, making the onlookers gasp with sighing.”
Only the worst category of sinners requires the maximum of twelve months of such torture in Gehenna. It is for this reason that we say kaddish for our deceased loved ones for only eleven months, so as not to imply that they are in the worst possible category. Rabbi Hanina suggests that the only sinners who can never be redeemed from Gehenna are those who commit adultery, those who publicly shame another, or those who call another by an obnoxious nickname. Whether or not we understand this literally, it certainly serves to emphasize the primary values of faithfulness in marriage and sensitivity to the feelings of others.
Tekhiat Ha-Metim
There are those who suggest, contrary to my friend Peck, that our physical bodies will live again, that our dust shall be awakened! This is the traditional understanding of the phrase, “mekhaye ha-metim”, where we refer to God as giving life to the dead in the third blessing of the amida. Resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul are the two essential components of the rabbinic Jewish belief in the hereafter. The Reform and Reconstructionist liturgy reject this notion of a physical resurrection, and have updated the language of the prayer to read- “m’khaye ha-kol”. We give thanks to God who gives life to everything, rather than, who gives life to the dead, shifting the emphasis from the future afterlife to the present moment.
In the Books of Beliefs and Opinions written by the 10th century sage Saadia Gaon, he wondered, “Suppose a lion were to eat a man, and then the lion would drown and a fish would eat him up, and then the fish would be caught and a man would eat him, and then the man would be burned and turned into ashes. Whence would the Creator restore the first man? Would he do it from the lion or the fish or the second man or the fire or the ashes?” He concludes that we have limited capability to understand these matters and that at the time of resurrection prophets will be available to offer guidance.
Maimonides, not a fan of the body even in this world, rejects this notion altogether, insisting that in the afterlife we will be disembodied souls and attain a knowledge of God unavailable to us in our physical being.
Gilgul Nefashot
By the 12th century, the idea of reincarnation appears to be taken for granted in kabbala, in the Jewish mystical tradition. The basic understanding is that the soul has an independent life, existing before and after the death of the body. It leaves the body when we die, ready to assume its next assignment in the physical world. Kabbalists use gilgul nefashot, the wheels of a soul, to explain odd or unusual occurrences in human characteristics. They asked, for example, why some people act like animals. The answer offered is that these people carry the soul of a beast. Converts to Judaism are assumed to be individuals whose souls previously inhabited Jewish bodies.
In his classic work on the subject, Dr. Philip Berg suggests that reincarnation may be particular to the cleansing, tikkun, needed by that soul. “In a prior lifetime one may have been a bank robber who caused several deaths. In this lifetime he might be a famous surgeon and use his skill to save several lives.” He also notes that the majority of women accomplish tikkun much more swiftly than their male counterparts and are here simply to help men bear their burdens. “Most women”, he writes, “are here on a volunteer basis for the benefit of men with whom they may have endured a number of incarnations. When a woman is seen being especially hard on her husband, it usually is an indication that she is doing precisely what she should do to help him make his tikkun.”
Conclusion
Wiesltier reminds us that, “What death really says is: think.” Life is so fragile, so precious. Awareness of this reality is the hallmark of religious maturity. The purpose of studying what our tradition teaches about the afterlife is, first and foremost, to enrich our lives in this world. “A colleague. . . tells of counseling a young woman who had a falling out with her parents and had not spoken to them for several years. He asked her, ‘If you were to get a phone call today that they had died, would you go to their funeral?’ The woman thought for a moment and said, ‘Yes, I suppose I would. The rabbi asked, ‘Why?’ And the woman said, ‘Because I guess I owe them that. They are my parents. And because I’m afraid I wold feel guilty for the rest of my life if I didn’t, and I don’t want that. I would go because I would need that sense of closure.’ The rabbi said, ‘Good answer. So why are you waiting for a funeral? Why not go to them now, when you could both have a sense of closure.?’
As we reflect on the year which is drawing to a close, and re-chart our direction for the year ahead, we come together to acknowledge the transience of our lives, and to pray that our days be filled with meaning. Death is not a punishment- it is a reminder, a wake up call. Our observance of these days of Awe, our confrontation with our own mortality, our study of Jewish perspectives on the afterlife, all of these have, indeed, have given us much to consider. The best that we can do is to live our lives in such a way that if there is an afterlife with the Holy One, that we will be worthy to enjoy it.
I am a fan of many books by M. Scott Peck- The Road Less Traveled, People of the Lie, and other works. So when I ran into a remaindered copy of his novel, In Heaven As On Earth, I snatched it up. Unlike his other works of non-fiction, this book is a work of fiction set in, of all places, the afterlife. Peck creates a credible vision of a world where we transition from our lives in bodies to a state of conscious energy. He describes the greeters who join him on the other side as guides and resources. There is still a sense of sleep in this other world, and upon awakening it is a shock to discover that there is nothing one has to do! For many of us, this surely feels like heaven- no to-do list! What activities in our daily lives might we miss, and what are we ready to forego? On the list of things he misses- feeding the cat and making a cup of coffee. Not missed- flossing and exercising.
Eventually he travels beyond the confines of his own space and finds himself in a hall, where he is drawn into another room in which a woman wallows in self-inflicted misery. Her version of purgatory includes intensive group therapy. (The therapy is not the purgatory, that’s part of the healing process.) Hell is a trash can in the hall, filled with millions of souls who compete in an endless business venture. Each soul appears like one small rock and oozes a sense of misery.
What was especially fascinating about this version of hell is that there is no rest, no Shabbat. That is Peck’s definition of hell! No wonder that in Judaism, Shabbat is called a taste of the olam ha-ba, the world to come. In the Jewish understanding of hell, even the souls in hell get a reprieve on Shabbat, which is part of what makes our observance of Shabbat so critical. When we rest on Shabbas, the souls in hell rest. We should extend our prayers at the conclusion of the Sabbath, the tradition suggests, so that the respite of those who suffer can charitably be extended.
Some say that observance of Shabbat in this world protects us from Gehenna, from punishment in the netherworld. By providing time for Torah study and an opportunity for reconciliation with God and others, we have the chance to score points in heaven. Observing Yom Kippur in this world is also considered an antidote to punishment in the world to come.
The themes of the Kaddish prayer itself, the prayer we recite upon the death of our loved ones, are plumbed in intimate depth in Leon Wieslthier’s five hundred eighty five page tome, Kaddish, an emotional journal of his year saying kaddish twice daily for his father. Wieselthier combines his personal reflections with an exhaustive scholarly study of the history of the prayer itself. One reviewer suggested that only about four people had actually read the whole book, and I’m not one of them, although I read almost all of it. It is very slow going, but very worthwhile. He remains faithful to his obligation to say kaddish twice daily with a minyan, observing that, “The angel of death is the best sexton ”, even when finding a minyan and getting through the service is challenging.
Wieslthier wryly comments, “Is there any torture greater than sitting in shul helplessly as the cantor prolongs the prayer with all his might? Oh, the things one does for one’s dead!”
Back to our friend Peck. When he is ready to leave his small, green room, his deceased son appears to serve as his spiritual guide. You’ll love his answer when asked, how he fills his days in heaven, “A lot of committee work. It’s fun.” I’m sure all our hard-working shul volunteers are groaning right now- heaven? committees?!!! Let me go to you know where!
It is his wife who shows him heaven, a place where he is overwhelmed with an almost unbearable sense of gratitude. However, since one cannot exist forever in sheer contemplative bliss, he asks her, “Does everyone in heaven work in committees?” “Naturally.” Since it seems that there’s no escape from volunteer work, even in the next world, you might as well get used to it and practice volunteering for committees now.
Peck’s book was a quick read and most intriguing; the nature of the afterlife is a universal human concern. At the High Holiday season, we especially focus on our own mortality and the extreme transience of our own existence. On Yom Kippur, we recite yizkor, remembering our deceased loved ones, and we wear takhritim, shrouds, foreshadowing our own demise. We wonder what our tradition teaches regarding the world to come, the olam ha-ba? “Human fears”, writes Rabbi David Wolpe, “are two: the uncertainties of life and the certainty of death.”
“Some years ago, the City National Bank of Binghamton, New York, sent flowers to the management of Binghamton Savings Bank, congratulating the latter upon the opening of its new facilities. Unfortunately, there was a mix-up, and flowers intended for a funeral were mistakenly sent to the bank with a card that read, ‘Deepest Sympathy.’ Later, an embarrassed florist called the bank to apologize. However, he confessed that what really worried him was that the bouquet intended for the bank had been incorrectly delivered to the funeral. It carried the message, ‘Congratulations of your new location.’”
That we live on in some form is taken for granted in Jewish tradition, though many Jews are unaware of these teachings. Our souls are thought to gradually move from the place of burial to the next world during the period of shiva, the first seven days of mourning. There can be no sense of accountability for one’s actions and no justice in the universe, according to the Jewish conception, if the wicked are not ultimately punished and the righteous not ultimately rewarded. There is a Yiddish proverb which states that, “Every person knows that they will die, but no one believes it.” Belief in an afterlife is a strong motivation to refrain from those actions we might otherwise try to get away with, acts that no one on earth would ever know. Knowing that God sees and knows, knowing that, as we imagine today, our book of life is open and written in our own hand, encourages us to choose the right.
Heaven
The Jewish view of heaven includes, according to at least one source, “eating and drinking, and. . . joy,” at least for the righteous! The Talmud offers the opposite point of view, “In the world to come there will be no eating or drinking or procreation or business or jealousy or hatred or competition, but the righteous will sit with crowns on their heads feasting on the radiance of the Shekhina, the Divine presence.” So, whether we will be embodied or not in our next life is open to interpretation.
According to the midrash, there are special gates to enter into heaven designated for those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and clothe the naked, for those who look after orphans and those who engage in acts of lovingkindness. And, the students among us will be pleased to know that many rabbis envisioned heaven as a giant yeshiva with study as our only focus.
Gehenna
The Bible does not offer a well-developed concept of hell, referring only to “Sheol”- the netherworld, the place one goes when one is gathered unto one’s kin. Sheol is not associated with punishment; every living being, regardless of moral character, goes down to Sheol at the time of death.
The place of punishment is called Gehenna, and it is developed extensively in later Jewish thought. Some suggest that although God did provide Gehenna’s fire in order to insure our obedience to the Torah, that God’s mercy precludes its actual use. We are supposed to learn from this teaching to practice mercy towards others in our own lives, made, as we are, b’tzelem elokim- in the image of God.
An argument for the reality of Gehenna is based on the tradition of the mourner’s kaddish. A deceased soul is being punished for favoring the rich when he worked as a tax collector. His punishment consists of chopping wood all day long. After his death, he visited Rabbi Akiva, and told the rabbi that he would be released from Gehenna if his son, whom he’d left behind on earth were to lead the congregation in the Barkhu and the congregation would answer, “yehi shmey rabba” in the kaddish. Rabbi Akiva finds the child, teaches him, and, lo and behold, the soul of his father is released. By the son’s actions, he demonstrates why his parent deserves mercy- the tax collector raised a son who is an observant and faithful Jew. “The son”, in this understanding, “is not the advocate, the son is the evidence.”
An Italian kabbalist describes the power of the kaddish thus, “It is already widely known that the kaddish has the power to extinguish the fire of Gehenna and to subdue the strange and hostile forces. With the power of the kaddish, the son rescues his father from the grip of exteriorities and gets him into Eden. . . And with every kaddish he freezes hell for an hour and a half.”
Even those who do remain in Gehenna get a reprieve, as I mentioned, on Shabbat. In his studies, Wiesltier found this vision of Shabbas in the netherworld, “On that afternoon the souls are made to stand by a gleaming fountain of water that flows at the entrance to the garden, and they rinse themselves in the water to cool their bodies from the fire”
By contrast, he also quotes a description of the ongoing punishment of the wicked during the other six days of the week, “Six months in the heat and six months in the cold. For a start, the Holy One inflicts them with an itch. Then he moves them into the heat, whereupon they say: ‘Is this all there is to God’s hell?’ So He takes them out into the snow, whereupon they say: ‘Is this all there is to God’s chill?’ (So he moves them into the heat.) In the beginning, they say wow and in the ends they say woe.” On which Wiesltier comments, “An itch! Hellish indeed. (The Jews among whom I grew up always confused an annoyance with a torment.).” I’m hoping for the more benign Chassidic version of hell, which suggests that God will merely take us one by one and tell us what our life was really about, so that we come to understand the good and the bad we did, and this will be our heaven and our hell. Frankly, having to confront all of our wrong and foolish decisions sounds like punishment enough!
Perhaps the most graphic description of the torment of the wicked is that proposed by Immanuel ben Solomon in the 13th century, “We journeyed thence and lo, there were pits full of serpents, poisonous and flying, hundreds and thousands of lions and leopards were dying, and round about angels of death with their swords were plying, and torrents of mighty waters in floods were lying, making the onlookers gasp with sighing.”
Only the worst category of sinners requires the maximum of twelve months of such torture in Gehenna. It is for this reason that we say kaddish for our deceased loved ones for only eleven months, so as not to imply that they are in the worst possible category. Rabbi Hanina suggests that the only sinners who can never be redeemed from Gehenna are those who commit adultery, those who publicly shame another, or those who call another by an obnoxious nickname. Whether or not we understand this literally, it certainly serves to emphasize the primary values of faithfulness in marriage and sensitivity to the feelings of others.
Tekhiat Ha-Metim
There are those who suggest, contrary to my friend Peck, that our physical bodies will live again, that our dust shall be awakened! This is the traditional understanding of the phrase, “mekhaye ha-metim”, where we refer to God as giving life to the dead in the third blessing of the amida. Resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul are the two essential components of the rabbinic Jewish belief in the hereafter. The Reform and Reconstructionist liturgy reject this notion of a physical resurrection, and have updated the language of the prayer to read- “m’khaye ha-kol”. We give thanks to God who gives life to everything, rather than, who gives life to the dead, shifting the emphasis from the future afterlife to the present moment.
In the Books of Beliefs and Opinions written by the 10th century sage Saadia Gaon, he wondered, “Suppose a lion were to eat a man, and then the lion would drown and a fish would eat him up, and then the fish would be caught and a man would eat him, and then the man would be burned and turned into ashes. Whence would the Creator restore the first man? Would he do it from the lion or the fish or the second man or the fire or the ashes?” He concludes that we have limited capability to understand these matters and that at the time of resurrection prophets will be available to offer guidance.
Maimonides, not a fan of the body even in this world, rejects this notion altogether, insisting that in the afterlife we will be disembodied souls and attain a knowledge of God unavailable to us in our physical being.
Gilgul Nefashot
By the 12th century, the idea of reincarnation appears to be taken for granted in kabbala, in the Jewish mystical tradition. The basic understanding is that the soul has an independent life, existing before and after the death of the body. It leaves the body when we die, ready to assume its next assignment in the physical world. Kabbalists use gilgul nefashot, the wheels of a soul, to explain odd or unusual occurrences in human characteristics. They asked, for example, why some people act like animals. The answer offered is that these people carry the soul of a beast. Converts to Judaism are assumed to be individuals whose souls previously inhabited Jewish bodies.
In his classic work on the subject, Dr. Philip Berg suggests that reincarnation may be particular to the cleansing, tikkun, needed by that soul. “In a prior lifetime one may have been a bank robber who caused several deaths. In this lifetime he might be a famous surgeon and use his skill to save several lives.” He also notes that the majority of women accomplish tikkun much more swiftly than their male counterparts and are here simply to help men bear their burdens. “Most women”, he writes, “are here on a volunteer basis for the benefit of men with whom they may have endured a number of incarnations. When a woman is seen being especially hard on her husband, it usually is an indication that she is doing precisely what she should do to help him make his tikkun.”
Conclusion
Wiesltier reminds us that, “What death really says is: think.” Life is so fragile, so precious. Awareness of this reality is the hallmark of religious maturity. The purpose of studying what our tradition teaches about the afterlife is, first and foremost, to enrich our lives in this world. “A colleague. . . tells of counseling a young woman who had a falling out with her parents and had not spoken to them for several years. He asked her, ‘If you were to get a phone call today that they had died, would you go to their funeral?’ The woman thought for a moment and said, ‘Yes, I suppose I would. The rabbi asked, ‘Why?’ And the woman said, ‘Because I guess I owe them that. They are my parents. And because I’m afraid I wold feel guilty for the rest of my life if I didn’t, and I don’t want that. I would go because I would need that sense of closure.’ The rabbi said, ‘Good answer. So why are you waiting for a funeral? Why not go to them now, when you could both have a sense of closure.?’
As we reflect on the year which is drawing to a close, and re-chart our direction for the year ahead, we come together to acknowledge the transience of our lives, and to pray that our days be filled with meaning. Death is not a punishment- it is a reminder, a wake up call. Our observance of these days of Awe, our confrontation with our own mortality, our study of Jewish perspectives on the afterlife, all of these have, indeed, have given us much to consider. The best that we can do is to live our lives in such a way that if there is an afterlife with the Holy One, that we will be worthy to enjoy it.
Posted by Rabbi Bonnie Koppell at 8/19/2008 7:47 AM 
Categories: Gehenna, Gilgul Nefashot, Afterlife, Life after Death, Resurrection, Heaven, Reincarnation, Sheol, Hell, Kaddish
Categories: Gehenna, Gilgul Nefashot, Afterlife, Life after Death, Resurrection, Heaven, Reincarnation, Sheol, Hell, Kaddish
Comments