The Jewish Afterlife

by Professor Solomonhttp://www.professorsolomon.com

The Jewish Afterlife

T evolved over the millennia. Originally, the deadwere thought to descend into Sheol, a dark and

gloomy underworld. There they continued on as refaim, orshades: listless beings who were barely conscious. Sheol wasa repository of souls—a Realm of the Dead that was bleakand 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 intocontact with new ideas—and selectively adopted them.From the Persians came the concept of resurrection: a beliefthat the body would be reconstituted at the end of time, ris-ing from the grave to its reward or punishment. And fromthe Greeks came the idea of an immortal soul: a spiritualessence that was independent of the body. Jewish thinkerscombined these ideas and added a monotheistic perspec-tive. On a Day of Judgment, it was now believed, Godwould raise the dead; reunite them with their souls; andjudge them. As the prophet Daniel declared: “And many ofthem that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, someto everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting con-tempt.”

In this new scheme of things, the dead wound up ineither Paradise or Gehenna. (Sheol—no longer needed—had been shut down.) Paradise was envisioned as a celestialGarden of Eden. Its residents ate from the Tree of Life andbasked 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. Theysaw Gehenna as a place of punishment: miscreants wouldbe purged of their sins by its fire, then admitted to Paradise.

For two thousand years this view of the afterlife remainedcentral to Judaism. Maimonides, the medieval philosopher,

listed it as one of his thirteen Articles of Faith. And to thisday, Orthodox Jews believe in a World to Come—a glori-ous destination that awaits the righteous.

But other Jews—of a more rationalistic bent—haverejected the idea. “Our present difficulty,” writes RabbiEugene Borowitz in Reform Judaism Today, “is that thenotion of such a substance as a soul is no longer intellectu-ally tenable for most modern thinkers.” While paying lipservice to a belief in immortality, many rabbis have feltobliged to redefine it. We survive death, they allow, but insome plausible fashion. We live on in our descendants. Orin our accomplishments—the ramifications of our deeds—our influence on others. (“Insofar as the good we do whilewe 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 memoryof those who knew us. Or as a part of Nature, to which wereturn. (“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 seemto have been denatured and rendered innocuous. That’s it?That’s our reward in the end—that we’ll be remembered?That our molecules will be recycled? That we’ll become partof a flower? To such a fate, even Sheol would seem prefer-able. True, the inhabitants of that underworld were listlesszombies—mere shadows of their former selves—residentsof the bleakest of rest homes. But at least they were stillaround!