Ask the
Clergy
Is There Life After
Death?
by
Senior Rabbi, Alan Green
Published in the Jewish Post on
Wednesday,
July 2, 2008
Jewish belief in life after death has
fluctuated over the millennia. During the Biblical period (1500 to
300 BCE) there was no specific mention of life after death. The
Torah speaks of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob “being gathered to his
people,” but we hear nothing about any surviving remnant of
consciousness, or an eternal soul in any Biblical description of
death.
However, by late Second Temple times
(First Century CE), there were at least two competing systems of
belief and practice in the Jewish world: those of the Sadducees, and
the Pharisees. The Sadducees were the upper class, urban population
in Jerusalem—educated, well-off, and closely connected with the Holy
Temple and the Roman authorities. For the Sadducees, there was only
life in this world, and one was rewarded and punished for one’s good
or bad deeds in this lifetime.
On the other hand, there were the
Pharisees: the less educated, less sophisticated, less urbanized
part of the population. These were the simpler, more traditional
folk—people to whom life hadn’t been so kind—and who therefore
looked forward to a “world to come,” an afterlife in which the good
would be rewarded, and the evil given their just desserts.
What happened to the Sadducees and
Pharisees? The Sadducean world came crashing down in the year 70
CE, when the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt by destroying the Holy
Temple, and killing or enslaving hundreds of thousands of Jews.
With the demise of the Sadducees, and the destruction of the Holy
Temple, Judaism was ripe for radical formatting. This task fell to
the descendants of the Pharisees, who we know today as the rabbis of
the Mishnah and Talmud—the spiritual authorities who gave Judaism
the form in which it could survive nineteen centuries of exile
outside the land of Israel.
One aspect of the spiritual heritage of
the Pharisees, vigorously preserved by the rabbis, was the belief in
life after death. The rabbis permanently engraved this spiritual
marker into Jewish life by inserting it into the Amidah prayer—the
central prayer in any Jewish service of the year. God in the Amidah
is M’CHAYEH HA-METIM—the one who restores the dead to life.
Notwithstanding the many different meanings that can be assigned to
these simple words, one outstanding meaning is that the soul
survives the death of the body. God restores the soul to eternal
life in the world to come, after the body dies.
Life after death therefore remained the
standard of Jewish belief right down to the 19th century
Haskalah (“enlightenment”), when the emancipation of the Jews of
Western Europe combined with the industrial, scientific, and
nationalistic revolutions to utterly transform Jewish life. Belief
in life after death among Jews has fallen into disfavor for the past
few generations. But things never stand still, and for the past
thirty years, the pendulum has begun to swing back in favor of this
belief once again.
Do you have a question you would like answered in this column? Email
information@shaareyzedek.mb.ca. |
