LIFEs*'v°4-6LIFE
Rabbi Lane Steinger:
"Some part of the
human person is
imperishable."
pagan cult sacrificed a child in biblical
times. Gan Eden, paradise, comes from the
Garden of Eden.
Those souls who have yet to warrant
either paradise or punishment may find
themselves back on earth; some Jews have
no doubt that Judaism
believes in reincarnation.
Speaking to Jews about to
commit suicide rather than
be captured by Roman
soldiers, historian Flavius
Josephus said: "The bodies of
all men are, indeed mortal,
and are created out of corrup-
tible matter; but the soul is
ever immortal, and is a por-
tion of the divinity that in-
habits our bodies . . . Do you
not know that those who de-
part out of this life according
to the law of nature . . . enjoy
eternal fame: that their houses and their
posterity are sure, that their souls are pure
and obedient, and obtain a most holy place
in heaven whence they are again sent into
pure bodies!'
THE SEARCH FOR
IMMORTALITY
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS
Sheol, a place described in the Torah as a
region where the dead live.
Few details are given about Sheol,
though the Torah says wealth and power
are irrelevant there. Some call it a dark pit,
while others describe it as a temporary
resting place, perhaps a grave, from where
God will recover souls and take them to
Him.
The Bible makes mention of an after-
world in Daniel 12:2: "And many of them
that sleep in the dust of the earth shall
awake, some to everlasting life, and some
to shame and everlasting contempt!' and
in Ecclesiastes 12:7: "The dust returns to
the earth as it was, but the spirit returns
to God who gave it."
Job, however, rejects any concept of an
afterlife. In chapter seven, he says: "As the
cloud is consumed and vanishes away, so he
that goes down to Sheol shall come up no
more!'
King David in Samuel II also says
following the death of his child, "I shall go
to him, but he will never come back to me!'
It was only in post-biblical times that
discussions of Olam Haba, the world to
come, began to appear in rabbinic texts.
Descriptions of paradise and hell are not
unified and are often nebulous. Rabbis
could speculate at length because unlike
the Torah, God did not give the Jewish peo-
ple any manual about the afterlife.
Yet virtually all Jewish scholars agree
that some kind of afterlife exists. The
soul, they believed, would "ascend" and
wait to be reunited with the body when the
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FRIDAY, MAY 25, 1990
Messiah comes.
Both prayers and rabbinic literature
are filled with references to one's soul retur-
ning to God after death. The prayer
"Elokai N'shamah" includes: "My God, the
soul with which Thou has endowed me is
pure. Thou hast created it.
Thou has formed it. Thou
hast breathed it into me.
Thou dost preserve it within
me, and Thou wilt hereafter
reclaim it and restore it to me
in time to come."
As diverse as the ancient
rabbis' views on the afterlife
are positions taken by the
various movements today.
Reform Judaism differs
with Conservative and Ortho-
dox Judaism on the question
of bodily resurrection.
Conservative and Ortho-
dox Judaism espouse the belief in bodily
resurrection when the Messiah comes, as
defined in the Talmud. This is one reason
Conservative and Orthodox Jews do not
permit autopsies and cremation.
Many also say the burning of a Jewish
corpse today is unthinkable in the after-
math of the Holocaust.
The Reform movement, in its 1885 Pitt-
sburgh Platform, reasserted the view that
man's soul is immortal but rejected the idea
of bodily resurrection and concepts of
Gehenna and Gan Eden (hell and
paradise).
Reform Judaism "removed from the
prayer book all mention of the 'resurrection
of the dead' because the concept was in-
tellectually unacceptable," Rabbi Levi Olan
writes in Judaism and Immortality.
Prayers in the Reform Siddurim Union
Prayer Book and Gates of Prayer have
"At bottom no one believes in
his death, which amounts to
saying: in the unconscious
every one of us is convinced
of his immortality."
— Sigmund Freud
been rewritten to accommodate positions
expressed in the Pittsburgh Platform.
Thus, "Elokai N'shamah" contains no men-
tion of God restoring one's soul in the
afterlife; instead, it reads: "The soul that
You have given me, 0 God, is a pure one!
You have created and formed it, breathed
it into me, and within me You sustain it!'
Call it `ruach' (spirit), 'n'shema' (soul)
or `nefesh' (soul), "some part of the human
person is imperishable and comes from
God," says Rabbi Lane Steinger of Temple
Emanu-El. "And at its bodily death, it
returns to God!'
The soul comes from God and so is in-
herently pure, he adds. Man's responsibility
Rabbi Efry Spectre:
"We must believe that
by being in this
world we can make it
better."