Life Before Death

Yizkor 5786, Yom Kippur 5786

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

A woman was describing her discussion with her elderly mother about dying, and how comfortable her mom was at the thought of passing away.  She was a cheery person, generally, the mother, and was excited about seeing all the people she had loved but lost after she died.  In her mind, heaven looked a lot like a beautiful Italian villa, with the chance to spend time enjoying seeing her late husband, her parents, cousins, and friends.  But then she stopped short, as a thought occurred to her: “Oh, dear; what if they don’t make it!”

What if they don’t make it…

Now, in truth, we have no real idea what happens when we die.  We not only don’t know if our loved ones are going to “make it” to The Good Place afterlife.  We don’t know if we are going to make it there ourselves.  Not only that: we don’t even know if it exists.  But I love the confidence of that elderly woman’s exclamation: “Oh, dear!  What if they don’t make it?” Indeed.

My friends, I am often asked about the Jewish view of life after death.  I generally answer, “Judaism cares much more about life before death than life after death, to be honest.”  And that is surely true.  But one of religion’s great responsibilities is to explain things we can’t explain otherwise, to speak to questions that have no straightforward answers, to help us understand the most challenging problems and offer valuable insights that address our need for resolution and comfort.

And one of the most difficult of all these great questions is, “What happens to me after I die?”

Unlike most other religious traditions, Judaism has a lot of different ideas about this, and none of them are exactly canonical, or even required, even in Orthodox belief.  As some of you know, from time to time I teach a class called “Life After Death in Jewish Belief,” which surveys the development of our people’s understandings about what happens after we die.  It is a fascinating class, and one of my favorite courses to teach, mostly because no one can prove that I’m wrong about anything I say in that class.  For one thing, no one wants to do the research. 

Now, there are many interesting and surprising aspects to our Jewish understandings about the afterlife.  First, there is no record of any Jewish belief in life after death in our most authoritative text, the Torah, at all.  Only when we reach the books of the Prophets, and more specifically the last part of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, the Writings, the Ketuvim do we see a real theology of life after death. 

The two central ideas of what happens after we die probably didn’t even originate from us.  The first was the concept of the resurrection of the dead, the idea that after we die and are buried, at some point in the future we will be revivified, have flesh restored to our bones, and be brought back to life as human beings.  That idea likely came into Judaism from the Babylonians, who had various traditions and myths about resurrection.  The second major idea was the notion that each of us has an eternal soul, an aspect of us that is unique, and which is indestructible.  After we die, it remains behind, or goes to some general repository for souls.  That idea was likely brought into Judaism from the Persians, during the Persian Empire period.  Both ideas may have originated farther east still, in India, and worked their way west somewhere between 2700 and 2500 years ago.

By the time of the Book of Daniel, perhaps 2200 years ago—a long time, of course, but remember, at that point Judaism had been around for about 1500 years—the two ideas merged into one theology of life after death.  In Daniel, the understanding became that after we die and are buried, sometime in the future, a great, disastrous world war will take place, followed by a Judgement Day.  An anointed human being, the Messiah, will herald it, and at that point our bodies will be resurrected, restored to full human form, our souls will be reimplanted within our bodies, we will be judged for actions when we were alive, and some will go to eternal reward and others to eternal punishment. 

Now, mind you, there isn’t much more in the Bible about what either of those options means, and even the Talmud, composed hundreds of years after the Book of Daniel, doesn’t get too specific about heaven or hell, or even the structure of Judgement Day.  That version of life after death, or at least what the end of days, the acharit hayamim will look like, became the typical Jewish understanding of afterlife.  But interestingly, it never turned into the focal point of Judaism.  That is, we had a general concept of life after death, and it fit that model, but no one spent much time thinking about it or talking or preaching about it. 

I could go on about the various Jewish views of life after death; they range pretty broadly through history, and there remain many different ideas about what happens after we go.  A friend and past scholar in residence and guest on Too Jewish, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, was asked in a lecture he gave for me once, “Where do we go when we die?”  He said, “We don’t go anywhere.  We are part of the time-space fabric, and we simply move to a different part of it.  We are all part of everything.”

You see, unlike so many other religions, the afterlife was never the point of being Jewish.  You don’t live your life here in order to get to heaven, or to avoid hell.  You are supposed to live your life according to the mitzvot in order to be a good, ethical, moral Jew, to improve the world we live in, not to get rewards afterwards or to avoid eternal punishment. 

That’s likely why the Jewish views of heaven and hell are so underwhelming.  I mean, other religions devote great energy to their depictions of heaven and hell.  In Islam, heaven is vividly described, filled with fountains and iced fruits, a place of infinite bliss and, for men, 72 virgins, according to a Hadith.  In Christianity, hell is even more vividly delineated, with tortures and punishments for the wicked—“abandon hope all you who enter here” Dante has it labelled, while Hieronymous Bosch paints the torments of the sinners in hell with unparalleled vicious detail. 

In Judaism?  Not a whole lot of info on either place.  This is perhaps best illustrated with a story.

A righteous Tzadik, a great rabbi, dies and goes to heaven.  He meets God at the entrance and God welcomes him warmly, asking if he’s hungry from the long trip to heaven.  “Well,” says the Tzadik, “I could eat.”

So he is presented with a plate of rye bread and pickled herring. 

The next morning he wakes up from his comfortable bed, and is presented with his breakfast: rye bread and pickled herring.  For lunch, it’s the same thing, rye bread and pickled herring.  At dinner, once again, rye bread and pickled herring.

The rabbi hesitantly asks, “I’m sorry to trouble you, Ribono shel Olam, but this is heaven.  I’m thrilled to be here, but tell me: why is every meal rye bread and pickled herring?”

And God answers, “For two, it doesn’t pay to cook.”

Rather a limited view of the afterlife, no?   

Perhaps that’s because, for Jews, what really matters is not what happens after we die, but before we die.  It is how we live on earth that we control, the quality of our relationships, the love we create and share.

There is a remarkable play you likely haven’t heard of called The Makropolous Case.  It is by the Czech playwright Carel Kapek.  The premise is that a woman is given 300 extra years to live.  As the play begins, she is now 342 years old, and has seen everyone she loved originally, as well as all her children and grandchildren live their lives, grow old and die.  She’s done every job and profession you can think of, and pursued every hobby there is.  After all, she had 300 extra years.  Now in the play she’s offered 300 more years.

The central issue of the play is to determine what she will do: will she choose to continue to live?  Or will she voluntarily choose not to continue?   

In the end, she declines. 

The lesson is clear.  Life is so valuable in part because it’s time-limited.  And because it is limited, it is up to us to make it meaningful in the time that we have.

There is a beautiful quote, from write Maria Popova in a review of a book by James Baldwin.  She wrote, “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”

We have arrived at the time for remembering people who are gone.  For recalling the love they gave us, the light they shone in our lives. 

We don’t know where they are now.  But we do have the ability to preserve their love, and their light, during our own brief time on earth.  By making their memories sacred we memorialize something precious: life itself.  And our holy relationship with those people we love and have lost.  Wherever they are now, they are with us during this time.