Rabbi's
Sermons
Yom Kippur
Sinai Synagogue, Monday AM, October 2, 2006
Yossel a pious and righteous Yid dies at the end of a long life. As he is admitted to Heaven the angel says to him, “Is there anything we can do for you?” “Yes, I would like to see my saintly rebbe who died 30 years ago”. “Of course”. He is brought to a spacious avenue with huge mansions and beautiful lawns. He sees his rebbe’s name on the mail box. He is amazed at his rebbe’s beautiful estate, knowing the poverty with which he lived in the temporal world. He enters and sees his rebbe, just as he remembered him. Old and wizened with a long white beard sitting over an open volume of the Talmud. Except that he is sitting at poolside with a beautiful well-coifed woman, with polished nails, wearing a very skimpy outfit. Yossel approached him, “Reb Yonah, it’s so good to see you!” “Ah Yossel good to see you”. “Reb Yonah, I must ask you a question. It is not that I don’t wish you the best but is this really the fruits of paradise?” “Yossel, my boy,” said Reb Yonah shaking his head slowly, “not so fast. It’s not my heaven – it is her hell”.
You know, it is interesting that there are not that many Jewish jokes about the world-to-come – as you could probably tell by the last one I just told. But in a way it is not surprising for we Jews remind ourselves repeatedly that we are this-worldly religion. We are concerned with improving conditions in the earthly world unlike religions whose most important goal is to achieve eternity in the next world.
However we Jews also believe in a world after death and truth is we put great significance on the next world. According to Rabbi Jacob in Pirke Avot 4:16 “this world is comparable to a foyer of the world-to-come, prepare yourself in the foyer so you can enter the great hall”. So dearly is this belief held that Rabbi Moses Maimonides included belief in life after death in his list of 13 principles of Jewish Faith. Most significantly the traditional Jewish view of life after death is not the belief of a disembodied soul living eternally, but rather a concrete re-embodied resurrected existence.
In the final class of my ‘Judaism and the End of Life’ course this summer we discussed what happens after we die. Today seems like a good day to review this topic. On Yom Kippur we confront our mortality – we do not eat as if we were dead, we wear white shawls like the dead, we are forbidden from engaging in acts that perpetuate life such as sexual relations. So on this day when we place ourselves as if we were dead let us consider what Judaism has taught about life after death and specifically if the traditional view of life after death is one of physical resurrection – Can we still believe this? And other than George Romero and horror movie directors, why would anyone believe that such a doctrine was important, valued and even holy?
What is firstly so remarkable about this concept is that for such a basic Jewish belief there is almost no biblical support. The Bible mentions a place where the dead go – Sheol. There is no detailed description of it other than as a place one goes down to in death as Jacob cried out after hearing of Joseph’s death, “I will go down mourning to my son in Sheol.” It is not a place from which one returns: “As a cloud fades away, so whoever goes down to Sheol does not come up” (Job 7:9). Death is, if not final, a state that is unequal to life – “The dead cannot praise the LORD, nor any who go down into silence”. (Psa. 115:17) Only in the book of Daniel is there a hint of life after this world: In the future a time will come when “Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, others to reproaches, to everlasting abhorrence.” (12:1-3) The book of Daniel was written just before the period of the Maccabees. Unlike the Bible, we find the idea of life after death prominently in Jewish books written during this period. In the Second Book of Maccabees, a Jewish book written some time after the Hanukah story occurred but describing the events surrounding this period, we learn of the martyr Hannah and her seven sons. The sons are murdered one after another as they defiantly refuse to bow to Antiochus’ demands to defile their Jewish beliefs. Just before the second son dies, he calls out “Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting life.” The language is telling – raise us up? Raise what up if not the body? But where does this idea come from? Perhaps from a desire for true justice or of retribution for the sake of those who were put to death for observing Jewish law. It seems a first of its kind in Jewish history. Or perhaps as a response to the Greek idea that had permeated the Jewish and Middle Eastern worlds that the immortal soul continued on after death. Or as Dr. Jon Levenson argues in a new book on resurrection in ancient Judaism the notion was always there but developed and became more clearly expressed over time. In any case in these early accounts we note that only certain Jews achieve resurrection.
The Sages of the Rabbinic period liberated this doctrine so that in their words, “(San. 10:1) All Israelites have a share in the world to come... But these are the ones who have no portion in the world to come: Example 1 - He who says, the resurrection of the dead is a teaching which does not derive from the Torah”. The Mishnah was compiled at the beginning of the 3rd century CE – within 400 years the idea of physical resurrection had developed from mere hints to a point that the rabbis could insist that every Jew had the opportunity for resurrection and punishment would come upon those who suggested that it was not an obvious doctrine in the Torah, even though it was not obvious.
This belief in physical resurrection was confirmed daily in worship: “You make the wind to blow and bring the rain. You sustain the living, you give life to the dead with great love, you uphold the fallen, heal the sick, free the captive, and are faithful with those who sleep in the dust…who is similar to you O Sovereign who causes death and causes life, and brings forth salvation.” Just as nature appears to die in the winter and in drought, so too humans only seem to die when death comes but in fact they will be resurrected in time to come just as nature is resurrected anew season.
But why was it important to the rabbinic sages to make it clear that immortality was not only a spiritual immortality but a physical immortality as well? A midrash sums it up by using this analogy: Said Rabbi Judah HaNasi: To what can (the future judgment day) be compared? To a human king who owned a beautiful orchard which contained splendid figs. He appointed two watchmen, one lame and the other blind. The lame man said to the blind, ‘I see beautiful figs in the orchard. Take me on your shoulder that we may take them and eat’. So they did. When the king returned and saw his figs had been eaten, he asked ‘who ate my figs?’ Said the lame man, ‘Have I feet to walk with?’ Said the blind man, ‘Have I eyes to see with?’ What did the king do? He place the lame upon the blind and judged them together. So will the Holy One bring the soul, replace it in the body and judge them together.
If indeed as the Sages taught us, a time was coming when the travails of this world would end and peace and harmony would reign and perfect justice would be meted out, then physical resurrection was the only logical way for the individual to be judged completely and fairly.
Yet despite the rabbinic insistence that physical resurrection was the normative Jewish view there were other voices that suggested that the person’s spiritual component, their soul, breathed into humanity by God, was the only truly immortal element to the person. Philo of Alexandria a Hellenistic thinker roughly contemporary with the Rabbis believed this. And so did, in a fashion, Moses Maimonides the great Jewish scholar of the 12th century who included in his 13 principles of Jewish belief the belief in physical resurrection. Maimonides was influenced by his studies in Aristotle. His writings indicate both an adherence to the traditional view of physical resurrection and an attraction to the idea of spiritual immortality. Professor Neil Gilman in his book The Death of Death details how Maimonides’ discussions of the afterlife in his various works created a complex view of the age or ages to come. Put simply, Maimonides expounds a doctrine of double dying. We die once and our bodies return to the earth while our souls leave the body. When the Messiah comes, we are resurrected body and soul. After a thousand years, we die a second time after which the souls of the righteous enjoy the totally spiritualized and eternal life in the world to come. This was Maimonides synthesis of Torah and philosophy, they are both true.
In the medieval period a number of mystical doctrines developed that suggested that souls which are immortal reincarnate into new bodies when their previous body dies in order to complete the tikkun, the reparation, that was not complete in the previous life. In the modern period the idea of physical resurrection was discounted as crude. It was obvious that the body disintegrated after death and yet a strong belief that our life did not end with physical death led many Jewish thinkers to support spiritual immortality. The mystical and modern approaches though quite different in temperament and motivation were associated in that both detracted from the importance of the body in favor of the soul.
But today as we sit in this synagogue fasting and feeling the hunger pangs; all the while knowing that it is our conscious choice to deny ourselves this normal physical need and to deny this physical need because it aids in our spiritual development, can we really divest body from soul?
Can one ever cleanly distinguish one’s physical components from the spiritual? The nihilist says no – all we are is matter, consciousness is merely a component of our bio-physiological development. After this existence there is nothing. The philosopher says yes – our true selves are our spiritual selves, the body is a prison, or holding cell until our true self is released. But the Jew says just as both physical and spiritual presence are required in the temporal world so in some way both must be necessary in the eternal world.
A non- Jewish researcher into the issue of death, Elizabeth Kubler Ross in an article called “Life, Death, and Death after Life” describes her research into near death experiences. Of the thousands of interviews she and her team did, they found a remarkable similarity in the survivors’ accounts of what they saw and experienced when they were almost dead. There was a drawing near to other relatives and loved ones, a sense of peace and wellbeing and of light. The individuals who had such experiences never felt alone during their deaths but always accompanied. And finally while they had what we call an out-of-body experience, in that they could look down and see their physical body they were contained in what Kubler Ross called an ethereal body. She writes that “from the moment of our existence until we return to God, we always maintain our own identity and our own energy pattern. In the billions of people in this universe …there are not two of the same energy patterns, no two people alike.”
While we cannot know the accuracy of Kubler Ross’ studies until we reach the after life, her studies help us begin to understand the value of the rabbinic doctrine of physical resurrection.
Will Herberg, the modern Jewish philosopher, was one of the first neo-traditionalists to insist on adherence to the concept of physical resurrection. Belief in physical resurrection demands that “the whole man – body , soul, and spirit – are joined in an indissoluble unity.” We are not pure souls locked into a corruptible body but rather an integrated unit of which each component has it own integrity. Neil Gillman writes in The Death of Death, “that my body is indispensable to my sense of self. Without my body there is no ‘me’. Whatever my ultimate destiny then, whatever God has in store for me at the end, must include my body.”
The importance of physical resurrection transcends the desire of the individual to know that he or she has a unique and eternal integrity. It effects how we look at society as well.
To return to Will Herberg: The doctrine of physical resurrection affirms that God’s promise of salvation is not a private, individual affair… but the salvation of mankind, the corporate redemption of men in the full reality of their historical existence. The whole point of the doctrine of the resurrection is that the life we live now, the life of the body, the life of empirical existence in society has some measure of permanent worth in the eyes of God, and will not vanish in the transmutation of things at the ‘last day’”.
Or as Neil Gillman puts it: “If my body inserts me into history and society, then the affirmation of bodily resurrection is also an affirmation of history and society. If my bodily existence is insignificant, then so are history and society. To affirm that God has the power to reconstitute me in my bodily existence is to affirm that God also cares deeply about history and society.”
What Herberg and Gillman are telling us is what the Sages of old want us to understand –
How we look at life after death teaches us about how we look at life before death!
What we learn is that God loves each and every one of us in our totality – body, soul, spirit, psyche.
And not only that, but God loves humanity – human society, culture, community.
My body has a sanctity inherent in it. It is not only my soul which is holy. I must treat my body with respect.
On Yom Kippur we recognize the potential sanctity of our body and soul. Just as we control our physical needs and desires in refraining from eating and drinking, washing and sexual relations so can we control our spiritual and emotional needs. Raising our whole person up depends on our controlling our desires.
Humanity and its development is significant and purposeful. Communal salvation is important not only personal salvation. Put in the most concrete way – praying for the victims of Darfur will not do as much good for them as stopping the murderers.
On Yom Kippur I recognize the sacred communities of my past when I recite the Martyrology and Yizkor and the Avodah service. Others came before me and made choices that allow me to better understand what is sacred. They made choices that allowed me to enter into existence. Their choices are a guide for me in making my choices.
My life has a purpose not limited to a personal Tikkun, correcting faults that I have acquired but a Tikkun Olam, bringing healing to the physical, social and psychological defects of the world around me. The body is important enough for God to return our bodies to us in the end of days, therefore in this world it is important for us to partner with God to work to end violence, sickness, pain and suffering. Such a goal speaks to a future world which achieve this ideal.
Yom Kippur compels us to strive after such a world on a personal and a communal level and to have faith that some day this ideal will be achieved.
Finally Yom Kippur teaches that I in my totality as a person, am accountable for my deeds and that if that accounting is not completed in this world it will be in the future. God does hold me responsible for my life. My physical as well as spiritual existence is accountable.
We all hope that our lives and our loved ones’ lives do not end with our demise in this world. We Jews believe that neither our spiritual nor physical lives conclude with death. But more importantly, may we leave this sanctuary this day with the conviction that we make our lives of great consequence in this world so that we are worthy of being given new life in the next.
