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A Jewish Concept of Death
Giuseppe Laras
Due to its categoric and absolutely specific nature, it is beyond dispute that the phenomenon of death instinctively arouses fear and distress in the human person who is both the possessor and expression of life. Death appears to be the end: an emptying, an annihilation and a negation, the opposite of what is, of what exists; in other words, the opposite of man himself. A painful and anxious feeling of fear and especially of powerlessness grips him and accompanies him from the moment he recognizes and reflects instinctively on this strange, unavoidable, uncontrollable exit from life.
It is, however, just as certain that the very same phenomenon of death, while maintaining its categoric distinction of apparent negation of life, leads to a very different attitude in those who possess a religious vision of life. By religious vision, I mean a concept of reality which is neither automatic nor pantheistic, but rather centered on the idea of a God, Creator of the world over whose destiny he watches and waits.
The Contribution of Judaism
Judaism which, with its ethical monotheism, has introduced a revolutionary concept of reality into the world (a reality which, instead of being left to itself through the necessity of fate, persists right from its birth and development through to its fulfilment within the free and conscious divine will), could not avoid posing the problem of death, together with so many other problems, from a perspective different from that in which it could be viewed, either instinctively, or outside a religious point of view.
Let us say right away, however, that a dichotomy between soul and body, between spirit and matter, is foreign to the Jewish mentality in the sense that only the first of these two elements would be noble and valid, while the second would bear the traits of a negative accident, both superfluous and constraining. God has created the spirit, but even earlier he created matter.
Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Gen. 2:7
This quotation, as well as other theological considerations which may derive from it, stresses a very important exemplary point which is, that life — "the world of here and now" — is a gift of God lavished upon us, which all of us must use in the best way we can, both in its material and spiritual expressions, conforming with what is God's will made known in our regard.
The Gift of Life
Now if life, this life, is intended to be an intrinsically good gift which must be used within the framework of a serene relationship of obedience to God, it becomes clear that the duty entrusted to man as a collaborator and completor of creation aims to lay the world, this world, under the dominion of the Almighty.
Admitting this necessity — which emerges from the first pages of the Torah and continues to be confirmed in other biblical texts too — of underlining the holiness of the temporal-human dimension in the framework of a vaster reality including invisible inexplicable aspects, a reason can already be detected as to the lack of detailed explanation concerning the soul and its fate after the death of the body. Obviously, this does not mean that no allusions, traces or relevant indications on such a matter do not occur in the bible. On the contrary, they are easy to verify. According to our way of understanding, the "world to come" — "Olam Ha-Ba" — is the dimension in which the soul takes refuge after having left the body at the moment of death.
Even without a specific explanation in the Torah concerning this, we should nonetheless be in a position to sense that the soul is not subject to death. Indeed, if the soul really is the divine part in us — So God created man in his own image (Gen. 1:27); When God created man he made him in the likeness of God (Gen. 5: 1) — it cannot be admitted that it could be susceptible to annihilation and death in the same manner as the body which decomposes. The soul cannot decompose and disappear, it becomes detached from the body, and the "divine image" imprinted in us persists in its essence, even beyond the body and without its support.
On this topic, the famous poem of Koheleth:
The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it,
Eccles. 12:7
besides consoling us, is all the more explicit and precise.
Resurrection
Another argument closely associated with the soul and the "world to come" deals with the "resurrection of the dead", a belief this, which is perhaps older and certainly more explicit than the belief in immortality.
Precise examples can be found in:
Deut. 32:39:
I kill and I make alive;
I wound and I heal...
I Sam. 2:6:
The Lord kills and brings to life;
he brings down to Sheol and raises up...
Is. 26:19:
Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise,
O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For thy dew is .a dew of light,
and on the land of the shades thou wilt let it fall... Ezek. 37:
This is the well-known story of the vision of the "dry bones", on which flesh and sinews grow and which come to life again (even if, for some people, this seems more probably and more simply to symbolize the national revival of Israel).
Dan. 12:2:
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,
some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt...
Together with the concepts of the Messianic Age and Reward, these ideas or beliefs which we are considering are all elements which only seem to be autonomous but are in fact part of a more general singleproblem which comes under the generic name of "Olam Ha-Ba" or "World to Come", a term we have used until now in a more limited sense.
In spite of the passing of the centuries with their resulting changes in the political and environmental fields which almost always have been traumatic, in spite of contact with different cultures and ways of thinking, Israel has always remained faithful to those principles of faith, even if all it has done has been to enrich them with more exhaustive explanatory details, and to raise certain of them in some cases to the ranks of actual dogmatic propositions.
The belief in the immortality of the soul and in the resurrection of the dead is, however, already well established and widespread in the century which precedes the common era, and even earlier, in the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books.
It must be remembered that the basic element which — on the doctrinal level — opposes the Pharisees to the Sadducees, is actually the resurrection (denied by the latter) and almost certainly, the immortality of the soul as well.
Bearers of Tradition
Even though it may be difficult within the scope of our present discourse to find systematic theories which are complete and uniform in the vast aggadic sector of Talmudic literature, it is certain that Pharisaism (the majority's current, or in other words, the most faithful and characteristic expression of Judaism, which after the national catastrophe of 70 C.E. guarantees the survival of the Jewish people) believed in a world of souls separate from their bodies.
Particularly apt is the famous saying of Rab (con¬stantly referred to by medieval Jewish theologians):
The future world is not like this world. In the future world there is no eating nor drinking nor propagation nor business nor jealousy nor hatred nor competition, but the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads feasting on the brightness of the divine presence, as it says, And they beheld God, and did eat and drink. (Ex. 24:11) - T.B. Ber. 17a
Concerning the aspect or character of such a heavenly dimension, even if constant references to a Gan Eden (garden of delight) and a Gehenna (place of suffering and flames) abound, a general brief deduction can be made that in such a dimension souls live an experience which is completely different from the experience of the material world, deriving from it positive or negative feelings according to the way in which they have lived in their previous earthly life. As regards the resurrection, the latter represents no particular difficulty about how it should be understood and defined (even if, in the light of pure logic it seems impenetrable) while on the other hand it poses no small problems such as to when it will come to pass, for how long it will last and how it will be coordinated with the world of souls.
The Meaning of Resurrection
What does "resurrection" mean? The remaking or rebuilding of the material body through the recuperation of all its members no matter how decomposed and changed they may have become and from wherever they may have ended up; and the re-entry into this reborn body of its own original soul. Ezekiel's image (Ch. 37) mentioned above helps us understand precisely how the resurrection will happen, at least according to those who attribute to it a particular descriptive and prophetic capacity, and consider it a divine "super-miracle": a kind of second birth of Adam, moulded outwardly of earth and inwardly of spirit.
Among the many problems posed by the resurrection, as we have said, there is one in particular which should be noticed: that is, what will happen once the resur¬rection of bodies has come about?
The answer seems to be the following: the resur¬rection is depicted as being the final point, presumably, in earthly experience, when the recreated or reborn body, even if it is lightened and refined in its substance, will pass or will be introduced into the world to come, to remain there for good, or until God so desires.
But how can a body enter into the world to come, a world which is entirely spiritual and lacking by definition any material receptivity? Yet again, given that in the world of the spirit such a body will not be able to manifest any of its material physiological functions, how can it be admitted that God creates, or better still, recreates organs destined not to be used?
Precisely to overcome these objections (how well we know them! They appear serious and insuperable when we examine them from a logical angle which is rigidly human, but lose much of their vigor if they are correlated to one unique, unrepeatable, divine "action"), Maimonides — the great medieval theologian (1135-1204) — breaks the link between the resurrection of the body and the definitive dimension of the world of souls, explaining that the miracle of the resurrection (not necessarily linked to the "end of days" as regards its occurrence), would be able to happen at any moment of the human experience and especially that it will end with a newphysical death, which will open the way to a final re-entry of the soul into the "world to come".
This position, demonstrated by the philosopher of Cordoba regarding the resurrection, represents in truth, a rather solitary position which is scarcely supported by the great Jewish theologians, who accordingly prefer — notwithstanding the above mentioned difficulties —the traditional interpretation which links the resurrection to the world of souls.
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R. Hiyya b. Abba also said in the name of R. Johanan: All the prophets prophesied only for the days of the Messiah, but as for the world to come, "Eye hath not seen, oh God, beside Thee". (Is. 64:4) T.B. Ber. 34b
* Rabbi Professor Giuseppe Laras is Chief Rabbi of Milan.
