Jeremy Rosen
Life After Death

Jeremy Rosen | Life After Death | 06.08.21

- Okie dokie. So, I’ve been playing Beethoven’s “Romance”. Technically its full name is “Violin Romance No. 2 in F”. One of my favourites. But that’s not the subject of today, which is life after death.

Death is something, as we get older, we think more about, but it’s there all the time. It’s in the nature of humanity that some of us die almost immediately we come out of the womb and others go on until the hundreds. It’s something that some of us are frightened of, some of us are comfortable with, and others of us are not concerned so much with death as to what happens before we get there, may be ill health, infirmity, and so forth. But I want to discuss the idea of death from a range of different positions and come to some sort of conclusion as to how we should deal with it.

Those of you who are familiar with psychology will know that as between Freud and as between Jung, there were two very different attitudes towards death, and the term that they used was thanatos. It’s an old Greek term to do with the state of dying, but there are in fact seven different terms for dying in Greek philosophy and thought. Of course, you’ll be more familiar with the ferryman who takes people across the river from this world to the next. But according to Freud, thanatos is a bad state. It’s an awful state, something we should avoid at all cost. It’s the basis of all horrible things that happen.

Whereas on the other hand, according to Jung, myths about death are very comforting, are very helpful. We shouldn’t be frightened and we shouldn’t think it’s a bad thing altogether, just part of the process of living. So you have these different ways within psychology and psychiatry of looking at death. When we go to the Bible, which is where I always start with things, we see that the Torah itself is very ambiguous. Nowhere in the Bible, in the Torah does it expressively, specifically talk about life after death. And the big question is why not? There are several possible explanations.

One of them is, look, everybody believed in life after death in those days, the pyramids or the ziggurats, every culture that you could think of had arrangements for death and preparing the soul to come back, or the bodies to come back and burying them with all the necessities they needed after life. So you could say that because the Torah was a manual for living, it didn’t feel the need to mention life after death, because everybody knew about it, everybody thought about it, everybody considered it. The other possibility is to say no, the Torah does not believe in life after death. Everything in Judaism about life after death comes much later from other sources from outside of the original idea. That is one way of looking at it.

When we come to the beginning, to Genesis, we talk about death in the sense that God says to Adam and Eve, “Don’t touch.” There are two trees in the garden. There’s the tree of life and there’s the tree of death, and there’s the tree of God and the tree of bad, and you have to make the right choices. And it seems that when choosing to disobey God, God wanted to make sure they didn’t disobey God a second time by taking a bite out of the fruit of life and live forever. So it would appear that originally the idea was that human beings would go on living forever, but of course that is not something that makes any sense if we’re looking at it from a rational point of view. And so having talked about the tree of life, immediately, the Torah goes on to just talk about primarily the way we human beings screw up.

And even the mention of the Garden of Eden does not imply anything in another world, in a supernatural world. It just seems to be a stage in the development of the human. And when it comes to the creation of man, man is created out of the dust of the earth and he will return to the dust of the earth, which seems that that was the original intent, but we can only speculate. So there we have the idea of death as being a condition like taxes of human beings, but do we know anything more about it? We know in Babylon at the time when the Torah was being written, there were different names of the gods of death in Babylon too. There was Mot, which is rather like the term Mavet in modern Hebrew, which is death. There is the idea of Sha'ul going down to the grave and that is something different. And in the ancient world, the death process was in these stages, the body becomes inanimate, it stops breathing.

The body then is laid out somewhere or maybe burnt somewhere to take the flesh off of the flesh to decompose. And then finally the bones are gathered together and they’re placed in what we call ossuaries made of ceramics or placed in caves, as happens with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the cave of Machpelah. And that’s where they are left with no comment about what happens afterwards. When talking about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esau and Joseph, the Bible uses a strange combination of words that it doesn’t use later on. It says that in Hebrew, is a body. That’s to say he becomes just a carcass. And then it says, and he died. Well, what’s the difference between just becoming inanimate and dying?

So Mot, if you like, was the God that consumed the flesh, , and then is phrased . He is gathered to his people. And what does that mean, being gathered to your people? It sounds very much like it could either mean your bones are then gathered and put with the rest of your ancestors in the family tombs or ossuaries. But there are some people who would like to say, but that implies they go to joy in the souls of previous souls who have died and passed on. And that might be, that might be the only reference you will find in the Torah to what we call life after death. Very interestingly, when you move on from the Torah itself and you come to the book of Ecclesiastes attributed to Solomon probably a bit later, this is the first example of the notion of an afterlife, because it’s the first time you get this question, who knows if the soul of man rises and the soul of animals when they die sinks down into the earth? Who knows? We don’t know anything about it.

It’s not a categorical statement in any way that it is a fundamental of Jewish life to believe that there is life after death. And yet, for the last 2,000 years at least, life after death has been a fundamental topic of Jewish thought. And life after death really divides into several different categories. Sometimes it’s called (indistinct), the world to come. Sometimes it’s called (indistinct), the future to come, and sometimes it’s called (indistinct), resurrection of the dead. All these interesting ideas have accumulated over a period of time. And when you look at the sources of the Talmudic era going back some 2,000 years ago, you see they are all mentioned in different ways. And as is the custom and as is the style of the Talmud, you will have lots of different conflicting opinions as to what exactly we mean by this state of life after death.

So, for example, you’ll find the idea that is expressed in the Mishneh that there is a world to come, that this world is like a corridor, it’s a preparation for a palace. If you do a good job in this world, then you all go through to the palace. And if you do a bad job, that will be the end of it. Now, that is one opinion. There’s another opinion which says, when it comes to reward and punishment for one’s deeds, that doesn’t happen in this world at all, it happens in the world to come. And there are other opinions which say, and we’ll come to this at a later date when we discuss the notion of reward and punishment, what is there at all if there is such a thing as reward? But then they go on to talk about the idea that there is a world to come and that everybody has access to that world to come if they behave in an ethical and in a good way.

The Israelites do. If they follow the Torah and behave in a good way, there is somewhere to move on to. But so do the non-Jews too. There are pious non-Jews in the world who also have part of this world to come. It’s rather like dangling something in the future in the hope that something good will happen to us, because we humans seem to have this concern that bad people seem to do, very often, extremely well and die comfortably in their beds and good people seem to suffer horrible ends and suffering, regardless how good they are. And if we believe there is a God who judges, then of course why does it work out that way? And the easy way of solving the problem is shoving it off to the afterlife and saying, don’t know what’s happening.

Nobody, and here’s another famous quote from the Talmud. “Nobody knows anything about the world to come because nobody’s come back to see it.” Nobody has seen what life after death is, and so what’s the point in talking about it? And yet the Talmud spends a lot of time talking about life after death or the future. And people who talk about it divide into those who say it is a different state in this world that this world is going to change. And others who say, no, it’s in a different world altogether. Now, those who say this world is going to change come up with a whole range in the Talmud of opinions which say there’s going to come a time in the future when fruit will grow on the trees all the time, when women will give birth to children all the time.

I’m not certain that’s a wonderful thing to look forward to, that all the laws of the Torah will be put into because we won’t need the laws anymore because we’re going to be so good, which seems to imply there’s a state that we can work to, but in this world. And yet, on the other hand, you have these ideas that talk about this world to come where all the wise men will be sitting around studying Torah and they will be close to the presence of God and benefiting from divine influence. And these ideas are not in a sense necessarily dogma in a way.

So, for example, the Talmud does not say you must believe in the world to come, but it does say if you don’t believe in the world to come, you just don’t get the world to come. In other words, the religion is concerned with keeping one’s theological options open. Because we are different, some of us are rational and some of us are not rational, they want to allow for different ways of looking at life and different ways of looking at death and what comes after death. So this ambiguity is very important in the Talmud because it is not laid down as dogma. But by the time you come to the mediaeval period, thanks to the development of Christian dogma, the Jews have acquired certain dogmas.

So let’s jump to the 1,000 years ago with Maimonides, the great Jewish rational philosopher, and yet the great Jewish lawyer and legal expert and greatest, in many respects, of our tradition. When he talks about his philosophy, for example, whether we’re talking about the guide to the perplexed, or we’re talking about what are call the laws of repentance, , he says very clearly that when a person dies, their soul continues because their soul, that part, and that’s something else we’re going to talk about, what we mean by soul, the soul rises to God and merges with God at death. But if you don’t have a soul, if you’ve obliterated your soul because you have no spiritual dimension, then all you have is your physical and your physical simply dies.

And when we talk about the Garden of Eden in heaven, we simply mean a spiritual dimension. And when some too they talk about Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, which is a place where children were burnt by the Canaanites and a bad place, it simply means you die. And so in a sense, you either create your heaven, or you destroy your own heaven. But when he talks about Jewish law and talking about a dogma for the average person, he says quite clearly and quite unmistakably that you must believe in life after death, but he phrases it, he phrases it as resurrection, that we will be brought back to life in some form or another.

So you see the ambiguity between the rational on the one hand and the sort of popular theology for the masses on the other. Because as Maimonides recognised, some people are intellectually influenced and rationalists, and some people are, if you like, more basic, more emotional, less rational. And we have to appeal to both and give justification for both. Now, we happen to be going through a phase within Judaism, we have become excessively fundamentalist and excessively reliant on dogma. But everything in Judaism over the years has gone through cycles and fashions and changes, and we never know exactly what’s going to happen in the next generation in terms of which explanation, scientific or others, will appeal to us more.

Now, there we have a background in which what I’m trying to say to you is that the Torah in our tradition is incredibly un-dogmatic about what we understand as life after death, what we understand as death itself. But when we come to the actual process of death and the actual customs relating to death, there we become much more specific. There, we start off with the idea that the body is something holy, that the body is something that can be used as a vehicle for spirituality and for ethical moral behaviour. And therefore, the body has to be treated with inordinate respect. And this is one of the reasons why Judaism never accepted the idea of cremation, or air burials in that sense, and insisted that the body be buried and treated with respect. And that would include an amputated leg or some other part of the body that was removed at some stage or another.

But that doesn’t mean to say that respect for the body and requirement for its treatment with respect means that if, for example, you don’t, if you are cremated, or if you do find your body is never discovered again because it was consumed by some awful cataclysm, that you therefore are doomed in some way. Because if you took that point of view, all those poor people whose bodies were incinerated in the Holocaust, then many of them greatly spiritual and good human beings, would have no portion in the life to come or life after death if you believe that is an important feature of one’s religious, spiritual life. So respect for the body is one thing, but that doesn’t mean to say, as very often happens, we cannot use parts of the body to help the living because the living are more important and life is more important.

And because life is regarded as a gift, this is why it is something we should treat with respect and value. It’s also why, in a sense, that suicide is not considered a legitimate form of escaping one’s problems. Technically speaking, you could argue that somebody who commits suicide shouldn’t be buried in a Jewish burial ground. And yet the fact is that according to Jewish law, almost always the rabbis conclude that even if a person appears to have started off by trying to commit suicide, he or she certainly wouldn’t have wanted to complete it and therefore, in a sense, repented before their death, and therefore we can and very often do bury them in a normal traditional burial ground. And the fact is that even somebody who is cremated, from a religious point of view, their ashes still need and should be buried and treated with respect.

But of course, as with anything within religion, we individuals make our own decisions about how far we want to be bound by Jewish law and not bound by Jewish law. And so we have these rules and regulations about dying, which include mourning. And the question of course is, what is the purpose of this mourning? Is the purpose of this mourning for the dead in some way, or is it for the living to be able to cope with the trauma of loss? Now, when it comes to what we understand by death itself, the Talmud has different examples of what they can consider to be death. The ideal form, a form which they normally attribute to very good people, is what is called (indistinct), the kiss of death. In other words, you fall gently asleep into the darkness and it’s just like being kissed on your way. Or another example is it’s like moving a thread or a hair through milk, gently passing it through from one stage to another.

On the other hand, as we know, whether we deserve it or not, there are deaths that are extremely painful. There are deaths that come around as the most horrible result of the most horrible of tortures, most horrible of situations, being caught in a burning building. And the truth of the matter is that there is a difference between the idea of death, just as there is the idea of God and what we tend to fear, which is not in a sense death in itself so much as what we would call in Hebrew , an unusual, a horrible kind of a death.

And we don’t know who or when or how is going to suffer from that. And so in that sense, if you ask me what my attitude is, my attitude to death is that it’s something I don’t have a problem with, I’m not frightened of, in a sense I welcome this idea of going into permanent sleep. I now worry about who I leave behind and that they’ll be unhappy. But I don’t worry about the process of death. What I worry about is being left penniless, poor, sick, ill, suffering. But that’s a different issue. There are people who go through that when they’re very much still alive in their early years, not necessarily at the end of their life. And so the attitude that one has is very, very subjective.

Now, mourning raises some interesting issues. The Talmud raises the issue of whether dead people still know what is going on after they’ve died. And in fact, there are examples in the Torah of people going to graveyards and communicating either with bodies that have not been buried properly, or hovering, waiting to get into the next world. And this idea, in one sense, is the idea that relates to the periods of mourning that we have, the seven days, the 30 days, and the year. And the idea of saying Kaddish. Now, the idea of saying Kaddish is a relatively late advent into Jewish life. 2,000 years ago the tradition was that if somebody died, the community had lost a member, so you had, in a sense, to repay and refill the vacuum in the community.

And the way you did that was by strengthening the community, and the way you did that was by either studying, or alternatively praying. These were the two vehicles for spiritual development after the destruction of the temple. And so you had, for example, the idea that , which means a soul, also means , study, so a soul has been extinguished, study to replenish it. And so the idea of saying, taking a service was an adjunct or an alternative to study when people couldn’t. But then a lot of people didn’t know how to take the service and so they decided what can we give people, something to do that, in a sense, gives them this feeling that they are contributing to the community?

And this is where something called the Kaddish comes in, because the Kaddish is in Aramaic. And 2,000 years ago, most Jews spoke Aramaic and weren’t that familiar with the Hebrew. So in speaking Aramaic, they were given a little part of the service to do. And the Kaddish, which doesn’t mention the dead people at all, it doesn’t mention death whatsoever, was originally a kind of a marker because the service was made up of different elements. There was reading the Shema, which is not necessarily a prayer as such, it’s reading from the Torah. There was the Amidah, the prayer recited standing the 1819 benedictions, which was what was called , to express oneself.

Then there was on occasion reading from the Torah. And so the Kaddish was a marker between these different sections and it was the one part of the service that was repeated more than any other, repeated in Aramaic, so everybody could say a Kaddish, and that would be part of the process of remembering the dead. But somewhere along the line, the idea also came in that this would help the dead get through the transition from purgatory into cleansing, into heaven, and that could take as much as a year, which is why you have this tradition of saying Kaddish for a year, but we stop it in the 11th month because we don’t want to suggest that we need to to use up all the credit of 12 months, ‘cause this guy had no credit to get in on his own, and that’s why we stop before the 12th month comes up.

It’s a lovely idea if you like, but we’re not going to take it too seriously. So do the dead know? Do they hover around, and in which way do they hover around? We have no evidence whatsoever about whether they do or whether they do not, and it’s not a dogma. And it’s interesting, because in the Talmud, talking about this idea of what happens afterwards, you have, in the last chapter of “Sanhedrian”, this amazing question that Cleopatra, yes, Cleopatra is mentioned in black and white in the Talmud. She asks Rabbi and she says, “I know that I will continue to live in the next world, but what I want to know is will I be in the next world with my clothes on or without? And when I come back to earth, will I be in fashion or out of fashion?”

And of course this raises the issue that in the world to come, if we take it literally, at what stage would I be in the world to come? Will I be with clothes or without, with my false leg and my false teeth, before I had plastic surgery or after? Who will go recognise me? And so these, shall we say silly little points, nevertheless, were points that people always worried about, 'cause we do worry, we do very much want the idea that we’re going to reunite with our families, with our loved ones in the next world, even though how that would work in practise is simply beyond logic. It does not become a matter of logic, but I don’t want to underestimate the extent to which the mystical, might be the superstitious, might be the cabalistic, plays an important part in people’s lives and in the end is, if you sense it and if you feel it, that works for you.

And a lot of people derive a tremendous amount of comfort from the idea that the ones they love are still there. And most of us dream about the ones we’ve lost in the past and we like to think we will meet them again, maybe walking down high street world to come and we will say, hi, dad, how are you? You’re looking great. It’s good to see you. Let’s sit down and study a bit of the Talmud together. So what worries me is not that there are customs and there are traditions of mourning the dead, because that’s very therapeutic. If you are not able to mourn properly and recognise that people do die and you have to get on with life, this can have a very debilitating impact on one, as we know of course from Freud and other great mind experts, that this idea of sometimes needing to feel something and driving great comfort from it is incredibly important and we should not diminish it.

The period of seven days of coming together, I believe, is therapeutic for the mourners. I don’t believe it’s for those who have gone on, but we need a transition from the sudden shock of death to where we’re ready to reenter society. Some take longer, some take less, and it is sometimes important to have community support and people coming around to be with you. It’s interesting that according to official Jewish law, when you go to visit a mourner, you should not open the conversation. You shouldn’t start blathering and coming up with, shall we say, disturbing answers to why, you know, maybe they did something to deserve it. You know, we all know we all have a certain allocation of life, how long to lead, some quicker, some less, some more, some achieve more in a shorter time, some in a longer time.

We’ve heard all these arguments to explain why, which don’t explain why and very often are not comforting, and yet some people do find them comforting, which is why even though the law says you should sit in silence following the Job’s mourners and not open the conversation, most people find it very embarrassing to sit in silence. We live in a world in which we’re talking all the time, all the time getting all the information. But in fact, there’s a lot to be said to wait for the mourner to open the conversation if they feel like it or if they don’t. So the period of the shiva of the seven days is incredibly therapeutic for most people, and therefore I believe it is important for the living in the same way the transition to the 30 days, 30 days, which applies to everybody, but the exception of this is the parents are the only ones that you go on mourning for the whole of the year, or almost the whole of the year, is also a process of transition.

Not as strict as the seven days, much easier, but going gently through the phases of what I would call a healthy mourning process, but not to feel, as a lot do, that if I don’t go through the routine, sometimes it’s damaging the soul of my parents, or my parents are disappointed in me. If anybody is disappointed in you, it should be yourself not necessarily relying on anybody else. And this idea of fearing death I think is, as opposed to fearing what happened around the nature of death, if it’s a bad thing, I believe rather like guilt, is not a very healthy emotion to have, and yet the fact is we all have it. We’re all in that position and each one of us has to deal with it as best we can.

Now, this is where I would like to stop my presentation and focus rather more on discussing those aspects that interest you rather than just listening to me, because I believe we all have something to learn from each other. Nobody has all the answers of life. We’re all trying to find our path through it as best we can.

Q&A and Comments

So I’m opening up the questions now and we will start with Eli, saying Enoch walked with God and then he was no more, for God took him. Now, that’s an excellent point. There are different phases, different phases of the evolution of biblical characters. And when we start off with Adam and Eve, we have this relationship simply rather like children. This relationship of God says, like a parent, “Don’t do this, do that. No argument, just go on with it.” After Adam and Eve, we have the example of Cain and Abel, in which Cain kills Abel. So see here the beginning of realisation that one can kill people, and when Cain kills Abel, God turns to Cain and says, “The blood of your brother is calling out to me from the ground,” which would imply that at that stage, blood goes into the ground and it is death, not that he has come to join me in an afterlife.

Then you have Enoch, who begins to call in the name of God, and instead of just sacrificing and relating to God through gifts, relates through words. And then we come to Enoch, Hhanokh, and as you say, it says He walked with God. He was no more for God took him. Well, God took him could mean he died, maybe ahead of his time. The rabbis, interestingly, disagree about what this means. Some say he was a good man, he walked with God, and God took him away before he could get up to monkey business. Other people say, no, God was, did take Enoch to join God. The soul of humans becomes part of God. So you can read it in very different ways.

Myra, you asked me how the bar mitzvah and underworld. Thank you very much. It’s not the forum to talk about it, but if you want to email me, I’ll happily tell you.

Q: Michael says, “In the Shacharit service, we talk about the HaOlam HaZeh and HaOlam HaBa, What is the source of this and how should we interpret HaOlam HaBa” A: Well, yes, by the time you get to the Talmud, the Talmud is obviously predicated. You just have to look at Mishnah, the beginning of the Mishnah where we talk about this, the reward of punishment is in the next world, the good person gets the next world. We have this coming, actually the debate of the Talmud predicates itself on an earlier statement in the Torah. And the earlier statement in the Torah comes in the 10 Commandments when it says, “Honour your father and your mother in order that you should have long life on this earth.” It doesn’t talk about anything afterwards. It talks about this life.

It also talks about this in the context of sending the mother bird away from the nest. “If you send the mother bird away from the nest, you’ll have long life.” And then again it talks about that in relation to honest weights and measures, which basically means good business ethics. Now, what does long life mean? And so there’s a nice story in the Talmud which talks about three rabbis standing around, watching a father send a child up a tower to send away the mother bird and take the eggs. But unfortunately, coming down he falls and he breaks his neck and dies. And the rabbis say, “Where is long life?” And one answer to the question of long life is to say it doesn’t mean long life in this world, it means long life in the next world, even though the Torah doesn’t say that, doesn’t mention it specifically anywhere. To which one of the rabbis, who later abandoned Jewish religion for Greek rationalism, said, “I’m sorry, I just don’t buy this. I can’t buy this idea of another world.”

And then you have a third opinion which says, did anybody bother to check the ladder? Maybe the ladder was a bad ladder, and other people say, maybe he was a bad guy, who knows? So you can see that even though by the time of the Mishnah and Talmud, everybody’s talking about HaOlam HaZeh nobody’s actually specifically clear what it actually means. And so as I said before, it has become part of our dogma to talk about HaOlam HaBa. And many people will say, we always have, because bear in mind, at the time of the Torah, everybody believed in life after death. It was a normal thing. That’s what everybody thought until rationalism and scientism came and rubbished the whole idea. So there you are, you could take it whichever way you want to.

Q: Romaine says, “I like the idea of Jews managing daily life. However, was there always existential angst about death?” A: Well, yes, I think there always was existential anxiety about death, but was it the actual death itself? I mean, I think that we have been heavily influenced by the Christian notion of hell and purgatory and death and all those Hieronymus Bosch pictures we see of suffering and all the hell fire and brimstone of all these preachers we have. And you know, I don’t think that is essentially part of an authentic Jewish way of looking at life, to see life in those terms, but a lot of people do because we’ve been influenced by all these different ideas and influences that go on around us.

Q: And Brian asks, “If one believes in the beauty of what we have as a result of God’s creation, isn’t it selfish to expect more than death?” A: Well, yes, it is, we’re built the way we are. We can see how we slowly deteriorate after our process of growing, and therefore I do think that we should accept that this is the world we’re living in. We live in a physical world and we should look at the physical world. My problem is that I believe there are other dimensions and there is more than just the physical world, and the function of religion is to get us to think about these other spiritual dimensions which are much less tangible and much more unstructured, but still play a part, just as emotions play a part in our lives and in our relationships. And therefore, I do not like to claim only a rational perspective, because I think that misses so much art of life, which is why I do believe one needs to combine the rational with the spiritual.

Q: “Doesn’t Rambam’s say 13 Principles of Faith, you have to believe?” A: Yes, Shelly, and I think I dealt with that in my talk that I believe this idea of dogma is a relatively recent appearance in Judaism and there were many rabbis at the time of Maimonides who didn’t agree with his 13 principles. And if you read the writings of Rabbi Mark Shapiro and the limitations of orthodoxy, you’ll find all the sources that show that not everybody agreed there were 13, some came down as far few as three, and others treated many of these as recommendations, not as dogma. So it’s a constant open discussion and debate, which is why I keep on saying that my task as a teacher is to present the options, to present the different dimensions within Judaism and even beyond Judaism and leave it to my audience and my pupils to take out of it what they will. So that is what I consider to be education as opposed to some sort of brainwashing or dogmatism.

Esther says, “I thought we believe the body dies, but not the soul.” Yes, that’s what a lot of people believe, but exactly what it means and how it works, and how we communicate is left out to us.

Romaine, this is Rodney saying resurrection, the new religion Christianity latched onto this idea which suited their dogma. Well, yes, the idea of resurrection started off in Babylon. In Judaism, resurrection started off in Babylon with the idea that we can come back from exile, we can come back from the dead. And resurrection, in that sense, which is something I’m going to discuss when we come to talk about Messianism, began there on a national level in the same way that the notion of reward and punishment initially was on a national level, not an individual level, that the nation will survive and come back from the messes that it makes. So life after death is wishful thinking. It may well be, it may well be, but that doesn’t need to say there is no value in it. In the same way that very often, if you think somebody loves you, you may be guilty of wishful thinking, or that your parents love you, you may be guilty of wishful thinking. And as one sceptic famously said, “There is such a thing as wishful doubting.” So some people wishful think and some people wishful doubt. And I like keeping options open.

Q: “If one person,” asks Lawrence, “Keeps 500 of the commandments and another person keeps 600, is a second any better than the first?” A: Now, Lawrence, you’re talking about reward and punishment. It’s a big subject and it’s a subject that I’m going to come back to in greater depth. But in the end, only the Almighty, in a sense, can know who is better and who is not. A lot of human beings put on great facades all the time and we don’t know. What we do know is that being a good person is what the Almighty expects of us and we should do our best. The Talmud actually says, I mean, after all, King Solomon says, “There’s no such thing as somebody who only does good and never does bad.” We all make mistakes, we’re all sinners to some degree or another. And the Talmud says that coming up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are all judged. If somebody is perfect, they immediately go through, whatever that means. And if somebody is bad, they’re immediately condemned. But most of us are in the middle. And in the middle we’re constantly on an edge and it’s up to us to try and tip us over the edge. But what the Talmud is saying is the vast majority of people are in this middle ground. We all do some good and some bad. We all keep some and less. And actually, the idea of having 613 commandments is, again, it’s a metaphor, because the fact is that nobody can keep 613. First of all, a third of them are to do with the temple, which we don’t have anymore, and then another lot have to do with purity and impurity we don’t have anymore. Then you’ve got a lot of the negative commandments that deal with things that most of us don’t get up to, like not murdering, not committing adultery, not stealing. And so in the end, of the 613, there are probably no more than 200 that under the best of conditions we should keep. So don’t worry if a couple of them fall by the wayside.

Ronnie refers to the story of soul coming up with Samuel’s spirit with the Witch of Endor. And there are references to this, but we don’t know if that was the imagination or not, because remember, people can achieve with magic all kinds of imagery and all kinds of what we call tricks. And a person’s mind comes up with kinds of things. People see the Virgin Mary appearing on rooftops and people get messages all the time. Just think in a way of Abraham getting the message to kill his child and we are told, “Don’t listen to those crazy messages, just stick to the moral law.” And therefore I don’t think we take these narratives as being, shall we say events that happened in time and space and history so much as in imagination and in our spiritual world as opposed to our physical world.

Susan, I could never wrap my mind around cremation, putting it in an oven and considering our history. Well, yes, but there are many people who do and feel perfectly comfortable with it and you’ve got to allow people, people are influenced by all kinds of different cultural influences. As Jews, we live in a world in which we are a very small little sliver. And so the mass of information and attitudes towards morality come from other sources. So I’m not surprised there are people who can’t wrap their mind around cremation, or circumcision, or other things that are part of our tradition and we find ways of relating to.

Q: James asks, “Is the concept of life after death a deterrent to doing bad deeds in this life?” A: I’m sure it was at some stage and I’m sure many people intended it to be a kind of a threat. After all, that’s what, in a way, the Torah keeps on saying. If you keep God’s commandments, everything will be fine, and if you don’t, things will not be so fine, because the truth is everybody used to use and still does use bribery as a way of getting people to behave. They use it in different ways. But yes, people do try to bribe. Every parent tries to bribe in some way to get their child to behave. And most of us, in fact, behave very differently if there’s a policeman standing around. So in a sense, you could say God plays that role of the policeman.

Q: Miriam says, “In the prayer, there seems to be a direct reference to the dead dwelling amongst the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. Is it symbolic, or to the religious, meant to be taken literally?” A: Well, remember, the prayers are a product of mediaeval times, and therefore that’s how they looked at things in the main in mediaeval times when many people still believed in witchcraft and magic and things of that kind. So you have to take the prayers, whether they’re prayers that go back 2,000 years, 1,000 years, you have to take them within the context of time. For example, we always had a prayer for the martyrs who died in Europe under the Crusades. Now we have a prayer for the martyrs who died under the Nazis. So time changes, prayers change, and I don’t believe prayers are meant to be taken at face value, anything at face value. So, for example, if you take the word prayer, , in one way, you can understand it to ask for something, in another way, you can understand it to express your fears and your anxieties and your hopes.

Shelly said, "My father died two days before Pesach, my mother two days before Sukkah, there was no real shiva. Is shiva needed for the soul for transition? There’d be no need for shiva.” Well, you are quite right. That’s an excellent point. The excellent point is this, that the laws of mourning are essentially rabbinic laws. They’re laws that came in at a later stage. There is no command about mourning in the Torah. There is mention in the Torah of mourning Moses for a period of time, and Aaron for a period of time.

But the laws we have of mourning are much, much later. And therefore, when it comes to an option, if you have a festival and there’s an obligation in the Torah to celebrate the festival, you can’t override a biblical law of celebrating the festival with a rabbinic law of the laws of mourning, and therefore you do stop. And in fact, the festival cancels the shiva, whether it’s two days, three days before, or even an an hour before or so. You sit and then it’s cancelled out. So that does seem to prove the point that it’s got nothing to do with the soul going up to heaven because in one way, you could say, what a wonderful thing that your soul is going up to heaven during a festival. So it doesn’t make sense to treat this in a rational way.

Surely life after death was instituted following the Christians. Well, no, because there was life after death before that. Life after death long before Christianity. But they made a huge big thing of it, because in the case of Christianity, they get the idea of Jesus being resurrected and coming back alive in a human form, because people claimed to have seen Jesus in a human form. And that became an absolutely crucial element of Christianity. Whereas, to us, it was not that specific at that moment. It was a more generalised, abstract idea.

Ronnie asks about Haredi gathers cemeteries to play for the deceased, prey on their behalf. Weird. Well, yes, I mean, this is something that I believe was given a tremendous impetus by Christianity and going to all these Christian holy places, all these shrines, it became adopted by Christianity, by Islam, and by Judaism. Logically, it does make sense, but it does give a lot of people a sense of going back to their roots. And you do have the idea that great people, great spiritual minds can be inspirational, and therefore people draw inspirational for going around to visit these cemeteries. I have to say it plays no part at all in my religious life. I don’t consider this to be other than a marker where one may go for sentimental reasons, maybe to recharge one’s batteries in some way.

But they have now made such a thing of this that there are constant pilgrimages, both by Haredi but not Haredi. If you think of it within the world, particularly in the Moroccan world, many non-religious people keep on going around to the graves of the Holy Moroccan rabbis, and look at how many secular Jews, Israeli Jews go to these mystical rabbis for blessings because they consider they have some special gifts that will enable them to do well in business and succeed in life. Not necessarily to defy death, but I’m sure a lot of them are prepared to guarantee it if you pay them the right amount. So this becomes a new cultural phenomenon, just as wearing Hasidic garments is a new cultural phenomenon.

Susan says, “I went to a conservative temple growing up and went to Hebrews for six years. It was my understanding the Jews do not believe in life after death when you die.” That’s not correct. No, it’s not correct. You can say some do and some don’t. So obviously your particular conservative temple didn’t, but others certainly do. It’s a very subjective thing. Just as some Jews believe in God and some Jews do not believe in God. Always be wary when somebody says Jews believe, in the same way you should be wary when you say Christians believe or Muslims believe. Within all of them there are different, more intense, less intense, more rational, less rational. They’re all there. Do Jews believe in reincarnation? There are some Jews who do believe in reincarnation and I’m going to deal with that in greater depth in a future one of my talks over the next couple of months.

Q: Evan, we always say, “May the memory be a blessing.” What’s your interpretation of this? A: Well, that’s a very good point, when you say may his blessing, or you also, you say, for example, (speaking in foreign language), may his memory be a blessing, who? For me, I get inspiration for the memory of my father. So I consider it a blessing to think about my father. Other people use , may his soul go rise in peace, or her soul rise in peace. You have these general greetings, like you have different titles given to rabbis, rabbi this, may he live a long time. Rabbi this, may he enlighten our lives and enlighten our eyes and great background and inspiration. So these are just phrases. They don’t necessarily mean something specifically theologically.

I’m sorry you lost your parents in the last two years, and you find Kaddish very healing. It does because, you know, we pass over memories too quickly. We lose the impact of our parents, and therefore saying Kaddish does reiterate our relationship to them and it’s very important for a lot of people and it brings a lot of people closer and back to their religion. So I’m in favour of its impact on you personally, but I’m only talking about whether you think it has some impact on the soul of the departed.

Helen says, hi, Helen. “Thank you very much for a brilliant webinar on a topic shall we discuss. I greatly miss your weekly Torah hour, which rekindled my interest in Torah is invaluable.” Thank you very much. I hope I’m invited back too, but at the moment, it’s not happening, but who knows? You never know.

Dear Rabbi Rosen, really missed your lectures. I’m sorry, Clara, too.

Q: Surely, if the Israelites knew more about Egyptian life after death, why no mention in the Torah? Was taken up from the Babylons? A: Yes, but they were Egyptian, they were in Egypt too, living in Egypt as slaves. They did know about life after death. The only question, of course, is whether life after death was something the Torah chose not to mention because the Torah saw itself as a book documenting life, how to live life in the present. So they weren’t so busy with it. We’ve become more interested in it later on.

Q: So heaven is a Christian term and concept? A: Well, yes, the way heaven is used and hell is used, those terms are Christian terms. We don’t use 'em in the same way and we mean something very different to what traditionally the Christian world meant by it.

Mike says, “Cain and Abel refers to the difference between farm and cattle herder.” That’s one way of looking at, it’s indeed. There are many ways of looking at every story in the Torah.

Carla, nice to hear from you again. Thank you.

Q: Martin, as you see from reincarnation, what does traditional Judaism tell us about reincarnation?“ A: Well, as I said, I’m going to counter this. It’s such a big subject. I want to deal with it within a context of its own.

Enoch should have taught the population. Well, you could argue that so should Noah have taught the population, he didn’t get anybody to join him in the in the ark. He didn’t do a very good job of bringing ethics to everybody. As a faith we are one of life rather than focusing on death. I think that’s an important nuance. Yes, we do focus on life.

Q: Why does Judaism allow contact with spirits for spiritual healing and not for trying to connect with parents, dead spouse? A: Well, my answer is there’s a difference between spiritual healing in which you use spiritual energy to encourage somebody to heal themselves rather than going to a specific body or structure, which simply goes against what the Torah specifically says you should do. The Torah is very specific in saying time and again, don’t go to spirits, don’t go to psychics, don’t go to these forms of advice because usually they’re not 100% either objective or honest.

Joe, you have not mentioned the soul mourning, praying. So again, soul is something I need to talk about in greater depth. It’s such an important subject. So I will come back to that in due course.

Miriam says, "At least it is the format of the prayer in our orthodox synagogue in Durban.” Yes, yes. Most synagogues have that as a format indeed. It depends what you mean by it.

This is a story not to be taken as fact, but to prove a point. Well, you could say that most of the narratives and most of the mythos is meant to make a point. That’s the purpose of story, of narrative, is to convey some values, both what’s good and what’s bad. We don’t necessarily have to take this as literally because we don’t know what was in the minds of the authors.

Tamara asks, “As an artist who uses , real or invented, develop much of my work, I believe one of the kinds of things one could do is to tell stories about the departed. I create shiva boxes to record stories, give grandkids something useful to do, keep emails, please visit Tama Gentles.” I think that’s right. Different ways. Yes, I think it’s very important. is very important. It’s very important to keep the memory alive, not just memory of the holocaust. And that’s terribly important so people shouldn’t forget, and families, and I always encourage families to write down the family history, to write down experiences to pass on to the next generation. That’s very important.

Nobody believed in life after death, the time throughout. Mike, how can you say that? You weren’t around at the time, you don’t know.

Dennis (indistinct) discussion with me insisted that Moses gathered his kin prove that Jewish beliefs in life after death. Well, he’s entitled to his opinion and he is a man with a record and substance, and if that’s what he believes, well, good luck to him.

Daniel Lentz, since you say that life after death was fully accepted rather than the mission on Talmud and there are many rabbis that predate Christianity, is it correct to say Judaism was affected by Christianity rather than the other way round? I think both influenced each other. Both went on. I’ll give you an example. In Talmudic Judaism, divorce is considered to be a healthy thing to do if a relationship has broken down so that you don’t hate each other, that you get on with each other and start a new life long as you look after each other and take precautions. This hatred antagonism towards divorce changed during the Christian era where divorce was considered a very bad thing because sex was considered a very bad thing too. So of course we were influenced and there’s constant interaction between religions and cultures and societies.

Q: Barry says, “In Rhodesia, South Africa, we always wish a person long life. Can you comment?” A: Yes, yes. Long life is a traditional wish one gives when somebody dies. There’s that. There’s may the soul go up in Yiddish. There are all these different customs that depend on local community traditions.

The Amidah mentions resurrection. It does, but it depends what you mean. It mentions resurrection in the context of returning from bad health, of the rains coming back, and resurrection can mean different things. It can mean things coming back that were away, not necessarily bodies coming back to life. When we talk about Elijah bringing a body back to life, it looks very much like mouth and nose resurrection in the sense of reviving people.

Can you say something about up to 120, should you live to be 120? That’s because in the Bible it says the years of a human being in the Psalms are 120, 80 if it’s good, and if you’re longer, you can go up to 120. That’s the maximum of Hebrew life. That’s the version of it. Who knows if we will outlive it in the future. And again, it is meant to be a round figure, not literally. There are some people who jokingly wish you should live to 119 years, so at least your wife should have one year of peace without you. And the other way around.

I see a correlation, I suppose, between the story, the moral of the boy bird and the eggs have a lot in common. Oh, don’t eat a goat in its mouth. I’m not sure what you mean by that, Ilana. Maybe you could send me more about what you mean in the form of an email, jeremyrosen@msn.com.

Gail, thank you for the excellent class. Thank you, Gail.

Q: Mike, why can’t we abolish burying the bed within 24 hours when nations kind of get to the buried at a short time? A: Well, that’s a matter of custom. You can postpone for the main mourners to get back in time. But the idea is to bury as quickly as possible so that the body doesn’t decompose and that’s the tradition. But if necessary, sometimes you are burying people years after they died when their bodies are discovered.

(Speaking Hebrew) is a blessing 'cause it gives us a moment to remember. That’s correct, it is very important, the annual memory. And there, again, you have different customs. Some people have a custom of fasting on their (speaking Hebrew). Others, many Hasidim have a festival of celebrating and drinking and celebrating on (speaking Hebrew). So you see different communities have different customs.

Q: Shouldn’t we live as atheists and be good because we love our father rather than because we fear God? A: Well, we should be good because it’s the right thing to do. If some people need God to nudge them, that’s a different matter, but ideally, we do it 'cause it’s the right thing to do, either as a Jew or as a person who doesn’t believe in God.

Q: So why no system of burying in the Torah? A: Well, yes, the Torah does talk about burying in the cave of Machpelah, of putting the ossuary in there, or burying them there. And so it certainly does. We don’t know where Moses was buried because we don’t want to have somewhere to go and worship Moses as opposed to God.

I get great comfort (indistinct). Reunited with your parents and grandparents. I’m delighted that you do and it’s wonderful that you do. And if you do, please God, you will.

Q: How can one help terminally ill parents who are afraid to die? A: That’s a very interesting question. I think one tries to reassure them, if they are rational, that the process of death is to be welcomed, that it is something like falling to sleep. It is something that will give you ease and remove physical pain and discomfort. But if you see that they will feel better knowing they will be reunited with their family, then tell them that, because it’s going to make them feel comfortable. It’s back to the old question, do you tell somebody you’re going to die, or do you rather tell somebody we don’t know? Sometimes telling people things has to be very delicate and has to be done within the context of who they are and what they want to do.

Kale wishing a long life (indistinct). Yes, it is.

Q: How does Kabbalah relate to life after death? A: Kabbalah certainly accepts very definitely the idea of life after death, but does not specify the actual process on what you come to on the other side.

Ossuary is not the same as being buried ash to ash. No, it isn’t, but it’s better than nothing.

So goodbye, everybody. Thank you. And please God, we will meet again.