Posts Tagged ‘world to come’
Zochreinu L’chayim – Remember Us For Life – Three Weeks Later
1: It feels almost impossible that just three weeks ago we were in the middle of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – intensifying our prayers that God would write us into the book of life this year.
2: As it happens, I led a discussion in shul on Yom Kippur afternoon this year on the theme of the Book of Jonah and the concept of collective punishment. I focused in particular on the sailors who were put in danger because of Jonah embarking on their ship and on the inhabitants of Nineveh.
3: I drew on the commentaries of Rashi and the Malbim in relation to the sailors, and on the Midrash Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer in relation to the King of Nineveh and its inhabitants. In particular, the sailors go to particularly impressive lengths to avoid exposing Jonah to danger until they are absolutely sure that keeping him on board would expose them all to undeserved and serious risks and that expelling him would not add to his own danger. And the King of Nineveh (a reincarnation of Pharoah, according to the Midrash) shows his lack of understanding of moral principle by staging a repentance program that inflicts suffering on children and animals (demonstrating a lack of true moral understanding as a result of which, according to the Midrash, the “salvation” of Nineveh was only ephemeral).
4: I tried to develop some thoughts about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocent bystanders out of these incidents: but I had not prepared sufficiently carefully for my thoughts to be properly articulated and I failed in the discussion to express them coherently.
5: Unhappily, since then we have all had the need to think more deeply about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocents, whether as targeted victims or as “collateral” deaths. And I think I now know what I should have said on Yom Kippur afternoon.
6: The starting point is that Abraham established in his debate with God at Sodom that is axiomatic to Jewish theology that God does not permit the deliberate killing of the innocent with the guilty. The episode of the sacrifice of Isaac can be understood as God’s final challenge to Abraham, seeing if he was prepared to challenge God by saying, in effect, “yes, if You command me to kill an innocent child I will do that, but after that I will no longer believe that you are a God worth following”. My understanding is that if God had not prevented Abraham from complying with the command to kill Isaac, Abraham would have ceased to see God as espousing values of decency and justice and would, so to speak, have abandoned the religion. (I have discussed this elsewhere (https://thescepticblog.com/2014/09/ – and What If God’s A Christian, Chapter 46 – https://www.danielgreenberg.co.uk/product/what-if-gods-a-christian/), and I am told that a similar thesis is found in respectable orthodox Jewish sources.)
7: We are therefore required to emulate the sailors in the book of Jonah to do everything we possibly can to avoid punishing a person for things for which they are not responsible.
8: But sometimes entirely innocent people will suffer, and may even die, as a result of circumstances over which they have no control and for which they bear no responsibility of any kind. There will be all kinds of reasons for this: innocents will sometimes be targeted deliberately, carelessly or otherwise wrongly; or they may be used by murderers or others as human shields; and there are so many other dreadful circumstances in which innocent adults or children die every day all around the world as victims of natural or human events over which they have no control and for which they have no shred of responsibility.
9: How do I continue to reconcile this with a just God? At what point should we consider, like Abraham at the akeida, walking away from our faith on the grounds that it no longer appears to make any sense or to produce anything useful?
10: The critical point here is my belief in life after death. One of the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion is that this world is a physical corridor to a spiritual existence. The purpose of this world is to use its opportunities – and in particular the opportunities for kindness and sensitivity that arise from our interactions with each other – for me to build something in my essence that will survive after my physical death.
11: This is what Rabbinic literature generally refers to as The World To Come – Olom Habo. Critically, in Jewish theology, almost everyone who dies receives a place in the World to Come. Put another way, virtually everyone, irrespective of religion, race or any other characteristic, acquires spiritual merit in myriad ways every day, and that merit becomes their spiritual identity after death. The Talmud lists some classes of person who are thought not to survive into the next world – and the common denomination is the kind of arrogance and depravity that leads them to deny the value of moral or spiritual behaviour. “Ordinary” failings of the kind that amount simply to giving in to normal human temptations do not according to Rabbinic tradition debar a person from acquiring the spiritual merit that amounts to a place in the World to Come.
12: In essence, everybody remotely “normal” receives a life after death, however shallow and flawed their life may have appeared to them to be, in the way that most of us tend to think of our own lives. I have discussed elsewhere how I suspect that the failings we are most shamed of may turn out to be dismissed by the “Recording Angel” as merely human and irrelevant to the final spiritual reckoning, while many of our greatest merits may turn out to be things we thought too commonplace to be worth noticing.
13: And it is fundamental Jewish doctrine that nobody and nothing can take my World To Come away from me. We have not even the vaguest inkling of an idea why God permits wicked people to murder and destroy: but we have a clear faith that their victims rise straight to the World To Come and enter a phase of eternal spiritual life that the rest of us will reach in God’s own inscrutable time.
14: On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we are not really asking for physical life at all: we all know how fragile all human life is and how uncertain it is for any person whether they will survive physically for another day or not, let alone for another year or not. In so far as we are asking to be kept alive at all it is “l’maanchoh – for God’s own sake” in the sense that through self-improvement, introspection and kindness (teshuvah, tefiloh u’tzedoko) we will prepare ourselves for eventual death and what comes beyond it. Yom Kippur is more about the unimportance of physical death than the importance of preserving physical life.
15: (None of this is in any sense a theological excuse for murderers. The Talmud has a lengthy passage in Tractate Rosh Hashanah about the treatment of murderers who argue in the afterlife that they must have been “doing God’s will” or otherwise it couldn’t have happened – the bottom line is that the fact that God “wants” something to happen, whatever that means, does not relieve the perpetrator from the spiritual consequences of the moral decision to be the person who makes that thing happen. And those who murder and destroy out of arrogant belief in their own righteousness, or in the righteousness of their own religious or other ideology, fall within the classes of person who according to the Talmud lack the spiritual qualities to endure after death.)
16: Nor does any of this purport to make sense of any of the madness in the world today.
17: But it does mean that I can – just – remain a committed practising Jew despite the innocent lives that are lost or blighted in so many places around the world everyday.
18: Like us all, I am praying for peace for everyone everywhere as soon as possible; and hoping against hope that the decent human instincts and values that are an emanation of the Divine in whose image we were all created will prevail. And for those innocents who lose their lives every day in so many places around the world, I join the collective and continuous Jewish prayer that they all should be “bound in eternal life”.
The end of the world may – or may not – be nigh
1. A common objective of environmental campaigns is sustainability. That is to say, a test frequently applied in determining the propriety of a use of natural resources is whether it is sustainable itself (as in the case of forestation and irrigation) or whether it threatens the sustainability of all or part of the ecological system (as in the case of the emission of greenhouse gases or the hunting of a species). However, this assumes either that the world ought to be allowed to last forever or, at least, that it is improper for us to do anything that threatens to shorten its likely span of existence.2. Jewish thinking has traditionally neither expected nor desired this world to last forever.
3. Midrashic tradition posits this world as the seventh in a series (based on the number of words in the first verse of the Bible), each of the first six of which was destroyed (based on the rabbinic understanding of the word “sohu” as not meaning “null”, as sometimes translated, but as referring to desolate destruction) (incidentally providing one of the many possible rabbinic explanations of dinosaur fossils).
4. Each world, according to this tradition, is a time-limited experiment created by God to produce some kind of spiritual force, of the nature of which we can comprehend only a very shadowy picture. In the case of this world, the rabbinic construction of the behaviour of Adam (“Adam sinned for the sake of Heaven”) suggests the creation of a world in which man descended from an angelic state, in which he obeys God as an automaton without choice, to a state of tension between a selfish animalism and an altruistic holiness. When human altruism finally triumphs over bestial selfishness through an exertion of free will, the product is a kiddush hashem of unequalled proportions, justifying the creation of the world and rendering its continued existence, at any rate in this form, unnecessary.
5. Hence the difference between the Messianic Era and the World to Come. The former is still “business as usual” so far as nature is concerned (at least according to Maimonides – others differ to a greater or lesser extent) while the latter is the end of this world as we know it. This is why the description “the world to come” is used to describe the state attained by those who die now, as well as the state attained by everyone as a culmination of the perfection of the natural order known as the Messianic Era.
6. For the Jew, therefore, the continuation of this world is not, in itself, an aim at all. For me personally, I aim at the attainment of a state of wholly spiritual existence after death known as my personal world to come. For the world, I aim to participate in producing an environment which proclaims the existence and kingship of Hashem. With this in mind, the rabbis have often predicted different periods for the life of this world. A number are discussed in Gemara Sanhedrin 97. One that focuses our minds is that of 6,000 years, which on the basis of our traditional numbering would give the world a little over two centuries to go.
7. Nor does that necessarily seem unreasonable to the modern mind. The world seems tired. Its resources, whatever environmental decisions are taken, will become more than a little stretched in the next couple of hundred years even if the human family increases at a slower rate than at present. And, of course, increasingly sophisticated techniques of astronomical observation have made it possible in recent years for scientists to observe the number of near misses that the world has had in the matter of meteoric collisions and to speculate how long it will be before we sustain a direct hit.
8. Although much of Jewish law tells us to respect the world and its resources and to use them with care, the prospect of using them solely in order to achieve perpetual sustainability is not one which commends itself. For one thing, we have always believed in the precariousness of the world’s existence, and the constant reliance on Hashem’s chessed in keeping us alive, which scientists are now beginning to conclude for themselves. For another, it has always seemed to us to be more important to ensure that we arrive at the next world in a fit spiritual state than that we prolong this world, or our miniscule share in it, to a particular length.
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