Heaven Deserves a Lot More Respect

Q: I worked with a Jewish woman for several years and finally got up the nerve to ask her she believed about life after death and heaven. She had a hard time explaining and finally said she didn't know how to answer my questions. Can you give me an answer? I've since heard that Jewish people believe what they want to believe. - J., Gainesville, FL, via godsquadquestion@aol.com

A: In my opinion, the two most important Jewish beliefs, which were shared and taken up by both Christianity and Islam, are the elements of the moral law meant for all people, and the belief in life after death.

Moral law consists of all the prohibitions against murder, theft, perjury, envy, as well as the commandments to be generous, forgiving and committed to justice for the oppressed. These laws form the basis for human virtue in every civilized society. They're rooted in the Torah and are the first and finest legacy of Judaism to the world.

The second legacy is the belief that death is not the end of us. While this is a Jewish belief, there's a scholarly dispute about whether or not it's from the Torah. I side with the scholars who hold that life after death is not a biblical belief. I agree with them that this tenet arose after contact with Greek thought, which occurred after the Bible was codified.

In 333 BCE, when Alexander the Great conquered Israel and brought with him the teachings off his tutor, Aristotle, new philosophical ideas were introduced into Jewish theology. Chief among them were the ideas that everything in the world is a product of the interaction of matter and form. Matter is the idea of potentiality and form is the principle of actuality.

In simpler terms, what this means is that everything is either Stuff or an Ideas-That-Shape-Stuff. Think of a clay sculpture of a horse. Matter is the clay and form is the idea of a horse that the sculptor used to shape the clay into the sculpture. The rabbis who studied the Greeks adapted these ideas into the religious beliefs of body (matter) and soul (form).

God is pure form. God is immaterial, and so the biblical idea that we're all made in the image of God now became the idea that we all have a soul, which is the spark of God's formal essence implanted in our material bodies. This was the most revolutionary transformation of biblical Judaism ever, and through it Christianity and Islam were born into a world with new spiritual possibilities.

With the new Greek-inspired beliefs in body and soul, death would no longer be the end of us. Death is only the end of our bodies, not our souls.

These new ideas about body and soul also helped address several important religious problems, such as the suffering of the righteous on earth. If death is the end of us, then unjust suffering is a refutation of God's justice and goodness. However, if in heaven the righteous receive the rewards of their righteousness denied them on earth, and if the wicked are finally punished, then the scales of divine Providence are ultimately set right.

On a personal level, I'm given hope through my Jewish belief in life after death that I won't be separated forever from those I love who've passed to life eternal. I believe we will be reunited in the World to Come, in the presence of the glory of God.

I love the teachings of my Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters about heaven. I'm deeply grateful and admiring of the way they've preserved the teachings on life after death inherited from rabbinic Judaism, and then greatly enriched them through the specific genius of their own theologies.

I know many readers reject the concept of life after death, viewing it as a pathetic crutch for those too cowardly to face the fact that after death, the worms eat us and that's all there is, folks. Maybe so. Maybe we are just material beings who've invented ways to avoid the perils of human finitude. Or maybe, just maybe, we're not material beings but spiritual beings who just happen to have a brief material existence on a long and exciting spiritual journey.

I always bet on hope, and frankly, I'm not deterred by taking up a crutch if the alternative is falling flat on my face in a pool of despair. Whatever turns out to be true, embracing the concept of life after death is not the kind of belief that can be refuted by name-calling. Whether or not there is a continuation of some form of existence for our souls or whether we even have souls is one of the great mysteries. Religion is about mysteries. Life is about mysteries. If you need absolute proof, go to a scientist. If you need hope, go to church, synagogue, mosque, or anyplace where your horizons rise above the muck of our broken world.

Over the years, Jews have become sadly unaware of the real teachings of Judaism. The Jewish term for heaven is The World to Come, and many rabbis don't preach about the World to Come because they think of Judaism as more "this-worldly" and Christianity as more "other-worldly."

The final word is, Jews do believe in heaven; we invented it, and I want it back! I've made it my personal mission to remind Jews that life after death is a fundamental part of Judaism and a powerful antidote to the fear of death and injustice in the world. Its value to me is like the value of the sun as described by C.S. Lewis. "I believe in Christianity," he wrote, "as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

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