Moment is a journal on Jewish affairs, founded in 1975 by Elie Wiesel and currently edited, with great imagination and verve, by Nadine Epstein. In its issue of July-August 2011 it carries a cover story, with a shorter piece, on Jewish thinking about life after death. A symposium ranges across the spectrum of contemporary Judaism. The Orthodox position is clear enough. Yitz Greenberg, an influential Orthodox rabbi, states the position succinctly: “Belief in the afterlife—a world to come in which the righteous get their true reward and the wicked get their deserved comeuppance—is a central teaching of traditional Judaism.” The same statement would also fit traditional Christianity and Islam. There is an Abrahamic consensus as against the religious traditions of southern and eastern Asia. Most of the symposium voices from the less traditional segments of American Judaism significantly diverge from this consensus. Peter Schweitzer, a rabbi from the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism in New York, begins his comments with a rather interesting sentence: “Most people I know believe that this is the only life we’ll ever know.” No reason to question this assertion. What does Judaism mean to all these humanists in Rabbi Schweitzer’s circle of acquaintances? (As a sociologist, I would hypothetize that they shop at Zabar’s, read the New York Review of Books, and voted for Obama in 2008.)
As one goes through the symposium, one comes across three main answers to the question. One: Judaism is a religion robustly grounded in this world (as against the otherworldly concerns of Christianity)—Jews are called to work on tikkun loam—“repair of the world”—and to stop worrying about the afterlife (if any). Two: We live on beyond death in the memory of our deeds. And three: We live on in our descendants—my DNA, after all, goes on for ever—if I may paraphrase this with a little chutzpah, I am immortal because my great-grandchildren will inherit my hay fever. This last answer is the most interesting, because it reaches back to the earliest phases of the religion of ancient Israel.
Biblical historians disagree on many things, but in the matter of Judaism and belief in individual life after death there is very broad agreement. Most of the Hebrew Bible contains little that could be called good news on the subject. If we are not obliterated completely in death, we can only look forward to lingering on in the very disagreeable afterlife of Sheol, roughly similar to the underworld of the ancient Greeks. A few particularly meritorious individuals may be saved from death, such as the prophet Elijah, who was yanked up to heaven in a miraculous chariot. But the promises of God pertain to individuals in this life or to collectivities in the future, especially the descendants of Abraham and the entire people of Israel, with whom God has made a solemn covenant. In the Book of Ezekiel there is imagery of a future resurrection (an idea that may be due to Zoroastrian influence), but most scholars believe that this too pertains to Israel rather than individual Israelites.
A significant change occurred in the second century B.C.E., with the appearance of so-called apocalyptic Judaism—that is, a belief in an end of history. The first unambiguous reference to individual physical resurrection is found in the opening lines of the 12th chapter of the Book of Daniel, which is very likely the latest book in the canon of the Hebrew Bible. Here the resurrection is linked to a final day of judgment, an act of God. This is very different indeed from the idea of an immortal soul, let alone the idea of reincarnation. Leaving aside the (very uncertain) notion of Zoroastrian influences, this belief in the physical resurrection of individuals and their judgment on the other side of death sharply differentiates Biblical faith from all other major religions. The belief has indeed become “traditional” in Judaism and its Abrahamic offspring. But one should remember that this tradition comes quite late in Biblical history—later than the texts making up the bulk of the Hebrew canon. I can imagine that this fact must be more embarrassing to Jews than to Christians or Muslims, for whom, after all, the Hebrew Bible is the prelude to even better things to come.
In the most ancient Israelite tradition there was no expectation of a happy afterlife for the ordinary individual (Elijahs were few and far between). Such an individual took comfort from the thought that he would lived on in his descendants and in the people of Israel, indeed even in his lifetime did not think of himself as a being apart from the collectivity (family, tribe, nation) to which he belonged. This is why the loss of children, or the inability to have them because of infertility, were feared more than death. This belief is dramatically illustrated by the institution of so-called Levirate marriage (as legislated in Deuteronomy 25:5): If a man dies childless, his brother is commanded to produce offspring with the widow, so “that his [the dead man’s] name may not be blotted out of Israel”. A son born out of this brotherly duty will carry the name of the dead man, who then is presumed to live on.
Why did a change occur in the second century B.C.E.? A common explanation has to do with the attempted suppression of Judaism by the Hellenistic Seleucid dynasty, which then ruled Palestine. The Seleucids, whose Hellenistic ideology curiously foreshadowed the “civilizing mission” of Enlightened modernity, desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem by placing in it statues of Greek gods and aggressively sought to eradicate what, in their minds, were the “barbaric” beliefs and practices of Judaism. The Maccabees rebelled against this aggression. Many of them became martyrs, dying in fidelity to the God of Israel. Supposedly the change came out of concern for the fate after death of these martyrs, shifting the old theodicy—the explanation of why God permits evil and suffering—from the collectivity to the individual. This explanation was refuted in great detail in a recent book, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (2008), by Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson (both professors at Harvard Divinity Schhol). The assertion here is that the change was not totally new, that it was grounded in a much earlier belief in the power of God as the giver of life, which belief developed over centuries before reaching its mutation in the time of Daniel. I am not competent to make an informed choice between these attempts at explanation. It seems to me that the thesis of Madigan and Levenson leaves unexplained why a fairly abrupt shift did take place in the second century B.C.E. I wonder whether there emerged a new individualism, ironically mediated by the very Hellenism against which the Maccabees were fighting. But then I’m always inclined to suspect ironies in history.
Be this as it may, there is one irony—or paradox, if you prefer—about which I’m quite certain: The thinking about death by liberal Jews, who think of themselves as being very modern, goes right back to a very premodern idea indeed—that we survive in the memory of others and in the lives of our descendants. It is an idea that can be found far beyond the boundaries of Judaism. The Homeric heroes of ancient Greece, while they may not have shared the Israelite obsession with descendants, also believed that they will live on in the collective memory of their great deeds. In Greece too there took place an individuation of the old collective self. These archaic beliefs are returning in a curious rebirth in the secular folklore of contemporary America and Europe. As always, the folklore has a ritual dimension. The ritual is repeated again and again as comfort in the face of bereavement: “grandfather is still with us”. In a curious way it represents a sort of eternal return of the mythic matrix that we find as we go back in history in every part of the world—the mythic world in which the individual is solidly embedded in community and nature. Its re-evocation in the face of death is thus both pre- and counter-modern—an implicit repudiation of the individualism which has been a key ingredient of the modern experience and of the idea of human rights.
How one comes out on all this depends on whether one regards the experience as constituting a genuine discovery, which has binding moral and political implications—precisely those of “the rights of man and of the citizen”. Let me quickly confess that I, for one, accept the validity of the discovery, with all its ideological consequences. If one does that, another paradox comes to light: “Traditional” religious beliefs in life after death are frequently criticized by non-believers (on whatever level of sophistication, between, say, Freud and the campus atheist) as purveying an illusion. It seems to me that the belief that I live on in the memory of others and in the genes of my descendants is very illusionary indeed. If years after my death somebody will read a book I wrote, this does not restore me to life. I am not my great-grand-child. I am not my DNA. I am certainly not my hay fever.
The preceding paragraph is not an argument in favor of religious faith. This is not the place to make this argument. However, if there is really nothing beyond death, let us face this unpleasant reality and cultivate the virtue of stoic resignation. Let us not indulge in the illusionary comforts of posthumous fame, great-grandchildren and an eternal DNA. Let us accept our modernity.