After Life

RIEMER, JACK

AFTER LIFE JACK RIEMER I know nothing whatsoever about the afterlife. Neither does anyone else, for no one has ever been there and come back and no one can claim to know first-hand the furniture...

...That caution has held until our time...
...The person who lives through the Jewish year learns to see himself or herself not only as an individual but as a link in the chain of the generations, as a partner in a plan that began before his birth, and that will continue through him, and then beyond him, until the end of time...
...Certainly each death is a tragedy...
...If a person suffers the loss of a relative on the day before one of the festivals, he is only permitted to mourn until the festival begins...
...How can both these perceptions be true...
...From the Treasures of King Tut to Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin...
...Seen in this way, what seems at first to be a cruel law may actually be a consoling one...
...This is a kind of immortality that speaks to the souls of those who are involved in communal affairs...
...And it is by means of the festivals that the individual Jew relives and re-experiences and expresses the history and the destiny of his people and senses this identity...
...with all the Jews that are here and all around the world...
...The most appropriate language for this effort has been agada, not halachah...
...The Torah maintains—most likely in reaction to the excesses of Egypt—a pristine, almost total silence on the subject of death and after-life...
...As Maimonides puts it in his commentary on the Mishnah: "For human beings in this world to try to grasp the nature of the hereafter is like a person who has been born blind trying to grasp the nature of color...
...Tearing himself from the womb he falls outward...
...Does such a view speak to one whose concern is with his own self and with his own self-fulfillment...
...It means to be a grandchild of Abraham and an ancestor of the Messiah...
...We have the power, and with it, the obligation, to make ourselves a part of the destiny of the Jewish People, and then in its life we too shall have life and continuity and fulfillment...
...Then someone at my side says, "There...
...That parable comes not from a theologian or a philosopher but from a soldier...
...The Laws of Partnership This is a story that comes out of the Lithuanian Mitnagdic tradition in Jewry...
...One comes from a soldier, one from a talmudist, one from a novelist...
...It was found on the body of the American Jewish soldier, Colonel David Marcus, who was one of those who helped to form the first army of the State of Israel and who died in the defense of Jerusalem...
...Is this law not beyond the strength of human beings...
...What a horrible end...
...Mere stories do not impress him...
...There are a thousand different versions of what it will be like...
...Who could conceive anything bigger, better, more comfortable...
...The second infant is a thorough skeptic...
...Without them, he said, the Yeshiva could not have succeeded and so they, too, deserved a share of the reward...
...No more...
...We have learned more about what our tradition rejects than about what it asserts...
...To be a Jew means to be a cousin to the Jews of New Delhi and New York, Berlin and Bagdad, Cairo and Calcutta...
...Just as I predicted...
...it is an eloquent response to Egypt...
...And yet, a Jew cannot walk among these treasures without a sense of horror in his heart...
...All that we know is what we hope for, yearn for, wait for, work for and wish for...
...Then there is a mysterious pounding...
...Surely if it continues, we will exit one day...
...And since some of these slaves were our ancestors, we have the right to feel horrified...
...We claim that it understands human nature, and that it never asks more from us than is within our capabilities...
...Author Unknown) May these words bring some light upon our path—till then...
...That is a strange belief, seemingly without foundation, but one to which he holds fast...
...If this interpretation is correct we have a conception of immortality here that is more "humanistic" than we usually think of Rabbinic Judaism as being...
...What is our picture...
...still, we sometimes see funerals that are more Egyptian than Jewish in their tone—coffins of bronze or mahogany rather than of simple wood, as the Jewish tradition provides, lavish bouquets of flowers left to wither on the grave, the dead prettied up with cosmetics or dressed in tuxedos instead of in the simple white linen shrouds with no pockets that the tradition ordains...
...This time, fifty-five works of art and fourteen hundred photographs were included in the display...
...they saw an exhibition of art that was truly impressive...
...We mourn the loss of one we loved because it makes us appreciate more the preciousness and the precariousness of each moment that we have...
...This is the law, and this is one interpretation of what it means...
...To be a Jew means to be connected horizontally and vertically with all the Jews who ever were and who ever will be...
...One reason is that this tomb and all that was in it was the work of slave labor...
...As he is thus lamenting, he hears a head-splitting cry, and a great tumult from the black abyss, and he trembles: "Oh my...
...Modern Jews have tried their hand at describing the indescribable as well...
...Is it realistic to require human beings to stop their sorrow when a festival arrives or to postpone their grief until a holiday is over...
...As Rabbi Daniel Silver put it, we are appalled that all of this opulence was made only for the grave...
...An end to consciousness...
...Then Reb Hayim argued that all Jews should be admitted with him, since all Jewish householders everywhere contribute in some way to the maintenance of the Torah...
...Their lives are serene...
...The believing brother exits...
...But then, at the end, the prose takes wing and his imagination takes over as he tells this tale: "Imagine twins growing peacefully in the warmth of the womb...
...it is his explanation that follows here...
...What we would like to know, if we can, is the reasoning behind this law, and the insight that it may Moment/45 provide into the Jewish understanding of death and immortality, of sorrow and consolation...
...And so in every generation, Jews, like others, have tried to describe that which is inherently indescribable, to define that which is indefinable, and to capture in words that which is beyond the ability of words to express...
...The prosecution yields quickly when the defense attorney tells how much Bontsche endured and how patient he was, and the Court offers Silent Bontsche whatever reward he wishes...
...There is no foundation for this belief...
...To have formulated a doctrine of afterlife in the language of halachah would have been to make the doctrine binding, the formulation rigid, and the result constricting...
...this life, taken in its own terms, is too brief and too incomplete...
...For to affirm only this life is to end up in despair and disillusionment...
...No one who saw this exhibition can any longer assume that we moderns are superior to the ancients...
...This time he was told that he had asked too much, that there simply was not room enough in heaven for all, and that what he was asking was not possible until the Messiah comes...
...The gold and the diamonds, the lapus lazuli and the feldspar, the colored glass and the benches of ivory and ebony are simply magnificent...
...Meanwhile, as the skeptic brother mourns, his "dead" brother had been born into the "new world...
...Does it really help, does it console us at all, to say that the Jewish People will live on beyond us...
...We mourn the loss of one we loved because each death diminishes us and reminds us of the frailty and the fragility of our own lives...
...Now the first infant is a believer...
...the tradition that burials should be simple and graves should be plain...
...He is the author of an important work on the laws of mourning called Gesher Hachayim...
...Tut—who was nineteen years old when he died—went to his grave in such sumptuous style because thousands of poor downtrodden human beings did backbreaking labor...
...The insight into the meaning of this law was first suggested to me by Rabbi Stephen Riskin...
...Somehow we must learn to balance both truths, to hold the world, as Milton Steinberg once put it, "with open arms...
...This may not be a comforting thought, but it is the only logical and realistic one...
...on Sukkot as if he himself is going through the wilderness...
...And we have learned that Judaism walks a thin line between saying that this is the only life there is and saying that the world-to-come is the only real world...
...It speaks instead only of this life and this world...
...This next story, which comes out of the Mitnagdic tradition, is different...
...It has been retold in our time by Fishel Schnearson in his novel Hayim Grivetzer...
...All in the heavenly court are ashamed that this is what a human being can be reduced to...
...Nothing...
...Here is one halachah, a halachah which, on first hearing, may seem strange and even inhumane, but which says something significant about the Jewish understanding of life and afterlife...
...Therefore it is instructive, therapeutic, and right to mourn...
...there is no denying and no minimizing that...
...The alabaster bowls and jars, the bejeweled scabbards and scimitars, the amulets and the statuettes are works of art that dazzle the beholder...
...But some things remain to us as direct legacies from the experience in Egypt: the law that our kohanim shall have no contact with the dead (in contrast to the priests of Egypt whose whole work was in tending the dead...
...He said: "The people of Volozhin at least had the satisfaction of seeing the results of their charity...
...We claim that Jewish law is kind and compassionate...
...Evidently it is, for we know many cases of people who have somehow been able, when they had to, to carry out this difficult commandment...
...Since the festivals are the expression of the life of this Eternal People they take precedence over our individual mourning and grief...
...he says...
...And the treasures of King Tut were bribes and passports into the world to come...
...Black void...
...The skeptical brother snappily replies, with all the assurance of the certain, "We will go with a bang...
...The whole world, to these twins, is the interior of the womb...
...The way of the land of Egypt was king-centered and death-centered...
...She comes!' And that is dying...
...They begin to wonder: We are getting lower and lower...
...He must, according to the law, not only stop all of the outward signs of mourning, but, even more difficult, he must free his heart of all feelings of sadness and grief...
...Says the faithful brother: "After our 'death' here, there will be a great new world, a whole new realm of being...
...His life is but a breath...
...There we will eat through the mouth, not the navel...
...The host of angels who came out to greet him told him that there would be no need of a trial and that he would be admitted into heaven immediately, Moment/49 so rich was he in good deeds...
...The womb convulses...
...And our heads will be up and free, rather than down and boxed in...
...The reason is that ours is not an I-Thou religion but a We-Thou religion...
...But what can such a law and such a conception of immortality possibly mean to a generation such as ours, a generation so individualistic and so private in its world-view and in its life-style...
...In that case," said Rabbi Hayim, "I will stay outside with them and wait...
...But Reb Hayim then argued that he would not enter Heaven unless and until all the people of Volozhin were admitted too, for it was they who had taken the students in and given them "days" to eat so that they could study...
...What .about us...
...He cited the passages in the Laws of Partnership that deal with this issue and he said: "I refuse...
...They taught us, as Rabbi Silver puts it, that good deeds and not gold are the only relevant admission cards in the world-to-come, that lavishness on our part cannot buy any better accommodations for those whom we love when they go...
...And yet there is a strange amendment to that law, an amendment that forbids a person to mourn if his loss coincides with a festival...
...We start with history, then move to law (halachah), then to legend (agada...
...He argued further that the Gentiles too have provided a home for the Jews and therefore they, too, have a share in the Torah...
...Some people have seen it as a happy hunting ground, some as a harem with every material pleasure, some as a banquet, some as an academy...
...Rabbi Jack Riemer is Scholar-in-Residence at Congregation B'nai Amoona in St...
...She's gone...
...And it is in this light that the strange law that the festival of the group has priority over the sorrow of the individual is to be understood...
...Agada: No one can speak with certainty about the hereafter for no one has ever been there and come back...
...Perhaps this is why the Torah that was given to the people that came out of Egypt is so reticent about afterlife, so totally different in tone from the Book of the Dead or the other sacred writings of that society...
...Yet we all speak about it...
...There we will be able to see for great distances, and we will hear through these two things that we have on the sides of our heads...
...And so a whole gamut of doctrines and dreams, of conceptions and hopes, emerged in the course of time...
...But to affirm only the life to come is to diminish the importance and the sacredness of this world...
...And so Judaism's word for leaving this world is niftar, which means "to be released from service," "to be summoned home from duty," "to be brought back from struggle to rest...
...Having said that it could not be done, Maimonides then proceeds to do it...
...They provided a better sense than we have ever had of the glory and the grandeur of the four packed chambers of the tomb that Howard Carter and his associates unearthed in 1922...
...The word suggests that this world is better than the world to come, for in this world one may do work for God, while there, in the next, one can only rest and be reconciled with God...
...There is upheaval, turmoil, writhing...
...History: There is a verse in the Bible that our generation can understand better than any previous generation could...
...Why didn't he take better care...
...We are distressed that all this gold was hammered out only to be buried, that all these jewels were polished only for the tomb, that all these hieroglyphs were cut only for the eyes of the gods and the guards of the netherworld to see...
...There our feet will be straightened and eventually we will learn how to walk upon them...
...This is as it should be, for when we talk about death and the beyond we stand on the threshold of mysteries where no one can speak with certainty...
...Rabbi Riskin suggests that we mourn the loss of a loved one for seven days because God made the...
...Gone where...
...Their mouths are closed, and they are being fed via the navel...
...But there is a deeper reason for our heartache at the sight of all this splendor...
...She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she is only a ribbon of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other...
...There is only this world, there is no world to come...
...Most of this work is legal, even petty and pedantic in its concern with details...
...You are straining your imagination again...
...The second brother shrieks—startled by the "accident" that has befallen his brother...
...It is a touching parable, one that contains great wisdom...
...But within the context of this perspective, death can be seen as a pause, not an end, as a note in a symphony that still continues for as long as the Jewish People do...
...He is heir to a religious tradition which tells him that there will^be a "new life" after this wet and warm existence in the womb...
...the deathbed request of Jacob that he not be buried in Egypt, so that his tomb not become a shrine...
...They saw the students who studied...
...Surely they too deserve a share in the reward as great as mine, for without them I could not have done it...
...The thousands of people who stood in line at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and at the Smithsonian in Washington last fall were wellrewarded for their time...
...Why did he have to fall into that terrible abyss...
...Our world will collapse and sink into oblivion...
...The festivals are all history holidays, anniversaries of events in the life of the People...
...A civilization in which the rich and poor are separated by such a chasm and in which so much wealth and beauty were wasted on the grave must have affected them profoundly...
...I will not enter heaven until and unless they are admitted too...
...At the trial they said that, of course, he should be admitted and given a seat of honor in heaven for having established this mighty academy...
...If the Bontsche Schveig story reflects the love and compassion for the common man which was so characteristic of Chassidism, this story reflects the love of learning and of the Law which was so characteristic of the Mitnagdim: "When Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin, the founder of the famous Yeshiva of Volozhin, died there was great excitement in heaven...
...It is only your survival instinct, an elaborate defense mechanism, a subterfuge...
...And until this day his great soul waits patiently at the portals, studying the Law with intensity and praying for the ultimate redemption of all mankind...
...what have we learned...
...It sees the afterlife not in heaven, and not in resurrection, but in the life of the People here on earth...
...The message of the holidays is the eternity of the Jewish People...
...Until then our teaching is: When you love, give it everything you have got, and when you have reached your limit give it more, and forget the pain of it because, as you face your death it is only the love you have given and received which will count, and all the rest,— the achievements, the struggles, the fights,— will be forgotten in your reflection...
...The Jew as an individual is mortal...
...Why should this be so...
...Because we do not claim to know what will be, or when, or how, Judaism affirms that this life is a mystery and a gift, that this world is a wonder (plant, which means world, and ne-elam, which means wonder, are one word) and so too is whatever lies beyond, and that only when we get there will we comprehend what will be...
...The treasures that were buried with this nineteen-year-old boy would have been more than enough with which to feed a whole province of Egypt for more than a year...
...She's gone!' there are other voices ready to take up the glad shout, 'There...
...He bewails and bemoans the tragedy— the death of a perfectly fine embryo...
...lower, lower...
...Gone from my sight—that is all...
...A ship at my side spreads her white sails in the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean...
...The faith of Israel recoiled from that cult and that culture and all that it stood for...
...It insists on saying "both-and" rather than "either-or...
...The Torah that was given to the Jews who came out of Egypt does not say a word about death or afterlife, about that which was the sole concern of Egyptian religion...
...The exhibit was larger^and more elaborate by far than the exhibits that had toured this country in 1961, or Japan in 1965, or Paris in 1967, or the British Museum in 1972 or the Soviet Union in 1974...
...The head-splitting cry was a sign of health and the tumult was the chorus of mazel tov's sounded by the doctor, the nurses, and the attendants, all thanking God for the arrival of a healthy child...
...Halachah: Jewish religious literature is of two types: halachah and agada...
...Later generations could not maintain an equally pristine silence...
...Well, then," asks the first brother, "What do you think it will be like when we leave here...
...Because of his silence here below he is beloved above and so the trial is a mere formality...
...By halachah we mean the vast network of laws by which Jews live, and by agada we mean the equally vast network of ideas by which Jews live...
...But what about all those Jews in all the many communities that I visited who gave me donations for the Yeshiva without ever having the satisfaction of seeing the school and its results...
...The pyramids were mighty mausoleums...
...On Pesach each Jew is required to feel as if he himself has gone out of Egypt...
...What a waste...
...We mourn the loss of one we loved because our hearts are filled with regret for words left unsaid, deeds left undone, conversations left unfinished, and dreams left unfulfilled...
...But Rabbi Hayim brushed aside the invitation and insisted that there had to be a trial for him, just as there is for everyone else, and he cited the passage in the Talmud which says that all must be treated equally by the law...
...Neither does anyone else, for no one has ever been there and come back and no one can claim to know first-hand the furniture of heaven or the geography of hell...
...The halachic principle that underlies this law is: "A positive commandment which is addressed to the entire community, such as the commandment to rejoice on the festival, has priority over a positive commandment which is addressed to an individual, such as mourning...
...She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination...
...The Bible says (in Leviticus, 18), "In the ways of the Land of Egypt you shall not go...
...So they turned away, as far as they could, from the belief that gold or silver or decorations could impress the guards of the world to come...
...Instead, Jews chose to speak about that which can only be yearned for, hoped for, trusted in and dreamed of, in the language of agada, in the language of poetry, of free-running imagination...
...He believes only in that which can be demonstrated...
...Until then...
...Yet at the very same time the tradition says that one hour of bliss in the world to come is worth more than all of the life of this world...
...world in seven days and each person is as precious and as irreplaceable as a whole world...
...What will happen then...
...A vast network of laws and legends has accumulated around death and afterlife, but at the core there has remained the simple instruction: we are not to go in "the ways of the land of Egypt...
...We can understand this verse much better now that the government of Egypt, in accord with a special treaty signed by our Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister of Egypt, has sent us a traveling exhibit of the "Treasures of King Tut," an exhibit which demonstrates, perhaps more clearly than anything else, precisely what the ways of Egypt were...
...The court conferred and came to the conclusion that he was right, that the students were also entitled to a share of his glory...
...You are looking for something to allay your fear of "death...
...What the law seems to be saying is that although we as individuals are all destined to die, we have the power to make ourselves part of something that will not die...
...It has been more than three thousand years since we left Egypt...
...And then the assembled are embarrassed: all that Bontsche can think to ask for, the acme of his desires, the most that he can conceive of as heaven, is—a fresh roll with butter every day...
...Just then the water inside the womb bursts...
...Her diminished size is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There...
...Indeed it is a mitzvah, one that everyone can understand and appreciate...
...So the time-to-come was described by the sages as an academy, by the scholars as a court of judgment, by the philosophers as a place where one could contemplate Infinity, by the mystics as a place of eternal bliss and union, and in a thousand other images and metaphors that coexisted down through the centuries...
...But Rabbi Hayim argued, on the basis of a passage in the Talmud that deals with the Laws of Partnership, that if he was entitled to a reward then surely the students of the Yeshiva were as well, for he could not have accomplished what he did without them...
...they were imbued with a very different kind of a faith...
...It cannot be done...
...He is enlightened and tolerates no idle conjecture...
...The Israelites must have been as horrified as we are by what they saw in Egypt...
...It insists on holding both of these views rather than choosing between them...
...But Rabbi Hayim was not finished yet...
...Replies the skeptical brother: "Nonsense...
...The Birth The second parable comes from a contemporary halachic scholar, Y. M. Tuckachinsky...
...Louis, and editor of Jewish Reflections on Death (Schocken) and New Prayers for the High Holy Days (Media Judaica...
...Then, starting with the moment of candle lighting, he must rise from the mourner's seat and turn to celebrating the holiday...
...Our ancestors must have been sickened by the Egyptian experience...
...And it serves to remind us that concern with death and concern for what lies beyond it is not the special province of "thanatologists" or theologians alone, but is the concern of all who live...
...But to the extent that he is a part of an Eternal People he too participates in something eternal...
...Is it really possible for human beings to turn off heartache or to postpone anguish...
...We come before God, and we understand ourselves and our identity, not only, and not even primarily, as individuals, but as members of a people, an eternal people, a covenanted people...
...Faster, faster...
...on Shavuot as if he himself now stands at Sinai...
...But even this did not satisfy him...
...The Ship "I am standing upon the seashore...
...Forgotten...
...In that story a poor man who is downtrodden but silent here on earth arrives before the Heavenly Court and finds that there he is a celebrity, eagerly awaited...
...Here are a few of the images that they have given us...
...The different versions tell us more about the people who dream them than they do about the world to come, but there is no century, no society, no civilization, down through the centuries that has not had some dream, some version, some picture of what it will be like...
...And harder still: if the loss should occur during the festival, he must postpone his grief until after the holiday—and then begin to mourn...
...The court conferred and checked the passages that he had cited and again concluded that he was right...
...by any standard, the men who made these things were master craftsmen...
...The heavenly court conferred and they checked all the references that the Rabbi had cited in the Laws of Partnership and came to the conclusion that he was right, that the people of Volozhin were entitled to a share of his glory...
...The silence of the Torah is no accident...
...When we see such funerals, we see something closer to the spirit of the children of King Tut than to the spirit of the Children of Israel...
...and if you have loved well then it will have been worth it, and the joy of it will last you through the end, but if you have not, then death will always come too soon, and be too terrible to face...
...And yet, every single generation of every single civilization since the beginning of time, including our own, has speculated about and spoken of, yearned for and dreamed of, and even described something beyond this life...
...What is not within one's experience can have no basis in one's imagination...
...It is a kind of mitnagdic counterpart to the famous Peretz story of Bontsche Schveig...
...He lives on within its life...
...What exactly were these ways of the Land of Egypt that we were forbidden to follow...

Vol. 4 • October 1979 • No. 9


 
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