JWR Outlook

Jewish World Review Feb. 26, 2001 / 3 Adar, 5761



Getting Lost in
the Afterlife


By Rabbi Mayer Pasternak


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- SEVERAL years ago I presented a series of classes titled the "Lives of a Soul" -- it covered some of my favorite and best material -- The Soul, Life Before Life, Paranormal Experiences During Life, Near Death Experiences, the After Life, Resurrection of the Dead and Reincarnation. Well, it turned out that it wasn't just my favorite material. The class kept growing from session to session -- 45, 55, 60, 70 people and it turned out to be the favorite topic of many people in attendance too! By the time the series was nearing it's end it was a Standing Room Only, overflowing into the halls.

Participants' ages and religious backgroundsran the gamut. People asked, challenged, talked, debated and cried. It was an extremely inspiring experience. Well, obviously I won my students' interest and attention and we seemed to have formed a rapport. We were connecting on many levels.

Before the final session, the director of the institute came over and suggested that I offer a few additional classes after the course's official end. They need "Real Life," not just this "weirdo stuff"! he said.

You see, he said, while I am very successful at addressing Life After Life and Life Before Life, I tend to purposely avoid the Life During Life stuff.

I told him I would give it a try.

The holiday of Purim was a few days away. The night of the last session I announced I would add one class. A more "practical" lecture on the topic of Purim, a profound holiday masquerading in what many mistakenly believe is a holiday for kids! So off I went, leaving my 80 eager students of pseudo-mysticism, in anticipation of the next class.

The night of the class finally arrived. Eagerly, I awaited the throngs to arrive! Did I ever have a rude awakening -- only 3 out of the previous week's 80 participants showed up!

I was crushed! What happened!? Wasn't I the same charismatic, loveable and cute teacher? Why didn't they want me?

I went home depressed and dejected.

This was probably the most explicit and dramatic demonstration of what I had sensed and experienced when teaching about these topics in the past -- that the people who are interested in the soul, afterlife, reincarnation and these types of spiritual topics, often had a disconnect with living Judaism and allowing their heritage impact the here and now! Their preoccupation with "spirituality" did not carry over into the realm of the tangible.

Some of these folks were the ultimate voyeurs -- getting a glimpse of that which was off limits or out of the realm of their mundane lives. Some of them were interested in these topics as a form of escapism -- because their lives were difficult and it was easier to talk about a different world than this one. Others, were bereaved and wanted reassurance that their loved ones lived on and they still had a relationship with them and would in the future. Still more, simply wanted some knowledge of what lies ahead for them when they encounter death, that great equalizer, themselves. But somehow this knowledge, as emotional comforting and as fascinating and engaging at is was, seemed to be departmentalized from their Life!

I first encountered this phenomenon 13 years ago when I started reading and researching near death experiences -- N.D.E.s.

Raymond Moody's groundbreaking book, "Life After Life" (which is being re-released on March 6; click on title to order) unleashed a stream of people who had near death experiences, who started to discuss their experiences in the open, once they realized they were not strange and that other people had these experiences too.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Near Death Experience, it is when a person is basically dead, at least temporarily that is, and they perceive that their consciousness or soul has left their body. I'm sure by now, most of you have heard about the soul looking down from the ceiling at the events going on below and seeing and hearing things that the person's body was not in a position to experience.



Then people meet dead relatives, a being a light and have a life review and are told its not time yet to leave and whoosh they are back in their bodies. My dear friend, Rabbi Tzvi Shur, related to me this morning an experience he had when he was a Hospital chaplain in Milwaukee. There was a patient who was dying of cancer who was very close to death. When he arrived in the hospital one afternoon to visit him, the resident told him that the man had just passed away 20 minutes earlier. He entered the room with another doctor friend of his to find the man's body covered with a sheet. The doctor on a lark, put his hand of the deceased neck and he was shocked to discover that his pulse had returned!

Time passed, and the man came to and said that he had had a near death experience and his soul had left his body. He said that he encountered some deceased relatives and asked them about the whereabouts of his parents who had died years earlier. They responded that they could not tell him where they where because it was not his time yet to cross over. They told him he still had two things left to accomplish in this world and then it would be his time!

Immediately after that he found himself back in his body coming to. According to Rabbi Shur, as soon as the man did those two unfinished tasks, he passed away --- this time permanently.

I was once invited to give the opening benediction on a Sunday morning at a conference called the Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Death -- featuring Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross -- the famous expert of grief and bereavement. I think I am one of the few Rabbis that have ever had the privilege of performing a Sunday morning benediction for 900 gentiles. Dr. Kubler Ross was exceptional, inspiring, and very candid. But she made one comment that always sticks out in my mind. She said that she personally interviewed over 20,000 patients who had had near death experiences and she could have written the same book as Raymond Moody! With advances in the medical profession and technology it is becoming extremely common for people who are "flat-liners" to be revived.

So the number of people who have had near death experiences is increasing astronomically.

From my own research into the Near Death Experiences I personally think that it is an effective way of demonstrating that the soul does exist and that it continues to exist beyond death. There are too many pieces of information that the people who "died" knew, that they had no access to know from where their lifeless bodies lay -- unless their soul was seeing it from a vantage point outside of their bodies. But that is my intellect speaking. The people who have had near death experiences themselves -- KNOW that the soul lives on. They all say that the experience is totally unlike any kind of dream and the experience lives on within them for many years.

In most cases the experience is ineffable or indescribable in terms that others can understand, but to them it is very clear that death is not the end! They walk around with the confidence that they have an immortal soul and do not fear death anymore!

But there is one fact that I could never understand and always disturbed me. Even though these people said that they now know that there is a soul, studies showed that 97% of them did not become any more religious then they had been. I never understood how that was possible! I think we all hold back on living a more religious life because we have some kind of lingering doubt about the existence of the soul and G-d, that allow us to rationalize the service of G-d away.

By the way, I totally reject the notion that there is a soul but there isn't a G-d and that there is some kind of spiritual evolutionary process where souls came into being through evolutionary mutations akin to the claim of physical evolution. It is hard enough to fathom the regular evolutionary process in light of the complexity of the human body and brain, let alone the evolution of a soul. Rather, I maintain that if a soul exists then G-d exists too! So when a person encounters the soul and G-d head on, with such clarity that it becomes an emotional reality to them, how is it possible that it does not affect them and make them consider becoming more religious!

This was my first encounter with the realm of "spirituality" devoid of religion and the disconnect between the people's knowledge and interest in things spiritual and how they live their lives.

This has been the major reason that I have delayed in writing more articles about these topics. I wasn't convinced that it would really change the way that people experience their Life During Life! There were an enormous number of people who posed questions to me after my last article, but as I spent several days answering all their questions I realized that I was getting Lost in the Afterlife! So I decided that I wanted to help people use these studies specifically to help them live their lives differently or to help them integrate this knowledge into this world! My goal is to help people use this information in ways that will help them connect it to their lives.

The healthy connection between studying the soul, afterlife and spirituality with Life During Life is expressed in the connection between the last week's Torah portion, which describes the giving of the Torah and this Week's selection that deals with civil law.

Last week we read about the encounter between the Jewish People and G-d at Sinai. There are no people in the history of the world that make a claim that millions of people experienced mass revelation, except for the Jews! The Jewish people heard G-d speak and dictate the commandments to Moses at Sinai. They were witnesses to the fact that prophesy; the ability of G-d to communicate with man exists. They also validated the fact that Moses was the prophet of G-d because they listened in on G-d conversing with Moses. But the experience was even more startling than that! According to Jewish tradition, the Jewish people actually had a collective near death experience at Sinai. The verse in Song of Songs says "My soul left me when he spoke".

This has been interpreted to mean that with the utterance of each commandment by G-d at Sinai the souls of the Jewish people left them and they effectively died. The tradition is that they were effective resurrected from the dead after the commandment. They decided that this dying and revival process was not for them. So they asked that Moses be their intermediary after the first two commandments. During this temporary death and throughout this experience -- they had the experience of "Seeing G-d".

There is a famous Midrash on the verse "That no man will see me and live," that when a person does die he will see G-d. Some commentaries actually claim that the process of death occurs specifically by G-d revealing himself to the person and then the soul is drawn out of the body by the revelation of G-d by a spiritual magnetic force! So it seems that G-ds revelation at Sinai was itself the trigger of their near death experience. The Jewish mystics claim that they knew that what they where experiencing was G-d -- because it was a categorically different experience then anything that they ever had experienced before. This similar to the experience that people that have had a "conventional" near death experience describe.

The Jews at Sinai had an experience that was transcendent and was beyond anything ever experienced in the realms of spirituality. It is also clear from some classic mystical commentaries that they experienced levels of heightened awareness of the soul that could normally only being achieved through prolonged meditation.

One would think that after having had this kind of mystical experience, a near death experience and experienced the revelation of G-d, that the Jews would have become preoccupied with these experiences. Perhaps they did. But their preoccupation with the Afterlife and "spirituality" manifested itself very differently then the 77 people in my class who didn't show up to my last class. To understand the Jewish preoccupation with the afterlife we turn to one of the Greatest Kabbalist/Philosophers who ever lived, Rabbi Chaim Moshe Luzzatto, ZT"L. Here is a translation of the first section of his famous Missilas Yesharim -- The Path of the Just:

"The foundation of piety and root of perfected service is that it should be clarified and understood to a person, what his obligation is in his world and to what his goal and focus should be on, in everything that he toils in, all the days of his life. The Rabbis have taught us that Man was created only to derive pleasure from G-d and to enjoy the radiance of His presence, which is the true pleasure and the greatest pleasure of any that could possibly exist.

"The real place for this pleasure is in the World to Come, which was created with necessary preparations for the enjoyment of this pleasure. However, the path to reach this place of this desired pleasure, is this world. As the Rabbi taught us, that this world is like a corridor leading to the world to come. The intermediaries that enable us to attain this goal are the commandments that G-d commanded us. The place for performing these commandments is only this world. Therefore man was placed in this world first, so that through these intermediaries that he encounters in this world, he can reach the place that was prepared for him, namely the world to come, where he will enjoy the good that he has acquired through these intermediaries. This is what the Rabbi taught us "today" is for performing the commandments and "Tomorrow" is for receiving their reward."

Rabbi Luzzatto teaches us that people need to preoccupied with the world to come. We are supposed to be thinking about it all the time … as we are living this life. It is the goal and purpose that effects what we do and how we do it in the here and now! Somehow, people are interested in the afterlife but not the implications that its existence points to and the responsibility that it places upon us.

The afterlife is the goal of a bigger picture and it must be understood in its proper context. Simply stated there are three basic fundamentals of Judaism: 1) There is a G-d -- the Creator of the universe, body and soul, whose creation was purposeful 2) This G-d communicates his will and his expectations to mankind through prophesy -- this communication is the Torah and the commandments 3) That this G-d is aware of our performance of his will and rewards and punishes accordingly -- the place for this reward is the world to come. Afterlife discussions should be simply that, what happens after someone has actualized LIFE itself.

The afterlife gives life itself profound meaning and responsibilities.

G-d had a great reason to reveal himself at Sinai to the Jewish people. He wanted the Jews to have experienced him in a way that was undeniably real. They needed a lesson in the belief of the existence of G-d after living in pagan world for so many centuries. They needed to have 10 proofs of his existence, which they received through the plagues of Egypt and they needed more. They needed a clear uncontrovertibly encounter with him that would serve as the basis of their faith, that would last them throughout the centuries of hardship and the challenges of the future. They needed to have a near death experience at that encounter too, so that they could experience the soul and the sense that this world in not all that exists. They needed this knowledge in order to be motivated emotionally to funnel their life energies towards that goal.

They also needed to know that the here and now is not all that exists and that even if they encounter suffering throughout their history, their reward will be in a different time and place. They needed great mystical experiences so that they could get a taste of the pleasure of being in the presence of G-d, which is the ultimate pleasure of existence. They received a taste of the G-d, the soul and the afterlife.

But then this ecstatic mystical revelation experience ended and it was time for living this life, real life. Immediately following the narrative of the revelation of G-d is the narrative dealing with Altar in the Temple and then the Torah portion of Mishpatim.

Mishpatim deals with civil law, tort law and all the mundane issues of living life in an ethical law abiding society. There is no separation of church and state, of the mystical and the normal, the religious and the profane. All of life itself is governed by the same G-d of revelation and is part of the bigger cosmic picture. More than that! It is specifically through religious activity and through the commandments that deal with the mundane that we actualize the goals of the afterlife. This is the message of the juxtaposition of these laws with the revelation experience. Revelation leads to religious expression symbolized by the Altar, and extends into the realm of all human activity and civil law as described in this weeks portion.

So if you are interested in the afterlife, make sure you just don't get Lost in the Afterlife! Avoid the disconnect between these studies and reality. This knowledge can help you live a more purposeful, meaningful and enriched life now. Just keep in mind it is the life during life that determines the life after life!


JWR contributor Rabbi Mayer Pasternak is a Baltimore based lecturer and scholar. Send your comments -- and/or questions -- by clicking here.

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© 2001, Rabbi Mayer Pasternak