Dust or Eternal Life? An Overview on Life After Death

“Dust You Are and Dust You Shall Remain” the first Human Being is told in Genesis. Ecclesiastes continues that “a season is set for everything; a time to be born and a time to die.” Yet every important Jewish thinker has depicted belief in an afterlife as a fundamental feature of Jewish Faith. Human beings have always asked what is next. Is this life all there is? Is death the end, the annihilation of all that I am? Or, as Tolstoy poignantly puts it: “Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by the inevitable death that awaits me?”

Historically and theologically, traditional Judaism has affirmed that, though death is inevitable, something of ourselves can survive our physical death, that some form of individual self-perpetuation is available beyond the grave.

In contrast, much of Western civilization has sought to deny the reality of human mortality. Franz Rosenzweig, the early twentieth century Jewish philosopher, and many others as well, characterized the history of philosophy as an attempt to, “distract us from deaths perennial dominion.” We readily use euphemisms to disguise death. The deceased has “passed’; the grave is a “resting place” for one who is on a “journey.” The “deceased” is taken to a “parlor” where cosmetic techniques may make it look “lifelike.”

The traditional blessing recited after the Torah reading says: “Eternal life (khayey olam) you (God) have implanted within us.” This 2000 year old prayer does not say that God has assured us eternal life, but that God has implanted within us, like a seed within the soul, the potential for life after death, for a way of self–perpetuation.

Belief in an afterlife is not a way of escaping the responsibilities of life in this world, but is rather a challenge to imbue life with a meaning that will outlast us.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “Survival beyond death carries, according to Judaism, demands and obligations during life here and now. Eternity is not an automatic consequence of sheer being… It must be achieved, earned.” How a person lives his or her life determines what of ourselves can be perpetuated beyond death. As William James put it, “Spend life in a way that will outlast it.”

The kabbalistic teaching about the heavenly garment “halluka” illustrates this view. According to this teaching, every deed we do during life weaves a stitch in a heavenly garb. The nature of the deed determines the nature of the stitch. After death, each person is cloaked for eternity in the garb woven from his or her deeds during life. In this view, the spiritual and moral quality of each of our lives is perpetuated in the life after death. The imprint made by our deeds on others, society, and culture can survive us.

For the eleventh-century Jewish philosopher Bahya ibn Pakudah, the belief that there is no afterlife – no ultimate accountability for the way we have lived, no possibility for self–perpetuation beyond our years on Earth-readily leads to nihilism, hedonism, escape from moral responsibility and obsession with trivialities.

Bahya’s Duties of the Heart and Moses Hayyim Luzzatto’s eighteenth-century Paths of the Upright have been two of the most influential works of Jewish ethical literature. Stating the dominant, representative view of Jewish religious literature about the afterlife, Luzzato writes,”The purpose for which human beings were created is realized not in this world but in the World to Come. Human existence in this world is but a preparation for existence in the World to Come which is the goal.” For Ibn Pakudah, Luzzato and others, life in this world should focus on developing our spiritual, moral, and creative potentialities – to prepare for the next step, to help insure some form of self–perpetuation in the world to come.

Death must be deemed a “good”, noted Maimonides, since it is the means of “perpetuating existence and the continuity of individual beings through the emergence of one after the withdrawal of the other”(Guide for the Perplexed 3:10). Maimonides inveighed against the notion of a physical restoration as man’s final state, and insisted that ultimate happiness consists of the incorporeal existence of men’s intellect, attained by pursuing a life of virtue and wisdom.

Isaac Pollak is President and CEO of an international marketing business for almost 4 decades. He holds graduate degrees in Marketing, Industrial Psychology, Art History, and Jewish Material Culture from City College, LIU, JTS, and Columbia University. He has been a student in the