Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [380]
The prayer contains a suggestion for the way that the resurrection of the dead will take place. It compares the waking of the body after sleep directly with the resurrection of corpses. It does this because the prayer is said in the evening, before sleep. And it praises God for being the one who will return the souls to dead corpses just as he returns wakefulness to people after sleep. Beyond that, the mechanism has little interest to the Rabbis or their community.
The prayer for the dead contains scarcely more detail. This prayer itself is not the Kaddish prayer, the famous prayer said in memory of the dead, which is a doxology of God. The Jewish prayer for the dead, El Male Rahamim, “God full of mercy …” is chanted at memorial services and at graveside, and it does prominently mention life after death:
God, full of mercy, who dwells on high, let these holy and pure beings find perfect rest under the wings of your Shechinah in the heights, let them shine as the brightness of the heavens, the souls of all those dear ones who are remembered today for a blessing. Let the garden of Eden be their rest. O Master of Mercy, hide them in the hiding place of your wings forever. May their souls be bound up in the bond of life and let them rest in peace upon their biers. And let us say “Amen.”
Some of the basic imagery is taken from 1 Samuel 25:29:
If men rise up to pursue you and to seek your life, the life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living in the care of the LORD your God; and the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling.
This image of the providence of the Lord is taken from the wording of Abigail’s blessing of David. She likens the way God guards the life of David to being bound in a bundle while the enemies of David are being cast out like stones in a sling. No one completely understands the metaphor. But in-gathering of the exiles is basic to the Rabbinic view of the afterlife.
The influence of Daniel 12 is also prominent in this very allusive passage from Jewish liturgy. The dead are to shine with the brightness of the heavens, just as Daniel 12 suggests. The garden of Eden has become the final resting place of the dead, as well as humanity’s original home, just as it has appeared in one of the heavens in the apocalyptic literature. But, in spite of Rabbinic Judaism’s eschewal of apocalyptic thinking, Daniel 12 continues to inform Rabbinic notions of the afterlife. In some way, the dead shine in the heavens, reside in Eden, yet their bodies find peace in the grave.
The World to Come
THERE ARE TWO other places where notions of the afterlife show up strongly in Jewish thought. The first is Midrash, that compendium of Biblical exegesis and homilies which glosses the Bible for use in study and in creating synagogue sermons, mostly for the feasts and holidays. There, we find a rich and completely free imaginative reconstruction of life after death. Each picture really depends on the imagination of individual Rabbis, who mirror the issues of different times and places as well as tell us of their own hopes. Because of the many treatments of this theme, there is no need to go into great detail about it.17
The dominant Rabbinic notion of life after death is Olam Ha-ba’ (‘olām habbā,’ lit. “the coming world,” or “the next world”), which is usually translated as “the world to come” and is contrasted with our present world, 'Olam Ha-ze (’olām hazzeh, lit. “this world”). Because Midrash is a communal literature, made up of the comments of many Rabbis over many centuries, one cannot expect a systematic or even a consistent treatment of “the world to come.” While the terminology is standard, the conception varies, depending on the Midrash and the exegetical or rhetorical needs of the Rabbi. “Better is one hour of bliss in the world to come than the whole of life in this world,” and yet we also hear at the same place: “Better is one hour of repentance and good works