Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [381]
Both statements appear in the same Mishnah, Avot 4:17, showing that there was no real interest in logical consistency in this literature. Each Rabbi’s exegetical statements and homilies were remembered and deliberately restated in such a way as to defy logic. This is due to the vision of the redactor. But each homily also contains its own deliberate literary technique, quite characteristic of the Rabbinic period in which it was written and continued into mystical literature.
Considering that the main Rabbinic interest was in resolving legal problems logically, this is especially striking and it is meant to be. Here, the interest of the Rabbis is in deliberately stating a paradox, challenging each reader to provide some kind of intellectual synthesis. Putting these two statements together yields a literature where the real interest of the Rabbis was conduct in this world, not the world to come explicitly, though many Rabbis might address it in their sermons and homilies.
The reticence of Rabbinic tradition to discuss the next life is summarized by the third-century Palestinian sage, Yohanan bar Nappaha: “All the prophets prophesied only about the days of the Messiah; but of the world to come, ‘no eye has seen it.’ (Isa 64:4)” (See b. Sanh. 99a, Ber. 34b). The effect of this statement is to dampen speculation on the pleasures of the afterlife. Perhaps it was meant to defend against particularly vivid depictions of heaven and hell in Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and later in Islam. But the Rabbis could not entirely resist imagining an afterlife as a life without some of the responsibilities of this world and with rewards impossible in this world. Rav Abba, a third-century Babylonian Amora describes a perfected world with restricted pleasures and difficulties:
It was a favorite saying of Rab: “Not like this world is the world to come.” In the world to come there is neither eating nor drinking, no procreation of children or business transactions, no envy or hatred or rivalry. But the righteous sit enthroned, their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the radiance of the Shekhinah. (b. Ber. 17a)
The passage seems to have behind it an interpretation of Exodus 24:10-11: “And they saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.” The passage narrates the theophany between God, Moses, and the elders of the Children of Israel at Sinai. The life to come is taken on that model, with the inconveniences of life removed. Angelic life will remove eating and drinking, procreation or business and thus all envy hatred and rivaltry will disappear. Sexuality disappears in this vision. In order to see these bodily processes as “inconveniences” one has to understand the Rabbinic love of study as a transcendent value, against which everything else is an interruption. We see here the Rabbinic penchant for exaggeration, possibly taken to a deliberately humorous, self-satirizing extreme.
In the idealized world, nothing will interfere with the righteous’s contemplation of God. They will receive the crowns and probably the thrones reserved for the maskilim (those who make others wise) because they are an academic community. Indeed, they conceive of God’s court no longer as a royal court, as in the Biblical traditions, but as a Rabbinic court where the righteous enjoy the ability to study Torah all day. They are a “yeshivah shel ma’aleh” (Rabbinic Academy on High). The equivalent Aramaic term is metivta deraqia’. The Heavenly Yeshiva is meant to reward those who study in this life and promise the same reward to those without the ability or opportunity to study in earthly academies. All will have the pleasures of study in the coming life, when all will have the ability and time and opportunity to occupy themselves with Torah.
The Midrash Eleh