Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [382]
The Academy on High is similar to the earthly academy. Scholars continue their studies and debates there. The death of a sage is expressed as a summons to the Academy on High to help settle an argument (Baba Metzia 86a). In a striking anthropomorphism, God himself participates in the debates and sometimes His authority is not accepted immediately. For example, one of His rulings is contested by all the other scholars, and a human, Rabbah b. Nahmani, is especially summoned from earth (i.e., to die) for a final decision, which he gives before he dies. The potential theological issue of God’s ultimate rightness is resolved when Rabbah b. Nahmani’s decision concurs with that of God.20 This portrait is meant to further exalt as transcendent the legal discussions of the Rabbis. To do so, the Rabbis figure God as a Rabbi.
The theme of the angelic identity of those who make others wise is furthered in a new social context in this passage. The tradition of angelomorphism has been academically domesticated, though one can see its original form, complete with the notion that the ascetic on earth can approximate angelic states in heaven, indeed, even experience them proleptically by means of altered states of consciousness. But, if so, the Rabbis scarcely ever speak about it in classic Rabbinic literature. In this sense, it is like the prophetic notion of “The End of Days,” rather than the apocalyptic eschaton. For the Rabbis, study and prayer is asceticism, as well as intellectual exercise.21
In the mishnayoth and gemaroth that we have so far seen, there is discussion of “the world to come” but there has been little actual description of it. The contents or nature of the “world to come” was not a central concern of the writers of Jewish legal documents. Instead, the descriptions are part of the Midrashic tradition. “The world to come” began its intellectual life parallel to apocalyptic notion, as a paradise on a reconstituted land of Israel, as the Mishnah’s use of Isaiah 60 would suggest. More and more in Midrash, however, Olam Ha-Ba’ does double duty as a postmortem realm.
Some Rabbis believed that the perfected days at the end of time would not contain any of the striving of this world. As one would expect, scenes of agricultural plenty predominate in Rabbinic descriptions:
Not like this world will be the world to come. In this world, one has the trouble to harvest grapes and press them; but in the world to come a person will bring a single grape in a wagon or a ship, store it in the corner of his house, and draw from it enough wine to fill a large flagon. There will not be a grape which will not yield thirty measures of wine. (Ketub. 111b)
Wine was not a forbidden pleasure to the Rabbis or to Jews in general. But that is not the point. Visions like this appeal to an urban as well as an agricultural economy, lionize the land of Israel, and demonstrate exaggeration as the language of heaven, perhaps stimulated by periodic lack of provisions. They have a wonderful folkloric naive pastoralism, demonstrating how an apocalyptic vision can be domesticated into a normative society. There was no active apocalyptic hope in these communities but the eschatological hope of a better future in a reconstituted land of Israel served as a substitute for the view of heaven.
But it coexisted