Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [383]
The sages have taught us that we human beings cannot appreciate the joys of the future age. Therefore, they called it “the coming world.” [Olam ha-ba’], not because it does not yet exist, but because it is still in the future. “The World to Come” is the one waiting for man after this world. But there is no basis for the assumption that the world to come will only begin after the destruction of this world. What it does imply is that when the righteous leave this world, they ascend on high, as it is said: “How great is the goodness, O Lord, which you have in store for those who fear you, and which, toward those who take refuge in you, you show in the sight of men [Ps 31:20].
This passage demonstrates that the Midrashic literature is a product of individual talents anthologized. The writer of this homily is declaring himself against the common tradition to make a point to his hearers. The homily probably originated as a kind of sermon or Torah lesson. It also shows that the Rabbinic concepts were available to creative reinterpretation.
The Midrashist deliberately uses ‘“olam ha-ba’” as a substitute for heaven, together with an implied judgment upon death and the resultant ascent of the righteous. Many people have read the various opinions with great interest. But, the flexibility and playfulness of the tradition are most impressive.
For instance, the Rabbis almost always pin their hopes on a difficult turn of phrase in the Scripture, which they can then intepret in a comforting way by looking at the context:
God said to Moses, “Behold thy days draw near to die” (Deut 31:14). Samuel Bar Nahmani said: “Do days die?” But it means that at the death of the righteous, their days cease from the world, yet they themselves abide, as it says, “In whose hand is the soul of all the living” (Job 12:10). Can this mean that the living alone are in God’s hand, and not the dead? No, it means that the righteous even after their death may be called living, whereas the wicked, both in life and in death, may be called dead. (Tanh b., Ber., 28b end)
Samuel Bar Nahmani picks up the scriptural anomaly that the subject of the verb “die” is actually “days.” Though it would be tempting just to say it was a Biblical idiom, he uses this interesting grammatical anomaly in the Bible to provide his homily. The Midrash is far more definite about the reward of the righteous than the punishment of the sinners and the truth of reward and punishment than any specific description of it. The notion that the wicked are dead in this life, the righteous alive in the next, has been sounded before.
On the other hand, there is the famous and very naive tradition, that the dead buried outside of the land of Israel will be provided with a subterranean path to Israel and they will roll there underground to be resurrected:
R. Simai said: “The Holy One, blessed be He, will burrow the earth before them, and their bodies will roll through the excavation like bottles, and when they arrive at the land of Israel, their souls will be reunited with them. (T.J. Ketub. 12:3ff. see also Ket. 111a)
Perhaps it is the strangeness of the idea that impresses modern sensibilities but it does answer the question of the pious buried in Diaspora: How can even the dead participate in God’s plan for the ingathering of the exiles? Are those buried in the diaspora left out of the privileges which those buried in Jerusalem obtain? In this case, Rabbi Simai even suggests that resurrection will include reclothing the soul with the body. The body makes its own way underground to Jerusalem where the soul meets it. This passage later states that the new body will be built from the single, root vertebra. Renewing the body from the bones is known in