The collective shock of losing so many people in the Holocaust was just too great. Most Jews today see the Jewish tradition through the lens of 20th-century rationality, so they don’t see those aspects. In the Artscroll prayer book, there’s a line in the bedtime Shema, “Forgive anyone who has harmed me in this incarnation or any other incarnation.” Even in the Bible, Saul goes to the Witch of Endor to raise up the spirit of Samuel from the dead. From the 14th century on, a belief in gilgul, reincarnation, was as kosher as Manischewitz. Maybe most Jews haven’t, but Judaism has absolutely always had a view of the afterlife. Joshua Cohen is the author of A Heaven of Others and Witz. I remember as a kid thinking, “Yes, yes-that’s a very effective way of getting me to shul.” I’ve never subscribed to the myth that the Kaddish can be used to spring one’s parents from purgatory. “Magnified and sanctified is God, Who brought us all here to the graveside to suffer and yet Who still hasn’t offered any reward.” It verges on gallows humor. I have always read the Mourner’s Kaddish as a unique provocation to God. The classic refusal of salvation is the Mourner’s Kaddish, which says nothing about death, or about life after death.

Anything that would see death as a salvation risks encouraging the believer to shirk his job on earth, or opt for thoughtless martyrdom. Everything I’ve read tells me that Judaism is loath to encourage a positive view of the afterlife, because it might encourage a more positive attitude toward death. Jews, if not Judaism, regard death as a great injustice. Once a man dies, his afterlife ceases to exist. Only the living can play, or imagine-or read. It’s an imaginary sphere, in which one can play out one’s fears, neuroses, desires and pains, but it’s still a terrain strictly for the living. I’ve always felt the afterlife exists in relation to life in the same way literature exists in relation to life. We’re left with a typically practical, or provisional, interest in the world as it is-a regulation of the mundane, the here and now, rather than a pondering of the celestial. It’s never had a formal approach to eschatology, either-what’s going to happen at the end of the world. Judaism has never decided on a formal approach to the afterlife. The afterlife is the principal preoccupation of anyone who’s going to die, regardless of religion.

Reflections on life after life pdf