Life in the Garden
This world is like an anteroom before the world to come. Prepare yourself in the anteroom so that you may enter the banquet hall. Rabbi Ya’akov, Pirke Avot 4:21
Prepare – “The nature of the afterlife has never been clear in Judaism.”[1] In contrast to the highly developed ideas of the afterlife in Christian literature (we might ask how this actually came about), Jewish thought simply recognizes that the commandments were meant for this world, that reward and punishment is the bedrock of justice and that the afterlife will see the righteous blessed. The focus is here and now, not later. The struggle is to be prepared for the coming day of judgment. Thus Luzzatto can write:
“The Holy One, blessed be He, has placed man in a world where there are many things that keep him aloof from God. If a man follows the promptings of his physical desires, he gradually departs from the true good, and soon finds himself engaged in a desperate battle. Man’s circumstances, whether fortunate or unfortunate, are a source of trial. . . To the extent that a man subdues his evil inclinations, keeps aloof from that things that prevent him from attaining good, and endeavors to commune with God, to that extent he is certain to achieve the true life and to rejoice in it.”[2]
There is a great deal of truth in the aphorism “so heavenly minded that he is no earthly good.” Unfortunately, the constant offer of paradise in the next world tempts us to think that somehow it will all work out in the end, and therefore what we do now doesn’t really matter all that much. Those of us who came out of the rich heritage of other-world promises find it difficult to accept Luzzatto’s declaration that we will enter paradise in exactly the same state that we have when we die. We will not have our hard drives erased and replaced. Whatever sins and temptations we have left unsettled here will accompany us in the ‘olam ha’ba. The work won’t end with the grave.
Christian emphasis on perfection in the next life finds the Jewish idea of accounting uncomfortable. Typically this Jewish idea is dismissed as nothing more than legalism, a result of a religion without grace. But such characterizations are decidedly incorrect. Grace begins with the Lamb before the foundation of the world. It is not invented on the cross. Reward and punishment are themes found throughout Scripture. And the ideas of heaven and hell are so vacuous that it takes someone like Dante to given them any real substance. In the end, we have no idea what life in the Garden will be like after we die. Perhaps deliberately. The Bible is not a rescue manual. It is a course in cultural saturation. It is a record of encounter with YHVH. And it is written for men and women in this world, not the next. Now is the day of salvation. What happens next isn’t really the crucial concern of living today.
Topical Index: afterlife, heaven, prepare, Pirke Avot 4:21
[1] William Berkson, Pirke Avot: Timeless Wisdom for Modern Life, p. 152.
[2] Moses Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, p. 19.
Amen.
We can get so wrapped up in this life. The yetzer ha-ra wants everything to be accounted for HERE, but it wants it to be accounted for according to its terms. The yetzer tov recognizes that everything here matters, but not as the final end-all-be-all. It starts here, and is all dependent on what happens here, but the picture this life paints clearly runs off the edge of its page on every side.
It was an amazing shock to me to realize at some point that this life is the preliminary heat; the race gets run next time. Life is a full-bore run with all the stops out that is just simply not possible with any death at all in the way. This time around is just the qualifier. The real ‘meaning’ of life here is not to be found here, but only found later. Many, many things that start here do not end here; loose ends are everywhere. Babies die without getting to live; people fall in love but don’t get to enjoy a life together; life is, yes, “nasty, brutish and short” for way too many, and it all looks so horribly ‘unfair’ on the surface; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and we are clearly driving this spaceship we are on into the ground and breaking it off. Nope. No final answers in sight! BUT, that does not mean that what happens here stays here: we don’t get to dump it all in the trash can where it looks like it belongs and start anew. We start the next go round where we left off here. And, no again; we don’t get a purgatory to suffer our way to righteousness, either. That doctrine is thoroughly pagan and hellish beyond comment, not to mention completely callous to not only what righteousness is, but how it is obtained. Righteousness is what is ONLY obtained by free choice, or else we would not have been given free choice. Hell and purgatory leave no choices.
This is the time we have been given to set our hearts. Perfection is not a mental assent, like Skip keeps driving home, but neither is it a life of no mistakes. The line between a righteous man and an unrighteous one is actually found in our response to every point that we stub our toe on reality. The unrighteous person will collapse at that point, and go into blame, shame, attempts to control or avoidance maneuvers: the righteous one will go into humility, submission, and – with a permission only to be found straight from the throne of grace – pick himself up, and try again, but this time after computing the new information. Sanity accepts what it does not know; insanity will allow only what it thinks it already does. The righteous man, says Proverbs, is not one who does not fall, but one who falls AND GETS BACK UP AGAIN the perfect number of times it takes to learn. Now is the time we have been given to learn WHY we will not want to sin and rebel next time. Now is when we learn to hate our enemy (death) with perfect hatred; hate it enough to figure out how NEVER to choose it again. Life is a choice we get to choose this time but only really get in its full context next time. Here and now is where we have been given to find life, but there is only one place we are going to find it, and that is inside the Fence. This time around is where we learn where that Fence is and why we should stay there.
I never could justify the end game preached by my church upbringing all those years. Walk the aisle once and ALL is forgiven and taken care. The only thing left is a little, just the slightest bit, correction and overseeing of your remaining life. Messed up? Don’t worry, be happy! You’re forgiven. Sinned a little. Never mind, I have been redeemed!
I never seriously questioned it all. I just went along for the ride, happy to have the wind blowing in my face from all the wonderful fluff feelings that the services sought and delivered. I usually felt pretty good after each service. Even the ones intent on scaring me in to submission in whatever way the preacher saw need of.
And then, I turned around and employed the exact opposite toward my children focusing constant overseeing, constant punishment and clear threats of immediate judgement. Whaaaaaaa?
Never once, that I can recall, did I simply say to my child in the midst of their rebellion, “Don’t worry, I forgive you,” or “Bless your heart, never mind your rebellion and disobedience, you are my child, all is well.” I certainly wasn’t the best parent by a LONG shot, however, I did know that I really had to work at deliberating the polar opposite attitude of discipline toward my children than that which I was adhering to via my christian “once saved, always saved” philosophy.
My real and tangible attitude toward my own life was, “Yeah, that sin I just deliberately exercised isn’t that bad. I’m forgiven anyway. No big deal.” If my child demonstrated that attitude with me, and they did, by the way, I was all over them with the sternest of chastisement and corrective discipline.
One of my children actually illustrated my kind of ‘christian’ outlook regarding obedience by expressing, “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to be away from you so I can do what I want!” Sounds like a perfect expression of “Come quickly, Lord, so I don’t have to put up with all this hassle of life. Come quickly so I can have it all erased, start over, and live a life of leisure in heaven.” In other words, take all this hard work type stuff away and provide me with an easy life of leisure, free of tears and angst.
I’m still aghast looking back at all the stuff I swallowed, unchallenged, and believed so whole heartedly. The anger is gone that I initially had for much of the church. However, the wonder of my blindness and lazy approach to it all still pokes at me. Not really in a bad way, I suppose, but in a way that prompts and motivates me to keep studying to move closer to YHVH in a way that pleases him rather than me.
Amein, Michael C, Two thumbs UP. No getting away from rebellion and disobedience, exactly, not now nor ever. HE chastises whom He loves.
“It is a course in cultural saturation.”
Would ‘cultural assimilation’ work in that statement, as well? Paul’s letters seem preoccupied with how to assimilate mass numbers of people from all walks of life —> into a Hebraic worldview. Much of what he says would conflict with the Tanakh and/or with his own writings,.. unless it taken in the context of assimilation. The modern mistake is to take Paul’s writings and interpret the exact opposite — to say that he is throwing the floodgates open and creating a new multicultural approach to following God.
The Acts 15 Jerusalem council and the issue of circumcision are two examples that pop into my head here. These selections from scripture weren’t dictates about the eternal place of the Torah,… it was simply clarifying what “developmentally appropriate” steps were needed for acculturation to take place.
Very well said, Gabe.
These selections from scripture weren’t dictates about the eternal place of the Torah,… it was simply clarifying what “developmentally appropriate” steps were needed for acculturation to take place.
Thanks Michael C. for your comment. It clarifies things for me.
“…we will enter paradise in exactly the same state that we have when we die. We will not have our hard drives erased and replaced. Whatever sins and temptations we have left unsettled here will accompany us in the ‘olam ha’ba.”
This thought of continuing working and growing in the word to come is new to me (no wonder) and, while it makes sense, I wonder about those precious people who have cognitive disabilities and who who are unable to engage with God, the world, and themselves in the same way the rest of us do (exercising their free will). What about the babies who die without having had a chance to live, as Laurita mentioned? I have always heard that these people will be healed and made new in the afterlife, which suggests that they will undergo a dramatic change. According to the view presented today, they will have to start where they left this world… Or am I misunderstanding something?
I wonder where we got the idea that it takes cognitive ability to relate to God? Heschel talks about the “roots of our ultimate insights are found not on the level of discursive thinking, but on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery, in our awareness of the ineffable.” (from God in Search of Man) Haven’t you ever noticed how words just come up short when you try to explain the awareness of God’s majesty?
Would it be such a terrible thing to have the opportunity to start again in a Torah observant world as an infant? If in fact, God comes first and our reasoning about Him comes second, why would we think that those with mental disabilities, or those without age, would have any less awareness of Him than we do? Maybe their awareness is greater because they don’t have to deal with all cognitive garbage that we are sifting through. Just a thought.
I agree with you, Suzanne, that ‘cognitive garbage’ is often in the way of simple faith. But I was not concerned about the ability of those who are disabled to relate to God or to be aware of Him. I was asking whether their disability may prevent them from responding to His love by being transformed into His image, which will, according to Luzzatto leave them unprepared for the world to come. I realize our discussion about what life there will be like is mere speculation but the thought of entering the next world in the same state as we are now was startling. Thank you for your response, anyway!
Suzanne! That’s wonderful! I read somewhere once about someone who worked with the severest of the ‘retarded’; the vegetables, or almost. Someone asked this person once how they could stand such a depressing job. “Oh, no” they replied, and proceeded to tell them that they couldn’t wait to get to work because it was the only place they had found where there was absolutely nothing in the way of love; that these people showed love and inspired love in all around them in a way that you could find nowhere else on the planet. It is not the ‘retarded’ that I think suffer; I think it is the emotionally crippled and insane people who are the pitiful ones. They are the ones who are suffering in large part from fear-based realities, and it can get really scary inside their heads sometimes, but the retarded ones may be the lucky ones who automatically ‘get it’, and the rest of us that struggle. Perhaps they were given to us to make easier for US!
I think it is much simpler than we think it is to ‘get’ love, and to hate the rest. We tend to put ourselves in other’s shoes and proceed to try to figure out how it would be if WE were them, but others start from a different place than we do, and I am convinced that from every starting place possible, it is no harder or easier to choose love. Grace abounds in hard places, and I think in the hardest of places, grace may be a given all the way. We may need to save all our pity for the seemingly most well-off among us, for to those to whom much is given, much will be required! Great questions! I know that He is Justice and Mercy personified, and the playing field is leveled in ways we cannot see and the tenderest of His regard He saves for the littlest and the most needy among us.
Laurita, you could well be referring to Jean Vanier, a Canadian who founded the L’Arche program that now consists of a network of more than one hundred communities in thirty countries for men with intellectual abilities to live with him. L’Arche is named after Noah’s arc, a place of refuge and new beginnings.
It is in THIS life that we are to walk right in His ways, then comes the reckoning, the giving account of how we spend our time and finances, and loving YHWH the way that He requires of us-in humility and awe of Him.
It is in THIS life that we are tested and tried if we fully grasp and understand His commandments, if we appreciate them as rules to guide us away from evil inclinations/yetza ha’ra, to weigh our thoughts and emotions in the way of Torah truth, to be identified as His people, of His Kingdom, to overcome obstacles that often beset us on this journey of seeking His restoration in our lives and for the folks around us in the world.
Restoration begins, and is much needed in THIS life. Shalom.