Is There a Jewish Heaven? from Planck's Constant

Thomas Cole, THE GARDEN OF EDEN, 1828
Photo Credit: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Is There a Jewish Heaven? Well, officially, the answer is no. Certainly the Old Testament doesn't mention it. Let me tell you why I bring it up. Recently a Muslim reader left a comment in response to my article Islam is the Fastest Growing Religion - Not. He wrote that only righteous Muslims go to Heaven but that infidels, no matter how righteous, will go to Hell unless they convert to Islam. But according to him, so what? All three religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) have the same restrictions regarding Heaven and Hell.

Not quite. For this discussion I will only concern myself with Judaism. Despite the fact that the Torah itself does not explicitly talk about an afterlife, Jewish commentators centuries later did discuss an unpleasant place called "Gehenom" where the unrighteous soul suffers spiritual consequences for its bodily misdeeds and "Gan Eden" or Garden of Eden where the righteous soul gets a spiritual massage from God. As for any suffering; it is not bodily pain, there is no body anymore, but more like an unpleasant tongue lashing.

Now all the souls stay in this afterlife until the Resurrection of the Dead. This is when all the souls, both in Gehenom and Gan Eden re-unite with their bodies in the "World to Come." It should be noted that when Jewish scholars talk about souls, they mean all souls, Jews and Gentiles alike. Even Muslims. We are all God's children and welcome to share in His Bliss.

Now all this talk of afterlife and the World to Come happened long after the Torah was written, and certainly by the first century, influenced by other religions during our diaspora and the Greek idea of an eternal soul.

So for some Jews there is a sort of Heaven. But strictly speaking, the Torah tells us that physical death is the end of life. Later books in the Old Testament like Job (3:11-19) have a very dark view of the afterlife where all souls, both the righteous and the unrighteous alike, go down to the abode of the dead (in Hebrew: Sheol); a view lifted entirely from the Sumerian concept of the "underworld." I should mention that in contrast to Christian and later Jewish ideas of "Hell" there is no notion of punishment or reward in Sheol.

The Torah says that the Almighty formed man from the dust of the ground, and blew into his nostrils His Spirit (Genesis 2:7). And when we die, we give both back. King Solomon wrote, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." (Ecclesiastes 12:17)

Seems pretty clear. When we are finished on this Earth, the body returns to dust and our soul goes back into God's essence. That is how the ancient Hebrews viewed death. Game over.

Because I am an atheist, my views of an afterlife are almost the same as that of the Ancient Hebrews. I know my physical body will return to dust. What saddens me, and this must disappoint all atheists, is that the part of me that is writing this blog, stringing these words into a sentence, that which makes me me, that part will one day simply float into the ether and disappear forever. All the stories in my head, the memories of my parents, the faces of friends long gone, my hopes and dreams for my children and their children, all these will just fade into the long dark night.