 All of us are very uncomfortable with death Maybe not so much for teenagers or people in their 20s, but as we begin to round middle age the prospect of dying becomes worrisome and As a result of this Many people tried to hide and hope that it will go away William Randolph Hearst used to forbid People to mention death in his presence Some people avoid going to doctors because they're afraid they may hear bad news We live in tremendous denial. I think Ernst Becker actually wrote a book called the denial of death morticians Camouflage the dead People sometimes at a funeral say doesn't Fred look great He didn't look so great a few weeks ago But as funeral Fred can look wonderful because we don't want people to even appear to look dead Some people try to outrun Death by building monuments to themselves by carving a name into a tree or building a pyramid But they want something to last beyond their own life people don't want to feel that Life is going to come to an end Woody Allen once quipped that I don't want to achieve immortality through my work I want to achieve it through not dying now. I would suggest that one of the greatest misconceptions about Judaism centers Around the issue of death and what comes afterward I don't think there is probably any other area in Jewish thought that is so misunderstood Dennis Prager. I think Dennis spoke here last night or the night before so Dennis Prager once Described a funeral he attended and he said at the funeral the rabbi declared That Judaism does not believe in an afterlife and the rabbi insisted that the dead only live on in the memory of Their friends and family who they leave behind The rabbi really should have said that he Doesn't believe in an afterlife rather than declaring this in the name of Judaism It's also very common to hear people say that Judaism does not believe in heaven or hell I Once had a social studies teacher in high school Who used to tell us that in matters of religion and politics? People often speak with a degree of certainty inversely proportional to how much they actually know now. I think some of the misconceptions About the topic we'll be dealing with tonight Might stem from an anti Supernatural bias that crept into modern Judaism from the Enlightenment. I think I'm up until the time the Enlightenment people didn't have difficulty with things that were miraculous things that were not easily measured With our senses and I think that as a result of the Enlightenment Speaking about the world of the spirit just became uncomfortable for many modern Jews Secondly another factor might be that many Jewish people have a tremendous allergy To anything that might even remotely sounds like it has anything to do with Christianity So if Christians speak about x y or z then we have nothing to do with something like that Tonight what I'm going to try to do is present an outline I stress I'm going to try to present an outline of Traditional Jewish teaching on the topic of the afterlife. I should state at the outset That no one really knows exactly what will happen after death and very few people are very anxious to try to find out Therefore much of what I'll be sharing tonight is somewhat speculative and provisional In addition, I should stress there isn't only one traditional Jewish view on This topic of the afterlife there tend to be several strains of opinion and What I'll be trying to do is share with you some of those strains However, the basics of what I'll be sharing tonight are alluded to in the scriptures in our holy Bible and in rabbinic literature So I'll try to summarize. I hope What is more or less the prevalent understanding and one of the major problems? I think this is probably the big one with understanding the topic of the afterlife was captured by the venerable Chinese philosopher Confucius who lived about twenty five hundred years ago When he said we don't know anything about life So what can we know about death and So I'm gonna have to share with you a bit of a long preamble tonight In order to understand the Jewish view of death and the afterlife because it really all hinges on our view of life in the first place and I think the first question We have to understand the real question. It's a bit of a conundrum at the outset tonight It's not why people die But why are we alive in the first place meaning? Why are we here in this world in the first place as We'll see God had a very different option available to him for creating human beings Then the kind of world that we know We're all familiar with this world But the truth is if we understand God's agenda in creating a world He could have created a much different kind of world and it's important that we understand why are we in this world? Rather than another kind of existence What was God's intention in creating human beings? So the Bible says after each day of creation by our Elohim Kito Normally translated and God saw that it was good But the German Bible commentary of Jakobs v. Mecklenburg in his Katawa Kabbalah writes That by our Elohim Kitov can be translated really as the causative by our and he Caused it to be seen God caused it to be seen Kitov because he is good meaning after each thing that's created The Bible is not telling you that God made it and then God looked it and said hey pretty good And that's absurd God's not gonna make something and look at it and say yeah, I give myself an 85 So it's not giving you an evaluation of the quality of what God made It's telling you after each thing that was created. Why did God make it? by our Elohim Elohim Kitov God brought it into existence because he is good meaning That the motivation for creation is God's love and altruism Creation was not for his sake Our sages teach that the nature of someone who is good is to do good To give and God created us out of his desire to give To have a recipient for his goodness Just like parents want their children to have a life of ultimate fulfillment and pleasure God wants no less for us The famous Jewish cabalus of Moshe Chaim Lutzato a brilliant Italian mystic from the 18th century Expressed it like this in his famous book Derek Hashem the way of God He writes God's purpose in creation was to bestow his good to another Since God to start desire to bestow good a Partial good would not be sufficient God's gonna do something. He's doing it all the way The good that he bestows would have to be the ultimate good that his handy work could accept God is not interested in creating human beings who will go through life in second or third class God's desire is that we experience life in first class Now what is this pleasure? What is this great pleasure that God seeks to give us? It's obviously not a piece of cheesecake or 15 minutes of fame or even winning the mega millions Should happen to all of us Tevia said may the Lord strike me with it. May I never recover? Rabbi Lutzato goes on to explain that the ultimate pleasure is Eternal pleasure cheesecake is not eternal the ultimate pleasure is an eternal pleasure and That opportunity to attach ourselves To the greatest good in the world and the source of all other pleasures That's the greatest pleasure possible to attach ourselves to the source of all other pleasures The headquarters of everything in this world So he writes God alone is the only true good and therefore His beneficent desire would not be satisfied Unless he could bestow that very good What does God want to give us? himself The nature of this true benefit is his giving created beings the opportunity to attach themselves to him To the greatest degree possible for them bonding with God and knowing him is clearly a spiritual experience It's not a physical experience our bodies would be irrelevant and They might even get in the way and interfere So I go back to my question If God's intention is for us to experience closeness with him Why create us in a physical body and put us in a physical world Why not just create us as as simply a spiritual Non-physical soul and allow us to exist in a blissful heavenly realm forever That's my question If the ultimate goal is for us to experience the greatest pleasure, which is God So what Experience is God. It's not our stomach. It's not our fingers. It's our soul and so if that's the agenda So I'm asking why are we alive in this world in a body? God should have just stuck us in heaven as a soul That seems to have bit would have been a much more direct and efficient way of achieving his agenda Why put us in this physical world? When a physical body were so easy to get distracted from the spiritual and even tarnish our pure spiritual souls by sinning It's tremendously dangerous in this world Rabbi Lutzato explains That if the goal is for us to have pleasure and hear me well If the goal is for us to have pleasure We all know that we have infinitely more pleasure from something that we earn and deserve by working for it Then something that we get as a handout as welfare as charity As a matter of fact We don't feel good when we get something that we didn't work for or earn or deserve We're actually embarrassed by it and The capitalists refer to this as the Nama the chisufa the bread of shame When you get something that you didn't deserve you didn't work for You don't get pleasure out of it. You're embarrassed by it. So for God to place us in Paradise Without having to work for it would not really accomplish What he set out to accomplish? If God wants us to have ultimate pleasure That will only happen in an environment Where we're able to earn it by working for it rather than just getting it as a free gift Therefore God did not create us simply as a spiritual entity a spiritual soul The Torah tells us that we were created From the dust of the earth That God then breathed this breath of life into we are both physical and Spiritual what Rabbi Eliezer Birkowitz referred to as bio psychic beings Not only did God fuse our soul into a physical body He put us into a physical world where there are numerous challenges temptations and distractions To draw us away from a relationship with him in addition think about this We live in a world where God is not visible We cannot see God the Hebrew word for world is Olam Olam means hidden concealed because the Creator is concealed in the world. He created The world seems to be able to function perfectly well without him There were actually philosophers called the deists who believed that God created the world and then took a vacation in Mexico And he's not involved with running the world. He just set it up and it runs all by itself And so if we're not feeling well, we can go to the doctor takes a medicine and we feel great And we don't have to believe that God had anything to do with it. I got a great doctor Wonderful pharmacist great drugs. Thank God We can go to work and make money and feed our families We can have a land as a people and defendant and we could assume as the Bible says Koch Kochee ve Otsem Yoddee Osu Lee as ko lechai eleze. It's my strength and my might that have given me all of this We're put into a world where it's not clear that our prayers our Torah study our acts of kindness our Performance of mitzvot the perfection of our character really have much impact on our lives at all We're supposed to get close to God But obviously a relationship that's forced is not really a relationship So how do we form a relationship with God and how do we attach ourselves to God? We live in a world with his tremendous tension between our body and our soul We feel both of them We feel drawn to our soul. We feel drawn to our body. We often feel in conflict My soul pulls me in one direction. I know I should get up this morning and pray my body says ass stay in bed You don't need to get up to pray This is a constant tension that we feel between our body and our soul and This tension between our body and our soul between the physical and spiritual is the arena In which free will operates. That's the arena in which we as human beings get to choose We get to choose Spirituality we get to choose godliness. We get to choose to put God in our lives rather than living without God But it's a choice and we have tremendous obstacles to overcome in making this choice It's not easy Tremendous obstacles to live a virtuous life But by making these choices we become deserving of Our closeness with God the Talmud teaches that we can get close to God by emulating him By modeling our lives after God by being like him The first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that he is a creator and he didn't have to create the world He did the creation as an act of free will as an act of love But God's first action in the Bible is to create and by placing us in bodies and In a physical world. He provides for us an arena of free will For us to be like him how? Because we can be creators just like God that's what we can become human beings can become creators It's interesting by the way that when the Bible speaks about the creation of man It says we were made but sell them Elohim in the image of God The Bible has many different names for God. It has the tetragrammaton the you'd have of hay Shaddai Svaot, there are many names of God in the Bible. Why does the Bible specifically say that we were made in the image Elohim and The famous student of the Vilna Gome With Chaim of allusion says that we're told that we're made in the image of Elohim Because Elohim is the name that's used for the creation of the world. The whole creation story is what Elohim did That's the name of God that's used and we're told that we're in the image of God in that we Can be like God and that we also can create How do we create? We create ourselves That's what we get to create Each one of us is here in this world to create a masterpiece Everything else in the world God created unilaterally God said let there be light let there be dogs Let there be trees let there be stars God makes everything unilaterally when it comes to the human being God says let us make man and According to the Baal Shem Tov God is speaking to each and every one of us and God is saying to each human being Come on, bubola. We're gonna create you. I am gonna give you the raw ingredients God says to each of us. I will give you a body and a soul But who you ultimately become is a function of what you do with those Ingredients, what do you do with your body and your soul? What choices do you make and in making those choices every single time you choose the eternal over the temporal every time you choose The righteous over what's convenient every time you choose Spirituality over the material You're growing you're creating yourself. You're becoming a greater and bigger human being So to sum up thus far The reason that we are alive in a physical body is to allow for the kind of tension That provides an arena for free will This allows us to work and Earn our closeness to God by choosing it rather than just receiving it passively now. Let's go to the next step originally human beings were supposed to be Immortal that was the original plan out of the starting gate. Human beings were supposed to live forever It was only after eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil That Adam and Eve became mortal as well as all of their descendants human beings became mortal God doesn't say by the way if you eat from that tree, you're gonna drop dead God says on the day you eat from it moat tamut dying you will die meaning you'll become mortal Because they didn't drop dead as soon as they ate from the fruit, but they became mortal Why is that? Why is that? We know in the Bible Knowledge the word to know expresses intimacy and Adam knew his wife Eve This is the tree of knowledge of good and evil That somehow after eating from this tree human beings became intimate with something and That was themselves who became intimate with our own bodies We became very very attached to our bodies Prior to eating from this tree humans had an objective view of Who they were they understood the true nature of their bodies and their souls It was understood that their souls reclothed with a physical body But the physical was understood to be in service of the spiritual and separate from the spiritual After eating from this tree it no longer was so separate They became mixed up their bodies began to take on a life of their own They began to subjectively Identify with their bodies Their bodies became more and more aware of how they saw themselves eating became an act of physical pleasure in its own right and Not necessarily connected to the soul that was a difference Prior to eating from this tree everything was connected to the soul They understood there is soul and everything I'm doing is to serve this soul to help the soul So the act of eating was not an act of eating that was mindless that was consciousness lists Eating was a spiritual activity. It was the food was taken as a way of Building the soul after they ate from this tree the physical assumed its own arena and eating became a pleasure in its own right Previous to this the physical world and its temptations Were external to us? They were external to us The snake which represents our evil inclination was an external force in the world But after eating from this tree of knowledge of good and evil we became intimate with it. It became an internal thing We couldn't separate our desires from reality and This is what caused Adam and Eve to become ashamed and To try and hide from God Because of this confusion it became impossible for you beings To ultimately and truly fulfill the purpose of their creation Embracing and identifying with the physical made it much more difficult for our souls to soar and Embrace a true connection with God being immortal at this stage Would totally entrap us and enmesh us in the materialistic world And we would lose connection with the spiritual death became a necessity It's actually a great act of kindness for God to bring death into our lives death became a necessity at This stage to break the intimate connection between the body and the soul by allowing the soul To cleave to God unencumbered by the body. That's what happens after we die The sage of the the Talmud the Talmudic sages tell us That this is a great blessing After each day of creation if we saw the Bible says and God saw that it was good But after the entire creation process it says and God saw everything he had made and behold It was very good and the rabbis ask what is very good. They say very good. That's death Death is very good for us Because in death the soul learns that it's not a body the question is What happens after we die? What happens after death? So when we ask the question what happens after we die We have to remember who is this we? The we is composed of two parts our body and our soul We first became alive We first became alive when God took lifeless dust and breath the breath of life into it. What is death? Death is simply the removal of our soul from our body That's all death is death is a departure of our soul from our body Life was the implanting of the soul into our body death is the removal of the soul from the body our souls of course being spiritual Continue to exist after our bodies return to the earth King Solomon wrote in the book of Kohelet in Ecclesiastes chapter 12 verse 17 The dust will return to the ground as it was and the spirit will return to God who gave it Now it's very hard and I appreciate this For people to imagine what this means What does it mean that our soul? Continues to exist What is that like? And I think many people have a hard time believing in the afterlife Big price precisely because they can't imagine what existence is without a body It's a famous book. Yes, sir. Ah haim Which speaks about death and mourning And he tells a famous parable of two twins in a uterus two twins that are about to be born And they have this ongoing argument because in the uterus these two twins are living it up Everything is provided for them. It's nice. It's comfortable. There's air conditioning. It's the proper temperature They've got enough food Everything is beautiful But then they begin to wonder so what's next? What happens if we have to leave this place? So one of the twins happens to be a very optimistic and says I am sure that after we leave this place We're going to go to even better place And the other one says you're a fruit cake. What are you talking about? After this you evaporate you disintegrate you come to an end. You're finished There is nothing after this And back and forth they argue that back and forth obviously Who's going to know until that day nine months after they're conceived The optimist is the first one to emerge The attending doctor picks up the baby Slaps it in the tuchas He begins to take his first breath Begins to scream and cry And his brother in the uterus says I was right I knew it If you leave this place you're going to perish a horrible death It is bad news ever to leave this place And he doesn't know that in that room There's a big celebration going on mazel tov people are making lechayim's Because this little baby is now emerged into the next stage of life I think there are some very compelling reasons for us To understand that the possibility of continued existence After death Is very very reasonable The labava chereba used to always say That the first law of thermodynamics and physics Teaches that energy is never destroyed or lost Energy merely assumes Another kind of form And he said if this is true regarding physical energy Then how much more so when it comes to spiritual energy spiritual reality of the social Whose existence is not limited to time or space It too will pass from one form of existence into another Also, does it make any sense? For god to create human beings And allow his creatures to spend their lives In an effort to achieve perfection Only to have everything come to a terrible end just 70 80 100 years later What would be the point Also, there's so much injustice in this world God's fairness would seem to require and demand a realm Where accounts could be settled Where the righteous who suffer during their time on this earth Can truly be rewarded And the wicked who seem to skate by And enjoy a wonderful pleasurable life in this world can get their payback Now in recent times many of you are aware of the fact There has been a tremendous amount of research into near-death experiences These are people who were pronounced clinically dead Their brains didn't register any activity Their hearts stopped beating Their senses ceased to register any stimuli Yet these people who were pronounced clinically dead Could later recount Exactly what happened in the rooms where their bodies laid after they were pronounced dead They could tell who came in and out of the room They could recount exactly what was said and conversed about in front of them and as they laid their dead In the 20th century Elizabeth Kubler Ross and Raymond Moody Did studies of countless people Not just in North America Countless people throughout the entire world all reporting Very similar experiences of what happened after they were pronounced dead There's a pediatrician from Seattle Dr. Melvin Morse Who studied children who had survived cardiac arrest And he concluded that their near-death experiences were not due to the taking of drugs or cultural conditioning In one of his studies There was a child who was pronounced dead That reported afterward that they had traveled out of their body and went home from the hospital And described exactly what their family members were wearing What exactly they were doing what video games his brother was playing on the computer And all of these observations were later confirmed to be accurate As well countless people have who never died People in this room I'm sure Report having had very clear and dramatic encounters with their loved ones who had died They either came to them in dreams or appeared to them in apparitions Some of these incredible stories can be found on a recent book published by Yita Halberstam and Judith Leventhal Called small miracles from beyond published in 2014 If I had time I would share some of these stories with you they would absolutely blow your minds That's an ad to buy the book When people die The quality of that experience is very different for different people Upon the separation of the soul from the body The body is buried And the soul enters into a state of existence called the olam hanishamot the world of souls The talmud teaches us that for righteous people who spent their lives trying to grow spiritually For these people the separation of their souls from their bodies Will be just like removing a strand of hair from a saucer of milk That's how easy and smooth The separation of the body from the soul will be Because they never got too attached to their bodies For them death is not terrifying And it's not traumatizing to their soul However for people who spent their entire lives pursuing only physical pleasures And material comfort And ignoring their their spiritual lives For them death will be very very difficult The talmud says that for them The separation of the body from the soul will be like trying to pull a tuft of wool out of a thicket of thorns It's not going to come out so easily Because the soul there is very attached to the body These are people that have come to totally identify with their bodies They were basically living only as a body And engaged only in physical activities For these people their souls will feel very disoriented upon death Their souls had been so wrapped up in their bodies They will have a hard time even relating To what a spiritual existence is For them it will be very difficult to disconnect from the physical world and to appreciate The spiritual pleasures possible in afterlife These people will have to go through a rehabilitative process to allow their souls to come into their own Part of this will be the shock of being buried An undergoing physical decomposition You can imagine to a soul that was so intimately wrapped up in a body The sages call it khipotakhever To hear the grave the the coffin slamming shut That final announcement must be terrifying to experience their own body decomposing This body that had been so connected to Starts to decay That must be terrifying to a soul that only identified as being a body For spiritually refined people it will feel just like taking off one garment and putting on another But for people whose souls atrophied It will be a very uncomfortable experience to go through the death process Of course Judaism emphasizes That much of this discomfort can be avoided If we wake up before we die And begin focusing on our lives properly It's one of the major teachings of Judaism In the Talmud Rabbi Eliezer would say repent one day before you die And his students would say but Rebbe you don't know when you're gonna die And he would say good point grasshopper therefore do it now So people who begin to wake up and by the way Our sages teach us that that's the purpose of illness You know that illness didn't exist in the world until Jacob died Until Jacob our patriarch died people would not get sick. They would sneeze and they would drop dead And that's why we say god bless you when someone sneezes But by Jacob we're told before he died he got sick. He was the first person ever to get sick And the reason is our sages teach us it's giving us a little bit of a wake-up call You know the Khofetz Chaim said that when you get your first gray hair It's a summons to the supreme court upstairs So god has many ways of calling out to us and saying look you went through so much of your life already Ignoring your soul isn't a time to wake up Start devoting some time To spiritual things in life to growing spiritually To working on yourself to growing as a person To studying Torah to doing mitzvot to helping other people to working on your character traits to doing chesed There's so many things that we're supposed to be involved in And people seem to just ignore it and play video games It's so easy to waste our time in this world and to get distracted People who lived righteous lives And rectified their souls while they were alive Will exist in this olam hanish amot this world of souls Where they'll experience reward for their virtues And exist in an extremely pleasurable state of existence They'll take great pleasure In all the good they did all the wisdom they achieved And all of their spiritual concept all their spiritual accomplishments This experience is referred to as gan eden the garden of eden By the way, the people in the world of souls are aware Of the major challenges facing their loved ones back here in the physical world And they're able to assist us by praying for us Or by actually offering us advice By coming to us in dreams and in other ways of communicating with us But what happens to people who did not rectify themselves enough spiritually yet? These people will need further purification of their souls And they'll enter into a state of existence known as gehenem This is not to be confused with the christian idea of hell From dante's inferno where there's eternal suffering and gnashing of teeth and burning in fire That's not the jewish concept of gehenem First of all, gehenem is not so much an experience of punishment as it is one of rehabilitation It's also not eternal The experience of gehenem can last for moments You could be there for a second Or it can last up to one year maximum That's it Meaning even the most spiritually challenged people Can usually get their souls dry cleaned in a year What is the basic experience of gehenem? What happens in this state of gehenem? I don't know But our sages teach us that the basic idea is That we are able to very clearly see And understand all the failures of our life We're able to clearly understand the negative impact of all the wrong things that we did Both to ourselves and to others When we do something wrong, we don't only hurt other people, we hurt ourselves And we don't often appreciate the incredible impact that our deeds can have We don't realize that if we insult someone it could ruin their day and they might kick their dog And there might be a whole chain of events just from the one negative thing if you gave someone a cross look Or you didn't say good morning to someone In gehenem, we're going to see the incredible clear impact of everything that we did that was a failure And that's going to cause Tremendous shame and embarrassment When we see and re-experience All the passion that we had in pursuing nonsense or pursuing things that were actually destructive It'll cause tremendous shame and embarrassment And what this shame and embarrassment will do Will be to clear away the barriers That were created between us and god when we did the wrong thing And this will then allow our souls to experience the spiritual pleasures of the afterlife Now Jewish mystics teach there's another possibility That may occur To help us rectify parts of our soul That didn't complete their mission while we were alive This is something called gilgul nishamot. Some people call this reincarnation Our mystics teach that our soul is not a simple entity Our souls actually are composite entities Our literature speaks basically of five different levels to the soul There's the nefesh the part of our soul that's basically the animating life force of who we are Animals, by the way, have a nefesh The nefesh is what keeps us alive Then there's a level of ruach That's the emotional part of who we are our feelings are emotions Then there's the third level the nishama Which is the intellect and the spiritual part where we connect spiritually to the beyond And then there are two parts to our soul which are not even part of our attached to our body It's the parts of our soul that really connect us to god, which I can't explain. It's the khaya and the yehida So we have different parts to our soul And by the way, each of these five parts has all the other five parts within it Now normally The three upper levels in the shama the khaya and yehida Are very very difficult to corrupt almost impossible to corrupt But some people may have other parts of their souls Needing rectification And so what the cabalists teach is that those parts of our soul May enter into another human body In order to allow those parts to be rectified You should know that reincarnation is not universally accepted by all jews, although it seems to be accepted by the vast majority of jewish teachers I should also point out that for a very small number of people Very small number of people Who are thoroughly evil in their lives And not able to be rehabilitated through gehenam or any other means They will exist forever in shame and humiliation in gehenam. They will not be able to experience the afterlife They will basically have eternal misery, but that's a very very very small fragment of people Humanity itself will enter its next phase of existence in the messianic age This will be a time in human history where human strife will be eliminated Swords will cease and people will be able to pursue spirituality And a relationship with god relatively unencumbered In the messianic age, it will be possible for people to devote themselves to spiritual pursuits At some point during this messianic age The next stage will take place which is called t'chiata meitim The resurrection of the dead Our bodies will be reconstituted like plants that emerge From seeds that first decompose In the ground and then sprout But our bodies will become more refined bodies than we are now There'll be less course less tether to the physical More ethereal bodies We won't need to eat physical food For example, we'll be able to survive and receive our nourishment from spiritual means only But we will have bodies that come back to life And now there are two major views on what happens next The minority view is the one taken by the rambam maimonides Maimonides holds that the purpose of this period why are our bodies going to come back? What is the purpose of that? Maimonides says that while people lived in this world most of humanity lived in a world That was a very broken world A world of strife a world of war especially for jews a world where we're always being persecuted Maimonides says that for most people who lived throughout human history life was difficult And it was hard to pursue this spiritual So they're given a chance to come back into the messianic age to live a life again In a more refined world where it will be easier for them to devote themselves to spirituality However, maimonides says that after these people live in a resurrected body they will die again And then their souls alone just the spiritual part of who they are Will enter into the existence of what is called olam haba the world to come Which is basically a blissful eternal paradise Maimonides says that people That finished their resurrection stage Will exist eternally as a soul in this state of bliss Experiencing the knowledge and reality of god That's all folks But most other jewish sages take a different approach here They say that the time of the resurrection Is not only to allow people to experience life in the ideal messianic age But that ultimately We will live forever As a composite complete human being a body and a soul Why is this? Why do we have to exist in the future? Not just as a soul, but as a soul reunited with the body So the talmud tells the following story. I'm going to read it to you Antoninus Marcus Aurelius said to rabbi huda hanasi In the second century The body and the soul can both escape god's judgment This roman wise person said you know what in the future the body and the soul they can get away with murder Why? The body and the soul can escape god's judgment because the body can defend itself by saying It was the soul who sinned Because look Since the day the soul left me I have lain still like an idle stone in the grave and have not committed any sins If it wasn't for the soul, I wouldn't do anything wrong. That's what the body could say And the soul can likewise say it was the body that sinned Since I left the body I have flown free like a bird Rabbi huda replied I'll offer you a parable in response A human king once possessed a beautiful garden full of young delicious figs He assigned two guards to watch the garden one of them was crippled and one of them was blind The crippled guard said to the blind one I see luscious fruit in this garden Carry me on your shoulders And we'll share them and that's exactly what they did The blind man carrying the lame one until they had consumed the choicest fruit of the garden When the king returned He accosted his watchmen asking Where are my delicious luscious fruit? The blind man Answered do I have eyes that I could locate the fruit The crippled guard said do I have feet that I could retrieve the fruit? But the wise king was not fooled What did he do? He placed the crippled man on the blind man's shoulders and judged them as one So too God summons the soul and restores it to the body and then judges the two together So we see at the end of time We're taught that a human being will be judged and rewarded As a whole person with a body and a soul Let me wrap up Our sages teach us that we can actually experience A taste of olam haba A taste of this eternal Blissful paradise In this world We have the opportunity of experiencing A foretaste of what olam haba will be like One of those ways of experiencing olam haba Is shabbat Shabbat is called me'en olam haba A foretaste A little taste of the world to come Because shabbat is an opportunity for us to spend 25 hours Immersed in the spiritual Our meals are not physical meals. Our meals are spiritual meals Shabbat is a time we don't have to work. We can spend our time praying With leisure Studying the Torah Deepening our relationship with other people But the sages tell us That only the one that prepares for the shabbat is able to eat on the shabbat You cannot cook on the Sabbath If you want to eat on the Sabbath you have had to prepare it from before the Sabbath So we learn here a very vital lesson Our experience of olam haba ultimately in the future Requires preparation The purpose of this world that we're living in our sages say this world is a prose door This world is an anti-chamber to the world to come We are in this world as I said before to work The verse in the book of Eov of the book of Job which says Adam la Amol Yulud A person was born in order to work. That's why we're here in this world We're here to work. We're here to work on ourselves We're here to work on perfecting ourselves. We're here to growing spiritually We're here to preparing ourselves so that in the future When we enter into the world to come it's not going to be a huge transition One of the parables it's given for the world to come Is that God's going to be teaching a class in Talmud to everyone For people from whom learning God's wisdom was important in their lives This will be the most amazing thing in the world For people who totally ignore that it'll be like going to hell I've got to sit in the Talmud class for the rest of my existence So everything that we do in this world now while we're alive is in preparation for the world to come Both this world and the next world can be incredibly pleasurable The rabbis teach us in ethics of the fathers in Pyrkei our vote That all of the pleasures of this world Don't equal one sniff of the pleasures of the world to come Which means it's not just that all the pleasures of this world And rev desler explains that it means all the pleasures of this world It means take all the pleasures you ever had in your whole life And then take all the pleasures of every person alive in the world today all seven billion people take all their pleasure And add that to the pleasure of every person who ever lived The Talmud is saying that all of that pleasure all the pleasure of this world Doesn't equal map Tasting a knish in the world to come It means it doesn't even equal walking into the store and smelling the knish That's how incredible the world to come will be we can't even imagine how much pleasure there is there But the Talmud says incredibly That all the pleasure in the world to come Does not equal one hour spent in this world In growing spiritually So at the end of the day We live a life where there's Incredible potential for pleasure both in this world and the world to come I pray that all of us will be able to experience both of these potentials for pleasure Hopefully in a very long life in this world and then a very long life in the world to come