 When I was a high school student back in New Jersey in the late 60s, I had a teacher who would say to us, he was our social studies teacher, he would say that in matters of religion and politics, he said people usually speak with a degree of certainty inversely proportional to how much they actually know. And over the years since I learned that from him, I've found that to be often the case. The first YouTube video that we put up on our channel, we did this here many years ago, was about Jewish meditation. And I mentioned during that lecture that there are many people who assume, and they've told me, that meditation is totally foreign to Judaism. And we show during that lecture that there's no truth to that at all. We find similar statements about the topic of reincarnation. Many people assume that while it's central to Buddhism and Hinduism, it has absolutely no place within Jewish thought. What I'll try to show tonight is that this as well is not true. And one of the reasons I believe that the topic of reincarnation is not better known in the Jewish community, is that it's really not found overtly described or discussed in any of our primary literature. You won't find anything really about reincarnation in our Tanakh, in our Bible. You won't really find anything about reincarnation in the entire Talmud. The only mention you really find at all about the topic of reincarnation are in the mystical teachings of Judaism that we refer to as the Kabbalah. Now the Bible we'll find basically goes through the basic contours of Judaism. That's what we'll find in the Bible. The Bible begins with the story of God creating the universe. It goes on to describe later how God revealed the 613 commandments of the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. But many important questions are never really addressed in the Bible. Obvious questions. For example, the first sentence is in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Well, why did he create the heavens and the earth? What was his agenda? What was the purpose of creating the heavens and earth? How did it actually happen? Was it simply God saying let there be light and that's all that happened? Was there more to creation than the few verses that we actually read in the Bible? It says in the beginning God created the heavens and earth. Well, who is God? I mean, it's a word that appears everywhere in the Bible, but the Bible doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the question of who is God? How are we to understand God? So these are sort of very ultimate basic essential questions that are not really explored in the Bible. There's a God that created the world, but how does God interface with the world? How does an infinite transcendent God have any kind of a relationship with finite physical creatures? How does that work? What is the nature of the soul that God breathed into Adam? The Bible describes the creation of the first person formed from the dust of the earth, but then God breathes the breath of life, the soul, into this creature. Well, what does that mean? What is the nature of this soul? Again, it's just thrown out there, but you don't find any real discussion about these topics. What happens after we die? I mean, we're all here. Many people are curious what happens next. Not really discussed in the Bible. The Bible has lots of commandments that God gave us. Don't eat shellfish. Why not? I mean, the Bible gives us lots of instructions, dos and don'ts, but the Bible almost never engages in an analysis or discussion of what the purpose of these commandments are. What is the meaning? What are they supposed to accomplish? So it is these kinds of questions and many others that are explored in the Kabbalah. Now, there are several reasons why Kabbalistic thought has not been more widely known throughout Jewish history. One reason is that for many, many years, centuries and centuries, these teachings basically remain secretive. They were only studied by a select elite. The basic text, the primary text of the Kabbalah is called the Zohar, and it has its origins in the oral revelations that God revealed to Moses back at Mount Zion. Those are the origins of Kabbalistic thought. But the work of the Zohar itself was first composed by Rabbi Shimon Baruchai, who lived in the first century of the common era. But the text itself, the book, never appeared in print until the 13th century. So for many, many, many years, these concepts were simply not widely accessible. And after it was published, it wasn't widely disseminated. One of the reasons for that is that the material of the Kabbalah is extremely difficult, esoteric and complicated. It's not easily grasped by people who don't have a very strong and silent granting in the fundamentals of Judaism, which themselves can take a lifetime to master. So for a person to first really be well-grounded in the entire Bible and the entire corpus of rabbinic literature, like the Talmud and the Midrash, that's quite an accomplishment that's necessary. It's a prerequisite before someone can then approach the mystical teachings and understand them. So these mystical teachings of Judaism are really not well known at all by the masses of Jewish people until approximately the 18th century. What happened in the 18th century? Rabbi Zoro Balchemto started the Hasidic movement, which was a populist movement that swept throughout Europe. And it began to popularize and spread Catholic teachings. It made it easier to digest and easier for the non-scholar to understand. And so for the first time really in our history, Kabbalistic ideas began receiving a lot of attention by the masses of Jewish people. However, at the very same time in our history, there was a parallel movement. We know that during the enlightenment, the skeptical enlightenment, we began to find a challenge and a question of all concepts in Judaism that seemed supernatural, mystical, mysterious. There seemed to be an anti-supernatural bias that crept in to the Jewish world. And what happened is sociologically, you know this, if you just look at the history of North America in Jewry, even going back to European Jewry in the 1800s, there was a growing tendency towards secularism among Jewish people. And Jewish communal life became focused primarily on things like Jewish ethnicity connecting to Israel, but the more spiritual aspects of Judaism were neglected. I mentioned I grew up in the child of the 60s. I originally was from the Bronx, New York, and then my family moved to Fairlawn, New Jersey. There was a very well-known famous rabbi from Fairlawn who later, after I left, published a book in 1989 where he wrote in this book that reincarnation is totally alien to Jewish thought. So this famous rabbi just states unequivocally that reincarnation is a concept totally alien to Judaism and the Jewish thought. And there's a wonderful book that I recommended before called The Jew in the Lotus. This book has a little bit of a history. Many of you know that the Tibetan Buddhists were basically going through a systematic persecution by the Communist Chinese. Communist Chinese were destroying many Tibetan Buddhist temples, persecuting and murdering many Tibetan Buddhist priests. It became very difficult to maintain any kind of connection to their spiritual traditions in Communist Chinese occupied Tibet. So many people began to believe it. And we know that in the 1960s, the Dalai Lama, who was the leader of the Tibetan Buddhist path, spiritual path, by foot traveled to India from Tibet with many of his followers. And the Indian government was kind enough to give them an abandoned hill city. It was a hill village that was used by the British in the 1900s because it was cool there. It was destroyed by a earthquake and it was abandoned. So the Indian government allowed the Tibetans to come there. It's a little town called Dharmasala. And that became the headquarters of the Tibetan Buddhists in exile. The Dalai Lama found that it was difficult to be a people in exile. He found that many Tibetan Buddhists outside of Tibet began assimilating into the outside culture. So his concern was, how do we survive exile? Turns out that the Dalai Lama has many Jewish students. And they said, you know Dalai Lama, our people have to be the leading experts in the world in surviving exile. We've been in exile for over 2,000 years. So the Cummings Foundation organized meetings between the Dalai Lama and a number of Jewish rabbis and educators. They traveled to India. And there was a young, he was a professor of English, literature I believe, his name is Roger Kamenez. He went there to document and to report on these meetings. And the book produced this quote, The Jew in the Lotus. There's a wonderful comment in this book where the Dalai Lama begins asking because morally these rabbis are gonna explain the secrets of your survival. You know, we have families, which is a problem because Tibetan Buddhists are roughly monastic. And we have these holiday celebrations like the Paschal Crusader. And they were trying to explain, what is it that we are able to have as a technology to help us survive? But the Dalai Lama was very curious and he began asking questions about Judaism. And he began asking about mystical concepts. Now one of the rabbis, only one of them was someone that had a strong background in Jewish mysticism. His name was Rabbi Solomon Schachter Shalomni. And he went into a long discussion in front of Wally Liravai's and the Dalai Lama about angels and about spiritual worlds and about Kabbalah. And the Dalai Lama was totally captured by it. Totally captured. So Kamenez writes here the following. I can see the other delegates were getting a bit uncomfortable. Rabbis have egos too. And perhaps some were simply concerned that Rabbi Solomon would use up most of the talk in that day, as indeed he did. But there was something else going on. Although the group had already assumed that Rabbi Schachter's material would be of interest, they could not have anticipated this absolute explosion of curiosity from the Dalai Lama. It hit with enormous force and suddenly they confronted their own embarrassment about these subjects, which was not just theirs personally, but was endemic to contemporary Judaism itself. Rabbi Yitzchgrimburg, for example, felt the need to add some spin control. Well, what you're hearing is the mystical tradition, but more legal systems would not affirm all of these beliefs. Then Rabbi Joy Levitt piped in to general amusement and she said, and some of us are hearing these ideas for the first time as well. So there was this huge vacuum in the Jewish world where as the community began pulling away from mysticism and capitalism began to thwart, but many, many Jewish seekers wanted exactly that. And so we found that many Jewish people returning eastward, there was a tremendous interest among Jewish people in Eastern spiritual traditions. Pearl Epstein wrote a wonderful book called Pilgrimage, which to a great extent is autobiographical and describes her own struggles to find spiritual path within Judaism. And she mentions a friend of hers named Sue, who was one of these seekers who went off to India to find transcendence that defines spirituality. And is a particularly poignant line that Pearl Epstein has here, where she said, in the ragged, obscure manuscripts of the Catholics, I began to find tantalizing glimpses of the holy sparks that I had intuited in the scriptures as a child. And I marveled at the powers of obstruction that had hidden the ecstatic teachings from Jews like Sue, who were so hungry for them that they would travel to dusty Indian villages, contract dysentery, and even die to find those teachings. Hebrew word for reincarnation is Gilgul. The word Gilgul is related to three other Hebrew words. The word golel, which means to roll. For example, if you come to the synagogue in Shabbat, there'll be someone who lifts the Torah after it's read, it's called Hattah. And then someone rolls it together, that's called Ilela. So golel means to roll. Gilgul is also related to the word gal. A gal is a wave. And also the word gal gal, which means either a wheel or a circle. So why is the incarnation called Gilgul? It's the idea is that life is not always a straight line. Life is not always simple. And sometimes life has to go through a cycle of life and death and life and death, rolling from one body into the next. And this may be why the Hebrew word for life itself, khayim, has a plural ending, right? The same way in English, if you want a plural word, you have an S at the end. So when Hebrew, a word becomes plural by having the in, the unit that's so fleet at the end of the word. So khayim, we say is life, but khayim is life as a plural ending. And it might be that the purpose, the reason that the word khayim itself is a plural ending, a plural form, is that really life itself might be a process of many lives. The Jewish concept of Gilgul is not exactly the same as the one taught in Eastern religions and many contemporary New Age philosophies. They view reincarnation really more technically trans-migration as the soul of someone when someone's soul dies and returns intact into a subsequent body. And this can happen more than once, but it's always the same soul that returns. The same soul that comes back into body after body after body. The goal of Hinduism is to escape that cycle of reincarnation, but it's always the self, the original soul that gets totally trans-migrated into a new body. In the Jewish mystical understanding, Gilgul is more nuanced and more complex. And it's basically finding the way we understand the makeup of the soul itself. The Kevala teaches basically that our soul has five levels. And that itself is a tremendous oversimplification. Let's begin there. The soul is understood to have basically five levels. Though part of our soul that's the closest to God, our unique divine soul is called Yechidah. Yechidah from the word unique, personal. Then, lower down, meaning more distant from that godly source, is an aspect of our soul called Chaya, again from the concept of life. And that is the life source, the transitional life source, that really animates the other three levels down group. The next level down is called Nishama, many of you've heard that term. Nishama is the aspect of our soul that's associated with our intellect, our ability to think and to conceptualize. The next level down is called Ruach, which is the emotional part of who we are. And finally, the Nephish, which is the instinctual aspect of who we are associated with our bodies. And the Bible actually, animals also have a Nephish. They have an animating soul that keeps them alive. Now in reality, our souls are much more complex than these five levels. I remember when I was in junior high school, we were learning physics for the first time, chemistry actually. So in seventh grade, I think the teacher said, well, class in Adam has a nucleus which is composed of protons and neutrons. But then around the nucleus, there are electron rings. They're actually rings of electrons and they're right. I remember at least two electrons in the first ring and then six or eight in the next ring. But then I remember two or three years later, the teacher said, well, that wasn't true. It really aren't these discrete electron rings. It's really an electron cloud and it's a probability curve. But two years ago, you couldn't have really wrapped your head around something as abstract as a probability curve electron cloud. So we made it work concrete for you. So the truth is we don't have these just five simple levels of the soul. But each level contains all five levels. Our soul is also connected to more inclusive primordial root souls. So for example, on some level, each of us is connected to Adam and Eve. So in the view of Kabbalah, rectified parts of our soul. Parts of our soul that have been perfected and rectified move on and don't need to return. It's only those levels of our soul that still need further development and rectification that undergo reincarnation or real rule. The concept of reincarnation. What I'd like to try to do is see it within the broader discussion of what life in general is all about. And so the more artificial to look at that part of life without having the bigger picture. So I'm gonna share with you a foundational presentation of this idea based upon the seminal work of our emotion of time with Sato called Dera Hashem or the way of God. And I'm gonna be summarizing his presentation. Number one, he says, why did God create the world? Why did God create human beings? He says that God's purpose in creating the world was in order to be able to bestow his goodness upon others. Meaning that he says the nature of good is to do good. The nature of good is to give. The nature of love is to want to give. It says in the book of Psalms, Ola Nkhestah Nyeba Naye, the world was created out of loving kindness. So if God by nature is good as loving and wants to give, that's just God's nature. If you want to use a word like that. So God desires to give to others. The focus of the Bible is what he intends to give to human beings. The require, when necessary, when necessitate that the recipient, human beings, receive the greatest good and pleasure as possible. God's agenda is for the recipient to receive not just any good, but the greatest good and the greatest pleasure possible. Think about these terms. What does every normal parent want for their children? Any normal parent wants their children's pleasure. And if you ask the parent how much pleasure, the parent will say as much as possible. No parent would say, I'd be happy if they traveled third class. Oh, every parent wants their children to have first class pleasure. The absolute maximum possible. And that's God's desire and his will. Now since God himself is the ultimate good. So the ultimate good that we can have is the ability to attach ourselves to God. The ability for us to be connected to God. Normally we think of pleasure in much more mundane terms. We think of an ice beach or a piece of dark chocolate. Whatever our vision of pleasure is. But Kamala basically says that all of these pleasures in the world, they have a source. There's a source to every pleasure. And if you enjoy the product of the assembly line, so imagine being able to spend your whole lifetime connected to the source of all these pleasures. So if you enjoy a beautiful sunset with a smile of a baby, and that gives you a lot of pleasure. So imagine the possibility of being connected to the source of all pleasure in the world. This is the goal. If this is God's goal, why didn't God just create souls? After all, that's when each of us is. When you come down to it, we're not really a body. After 120 years, your body is going to be separated from your soul. The body is going to be buried in the ground and bye bye. What exists eternally is our soul and our spiritual essence. So if God really wants to give each of us pleasure, why didn't God just take our souls and plunk them into paradise? Take our souls and just stick them in heaven. And each person would be in bliss from square one. Why place the soul into a visible body and make this soul with this visible body dwell in a visible world with all the distractions that our world has against spirituality. We live in a world where spiritual pursuits are not always the most attractive pursuits. If many people had a choice between coming to a class in spiritual thought or going to a Blue Jays game, they might consider going to a Blue Jays game. I think that there are huge temptations in the world, distractions from spiritual pursuits. So why would God put us there? So Rabbi Lusaz was saying that true pleasure only results when we earn it and work for it. That anything that you receive for free as a handout without working for it is not really pleasurable. It's only really pleasurable when it's really yours and it's really yours when you work for it, when you've made it part of yourself, rather than it being given to you and it's really only associated with you accidentally. God forced us into a relationship with Him. God could have forced us to have a relationship, but obviously the relationship is infinitely more meaningful when we choose the relationship. So therefore God placed human beings into a world where we have free will, a world where the choices in front of us are equally attractive and balanced and we're not compelled toward either choice. In addition, we ourselves would have to be beings consisting of both the physical and spiritual side, the soul being drawn to the spiritual, the body being drawn to the physical and these two sides of ourselves are in a state of constant tension. If the soul prevails, it elevates itself and it elevates the body with it and the individual achieves their personal potential. Each person achieves his or her personal potential. Of course, when a person is drawn more to the physical and the spiritual, they don't achieve their perfection. They go through their lives and identify primarily as a body. They think of themselves primarily as a body. Who am I? Excuse me. A body. And they don't attend to their souls or spend any time on spiritual development. I'm sure each of us probably knows a few people that don't pay any attention to developing spiritual. The Talmud teaches that when a person dies and their soul separates from their body, because that's basically what happens when you die, the soul separates from the body. So if it's a person that spent their life developing their soul and recognizing that at the end of the day, they're not a body, they happen to be a soul that's temporarily in a body for 70, 80, 90, 100 years, but then the body's gonna be buried and the soul will tend to exist. So a person that has spent their life developing this virtuous mind when they die and the soul separates from the body, it's like removing a hair from a saucer of milk. That's how difficult it is to get their soul away from their body. The body's not cringing to the soul. The body understands it's not a soul. So the Talmud says it's like removing a hand, a hair, a strand of hair from a saucer of milk, but when a spiritually unrefined person dies and their soul separates from their body, it's like removing a tuft of wool from a thorn bush. It's very difficult for that body to let go of that soul, or that soul to let go of that body. So according to the mystical teachings of Judaism, one of the major reasons for reincarnation and the major purpose of the reincarnation is that it offers us a second chance to earn perfection. The Zohar teaches the following. The Zohar says, as one as a person is unsuccessful in fulfilling their purpose in this world, the Holy One blessed me, He uproots and replants them over and over again. This is the way Rabbi Moshe Chaim Sato describes it in his book, Derah Hashem, the Way of God. He says, God arranged matters so that our chances of achieving ultimate perfection should be maximized. A single soul can be reincarnated a number of times in different bodies, and in this manner, it can rectify the damage done in previous incarnations. Similarly, it can also achieve perfection that was not attained previously. Now the basic platform of Allah is found in the Zohar. It wasn't until the 16th century when a spiritual genius named Isaac Luria was referred to as the Irene. He was born in 1534 and died 38 very short years later in 1572. He was the one that fleshed out and fully elaborated the ideas in the Zohar. The last three years of his life, he moved at Svat in northern Israel and he taught his teachings to a select group of students. His main disciple, Rechaim Vitaal, who lived from 1542 to 1620, basically committed the idea of his master, the Irene, to writing in a massive eighth section work called the Eighth Qayyim, The Tree of Life. And one entire section of the Eighth Qayyim is called the Shahr Adil Ghalim, the Gate of Reincarnations. It's an entire book explaining probabilistically what reincarnation is all about. And he suggests that there are a number of reasons that a person might be reincarnated. For example, to fulfill commandments that they never fulfilled previously or that they didn't fulfill properly. There are 613 commandments in Torah. Some people go through their whole life and they don't fulfill every commandment. Or maybe they fulfill commandments but not with a whole heart. Maybe they give charity but not with a whole heart. So they may have to come back to fix what they didn't do properly previously. Or they may have to study all the parts of the Torah. There are any parts of the Torah and we're supposed to ideally study everything in the Torah. Not just the nuts and bolts of the commandments but their mystical interpretations. That's important to learn. We may have to come back to be able to study parts of the Torah we never studied previously or to rectify any sins that we may have committed or personality traits that were not perfected in previous existence. Or we may have to come back to rectify a problematic relationship pattern. We all know that there are certain things in our lives that we keep on going back and doing incorrectly in terms of our relationships with other people. We don't give people enough space. We're too nosy. We're not generous. We may have to come back to fix those. There are people who went through this life and never had children. They may have to come back and have children. There are people who never met their soul mate. But even the person they married was not their real soul mate. They may have to come back to marry their real soul mate. They may have to come back to this world to help other people. Maybe they're okay. But it could be that you would be the unique position to help someone else. You may have to go back for that. How many times has the soul reincarnated? How many times have they come back? Most sources say that after our initial life, a person can be reincarnated three times. And this is found hinted at in the verse in the book of Eove, the book of Job. In chapter 33, verse 29 and 30, which says, God does all these things twice or three times with a person to bring their soul back from the grave to bask in the light of the living. So the basic teaching is we may come back three times. However, there are sources like the Savior by here. We'll talk about that in a few moments. The Savior by here says that a person can be reincarnated a thousand times. So which is it, three or a thousand? And so the way most people understand the resolution of this is that if after three times a person comes back and they make no progress, they don't make any forward progress after coming back three times, that's it. They'll never come back again. They may lose that possibility of correcting their lives through reincarnation. But if their soul makes a little bit of progress during those three times they've come back, they can keep coming back even a thousand times and the Tsukune Zahar says they can come back as many times as is necessary. Now, Catholics teach that normally we are not aware of our previous incarnations. They teach by the way that just about every single person in the room here is here not for the first time. The Catholics would teach that just about everyone in the room, this is not our first time around. But most of us are not aware of previous incarnations. However, and don't get scooped out by this too much, some Catholics maintain that there are times when someone can come back as an animal, a fish, a plant, or a inanimate object. And here, the person is not able to achieve rectification through their free will anymore. But they will be aware of their human incarnation. They will know that they came from a person and that will cause them a lot of anguish. And that anguish can be cleansing for the soul. So when we are here in a reincarnated human form we're not aware of our previous incarnations. If people come back as a fish or as a deadline they are aware of the fact that they are a human soul in an inanimate object and that's not fun. So one main purpose of reincarnation is to be able to get a second chance at life. Another purpose of reincarnation discussed in the literature is that it may help explain why righteous people may seemingly undergo unjustified suffering in their lives. I mentioned before the Sehra Abahir. It's one of the earliest published capitalistic works. It was attributed to Rabbi Nakhunya Benakana who lived around the year 100 of the Common Era and it was first published in 1174. And this book writes the following. Why is there a righteous person who has good but another righteous person has evil? The answer is because the second righteous person was wicked in a previous lifetime and is now being punished. Now when we seek to evaluate someone's life to see if they are being treated fairly by God, everybody has a sensitive meter. You know how fairly they're being treated by God. And they are sensitive to how other people are being treated. We say in Hebrew, right, it's a low fare. But at some time in life it's not fair. Gilgul reincarnation expands the context of the life being examined. Life is not just the 70 years we're here on this earth. It could be that the scene to look at is much broader. Sometimes evens out the ledger from previous lifetimes and subsequent ones. According to Nakhunya Benakana he said that Gilgul is an idea that features in the book of Eo and the book of Job. If you're familiar with this book, it's an entire book of our Bible dealing with the topic of theodicy, of explaining why righteous people suffer. And this banding Eo of the Job is an extremely righteous person and he is going through serious, serious suffering. And he can't understand it. Why am I suffering so badly? I'm a righteous person. I shouldn't be going through this. So three of his friends come to basically explain to him, look, God is just. And if you're suffering it must be for good reason, you must have done some bad sins. And he's indignant. And he says, no, I did not do anything wrong. I'm righteous, I shouldn't be suffering. What's interesting is that not only does Job himself forcibly refute these three friends of his, but towards the end of the book, God as well chastises these three friends of Job. But there's another character who enters late in the scene named Elihu. And Elihu tries to help Job contemplate why he's experiencing what he's experiencing. And neither Job nor God responds to Elihu. Meaning it seems that what Elihu was saying might have some substance to it. And Ahmadi says that in some of the words of Elihu, you see this idea of reincarnation. For example, in chapter 33, verse 25, he says that God will return, he will return to his days of youthfulness. People return to their days of youthfulness or the verse we saw before, that God will bring back his soul from the grave. And therefore, according to Ahmadi's, what Elihu was hinting at is, look, Yov, look, Job, it's true you didn't do anything wrong in this lifetime. From that perspective, your suffering is unjust. But it could be that you're suffering now to pay back things that you did wrong from a previous lifetime. So it's not as if your suffering doesn't make any sense. And it could be that this was consoling to Yov. The Chavitzchayin, I grew up on my grandmother hearing stories about the Chavitzchayin. He died in the year 1933. He was a mainstream rabbinic leader, not known as a capitalist. He wrote that a child who dies young may have been the reincarnation of a great person. And the Balchentom I mentioned before was the founder of the Hasidic movement was alleged to have the ability to identify the purpose of a person's incarnation. In a famous story, there was a couple who once asked the Balchentom for a blessing to have a child. The woman became pregnant, she had a baby, but before the baby turned two years of age, the baby died. And the couple came back to the Balchentom and they were complaining. They said, why did you bless us with a child if we were only gonna lose him shortly afterward? So the Balchentom told them the following story. He said, in your child's previous incarnation, he was a son of a powerful king. He was a very special child with unusual abilities. So his parents hired a special tutor for their child, for their son. And the tutor was a great genius, very brilliant man. He himself was almost chosen to be the bishop of the city, but he turned down that position. And he agreed to tutor the boy under one condition. The condition was that he would be allowed to have one hour a day for himself. And during that hour, he would lock himself in his room and no one was to disturb him. So he went on for years tutoring his boy until the boys from Nassiki got the better of him. And one day after the tutor sent him out to play, he hid in the closet of the tutor's room. When the tutor locked the door of his room, the boy peered out from the closet and what he saw shocked him. He saw his tutor standing by the wall, wrapped in a tallit and a fillin that was strapped in his arm into his head. And he was swaying and chanting words the boy didn't understand. The boy let out a gasp and he was discovered. He began asking this tutor numerous questions. What is he doing? What is all about? What are all these things we were doing? And he was so impressed with the answers of his tutor that he begged to be taught about Judaism and he promised to keep his tutor secret. He became an adult and converted to Judaism and became a great Torah scholar and Islamic, a righteous sage. Now the Al-Shantul told the parents that when this man died at a rightful age, he could have immediately gone through a blissful paradise. But one thing was missing from his life. He was never loved and nursed by a Jewish mother. So the Al-Shantul said therefore he returned to this childless couple and died at a young age before he could commit any sins so he could fully experience the heavenly bliss. And the Haqqas Chaim himself explained that the ways of God are altogether just. God is just the way he runs the world. And he saw this in the verse in the book of Psalm 19 verse 10 where this verse says the laws of God are true and altogether they are just. And the Haqqas Chaim told the story of that person who was very, very wealthy, but very arrogant and cruel and abusive to people of lower status. After he died, he was taken to task for never asking forgiveness from these people. And he had to go back to the world to make amends. He was told they're gonna have to go down, buddy. So he pleaded to be sent back as a corporal. I don't wanna go back as a rich man. I wanna go back as a corporal. But the heavenly court said, no, that wouldn't be much of a test for you. You're going back as a rich man. And he pleaded, please, I can't do that. Please send me back as a corporal. And God in his mercy relented and he came back to live a miserable existence as a forper, but he was able to rectify sins and purify the soul. The Haqqas Chaim said that when we look through the people that we see in our lives, you might see a forper that's living so destined to be poor, homeless, without anything to support himself. And you might wonder, why can't he make a living? Why is he so downtrodden? What did he do to deserve such an existence? We don't see the big picture. We don't understand the whole picture. The Haqqas Chaim said, that's why in the verse it says, all together when you see the big picture, God's ways are just. Now we know why this person came back as a forper. Now there's no clear reference to reincarnation in the Bible or Talmud. Our sages found numerous illusions to it. We previously saw, for example, in the Haqqandis, some of these were several verses in the book of Job pointing to the idea of reincarnation. Some see a hint in the book of 2 Samuel, verse 14 in chapter 14, which says, God favors not a soul, but he devises means so that the soul, which is banished, be not cast from him, meaning God finds a way to rectify his soul. Psalm 19, verse 8 says, Torah sashantanima, the law of God, the Torah of God is perfect. Mashi'vah's mouth that should restore the soul. So some of the Catholics say, yes, the Torah of God is perfect and has the ability to help us to reach perfection. But if we don't reach perfection, Mashi'vah's mouth that's God will return our soul for a second chance. The Zohar itself has a very curious source of the idea of reincarnation. If you want to find the egg words of the entire Zohar for a discussion on reincarnation, it appears in the part of Olmishpatin, beginning in Exodus chapter 21, that focuses on Jewish civil law, the laws of torts, monetary payments, and the Zohar takes this chapter on an allegorical symbolic level as the need for us to make payment for things that took place in previous lifelines. Another thing that's explained by the Catholics in the Bible is famous law of liberal marriage. You see that in Genesis chapter 38, Yehuda, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, so Yehuda had a son named Eric, who died childless. And his brother Onan was supposed to marry Eric's dead brother's wife, whose name was Tamar. Onan was supposed to marry Tamar, who was Eric's wife. Through what was known as liverite marriage, so that the brother's name could be carried on. And we know that Onan didn't want to do this. Now, why didn't he? It's impossible to say that he didn't want to give his brother's name to the child. Why would that be so offensive? And the truth is that in liverite marriage, he didn't have to name the child with the same name as the dead father. Now, onan suggests that this story contains a very deep, capitalistic secret. And the commentary to Onan Lee suggests that it is hinting at reincarnation and pupil. And that when it says that this baby is going to carry on the name of the father, what it really means is that when his liverite marriage and a brother marries the wife of his dead brother, the child that's born will have the soul of the dead father. And that's why Onan did not want to have children with Tamar, but he said it's not going to be my child. And why should I be raising someone else's child? So many see the whole idea of liverite marriage as based upon the idea of the pupil. Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, the great Vilna Graham, saw the entire book of Jonah in the Bible on a metaphorical level and the story about the soul of someone that has to return to this world in order to accomplish this perfection. It was a soul that did things improperly the first time around, and Jonah has to come back again to make repairs. Now, the capitalists like Deoree and others claim to know the prior incarnations of historical figures. For example, if you're familiar with Vilna in the Bible, Vilna was the non-Jewish prophet, who was hired to curse the Jewish people. So the Ares says that Vilna was a reincarnation of Levan. Levan was Jacob's father-in-law. And on the way to trying to curse the Jewish people, Vilna's donkey refused to cooperate and pushed him against the wall, squatting his leg against the wall. And the Ares says this was a reminder to him that the way to Jacob was violated. Levan said to Jacob, this mound, God, this God, this mound, will be a witness that I will not go beyond this mound with that intention, as Genesis 31-52. So because Vilna broke this oath of not going against the descendants of Jacob with that intention, we're told that he did not live a long life. According to the Talmud and Trakiks on Peter in 106b, he was 33 years old and he was killed by Pinchas. By the way, the word Gal for mound in Hebrew adds up to 33. So Vilna was 33 when he died. And it says in the book of Psalms, chapter 55 verse 24, that men of bloodshed and deceit will not live out half their days. The moral life is 70 years. He didn't reach 35, he died in 33. There are many, many other theories that the capitalists put forward about different reincarnations. So Jethro, Yisro, Moses' father-in-law is seen as the guilty will, a reincarnation of Cain. Moses is seen as the reincarnation of Abel. So those two brothers come back later on into this relationship between Jethro and his son-in-law, Moses. The 10 martyrs that we read about on Tisha Bahad and Yom Kippur, who were brutally slain by the Romans, are seen by the capitalists as reincarnations of the 10 brothers who sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt. And now they're coming back in these 10 martyrs that have to pay for what they did to Joseph. It's interesting that in the Bible, these 10 brothers would never really, there's no consequence to them. Joseph lets it slide. They say to them, well, whatever you had in mind for evil, God made sure it turned out for good. But they were really guilty of kidnapping and attempted murder. Now I want to emphasize, it's not important for us to believe in bill of wool. It's not a card to believe in Judaism. As we mentioned, it's not even in the Bible, it's unlawful. So if it rubs you the wrong way, don't feel guilty. And there were several great rabbinic authorities that didn't seem to accept the idea of reincarnation. Included was Rabbi Ságaón in the 10th century, the leader of Babylonian Jewry. Rabbi Nerojosef Albo, 14th century from Spain, wrote the famous St. Mary of Calvary, the Rajah of 13th century Spain, and Rabbi Greskis, among others, who simply did not accept either because they didn't know about these powerless teachings or they had various philosophical or psychological objections to bill of wool. For example, one objection was, an interesting one, if we believe in reincarnation, right? So if we believe in the resurrection of the dead. So if we are going through various reincarnations, which body will be resurrected at the end of days? That was an objection that was presented to the capitalists because Jews have to believe in resurrection. That's in the Bible. So there are many theories to explain this. By the way, the capitalists had answers for all the objections. One theory was that the soul will take on the body of its last incarnation. So which body will be resurrected? The last one you're in. So you should make sure the last body you're in should be with shape and look nice. A soul, or others say, that our souls will be divided into a number of bodies and they will all be resurrected. That's gonna be fun. Or, it might be the most elegant solution, a spark in soul will be combined into one resurrected fold, which sounds nice. Okay. I'm gonna conclude tonight by sharing with you the fact that this is a topic that has gained a tremendous amount of traction in the world in general. One of the first people to really do a lot of research into reincarnation was I Jewish man, I think he's Jewish, Dr. Brian Weiss, who wrote a famous book, wrote many books, but his famous book was called Many Lives, Many Masters. Now, he was not a insignificant doctor. He graduated from Yale School of Medicine and he ran a major medical center, the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. He headed this psychiatric wing of this hospital. In 1980, a 27-year-old woman who he refers to as Catherine in his book came to his office in Florida, complaining that she had life crippling phobias. She had fears of water, fears of drowning, fears of the dark, fears of choking. And because of these fears, she was literally not able to sleep at night, literally couldn't sleep. The fears were paralyzing. So he tried conventional psychotherapy for about a year and a half, nothing helped. So she finally allowed him to use hypnotherapy. During hypnotherapy these sessions, it was revealed that she had repressed childhood trauma. And normally what psychiatrists find is when you reveal repressed trauma, the phobia associated with those trauma will be resolved. But even though she was able to recover, actual things that happened to her when she was a child in this life were phobias that go away. And he was really perplexed. So during one session, Dr. Weiss induced a very deep hypnotic state and asked Catherine to go back to the very first experience poisoning her traumas. And she began to describe the great detail experiences from her life thousands of years before and how a tidal wave flooded her village in Grand Creek. Unlike at that point, didn't believe necessarily that this was true, but the following week, Catherine came back and reported that she no longer had any fear of water or drowning. And she was feeling a much easier time sleeping. And Weiss was very impressed by this. But he still didn't accept uncritically the idea that Catherine had described her previous existence. But he continued to treat Catherine by having her go back to the initial source of her trauma. And she continued to describe events in her previous lives while her symptoms continued to ease in the race after recovering their source in her previous lives. But then, a totally unexpected game changer happened. Under deep hypnosis, while describing how she died in the previous life, she told Dr. Weiss that his father and son were with her. She said, your father says you will know him because his name is Avron. His death was due to his heart and your son's heart was also a problem because it was backwarded. And Dr. Weiss was shocked by this because indeed his father and son had died earlier before Catherine became a patient of his. His father did die from heart problems. His name was Avron, which was not the name he was usually called, usually people called him by his English name, Alvin. And his son had an extremely rare condition that took place in one out of 10 million births where the veins that his father were going into the wrong side and his son died after 23 days on his plan. This finally convinced Dr. Weiss that there must have been something to Catherine's past life aggressions. She continued to have therapy with him for a few more months and was totally curable at phobias. Dr. Weiss then continued to study and research over 4,000 patients using past life regression therapy. He came to believe in reincarnation as a phenomenon based upon his significant findings and research and data. It wasn't for him a belief, it was something that he felt he had documented. And Dr. Weiss believed that the stronger evidence for reincarnation are not the stories of adults that tell about past lives during hypnotic regression, but the stories and accounts of children who recount past lives not under hypnotic regression. And children are usually not that able to fool people. They're much more innocent and naive. So the person that's studying this was Dr. Ian Stevenson. He was associated with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia and he documented over 3,000 such cases of children who described to him past lives. What Stevenson would do was he would travel all over the world, welcome to India and to countries in the Far East. He would interview children at grade length and then he would go to the places that they were describing to corroborate the details of the child's story. And he found a monotony corroboration between what the children were telling him and they had no way of knowing and the research he did in the places that they were describing. For example, in one case a young girl made 49 statements about an earlier life in a place somewhere else in India. He was able to corroborate 46 of those 49 statements, including great detail about the house where she allegedly lived in her past life and family members that he was able to identify was still alive. In another story, there was a toddler from Sri Lanka who heard his mother mention the distant town of Kataragama and he proceeded to tell her mother, she proceeded to tell her mother that she had drowned there in this city when her dumb brother pushed her into the river. She went on to mention 30 details of her previous home family and neighborhood. Professor Stevenson went to this town and found a family that perfectly fit the child's description. Their two-year-old daughter had indeed drowned in the river while playing with her mentally challenged brother. Professor Stevenson verified 27 of the 30 statements made by this young girl, Dr. Helen Bambach, sent out in this crew reincarnation and she hid the tide over a thousand subjects beginning in the late 1960s and asked very detailed and specific questions about numerous details about the time of these subjects allegedly lived, describing the clothing, the homes, utensils, what kind of money they had. And except for 11 subjects, their descriptions were totally corroborated by the history of these periods. 11 out of over a thousand were not corroborated. She became a believer in reincarnation and published the book for Life Before Life in 1978. And in conclusion, I wanted to point out that tonight happens to be Yonah's show. This is the day tomorrow we commemorate the European Holocaust of six million Jews. And one of the most fascinating fields of research that's going on today, into reincarnation, have been the accounts of numerous people, including many non-Jews, who recall having lived through the Holocaust. Youngest inversion someone actually met in Minneapolis, Minnesota many years ago, wrote a book called Beyond the Ashes, documenting numerous cases of people that had strange phobias, but were born after World War II. Some of these unexplained phobias were paralyzing the fears of anyone in tall black boots or seeing barbed wire, where nothing was able to explain these phobias, which caused these people to go into incredible, absolute terror. Many of the non-Jews interviewed by Gershwin believed that they actually died during the Holocaust. In one such story, a young man named Ryan Arthur Rishers, born in 1977 in Olan, Nebraska, to Christian parents never knew or met a Jew while he was growing up. He began having a dream that he was a religious Jew with a beard and peice, working as a scribe. He would see himself ushered into a shower room with other Jews. He knew that these were gas chambers. He couldn't understand why this was happening to him. He was a religious Jew, and he became very angry with God and cried out to God, why did you make me a Gentile? Why did you make me a Jew? Why did you make me a Gentile? He kept on having his dream over and over again in 2001, while the dream was still recurring. He met a Jewish person on an online chat room and began discussing these dreams and Judaism. Three months later, he gave up and renounced Christianity. Two years later, he began a conversion process in Chicago. In 2010, he moved to Israel and finished his conversion in 2011. Today, he lives in Calvary, El, and many Torontonians live there in northern Israel, and he's studying to be a solter of scribe. Take from this discussion of reincarnation. I just want to share two points that I have, and then I'll be happy to try and take the question. One point that I have after going through this material is that it made me much more aware of the fact that there's much more to our lives than we often think there are. There's much more going on than we tend to assume is there. Life's much bigger than the life we normally pay attention to. And secondly, reincarnation to me is a message about how much God loves us and cares for us and how much faith he puts in us, how much faith God has in us, that he keeps on giving us a chance after chance after chance to improve and to succeed. Or something I'm calling of the Linn, great Hasidic master who died in the year 1900, said that as Jews, we have to not only believe in God, we have to believe in ourselves as well. We have to believe that we have incredible spiritual potential. And in the same way that God has faith in us and God tries to give us every chance to succeed, we as well have to have faith in ourselves.