Introduction to Parashat Hashavua
Yeshivat Har Etzion

Parashat Behar-Bechukotai

The Promise of an Afterlife

By Rav Michael Hattin

If you will follow My decrees and observe My commandments to fulfill them, then I will provide your rains in their season; the earth will bring forth its produce and the trees of the field will yield their fruit.  Your threshing season will last until grape harvest, and the grape harvest will continue until planting, and you shall eat your bread to satiation and shall dwell in security in your land. 

I will grant peace in the land and you shall lie down to sleep without fear, and I will rid the land of dangerous animals and the sword shall not pass through your land.  You shall pursue your enemies and they shall fall before you by the sword.  Five of you shall pursue one hundred of them, and one hundred of you shall pursue ten thousand of them, and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.  I shall turn towards you and shall make you fertile and numerous, and shall establish My covenant with you. 

You shall eat the former years’ crop for a long time until you will have to clear it out to make room for the new.  I will put My sanctuary in your midst and shall not cast you away.  I will walk in your midst and I shall be your God, and you shall be My people.   I am God your Lord who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt where you were their slaves; I broke the bars of your yoke causing you to walk upright and proud (Vayikra 26: 3-13).

So begins Parashat Bechukotai, the final section of Sefer Vayikra, with a passage unparalleled for its portrayal of the blessed state that awaits Israel should they but observe God’s statutes and serve Him with sincerity.  As His special nation, they are expected to follow the statutes of the Torah, to faithfully observe its teachings, and to fulfill its commands.  In consequence, they are to enjoy God's copious blessings – rain in its due season, bountiful harvests, peace and security, abundant health, and the experience of God's overarching closeness in their midst.  But if Israel fails to observe the Torah, then disaster will befall them, for their land will become barren and its natural vigor will be exhausted.  Warfare will overwhelm them and their enemies will cast them into exile, far from God's presence and from the tranquility that they had enjoyed.

THE UNIQUENESS OF OUR PARASHA

            While the Torah speaks of "reward and punishment" on a number of occasions, the discussion in Parashat Bechukotai is nonetheless notable.  First of all, the blessings and curses spelled out in our section are comprehensive, for they leave no aspect of human life and experience unaddressed.  Physical health and sustenance, emotional well-being and stability, spiritual satisfaction and fulfillment and every other possible blessing that inspires our earthly existence with worth and meaning, are all presented as the natural outcome of serving God in sincerity.  And sickness and poverty, anxiety and fear, alienation and depression and all of the other myriad demons that haunt humanity and crush it with their oppressiveness, are even more prominently highlighted in our Parasha as the inevitable consequences of abandoning God and abrogating His commands.

            Secondly, while the Torah more often than not speaks to the individual Jew and charges him or her with the holy burden and noble responsibility to uphold its teachings, our section speaks to the dominion, to the people of Israel and to their political state.  Parashat Bechukotai has little to say about this person or that and his or her obligations; it does not address the community of which that person is an integral part.  Instead, the soaring words of our section are about People Israel, settled in its own land and exercising the sovereignty that is the exclusive preserve of nations.

            Finally, other passages in the Torah tend to appraise the human condition in realistic terms.  Many of the Torah's commands are predicated upon a recognition of our inherent limitations and may occasionally even offer us a concession to our penchant for malevolence.  By and large, while the Torah seeks to tame our feral drives so that we might yet behold God, its narratives and laws tend to accurately portray a moral landscape in which social ills such as poverty, injustice and distrust are alive and well, and in which societies – even decent societies – must constantly struggle to eradicate evil, inequity and anguish from their midst.  The Torah describes the nature of man for what it is – inspired with a Divine potential for the good, but often consumed with the nasty self-interest that can only foster destructiveness. But our passage, in contrast, paints a picture of man and of Israel that is so overwhelmingly good that the commentaries early on proclaimed that its primary applicability must be confined to the messianic era. 

WHY NO MENTION OF AN AFTERLIFE?

            Considering our Parasha in this light raises a profound problem.  Why is it that the Torah, in its discussions of reward and punishment, invariably speaks in terms that are material and utilizes descriptions that are tangible and physical?  If life's greatest rewards await us after death, in the realm of the spirit where base corporeality holds no sway, then why doesn't the Torah ever spell out the "afterlife," the "world to come," or the "future world" in explicit terms?  If the greatest pain that the human being can experience is truly spiritual estrangement from God, then why are such descriptions so obviously absent from the "curses" of our section?  In other words, why speak of rainfall, harvest, health or peace when one ought to speak of radiance, repose, and being bound up in the bliss of God's eternity?  The question is in actuality not at all confined to our passage, for everywhere the Torah speaks in similar terms:

If you serve God your Lord then He will bless your food and your water, and I will remove sickness from your midst (Shemot 23:25).  Perform My statutes and observe and keep My laws, then you will dwell securely upon the land.  The land will give its produce, and you will eat in satiation, and you will dwell securely upon it (Vayikra 25:18-19).  It shall be that in consequence of listening to these laws, observing and keeping them, that God your Lord will fulfill the covenant and the compassion that He swore to your ancestors.  He will love you, bless you and multiply you, He will bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your earth, your grain, wine and oil, the offspring of your cattle and your sturdy sheep, upon the land that He swore to your ancestors to give to them (Devarim 7:12-13).

Now, lest there be any confusion about how our tradition views the relative value of the spiritual afterlife versus the dizzying promises of our passage concerning the physical and material pleasures of this world, the Rambam, in a well-known passage from his Laws of Teshuva (8:1-5), sets us straight:

The ultimate good reserved for the righteous is the afterlife in the future world, for it is life that includes no death whatsoever and the complete goodness that involves no bad…in the afterlife there are no physical bodies but rather the incorporeal souls of the righteous, just like the ministering angels.  Since there are no bodies, then there is neither eating nor drinking, nor any of the other needs of physical bodies in this world…

Now this goodness may seem inconsequential to you, so that you might imagine that the future reward for the mitzvot and for a man's perfection in the ways of truth ought be for him to eat and drink the best foods, have relations with the most beautiful women, don garments of fine embroidered linen while lying recumbent in ivory palaces, and to make use of vessels of silver and gold and the like.  This is in fact the opinion of those foolish and philandering Arabs (who perceive the afterlife in corporeal terms)!  But the wise ones who possess knowledge know that all such things are truly transitory vanities that have no lasting value.  We regard such things as very good in this world only because here we have bodies and corporeality, and these things are needs of the body.  The soul only desires them here because the body craves them in order to achieve its desires and to be vigorous.  But where there is no materiality, then of necessity all of these things are irrelevant!

THE FORMULATION OF THE RAMBAM

            The Rambam himself goes on to address our question, claiming that the dearth of descriptive material in the Scriptures concerning the nature of the afterlife is a conscious exclamation: to attempt to describe such ethereal things is to effectively depreciate them, for they are so utterly beyond any of the material pleasures that we are capable of experiencing while still bounded by our limiting physicality.  As for the single-minded focus of the Torah on the rewards and punishments in this world, the Rambam avers:

…this is the explanation of the matter.  God gave us the Torah, a tree of life, and whosoever fulfills all of its precepts and comprehends Him correctly and completely, merits through it the afterlife, each one in accordance with the greatness of his deeds and the breadth of his wisdom.  He promised us in the Torah that if we fulfill its teachings joyously and with goodness of spirit, occupying ourselves with its wisdom constantly, then He will in turn remove from us all of those things that prevent us from fulfilling it such as sickness, war, famine and the like.  He will grant us all of those good things that give us the ability to perform the Torah such as plenty, peace and wealth.  This is in order that we not be preoccupied with all of our bodily needs but rather we might dwell in comfort to study its wisdom and perform the commands in order to merit the afterlife…( Laws of Teshuva 9:1).

THE BLESSINGS OF THIS WORLD AS A VEHICLE

            In other words, the Rambam maintains that while the afterlife is the final goal of our endeavors and its spiritual pleasure of proximity to God's presence constitutes life's most profound reward, it is the life of this world, with all of its physical limitations, that constitutes the only vehicle through which we may secure that achievement.  The Torah addresses our lives here and now, its commands are directed to perfecting this world, and its exhortations to the people of Israel to comprehend the Creator and to understand His ways can only be realized while we are alive in our physical bodies.  That being the case, it is eminently reasonable that our task will be made much easier if we can in fact be devoted to those loftier pursuits rather than distracted by the myriad material concerns that tend to overwhelm us.  If the people of Israel must worry about the next meal, or suffer pain due to illness, or be apprehensive because of looming military threats (or all of the above!), then their ability to focus on the Torah and its wisdom is correspondingly decreased.

            For the Rambam, who views the issue through the lens of nationhood, the system is essentially a closed one: Israel does the commands, God blesses them with material plenty, so that Israel can then pursue the commands with even greater vigor.  At the end, Israel merits blessing in this world as well as the more profound and real blessing of the afterlife.  As for the "curses," they are nothing but the converse of this principle: Israel abrogates the Torah, God unleashes deficiency and want, so that Israel is then even less able to perform the precepts.  In the end, we stand in danger of surrendering not only this life's material joys, but our spiritual afterlife as well.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH

            Quite a different response to our query is offered by the Ramban (13^th century, Spain), in his celebrated remarks to the conclusion of Parashat Acharei Mot. There, the Torah mentions the consequence of karet, or spiritual excision from the people of Israel, for the one who abrogates God’s commandments by engaging in forbidden sexual relations.  The Ramban elaborates on the nature of this oft-mentioned state:

Know and understand that the kritot mentioned with respect to the soul constitute a great source of conviction concerning the continued existence of the soul after the demise of the body and concerning the granting of ultimate reward in the world of the souls.  Since the Blessed One said that "that soul shall be cut off from among its people" (Bemidbar 15:30), or "that soul shall be cut off from before Me" (Vayikra 22:3), this implies that while the soul that sins shall indeed be cut off in its iniquity, the other souls that did not transgress shall remain in existence before Him, sustained by the supernal splendor…it is the iniquity that cuts off the soul!

The reason for the matter is that the soul of man is the light of God; it was blown into our nostrils from the mouth of the Supreme and from the breath of the Almighty, as the verse states: "He blew into his nostrils the breath of life" (Bereishit 2:7).  It therefore remains in its initial state and does not die.  The soul is not composite for in composition it must break down, nor does the soul experience growth and decay like material things.  Rather, the eternity of the soul is its entirely fitting state, and it lives on forever like the "distinct intelligences" (i.e. the angels).

The Torah therefore need not state that on account of the merit for mitzva fulfillment the soul will continue to exist, but rather states that because of punishment associated with transgressions the soul becomes sullied and impure, cut off from its natural state of eternal existence.  This is why the Torah uses the language of karet, for it resembles a bough cut off from the tree and severed from the source of its sustenance…

We have already explained that the promises of the Torah concerning mitzva fulfillment as well as the punishments that relate to their abrogation are all miraculous, hidden miracles concerning which the Torah promises and warns all of the time.  Therefore the text here speaks of karet because it is supernatural, while neglecting to mention continued existence, for this is in actuality the natural state… (commentary to 18:29).

THE MATTER OF KARET

            The Ramban begins his discussion by taking note of the unusual penalty known as karet, a word whose grammatical root signifies "cutting off."  The Torah reserves the penalty of karet for unusually noxious infractions, often ones that relate to sexual immorality.  But the very fact that the Torah threatens this consequence for the perpetrator, and more specifically for his "soul," implies that one who is not so sentenced will not experience the state of being "cut off."  In other words, the very possibility of karet introduces the notion of an existence that is not bodily, a default state reserved for all but the one whose soul is cut off from it.

            The Ramban now attempts to explain this reality by reminding us that the soul of the human being, "breathed into his nostrils" by God Himself, is a non-physical entity that is clearly distinct from the body.  Nachmanides reminds us of the creation account preserved in Breisheet Chapters 1 and 2, in which God fashioned all terrestrial creatures with material bodies, but reserved the "breath of life" for man alone.  This special dimension of existence constitutes our uniqueness as human beings, created in the Divine image, and allows us to exercise our most precious rights – making the moral choice while committing ourselves to live our lives in the presence of God.  Because our souls have their origins in the Divine, they are non-corporeal and ethereal, eternal and utterly indivisible, just like God Himself.  The vagaries that visit material things and by extension all living creatures – growth and inevitable decay, birth, aging and ineluctable mortality – are meaningless in the realm of the spirit, for the soul naturally transcends the callous limits of materiality.

REVERSING THE CONUNDRUM

            Finally, the Ramban indicates – in a brilliant reversal of the conundrum – that precisely because the soul tends towards eternity naturally, there is no need for the Torah to confirm the existence of an afterlife.  Why should we think otherwise?  Is it not obvious that this small spark of transcendent God invested in man should continue to exist forever, even after the demise of the physical body that constitutes its temporary abode?  If there is anything unusual at all about the afterlife that needs to be spelled out by the Torah it is the possibility that a soul may forfeit its eternal patrimony, by engaging in activities that divest it of its Godliness.  In other words, the consequence of karet points directly to the notion of an existence that is non-corporeal and hence unfettered by the chains of materiality.

            The Torah tends to focus on physical rewards – rain and plenty, health and peace, riches and pleasure – because these are not at all the self-understood consequences of living a Godly life in this capricious world.  Should we assume that keeping the Shabbat ought to translate into physical longevity when there is no rational connection between the two?  Does the observance of the laws of Kashrut logically imply plentiful rainfall, or is the latter instead the product of winds, water vapor and the ocean currents that spawn the fructifying clouds?  If there is any connection at all between the performance of the mitzvot and physical success in this world, then it is the product of Divine intervention, a miracle, if you will, of natural proportions.  And therefore the Torah must emphasize it at every possible opportunity: "It shall be that in consequence of listening to these laws, observing and keeping them, that God your Lord will fulfill the covenant and the compassion that He swore to your ancestors.  He will love you, bless you and multiply you, He will bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your earth, your grain, wine and oil, the offspring of your cattle and your sturdy sheep, upon the land that He swore to your ancestors to give to them" (Devarim 7:12-13).  But the notion of an afterlife is so patently OBVIOUS, the straightforward and unremarkable outcome of possessing a soul, that the Torah need not even mention it all!

TWO DIFFERENT ANSWERS

            We therefore have two distinct answers to our question.  The Rambam, always the rationalist, provides us with a rational answer.  In reality, the comforts of this world are empty vanities but they do nonetheless (if we make correct use of them) afford us the opportunity of concentrating upon what is really of significance: the nurturing of our souls through the study of the Torah and the performance of the mitzvot.  And though the Torah might want to offer us a glimpse of the afterlife, that state of perfect spiritual repose is so far removed from our limiting physical reality that we could not even begin to comprehend it, as long as we are bound to the terrestrial plane by the crushing weight of our material bodies.  For the Rambam, then, the omission of an afterlife from the Torah’s lists of rewards is a logical necessity.

            For the Ramban, on the other hand, the matter is (not surprisingly) more mystical.  His focus is not so much upon the parameters of the physical life but rather upon the nature of the soul.  And it is through that profound understanding of the nature of the soul that the Ramban comes to his startling conclusion: an afterlife is so clearly dictated by the soul’s fundamental spiritual makeup that its existence is a given.  The afterlife must follow this earthly existence seamlessly, and there is no need for the Torah to elaborate at all upon its inevitability.

            Perhaps we ought to conclude that both views are correct, for each one of them contributes something different and significant to the discussion.  Few things are as perplexing as the notion of an afterlife and few problems are as vexing for a loyal student of the text of the Torah as this glaring omission.  Fortified by the explanations of both of these towering figures we may confidently keep the skeptic at bay while continuing to trust in God’s goodness.

Shabbat Shalom