The Beauty of ‘Life After Death’

For many of the faithful, as deep as our religious beliefs may be, articulating the concept of God is challenging. Words alone are flimsy tools to capture that which transcends human conception by its very nature.

So how can we even hope to converse about the concept of an afterlife, which itself derives from the transcendent?

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The default version is that which has populated our culture for a long time — the deceased magically grows a pair of wings, a harp appears in his hand, he is suddenly clothed in high-end silk white robes, and he ascends into a cloud-filled wonderland.

Considering that we’ve all traveled at 30,000 feet in airplanes and much of the world has been mapped, it’s safe to say this image remains just that — a fanciful depiction of something far more difficult to comprehend.

People of faith often choose indirect methods when endeavoring to discourse about God. We talk of evidence of God’s existence through acts of godliness, or even by symbols and metaphors, as we often see in the holy texts. So, too, can we interpret the meaning of the word “afterlife.”

As Rabbi Arnie Rachlis of University Synagogue in Irvine, California, said, “In the last two centuries or so, as a result of the Enlightenment, studies in comparative religion, the widespread acceptance of science, philosophy and psychology and confronting the profound evil of the Holocaust, fewer Jews literally believe in an afterlife of reward and punishment.”

Judaism removes the discussion of an afterlife as being “some place up there that we can’t see,” and places the discussion in the present, in the living world. Live a life of good deeds, teaching the wisdom and values of Torah to build communities based on its ethical insights for all the generations to come. In doing so, those who die leave behind that extraordinary legacy.

“For most Jews, our ultimate concern rests on the legacy we leave behind — the people whose lives we touched and, hopefully, changed for the better — and not our possible enjoyment of heavenly bliss,” said Rabbi Lewis Eron, of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyandote, Pennsylvania.

“Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world, which He has created according to His will.”

“As the people of God, our task is to enhance God’s sacred presence by working for the material and spiritual betterment of our world which, according to the Kaddish prayer, was fashioned according to God’s will,” Eron continued.

The afterlife, then, exists not in some undefined physical or spiritual location for the deceased — but in the living testament of all those he has touched.

It is how the words, the works, the love, the kindness, the compassion, the children, the thoughts, the charity, and all the other elements of godliness that the deceased actively engaged in that becomes his afterlife.

As Rabbi Eron said, “For most Reconstructionists, ‘immortality’ is gained through the caring deeds and love that we have given in this world, through naming after the deceased, through genetics and through others internalizing and living up to our ideals.

Indeed, at a Jewish funeral, a specific prayer is always recited. The Mourner’s Kaddish does not speak at all of death. In fact, it extols praise on God. In part: “Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.”

We are asking God, and by reflection God is asking us, to create “His Kingdom” — to heal the world, to make it whole again — in your lifetime and during your days. To embrace all the gifts and wisdom of the deceased, and marry it with all our knowledge, and do the best deeds we can.

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That’s the afterlife. That’s heaven. It takes the pain and sorrow of what was lost, and what we grieve over, and translates it to the present tense of action.

Live now. By remembering the life of our departed, and using that life as inspiration, we not only create a better life here on Earth, but lift and honor and perpetuate and celebrate the person who has gone.