Woody Allen and Life After Death

A few nights ago, we went to see Woody Allen’s new film Café Society. Set in the 1930s, the main character is a young Jewish man named Bobby Dorfman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) who leaves New York to seek his fortune in Hollywood.

 

From a Jewish perspective, the more interesting character is Bobby’s brother Ben, who leads a life of mobster-type crime. Caught and convicted, Ben converts to Catholicism in prison because he wants access to the afterlife. As evidenced by the film’s dialogue, neither Ben nor his Jewish mother Rose, have any clue that Judaism has a rich tradition of teachings about life after death.

 

I’m reminded of my own thoughts when I was just beginning to explore Judaism. There was a 4-week adult education course being offered in a local synagogue called “The Jewish View of Life after Death.” At the time, I was binge reading Shirley MacLaine books and studying past life regression. As I signed up for the course, I remember thinking, “I didn’t even know Judaism had a view of life after death.”

 

In many ways, those four Tuesday evenings in October so many years ago ignited my intellectual journey back to the faith of my ancestors.

 

A verse in Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) states, “And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to G‑d, who gave it.” There is a fundamental Jewish belief that the soul existed before it was united with the body in which it currently resides and will continue to exist long after the body has deteriorated into dust.

 

The body has many limitations, not so the soul that animates it. Rather, when it is united with a body, the soul exists on a physical plane. However, the soul is also capable of existing in a more elevated, spiritual level. In traditional Judaism, there is both punishment and reward after death for what the soul did during the time it was in a physical body.

 

The Rambam, also known as Maimonides, a 12^th century sage of the highest order, boiled the most important Jewish belief down to the Thirteen Principles of Faith. Of these, two specifically refer to the idea that there is so much more to life than, “You're born, you live, you die and that's it.”

 

The Rambam’s 11^th Principle of Faith calls for the belief in divine reward and retribution. In other words, God rewards those who live according to His laws, as expressed in the Torah, and punishes those who do not. These rewards and punishments come to the soul after the death of the physical body. The greatest way that God can reward the faithful is with the experience of the purely spiritual World to Come (called Olam HaBa).

 

As an aside, the Rambam taught that a Jew who was never taught the Torah is not punished as harshly as one who knew about God’s laws but refused to live by them.

 

The Rambam’s 13^th Principle of Faith calls for a belief in the resurrection of the dead (techiyat hameitim). This is expected to occur after the arrival of Moshiach, the Jewish redeemer. According to this principle, every Jewish soul who ever lived in a body will be reunited with a body and will live again in the Messianic Age.

 

These thoughts are merely an appetizer. The entire body of Jewish teachings about life after death is much too lengthy, and often esoteric, for a single blog post. I recommend Afterlife: The Jewish View by Jonathan Morgenstern and Rabbi Sholom Kamenetsky as an excellent antidote to Woody Allen’s ignorance about this fascinating topic. Another accessible introduction is Back to the Afterlife: Uncovering the Mysteries of What Happens to Us by Bernie Kastner.