The Soul, Life After Death and the Purpose of Life

Overview

Recall questions on nefesh, ruach and neshamah, Kaplan-Spitz and Weiss on the soul and survival, She'ol and Gehenna, resurrection of the dead, Reform teaching on the afterlife, and Buxbaum on the purpose of life.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does Jewish tradition mean by the soul?

   Model answer

   The soul is the God-given life and self of a person, breathed in at creation and returned to God at death. Jewish sources describe it as pure in origin, which is why the traditional morning prayer thanks God for restoring a soul that is still clean, and it is generally treated as the seat of moral responsibility.

2. 2

   What do the terms nefesh, ruach and neshamah pick out?

   Model answer

   They are the main biblical and rabbinic words for the soul, and later thinkers, especially in Kabbalah, treated them as layers rather than synonyms: nefesh as the animating life shared with all living creatures, ruach as spirit or moral character, and neshamah as the highest part, closest to God.

3. 3

   Does Judaism treat a person as a soul trapped in a body?

   Model answer

   Generally not. Jewish thought tends towards seeing the person as a unity of body and soul, both God-given and both good, rather than a spirit imprisoned in matter. That is why the body is treated with great respect after death, washed and buried promptly, and why traditional Judaism has resisted cremation.

4. 4

   What does E Kaplan-Spitz argue about the soul?

   Model answer

   Writing as a Conservative rabbi, Kaplan-Spitz argues that Judaism does have a serious doctrine of the surviving soul which modern Jews have largely forgotten. He draws on Jewish mystical sources, including the idea of the soul returning in another life, together with reported near-death experiences, to argue that consciousness is not simply produced by the brain.

5. 5

   What line of argument does B L Weiss bring to the question of survival?

   Model answer

   Weiss argues from patients' apparent recollections of earlier lives, recovered under hypnosis in a therapeutic setting, that the self continues beyond one lifetime. Critics reply that hypnosis is notoriously suggestible and that such reports are far better explained as reconstruction than as memory, so the material is contested rather than settled evidence.

6. 6

   How does the Tenakh picture She'ol?

   Model answer

   She'ol is the shadowy place below where the dead go, a realm of silence and dimness rather than a scene of reward or torment. Its inhabitants are pictured as weak and cut off from the praise of God, and the emphasis in the Hebrew Bible falls overwhelmingly on life before death rather than after it.

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