Life and Death

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LIFE AND DEATH

In Jewish thought both life and death are part of the divine plan for the world.

Life

The opening chapter of Genesis states that all things are created by God. They are, therefore, all purposeful. They all have some value, as is clearly implicit in God's judgment on the created order: "God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). But it is man who is at the apex of creation and the highest level in the order of value. All other things were created for his sake and constitute the theater of his operation and creative ingenuity.

Since life is the highest good, man is obliged to cherish it and preserve it. Every person is under mandate to marry and procreate in order to share in perpetuating the human species (Yev. 63b). He must preserve himself in a state of health. The Talmud includes many rules of hygiene and cautions against making one's home in a community where there is no competent physician (Sanh. 17b). Maimonides included a chapter on rules of health in his code Mishneh Torah, since "the preservation of the health of the body is one of the godly ways" (Yad 4). The rabbis ruled that the preservation of life supersedes the fulfillment of all commandments, except the prohibitions against murder, unchastity, and idolatry (Yoma 82a). One should be concerned as much with the preservation of others' lives as with one's own life. Rabbi Akiva regarded the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself the most fundamental precept of the Torah (Sifra 19:18). Whoever sustains a single person, taught the rabbis, is as one who sustains the whole world, and whoever destroys a single person is as one who destroys the whole world; for every person bears the divine image, and every person was created unique and irreplaceable. Each one, therefore, has a right to say: "For my sake was the world created" (Sanh. 4:5). Indeed, man's obligations are not limited to his fellowmen. They extend to all existence. He must not wantonly and unnecessarily destroy any object in the world nor inflict pain on any living creature. In this spirit the 18^th-century rabbi Ezekiel Judah *Landau forbade hunting (S. Wind, Rav Yeḥezekel Landau (1961), 54).

In stressing the sanctity of human life, the rabbis often went beyond biblical precedent. For example, the Bible calls for capital *punishment for a wide variety of crimes, but the rabbis limited such punishment to conditions which in effect made the law inoperative. The Mishnah brands a court that imposes a sentence of capital punishment once in seven years, or according to another tradition, once in 70 years, a murderous court (Mak. 1:10).

Death

In view of the high value attached to man, death, which puts an end to man and his achievements, is the most baffling phenomenon. The account of Adam's sin (Gen. 2) is the biblical attempt to deal with the problem. Rabbinic literature contains a variety of views on the subject. Some rabbis regarded death as a punishment meted out to Adam and his descendants because of his sin in the Garden of Eden (Gen. R. 16:6), but others held that death was an appropriate termination for a finite creature and that it had been preordained at the time of creation (Gen. R. 30:8; Ex. R. 2:4). Death is the price paid for new birth, for the continued emergence of a new generation. Death must be deemed a good, noted Maimonides, since it is the means of "perpetuating existence and the continuity of individual beings through the emergence of one after the withdrawal of the other" (Guide 3:10).

Death was also robbed of its terror by the belief that after death individuals survive as incorporeal spirits (Ket. 103a; Ber. 18b). Related to this was the belief in retributive judgment. The righteous would be rewarded with eternal bliss in paradise and the wicked, punished in hell (see *Garden of Eden, *Gehinnom, and *Beatitude).

The final mitigation of the terror of death in rabbinic literature was the belief in the *resurrection of the dead and the world to come. At the end of the historical process God will create the dead anew reuniting body and soul, and then the resurrected dead will enjoy the bliss of the "world to come." The literalness of the belief in the resurrection appears to have been questioned by some rabbis. Thus, one view expressed in the Talmud states that in the world to come "there is no eating or drinking, no begetting children, no commerce, envy, hatred, or competition, but only this: that the righteous sit with crowns on their heads and delight in the splendor of God's presence" (Ber. 17a). The technical term for resurrection is teḤiyyat ha-metim, literally, "the revival of the dead." But there were Jewish philosophers, beginning with Philo, who interpreted this figuratively as referring to the immortality of the soul. Maimonides, especially, inveighed against the notion of a physical restoration as man's final state, and insisted that ultimate happiness consists of the incorporeal existence of men's intellect, attained by pursuing a life of virtue and wisdom.

To accentuate the rejection of a belief in physical resurrection, the Reform liturgy drops the praise of God as the meḥayyeh ha-metim ("He who revives the dead") from the Amidah and substitutes note'a be-tokhenu hayyei olam ("… who has implanted within us eternal life"). The Reconstructionist prayer book substitutes for mehayyeh ha-metim, zokher yeẓirav le-ḥayyim be-raḥamim ("…who in love rememberest Thy creatures to life"). But many Jewish modernists use the traditional text, interpreting it, no doubt, as an allusion to the soul's *immortality.