Reincarnation
and the RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD
Abstract: Do not believe those who try to convince you that after death it will not be nothing left of you! Do not resign yourself to the eternal nothing, do not believe it, it is a lie! If your soul has the aspiration to live for ever, consider it as the most eloquent proof of your immortality!
Even if death is a natural law, man's task is to understand the intrinsic mechanisms to the laws of nature and to dominate them.
The Torah tells you that our G-d is a G-d of the living, and as a living being, you have the right to fight against the death of your loved ones and you have to work together with the humanity to defeat it!
To eternalize our myths, our divinities and our idols is one way to exorcise our worrying fear of death.
The human dynamic is so widespread that occurs periodically throughout history, taking in turn various shades related to the cultural context which produced them. Whether it is Jesus rose from the dead, the never dead Rebbe Lubavich to whom everyone can still communicate, to Elvis Presley who lives hidden or Michael Jackson that many fans tells to see, we face the same problem: you can not accept the death of a god, and if death has annihilated an immortal, the idol is still a mere mortal like us all ... and that means seeing the collapse in an instant across the immense edifice of hope placed in him, and left without answers to questions that we thought we had finally resolved.
This is so true that Paul of Tarsus came to define that the faith in Jesus would be vain if he had not really risen. We must also remember that early Christians were convinced that they would have not died, and when they began to see that people still died even after the "resurrection" of their teacher, had to find a new explanation to the fact that the Jewish hope of the resurrection of the dead did not coincide with the coming of the alleged Messiah, haven’t Jesus promised his disciples that whoever would believe in Him shall not would die as the fathers in the desert? If he was the Messiah why did people continue to die?
The resurrection of the dead is in fact a belief deeply rooted in the Jewish people and is still seen as the most important event related to the coming of the Messiah.
In the world of idols of the showbiz, in which to invent a new mystical interpretation of events becomes more difficult for many fans, to commit suicide becomes the only acceptable alternative.
The hope of life after death is as old as mankind: always, in every civilization and culture, man has tried to give an explanation of death, relegating the continuity of life beyond the realm of time and real space.
Judaism has developed a rather less spiritualistic conception, which provides a physical resurrection of the dead.
Although Judaism has developed an esoteric current in the closed circles of the kabballists who sees the world like an immense chain of lives that come back again and again as a reciclying of cyclical reincarnations of the souls. What most characterizes the thinking in the field of Jewish life and death is the belief in the resurrection of the dead.
The resurrection of the dead is one of the 13 principles of Jewish faith, drawn from Rambam, that every jew is obliged to adhere with absolute certainty and conviction.
Reincarnation is GHILGUL
Science has not yet found the solution to the disease, suffering, death ...
Religions have offered otherwordly and metaphysical explanations that have been defined as "opium of the people" as they tried to quell the burning questions about life and death. In the worst case, religions, in their most fundamentalist expressions, require life in the name of a higher ideal.
The existence of evil is the necessary condition to the exercise of free will: if only there were good there would be selection of an option, and if there is no choice there is no freedom and without freedom we are all as robots. The choice makes us grow and evolve, humanity is not static, it continues to grow and develop towards a perpetual overcoming.
Anyway we are all spectators of the intolerable injustice of this world, the wicked ones proliferate and the righteous ones suffer ... the Torah teaches us that, despite appearances, there is an intrinsic and incomprehensible logic in the diversity of roles and destinies.
The Kabbalah explains the presence of evil as a consequence of our bad actions that we have in some way to repair in order to restore the unitary cosmic harmony. This repair is done through the cycles of rebirths.
Reincarnation is the English word which translates the Hebrew word "ghilgul" which literally means "wheel cycle."
A colossal work was written by Haim Vital, a disciple Hakadosh Air, based on teaching of the Master on the cycles of reincarnation of souls.
The Zohar interprets various verses of the Torah in the light of reincarnation; they include a couple for example:
"Generations come and generations go,
the earth remains forever." (Ecclesiastes 1, 4)
The Zohar says that the Torah is always talking about the same generation of souls that cyclically return to new bodies.
"'G-d' visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation "
Exodus 20.5
The Zohar considers this verse as one of the many biblical evidences of reincarnation: a soul comes back into its own descendants to repair the sins of their ancestors, that is committed by him during his many transmigration.
The purpose of this return is the redress of imbalances and imbalances that have resulted in the world with our bad choices and actions, but also contribute to the restoration of the whole world.
DNA studies have forced us to take note of heredity, of the long chain of lives and stories of which we passively receive physical, psychological, spiritual connotations. Here lies the cause of diseases not only biological, but also mental and parapsychological.
RAV Berg says: "When Einstein developed his theory of relativity, has destroyed many of the fundamentals of physics by announcing that the time was not invariable. In saying this, he opened the door to the possibility of reincarnation."
The death of the body, the soul is eternal and immortal.
Death is dissolution of the chemical elements, death is de-composition, ie organic breakdown ... Science shows us that the chemical elements that make up matter, including our body, are eternal.
The cycles of nature are a perennial composition, decomposition and recomposition of the same basic elements.
The souls return to repair something, a Tikkun, which is not simply expiations of the sins committed during a life gone, but a further stage of progress in the construction of the world.
This restoration of the world is often done in couple: twin souls are two halves of a single soul who tend to look for each other in the reincarnations and rejoin. This explains why the love between a man and a woman is the universal subject and more time-sung by all generations, a source of inspiration of the greatest literary and artistic works of all time. A soul is not complete until it meets its own half, but it is not to all to find it in just one life.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD
The idea of life eternal and immortal is one of the oldest concepts of Judaism. But this is not just a hope that it will be rewarded and filled in once crossed this world of ours. It is wait for an event that will take place physically in this physical universe.
But if we die and everything we have done will be lost, so why do we should sweat so much? Just to let some weak track in this world, hoping to continue to live in the memory of someone? And when that someone who keeps us as a fragment of his memory will die, in turn, what will remain of us and what we were?
The man wants to live, and this shows that he was made to live eternally. And if it is true that there are people who decide to kill themselves is because they simply have not found the answers to the questions just raised.
In our culture we no longer speak of death, or rather we talk about it just trying to exorcise it... we try to plan out his disturbing reality or ignoring or trying to make it desirable.
For Judaism, death is a temporary barrier, to be finally demolished. Death is a non-truth, a lie against which man has a duty to fight. We have a duty to dominate and subjugate all the hostile forces that are opposed to the full realization of the divine plan that we bring to us, including death.
And this is not abstract philosophy: Israel is the people who made more than once the concrete experience of the resurrection from the dead, during his long and difficult history disseminated by continuous persecution and attempts to exterminate the people of Israel has demonstrated a strong regeneration that is unparalleled in the history of mankind! The latest evidence is the rebirth of this people in the land of his fathers from the ashes of the Holocaust.
The people of Israel continues to innovate with creativity to be a living witness that death is an obstacle that humanity will learn to overcome.
In Judaism the immortality is not only a religious belief, but our future land. It is not utopia, but the patient awaiting our fate.
According to the thought of Rav Kook, which is rooted in tradition kabballistic and Hassidic and in the writings of the great teachers of Judaism that preceded him,
man aspires essencially to be good, its soul is drawn from infinity and intuits the unfathomable extensions of eternity. His search for the good is only possible when it has reached the hightes freedom, free from the obsessive weight of suffering and death.
The aspiration to good is not just a human characteristic, but it is a cosmic longing that involves all forms of animate and inanimate life: all that exists in this universe is animated by a constant need to overcome and tension towards the full development, a process of perpetual becoming in elevation ...
Fear of death is at the root of all our existential anxiety, is the quiet constant presence that we are trying to annihilate putting us into a life of noise strong enough to silence it.
According to Rav Kook, as negation and annihilation of the end, death is absurd anti-divine, which must be overcome, not the afterlife but in our world. It is inability to accept the infinite that makes us mortals. Life is a struggle against death and the man born to life is called to this in a concrete way. Death is a temporary defect in the establishment to which the man sooner or later find a remedy through the knowledge of esoteric Jewish mysticism and scientific research that is now becoming increasingly pure metaphysics ...
It is true that science is still far from giving the mathematical formula of eternity and that we might not be here to enjoy it, but we know that we too can contribute to this process of universal immortality, learning to defeat in outselves and in other causes of death both physical and spiritual: how to fight the diseases with natural therapies and medicines, so we have to fight the diseases of the appropriate care and medication that Kabbalah gives us.
(This argument is developed within the text "Liberation from Egypt Interior, the right to be themselves" to be published.
Those who wish to order it may make a request via email to our address: kabballart@gmail.com)