judaism

In Does The Soul Survive?: A Jewish Journey To Belief In Afterlife, Past Lives & Living With Purpose, Rabbi Elie Spitz writes with complete candor and impressive scholarship about his belief in telepathy, near-death experiences, communications with those who have died, past life regression, and reincarnation as being within the scope and compass of Jewish tradition and teaching regarding the continuance of the soul beyond a physical death. Rabbie Spitz examines all the arguments, pro and con, regarding these issues from a thoroughly Judaic perspective. Enhanced for the reader with an appendix presenting a comprehensive view of what Torah and Jewish scholars throughout the ages have had to say regarding the immortality of the soul, Does The Soul Survive? is informative, challenging, at times controversial, but thought provoking and firmly grounded in Jewish scholarship.

Rabbi Spitz has given us a sincere, openminded account of his exploration into the immortality of the soul. It brings together the Jewish point of view on soul experiences in a very personal, thoughtful way. I hope that it introduces Jewish people to the subjects of reincarnation and the afterlife in a rational and convincing manner. However, it fails to explore the experiences and the findings of the Jewish-Christians of the beginnings of Common Era (A.D.) and thereafter. There are many books written that introduce Christians to the concepts of reincarnation that would have been helpful to Spitz's study. For any who would read further in the exploration of these matters, the most profound study of reincarnation is the Karmic Relations lectures of Rudolf Steiner, available through the Anthroposohic Press. Steiner is compatible with Kabbalahistic practioners. Among the most prominent followers of Steiner were Orthodox Jews.

It was early on a Sunday morning. My father was in Seattle, lying in a hospital bed, recovering from open-heart surgery. I was in Southern California, at the synagogue where I work, opening up the building for religious school. The sanctuary at our synagogue, when it is not being used for worship services, becomes a multipurpose room. A special family learning experience was scheduled to take place in it that morning for students and their parents.

As I opened the sanctuary doors, anger flowed through my veins when I saw that the room was not set up the way it needed to be. Did I forget to give the custodian directions on how the room needed to be set up? Or, did the custodian just mess up? I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, and began moving chairs and tables.

Sweat started dripping on my forehead. In the corner of the room, I saw my father sitting in a chair dressed in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. I immediately walked over to him and engaged him in a conversation, which was really an argument. For some unknown reason, I did not inquire about his health but felt the need to talk with him at that particular moment about a painful childhood memory, a memory that I was surprised to remember.

A few hours later that same morning, as I walked into my office, the phone rang. It was the baby sitter who was with our children. She said she had an emergency message, that I needed to call my brother immediately. My brother was not home. His wife answered the phone. She gave me the message. My father died that morning.

When I tell people about the conversation I had with my father that morning, they respond in one of two ways. They think I was either hallucinating or that I actually encountered my father's soul. That week, my thoughts centered on my father's condition. The combination of mental exhaustion (from worrying about him,) physical tiredness (from being up early in the morning,) and anger (at the room not being set up correctly,) led my mind to imagine a mystical encounter.

On the other hand, there is an idea of Gehenna (Hebrew for "hell") in Jewish tradition. Unlike the Christian notion of eternal damnation, Gehenna is only a temporary state. At death, the soul departs from the body and goes to Gehenna, a process of purification where the individual confronts his or her sins and atones for them. After this real Yom Kippur, the soul then either returns from Gehenna to the world in another life (reincarnation) or goes to heaven to be with the Divine. Perhaps our encounter that morning had something to do with this mystery.

Since this experience, I have engaged in many conversations about the afterlife. I have become open, in these discussions, to the possible belief that our souls are eternal, that our souls existed in a previous life, and that our souls will be transferred into another life after we die.

Elie Spitz, the spiritual leader at Congregation B'nai Israel in Tustin, California in his new book Does the Soul Survivie? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives, and Living with Purpose agrees with this possibility. He recognizes, as a practicing pulpit rabbi, the potential comfort that belief in the afterlife and past lives can provide. He feels, in his heart and mind, that this belief is true.

Throughout the book, Spits searches Jewish tradition for evidence about the eternity of the soul. He interprets the possible existence of the soul's eternity in various Biblical texts and analyzes the type of afterlife and previous life existence of the soul that is presented in various rabbinic and other post-biblical literary sources. He also shares personal experiences that validate to him this existence.

To find evidence that a soul could have a previous life, Spitz meets with Dr. Brian Weiss, a Columbia University and Yale Medical School graduate who is chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami and author of the book, Many Lives, Many Masters. Weiss has become famous using therapeutic techniques of hypnosis to get individuals to speak foreign languages that they have never learned, to describe areas of the world that they have never visited, and to share personal accounts of previous time periods that historians later believe are authentic.

Weiss's evidence is not only documented in his research, but observed and experienced first hand by Spitz. Spitz, in recollecting about various life experiences and through hypnosis conducted on himself, comes to the belief that his own soul occupied a previous life. The detail in which he can describe that previous life, and how that previous life influences his existence today, is persuasive.

The evidence that Spitz shares about the afterlife is equally persuasive. In gathering this evidence, the author and his wife encounter James Van Praagh, a psychic and best selling author who's works as a medium communicating with the souls of the departed goes well beyond the realm of mere coincidence.

In the ending of the book, Spitz shares how his belief in the afterlife has benefited him as a pulpit rabbi. He shares a first hand account of how he was able to comfort, in a hospice situation, both a congregational member before she breathed her last breath and her loved ones who observed that last breath. Without a belief in life beyond this world, he would never have possessed the resources at that moment to console.

"Faith," Spitz writes, "in the survival of the soul might lead to magical thinking, the belief in an ability to defy reality and an unrealistic holding on to departed loved ones. But when responsibly approached, faith in the survival of the soul can also be an important source of affirmation and comfort. Like love, such faith is dangerous but no less real."

In Does the Soul Survive, Spitz does a masterful job demonstrating how this subject can be approached in a responsible manner and how affirmation and comfort can be extracted from that approach.

Elliot Fein teaches Jewish Religious Studies at the Tarbut V'Torah School in Irvine, California.