IB World Religions 1.5.3. Where Are We Going? This Life, the Messianic Age and Olam Ha-ba Notes

1.5.3. Where Are We Going? This Life, the Messianic Age and Olam Ha-Ba

Weight on this life

1. Judaism answers the second fundamental question with unusual restraint. Jews affirm a life beyond death, but the tradition spends far more effort on how a person lives now than on describing what comes later.
2. The Torah itself says almost nothing about the hereafter. Its promises and warnings are worked out in this world, in harvests, health, land and descendants.
3. The Hebrew Bible's word for the realm of the dead is Sheol, a shadowy place where the dead are gathered. It is described without detail, and no reward or punishment is mapped onto it.
4. The rabbis later developed a fuller picture, yet kept the emphasis. They taught that one hour of repentance and good deeds in this world is worth more than the whole life of the world to come.
5. This is why Jewish teaching about the future is inseparable from Jewish practice. The commandments are given to the living, and Jews hold that a person prepares for what follows by keeping them now.
6. The restraint is deliberate rather than accidental. Jews often say that the details of the world to come are God's business, and human business is the world in front of us.

The Messianic Age

1. Jews expect a transformed future in this world, not only beyond it. They call the figure associated with it the Mashiach (the Anointed One, from which the word Messiah comes), a human king descended from David.
2. The expectation is political and social as much as spiritual. The prophets describe an age when war ends, exiles return, justice is done to the poor and the knowledge of God fills the earth.
3. Isaiah supplies the images Jews reach for most often: nations beating their swords into ploughshares and refusing to learn war any more.
4. Maimonides listed the coming of the Mashiach among his thirteen principles of faith, and insisted the age would run by natural means, with the world continuing in its ordinary course under a righteous ruler.
5. Traditional prayers ask for the ingathering of the exiles, the restoration of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple. Jews pray for these three times a day in the Amidah, the standing prayer.
6. The hope is corporate rather than individual. What is expected is a repaired world for everyone, which is why Jewish teaching links the messianic future to justice done now.

Olam Ha-Ba and resurrection

1. Olam Ha-Ba means the world to come, and names the reward that awaits the righteous. Jewish sources use it both for the era after the Messiah and for the state souls enter after death, and the tradition never fully settled which.
2. Alongside it stands techiyat ha-metim, the resurrection of the dead, which Maimonides made his thirteenth principle of faith. The second blessing of the Amidah praises God as the one who revives the dead.
3. Rabbinic texts do name places. Gan Eden (the garden of Eden) stands for the reward of the righteous and Gehinnom for a period of cleansing, but they are sketched rather than mapped.
4. Gehinnom is not understood as eternal damnation. The rabbis limited it to twelve months for almost everyone, and mourners recite Kaddish for eleven months so as not to imply a parent needed the full term.
5. Reticence is built into the sources themselves. The Talmud applies to the world to come the line that no eye has seen what God has prepared, which is used to close speculation rather than to open it.

Movements on the Messiah

1. The movements agree that history is going somewhere good and divide over what to expect. The split runs between expecting a personal Messiah and expecting a messianic age.
2. Orthodox Judaism keeps the classical expectation intact: a personal Mashiach descended from David, the ingathering of the exiles, a rebuilt Temple and the resurrection of the dead.
3. Reform Judaism, from its Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, set aside the personal Messiah and bodily resurrection. It teaches instead a messianic age that human beings help bring about through justice and reform, and it speaks of the immortality of the soul.
4. Conservative Judaism keeps the traditional hope while allowing that its images are figurative, and Reconstructionist Judaism generally reads the messianic age as a goal for human effort rather than an intervention.
5. Expectation can still run high inside Orthodoxy. Some Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim have held their late Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to be the Mashiach, a claim other Orthodox authorities reject.
6. Jews across the movements share the practical conclusion. Whatever is expected, the response is the same: keep the commandments, pursue justice and leave the timing to God.

Death, mourning and hope

1. Jewish belief about the future is most visible in how Jews bury and mourn. Practice carries the doctrine where speculation is avoided.
2. Traditional practice requires burial soon after death, with the body washed in tahara and wrapped in plain shrouds. Orthodox and most Conservative authorities forbid cremation, partly because the body is held to be made in God's image and awaiting resurrection.
3. Mourners recite the Kaddish, a prayer that praises God and does not mention death at all. Its subject is the sanctification of God's name and the coming of God's kingdom.
4. Mourning is staged in time. Shiva covers the first seven days at home, shloshim the first thirty, and the yahrzeit marks each anniversary with a candle and Kaddish.
5. The community carries the mourner through it. Visitors come to the house of mourning, and a minyan of ten gathers so that Kaddish can be said aloud.
6. The customary words at a death sum up the emphasis. Jews say may their memory be a blessing, which places the hope in what a life did as much as in where its soul has gone.