After One-Hundred-and-Twenty

Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition

Hillel Halkin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400880461
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

A deeply personal look at death, mourning, and the afterlife in Jewish tradition After One-Hundred-and-Twenty provides a richly nuanced and deeply personal look at Jewish attitudes and practices regarding death, mourning, and the afterlife as they have existed and evolved from biblical times to today. Taking its title from the Hebrew and Yiddish blessing to live to a ripe old age—Moses is said to have been 120 years old when he died—the book explores how the Bible's original reticence about an afterlife gave way to views about personal judgment and reward after death, the resurrection of the body, and even reincarnation. It examines Talmudic perspectives on grief, burial, and the afterlife, shows how Jewish approaches to death changed in the Middle Ages with thinkers like Maimonides and in the mystical writings of the Zohar, and delves into such things as the origins of the custom of reciting Kaddish for the deceased and beliefs about encountering the dead in visions and dreams. After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is also Hillel Halkin's eloquent and disarmingly candid reflection on his own mortality, the deaths of those he has known and loved, and the comfort he has and has not derived from Jewish tradition.

CHAPTER ONE

HAD I BEEN AN ANCIENT GREEK, EGYPTIAN, OR BABYLONIAN living about 1000 BCE, which would have placed me at the start of the Iron Age, the country of death would have been a real place. I would have known how to get there and what to expect on arrival, and the success of my journey would have depended on following the instructions given me.

The map, to be sure, was a crude one. “When in your ship you have crossed the stream of Oceanus, where there is a level shore and the groves of Persephone—tall poplars and willows that shed their fruit—there beach your ship by the deep eddying Oceanus,” Circe tells Odysseus in The Odyssey, bidding him to visit the dead and consult the shade of the seer Tiresias. “Go yourself to the dark house of Hades; there into Acheron flow Puriphlegethon and Cocytus, which is a branch of the water of the Styx; and there is a rock and the meeting place of the two roaring rivers.”

These are rather imprecise directions. Often identified with the Atlantic, which their mariners did not venture out on, the “deep eddying Oceanus” was thought by the Greeks to be a body of water encircling the inhabited earth. Possibly, Odysseus was tasked by Circe with reaching the Rock of Gibraltar at the western end of the Mediterranean and crossing its straits to their Atlantic side.

Hades, or Erebus, was the Greeks’ name for the dead’s abode and was alternately situated by them at the ends of the earth, beneath its surface, or both. The Babylonians called this realm Arallu or Ursetu Lo Tari, “the land of no return,” and pictured it as a netherworld traveled to along the rivers of the upper earth and through the abzu, the primeval depths. For the Egyptians, it was Sekhet-Hetepet, “the fields of peace.” Sometimes placed underground by them, too, or by a “lake of flowers” beyond the Nile, it was most commonly located in the heavens. The dead reached it in the boat of the sun god Ra, navigating past Apep, the great dragon of the sky, and the sun’s bright circle of flame.

Despite the country of death’s different locations, there was agreement that the spirit or soul animating the human body had to have somewhere to go when the body died and did not simply dissolve into nothing. Until challenged by a few of the early Greek philosophers halfway through the first millennium BCE, this belief appears to have been universal; no ancient culture known to us, and no “primitive tribe” studied by anthropologists in our own times, has failed to evidence some form of it. Perhaps human beings were first convinced of the incorporeal existence of a soul by their dream lives at night. In dreams, we go places, see things, and have strange experiences while physically remaining where we are; to the mind of prescientific man, only a part of ourselves that was free to leave our sleeping bodies and return to them could account for this. Death differed from sleep in there no longer being a body to return to. The soul or spirit had to find another home.

Greeks, Babylonians, and Egyptians shared the belief that this new home was reached by boat and guarded by supernatural forces, figures, and monsters, such as the Greek ferryman Charon and his three-headed dog Cerberus; the Babylonian “waters of death” with their fearsome snakes, navigable only by a sailor who delivered his passengers to the seven gatekeepers of the underworld; or the Egyptian Book of the Dead’s four man-eating crocodiles of East, West, North, and South. All held that there were appropriate actions and verbal formulas that could appease these beings and permit the dead to proceed on their way unharmed. All imagined that the country of death was reigned over by a deity with an entourage: the toponymic Greek Hades (better known by his Roman name of Pluto), the Mesopotamian queen-goddess Ereshkigal, the Egyptian god Osiris. All thought this country the occasional scene of divine dramas, like that of the Greek myth of Pluto’s abduction of the goddess Persephone or the Babylonian story of the descent to Arallu of the goddess Ishtar to rescue her fatally stricken lover Dumuzi.

If you weren’t a god, Hades and Arallu could be grim places. The former was populated by shades of the no longer living that flitted endlessly about while experiencing only their own tedium. In the latter, the dead endured a bare existence unless their families managed to intercede with the deities to improve their lot by means of the proper rituals and sacrifices. Otherwise, in the words of the Sumerian-Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the king who journeys to the underworld to find his dead friend Enkidu, “dirt is their drink; their food is of clay; like a bird, they wear garments of feathers; light cannot be seen; they dwell in the dark.”

The Egyptian heaven was more pleasant but had stricter admission requirements. These called for passing through a hall of judgment in which one’s heart was weighed on a scale of truth and justice by a divine court headed by Osiris. If condemned, your soul was devoured on the spot by an “eater of the dead” and annihilated; if judged meritorious, it proceeded to the fields of peace. There, given a new body, you lived a life much like your former one but attended only by enjoyments. The Greeks had their own version of this paradisical afterlife; called Elysium, it was an attractive alternative to Hades that was never integrated with it in their myths. Probably borrowed conceptually from the Egyptians, the Elysian fields, too, were located on the marge of Oceanus. There, according to the poet Pindar, “the good receive a life free from toil …. Sea breezes blow around the island of the blessed, and flowers of gold are blazing, some from splendid trees on land, while water nurtures others.”

Though a new land to the traveler, the country of death was thus not terra incognita. Yet had I, surrounded by these great cultures of antiquity, been a Hebrew of the same period, which was that of the Judges, the early years of the Israelite monarchy, and the First Temple, I would have been—at least to judge from the Bible—less knowledgeable. Although I would have been prepared when I died for a descent to an underworld like a Babylonian, or like my Canaanite neighbors whose ruler of this domain, the god Mot, had a name like my own word for death, mavet, I would have had no notion of how to reach it, of what awaited me there, or if anything much awaited me at all.

This destination was called She’ol, a word of obscure origin with no known cognates in Hebrew or other Semitic languages. While it occurs sixty-six times in the Bible, all but a few of its appearances are passing ones that tell us little. When the Psalmist asks rhetorically, “What man can live and never see death, who can deliver his soul from the power of She’ol?” or God questions Hosea, “Shall I ransom them from the power of She’ol? Shall I redeem them from death?,” She’ol is little more than death’s poetic synonym.

Yet it is clear from other biblical passages that She’ol was believed to be an actual realm beneath the ground. Thirteen times it is mentioned in conjunction with some form of the verbal root y-r-d, “to descend,” as when Jacob says of his son Joseph, mistakenly thought by him to have been killed, “I shall go down [eyred] in mourning to She’ol, to my son.” More graphically, the book of Numbers relates the fate of the rebellious Korah and his camp, “whom, opening its mouth, the earth swallowed … and they and all their possessions went down to She’ol.” And Ezekiel, prophesying the downfall of the Egyptian Pharaoh and likening him to a mighty tree that will be toppled, declares in God’s name: “I will make the nations quake at the sound of his fall and bring him down to She’ol with all who descend to the pit…. You [Pharaoh] shall be brought down with the trees of Eden to the land of the below.” “The pit” (bor) and “land of the below” (eretz tahtit or tahtiyot) are epithets for She’ol elsewhere in the Bible, too.

About what took place in this realm, the Bible is silent. There are hints that its only activity was a perpetual sleep from which one might be fitfully awakened. Isaiah imagines the refa’im, the shades of She’ol, roused from their slumber by the arrival of the slain king of Babylon; like them, he admonishes the newcomer, he will now lie down with “the maggot as your bed and the worm as your blanket.” A Hebrew verb used in this prophecy to describe She’ol’s stirring is ragaz, which has the sense of being troubled or agitated; the dead, it implies, are not pleased to have their sleep interrupted. The word has the same root found in Job’s lament, “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? … Then I should have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept and been at rest…. There [in She’ol] the wicked have no agitation [rogez] and the weary are at rest.”

The root r-g-z appears again in the most dramatic of all biblical passages about the underworld. This is the story in the book of Samuel about the witch of En-Dor, who is visited by a disguised King Saul seeking to raise the spirit of the prophet Samuel from the dead. Saul is in a precarious mental state. On the eve of a crucial battle with the Philistines, he is exhausted by his futile efforts to apprehend the rebel David and gripped by a sense of foreboding. Having first been crowned by Samuel and then denounced by him and told he will be stripped of his kingship, he badly wants the prophet’s pardon and guidance. Hearing of an old necromancer in the village of En-Dor, he rides to her in the dead of night.

The old woman is reluctant to grant Saul’s request. During his reign, Saul has sought to stamp out her profession in compliance with the injunction in Leviticus, “Do not turn to conjurers or wizards or be defiled by them,” and she, as one of its few remaining practitioners, is apprehensive. Yet reassured that no harm will befall her, she sets to work, and soon the figure of Samuel appears before her, “rising from the earth.” Saul, to whom Samuel is invisible, asks her what she sees, and after berating him for concealing his identity, which she has somehow managed to guess, she tells him: “An old man wrapped in a cloak.” Convinced the apparition is indeed Samuel, Saul prostrates himself in fear and respect. Samuel, though, is not appeased. “Why have you troubled me [hirgaztani] by raising me?” he asks angrily. Saul explains, and Samuel answers sharply, reiterating his prophecy of Saul’s doom—which, he predicts, will befall him on the battlefield the next day, when he will join him, Samuel, in She’ol. Samuel then vanishes and the terrified Saul rides off to meet his doom on Mount Gilboa.

It is a mysterious story. What makes the old woman realize her midnight visitor is Saul? Why is Saul so certain, even before the apparition speaks, that it is Samuel? The Bible doesn’t say. Yet neither does it suggest that Samuel is a figment of the old woman’s or Saul’s imagination. He has been raised from the dead and is annoyed.

Presumably, Samuel, like Isaiah’s refa’im, is an incorporeal shade, a ghostly outline of a once living body that will go back to sleep when its brief ascent from She’ol is over. His status as a prophet has earned him no special benefits there, just as the kings of Egypt and Babylon suffer no exceptional torments for having been tyrants. She’ol is not a place of reward and punishment; all its inhabitants are treated equally. It is a vast subterraneous space in which the spirits of kings and paupers, the noble and the villainous, lie side by side.

Had I lived and died then, my spirit would have lain with theirs. How would it have gotten to this place? Who would have guided it? Would it have dreamed of doors opening and shutting, hands thrusting it into darkness, a rough voice bidding it to find a resting place—or would these have been real sounds reaching it in its sleep as more and more dead were crowded into an airless dungeon that, however immense, could barely accommodate their legions? They shuffle into it with heads bent, scraping the low ceiling, stumbling on bodies in the dark, groping the damp earth for a space to lie down in. There are curses, the groans of troubled sleepers, the rasp of a snore. Who would want to awake to any of this? Sprawled around me are the forms of men, women, and children, none of whom I know. It would be impossible to find a familiar face in this perpetual night, let alone a face once loved in the sunlight. And if I found one, what pleasure could it give either of us? Any memories we might share would be intolerably painful. We could only lament our fates and crawl back to our places before they were snatched by new arrivals. Better to sleep—to stay asleep—to fight off all disturbance of sleep.

Such a scene, of course, has no biblical basis. The Bible’s reticence about She’ol, when contrasted with the elaborate descriptions of the afterlife in the mythologies of other ancient peoples, is consistent with the biblical demythologization of the world in general, whether in respect of its creation, its governance, or its unseen dimensions. In a universe made and ruled by a single, unrivaled God, there is no room for an independent kingdom of death with a divine cast of actors and a multitude of human extras. Conceivably, one could imagine such a realm ruled by the dead themselves under God’s tutelage. Yet this would have called for God’s involvement in their affairs—and the God of the Bible, though life and death are in His hands, is a God of the living, not of the dead. Death is not an integral part of His creation. Had Adam and Eve not disobeyed him in the Garden of Eden, the biblical gan-eden, the punishment of death would have been unnecessary. It is a catastrophe that should have been averted.

The Bible stresses this. “See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil,” God has Moses tell Israel in the book of Deuteronomy—and one reason death is evil is that God does not consort with it. He and the dead have no contact. As the Psalmist puts it: “In death there is no remembrance of thee, in She’ol who can give thee thanks?” Isaiah, mocking the conjurers who “chirp and mutter” in their shamanistic rites, attacks the idea that there is anything to be gained from communication with the dead. Though other peoples pray and sacrifice to them, he declares, God’s Law teaches that this is fruitless, the illicit crossing of a forbidden frontier. The country of death is in a state of permanent quarantine.

Had I been a biblical Hebrew, indeed, I would have been quarantined from the moment I died. “He who touches the dead body of any person shall be unclean seven days,” Mosaic law enjoins. Even contact with a tent or dwelling in which a death has recently occurred demands ritual purification, performed by washing with water mixed with the ashes of an unblemished red heifer ritually slaughtered by a priest. Whoever neglects to do this “defiles the tabernacle of the Lord” and is “cut off from Israel”—a punishment whose very vagueness evokes dread.

Not that my dead body would have been left unattended. On the contrary: burying it, despite the pollution this entailed, would have been a stern duty. Few fates were more feared than the abandonment of one’s corpse to the elements or to eaters of carrion. “And your carcass shall be food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth,” threatens Deuteronomy in its dire catalogue of the evils in store for the people that strays from God’s path. This was something to be avoided at all costs.

More than one biblical narrative deals with such situations. In the book of Kings, we are told of a “man of God” from the southern kingdom of Judah who is sent on a divine mission to rebuke the sinful ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, Solomon’s son Jeroboam. Enjoined neither to eat nor to drink in the place of the encounter, the Judean fearlessly executes his assignment and refuses the chastened Jeroboam’s offer of refreshment; yet immediately afterward he is approached by a local “prophet” and, hungry from his long fast, is enticed to break bread with him. No sooner has he done so than God tells him in the prophet’s presence that, in punishment, “your carcass shall not rest in your forefathers’ grave”—and upon leaving the prophet’s home, he is attacked and killed by a lion. The prophet, hearing of this, hurries to the site and finds the lion standing guard over the unmolested corpse. Placing the Judean on his donkey, he returns him for burial to his native territory. Moreover, he tells his sons, when he himself dies he wishes to be buried with him. “Let my bones,” he says, “lie next to his.”

What are we to make of this curious tale? Impelled by admiration for the Judean’s courage and guilt for having been his undoing, the nameless prophet is determined to give him a proper burial in his own village, even though this means flouting God’s will more brazenly than did the dead man, whose sin, after all, was no more than a momentary weakness of the flesh. And yet not only does God refrain this time from retaliating, but the lion, too, refuses to harm or let harm befall the dead body. Though God’s agent, the lion has a will and principles of its own—which include protecting, against God’s ostensible wishes, the man it has killed at His behest. Or do both lion and prophet carry out these wishes, God having repented of meting out too cruel a sentence?

Either way, the story affirms what might paradoxically be called the sanctity of the contaminating corpse. Other biblical tales do the same, such as one about Saul’s concubine Ritzpa bat Aya—who, after Saul’s death, keeps a vigil for months by the unburied bodies of his and her sons, murdered with the complicity of David, th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• By Way of an Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five