Life After Death Here on Earth: Jewish Techniques of ‘Resurrection’

Why is the symbolic sacrifice of scapegoats beautiful and useful, and what is justified guilt good for? Why do the scapegoat and the goat that we “raise” and sacrifice to God look the same? How is there life from the trauma of severe guilt and victimization, how is earthly life reborn after death?

The title of the week’s episode is “after death”, aharem mot in Hebrew. What it begins with is a description of the Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement liturgy, that is, of some kind of spiritual-spiritual rebirth. The central element of the ceremony is the display of two he-goats, one of which is sacrificed to the Eternal, the other of which the high priest drags into the wilderness to take away the sins of the community. It is clear that with this ritual of the scapegoat, with the display of the two outwardly identical goats, we are reminding ourselves that both good and bad impulses are present in us, side by side, yet evil does not belong to our true, higher personality. We sacrifice the goat that represents the good in them, “raise” it to its source, God, and simply throw away the bad.

“God, the spirit you have placed in me is pure,” we pray every morning. Conversion is possible, it is possible to be reborn because, according to the Torah, there always remains in all of us who are the image of God, some ultimate, undefiled purity, our true self, waiting for us to arrive, rise up, and convert to Him. We are responsible for our sins, but we are not our sins, we are not identical with them. The essence of the Torah is that man is not a gift, but a possibility. Chance. Going to the mikveh, going through the Yom Kippur ceremony, is actually resurrection, life after death, rebirth. Chatting about forgotten selves, finding home.

There is a way for the sinner to be reborn, but is there a way for the victim with a murdered soul? This week was also the time of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the title of the week’s section fits well: after death. Suffering trauma, if the body survives, kills the soul, and the main question of all therapy and all loving attention is where is the resurrection from this.

Passover is also about spiritual resurrection, just like the Day of Atonement, the autumn holidays, the two poles of the Jewish year. One is about the personal resurrection, the other about the communal resurrection.

Passover teaches us that we Jews must transform all our traumas into sensitivity and responsibility. We must love the refugee, the stateless, the sojourner, because we too were strangers in the land of Egypt. We must live, teaches the admonition of the Seder evening, as if we ourselves had come out of the land of Egypt. Everything that happens anywhere, anytime, with anyone, happens to us.

Even now, war is raging in many places around the world, hunger is ravaging, vulnerability and hopelessness, terror, and the death of innocents. The Holocaust will not end for Jewish memory until it happens, and there has never been a minute when it hasn’t happened. When we remember our own grandparents, great-grandparents, and parents, we must also think of them and take responsibility for them.

Life after death can mean if we try to help those who have entrusted us here and now. This is how and here the path that we took after leaving Egypt, and which leads to final freedom and redemption, must continue. The time has come for our generation to testify that there is life on earth after death, to understand the responsibility of remembering our dead, until He, whom we are waiting for, comes as soon as possible, even in our days.

The author is the religious leader of the Beth Orim Reform Jewish community