The Truth About Heaven & Hell (And What Happens After Death)

So let's talk a little bit about the afterlife and divine reward and punishment. This is a topic that I think needs a lot of clarification. First of all, it should be understood that from a Jewish perspective, certainly there is an afterlife. That is the life of the soul after its embodiment. Certainly there is reward and punishment. Meaning to say that a person's afterlife will be determined by their behaviors. here in this world. At the same time, it is not the ultimate reward. It's a temporary reward. And I'll explain what I mean by that. The ultimate goal in the Jewish worldview is the perfection of the physical plane. And I'm not going to get into a whole discussion about that right now about why the ultimate perfection is in the physical world. But it has a little bit to do with the paradox of true infinity is expressed in the finite. So in the finite nature of time space that is where the ultimate infinity of God will be revealed. And what will happen then is all the souls in heaven even souls who have been in heaven for centuries and millennia will come back into their embodiment in something called the resurrection which is one of the 13 principles of faith from my manities to believe in the resurrection and that will be in the perfected messianic era. Okay. But let's talk about right now the experience of the soul in the afterlife after its embodiment before its resurrection. What's happening there? What's the nature of that? Okay, so in general the nature of it is very blissful. Uh souls first of all love being in heaven. That's their natural habitat. So it's like uh a fish in water, right? Souls, by the way, you're saying does that mean souls are uncomfortable while they're when they're in bodies? Yes, it does mean that. Yes, you're correct. Yes, souls are uncomfortable in bodies. All right, but they have to come to bodies to do their mission. So that's why they do it. At any rate, so souls love being in heaven. It's wonderful. And basically what it is is a completely spiritual realm where the soul is experiencing the pleasure of God consciousness. Um you know the pleasure that we have from like an aha like a click when oh that's what that means. And that pleasure is actually more profound than any physical pleasure more than eating good food or you know a pleasant physical sensation. There's that pleasure of understanding of comprehension like aha bam you know that's the pleasure that the souls in heaven have they are understanding godliness. All of the buffers, the filters that cause us down here in embodiment to not see God and relate to God, those are removed and the soul is able to enjoy conscious closeness with God. It's interesting in a physical body, conscious closeness with God is very difficult. Even in our deepest prayer and meditation, we get just a glimmer of it. Um what we can do down here in a body which is unique is we can have objective closeness with God which is by doing acts of goodness and kindness. When we are an extension of God's will, we act so to speak as his hands and feet. By doing his will, we are like an extension of him. So that's objective closeness with God. But subjective closeness with God, like understanding God, very very hard while you're in your embodiment. As opposed to in heaven, that's what it is. Souls are just experiencing the delight, the true delight of understanding godliness and they go to higher and higher levels. They're constantly graduating to higher levels of that that blissful understanding. Now, having said that, there is the opposite of that. There is the uh a a state of punishment which occurs which is not pleasant to to state it mildly which also is not meant to be a fixation. In other words, a person shouldn't do good because they want to experience bliss in heaven and they shouldn't refrain from bad because they're afraid of punishment in call it whatever you purgatory whatever it's not not not a particularly Jewish term but whatever term you want to use Jewish word is gehenna at any rate but let's understand that a little bit like what is that pain what is that punishment why is it necessary why would an allloving god put us through that right think about it like this. Imagine that somebody is completely pathologically incapable of feeling bad about hurting other people. Total sociopath, let's say. And they're going around just destroying people's lives at will, causing a lot of harm and a whole like wake of just residual effect of like, you know, they say hurt people, hurt people. So imagine this person, he's patient zero. He's hurting people who are hurting people who are hurting people and he doesn't care. First of all, he doesn't know about all the damage he caused. Second of all, even what he knows about, he literally doesn't care. Now, imagine modern science creates some invention. It doesn't exist, by the way, but imagine it did. He gets an operation or he takes a pill or whatever it is. Just pretend. Doesn't matter. Um, and all of a sudden, he's capable of empathy and he realizes what he's done and it hits them all at once. how much human suffering he's caused. Can you imagine the wave of anguish that would hit this person all of a sudden who was incapable of empathy and that all of us then all of a sudden is capable of empathy. That would be perhaps a fate worse than death. That the the degree of pain of distress that a person would feel. Okay. That was just a metaphor. I just made that up. Okay, don't get too hung up on that. What am I really talking about? The soul comes to a body. It's in a body. The body is a big buffer. It's like putting on a a mitten on your hand and then like trying to string pearls. That's like a soul in a body. Okay. The soul is trying to operate in this big clumsy meat suit which causes us to not feel. We we lose our spiritual sensitivity. And because we lose our spiritual sensitivity, we're capable of doing immoral things and barely feeling it. We're even getting to a point where we come we become so jaded, we don't feel it at all. We feel the physical pleasure of it and none of the pains of moral anguish which the soul is feeling. By the way, don't get me wrong. The soul when it's being brought along during the time the body is sinning, the soul is feeling terribly violated and is in excruciating pain. But we're not conscious to that because the body sort of covers all that up, drowns it out. And you go around just doing whatever you want and you don't even feel anything. Now the body finishes its job. It's returned to the earth. Soul moves on to the spiritual realm. What's going to happen when all of a sudden the soul doesn't have a body filtering it anymore and it's looking at its own life and it sees now with no buffers, no filters exactly what it has done and all the consequences of what it has done. And it can see it now from a place where it's above time and space. So it sees not just the effects in the immediate environment, but everywhere. And not just at that time, but for all time. And it's face to face with the absolute disaster with the wreckage of of spiritual damage that it caused by every act of rebellion against God's will. That's obviously going to be exceedingly painful, more painful than anything like like any parallel in the physical experience cannot even come close. So you're going to say, why does God do that to us? Well, he doesn't do it to us. We do it to ourselves. Okay? So, and again, this is not supposed to be the primary motivation for not sinning, but it is a helpful perspective to realize that when we choose things that we know are against God's will, even if you get away with it, you're not getting away with it. It causes damage. And even if you say, "Well, I didn't hurt people. It was something that didn't involve anyone. It was just personal." Yeah, but if it violates God's will, then it's causing spiritual damage and it causes damage to the cosmos. Meaning there's a universe and that universe is nurtured by the infusion of good energy that's brought down through our good acts, our holy acts, and it's damaged, God forbid, through the opposite of that. And when we come face to face with that, yeah, that's going to be extremely unpleasant. At any rate, the point is that here in the body, we should appreciate the opportunity that we have. That although we are spiritually numb, we don't feel we are not aware of what's really happening. We have at the same time, ironically enough, this incredible opportunity to to do stuff. Now, we could cause damage, God forbid, by choosing things that go against God's will, but we can create healing in the world by choosing good things. And that's an incredible opportunity. The soul in heaven doesn't have that. And that's why the souls in heaven are a little bit frustrated. As much as they're enjoying themselves, they're also a little bit frustrated. Why? Because now that they're up there in heaven and they really see the beauty of a mitzvah, like what a mitzvah, their own mitzvah accomplished. They yearn to be back in a body and to be able to do mitzvah again and they can't. So that's why if you are connected to someone who's in the other world, a loved one, a relative, the most loving thing you can do for that soul that is post embodiment is to do a physical act, a mitzvah, and to do it in the honor of and the memory of the merit of that soul that doesn't have a body. You could even say it. You before you do the the mitzvah, you could say, "I'm doing this for the elevation of the soul of" and you say the name. And that is an incredible gift and it's more precious than anything else to the souls. We have a little bit of like a symbiotic relationship, the souls in us, you know, they give us an infusion of spiritual power. They're you know people you have parents or ancestors in the other world they definitely they're sending us good energy but we send them back profound pleasure by doing acts of goodness and kindness here in this world in their merit.