Resurrection: The Triumph of Life in Judaism

I grew up blessing the God who resurrects the dead (“mechayyeh ha-metim”) in my prayers three times a day, but I never heard the doctrine discussed or defended. Although I went to traditional yeshivot from kindergarten through semichah (ordination), and knew that in a famous mishnah in Sanhedrin the Rabbis said one who denies resurrection of the body forfeits his share in the world to come (olam haba), I never heard any of my teachers give a shiur on resurrection.

Modern Judaism gave up on resurrection of the dead (techiyyat ha-metim) almost completely. The Orthodox mostly neutralized Judaism’s promise of bodily resurrection by turning it into words that were routinely uttered but never discussed or internalized. The liberal denominations neutered it entirely, rendering the second blessing in the Shemoneh Esreh as one that blesses the God “who gives life to all” (Reform) or “who gives eternal life” (Conservative). The Reform version elides resurrection, affirming a god who creates life but not one who restores it, while the Conservative version replaces the audacious promise of bodily resurrection with a vague and presumably disembodied afterlife.

Our Rabbis did believe in the world to come but the idea was distinct from the promise of a messianic resurrection of the dead. In fact, in the well-known mishnah I just mentioned, I think the Rabbis implied that techiyyat ha-metim was more important to them than olam haba. They may have found it more believable, too.

My serious, considered belief in the eventual resurrection of the dead, and in the God who promises it, goes back to a crisis of faith I experienced in the early 1960s. In 1961, I went to Israel on a Fulbright Fellowship to teach American history at Tel Aviv University. That was the year of the Eichmann trial, and suddenly the reality of the Shoah came crashing down on me. Despite what I had come to do, I spent little time thinking about American history except when I was in my classroom. Instead, I went to Yad Vashem almost every day and read the records and testimonies of survivors. Their experiences and the murders of the six million who didn’t survive threw my belief and trust in the God of Israel into crisis. As I put it much later, “No statement, theological, or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” And yet the fact that I was experiencing this crisis in a Jerusalem that was being rebuilt, in a burgeoning new Jewish state, showed me that the continuing relationship between God and the Jewish people still lived. My faith fluctuated between these two poles.

My theological crisis lasted years. At some point, it occurred to me that while the statement that our martyrs are now in the world to come was no consolation for the Shoah, the promise that they will be resurrected and live again in a redeemed world was—if one could truly believe it. In 1974, I cofounded CLAL (the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership). Among my colleagues there was Reuven Kimelman, a historian of Jewish prayer. Once, I was talking with him about the idea of resurrection, and he pointed out to me that you could see in the careful wording of the techiyyat ha-metim blessing itself that the Rabbis understood how hard it would be to trust in such a doctrine.

The second blessing of the Shemoneh Esreh begins, “You, O Lord, are mighty forever, you revive the dead, you are powerful to save,” at which point the Rabbis inserted a special phrase for the spring season: mashiv ha-ruach u’morid ha-gashem (the One who sets the wind in motion and brings down rain). They did this to remind us that there is a natural analogue to bodily resurrection: when the lifeless landscape is reborn into green life under the spring rain. God is described as sustaining the living, upholding the fallen, healing the sick, and freeing the imprisoned. The power implied in these achievements hints at the divine capacity to reverse death itself. They prepare us for the great leap in the prayer’s series of wonders: God keeps faith and performs miracles for those who “sleep in the dust.” The blessing acknowledges that all of this is beyond reason, but argues that God is incomparable:

Who is like You, the master of powers, of heroic accomplishments? Who can compare to You, a ruler who inflicts death and brings life, and grows redemption in stages?

It is only after this unanswerable rhetorical question that the Rabbis have us bless a God who can be trusted to accomplish the impossible and, ultimately, “revive the dead.”

Reuven Kimelman’s insight into the careful structure of the blessing I had been saying all my life helped me see that it was really the culmination of the belief in the covenant of redemption, which requires the total repair of the world (tikkun olam). This cohered with a larger theological point that I was also beginning to understand: Judaism is fundamentally an affirmation of life, and a rejection of life’s enemies.

The Bible starts with the creation of the world, but it is focused on the life within it. Throughout the world, there is an unrelenting struggle between life and death, or nonlife. God is always on the side of life. In Isaiah’s description:

This is the word of God, Creator of the Heavens, who alone is the Lord, who formed the Earth and is its Maker, who established it. It was not created to be a void; it was formed to be settled.” (Isa. 45:18)

That is, the prophet says, the world was created to be filled with life.

It was in this same period in my life that I read the work of the great academic Bible scholar Jacob Milgrom. Milgrom showed that the ritual system of Leviticus was not a set of arbitrary taboos—it was nothing less than a symbolic code of life and death, which, among other things, understood blood as the carrier of life and regarded purification through ritual immersion as symbolic rebirth. Holiness was associated with life.

I began to see that every commandment, every mitzvah in the Torah, is a choice of life. Maimonides says something close to this when he tells us in The Guide for the Perplexed that good or correct views are frequently called “life” in the Torah and evil or incorrect ones are called “death.” Maimonides goes on to quote Deuteronomy 30:15, in which Moses summarizes the message of the Torah: “See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil.” A few verses later, Deuteronomy underlines this juxtaposition with the famous exhortation: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life” (Deut. 30:19). To build upon Maimonides, every good deed involves choosing life, and every evil act involves choosing death.

In short, I concluded that working for good to triumph in the world meant what Isaiah said, “Death will be swallowed up in eternity” (Isaiah 25:8). In the messianic age, all the enemies of life will be vanquished. Death itself will be nullified and overcome by the resurrection of the dead.

Our Rabbis insisted upon finding the doctrine of resurrection in the Torah itself, though in truth, their prooftexts that resurrection is in the Torah were a bit forced. The most persuasive resurrection verse in the Torah is, I think, Deuteronomy 32:39:

See, now, that I, I am He and there is no other Lord with Me. I will inflict Death and will bring to Life. I have wounded and will heal. And there is none who can save from My hand [power].

As the Rabbis argue, just as the person who has been wounded by God is the same one who is then healed, so too, the person upon whom God has inflicted death is the same person who will be restored to life. This is, to say the least, not the only possible interpretation of the verse, which can also be read as a poetic celebration of God’s might. But the Rabbis were insistent that resurrection was grounded in biblical soil because they understood it as an expression of the Jewish dream of life’s final and complete triumph.

There are two profound religious approaches to life at the heart of the Rabbis’ insistence on resurrection. The first is the experience of human love and then, tragically, the loss of the beloved person to death. The second is the rabbinic affirmation of the value of the body.

When one’s life is tied to another’s, intertwined in a love so unlimited, fused by a need so urgent, connected by emotions so deeply felt and shared, the tear in the fabric of one’s life is irreparable such that it cannot possibly be mended, or at least not without a miracle—this is precisely what it means to have loved someone. It was suffering such a loss myself that probably brought me to a full appreciation and belief in the resurrection of the dead. Twenty-three years ago, my son J. J. was hit by a van and killed while riding his bicycle in Israel. He was thirty-six years old when he died. Some days I wake up in the morning and think, “This is another day you have to get through without J. J.”

A pious person may be tempted to find or give easy consolation for such a loss, saying that the deceased is with God or in a better world. One can also hope for new children, new life, as if that could take the place of the lost one. One can say that God grants immortality, so that one can look forward to reuniting with the deceased in the world to come. Yet each of these attempts to dissolve the grief and assuage the pain has an element of falsity; they do not, cannot, console.

To accept such consolation, I must forget the actual embodied person whom I loved. That person in all their uniqueness—physical, emotional, intellectual—that person with all their winning behaviors, all their flaws, all their specific being is the one I loved. There is no equivalent being; there is no substitute experience that can make me whole. A future spiritual reunion may be sublime, but it will lack the three-dimensional embrace of the person I loved. This sweaty, odoriferous, sometimes vital, sometimes frail, vulnerable, mortal person is the one I loved and who loved me. I miss his beautiful green eyes, his quirky smile, his athletic legs, and his hug holding me close.

The only full correction of the loss would be to restore the whole person whom I loved. This is the moral basis of the human need for nothing less than resurrection. Out of total love, trust, and at-homeness with a loving God, Judaism drew the strength to assert that when the world is perfected and the messiah comes, God’s love will be confirmed by the restoration of the loved one.

The second religious view of life enshrined in the idea of resurrection is the affirmation of the body—that frail, limited, vulnerable, mortal incarnation of an infinitely valuable and unique self, who is both body and soul. The contrast of the often achy, frequently hungry, energetic but tiring body with the pure and ethereal soul prompted many religious thinkers and traditions to recoil from the body. Jewish mystics, too, have often glorified a purely spiritual perfection. They have tried to deny or starve the body’s needs and divest it of its physical qualities to attain that state. In the body’s place, they have glorified the soul as the only being worthy of earning God’s love and of being at home with the Lord. The rabbinic Judaism that insisted on the corporeal resurrection of the body will have none of that.

God loves us in all our limitations, in all our needs and weaknesses, with all our shtick and pettiness. The human depth of life—in peak moments that end too swiftly, in profound connections that weaken and strengthen, in joy that comes and goes—is the most precious expression of being. At its best, for a finite moment, it is infinite; it is the affirmation, the celebration, the realization of life.

There is nothing more holy than this life. There is no superior realm to live in. Rather, we finite humans should do our best to live, to love, to spend our lives repairing the world for ourselves and others and those yet to come. The God of Israel so honors this truth that in the course of the final perfection, the actual human beings we loved, in all their complexity, will be restored to us through their bodily resurrection.

After the Shoah, this is what I now affirm, with a real, if somewhat broken, faith when I bless the God “who revives the dead.”