10. With Moses Mendelssohn, who in his Phædon tried to translate Plato's proof of immortality into modern terms, a new attitude toward the nature and destiny of the soul arose in Judaism among both the philosophers and the educated laity. Mendelssohn not only endeavored to prove the immortality of the soul through its indivisibility and incorporeality, as all the neo-Platonists and Jewish philosophers had done before him; he also attempted to show from the harmonious plan which pervades and controls all of God's creation, that the soul may enter a sphere of existence greater in extent and content than the little span of earthly life which it relinquishes. The progress of the soul toward its highest unfolding, unsatisfied in this life, demands a future growth in the direction of god-like perfection.[942] At this point the philosopher enters the province of faith, and thus furnishes for all time the cardinal point of the belief in immortality. The divine spirit in man, which is evinced in the self-conscious, morally active personality, bears within itself the proof and promise of its future life. Moreover, this corresponds with the belief in God as One who rules the world for the eternal purposes and aims of perfection, who cannot deceive the hope of the human heart for a continued living and striving onward and forward, without thereby impairing His own perfection. For we all close our lives without having attained the goal of moral and spiritual perfection toward which we strive; and therefore our very nature demands a world where we may reach the higher degree of perfection for which we long. In this sense we may interpret the Psalmist's verse: “I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with (beholding) Thy likeness.”[943] That is: our spirit, when no longer bound to the earth, shall behold the divine glory,—a vision which transcends our powers of thought.
11. In the light of modern investigation, body and soul are seen to be indissolubly bound together by a reciprocal relation [pg 296] which either benefits or impedes them both. Wherein the spiritual bond exists that renders both the physical organs with their muscular and nervous systems and the magnetic or electric currents which set them in motion subservient to the will of the intellect; what the mind actually is, into whose deepest recesses science is casting its search-light to illumine its processes,—these are problems which will probably remain ever incapable of solution by human knowledge, and will therefore always afford new food for the imagination. Yet it is just in periods like ours, when the belief in God is weakening, that the human spirit is especially solicitous to guard itself against the thought of the complete annihilation of its god-like self-conscious personality. This gives rise to the superstitious effort to spy out the soul by sensory means and to find ways of seeing or hearing the spirits of the dead,—a tendency which is as dangerous to the spiritual and moral welfare of humanity as was the ancient practice of necromancy.[944] It is therefore all the more important to base the belief in immortality solely on the God-likeness of the human soul, which is the mirror of Divinity. Just as one postulate of faith holds that God, the Creator of the world, rules in accordance with a moral order, so another is the immortality of the human soul, which, amidst yearning and groping, beholds God. The question where, and how, this self-same ego is to continue, will be left for the power of the imagination to answer ever anew.
12. Certainly it is both comforting and convenient to imagine the dead who are laid to rest in the earth as being asleep and to await their reawakening. As the fructifying rain awakens to a new life the seeds within the soil, so that they rise from the depths arrayed in new raiment, so, when touched by the heavenly dew of life, will those who linger in the grave arise to a new existence, clad in new bodies. This is the belief which inspired the pious founders of the synagogal [pg 297] liturgy even before the period of the Maccabees, when they expressed their praise of God's power in that He would send the fertilizing rain upon the vegetation of the earth, and likewise in due time the revivifying dew upon the sleeping world of man. Both appeared to the sages of that age to be evidences of the same wonder-working power of God. Whoever, therefore, still sees God's greatness, as they did, revealed through miracles, that is, through interruptions of the natural order of life, may cling to the traditional belief in resurrection, so comforting in ancient times. On the other hand, he who recognizes the unchangeable will of an all-wise, all-ruling God in the immutable laws of nature must find it impossible to praise God according to the traditional formula as the “Reviver of the dead,” but will avail himself instead of the expression used in the Union Prayer Book after the pattern of Einhorn, “He who has implanted within us immortal life.”[945]
Chapter XLV. Divine Retribution: Reward and Punishment.
1. The feeling of equity is deeply rooted in human nature, demanding reparation for every wanton wrong and yielding recognition to every benevolent act. In fact, upon this universal principle is based all justice and to a certain extent all morality. Judaism of every age compresses this demand of the religious and moral nature of man into the doctrine: God rewards the good and punishes the evil. This doctrine, which is the eleventh of Maimonides' articles of faith, constitutes the underlying presumption of all the Biblical narratives as well as of the prophetic threats and warnings and those of the Mosaic law, in so far as earthly success and prosperity were regarded as the rewards of God and earthly misfortune and misery as His punishments. In the same degree, however, as experience contradicted this doctrine, and as examples multiplied of wicked persons revelling in prosperity and innocent ones laboring under adversity and woe, it became necessary to defer the divine retribution more and more to the future—at first to a future on earth and later to one in the world to come, until finally it developed into a pure spiritual conception in full accord with a higher ethical view of life.
2. As long as in the primitive process of law the family or the clan was held responsible for the crime of the individual, ancient Israel also adhered to the idea that “God visits the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation,” as Jeremiah still did[946] in full accord with the second commandment. [pg 299] It was in a far later stage that the rabbis interpreted the words “of those who hate Me” in the sense of individual responsibility.[947] Only in accordance with the Deuteronomic law which says: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin,”[948] did the religious consciousness rebel against the thought that a later generation should suffer for the sins of its ancestors, and hence the popular adage arose, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge.”[949] It is the prophet Ezekiel who refutes once and for all the idea of a guilt transmitted to children and consequently of hereditary sin and punishment, insisting on the doctrine that personal responsibility alone determines divine retribution.[950] But here a new element affects divine retribution. God's long-suffering and mercy do not desire the immediate punishment, the death of the sinner. He should be given time to return to a better mode of life.[951]
But the great enigma of human destiny, which vexes the author of the seventy-third Psalm and that of the book of Job, still presses for a better solution. It is true that the popular belief and popular legends which are preserved in post-Biblical writings as well, insisted on a justice which requites “measure for measure.”[952] Still insight into actual life does not confirm the teaching of the popular philosophy that the “righteous will be requited in the earth” and that “evil pursueth sinners.”[953] The unshakeable belief in the justice of God had to find another solution for life's antinomies, and was forced to reach out for another world in which the divine righteousness would find its complete realization.
3. Biblical Judaism with few exceptions recognized only the present world and the subterranean world of shadows, a view preserved in its essentials by Ben Sira and the Sadducees, who were subsequently declared heretics. In contrast to them Pharisaic or Rabbinic Judaism teaches a resurrection after death for a life of eternal bliss or eternal torment, according as the divine judgment finds one righteous and another wicked. We may leave aside the consideration that the first impulse toward a Jewish belief in resurrection came from the non-fulfillment of the national hope, wherefore it was always bound up with the soil of the Holy Land, as will be seen in Chapter LIV. The fact remains that the divine judgment to follow upon resurrection was consistently regarded as a great world-judgment, which was to decide the future lot of all men and spirits. It must be noted also that the apocalyptic and midrashic literature often identifies the pious with the God-fearing Israelites as those who shall arise to eternal life, while the wicked are identified with the idolatrous heathen, who are condemned to eternal death, or, as it is frequently expressed, to a second death.[954]