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Scriptural Sources of the World to Come (3)

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The Garden of Eden

 

To understand the meaning of the release from She'ol, we must first look at the story of the Garden of Eden and its place in the Scriptures.  As we have seen numerous times, this story deals with the emergence of evil in the universe.  Our situation in the world is represented by the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  As we shall see later on, the experience of She'ol constitutes a similar type of expulsion.  The release from evil is redemption, and redemption is in essence a return to the Garden of Eden, that lost perfect world.  The concept of the Garden of Eden and the End of Days thus explains the actual phenomenon of evil, and not merely the suffering of the righteous.  Evil originated in sin, and sin did not exist in God's original creation; it will therefore disappear when all the sins and sinners will likewise vanish.   This marks the annihilation of cosmic evil and also the end of human suffering, which, as part of the cosmic evil, originated from sin.  As explained in previous lectures, during the period of the Jewish sovereignty, the national experience of evil and the suffering of nations brought about the formulation of the belief in national redemption and peace among the nations.  Similarly, cosmic evil, which is also personal evil, has implanted the faith in cosmic redemption and the return to the garden of Eden within the fabric and fiber of Jewish faith, since its inception.

 

     The prophets emphasized mainly national redemption.  However, many principles regarding the national vision of redemption point to another issue raised in the oral Torah - the vision of the individual's ultimate culmination, the return to the Garden of Eden.  Jewish faith teaches that each individual will return to the Garden of Eden and achieve immortality.  It is no coincidence that the traditional name for the world to come is "The Garden of Eden."  It merely annihilates death, and eternal life is then automatically achieved.  As the prophet says, "...awake and rejoice, dwellers of dust...[Isaiah 26:19]; "Death will be destroyed forever and God will wipe the tear from every face" [ibid., 25:8].

 

     Without going into a thorough analysis of the entire topic, I will mention a few details regarding the perception of redemption as a return to the Garden of Eden.  My first comment relates to the actual essence and location of the Garden of Eden.  The biblical description of the Garden refers to somewhere beyond this world.  It identifies four rivers that merge together, apparently at some central point between Egypt [Gichon and Pishon] and Mesopotamia [Perat and Chidekel].  From this description it is reasonable to suggest that this place is a kind of ideal Land of Israel, before the sin.  This means that the new Garden of Eden will be located in Israel.  At present the Land of Israel lies somewhere in between sin and redemption and therefore its general state and conditions deviate from this ideal.  This imperfect reality will change at the End of Days.

 

     The expulsion from the Garden of Eden means death.  This expulsion has a dual meaning, as manifest in another type of expulsion from God's Presence - She'ol.  The souls in She'ol exist in a kind of prison, which frees and shelters them from the outside and from others [Job 3;17,18].  On the other hand, it locks them in, and they have no ability to act on their own.  Even if the entire world and all its secrets are revealed to them, even if the future is revealed to them with no boundaries of time and space, if it is forbidden to discuss and analyze them, this knowledge and wisdom cannot save them from the oppressive imprisonment, an imprisonment which is also religious by nature.  The creation of She'ol, or the world of the dead, resulted from the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

 

     The meaning of ritual impurity and its laws are also connected to the expulsion form the Garden of Eden.  The Temple is a kind of Garden of Eden disconnected from death, and we create this reality by observing the relevant laws.  We relate to ritual impurity in the same manner.  The outcome of ritual impurity is a kind of exile and distancing from the divine Presence.  The ritually impure individual, as well as anyone who has been involved or connected with the results of ritual impurity, is distanced from the Temple, and sometimes also from the camp, itself a dwelling place of the divine Presence.  The place designated for the leper is a "prison" of sorts, similar to She'ol itself.  He has been distanced from the divine Presence.  The sources of ritual impurity in its technical sense (except for idol worship, whose impurity is essentially different) are the direct results of the original sin: death, certain illnesses which also cause distancing, menstruation and birth which are also accompanied by bleeding.  Ritual impurity is indeed a result of sin, and it means distancing from God, expulsion from the holy nation.

 

     It is interesting that certain immersions must be performed specifically in "living waters" (natural water sources). In a certain sense, the immersion affords him new life, or re-creation, certainly at least in part because of the return to the presence of God and to holiness.  Here once again the implicit ideas of the Scriptures are incorporated explicitly into the writings of the Sages: the purity of the world in the End of Days involves the idea of the resurrection of the dead.  The final stage of this total purity in the age of redemption is expressed in Rabbi Akiva's statement that God is the 'mikveh' of the Jewish people, it is He Who purifies them.  The hebrew word "mikveh" has two meanings.  One is the springwater bath used for ritual immersion, and the other is the word "hope."  Thus Rabbi Akiva turns the word which hints at Man's final hope into the implication of Man's ultimate, absolute purity.

 

Translated by Gila Weinberg

 

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