Jews believe in hell
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What do Jews believe about the afterlife?
I thought a few words were in order about Jewish tradition’s view of heaven. First off, with the exception of some kabbalistic texts, there is virtually no mention or description whatsoever of heaven in the Tanach (Bible). There are, however, some rather obvious hints. We are told, for example, that Jacob was “gathered to his people” when he died.
This infers that he was reunited with his ancestors in another place, echoing the Zohar’s statement that when we die, all our loved ones will come to greet and escort us. We are also told that Elijah the Prophet will return one day to announce the coming of the Messiah; where, exactly, would he return from if there was no heaven?
The Talmud is somewhat more explicit about an afterlife. The Mishna in Sanhedrin assures us that “all Israel has a share in Olam Haba, the world to come.” (This, by the way, does not mean that heaven is reserved exclusively for Jews; all people who follow the basic laws of civility and morality will gain entrance, as well.) And Ethics of the Fathers reminds us that “this world is but an entrance way leading to the next world; prepare yourself here so that you may enter the banquet hall.”
One dramatic story sums this up: Rabbi Yosef, the son of the great sage Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, had a near-death experience – he died, but came back to life. His father asked him: “What did you see there?” Yosef replied: “I beheld a world which is the reverse of this one; those who are on top here, were below there, and vice versa.” His father said to him: “My son, you have seen the corrected world.”
Is there a heaven and a hell?
Most Jews deem belief in heaven and hell highly unsophisticated, even primitive.
But like many other positions held by contemporary Jews, this one, too, demands an explanation.
On almost no level – the Jewish, the religious, the moral, the emotional, the intellectual – does denying heaven and hell make sense.
By heaven and hell, I mean reward and punishment in the afterlife. I am not referring to a hell of eternal fire or a heaven filled with harp-playing angels. Any attempt to describe either heaven or hell is likely to sound silly. I remember one of my yeshiva rabbis telling us students that heaven is eternal study of the Torah. Now this may well have sounded terrific to my rabbi, but all I recall is wondering what the alternative is like – and I actually liked studying the Torah.
This is surely one reason neither the Torah nor the rest of the Hebrew Bible describes heaven or hell. And the Talmud devotes much more time to details concerning temple sacrifices than it does to descriptions of heaven or hell.
The Torah, the biblical authors and the Talmudic rabbis wisely understood the dangers of describing heaven and hell. The widespread Islamic belief in a heaven where men are greeted by 72 virgins is a perfect example of a description that makes a mockery of the notion of reward in the afterlife.
For that is what heaven and hell are about. Heaven means there is reward after this life, and hell means there is punishment after this life.
One is that most Jews have been more influenced by secularism and the secular university than by Judaism. Heaven and hell are not only denied by the secular and intellectual worlds, they are mocked. And most people do not wish to hold beliefs that the sophisticated of their age mock.
The other is that Christianity strongly upholds belief in heaven and hell and is strongly identified with it. And most Jews find it anathema to uphold almost any belief that is identified with Christianity.
“I’ve always read that Jews don’t believe in the concept of hell. Is that true?”
First, let me distinguish between what “Jews” believe versus what “Judaism” believes. Quite often one has nothing to do with the other and this is a perfect example. Jews may not believe in the afterlife—heaven and hell—but Judaism unequivocally does.
Growing up I was told that Jews don’t believe in the afterlife. No heaven/ No hell/ No nothing. However, like most everything else I learned about Judaism growing up, this was incomplete. Although there are strains of modern Judaism that would argue against life after death, the vast majority of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish theology and Jews themselves unequivocally believe in olam habah—the world to come.
Yes, there is heaven. Although the Hebrew Bible devotes little time to speculating upon it, the Jewish tradition is replete with varying efforts and depictions of what the “world to come” might be. Some notions imagine God as Avenu Malkenu (Our Father and King) sitting in judgment, delivering reward or punishment within the heavenly court. Others imagine a supernal beit midrash (house of study), where the tzaddikim (righteous) study Torah all “day” long.
The more mystical Jewish traditions envision a ladder of consciousness, at the very top of which resides the ineffable: God beyond description. As you descend down the ladder, distinction sets in with arch-angels, angels, spirits and other divine beings all the way down to this world, where souls are coming and going, entering this world and leaving this world (and even a Jewish notion of reincarnation—returning to this world once again).
Yes, Judaism believes in “heaven,” and yes, Judaism also believes in “hell.”
5 Things You Never Knew about Jewish Hell
Even though they aren’t mentioned even once in the actual five books of the Torah, heaven and hell are fundamental ideas in Judaism. For example, the famous early medieval Jewish commentator Rabbi Moses ben Maimonides (aka, the Rambam) alluded to the concepts of heaven and hell when he wrote his 11th principle of faith, which states: I believe with complete faith that the Creator, blessed be His Name, rewards those who observe his commandments with good, and punishes those who violate his commandments.
Clearly, the Rambam wasn’t stating that people who keep shabbat and kosher get showered with riches, good health and every other blessing in this world – because even a quick look around the religiously observant Jewish world shows that’s not happening for a lot of people.
The reward and punishment being described by the Rambam takes place in the next world, once the eternal soul has already left its temporary body. But if you’re expecting little red guys with pitchforks to be doling out the punishment you’re going to be sadly disappointed, because Jewish hell differs from its more mainstream counterparts in a number of big ways, which we’ll take a look at now. Here are five things you never knew about Jewish hell.
1. It doesn’t last forever. This is probably going to come as a shock to a few readers, but most people won’t spend more than a maximum of 12 months in Jewish hell, or gehinnom, to give it its proper Hebrew name. That’s because gehinnom is more about cleaning souls up, then punishing them for eternity. God knows people goof up, do things wrong and succumb to temptation all the time, and He doesn’t expect perfection.
God created gehinnom as a kind of spiritual launderette, to clean off all those stains and icky residues left on the soul when those inevitable spiritual mistakes get made. Some souls take longer than others to get whiter-than-white again, so they spend a bit longer in the bleach cycle; but as soon as the soul gets properly cleaned up, its stay in gehinnom is officially over.
2. It’s not an ‘either / or ‘ choice between heaven or hell, because most people end up going to BOTH. So, how does that work, exactly? It’s like this: nobody is always 100% perfect and never does anything wrong, and nobody is 100 percent evil either (although some people throughout history have come pretty darned close…) God has kindly arranged things so that you get fully rewarded for all the good stuff you do in heaven, for eternity.
BUT before you can take your place, you first need to pay down the spiritual debt you accrued during your lifetime. The place you do that is gehinnom. The more ‘bad’ things that you did (that you didn’t already fix in your lifetime), the longer you spend there. But once you paid down your spiritual debt, the gates of heaven swing open, and you’re welcomed back upstairs. A few extremely pious individuals go to great lengths to fix any wrongdoing they might have done while they’re still alive. The people who manage this get to skip gehinnom and go straight to the VIP lounge Upstairs – but it’s a level that most of us just aren’t at.
3. It only cleans up sins between man and God. The pork chop you ate on Yom Kippur is a classic example of the sort of sin that can get cleaned off your slate in gehinnom. Ditto for driving to the beach on Shabbat, eating that toasted bagel on Pesach, or worshipping that cute pagan idol. But gehinnom doesn’t work for sins between man and man: if you hurt someone else in some way, lied to them, cheated them out of their pension or generally made their life miserable and you didn’t apologize to them and make amends for what you did during your lifetime, then you’re in trouble.
Heaven won’t let you in to claim your eternal reward while you still have some outstanding spiritual debts to pay down, and Jewish hell doesn’t work for those sort of sins. So what’s the answer? In a nutshell: reincarnation. God sends you back down to planet earth for another go around, so you can fix what you broke the last time around.
4. There are worse places to be… Strange to say, getting into Jewish hell actually ranks as a sort of spiritual achievement, and not every soul manages it. In our holy books, stories abound of souls who received much worse punishments than spending a few months in gehinnom: some of them got cast into the kaf hakela, a type of spiritual sling-shot that pings the soul from one end of the universe and then back again, never giving it a moment to stay in the same place and catch its proverbial breath.
Other souls are tricked into believing that they’re actually still alive and are then sent to what’s called the ‘World of Desolation’, where they can spend decades pointlessly going through the motions of ‘life’ before someone clues them in that they’re just wasting their time. And then, there’s a really terrible punishment where souls are sent to wander the earth as disembodied spirits, in the worse cases for centuries, until they pay down their massive spiritual debts and are given the ‘present’ of finally being allowed in to gehinnom.
5. Other people can get you out of it. There’s a famous story told about Rebbe Akiva, the famous mystic and defacto leader of the Jewish people who lived around 2,000 years ago, just after the destruction of the second temple. Rebbe Akiva once had a vision of a Jewish apostate and heretic, who was being tortured in a number of terrible ways for all the bad things he’d done in his life. Rebbe Akiva took pity on this soul, and decided to help him.
