Thread: Anybody Know? (Is there mention of hell in the OT? What do Jews believe about hell?)
Link:
chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/282508/jewish/What-Happens-After-We-Die.htm
What Happens After We Die?, By Shlomo Yaffe and Yanki Tauber
"What is Heaven and Hell?
Heaven and hell is where the soul receives its punishment and reward after death. Yes, Judaism believes in, and Jewish traditional sources extensively discuss, punishment and reward in the afterlife (indeed, it is one of the “Thirteen Principles” of Judaism enumerated by Maimonides). But these are a very different “heaven” and “hell” than what one finds described in medieval Christian texts or New Yorker cartoons. Heaven is not a place of halos and harps,
nor is hell populated by those red creatures with pitchforks depicted on the label of non-kosher canned meat.
After death, the soul returns to its Divine Source, together with all the G-dliness it has “extracted” from the physical world by using it for meaningful purposes. The soul now relives its experiences on another plane, and experiences the good it accomplished during its physical lifetime as incredible happiness and pleasure, and the negative as incredibly painful.
This pleasure and pain are not reward and punishment in the conventional sense–in the sense that we might punish a criminal by sending him to jail or reward a dedicated employee with a raise. It is rather that we experience our own life in its reality–a reality from which we were sheltered during our physical lifetimes. We experience the true import and effect of our actions. Turning up the volume on that TV set with that symphony orchestra can be intensely pleasurable or intensely painful,8–depending on how we played the music of our lives.
**When the soul departs from the body, it stands before the Heavenly Court to give a “judgment and accounting” of its earthly life.**9 But the Heavenly Court only does the “accounting” part; the “judgment” part–that only the soul itself can do.10 Only the soul can pass judgment on itself–only it can know and sense the true extent of what it accomplished, or neglected to accomplish, in the course of its physical life. Freed from the limitations and concealments of the physical state, it can now see G-dliness; it can now look back at its own life and experience what it truly was.
The soul’s experience of the G-dliness it brought into the world with its mitzvot and positive actions is the exquisite pleasure of Gan Eden (the “Garden of Eden”–i.e., Paradise); its experience of the destructiveness it wrought through its lapses and transgressions is the excruciating pain of Gehinom ("Gehenna" or “Purgatory”).
The truth hurts. The truth also cleanses and heals. **The spiritual pain of gehinom–the soul’s pain in facing the truth of its life–cleanses and heals the soul of the spiritual stains and blemishes that its failings and misdeeds have attached to it. **Freed of this husk of negativity, the soul is now able to fully enjoy the immeasurable good that its life engendered and “bask in the Divine radiance” emitted by the G-dliness it brought into the world.
For a G-dly soul spawns far more good in its lifetime than evil. The core of the soul is unadulterated goodness; the good we accomplish is infinite, the evil but shallow and superficial.
So even the most wicked of souls, say our sages, experiences, at most, twelve months of gehinom, followed by an eternity of heaven. Furthermore, a soul’s experience of
gehinom can be mitigated by the action of his or her children and loved ones, here on earth. Reciting Kaddish and engaging in other good deeds “in merit of” and “for the elevation of” the departed soul means that the soul, in effect, is continuing to act positively upon the physical world, thereby adding to the goodness of its physical lifetime.11
The soul, on its part, remains involved in the lives of those it leaves behind when it departs physical life. The soul of a parent continues to watch over the lives of his/her children and grandchildren, to derive pride (or pain) from their deeds and accomplishments, and to intercede on their behalf before the Heavenly Throne; the same applies to those to whom a soul was connected with bonds of love, friendship and community. In fact, because the soul is no longer constricted by the limitations of the physical state, its relationship with its loved ones is, in many ways, even deeper and more meaningful than before.
However, while the departed soul is aware and cognizant of all that transpires in the lives of its loved ones, the souls remaining in the physical word are limited to what they can perceive via the five senses as facilitated by their physical bodies. We can impact the soul of a departed loved one through our positive actions, but we cannot communicate with it through conventional means (speech, sight, physical contact, etc.) that, prior to its passing, defined the way that we related to each other.
(Indeed, the Torah expressly forbids the idolatrous practices of necromancy, mediumism and similar attempts to “make contact” with the world of the dead.) Hence the occurrence of death, while signifying an elevation for the soul of the departed, is experienced as a tragic loss for those it leaves behind."
:blush: