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“RABBI, IS THERE anything that you ever wanted to know and didn’t know who to ask?” Across from me sat a woman who said she
was communicating with her dead daughter using automatic handwriting techniques. “I will ask my daughter for you! Rabbi, I won’t
tell anyone!” Here I was, being offered a direct line of communication with the Other Side the spirit world or afterlife. Nothing in my
rabbinic training had prepared me for this situation – but the offer was very tempting.
It was only a few days earlier that I had met this woman who was now making this incredible offer. Immediately after I concluded my first lecture on “The Jewish Perspective on the Near Death Experience and the Afterlife,” people from the standing room only audience, flocked to the front of the room to ask questions and to share their own experiences. People had never realized that Judaism believed in the afterlife and how rich a tradition we had about these spiritual topics dating back thousands of years. The
floodgates were open and people were sharing their own encounters with Near Death Experiences or their own mystical/Spiritual experiences. Out of the crowd emerged a woman who exclaimed urgently “Rabbi, we have to talk privately!” We set a date for what was now tonight and when she would meet with my wife and myself.
At our meeting, she explained to us that her daughter, in her early 20s, had died several years earlier of the rare elephantitus disease. It is a horribly disfiguring disease, which they fought with whatever means that they could. The mother and daughter were inseparable and were not ready to part with each other when the daughter passed on. Heartbroken, she started to search for ways that she could get back in contact with her departed daughter. She experimented with all kinds of things to no avail, until she stumbled upon automatic handwriting. She explained that she would get herself into a semi trance-like state and begin writing and
her daughter would communicate to her by directing the writing process! To say the least, I was just a bit skeptical about this process --- it wasn’t part of the Practical Rabbinics curriculum at the Rabbinic College that I attended. This is not to say that there weren’t traditions of people communicating with the dead – but usually it was some great Rabbi in a vision or dream. This was, let’s say, a bit different.
“Here, I brought you some of her letters she wrote to me!” she proclaimed as she pulled out a stack of papers from her briefcase.
“Not only that Rabbi, I asked my daughter all about your lecture!” Now she had my full attention – it is one thing to have you wife critique your lecture (She has never been there – how would she know if I’m making it all up!), here I was going to get a Celestial critique of my afterlife lecture from someone who experienced it and who was allegedly on the other side! “OK, what did she say?” (I was still humoring her at this point)
My lecture was a comparison of the work of Raymond Moody’s classic book about Near Dear Experiences called Life After Life and traditional Jewish sources. I was attempting to show parallels within Jewish Rabbinic and Biblical literature to the different parts of the core experience that Moody describes in his book i.e. the tunnel, the being of light, the life review, the enhanced sensory capacities of the soul in the bodiless state etc. My research had taken months to complete and I had found fascinating direct
parallels in the literature to everything he described – except for one part – the loud buzzing sound that he described in his book.
Well, I did find one contemporary rabbi who addressed this aspect of the experience and he even suggested a mystical source, but in all honesty it was the weakest part of the presentation – the source was a real stretch – I really felt like I was fudging on that one point.
“Everything the rabbi described happened to me” the women proclaimed in the name of her daughter, “Except for that buzzing sound – that didn’t happen!”
Uh oh, I thought my celestial critic found the weak spot in my presentation! She discovered my fudging!
At this point I was a bit spooked to say the least – could it be true that this women really was communicating with her daughter?
So, I had her describe to me what happened to her daughter on the other side. This Jewish woman, who had not had an advanced Jewish education, started to describe precisely what her daughter was experiencing. She described precisely what the Kabalistic literature calls Kaf Hakelah (The Sling Shot) an intermediary state where the soul is still too connected to its earthly possessions and is not yet ready to advance to the next level in the afterlife. She described the departed family members that were trying to encourage the daughter’s soul to let go and move on. She continued with a detailed description that was straight out of the Jewish mystical literature (that currently only exists in Hebrew), which this woman had never studied.
At this point I was pretty positive that these letters were “real” and that they did represent some kind of communication with someone in the afterlife. That’s when she hit me with the hardest question of my career – “Rabbi, is there anything that you ever wanted to know and didn’t know who to ask?” Well sure there are! Even Rabbis have their inner questions that they would love to have someone tell them for sure – especially when you could get a direct line from the afterlife! Well, as I sat there formulating which of my profoundest questions I should ask – I see my wife shaking her head and saying, “no you don’t.” Every mystic has to have someone to ground him or her, once in a while – “But this is such an opportunity, I can ask all my questions!” I thought. There she sat, shaking her head with that wifely “You wouldn’t dare” kind of look. OK, reason prevailed – besides it wasn’t the earthly trauma of confronting my wife’s wrath (more about that in the article about hell ).
I explained to the women that I would pass on the offer. “Why?” she wanted to know. (Well, because my wife was there – but that wasn’t a very Rabbinic answer.) I explained that from what she described her daughter was still trapped at a very low level of the afterlife experience. The more focused and attached one is to their earthly possessions the more disoriented the soul is when it needs to part with them at the time of death. Sometimes a soul is so focused on the physical realm, that it just cannot progress and transcend its desire to be reunited with its “things”. The soul is stuck at an in between level – it sees its earthly possessions that it has left behind and it gravitates towards them but has no way to be reunited with them. This is the downward slingshot motion.
On the other hand it sees that there are other spiritual realms above it but it does not have the desire to experience them. It experiences a profound existential frustration of being trapped in this in between state. Hopefully, overtime he soul would let go of its physical attachments and be ready to move on. Whatever answers her daughter would have to my questions would be from the vantage point of this very low level of the afterlife experience! I explained that we had many mystical experiences documented in our literature from great Rabbis and Mystics who experienced higher realms and had access to insights from higher purer sources. If I had my choice of which information to trust, I would need to rely on these higher-level accounts – rather then rely on a trapped souls experience.
So I politely turned down the offer to ask any questions of the daughter to my wife’s relief.
I often think about what questions I would have asked. It is not everyday that you are offered a chance to ask whatever you want about topics that you have inner doubts about.
Since that lecture I have lectured on topics of heaven, hell, reincarnation and hypnotic regression, Life Before Life, Resurrection of the dead and general classes about the soul and the afterlife. There is a vast amount of literature on these topics within classical Jewish sources. Most people are unaware of Judaism’s rich traditions about these topics and they seek other religions for their sources of spiritual nourishment when they should start their own explorations in their own backyard. I often hear the refrain “I didn’t
know Judaism believes that!” These are topics that are unfortunately not taught in Jewish Sunday schools and even ordained rabbis many times do not focus their studies on these topics. I myself had not taken the time to look into these topics when I was a student.
It was only after the death of our 3 month old first born child to S.I.D.S. (Sudden infant death syndrome) that I had to grapple with the issues of my own mortality and questions like “Will we see him again?”, “Is there really an afterlife?”. My own search for empirical evidence led me to research Near Death Experiences, proofs of reincarnation and popular literature about hypnotic regression. There is a wealth of compelling evidence that exists readily on the market in the secular literature. However, there is very
little written on the parallels between these experiences and the traditional Jewish sources. This has been my area of fascination and research since that time.
***
I have been asked to do a series of columns for the Jewish World Review on topics of the Afterlife, the soul, reincarnation etc. and to share with you some of my findings. However, with bi-directional nature of the Internet, I would like this to be an interactive process and focus on what the JWR readership is interested in finding out about. Since these topics are so vast and we could spend a lifetime discussing these topics we will need to focus our attention to selected areas of interest and questions. So I will pose the same question to you that the women posed to me:
“Is the anything that you ever wanted to know about the afterlife or the soul?”
If there is, email us and let us know. Now is your chance to ask someone who has spent over a decade researching these topics.
Your questions and feedback will determine the topics that will appear in this
Jewish World Review Sept. 13, 2000 / 12 Elul 5760
Voice from the
Other Side?
By Rabbi Mayer Pasternak
Rabbi Mayer Pasternak is a Baltimore based lecturer and scholar. Comment by clicking here.
