As a rabbi I am privileged to be with families in their most joyful moments and in their lowest moments. I am often the confidante with whom people share their fears, desires, and wishes when they have nowhere else to turn. It is in this work that I have often been asked about what happens to our loved ones after they die. And the truth is, I don’t know. No one does. Well, physically we know that our bodies decompose and go back to the dust of the earth from which we were formed. Spiritually, however, we just don’t know. While we have people who have been miraculously revived after a medical death, we don’t have concrete or consistent data. While we might believe that the soul “returns” to God after we die, the question remains, does the soul survive in any significant way? Is reincarnation real? Can my deceased loved one still be present in my life?
My answer to these questions is generally one of inquiry and wonder: what do you think? I could argue both sides of any theory on what happens spiritually to our souls after we die. What we’re really asking in this question is to know, perhaps, that our lives mattered, that when we die we’re not simply vanished from the world.
Perhaps there’s some guidance, if not definitive answers, in this week’s Torah portion. This week we read Parshat Ki Teitzei. We receive laws about war and taking care of hostages, laws about our clothing, laws about family relationships, including parents and children, laws about taking care of the poor, and so much more. Ki Teitzei is actually the Torah portion with the most number of mitzvot (commandments) in it, but the recurring theme is how we should execute and fulfill the mitzvot prescribed to us.
Chapter 25, verse 6 discusses a levirate marriage in which a married man dies childless and his brother takes the widow as his wife to father a child who will be considered as the son of the deceased man. Why is this the prescribed process? The Torah explains that it’s because his name should not be blotted out. This seems to reflect the belief that death does not put an absolute end to an individual’s existence. A person’s name should not disappear forever once they die. Instead, our names and even our presence in the world live on forever by virtue of our actions in the world while we were alive.
There might be different ways of phrasing the question of life after death and just as many guesses as to the literal answer, but the one thing we know for certain is that what we do in life determines how we’re remembered in death. Not in the way that fame and celebrity provide their own version of a legacy, but in the way that people will remember how you made them feel.
