Israel and Humanity - The immortality of the soul in its relationship to human dignity

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VI.

The immortality of the soul in its relationship with human dignity.

This is not the place to examine the evidence as strong as many that can argue in favor of belief in the immortality of the soul in biblical Judaism. We do we even studied in detail elsewhere and we believe they are likely to convince anyone of good faith, if it persuaded the silence of Moses and writing in general about this. We shall only say that the lofty idea that Judaism has given the dignity of man implies that belief and it is easy to prove by our sacred books.

When Adam was cast out of Eden, God said, "and now, lest he put forth his hand and take the tree of life, and eat and live forever ". Man is thus likely to immortal life. But what became for him a simple text in this power was in him in action, we notice it well when he was placed in paradise. The only prohibition is that he made is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. All others, that of life including, therefore it was permitted. This results not only in an indirect way of prohibition itself, but also directly for permission before taking even the form of an order, injunction, because God told him: "You shall eat from any tree Garden ". So if Adam was not immortal by nature, he would have become by eating the tree of life. It is only through the effect of deprivation resulting from his sin he loses this power, but it is not in vain that the primitive intention God has been told and that sooner or later it must be made all the more that these chapters of Genesis seem to offer it an ideal and a program, it follows that man's destiny is to become immortal. If we remember further that the Act is named tree of life that its precepts give man life , we will not hesitate to see in the eternal life that Adam possessed the ideal before us. It also illuminates an unexpected promise of life that so often repeat the Pentateuch for observers of the Act.

We do not dispute that in these passages and others like the idea of national life in Palestine and that of the same individual longevity are not entirely absent, but the text of Leviticus that we have cited and where it is no question of one or the other, proves that Moses knew another life that is not the physical life of the individual or the political life of the nation. That to which he refers provides an analogy that does not ignore life with which Adam was endowed, he lost by his fault and he was declared able to recover, even after the fall, eating the tree of life, a divine gift that it is even intended to return, because if the man's role is to crush the serpent's head, that is to say, to destroy the cause of evil, the principle of his downfall, it is clear that the prerogatives of his previous condition must be made to him.

These are the psychological qualities of man underlying intellectual and moral nature. It is the latter, either before or after the sin, we are particularly interested. The moral state of man after the fall depends on the future of mankind, because it is so far as he retained the ability to love the good we can hope to see him perform on earth. To resolve this issue, we are thus led us to ask another order has both historical and metaphysical: What is the sin of Adam to Judaism? What we can say is that any idea of it as he did not have the Jewish perspective of disastrous consequences if the nature of man has been irreparably corrupted by him and that the existence and human destiny will be found by his poisonous influence forever. "The Mosaic," said Hartmann, expresses most clearly the belief in the possibility of earthly happiness of the individual, either in the hopes that he teaches, whether in the optimism of his general views on the world who have nothing transcendent . Reasoning thus, it is only consider one side of the problem. Moses did not just faith in progress, yet he has faith in human nature which is the main working and, if it was hopelessly flawed, could not make anything good. Original Sin, we repeat, is not therefore to Judaism that it became later in Christianity and the moral corruption that it has the Christian faith is foreign to Jewish thought.

Just as theology does not exclude the immanence of divine transcendence, as well as contemporary science of matter and mind are like two sides of a single subject, as well as to Judaism, this world it does point separates the next world, and both remain united rather be in the order of space as the inside and the outside of the same thing, in order of time like the present and the future, double continuity Judaism attests, the first by a belief in metempsychosis or reincarnation, the second by faith in the resurrection and palingenesis, one feasible and the other on the same stage where deploys the phenomenology of the present world.

So the powers that Judaism ascribes to man. They are summarized in a way that the Scripture gives it willingly: to glory, nobility, honor, dignity. "Man is the glory and he does not understand "and with a slight variation:" Man is the glory and there abiding ". The psalm which lists the quantities of man reported little lower than El-ohieme also said he was crowned with glory and majesty . This will be may be intended to immortality. This Bible, which some critics argue so materialistic, also gives to the human soul a name that has nothing comparable in any language, in any school or spiritualist. She calls Kabod , "glory" and the rabbis, saying, well we shall see, Adam was the glory of the earth, n have been imitating the language and ideas of the Bible.

Nothing more glorious than man to Judaism, we say the man as such and not an Israelite. After seeing how the idea of Judaism has made the dignity of man, his perfectibility and its immortal destiny, we must now examine in more detail the Jewish notion of human progress: it will be the subject of the next chapter.