Reincarnation

So as promised, here is my post about the Jewish view of reincarnation:

On sunday the speaker at ortho house talked about reincarnation. Every week there is a speaker there for their dollars for learning program (which we fondly call dollars for brainwashing). Basically, if you sign up and agree to go to their weekly lectures and spend an hour talking to a tutor and write up what you learned, they will give you money. I find the whole thing kind of sketch and I don't really agree with some of their views, so I don't do the program. Also I just don't think brainwashing is as fun as everyone says it is... Anyways, they always have a free dinner and a speaker and since this out sounded interesting and there was chinese for dinner, I decided to go.

The speaker told us about the mystic view of reincarnation in Judaism. Some Jews believe that souls are reincarnated into new bodied to fix a mistake made in a previous life or to improve themselves from their previous life. Reincarnation is not ideal- you don't want to be reincarnated multiple times because it's painful to the soul to watch its body decompose. Once the souls have done everything they have to they will not be reincarnated and go to some higher unknown realm and that is what our souls strie for. The idea is that each new soul has 3 lives to do something right, if in one of those lives something improves then the soul has an infinite number of chances/lives but if nothing improves in those three lives then something bad happens- he didn't really go into it.

Scholars claim that the soul has a knowledge of what it must do, fix, or improve and we can see it in a certain unexplained draw to study something or do something- that unexplained draw is out soul yearning for what it lacks or has lacked in the past. Also, if we have a problem or tendency to do something bad our soul could be showing us what its weaknesses are, what it needs to overcome.

I think the part that I found most interesting was that he told us that there is a finite number of souls in the world and that everyone alive now is a reincarnation. The belief is that once every soul has done what it has to it, it stops being reincarnated and the Messiah will come. The idea of a finite number of souls is what really intrigues me, though. I aksed about it, because it seems to me that if we believe that then we are believing that this world is full of souls that couldn't get it right. We're the screw ups- shouldn't that have an effect on the mystical veiw on today's society? I'm not sure that knowing that, I would have faith in the people of this world to bring about the Messiah. When I asked that question he didn't really have an answer except to say that instead of seeing this as a world of screw ups he sees right now as the epitome of God's forgiveness- at the point where he's given us the most chances.

I'm not sure that I buy that. I'm not sure that I buy any of it, actually. But it's interesting to think about, especially after learning and fighting with the Buddhist concept of rebirth all of spring term. Really it's closer to the Mahayana than the Theravada definition of reincarnation, but I won't go into all of that.

I've realized, as I always do, that I don't completely worry myself about life after death, I simply believe that there is something. I believe we can't know, and this guy and his misticism and reincarnation is just as likely to be right as anyone else. Amelia and I had a whole conversation about the speaker: she thought he was crazy- I didn't have a problem with him.

We believe what we can, we believe what we can imagine and feel- so I do what I can, and I focus on doing good things. In the end, I hope, I will learn what is true and what is right and I might be completely wrong. I guess I just don't think it will matter what I believed but how I lived it.