- Banned
- #1
The American rabbi Harry Waton had a theory to explain the organic unity, persistence and progress of the Jews. He wrote in his Program for the Jews, published in 1939: “Hebrew religion, in fact, was intensely materialistic and it is precisely this that gave it persistent and effective reality.”
“Jehovah differs from all other gods. All other gods dwell in heaven. For this reason, all other religions are concerned about heaven, and they promise all reward in heaven after death. For this reason, all other religions negate the earth and the material world and are indifferent to the well-being and progress of mankind on this earth. But Jehovah comes down from heaven to dwell on this earth and to embody himself in mankind. For this reason, Judaism concerns itself only about this earth and promises all reward right here on this earth.”
“The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people. Each Jew continues to live in the Jewish people, and he will continue to live so long as the Jewish people will live.”
This, Waton explains, it grounded in the Hebrew Tanakh:
“The Bible speaks of an immortality right here on earth. In what consists this immortality? It consists in this: the soul continues to live and function through the children and grandchildren and the people descending from them. Hence, when a man dies, his soul is gathered to his people. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all the rest continue to live in the Jewish people, and in due time they will live in the whole human race. This was the immortality of the Jewish people, and it was known to the Jews all the time.”[2]
This is close to saying that Jews have only one collective immortal soul. Significantly, Israel is the only nation who bears the name of one person (Jacob is given the name Israel in Genesis 32:29).
Is Waton’s understanding of biblical anthropology correct? And how far does it go toward explaining Jewish power? The answer to the first question is yes. Waton’s viewpoint was informed by the best scholarship of his days, which has not been contradicted since. It was and still is widely shared among educated Jews. In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, also published in 1939, Sigmund Freud correctly stressed that, on the question of individual immortality, the Egyptians and the Israelites were on the opposite end of the spectrum:
“No other people of antiquity [than the Egyptians] has done so much to deny death, has made such careful provision for an after-life […]. The early Jewish religion, on the other hand, had entirely relinquished immortality; the possibility of an existence after death was never mentioned in any place.”[3]
There is no expectation of an afterlife in the Torah. Instead, there is an implicit denial of it: “By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return,” says Yahweh to Adam (Genesis 3:19).[4] That is a logical consequence of the way “Yahweh God shaped man [adam] from the soil of the ground [adamah] and blew the breath of life [ruah] into his nostrils, and man became a living being [nephesh]” (2:7). The proximity between adam, “man”, and adamah, “earth” or “ground”, reinforces the idea. It has been said, by Cabbalists in particular, that nephesh and ruah are two terms to designate an immortal spirit. That is a misunderstanding originating from the Greek Septuagint translation: the Hebrew word nephesh is translated as psyche. But in reality it designates a “living being,” animal or human; it sometimes means simply “life” and is associated to blood in the ritual prescriptions of Leviticus 17. The Hebrew word ruah, translated as pneuma, means “breath,” and also designates life. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do these terms imply any form of individual afterlife.
This biblical anti-spiritualism is not to be explained as a “primitive” trait proving the Hebrew Bible’s great antiquity, as if the belief in an Otherworld of the dead was a late development in the history of religious ideas. On the contrary, the Hebrew denial of the afterlife was linked to the rejection of foreign cults, which universally included a concern for the afterlife. The Book of Genesis, whose anthropological materialism is the most explicit, betrays Mesopotamian and Persian influences that cannot be anterior to the Babylonian Exile. Significantly, it uses the Persian word Pardes to designate the “Garden” (of Eden), but turns its meaning upside down: whereas in Indo-European myths, Paradise is the happy world where the righteous dead become immortal by eating from the tree of life, in Genesis, it is a past lost forever for all mankind, and the stage of the drama that brought into the world the double scourge of death and labor; for death bears no promise, and work no spiritual reward.
Here is one illustration among others that I mention in my book From Yahweh to Zion: when, in Isaiah 38, the good King Hezekiah “fell ill and was at the point of death,” he expresses no hope of meeting his Creator or starting a new life in some Otherworld. Rather, he despairs at the prospect of not seeing Yahweh anymore. For, he tells him, “Sheol cannot praise you, nor Death celebrate you; those who go down to the pit can hope no longer in your constancy” (Isaiah 38:11-19). Sheol is simply “the pit”, and it is another common misunderstanding, stemming for its translation as Hades in the Septuagint, to think of it as a world where the dead live. There is no life in Sheol, it is a purely negative concept of death, as close as possible to the non-concept of nothingness. The term appears only five times anyway in the Pentateuch: four times in Genesis as a conventional name for death,[5] and once in Numbers 16, in a story about rebellious Jews who, by divine punishment, are suddenly swallowed alive by the earth with all their belongings.
The above are just excerpts from: Israel as One Man: A Theory of Jewish Power
“Jehovah differs from all other gods. All other gods dwell in heaven. For this reason, all other religions are concerned about heaven, and they promise all reward in heaven after death. For this reason, all other religions negate the earth and the material world and are indifferent to the well-being and progress of mankind on this earth. But Jehovah comes down from heaven to dwell on this earth and to embody himself in mankind. For this reason, Judaism concerns itself only about this earth and promises all reward right here on this earth.”
“The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people. Each Jew continues to live in the Jewish people, and he will continue to live so long as the Jewish people will live.”
This, Waton explains, it grounded in the Hebrew Tanakh:
“The Bible speaks of an immortality right here on earth. In what consists this immortality? It consists in this: the soul continues to live and function through the children and grandchildren and the people descending from them. Hence, when a man dies, his soul is gathered to his people. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all the rest continue to live in the Jewish people, and in due time they will live in the whole human race. This was the immortality of the Jewish people, and it was known to the Jews all the time.”[2]
This is close to saying that Jews have only one collective immortal soul. Significantly, Israel is the only nation who bears the name of one person (Jacob is given the name Israel in Genesis 32:29).
Is Waton’s understanding of biblical anthropology correct? And how far does it go toward explaining Jewish power? The answer to the first question is yes. Waton’s viewpoint was informed by the best scholarship of his days, which has not been contradicted since. It was and still is widely shared among educated Jews. In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, also published in 1939, Sigmund Freud correctly stressed that, on the question of individual immortality, the Egyptians and the Israelites were on the opposite end of the spectrum:
“No other people of antiquity [than the Egyptians] has done so much to deny death, has made such careful provision for an after-life […]. The early Jewish religion, on the other hand, had entirely relinquished immortality; the possibility of an existence after death was never mentioned in any place.”[3]
There is no expectation of an afterlife in the Torah. Instead, there is an implicit denial of it: “By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return,” says Yahweh to Adam (Genesis 3:19).[4] That is a logical consequence of the way “Yahweh God shaped man [adam] from the soil of the ground [adamah] and blew the breath of life [ruah] into his nostrils, and man became a living being [nephesh]” (2:7). The proximity between adam, “man”, and adamah, “earth” or “ground”, reinforces the idea. It has been said, by Cabbalists in particular, that nephesh and ruah are two terms to designate an immortal spirit. That is a misunderstanding originating from the Greek Septuagint translation: the Hebrew word nephesh is translated as psyche. But in reality it designates a “living being,” animal or human; it sometimes means simply “life” and is associated to blood in the ritual prescriptions of Leviticus 17. The Hebrew word ruah, translated as pneuma, means “breath,” and also designates life. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do these terms imply any form of individual afterlife.
This biblical anti-spiritualism is not to be explained as a “primitive” trait proving the Hebrew Bible’s great antiquity, as if the belief in an Otherworld of the dead was a late development in the history of religious ideas. On the contrary, the Hebrew denial of the afterlife was linked to the rejection of foreign cults, which universally included a concern for the afterlife. The Book of Genesis, whose anthropological materialism is the most explicit, betrays Mesopotamian and Persian influences that cannot be anterior to the Babylonian Exile. Significantly, it uses the Persian word Pardes to designate the “Garden” (of Eden), but turns its meaning upside down: whereas in Indo-European myths, Paradise is the happy world where the righteous dead become immortal by eating from the tree of life, in Genesis, it is a past lost forever for all mankind, and the stage of the drama that brought into the world the double scourge of death and labor; for death bears no promise, and work no spiritual reward.
Here is one illustration among others that I mention in my book From Yahweh to Zion: when, in Isaiah 38, the good King Hezekiah “fell ill and was at the point of death,” he expresses no hope of meeting his Creator or starting a new life in some Otherworld. Rather, he despairs at the prospect of not seeing Yahweh anymore. For, he tells him, “Sheol cannot praise you, nor Death celebrate you; those who go down to the pit can hope no longer in your constancy” (Isaiah 38:11-19). Sheol is simply “the pit”, and it is another common misunderstanding, stemming for its translation as Hades in the Septuagint, to think of it as a world where the dead live. There is no life in Sheol, it is a purely negative concept of death, as close as possible to the non-concept of nothingness. The term appears only five times anyway in the Pentateuch: four times in Genesis as a conventional name for death,[5] and once in Numbers 16, in a story about rebellious Jews who, by divine punishment, are suddenly swallowed alive by the earth with all their belongings.
The above are just excerpts from: Israel as One Man: A Theory of Jewish Power
