The Bible Answer Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Hanegraaff) once answered a letter asking 'How will I in Heaven tolerate knowing my dear son's in Hell?' with an anodyne verse of 'Every tear there will be dried.' leading me to conclude that what's in Heaven is at best a bad copy of yourself, as I don't think I could be myself and…
The Bible Answer Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Hanegraaff) once answered a letter asking 'How will I in Heaven tolerate knowing my dear son's in Hell?' with an anodyne verse of 'Every tear there will be dried.' leading me to conclude that what's in Heaven is at best a bad copy of yourself, as I don't think I could be myself and tolerate such—then again, I'm a Jew-atheist, so I hate the idea of eternal damnation _twice_.
(Yes, there was some belief in eternal damnation among Jews, but it seems to have been found mostly in tractates written in Yiddish for women, as opposed to Serious Theological Discourse [in Hebrew and Aramaic, for me].)
(If I recall correctly from "The Satanic Verses", the Muslims have an out in Muhammed's saying that punishment is "Eternal, or as long as Allah wills it." which at least removes one Jewish objection to the concept, that being that it seems to conflict with G-d's being omnipotent. Must investigate further, hrrmmm…there seems to be a variance of opinion.)
As I recall, the Jewish version of eternal damnation is that God forgets you. Which, if you take such things seriously, would be perhaps the worst possible thing that could happen to your soul.
However, I grew up in a town that had a fairly large population of Holocaust survivors. More than a few that I knew had lost their faith because they felt that God had already forgotten them. As Art Speigelman's father Vladek said of the Jews crying out to God in Auschwitz, "But to this place, God didn't come."
To the extent that there's a mainstream view (among the Orthodox, because otherwise you're nailing Jell-O to the wall) most people spend some time in Gehenna, the worst being destroyed utterly after a year. Savage, but comparatively reasonable. On the up-side, all Israel have a share in the World to Come to the extent they learn and fulfill Torah, the righteous of all other nations have a share as well.
The World to Come is described as being like a banquet; folk-belief has it that the food is the flesh of Leviathan. One allegory claimed that both righteous and wicked are there at a long table, and that the reward of the righteous and that the punishment of the wicked is that each must be fed by the person next to them.
Mostly, though, I was told that one had to believe in reward and punishment after death*, but that it was bad form to dwell too much on specifics because 0.) there was no specific and definitive scripture and 1.) one should just have faith in G-d's justice and mercy, and He would know best.
*The Pharisees or scribes, like Jesus, believed in this, as opposed to the priests who believed in none such, and also believed in a reasonable laxity in the Law; I don't know but believe that it was this ideological closeness that made the Pharisees the Bad Guys in so much Christian scripture, as all committed ideologues hate their closest-but-not-close-enough relatives most.
Something I read a couple days ago included horror at the notion that no matter how much damage you did, no one should be sentenced to an eternity of torment for what they did in a single life. I mean, maybe you don't have to believe in reincarnation wholesale, but it seems like a decent god would offer best two out of three.
The Bible Answer Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Hanegraaff) once answered a letter asking 'How will I in Heaven tolerate knowing my dear son's in Hell?' with an anodyne verse of 'Every tear there will be dried.' leading me to conclude that what's in Heaven is at best a bad copy of yourself, as I don't think I could be myself and tolerate such—then again, I'm a Jew-atheist, so I hate the idea of eternal damnation _twice_.
(Yes, there was some belief in eternal damnation among Jews, but it seems to have been found mostly in tractates written in Yiddish for women, as opposed to Serious Theological Discourse [in Hebrew and Aramaic, for me].)
(If I recall correctly from "The Satanic Verses", the Muslims have an out in Muhammed's saying that punishment is "Eternal, or as long as Allah wills it." which at least removes one Jewish objection to the concept, that being that it seems to conflict with G-d's being omnipotent. Must investigate further, hrrmmm…there seems to be a variance of opinion.)
s/for me/for men/
As I recall, the Jewish version of eternal damnation is that God forgets you. Which, if you take such things seriously, would be perhaps the worst possible thing that could happen to your soul.
However, I grew up in a town that had a fairly large population of Holocaust survivors. More than a few that I knew had lost their faith because they felt that God had already forgotten them. As Art Speigelman's father Vladek said of the Jews crying out to God in Auschwitz, "But to this place, God didn't come."
To the extent that there's a mainstream view (among the Orthodox, because otherwise you're nailing Jell-O to the wall) most people spend some time in Gehenna, the worst being destroyed utterly after a year. Savage, but comparatively reasonable. On the up-side, all Israel have a share in the World to Come to the extent they learn and fulfill Torah, the righteous of all other nations have a share as well.
The World to Come is described as being like a banquet; folk-belief has it that the food is the flesh of Leviathan. One allegory claimed that both righteous and wicked are there at a long table, and that the reward of the righteous and that the punishment of the wicked is that each must be fed by the person next to them.
Mostly, though, I was told that one had to believe in reward and punishment after death*, but that it was bad form to dwell too much on specifics because 0.) there was no specific and definitive scripture and 1.) one should just have faith in G-d's justice and mercy, and He would know best.
*The Pharisees or scribes, like Jesus, believed in this, as opposed to the priests who believed in none such, and also believed in a reasonable laxity in the Law; I don't know but believe that it was this ideological closeness that made the Pharisees the Bad Guys in so much Christian scripture, as all committed ideologues hate their closest-but-not-close-enough relatives most.
Something I read a couple days ago included horror at the notion that no matter how much damage you did, no one should be sentenced to an eternity of torment for what they did in a single life. I mean, maybe you don't have to believe in reincarnation wholesale, but it seems like a decent god would offer best two out of three.