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 t…
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.
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.