Listen. There’s a 2,000 year-old Jewish teaching that goes something like this: When a woman and a man prepare to make love, God calls on the Angel of Pregnancy, who is called Night, and says: “Tonight this one and that one are going to get pregnant. Go down there and make certain the seed becomes endowed with the potential to realize 365 organs, and then bring it to me.” Once the ovum is fertilized, it is seized by Night and brought before God. God then asks the angel in charge of souls to summon a particular soul from out of the Garden of Eden (Paradise), and says to it: “Hello, Soul. I would like you to enter this seed.” The soul protests: “What!? But I like it here. I have loved it here from the very moment you first created me. Why would you want to remove me from this very sacred place and jam me into that repulsive yukky gooey glob that has come about from an act so thoroughly physical and obscene? I am holy and pure and spiritual, and yet you want me to merge with that, that thing?” To which God responds: “The world I wish to send you to is far more beautiful than the one you have been living in all this time, and it is for that ‘thing’ that I created you in the first place, so get your ass in there. Skedaddle!” (Midrash Tanchuma, P’kudei, Chapter 3).
A powerful teaching. This world, with all of its ups and downs and lefts and rights, goods and evils, pains and joys, yuks and yums – is hyped up to be a better place than the spirit world from which everything originated, even more beautiful than Paradise itself!! This is so contrary a teaching to everything most of us have been taught, antithetical to everything we believed, a slap in the face of everything we’ve strived for! What?! You mean to tell us that all these years of striving and struggling, rising and falling for the purpose of achieving spiritual awareness is for naught? That all along we should have been focusing our awareness on this messed up, mundane, inane, profane, vain and insane life? What about all those teachings about spirituality? Spiritual consciousness... spiritual this and spiritual that? How can the holy sages of yore be telling us that in God’s opinion the world of the here-and-now is a far better place than the holy, pure, saintly sacred angelic realms of the spirit world? Of the Garden of Eden, no less.
I’m perplexed.
I have to admit, that although I have been studying and teaching the perplexing lessons of my people’s ancient wisdom now for more than 40 years, I still can’t get used to it. I’m shocked every time. I am convinced that Judaism is a Trickster Religion.
So I went to my teachers for some explanation. Here is what the second-century Rabbi Yaakov said: “More beautiful is one moment of personal transformation and doing good deeds in this world than an eternity in the World to Come; and more beautiful is one moment of bliss in the World to Come than an eternity of bliss in this world” (Mishnah, Avot 4:17).
Thank you. That was very helpful. Now I’m even more confused.
Self-described “Shamanic schmoozer and all-around coyote” Gershon Winkler tickles our funny bone and lovingly pokes at our spiritual center—at the same time. He invites us to look at where that center is and suggests some surprising answers along the way.
So I visited the 16th-century mystic and sorcerer par-excellence Rabbi Yehudah Loew of Prague (known also as the MAHARAL), famed creator of the legendary Golem, and asked him to clarify.
You cannot change anything about yourself in the World to Come, he said, gathering a clump of virgin mud from the Moldau River and fashioning the image of a man on the earth in front of him. You cannot do any personal transformation work in the Garden of Eden, he continued, or in the Spirit world. Or in Paradise. Only here. This is where you become dynamic. This is where you flow, flux, flex and germinate. Not there. Here. In this world. In the spirit world you simply are what you are, are what you have become while you meandered about in this lifetime.
In the spirit world you cannot execute the actual becoming, the infinite possibilities of transformation with which you are endowed. This only happens here, in this world, in the world of change, in the realm of instability, in the cauldron of relativity, in the arena of opportunity, the gauntlet of challenge. This is the happening place—indeed a far more beautiful place to be in contrast to the static, boring realm of spirit where you may fly around and shape shift all you want and bask in the much-talked-about “divine light” but you cannot change the essence of who or what you are, let alone enjoy any of it. All transformative work happens here, he said. Only here. So do the work here, don’t wait to die because over there you remain as you have become and can become no more than what you are. Here we have moment to moment the opportunity, the challenge, to become more than what we are—or less, of course. So what Rabbi Yaakov was implying is, that if you haven’t been here yet, this is a far more favorable place to relocate from the spirit realms. And, conversely, if you have been here or are still here, let me assure you that in contrast to this place, a single moment in the World to Come yields far more bliss than a lifetime of bliss in this world.
After all, in the Jewish creation story, the First Humans had to leave Paradise because they could not appreciate it. They could not appreciate it because they had not yet experienced its opposite. Not having known pain, they could not yet know pleasure. Not knowing sadness, they could not yet know joy. Not knowing anxiety, they could not yet know tranquility.
Bottom line, whether you believe in the spirit world, the world to come, the hereafter, life before life and life after death—or not—the lesson is important. Being here gifts us with unparalleled opportunity, infinite possibility, and a rich supply of chances to change, alter, transform, improve, or vice-versa. That alone makes this world, this lifetime, its foibles and troubles notwithstanding, a far better place to be—or, more to the point—to become.
So welcome to the Garden of Paradox.
Enjoy your stay.
Rabbi Gershon Winkler will be leading a workshop December 18-20. Click for details.
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