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Will Undead Jews Really Roll to Jerusalem? | |
| If you think the Easter story is scary, brace yourself for the End of Days | ||
 by Tod Goldberg, April 5, 2007
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Easter is the most brilliantly spooky of Christian holidays. Jesus the Zombie busts out of his grave and struts around for a couple days—some call this theology, I call it the stuff of nightmares. I prefer to think of Jesus as he was at the Sermon on the Mount, all fresh-faced and sweet. The risen dead belong in George A. Romero films, not in scripture.
But if an undead Jesus scares me, Lord help me when the Moshiach comes. Jewish eschato
In the Flesh: Fresh-faced, pre-zombie Jesuslogy involves what is possibly the weirdest End-of-Days scenario ever cooked up. And it includes lots and lots of undead Jews.
According to the Talmud, once the Moshiach bursts onto the stage like Elvis in Aloha from Hawaii, the corporeal (though badly decomposed) bodies of Jews, housed comfortably in pine boxes, or simply dead on the streets of Boca Raton if we missed the warning signs entirely, will be resurrected. According to the Midrash, the process here involves a few complex, magical steps:
- Our decomposed bodies will be flushed with the “Dew of Resurrection,” a sort of yeast of rebirth.
- Our bodies will then reform around a bone in the spine called the luz, which is generally considered to be the coccyx.
- We make time toward Israel to hook up with our souls.
The first two steps are hard to visualize. Rabbis haven’t traditionally been much help, basically saying that all will be clear once it happens. But the texts are clearer about the whole “making time towards Israel” part, and, sadly, it doesn’t involve a Lincoln Town Car.
The Talmud says resurrected Jews will literally roll their way to Israel through a series of underground tunnels and caves to be reunited with their souls, turning Israel into a frolicking undead playground. The Talmud predicts tha
Strong Buy: Messianic Age likely to see steep rise in Dramamine stockt all this rolling will hurt, to say nothing of the nausea.
The only way to avoid the pain of rolling from, say, Palm Springs to Israel, is to be a righteous Jew at the time of death; though even the righteous have to wander through the tunnels and caves, which sounds messy, what with the need to sidestep the rolling (and probably vomiting) un-Orthodox masses. When everyone’s finally in Israel, the Mount of Olives will open up and resurrected Jews will stream out—presumably in search of Dramamine.
If you find all this hard to fathom, you’re not alone. The idea that Israel turns into an eternal dance sequence from the “Thriller” video has scared the hell out of me since I first encountered Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones: “Behold, I will open your grave, O My people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, O My people. And I will put My spirit in you and ye shall live, and I will bring you in your own land, and ye shall know that I the Lord have spoken and performed, saith the Lord.”
If you need me, your basic bacon-eating Jew, I’ll be the one cowering in my grave, gripping a shotgun 
Valley of Dry Bones: The Prophet Ezekiel said the trippiest thingsand blasting away at the flesh-eating zombies.
The belief in resurrection likely goes back to the 4th Century B.C.E., when Jews were influenced by Babylonian concepts of religion. But it is Ezekiel’s vision that thousands of years of Jews have embraced as the definitive statement on the End of Days—though not without some discussion of the actual process, which is how we got this whole idea about rolling, with the Angel Gabriel leading the way.
Perhaps Ezekiel’s vision should be taken metaphorically. Though I’ve always been told we’d roll to Israel after death, what this really must mean is that we’ll metaphorically rise from the grave and metaphorically roll to Israel, right? Right? Right?!?
Well, no.
The Orthodox, at least, are quite literal in their belief that Jews will rise from their caskets and plunge en masse through the center of the Earth towards Israel. It is, according to Orthodox Rabbi Raleigh Resnick of AskMoses.com, one of the 13 principles of our faith.
The state of our bodies, however, is up for discussion. It’s reasonable to assume that if the power exists to resurrect the dead, the same power would exist to make us look decent, lest we live through eternity in differing states of decomposition. As a person who had hair like Robert Smith of The Cure through about 1990, I’d like toPhysical Perfection, circa 1990: Author will be restored to this form when resurrected have a choice regarding how I look. After resurrection, will I look as I do at the time of my death (probably even worse than 1990), or will I be in some perfect state of myself?
Rabbi Resnick, and Orthodoxy in general, believe that we will return in our prime, at our most vibrant, in a perfect state. This is why Jews do not typically practice cremation. To burn the body would be to desecrate it, which would prevent us from returning to the physical state, never mind the State of Israel.
This prompts a larger question: Won’t space in Israel be a little tight once all of the newly re-minted Jews take their rightful place on the 8,500 square miles of Holy Land? (And let’s not forget the issue of coordinating a few thousand years’ worth of undead Jews all the way to Israel. Last Thanksgiving, for instance, it was nearly impossible to coordinate the 14 living Jews who were coming to my house for a simple meal; I shudder to think what it would be like wrangling the totality of the Jewish dead halfway around the world.)
Fortunately, it seems like the Israel in question isn’t necessarily Israel as we know it. Rabbi Resnick says there are statements in the Midrash and also within Jewish literature which assert that the whole world will have the status of Israel, or that that the boundaries of Israel will expand to accommodate all of the Jewish people. Specifically, the Midrash teaches that in a Time to Come, “Jerusalem will diffuse its sanctity over the whole of the Land of Israel, and the Land of Israel will diffuse its sanctity over the whole world.” Should this come to pass, rolling to Israel should be a significantly less trying ordeal—what without the oceans, mountains, and molten center of the Earth to contend with—though there’s nothing in the literature which makes note of auxiliary Mounts of Olives opening up worldwide.
But as the rabbis say, we’ll know when it happens. I recommend brushing up on your somersaults and investing in some knee and elbow pads; it could be a long journey.
Goldberg, P.I. would like to thank Rabbi Raleigh Resnick and Rabbi Mayer Green. Other sources include To Live and Live Again, by Rabbi Nissan Dovid Dubov, and Holy Mountain: Two Paths to One God by Raphael H. Levine.
Got a Jewish question? Send it to goldbergpi@jewcy.com.
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Anonymous
jesus and zombies
Iliked the beginign but then you let it go. So give more scary or blow your head away detail because then it will have the better ending or it will be boring. But I loved it it was great.
I
Loved
It.
Anonymous
end of days
as often said of the Bible, "more is being revealed to you than you can understand". In this case, our Jewish ancestors of 3500 years ago knew nothing of physics or the complementary nature of energy and matter. Trying to explain these to them in ancient Aramaic or Hebrew would have been impossible.
The more I learn about matter and energy being the same but in different forms and speed of motion, the more I can believe in souls. It will be the soul, currently energy, that will be transformed back into matter, the body, at the end of days. And not the exact same body at a specific age, but a body with the ability to extract nutrients from nothing more than sunlight and water, so as not to overly tax existing resources ( you shall know them when you see them -- the "returnees" as opposed to the still living).
Anonymous
I beg to differ
Don't you have better pictures to which you will be resurrected?
Sorry, nothing personal.
Anonymous
Not about a flesh resurrection after physical death
We are supposed to be "bodily" resurrected now, and live as if in a perfected spiritual state (Eccl. 12:7). Thats what mikvah, sacrifice (killing off animal soul by substitution as if starting over) etc. were all about.
Not a form of god appeasement or cause and effect.
Ultimately on physically dead people are in a perfected state (I don't believe in bodiless souls, you don't need to add to this.
bipolar2
the myths of retribution
There are *apocalypses*, plural. The ecpyrosis of Stoic philosophy is a fiery end-of-time when time begins again to unroll itself exactly as before. Norse myth tells of a very different end by fire, Ragnarok -- the Twilight of the Gods.
But, none beats the middle eastern fable of how the "Hero who fights the chaos monster " became "Lord of the Apocalypse."
At the root of middle eastern myths of divine retribution lie the disgusting doctrines of return, revenge, punishment.
Of course, religions local in time and space dominate cramped thinking. The Big-3 monotheisms loom large. So, step back for a better look.
Among middle eastern religions, Zoroastrianism invents apocalyptic. The World Savior comes to renew his creation, raise the dead, punish the wicked, and dwell with his "children of light" forever in a blessed realm.
A terrible judgment visited upon the unrighteous gets taken up into Judaism, appearing in the book ascribed to Daniel. Thereafter, Judaism produces two important non-canonical apocalypses: Jubilees and 1Enoch. Xianity draws inspiration from the revenge soaked Jewish documents to produce the "Apocalypse" of John of Patmos.
They key to understanding all apocalypses within the middle eastern group of religions lies in realizing that each gets created during a time of foreign invasion, occupation, and sectarian violence.
Each is a product of a desire for revenge which can not be expressed except in words, words veiled in obscure symbols and arcane references.
See Norman Cohn's excellent, very readable "Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come" Yale Univ Press.
bipolar2
copyright asserted 2007
Anonymous
Re:
I'm no Jew, but I took a gander at this article, and I'm thinking to myself: "ok, is it just me or is something else being implied by the quoted scripture." (I've never read the Talmud)
"Our decomposed bodies will be flushed with the “Dew of Resurrection,” a sort of yeast of rebirth. Our bodies will then reform around a bone in the spine called the luz, which is generally considered to be the coccyx. We make time toward Israel to hook up with our souls. "
First off, as is taught in a few esoteric books, and primarily now in the writings of Samael Aun Weor, the tradition of kundalini yoga entails that the coccyx bone is the base of the spine from which the fire of kundalini is said to emerge, rise, awaken chakras, and form the foundation of what is to be the regeneration of the body, among other things implied such as immortality and the creation of the soul (being "born-again", hence rebirth, a process which requires time). There is alot of material in his books which suggest that differing people's of every age are like organisms which are born, live, reach an apex, and then degenerate (both physicly and socio-religiously as a group), thus if the quote is taken into context of meaning: 'the people of this age', 'whose bodies are degenerated as opposed to ages passed', then it might not be implicative of zombies or anything of the sort.
Next, alot of credible referrence to the bible is given for alot of the points listed. The author I mentioned makes a strong contention that Christianity, in it's original context was 100% Gnosticism, and as such, was eradicated (from public view) by persecution from "the church". Being Jews, I hope no offense is stirred by refferencing the New Testament in part, but nonetheless I find it most relevant to the topic:
Jesus lived for 33 years, and there are 33 vertebrae in the spinal column (through which the fire at the base, or coccyx supposably rises). Jesus died on a hill named Golgotha (place of the skull). In kundalini yoga, the fire at the base rises successively to each vertebrae until it reaches 'the skull', the head, the brain which is the seat of the soul (as I have heard). Jesus Christ, translated literally means Savior (Hebrew, Yeshuah) Light and Fire (Greek, Chrestos). So the Gnostics, when examining the life of Jesus, find that as a man he is also simultaneously the corporeally manifested esoteric symbol of a microcosmic paradigm which exists within each individual (i.e. the light and fire at the base of the spine), who when risen up on the cross (the spine, pole) to be sacrificed, represents the nehusthan of Moses, as is written in the New Testament (which likewise is an exoteric form of the esoteric practice of kundalini yoga, hidden within the Kabbalah). The author suggests that words such as: 'faith', 'chastity', 'belief', and 'virginity' have deeper connotations (esoteric and otherwise) which can, for instance be traced to their Latin root origins. Making their use in the bible vague and incomplete (I.e. believing in Jesus Christ entails works, complete investment of oneself out of love, not unlike what is claimed in James 2:26).
But since I see Easter also being mentioned, I'll touch on that as well, as it's completely relevant. Some historians believe Easter is a translation of Germanic and Babylonian words: 'Astara', or 'Ishtaar'. So what does Easter have to do with Isthar? Why do people paint easter eggs and observe a bunny to celebrate the ressurrection? Because before the Babylonian religion which heralded Ishtar became "degenerated", the fertility eggs and easter bunny were an extension of the fertility tradition which was kundalini yoga. The process to birth a child of the sun (hence the virgin birth).
Personally, after reviewing alot of bible verses, I've picked out some ones I think are either misinterpereted by Orthodoxy/Fundamentalism, or are altogether ignored, which completely support the details of what I've learned from SAW's books:
http://home.comcast.net/~mark004011/verses.txt
doodahman
Question
As a non-exclusory gentile (heaven is a big place where nothing, nothing ever happens), I probably wouldn't have a problem with a host of zombie Jews hitchhiking to Jerusalem, except for one thing. Will they try to eat our brains? If so, do the brains have to be kosher?
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