'You Are Dust and To Dust You Shall Return' Was Never Said About the Soul
October 8, 2020
A rabbi got
a phone call from a college student. He said to rabbi, “I am on my way and I
need to ask you a question”. The boy sounds very anxious. He pulls up in front
of a house, screeching to a stop, jumps out of the car, and in a panic he said
to rabbi, “Am I going to hell?” The
rabbi said,” Hold on your nerve”. This boy was not particularly religious or
observant. The boy said to rabbi, “I have a roommate on campus, an evangelist,
and who has been telling me that if I don’t convert I am gonna go to hell. So,
for couple of months his roommate humoured him, for couple of months he ignored
him and now it is getting to him. This boy now wants to know from rabbi whether
he is going to go hell or not. The rabbi said to the boy, “why did you have to
come all the way from Minneapolis to Saint Paul to ask me”. There is a Rabi on
campus. Why didn’t you ask him? He said, “I did”. “What did the rabbi say?” He
said, “We don’t believe in hell”. Rabi said, “You don’t like that answer”. The
boy said that is not an answer. If I end up in hell, am I going say my rabbi
doesn’t believe in it. The boy said I don’t want to know what he believes in, I
want to know if I am going or not.
Are we
really going to go hell? Do we even know what it is? What happens after death?
There is a very sad story.
There was a
woman up in the Louth where Bob Dillon was born. She lost her husband at a very
young age and she had two little girls. She went into trauma; she went into
therapies for many years. She was now doing fine but her children had grown a
little bit and they were asking where is daddy? She didn’t know what to answer.
She was doing laundry in a Laundromat and there was a catholic friend who was
doing laundry next to her, whom she knew. She asked her catholic friend the
girls are asking for daddy I don’t know what to tell them. The friend said to
her tell them that the daddy is now with the God, he is in paradise, among the
angels and so on. She thought wow that is a beautiful idea. I am gonna go and
tell my children. But then she thought, wait a minute that is Catholicism. So,
she called a rabbi in Minneapolis, which is a three hour drive from Louth. She
made an appointment with the rabbi to come down to see him. She came down and
asked rabbi do we believe in life after death. The rabbi said personally I
don’t, my wife does, so you can believe it or not. She got very offended and
was too polite to say anything to rabbi. She told her friend back in the Louth
that I didn’t go there to ask him about his personal or wife’s opinion. I
wanted to know what Judaism says about life after death. She went back to the
catholic friend and said to her, “tell me more”. Walkaway there was an Israeli
couple and she spoke to them as well and they said to her you went to a wrong
rabbi.
The rabbi
who is narrating this story met this rabbi who gave her a personal opinion at
some convention. The narrating rabbi said to that rabbi that do you know that
woman from Louth to whom you met. She is very angry at you. The rabbi said,
“Why?” The narrating rabbi said she came all the way down to hear what Torah
says about life after death? You didn’t give her a satisfying answer. He said,
“Oh these people… they want simplistic answers”. The narrating rabbi said, “why
simplistic, simple may be”. The narrating rabbi, “what do we know about life
after death?” First thing, is there life after death? It is a ridiculous
question. Life is a life. Life lives. Life can’t die. Just like death can’t
live, life can’t die. Living things live. So, the question “is life after death
a nonsense question”. Is there death after life? Can a living thing die? That
is a good question and the answer is no. So, what happens is that the soul that
is a living being enters the body and the body borrows the life from the soul because
inherently the body is not a living thing, the soul is a living thing, and when
they separate they go on their own ways. What happens, the body returns to the
dust and the soul goes back being a soul among souls. So, you can call it
anything but you are describing a continuous process of the living soul. So
what die’s is dead and what is alive lives. So what lives on? Every aspect of
your life. Your emotions, your memories, your relationships, your wisdom, your
knowledge, your pains and pleasures.
They all
live on……..
Life is
true, life is real, and the death is not its ultimate goal. The dust you are
and the dust you shall return was never said about the soul.
----
Dr. Arif Bashir is a PhD in Clinical
Biochemistry and is an invited referee of Springers Tumor Biology, the
Netherland
Original Headline: Life after death: A story from Louth
Source: The Greater Kashmir
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-spiritualism/dust-dust-shall-return-said/d/123078
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