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Is There Life After Death? Jewish Thinking on the Afterlife

Amy Schwartz / Moment

For a long time, I’ve thought that we Jews did not believe in an afterlife — that we believed we should live well and do what’s right for its own sake, not for the sake of entering heaven after we die.

Turns out that this is just one of a multitude of afterlife beliefs in Jewish tradition — many Jews believe in reincarnation, many believe in resurrection on Judgment day and some even believe our souls are transported to Jerusalem through a network of subterranean tunnels while being beaten to a pulp by demons (which sounds like no fun at all).

I’m sticking with “do right because it’s the right thing to do.” I like the sound of that. If we are rewarded in an afterlife, that’s a bonus. But I think that when our brains stop it’s lights out.

Re-learning how to read books

I read very few books in the late 2010s, while consuming massive quantities of articles and posts. That bothered me. A few years ago, I learned that book-reading is a skill, different from reading articles and certainly very different from reading social media posts. I retaught that skill to myself. Now I’m up to about a dozen books a year and I can live with that.

I generally read two books at once. I like to do one fiction and one non-fiction.

When I was a teen-ager, I read five books a week. I had more free time then.

Cory: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing

Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: Obama ran a grassroots political campaign but put his “organization into an induced coma between elections,” thereby losing “an important source of discipline and feedback” … “Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer.”

For me, one of the big lessons of 2024 is that political campaigns and primary fights aren’t just a means for the people to choose candidates; they are also a means for the candidates and parties to learn what the people want and adjust strategy and messaging accordingly. Harris and the Democrats deprived themselves of that opportunity and we are all paying the penalty.

J.D. Shapiro, who wrote the screenplay for “Battlefield Earth,” apologizes for writing “the suckiest movie ever” (NY Post) — I believe this gentleman is not sincere in his apology and in fact has no regrets. Heh. (Thanks, Cory!)

Excellent history and photo essay on Tristan de Cunha, the "remotest [inhabited] island in the world," population 265 as of 2016

Messy Nessy Chic:

Not a single ship visited Tristan da Cunha from 1909 until 1919, until the HMS Yarmouth finally stopped by to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Accessible on by sea, Tristan da Cunha is in fact an archipelago, the remotest inhabited one in the world, although only the main island was settled by man, with a permanent population of 265 residents as of September 2016.

There is no airstrip; the island is accessible only by a difficult six-day boat voyage from South Africa.

They don’t have home internet, but they do have an internet cafe. Or did in 2016.

I’ve been sick with a bad cold or flu. I slept nearly all of Thursday, most of Friday and today is the first day I woke up feeling relatively normal.

While I was sick, I had terrible dreams that we’d re-elected 🤡 as President and —

[checks news]

Fuck.

(I really was sick. And 🤡 really is President. Alas, I never forgot it, though.)

Andy Kaufman, subject of a new documentary, "anticipated our reality-bent world"

Jonah Weiner / NYTimes

Kaufman “set up camp on ever-advancing frontiers of unpleasantness, all the better to mystify crowds about where the joke, if there was one, ended.” You were never quite sure what was a bit and what was real.

There’s a direct line from Kaufman’s recurring routines as an obnoxious lounge singer and misogynistic wrestler to Musk and Bannon throwing Nazi salutes and never clarifying whether they are really Nazis.