August 6, 2009
Here’s a riddle: When is good news not good news? Answer: when a Christian evangelist knocks on your door with the “good news for modern man.”
“Evangelist” comes from the Greek euaggelion, which gets pronounced evangelions — “eu” meaning “good” and “angelos” (like “angel”), “messenger. Your visiting evangelist is “a messenger of good” announcing the Gospel — from old Anglo-Saxon, meaning a good story (“Godspell,” or “gut spiel”). The Christian “Gospel” is the “good story” or “good news” that “with the resurrection of Jesus,” we are saved from the finality of death. There is life beyond the grave.
You can close the door in the evangelist’s face, but here’s another tactic. “I have good news for you,” you announce. “My religion too has a gospel. Studying Torah and performing mitzvot already assure me of eternal life. Blessed is God who is good and does good!”
The blessing part of this response is the fourth and last benediction of the Birkat Hamazon (“Grace after Meals”) that our sedra this week commands. “V’ahalta v’savata uverahta” — “When you have eaten your fill, praise” God. Our standard Birkat Hamazon praises God for feeding the entire world, providing us with the Land of Israel, rebuilding Jerusalem, and “being good and doing good.”
The Talmud traces “being good and doing good” to the persecutions following the second-century Bar Kochba revolt. The war of 70 was nothing compared to this second rebellion, which resulted in a draconian ban on burying the Jewish dead. God, says the Talmud, kept the bodies from rotting and then induced the emperor to permit their burial after all. We bless God who “is good” (the first miracle) and who “does good” (the second).
Burial mattered because the rabbis believed that properly buried bodies would someday be resurrected. This became one of the few cardinal statements of Jewish faith. If it sounds vaguely like the “good news” in Christianity, it should, because whatever Jesus taught about being delivered from death came from the rabbinic tradition of which he was a part. The rabbinic “good news,” too, is the promise of life after death.
That is why the rabbis prescribed this blessing not just for ending meals but for hearing “good news.” Given the presence of gospel-thinking in the first and second century, not just among Christians but among Jews, it will come as no surprise to find that the rabbis meant something technical here: not just any old good news (like passing an exam) or even really good news (like having a baby), but really, really good news: There is life after death.
If you doubt all this, look at the blessing for hearing bad news (the opposite): “Blessed is God, the judge of truth” (baruch dayan ha’emet), exactly what we say when we hear about a death, and to this day, part of the ritual of tearing our clothes (or a black ribbon) when we go into mourning. Bad news is death; good news is the opposite: life ever after.
Religion is a whole lot more than the obvious signs of it, like being a good person and attending synagogue. We hardly touch religion’s essence if we limit it to ethics and ritual. Religion posits a vision of what might be. It thrives on the infinitude of possibilities that science excludes. Artists come closer; think of the church’s heritage of painters, sculptors, and composers whose genius still successfully manages to suggest the sublime — even to Jews who share none of their Christian imagery. Because medieval Jews were too poor to give us anything comparable, our artistic heritage is spiritually deprived. But we need not, on that account, remain spiritually unimaginative.
Let us stretch our imagination, then, and take seriously the rabbinic certainty of life beyond the grave, not literally as bodily resurrection, perhaps, but as a return to some form of cosmic consciousness from which life as we know it derives. Think of resurrection as just the best way rabbis 2,000 years ago could think about meaningful existence being extended beyond our physical lifetimes. What did they know about quantum mechanics, black holes, and the conversion of matter into energy? Their store of metaphors was not very large.
Even in the 21st century, we are at an elementary stage of human evolution. But the frailty of our imagination should not vitiate the underlying idea that we are called upon to imagine: the certainty that we matter more in the universal scheme of things than we can intellectualize, that there is some form of life after death, some manner of meaning in a larger whole than our own physical lifetime can accommodate. That’s the Jewish “gospel,” which is very good news indeed.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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