Sometimes, we Jews become jealous of some of our Christian friends. They speak about going to a better place after they die. They are confident that they will be reunited with all their loved ones who preceded them in death. We attend Christian funerals and hear ministers rehearse the glories that await the deceased in the hereafter.

At those times, we feel like outsiders yearning for some reassurance that our life is never really over, that it continues after death. It would give us solace to think that some day in the hereafter we will once again embrace our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives, our sons and daughters, and our closest friends.

We have labored under the impression that we Jews don't believe in an afterlife, that life is over when we are interred in the grave. As a result, we feel bereft of hope. Our minds rebel against the thought that our brief day on earth is all that there is and that we will never encounter our loved ones again.

Let me set the record straight as we enter into this New Year. We Jews have been seduced by an age-old misconception. Contrary to popular impressions, we Jews do embrace a belief in life after death.

Those of us who have visited Jerusalem have seen the large Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. It is opposite the place where the Temple once stood and will some day be rebuilt. Pious Jews through the ages have clamored to be buried in that cemetery. They want to be the first to arise from the grave with the arrival of the Messiah.

Resurrection figures prominently in the world of Orthodox Jews. They forbid cremation because doing so represents a denial of the resurrection. In every worship service, they praise God as a “Mehayei metim,” as one who bring the dead back to life.

They strongly discourage autopsies, except under carefully defined circumstances, because dissecting the body may affect the way the body will return to earth in the future.

Generally, we Reform and Conservative Jews have abandoned the age-old belief in resurrection, though we retain some of the traditional language about it in our prayerbooks. One of my professors at the Hebrew Union College once quipped that Reform Jews have rejected resurrection because they don't want to have to face their Orthodox grandparents again.

But because we do not embrace resurrection, does not mean that we have no concept of an afterlife. There are three other views that we Reform Jews do articulate. One is the immortality of the soul. Our bodies die and return to dust.

Yet our soul, that part of God residing within us, never dies. It lives on forever. It returns to God, the Soul of all souls. God granted that soul to us when we were born and God will take it from us when we die. But our soul itself is imperishable.

There is a third view, similar to that of the immortality of the soul. It may surprise many of us to learn that some Jews believe in reincarnation, that the soul of the deceased will return to earth to occupy another body. This concept is popular among those who immerse themselves in the Kabbalah.

Franz Kafka, the noted Czech Jewish writer, found healing in such a belief after the tragic death of his sister at age 16. His sister was so kind and loving. He kept asking himself how God could take such a sweet and gentle young woman and was unable to ease his overwhelming grief.

One day, Kafka wandered into a small synagogue in Prague. There he encountered a group of mystics, who were experts in Kabbalah. They were discussing their views of life after death. Kafka listened intently as they described the next world, where they said there are ten spheres.

At the center are God and the souls of all the righteous people. Then, in each progressively larger sphere, are lesser and lesser evolved souls.

When a person is about to be born, a soul is sent from one of these spheres to join the body. The soul is told: “You have twenty years or sixty years or eighty years. At the end of that time, you will be recalled.

If you have influenced the body toward goodness, you will be promoted from the tenth sphere to the ninth sphere. Then you will return to God or to the next world, and after a brief respite, will be sent down to earth again.”

The goal of each soul is to progress from the tenth sphere to the very central sphere. Then the soul no longer has to return to earth. It finds eternal peace.

These mystics said that this theory helped them to understand life. When we meet people who are very cruel or selfish, we should not to criticize them too much. Perhaps they weren't lucky. They may have received a soul from the tenth sphere.

Conversely, when we meet people who are kind, compassionate and generous, we shouldn't praise them too much. Perhaps they were lucky and got a soul from the third sphere, which had already been down to earth countless times.

And then these mystics added that when a young child dies, we shouldn't cry too much. In all likelihood, that soul needed to come to earth for just a brief time to be purified so it could join God in paradise.

Kafka then wrote: “I walked out of that synagogue and, for the first time, I had peace of mind. Now I knew where my sister was.”

There is yet a fourth view of life after death. It is popular with most Reform Jews. We maintain that our beloved dead remain alive in our hearts and minds.

At a recent Bar Mitzvah here in this Sanctuary, family members told me that during the morning they could keenly feel the very presence of the young man's grandfather who had died years before.

Our Reform prayerbook states this idea most eloquently: “By love are they remembered and in memory do they live.” When we and our children fondly recall our loved ones whose earthly life has ended, when we adopt their highest values and ideals and transmit them to the coming generations, we grant these loved ones their immortality.

To sum up, we Jews over the centuries have adopted four different ways of thinking about life after death: resurrection, immortality of the soul, reincarnation, and living on through memory and influence. Yet, by and large, we Jews are not preoccupied with life after death and for good reasons.

If we focus too much on a life after death, we will neglect many of the essential challenges we need to face here on earth. We see this happening with some fundamentalist Christian groups.

They are oblivious to the abuses of the environment, as an example. They say, “What's the difference? This world is going to end very soon and, as believers, we are going to a better place.”

For Jews, this is dangerous and irresponsible thinking. It represents a wholesale abandonment of our central mission which is Tikkun Olam, our duty to repair and heal a broken and aching world.

Even though we Jews may believe in life after death, we still say that what happens after we die is not that important. We emphasize the crucial phase of our existence is between our physical birth and our physical death.

When we visit a cemetery, we note on many tombstones the dash between the date of birth and the date of death. The dash is the most critical part of that designation. It is that span of our earthly years that we are urged to grow our souls, to become the best men and women God intended us to be.

In Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashanah is called Yom Hadin, the Day of Judgment. God judges us actions during this High Holy Day period. How can we modern, sophisticated, and seemingly secular Jews translate that idea of God as Judge?

I think that it means that on this holiday, we must submit to judgment by our highest self, which is that element of God within each of us. As God's deputies, we must be the severe critic of ourselves. We must ask ourselves: How do we measure up? Can we honestly pass this demanding test?

Each year, we begin our Selichot service, by recalling the Hasidic tale of Rabbi Zusya. Rabbi Zusya is reminded that when he is summoned for final judgment at the end of his days, he will not be asked, “Why were you not like Moses or King Solomon, or Prophet Isaiah, or Rabbi Akiba?”

Rather he will be asked, “Why were you not like Zusya? Why did you not become everything you were meant to become?”

Lillian Hellman, the celebrated American playwright, was widely acclaimed as one of America's foremost dramatists. She had over a dozen notable plays to her credit. One would think that she would have considered her life a resounding success.

Yet, she titled her autobiography, An Unfinished Woman. In the book, she explained this puzzling title: “All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time.” Lillian Hellman realized that her life was only partially lived. She could have made much more of her gifts and her days.

Our challenge then is to ask ourselves honestly if we have tapped our full potential as human beings. We probably will discover that we have been too wrapped up in our selves. If we have spent our years living selfishly, trying to satisfy our egos by acquiring more power, more spacious homes, more wealth, if we have wasted our days in trivial and superficial matters, now is the time to begin to change.

If we have cultivated friendships solely because they will give us greater popularity in the community, or improve our bottom line, or produce referrals, now is the time to change. In fact, the word Shanah, in the expression, Rosh Hashanah, comes from a Hebrew root which means “to change.”

We can change by reaching out to a person in need with a warm smile, an attentive listening ear, a caring phone call, an invitation to our home, a personal visit.

We can change by contributing a generous portion of our money to organizations that foster those goals that improve the lives of others.

We can change by emulating several of our Temple members who each week faithfully deliver Meals on Wheels to shut-ins or bring cheer to those wounded warriors at Brooke Army Hospital, whose bodies have been maimed in Iraq.

There is so much work to be done on earth that we shouldn't worry about what will happen to us after we die. As we ponder our earthly journey, whether it will be brief or long, let us not focus so much on our standard of living that we neglect our standard of life.

As we enter this New Year, let us raise our standard of life higher and higher. And when our time on earth comes to an end and God will ask us if we became the best men and women we could be, may we be able to answer with a resounding and convincing, “Yes.” Amen.

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