The World to Come

Abstract

Abstract Jewish thinkers have held two opposing conceptions of life after death, or what is known in the Jewish tradition as the World-to-Come (Olam Haba). On the ‘intellectualist’ conception maintained primarily by Maimonides and Gersonides, the World-to-Come is an immaterial realm that exists in the present, which one enters upon death as a ‘pure intellect’ in virtue of the knowledge acquired throughout one’s life. On the alternative ‘supernaturalist’ conception defended by Nachmanides, Crescas, and others, the World-to-Come is the future post-Messianic reality of our own physical world, which one enters by being resurrected in a physical body when this time arrives. In this chapter, we’ll see that each of the two classic views faces challenges in providing a satisfying explanation of how it is that we can come to exist in the World-to-Come as ourselves. After presenting the central commitments of each view and briefly sketching these challenges, the author of this chapter proposes an alternative direction for thinking about the World-to-Come that is grounded in and inspired by Hasidic Jewish thought. It is suggested that the Hasidic tradition can be interpreted so as to offer an alternative conception of the World-to-Come—one that integrates certain core aspects of the two familiar views into a unified metaphysical picture, and may have the resources to resolve the difficulties they face at the same time.