Beyond

Dear Friends,

I hope this Shabbat finds you well and enjoying the remnants of your Halloween candy.

Halloween today is a fun children’s holiday, harmless, for the most part, except to our waist-lines. But, its roots go back 2000 years to the ancient Celts, who lived in Ireland, England and northern France, and celebrated a festival called Samhain (pron “sah-win”) on the evening of October 31,, the night before their New Year. The day marked the end of the summer harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter. With the growing season coming to an end it was a time associated with death. The Celts believed that on the night before their New Year the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred and that ghosts of the dead returned to earth.

At about the same time that the ancient Celts developed their beliefs regarding death and the world beyond, we Jews began to develop our own notions of the afterlife. Those ideas shifted a number of times throughout our history, leaving us a rich and fascinating heritage about what happens to us after we die. I find that most Jews today are unaware of this and tend to associate the notion of life after death, of “heaven” and other ideas, with Christianity. In fact, the notion of life after death has been part of our tradition for many centuries, reaching back into antiquity before the arrival of Christianity.

I would like to invite you to join me for 4 evenings of learning and sharing on the topic of life after death, starting this Monday at 8:00 p.m. and continuing for each Monday night through the month of November. I look forward to hearing what you believe or don’t believe, what your experiences have been, as well as sharing some of the heritage that has come down to us through Jewish sources. The class is free; all you need to do is show up this Monday night and join us for what I hope to be an interesting and different kind of learning experience.

Shabbat Shalom,
Jordan

p.s. Don’t forget Sinai Sessions tomorrow night at 8:00!