Mysticism is undoubtedly the core of life. It is the driving force of human life. It is not one, however, that can be explained by reason or logic. Where reason and logic come into play faith finishes, the Haham Dr. Hoses Gaster said lecturing here to-day on “The Spiritual Aspect of Life According to Jewish Teaching” to the members of the Jewish Society for Psychic Research, which claims to spread “The Truth Of Survival”.
Materialism is not the solution of the problem of matter, Dr. Gaster went on. Even the wonder of the splitting of the atom only opens up a new gate to the Unknown.
What have we to say of these spiritual problems from the Jewish point of view?
The physicists speak of disintegration and reintegration of the Universe. Does it not mean death and resurrection? Does it in any way destroy the fundamental principle of unity in the world? And if there is unity in the physical world, how much more so is there unity in the spiritual world? Absolute unity then: change and transformation.
What is to-day life is to-morrow death, Dr. Gaster said, and what is death to-day is to-morrow life.
I have come here to say, be neither like Saul among the Prophets, nor Paul among the Apostles. That is, I have come here not to dogmatise, but to view this matter strictly from the traditional Jewish point of view, and from that point of view the driving force is the Divine Spirit.
I stress the word “divine”. No other interpretation has ever satisfied the world.
I stand on the basis of the Bible and of tradition, and although the Bible does not speak directly of metaphysical problems-it was a book for the masses-yet there are words and allusions which show the trend of the conception of spiritual domain of our ancestors, the beginning of the idea that the divine spark cannot perish.
Dr. Gaster went on to quote from Isaish…”The dead will live; those who sleep in the dust will rise up and praise God”. From the Pentateuch: “He will be gathered at his death to his fathers”. (by which, Dr. Gaster said, is meant “His spirit will be gathered up unto his fathers”); from the Jewish sages, who often refer to those who “slumber” in the dust; from the Eighteen Benedictions: “He will revive the dead”, Ezekiel and the dry bones, and the calling of the spirit from the four corners of the earth; from Jeremiah and the Ragadah, and the Cabbala.
I mention all these, Dr. Gaster said, to show that it is only prejudice which says that trying to solve the problem of how to grow stronger in the faith in immortality is not part and parcel of Judaism.
What the Hereafter is, what form the spirit will take is beyond our ken. We do not know whether it is individualistic. Those of us who wish to go a little further must remember that we cannot dispel even a little of the darkness except with the strongest faith in the Creator and the soul’s immortality, and then only with keen investigation and proper preparation.
Slowly we must rise, step by step, to remove some of the obscurities, but we cannot draw general conclusions from partial results. We must learn slowly to understand, and so on to illumihe. To-day in the physical world there are things that people never dreamt of. For those who wish to know the wonders of the spiritual, the door is open.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
