Bereavement In Judaism Bereavement in Judaism (אֲבֵלוּת, avelut, mourning) is a combination of minhag and mitzvah derived from Judaism’s classical Torah and rabbinic texts. The details of observance and practice vary according to each Jewish community. Mourners In Judaism, the principal mourners are the first-degree relatives: parent, child, sibling, and spouse. There are some...
What Is Second Death? The second death is an eschatological concept in Judaism and Christianity, related to punishment after the first, natural death. Judaism Main article: Jewish eschatology Although the term is not found in the Hebrew Bible, Sysling, in his study (1996) of Teḥiyyat ha-metim (“resurrection of the dead”) in the Palestinian Targums,...
Adam And Eve Adam and Eve, according to the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions, were the first man and woman. They are central to the belief that humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors. It also provides the basis for the doctrines...
The Resurrection In Revealed Scriptures This article covers The Resurrection in Revealed Scriptures. The Qur’an, the last heavenly Scriptures, has four main themes: God’s Existence and Unity, the Resurrection and afterlife, Prophethood, and worship and justice. It emphasizes the Resurrection far more than all previous Scriptures. Despite the distortion it...
Creation And Resurrection Your Creation And Your Resurrection Are As But A Single Soul What does the verse: Your creation and your resurrection are as but a single soul (31:28) mean? Answer: That the Divine Power can create and resurrect humanity as easily as it creates and resurrects one person. For...
Seven Heavens In religious or mythological cosmology, the seven heavens refer to seven levels or divisions of Heaven. The concept, derived from ancient Mesopotamian religions, can be found in the Abrahamic religions such as Islam, Judaism and Christianity; a similar concept is also found in some Indian religions such as Hinduism. Some of these traditions,...
Garden Of Eden The Garden of Eden, also called Paradise, is the biblical “garden of God” described in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Ezekiel. Genesis 13:10 refers to the “garden of God”, and the “trees of the garden” are mentioned in Ezekiel 31. The Book of Zechariah and the Book of Psalms also...
Speaking About The Resurrection Our next step should be to talk about the resurrection. The child should believe in their hearts that as soon as this life ends a new life, an everlasting afterlife, will begin. Science, wisdom and reality point out that Allah created this universe and that He...
Gog And Magog Gog and Magog (גּוֹג וּמָגוֹג, Gog u-Magog) appear in the Hebrew Bible as individuals, peoples, or lands. In Ezekiel 38, Gog is an individual and Magog is his land; in Genesis 10 Magog is a man, but no Gog is mentioned; and centuries later Jewish tradition changed...
Heaven In Judaism This article covers Heaven in Judaism. Shamayim (שָׁמַיִם), the Hebrew word for “heaven” (literally heavens, plural), denotes one component of the three-part biblical cosmology, the other elements being erets (the earth) and sheol (the underworld). Shamayim is the dwelling place of God and other heavenly beings, erets is the home of the living, and sheol is the realm of the dead, including, in post-Hebrew Bible literature...
Sheol She’ol (שְׁאוֹל Šəʾōl), in the Hebrew Bible, is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God. The inhabitants of Sheol are the...
What Is Jewish Mysticism? Academic study of Jewish mysticism, especially since Gershom Scholem‘s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), distinguishes between different forms of mysticism across different eras of Jewish history. Of these, Kabbalah, which emerged in 12th-century Europe, is the most well known, but not the only typologic form, or the...
Spiritual Practice A spiritual practice or spiritual discipline (often including spiritual exercises) is the regular or full-time performance of actions and activities undertaken for the purpose of inducing spiritual experiences and cultivating spiritual development. A common metaphor used in the spiritual traditions of the world’s great religions is that of walking a path. Therefore, a...
Religion And Drugs This article covers the relationship between religion and drugs. Many religions have expressed positions on what is acceptable to consume as a means of intoxication for spiritual, pleasure, or medicinal purposes. Psychoactive substances may also play a significant part in the development of religion and religious views...
What Is Kabbalah? The word Kabbalah means many different things to many different people. In a nutshell, it is an ancient wisdom that reveals how the universe and life work. On a literal level, the word Kabbalah means “receiving.” It’s the study of how to receive fulfillment in our lives....
What Is Divine Retribution? Divine retribution is supernatural punishment of a person, a group of people, or everyone by a deity in response to some action. Many cultures have a story about how a deity exacted punishment upon previous inhabitants of their land, causing their doom. An example of divine retribution is the story found in...
What Is Jewish Apocrypha? Jewish apocrypha includes texts written in the Jewish religious tradition either in the Intertestamental period or in the early Christian era, but outside the Christian tradition. It does not include books in the canonical Hebrew Bible, nor those accepted into the canon of some or all...
What Is Apocrypha? Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. Biblical apocrypha is a set of texts included in the Latin Vulgate and Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible. While Catholic tradition considers some of these texts to be deuterocanonical, Protestants consider them apocryphal. Thus, Protestant bibles do not include...
What Is Zohar? The Zohar (זֹהַר, “Splendor” or “Radiance”) is the foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah. It is a group of books including commentary on the mystical aspects of The Torah (the five books of Moses) and scriptural interpretations as well as material on...
Jewish Renewal Jewish Renewal (התחדשות יהודית, hitḥadeshut yehudit) is a recent movement in Judaism which endeavors to reinvigorate modern Judaism with Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and musical practices. Specifically, it seeks to reintroduce the “ancient Judaic traditions of mysticism and meditation, gender equality and ecstatic prayer” to synagogue services. It is distinct from the baal teshuva...