6 Things Jews Believe about Reincarnation

Your Soul is Made Up of Five Different Parts

Jewish esoteric thought, or Kabbalah, teaches that each person’s soul is made up of five different parts. Two of these parts are kind of kept tucked away in the Heavenly realms, which means that while they are still attached to you, and can still influence you spiritually, it’s a one-way street: your bad actions and behavior can’t tarnish or damage these bits of your soul. So really, you’re down here to work on the other three parts of your soul. Level 1 Soul is called the nefesh, or animal soul. You get this level as soon as you’re born, and it’s the soul that’s responsible for what’s often described as the life force or will to live. Level 2 Soul is called the ruach, or spirit. This is the soul that’s associated with your emotions and feelings. Level 3 Soul Is called the neshama, or Divine soul. This soul is the bit of you that only wants to do good, that only wants to stay close to God, that only wants world peace, good relationships with everyone, and an end to suffering and starvation in the world. It’s usually associated with your intellect, or mind.

Everyone Walking Around in 2015 is an ‘Old’ Soul

At this stage in history, there are no ‘new’ or complete souls. Every single one of us walking around in 2015 has a soul that’s made up of different bits of different people from the past. That’s part of what makes modern life so confusing, intense and ‘heavy’, because there is so much spiritual unfinished business going on. Say Mikey Cohen still needs to fix his Soul Level 1, (nefesh), and that Linda Abrahams still needs to fix her Soul Level 2, (ruach), and that Eli Strauss still needs some work on his Soul Level 3, (neshama). Now, God creates a new body called Susan Freeman, and gives her a soul that’s a combination of all these other people’s unrectified soul parts. That poor woman (ie, us… ) now has the job of tying up all the spiritual loose-ends that kind of got ignored for a few thousand years.

Jewish Purgatory (aka ‘Hell’) Only Takes Care of the Sins between Man and God

Jewish purgatory (what’s often incorrectly referred to as ‘hell’) only fixes the bad stuff a person did in relation to God. If you didn’t keep the commandments the way you should, like observing Shabbat (the Sabbath day), for example, then purgatory pays down that debt. But purgatory doesn’t atone for any of the bad stuff you did to people. If you stole something and didn’t give it back – you’ll get reincarnated to take care of that debt. If you hurt someone badly and never apologized for what you did – you’ll come back again, and this time you’ll be the one that’s on the receiving end of some pretty nasty behavior, to even things up spiritually. If you treated your spouse like rubbish the last go round – chances are high that in this lifetime, you’ll be married to someone who literally makes your life hell. As soon as you understand that reincarnation is a basic tenet of the Jewish faith, it suddenly starts to answer a whole bunch of those difficult questions about why apparently ‘bad’ things happen to apparently ‘good’ people.

No-one Suffers for No Reason

In the bible, Job became the ultimate poster-boy for good people going through some very ‘bad’ things. On the face of it, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why Job had to endure so much tragedy and trauma. In that lifetime, he was a pillar of his community, and the most righteous person of his generation. But to find out what was really going on there, we have to look back at an ancient Jewish midrash, that explains that Job was the reincarnation of Terach, Abraham’s wicked, idol-making father. At the end of Terach’s life, he regretted all the idols he’d made, and all the pagan stuff he’d been up to his eyeballs in. He wanted to come back to God and to serve God altruistically, without expecting anything in return. When he got reincarnated as Job, that’s when Terach’s soul got its chance to show God that he was serious about sticking to his belief in the Creator, regardless of how much suffering he was going through.