“What is the Jewish view of the afterlife? Do we believe in heaven, in hell? The immortality of the soul? Reincarnation? Resurrection?” Rabbi Bonnie Koppell of Temple Chai says that these are the questions that she is asked most frequently.
There has always been a Jewish belief in communication with the realm in which God and the angels abide. When Abraham had a knife to Isaac’s throat as a sacrifice to God, an angel stopped him at the last minute. God spoke to Moses and Moses spoke God’s word to the people. That eventually included a tradition of communicating (or trying to communicate) with the deceased. For instance, kvitel, or little notes with a prayer, are placed on the graves of Rebbes or Jewish holy men with the hope that the soul of the deceased will intercede for the individual in heaven. While many Jewish individuals accept this, others are quite skeptical of the concept of communicating with a departed soul. Perhaps this is because the Torah states, “You shall not practice divination or soothsaying.”
“It does seem that there is a biblical prohibition on trying to contact the dead” says Rabbi Koppell, “but you are probably familiar with the story of Saul who does raise up the soul of Samuel to consult with him, so here is a king of Israel who violates this Torah principle. I don’t think that it is that black and white. I think that the Jewish religion can tolerate [what one might call] a paradox.”
Despite that prohibition, interest in afterlife communication is high. At a time when life has become so chaotic and changes in the world so overwhelming, it’s not surprising that more Jews are examining spirituality. Yet, what many seekers see as New Age thinking is really as old as the religion itself. The Torah speaks of mystical experiences, visiting angels, psychic dreams and prophecies.
“I personally believe that souls can communicate from the other side,” Rabbi Koppell says. While she has not personally experienced this, people she considers reliable have shared stories about such phenomena. For instance, “an Israeli pilot was flying a plane in combat and clearly heard the sound of his deceased father’s voice behind him, calling his name. He turned around and, at that moment, a bullet came flying through the windshield. Had he not heard this voice ... he would have been killed. ...
"I think that Judaism is about behavior. It’s about practice. It’s about what we do in this lifetime. I think there is a lot of standardization about how one should behave, how one should treat other people, what mitzvot one should do. I think there is broad latitude about belief. I think that it’s something that none of us does actually know and this kind of a field is wide open. I think that there is ... a broad spectrum within the fold of Judaism.
"As a non-Orthodox Rabbi, I look at it more from a general perspective, that your focus in this world should be in this world," Rabbi Koppell adds. "I don’t know that it’s advisable that we spend our time in this world trying specifically trying to communicate with those that are gone. Obviously, if someone loses a loved one, they feel a sense of their presence, they continue to talk to them. Sometimes, they feel like they are hearing from them as well. Our emphasis is to rightfully be in this world.”
Rabbi Mendy Levertov of Chabad of North Phoenix believes that people on the other side are “unlimited” and that they have the tools to contact us from the other side. “At the end of the day, if we are going to disturb them, we have to assume they are doing something productive.”
Is there a way besides soothsaying and kvitel to communicate with the other side? Enter the “Soul Phone.”
Gary Schwartz, a University of Arizona professor who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, developed an interest in afterlife communication while working as a professor at Yale. He is considered by many as the expert in this field and has actively conducted research in afterlife communication as a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at U of A. His laboratory and a few other private laboratories around the world are attempting to measure the energy of spirit under controlled circumstances.
He is working on creating the “Soul Phone,” which uses text, pictures and audio that he and other scientists in this collaborative effort believe may make accurate afterlife communication possible.
Schwartz indicated that the “Soul Phone” is both a concept and a development. The concept is based partly on the idea that there is a physics of spirit, and the development is that there may be technology to measure spirit. His effort is the first systematically study of spirit under controlled conditions in a university laboratory. He is using state of the art technology from various fields and integrating them to conduct his research.
“The Soul Phone will do everything that the smartphone does, but it will be driven by spirit," Schwartz says. "That’s the goal. Just because a star no longer exists doesn’t mean that we no longer have the light from the star. There is no longer any question about whether this statistically works. However, it is not reliable enough yet. Can we take this from a scientifically, statistical phenomenon to a reliable phenomenon that makes it useful in real life? We’re working on that.
"We are close to experiencing a Wright brothers' moment with regard to the technology of detecting spirit. The question now is, what will it become and what can it become and how long will it take for us to reach the point where it is working so effortlessly that all of us take all of this for granted? Is it possible that we may be awakening to the reality of using technology to create sacred partnerships?”
How will this form of spirit Skype help the general public? Perhaps in protecting the public from some unscrupulous mediums who seek to separate grieving individuals, desperate to communicate with departed loved ones, from their money.
Searching for answers in this realm has gone mainstream, Schwartz says.
“The population has grown, the losses are increasing and the baby boomers are more open to this, partly because they have obtained more knowledge, partly because of the science and partly because of the media,” he says.
His afterlife research laboratory is not the replica of a futuristic science fiction movie that one would expect. In one of the rooms, there is a computer screen with what he refers to as a Sophia pattern. The name “Sophia” comes from three different psychic mediums who told him at three different times who it was with no time for them to compare notes in between. On the computer, there are two blue lines, which indicate to Schwartz that Sophia may have entered the room.
While Schwartz’s laboratory works with many different kinds of signals, the patterns displayed in this particular room are actually patterns of background radiation, or super-high-frequency light/cosmic rays that he records, acting like a special type of Geiger counter. This computer is set up to detect spontaneous radiation from a variety of environmental causes.
He and other scientists working on this collaborative effort believe their research shows that a spirit can use this kind of technology and can alter or influence the radiation that is being detected, and use the altered patterns to communicate with this world through the background noise produced by background radiation. According to the research conducted up to this point, he says, spirits are simply changing the patterns in the noise in order to facilitate communication.
Schwartz says that while working with this spirit called Sophia, for instance, that two high blue bars, one right next to the other, were consistently produced, and he calls that her pattern. However, with a noisy signal that pattern could possibly reproduce randomly, he says.
Schwartz seeks enough repetition of the pattern to rule out chance, the possibility that it's random.
He says that he’ll enter the room and ask, “Is anybody here?”
If Sophia’s “yes” pattern displays, he’ll ask, “If this is you Sophia, please show me your sign.”
If he sees the double bar in the next 15-20 seconds, he’ll ask “Sophia” to repeat the pattern. If he asks a yes or no question, he requires seeing three yeses in a row before he accepts that it’s a “yes.”
He believes this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Throughout the ages, people have wondered where you go when you die. Torah tells us not to communicate with the deceased even though this communication occurs repeatedly throughout Jewish history, whether through angels speaking, dreams or visions.
Does this theoretical and technological possibility change things? Would it be OK to communicate with our departed loved ones this way since it is not through a psychic medium, or soothsayer? Could this someday replace kvitelach?
The Jewish people have always been a people who work hard to excel and study hard to become educated. There will always be visionaries and, at the other end of the spectrum, skeptics. This is a scientific quest and perhaps, this too will soon be soaring as high and as reliably as the Wright brothers' flying machine.
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