Shmuel Pernicone

Kol D'mamah Dakah Shmuel Pernicone

In an effort to reconcile religious and scientific truth, Kol D'mamah Dakah reinterprets the textual sources for the afterlife as metaphors for a person's legacy. In the world that comes after we die, our body may return to dust but our spiritual shadow remains: children we reared, literature we wrote, study halls we built, lives we touched... everything but our body lives on. The essay delves into Tanakh and Talmud, Rambam and Ramchal, neuroscience and near death experience, rabbis and philosophers both modern and ancient, and concludes that however disquieting this truth may seem, it too is for the best-ethically, scientifically, and spiritually. "Be not like servants who serve the master on condition that they receive a reward. Rather be like servants who serve the master irrespective of any reward. And let the fear of heaven be upon you." (Pirkei Avot 1:3)