Reviving the dead

TO RISE FROM THE DEAD? - MISHKAN T'FILAH AND A REFORM LITURGICAL CONUNDRUM
by Rabbi Richard Sarason, PhD
An example of the desire to include in Mishkan T’filah more passages from the traditional liturgy and to reconsider earlier Reform deletions is the treatment of m’chayeih hameitim, the affirmation of God’s resurrection of the dead, in the second prayer of the Amidah. This belief was controversial in its origins, went on to become a hallmark of classical rabbinic theology that was given liturgical prominence in the daily Amidah, and then became controversial again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among modern western Jews....
The early Israelites believed in a shadowy afterlife in the underworld (Sheol, somewhat like the Greek Hades), without any reward or punishment after death. The individual joined his/her ancestors; immortality was attained through one’s descendants. The problem of ultimate reward and punishment for individuals became acute later, in the Hellenistic era, which had a fuller concept of individual, as opposed to corporate, identity. The late biblical book of Daniel, from the period of the Maccabean wars (167-163 B.C.E.), frets about the problematic situation of those righteous martyrs who fought for Judean victory against the Syrians but did not live to experience its fruits. The solution? “At the time of the end . . .many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). This is likely the earliest articulation of the concept of resurrection in Jewish literature.
At the end of the Second Commonwealth period, a belief in bodily resurrection in order to receive reward or punishment after death was a hallmark of Pharisaic conviction, opposed by the Sadducees (both Josephus, the Roman-Jewish historian, and the Gospels attest to this). The Mishnah (c. 200 C.E.), the earliest rabbinic text, maintains that Pharisaic belief and excoriates anyone who holds that the belief in resurrection cannot be found in the Torah; such a person has no share in the world-to-come (Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1).
The belief in resurrection figures prominently in the G’vurot, the second prayer in the rabbinic Amidah. The theme of this prayer is God’s power over life and death: God causes the rain and dew to fall, reviving plant life. By analogy, God will keep faith with “those who sleep in the dust” (coming from the Daniel passage quoted above), and bring them back to bodily life in the messianic age, for both reward and punishment. The expression m’chayeih (ha)meitim, “Reviver of the dead,” occurs four times in the traditional wording, for emphasis.
By the nineteenth century, this religious concept had become problematic. Enlightened Protestants in Western Europe affirmed the immortality of the soul, but not the bodily resurrection of the dead. Bodily resurrection was neither scientific nor spiritual. By the time of the Reform rabbinical conferences in the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the Reformers had spiritualized this belief as well. (Medieval Jewish rationalists like Maimonides believed similarly though they often kept it to themselves.) Abraham Geiger expressed this stance as follows:
Many religious concepts have taken on a more spiritual character and, therefore, their expression in prayer must be more spiritual. From now on the hope for an afterlife should not be expressed in terms that suggest a future revival, a resurrection of the body; rather, they must stress the immortality of the human soul.
Nevertheless, none of the German Reform prayer books—including Geiger’s—ever changed the wording of the benediction in Hebrew! Presumably, it was felt that the Hebrew expressionm’chayeih hameitim could be understood figuratively. In some of these same prayer books, however, the German rendering of the phrase is paraphrased. Geiger, 1854, for example:
Your supernal power, O God, gives life, preserves, and renews it. You revive vegetation when it freezes, and, when it dies, you let new growth spring up. You raise up the fallen, send healing to the sick, and keep faith with those who sleep in the dust. Indeed, Your supernal power inspires the dead with the promise that their salvation will sprout in a new, eternal life! Be praised, O God, who gives life here and there [i.e., in this existence and the next].
It should also be noted that the most radical German Reform prayer book, that of Berlin (1848 and many revisions), simply eliminated the Hebrew text of the Amidah (except for theK’dushah responses) and provided an abbreviated German paraphrase that, in this benediction, invokes God’s grace to the souls of the dead.
North American Reform prayer books, on the other hand, almost always changed the Hebrew text of this benediction, as well as supplying a vernacular paraphrase. Leo Merzbacher’s prayer book for Temple Emanuel, New York (1855), substitutes the phrase m’chayeih hakol(“who gives life to all things”); this is later taken up by Chaim Stern in Gates of Prayer (1975), and remains in Mishkan T’filah. The first edition of Isaac Mayer Wise’s Minhag America (1857) retains the traditional text, since it strives to be the prayer book for all American Jews; by the 1872 revision Wise eliminates m’chayeih hameitim, and substitutes (in only the last two iterations), v’ne’eman atah lachayim v’lameitim: Baruch atah Adonai, m’chayeih nishmot hameitim (“Faithful are You to the living and the dead: Praised be You, O Lord, who revives the souls of the dead”). David Einhorn’s radical Olat Tamid (1858), which became the model for theUnion Prayer Book (1894/95), introduces the phrase, (ha)notei’a b’tocheinu chayeih olam (“who implants within us eternal life”); this is taken up into all three editions of the Union Prayer Book. (Einhorn also renders, m’chalkeil chayim b’chesed / podeh nefesh avadav mimavet b’rachamim rabim---“who graciously sustains the living / who, in great mercy, redeems the souls of His servants from death”).
In recent years, many have questioned Reform liturgical literalism as too quick to emend the traditional text. Is it not possible to understand the expression m’chayeih hameitim as a metaphor? Can it not, as a metaphor, be a source of comfort to those in mourning and a source of hope to others? Still others ask, “Is there nothing beyond God’s ability? In that case, God can reverse death.” For all these reasons, Mishkan T’filah supplies both options,m’chayeih hakol and m’chayeih hameitim, letting worshippers exercise informed choice in addressing their religious needs.

The Afterlife in Judaism: Modern Liturgical Reforms by Rabbi Neil Gillman
One way of tracing the progressive disenchantment from the doctrine of bodily resurrection is to study the changes that were progressively introduced into the closing words of the Gevurot benediction of the Amidah.
Reform Judaism: Stress the Soul’s Afterlife
The earliest Reformers were loath to tamper with the traditional liturgy, but at a conference of Reform rabbis in Brunswick [Germany] in 1844, Abraham Geiger, the acknowledged ideological father of Classical Reform, suggested that his movement must deal with some liturgical doctrines that were foreign to the new age. One of these was the hope for an afterlife, which, he proposed, should now stress not the resurrection of the body but rather the immortality of the soul.
In the 1854 prayer book Geiger edited for his congregation in Breslau, he kept the original Hebrew of the benediction, but translated its concluding passage, “der Leben spendet hier und dort” (freely translated: “who bestows life in this world and the other”).
The champion of the radical wing of Classical Reform was David Einhorn (1809-1879). Einhorn was singularly responsible for transplanting Reform ideology from Ger­many to America. In his 1856 prayer book, Olat Tamid: Book of Prayers for Jewish Congregations, published for his congrega­tion in Baltimore, Einhorn replaced the tra­ditional Hebrew closing formula with a new version that praises God, “Who has planted immortal life within us.”
That formula was later used in the 1895 Union Prayer Book, which became standard in all American Re­form congregations until 1975 when it was replaced by The New Union Prayer Book, more commonly known as Gates of Prayer.
This latter prayer book, in turn, typically substitutes for the closing words of the bene­diction, the formula mehaye hakol (variously translated: “Source of life,” or “Creator of life.”)
These liturgical changes were echoed in the various platforms issued by American Reform rabbis as a way of giving their movement a measure of ideological coherence. An 1869 conference of Reform rabbis, held in Philadelphia, affirmed that “(t)he belief in the bodily resurrection has no religious foundation, and the doctrine of immortality refers to the after‑existence of souls alone.” This Philadelphia statement served as the basis for an even more influential statement of the principles of Reform, the Pittsburgh Platform, adopted in 1885.
The sixth paragraph of that statement asserts that “…the soul of man is immortal.” It continues, “(w)e reject as ideas not rooted in Judaism the belief…in bodily resurrection…”
Finally, the 1937 Columbus Platform states, “Judaism affirms that man is created in the image of God. His spirit is immortal.”
Still a third expression of the shift in thinking among Reform rabbis can be seen in theological treatises such as Kaufman Kohler’s Jewish Theology: Systematically and Historically Considered (republished, New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1968). Einhorn’s son‑in‑law, Kohler (1843‑1969) succeeded him as the champion of the radical wing of American Reform. He was responsible for convening the Pittsburgh Conference and for drafting its platform.
Kohler’s book devotes three full chapters to a historical overview of Jewish thinking on the afterlife and concludes that “…he who recognizes the unchangeable will of an all‑wise, all‑ruling God in the immutable laws of nature must find it impossible to praise God…as the ‘reviver of the dead,’ but will avail himself instead of the expression…, ‘He who has implanted within us immortal life'” (pp. 296‑297). For Kohler, God’s power reveals itself not in the miraculous but rather in the “immutable laws of nature,” which decree that all material things must die, that death is final, and that only the spiritual can live eternally.