What Comes After:
​A Jewish View of Life, Death, and What Really Matters

Judaism is a religion grounded in this world. While Christians center much of their theology around the afterlife—heaven, hell, salvation—Judaism pulls us back to what’s in front of us. We’re a people of the now. Of tikkun olam—repairing the world. Of feeding the hungry, comforting the mourning, arguing with G-d, wrestling with history, and building a future that reflects justice and mercy. That doesn’t mean we don’t have beliefs about what happens after we die—we do—but those beliefs are held with humility. They’re not the point of the story. They’re not the reward for getting it right. And they’re not a cudgel to control people.
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One of the most beautiful and deeply Jewish things I’ve ever learned is that you don’t have to know what happens after death to live a good life. And in fact, trying too hard to know can be a distraction from the work we’re actually here to do.

​Jews don’t really believe in hell. At least, not the fire-and-brimstone eternal damnation of Christian theology. The concept of Gehinnom—which sometimes gets lazily translated as “hell”—is far less punitive and much more restorative. It’s best understood as a spiritual waystation, or cleansing process. A place where the soul faces the truth of its life and undergoes purification. It’s not meant to be torment. It’s a kind of divine rehab.

Traditional teachings say that most souls spend no more than eleven months in Gehinnom. That’s why mourners recite the Kaddish for eleven months—to help the soul on its journey, but not to imply it needed the full year. Most people don’t. The assumption is that very few need that much time.

And what of the truly evil? The Hitlers of the world? Jewish thought doesn’t consign them to eternal suffering. Instead, it teaches that such souls may simply be unmade. Erased. Destroyed at the root. There’s even a phrase for it--yimach shemo, “may his name be erased.” It’s one of the worst curses in our culture, not because it condemns someone to flames, but because it denies them legacy. They don’t get to live on in memory, in prayer, in the hearts of those they hurt. Their name is wiped away like dust.

That, to me, is real justice. Not eternal torment. Just... silence. Removal. A full stop.
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I find more peace in that than I ever did in the terrifying afterlife of my evangelical childhood, where people burned forever for their sins, or for picking the "wrong" religion. Judaism trusts G-d to be just. And just doesn’t mean cruel.

​Something else you might not know: Judaism has reincarnation.

It's not talked about in every denomination, and not everyone interprets it literally—but the concept of gilgul neshamot, the “rolling of souls,” is an established part of Jewish mysticism. In Kabbalah, especially the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria in the 16th century, reincarnation is seen as a way for souls to return and complete unfinished spiritual tasks. Not because they were “bad,” but because they still have work to do. Because they want to repair what was broken. Because there’s more love left to give.

It’s not punishment. It’s purpose.

I find this profoundly comforting. I don’t need a final judgment scene. I want the option to come back, to try again, to heal what I couldn’t heal before. To love someone again in a new way. To stand where I once fell.

But not all takes on reincarnation are healthy.

When I was Pagan, I heard a lot of twisted ideas about karma. People told me that if you’re disabled, traumatized, sick, and/or poor in this life, it must be because of something you did in a past one. They said abuse was karmic “balance.” That victims of assault were being punished for past-life crimes. That children born into suffering had “chosen” it to work off bad karma.

One prominent Druid, whose name I will not mention, has publicly and repeatedly claimed that p*dophiles and r*pists often reincarnate as CSA victims “to balance the scales.”

That’s not healing. That’s not wisdom. That’s spiritual abuse.

Judaism doesn’t teach that suffering is a punishment for past lives. The entire Book of Job exists to scream into the void: Bad things happen to good people. It's not always about guilt. Sometimes it's just suffering. And even G-d doesn’t give you a straight answer.

To me, karma isn’t about retribution. It’s about pattern. About sacred echoes. About the way our souls remember each other. About being drawn to the same people across time, or pulled back to the same place to finish something we started.
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Sometimes karma is unfinished healing. Sometimes it’s reunion. Sometimes it’s memory leaking through the cracks of time.

When I was a kid—maybe six or seven—I was absolutely obsessed with Israel. I read every book I could get my hands on. I talked about it constantly. I remember saying to my mom, with all the conviction a child can carry, “This is where I used to live.”

Decades later, as an adult, I began having dreams. Flashes. Visions of a life I can’t explain logically. I believe I was a gay Jewish man in that life. I believe I survived Dachau. I believe I moved to Israel after the war, and I believe I died in the Six-Day War. I can’t prove any of that, but it resonates so deeply and consistently that I don’t need proof.

Meanwhile, in 1999, Andy—a Gentile—visited Dachau while traveling in Germany. And he wept. He said he didn’t know why. He just… wept. I believe he was remembering something too. I believe we’ve walked alongside each other in more than one lifetime. And I believe we found each other again in this one for a reason.

Love remembers.
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​I don’t believe I was “punished” by being born trans. That’s a grotesque idea. But it’s one that certain Jewish spaces actually teach.

One reason I don’t recommend Chabad resources to people is because of teachings like this one, directly from their Kabbalah section:

“Because of sins such as homosexuality, a male soul might reincarnate into a woman’s body.”
—Chabad.org, Cross-Gender Soul Migration

The article goes on to suggest that this soul’s “redemption” comes through bearing sons. In other words: if you’re gay, G-d might punish you by making you a woman next time, and the only way out is to become a baby factory.

That’s not Judaism. That’s patriarchal cruelty wrapped in mystical language.
I reject that completely.

I believe I was a gay Jewish man in a past life. I believe I came back this time as a gay Jewish man again—this time, in a transmasc body. 

I also believe that I came back this way because so much choice and agency were taken from me in that life. As a gay Jewish man in Europe, I didn’t get to choose safety, and when I fled to Israel post-war for safety, I died there in a war. I didn’t get to choose visibility. I didn’t get to choose whether my life would be interrupted, uprooted, or destroyed. I believe that Hashem—in infinite mercy—gave me another incarnation in which choice itself would be central to my soul’s work. This time, I would not be born Jewish; I would choose Judaism. I would walk toward covenant with my eyes open, my heart open, and my consent fully intact.

I did not choose to be a trans man, any more than I chose to be attracted to men. But there are profound parallels between my gender journey and my conversion journey—enough that I believe they are spiritually linked. Both involved long periods of knowing something was true before I had the language for it. Both involved resistance, fear, and finally recognition. Both required me to stand up and say, This is who I am, even when doing so carried risk. And both unfolded not as sudden revelations, but as slow, patient processes of becoming.

I am slow on the uptake about some things—but I am very good at pattern recognition. And when Judaism began to call to me, it felt achingly familiar. Not foreign. Not exotic. Familiar. Like a home I’d misplaced and then stumbled into again decades later. Being reincarnated as trans, I believe, gave me the embodied experience I needed to recognize that pattern—to say, yes, I know this terrain; yes, I’ve walked this road before.

​My gender journey trained me to trust that feeling of recognition, to honor it rather than dismiss it. And when that same feeling arose around Judaism, I listened.

This time, I didn’t have my Jewishness ripped away from me. I stepped into it willingly. Deliberately. Joyfully.

I believe we are reunited with our loved ones after death. I mean all of our loved ones—including our animals. I believe we will see our beloved pets again. Sometimes, I think, they even reincarnate to be with us again within the same lifetime. This isn’t a traditional Jewish teaching, and I’m not claiming it is—but I believe it deeply. Anything that can love has a soul, and anyone who doesn’t believe animals can love simply hasn’t been paying attention. I’ve shared my life with cats who were family in every sense that matters, and when they died, I marked their passing with a modified form of Yahrzeit. Because love creates obligation. Memory creates holiness. And if Judaism teaches us anything, it’s that love does not simply vanish when a body is gone.

And I believe love survives. I believe healing continues.

But I also believe that speculation about the afterlife is not the point. Judaism tells us not to dwell too much on Olam HaBa, the World to Come. We don’t build our ethics around fear of the afterlife. We build them around this life.
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This life matters.

We are here to choose life. To protect the vulnerable. To show up for the suffering. To honor our ancestors—biological or spiritual—and to make sure their legacy bends toward justice. We are here to make something beautiful in the midst of the broken. To say “never again” and mean it. To light candles in the dark.
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We are here for tikkun olam. We are here to help each other carry the weight of being alive.
The rest is mystery. And I’m okay with that.