Lord, please don’t make me a cockroach
Rabbi Marc Gellman
Q: If most of us wind up going to heaven, wouldn’t it be too crowded? What if there’s no room? I just can’t see how God can handle all of us! I really hope you answer me; I think about this all the time. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter. — From M
A: I also think about the World To Come (this is the Jewish term for heaven) even though knowing what happens there or even knowing if there is a heaven is way above my pay grade. The belief of all the Abrahamic faiths is clear. Death is not the end of us. This belief depends upon a belief that we are made up of bodies and souls. Our bodies are material and therefore take up space, but our souls are immaterial and thus take up no space. This makes your overpopulation of souls in heaven problem go away. All the souls just kind of fit together in one immaterial place that is not really a place because it takes up no space. Gravity is everywhere and acts on everyone and takes up no space. Heaven is like moral gravity.
There is however another spiritual solution to the problem of overcrowding in heaven: reincarnation. Reincarnation is the belief that our souls after death and judgment are reinserted back into newborn babies and given another shot at getting things right in their earthly existence. Hinduism, Sikhism and Jainism have embraced this belief as one of the central tenets of their faith. Buddhism rejected the Hindu belief in the soul (anatman) and so rejected reincarnation. Some parts of Buddhism do embrace reincarnation. Tibetan Buddhists consider the present Dalai Lama to be the 14th reincarnation of the original Buddha.
Reincarnation was not developed by Hinduism to solve your problem of the housing shortage for souls in heaven. Rather, it evolved as a spiritual corollary to the doctrine of karma, which is the belief that every single one of our acts of goodness and our acts of evil imprint themselves permanently on our souls. If the good outweighs the bad at the end of life, then our souls are re-born into a higher state of existence. The opposite is true if the evil outweighs the good we do. We could be reborn as a king or a cockroach. This is why Jains sweep the pavements where they walk so that they do not inadvertently step on Uncle Murray. Release from this cycle of rebirth (called moksha) is the ultimate spiritual goal for the eastern faiths.
I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation because I do not spend much time thinking about what happens after death. I try to do the good just because it is the good and not for some reward (or as a cockroach protection policy for my next life). However, the idea that God’s love would give us all another chance to get things right in life seems to me a lovely way to imagine God’s love.
The idea of reincarnation is not generally supported by Judaism, but certain Jewish mystics who follow Kabbalah do believe in it and call it, in Hebrew, gilgul ha’neshamot.
Reincarnation is basically absent from Christianity, in which the fundamental belief is that we live once and are judged forever as we read with explicit clarity in Hebrews 9:27: “And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.”
Those Christians who are attracted to the idea of reincarnation pin their hopes on Matthew 17:10-12: “And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias (Elijah) must first come? And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.”
What this passage seems to imply is that John the Baptist was the reincarnated soul of the Hebrew prophet Elijah. However, the text in Matthew could simply be referring to the belief that John the Baptist completed the role that Elijah was meant to fulfill of announcing the coming of the messiah. Unfortunately, those trying to make a case for Christian reincarnation based on the Matthew text have to cope with a text in John 1:21 where John the Baptist is explicitly asked if he is Elijah and he answers, “No.”
I have a great admiration for this eastern belief in reincarnation, but all things considered, I believe that we ought to try our best not to act like a cockroach in this life, even if we are not reborn as a cockroach in the next life.