Soul Journeys

Introduction

You meet someone for the first time. Inexplicably, you are drawn to each other. You relate easily, you laugh easily. There is no need for the usual masks you wear with typical strangers. On the contrary, you feel as if you’ve known this other person for centuries.

If physical chemistry is an irresistible pull between bodies, this is an irresistible attraction between two souls. Though you’ve never met before, it feels undeniably real that you’ve been together in a world of truth, goodness and peacefulness.

***

Every human being alive today – from the most spiritually sensitive to the most hard-boiled among us – has had “soul experiences.” Perhaps you’ve suddenly thought about someone far away, only to have that person telephone you the next instant. Or, perhaps, as in the example above, you’ve met someone for the first time and felt a powerful familiarity or bond that belied the newness of your friendship.

Just a few years ago, it was unfashionable to believe in anything Science couldn’t measure. The soul? Beyond-the-body experiences? A life after this one? You had to be a fringe member of society to embrace these beliefs.

Not anymore. Not only is the “other worldly” gaining acceptance as a reality of life, it’s even meriting major news coverage.

For example, in April of 1999, the state of Israel was rocked by a well-documented news story in which a woman’s dead husband spoke through her mouth to his children and friends. A radio station, alerted to the phenomenon, brought sound crews and captured the extensive dialogue on tape and broadcast it throughout Israel and abroad.

In a raspy voice, the husband’s spirit complained that he was not being allowed into either heaven or hell and was suffering terribly because of his sins during his life. A team of 30 rabbis from a well-established yeshiva was present and – in front of the media and many witnesses – performed a ceremony to free the woman from the wandering soul, or dybbuk, as the phenomenon is called in Hebrew. After being released from the dybbuk’s control, the woman and her family members pledged to overturn their lifestyle by keeping kosher and observing other Jewish laws. The entire state of Israel was in an uproar.

In our hemisphere, therapists like Florida psychiatrist Brian Weiss and many others continue to do groundbreaking research in past life regression, in which people are recalling lives they spent in previous centuries and on other continents.

All around the world, ordinary people – not eccentric in any way – are exploring these new frontiers, examining whether or not they’ve been here before.

Interestingly enough, these new frontiers – reincarnation and other types of soul transmigration – may be groundbreaking news for the word in general, but they are hardly revolutionary or even daring concepts to those well-versed in Judaism.

For thousands of years, religious Jews have declared nightly as part of their bedtime prayer that they forgive anyone who hurt them “whether it was in this incarnation or in another incarnation.” Even 5-year-olds in the religious world are familiar with the concept of gilgulim, as reincarnation is called in Jewish writings.

Jewish scholarship is as vast as a sea. Reincarnation is but one tiny wave in that sea, but even so it is expounded upon with a richness of scale unparalleled anywhere in the world. If we want to learn more about reincarnation and the journeys of the soul, then Jewish literature, and in particular, the Kabbalah – the mystical branch of Jewish knowledge – is a magnificent place to invest our energy.