Kabbalah

The World to Come Is Not a Place but a State of Union

Maimonides had already stripped the afterlife of physical geography centuries before Kabbalists layered mystical union on top of his account, producing a picture of Olam Haba as a condition rather than a destination.

Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah's Laws of Repentance, argues at length against picturing the World to Come as a place with location, direction, or physical reward; he describes it instead as a state in which righteous souls, without bodies, exist in pure closeness to God, comparable to how the ministering angels are described. This was already a radical rationalist correction of more literal, embodied images of paradise circulating in his own time. Kabbalists absorbed Maimonides' rejection of crude physical reward but supplied what his philosophical account left out: a specific mystical content for what that closeness actually consists of, namely devekut, cleaving or union with the light of Ein Sof as it flows through the sefirot. The resulting synthesis keeps Maimonides' insistence that Olam Haba is not a location while replacing his relatively austere intellectual beatitude with a fuller, more experiential picture of ongoing union — a case where a rationalist philosopher and mystical tradition ended up reinforcing rather than opposing each other on this specific point.

Maimonides (1138-1204) was a philosophical rationalist generally wary of mystical speculation, which makes the later Kabbalistic adoption of his own account of the World to Come, rather than a rival one, notable.

Mishneh Torah

Written about in

• What Kabbalah says about rest

  Maimonides argued at length that the World to Come has no location, direction or physical reward. Kabbalists kept that correction and filled in what he left out — devekut, cleaving to the light of Ein Sof. If the end is a state rather than a destination, rest is something being practised now, not waited for.