“W hen you come back what do you want to come back as?”
My interlocutor was referring to that ancient Jewish concept of gilgul haneshamos transmigration of the souls whereby an individual soul can return to earth time and again each time within a different physical body with a specific mission to accomplish. In truth I had never considered the matter before. Trying to live a decent life in this gilgul is challenging enough without worrying about what I would become in the next go-round. But his question forced me to give it some thought.
Since it took many years of challenging study to get my ordination or semichah as a rabbi plus additional years to obtain university degrees and then even more hard work to be a pulpit rabbi it would only be fair in partial compensation for all this travail to come back as something less labor-intensive. That is to say I would like to come back as something that I don’t have to work so hard to be. I would like to come back as a Jewish thinker.
How does one become a Jewish thinker? No one seems to know. (Though I have glancingly referred to it in previous columns.) Thinkers don’t need to attend special schools like lawyers or doctors do not have to receive special training do not undergo rigorous examinations by licensing authorities. No one is quite sure how thinkers become thinkers or what the requirements are or who decides who is and who is not a thinker or if there is a thinker association that issues official certificates. Apparently Jewish thinkers just “become” thinkers by some mysterious osmotic process.
