Sin death and beyond

SIN, DEATH AND BEYOND: M.M.NINAN
God. But for the belief in metempsychosis, they maintained, the question why God often
permits the wicked to lead a happy life while many righteous are miserable, would be
unanswerable. Then, too, the infliction of pain upon children would be an act of cruelty unless it
is imposed in punishment for sin committed by the soul in a previous state.
Opposition to the View.
Although raised by the Cabala to the rank of a dogma, the doctrine of metempsychosis still
found great opposition among the leaders of Judaism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
In his "Iggeret Hitnaẓẓelut," addressed to Solomon ben Adret in defense of philosophy,
Jedaiah Bedersi praises the philosophers for having opposed the belief in metempsychosis.
Ḥasdai Crescas ("Or Adonai," iv. 7), and after him his pupil Joseph Albo ("'Iḳḳarim," iv. 29),
attacked this belief on philosophical grounds, considering it to be a heathen superstition,
opposed to the spirit of Judaism. The opposition, however, gradually ceased; and the belief
began to be shared even by men who were imbued with Aristotelian philosophy. Thus Isaac
Abravanel sees in the commandment of the levirate a proof of the doctrine of metempsychosis,
for which he gives the following reasons: (1) God in His mercy willed that another trial should
be given to the soul which, having yielded to the sanguine temperament of the body, had
committed a capital sin, such as murder, adultery, etc.; (2) it is only just that when a man dies
young a chance should be given to his soul to execute in another body the good deeds which it
had not time to perform in the first body; (3) the soul of the wicked sometimes passes into
another body in order to receive its deserved punishment here below instead of in the other
world, where it would be much more severe (commentary on Deut. xxv. 5). These arguments
were wittily refuted by the skeptical Leon of Modena in his pamphlet against metempsychosis,
entitled "Ben Dawid." He says: "It is not God, but the planets, that determine the temperament
of the body; why then subject the soul to the risk of entering into a body with a temperament as
bad as, if not worse than, that of the one it has left? Would it not be more in keeping with God's
mercy to take into consideration the weakness of the body and to pardonthe soul at once? To
send the soul of a man who died young into another body would be to make it run the risk of
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