Anonymous asked Staff ago What I know from the words of Chazal is that Chazal believed our forefather Jacob did not die and that he lives to this very day, but how did they reach this ridiculous conclusion? It is explicitly written in the book of Genesis 49:33, “When Jacob finished his instructions to his sons, he drew his feet into the bed and, breathing his last, he was gathered to his people.” It is explicitly written that he died, so how did Chazal reach the opposite conclusion? Also, do Jews still believe that Jacob did not die and lives to this very day?
Sincerely,
Raz
jsadmin Staff answered 22 years ago
Dear Raz,
We have written about the issue of “Our forefather Jacob did not die” in the essay What the Dead Feel and What They Say; see there.
I will bring the main points: The Gemara in Taanit 5b states, “R’ Yochanan said: Jacob our forefather did not die. They said to him: So, was he mourned, embalmed and buried for nothing? He answered: I expound the Scriptures; it is written, ‘Do not fear, My servant Jacob, said G-d, and do not quail, Israel, for I will redeem you from afar and your seed from the land of captivity’ — he is compared to his descendents: as his descendants are alive, so is he alive.” From here Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, who served as the head of the Jerusalem Beit Din (b. 1917), the author of Responsa Tzitz Eliezer, learns in part 14, paragraph 98: “Chazal showed here that if the physical sense is contradicted by what is written in our holy Torah, we must conclude that the physical sense is in error, and it only seemed that he was embalmed — for since one expounds the Scriptures through the true rules given us at Sinai, the holy One, blessed be He, says so, and in any case it is clear that it only seemed to them he died, but he lived. This is how Chazal learned the Torah, and this is the great difference and the terrible distance between our views and Chazal’s. They are exactly the opposite: for us, in our sins, this world is reality and the Torah is expounded — but Chazal, with their holiness, saw the Torah with their senses as real, and when one expounds the Scriptures all senses and flesh-bound eyes are void, for they lie, mislead and are misled, and it only seemed that he was embalmed.”
It is very difficult to understand the reasoning of people who dismiss their senses in the face of a text written hundreds of years ago, simply because they think it was written by G-d. But when I met some Chabad people who wholeheartedly believe that the Lubavitcher Rebbe still lives, they bring as proof the issue of “our forefather Jacob did not die.”
This is the way of believers; they turn dark into light and the dead into the living.
Sincerely,
Daat Emet