Kaddish

A Holistic Experience
As discussed in previous articles, just as we may refer to people with drastically different opinions on a particular issue as coming from different worlds, a world can be Kabbalisticly understood as a state of consciousness or awareness.

With this in mind, we can approach the idea that the World to Come will be the experience of our selves as we truly are, without the distortions and fanfare of our society.

This is expressed in a verse in Psalms, which states that man will be told "what his speech is." Kabbalah explains that while we, of course, already know what we have said, the clarity of the World to Come opens us up to experience what our speech truly is. That is to say, the modern lie, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," will be revealed in its true light—that words, in fact, have a very real effect despite seeming to be a person's mere breath.

In the World to Come, we will experience our selves as the sum total of the choices we have made—not because it is a system of reward and punishment, but because that is what we have made of our selves. This is comparable to any individual who made choices that got him into a certain situation—the situation is the result of all that led up to the scenario in which he presently finds himself. So, while we can talk about it in terms of reward and punishment in order to convey an idea about Jewish belief, a more refined way of expressing the experience of the World to Come is that it is the experience of being who we have built our selves to be—nothing more, nothing less.

For some people, experiencing this awareness of self will be Heaven, and for others it will be Hell; it depends on what we have done with what we have been given.