If you're Jewish, is it time to start packing for Mormon heaven? The Jewish community, since 2010, thought we had a pact with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to stop baptizing Jews who had died in the Holocaust. However, recent revelations like the Mormon baptism of Anne Frank, as well as the baptism of Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal's parents, and the submission of the names of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel and some of his relatives as well as many other Jews to the list for baptism, has demonstrated that the practice continues.
Since whatever controls that have been put in place are not working, should Jews start making r
reservations for a Mormon afterlife planet? We do enjoy travel, even in space (On "Star Trek," the actors who played Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock are both Jewish). A change of scenery is always nice, and Mormon heaven with three distinct kingdoms, celestial, terrestrial, and telestial, does sound like quite an adventure (Just imagine the brochure). So, I'm wondering: do I need need a special visa? Shots? What about power adapters for my laptop and cell?
Are the heavenly accommodations rated on Yelp with five stars, or only one? If after I have died someone is going to send my neshama, my soul, into the Mormon Big Sleep, I really want the best.
Since the particulars of Mormon heaven weren't covered in Hebrew school, I turned to a LDS website for afterlife travel info. According to the site, the celestial kingdom "is a place where people will be happy, and it will be more beautiful than we can imagine."
You mean like Cancun at sunset? What's the catch? Reading on, I found that the occupancy requirements are tricky, since a person "must have repented of all their sins and must have accepted Jesus as their Savior." Uh-oh, with a travel alert like that, I was not sure if my Jewish passport was going to get stamped there.
What about the terrestrial kingdom? The site describes it as "not as wonderful as the celestial kingdom." (Sounds like a two-star place to me already) Yet, "Those who go to the terrestrial kingdom will be honorable people. Some of them will be members of the Church, and others will not. They will be those who did not accept Jesus on earth but later accepted Him in the spirit world."
Is this the heaven they are baptizing us for? What if my hereafter self doesn't want to accept "Him"? At that point, I hope there will be no charge for a change in destination, as I suppose my soul will be rerouted to the eternal one-star beddy-bye of the Mormon system--the lowly telestial kingdom. The site informed me that the people who live there "are those who did not accept either the gospel or a testimony of Jesus, either on earth or in the spirit world," and who will "suffer" in "spirit prison until after the Millennium." Holly moly! It gets worse, as apparently, I will be doing time in the hereafter with "liars, thieves, murderers, false prophets, adulterers, and those who ridiculed sacred things." (Hey, don't look at me.)
Is it too late to cancel? Theologically speaking, Judaism has always been a bit vague on olam ha-ba, the world to come, but after reading this, I'm loving the lack of landscape and accommodations. Mostly, our travel plans seem more focused on earthly destinations and life in the present. Even our prayer for the dead, the mourner's kaddish, is really more directed to the living.
We do have our dybbuks, open the door every year for a long gone Elijah, but other than a trip now and then to the cemetery, and the lighting of yahrtzeit (memorial) candles, what happens after we die doesn't occupy a great deal of our time.
Not that we don't dream of heaven.
I recall the bible story of Jacob's dream, with angels traveling up and down a celestial ladder. If I can, I will make my travel plants with same agency he used, since, no one can tell me if Mormon heaven is just a few rungs up, or down.
Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."
