Don DeLillo’s new novel Zero K revolves around high-tech schemes by “futurologists” to freeze the sick or aging so that they can be resurrected once the cure for their diseases—or for death itself—has been discovered. Reflecting on this theme, Abraham Socher draws some comparisons with Jewish ideas about the resurrection of the dead:
On the whole, the life after death of Zero K is a real resurrection, a promise that revived bodies will emerge from their capsules. . . . However, like the actual futurologists whom DeLillo has apparently studied closely, his characters sometimes offer a different vision of human life 2.0. This is a vision of a disembodied mind that can be downloaded and preserved in any number of substrates; as long as the software and content are preserved, the hard—or wet—ware is a matter of indifference.
The tension between these ideas, the world to come in which we have and need our bodies and the world to come in which we don’t, is also not new.
It was, in fact, the distinction between an embodied and a disembodied afterlife that animated one of the greatest theological controversies of medieval Judaism. In his Commentary to the Mishnah, Maimonides included the resurrection of the dead as one of the thirteen principles of faith. But his purely spiritual account of the world to come, where, to quote one of his favorite talmudic passages, “there is no eating and no drinking . . . and the righteous . . . bask in the radiance of the Divine Presence,” seemed to make such a resurrection pointless. If one is already a bodiless spirit communing with the divine intellect in an endless seminar on physics and metaphysics, and this is the summit of human attainment, why would one want to be re-encumbered with a body? And how could one’s body be revived anyway, given Maimonides’ scientific assertion that decay and decomposition are natural and inevitable processes?
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2057/its-spring-again/