ABOUT THAT NEXT LIFE THAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW

Like many people, I find the idea of reincarnation too seductive to dismiss. It solves so many problems: death, injustice, lack of closure. The concept that matter can’t be created or destroyed. And it crops up enough in mystical Judaism, that I don’t feel any more obliged to dismiss it than a Hindu.

So I find, over time, it’s become a fundamental tenet of my world view. I’m less certain of a god or divine power—although the complexity of imagination is miraculous to me, the way scribbled markings on a page impinge upon the eye, then morph into thought, then construct an internal world that can move me to tears. That phenomenon, and other invisible phenomena like the pleasure of music or the intensity of love, does seem miraculous. Invisible reality is often more convincing, to me, as evidence of a high power than the gorgeous and hideous physical realm.

But, reincarnation. Do we come back as rocks if we are evil as Adin Steinsaltz reported? Or as queens if we are good?

My firmest argument against these notions is that they are linear, still bound by a notion of unidirectional cause and effect. Must the bad girl from 1904 return as a deprived one in 1994. But why?

Why would reincarnation be bound by time at all? Perhaps our descendants return to us, now. Not via some elusive time machine, but because our second, third, twelfth lives defy physical time.


This is more likely: I will return as the woman I just cut off in traffic this morning, and we will replay that scene again, over and over. Only now, or then, I will be the wronged party, braking to a halt in the intersection, spilling my coffee and bursting into a rage when my new blouse is stained.

And we will trade lives back and forth, like actors trading scripts, until we finally get our roles exacly right.