So the solution to the afterlife on The Good Place is...Judaism?
Cool.
this is too good to only leave as a short text post. Iām gonna need the whole essay behind this to hang up on my wall.
So, this is TVGuideās recapĀ of the solution proposed to reform the afterlife:Ā
āas Eleanor puts it, the system treats life not as "a test that you either pass or fail but instead a class you take." The test comes in the afterlife, when a Good Place architect and a Bad Place architect team up to design a customized scenario that forces you to confront your moral flaws. The test can be anything ā from being sent to a fake Good Place "by mistake" to reliving a version of your life ā and its difficulty depends on the number of points you earned before death. Regardless of points, if you don't pass the test you're rebooted to take it again and again, with the hope that one day you'll learn enough to ace it and get into the Good Place.
"But wait," interrupts the version of Timothy Olyphant Janet conjured in her void, "how do you learn and grow if you're rebooted?" Thanks for asking, Tim. The trick is that after every reboot, you retain a vague memory of what you learned in your evaluation ā like, in Eleanor's words, "a little voice in your head, helping you become a better version of yourself."ā
Compare that this description of how the soul is cleansed in the afterlife in Judaism:Ā
āGehinom [is not] a place for eternity, but a temporaryāalbeit terribleāplace for the soul to be cleansed. In fact, the vast majority of souls do not stay in Gehinom for more than eleven months. Because we do not presume most people are so sinful as to warrant a twelve month sentence (reserved only for the wicked), the recital of Kaddish for a departed soul, which brings elevation to the soul and relief from Gehinom, is only recited for eleven months and thereafter only on the anniversary (Yartzeit) of death. On Shabbat all souls have an elevation. Souls in Gehinom are given relief, while those in the world of Yetzirah are allowed through the āAmud,ā the pillar that connects the two worlds of Yetzirah and Beriah. After the purification of Gehinom, the soul enters the World to Comeāthe Garden of Edenāwhere it receives the rewards it earned through work in this world.ā
Basically, the idea that the soul is put through a purification and cleansing in the afterlife before going on to its next destination is a Jewish concept (which makes sense because show creator Michael Schur is Jewish!).Ā
Interesting though I'll be another person to chime in that there's no one "official" version of the afterlife in Judaism, just several possibilities including actual reincarnation (including being reincarnated as a rock if you were really bad), eventually being resurrected when the (non-Jesus) messiah comes, and a large ladder form of the afterlife where you purefy over time and slowly move to better Heavens closer to G-d. It's also something that can be pretty minor - we didn't talk about the afterlife at all in my synagogue growing up, besides a casual non-specific mention of Gehenna in the Talmud
That's actually taken into account too. The heaven they end up in, when done being cleansed, is actually not the final destination. And there's a next step that nobody, not even the people who designed it, know what happens.
