ofblessedmemory:

Well. It really depends on who you ask, but most agree that there’s no way to know for sure what happens when someone dies until we ourselves die. Because of this, the answer you’ll get from different sources will often be really vague and may even contain several different answers.

There is a belief in “heaven” and “hell” in Judaism, but they’re very, very different from what Christianity believes, and fairly little attention is paid to them. It should also be understood that, in Judaism, there was no “fall of Satan.” That story is taken entirely as a metaphor for a really arrogant Babylonian king, and thus no belief in a “King of Hell” who tortures souls for all eternity. And as far as I’m aware, there’s no belief in a difference of what happens when a Jewish person dies and when a goy dies.

A popular theory is that when we die, our soul goes to a place called

Gehinnom, or “hell,” technically. It’s not a place of punishment, but rather a place of cleansing. Everyone goes there, regardless of what they did in life. Some people might be there longer, but most are only there for about three months, and often no longer than twelve months. While there, our sins are burned off so that we may enter Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden,) often believed to be “heaven.”

Though, many Jewish people also believe in reincarnation. Some believe that the soul goes through reincarnation -I think- seven times (more, if needed,) in order to be perfected and refined for entrance into Gan Eden.

When someone who is considered truly evil dies, like Ted Bundy for example, they wouldn’t go there. Instead, their soul would be considered far too corrupt to be able to cleansed, and thus destroyed.

There are some references in Torah to a place called She’ol, where the dead “live,” though it may also be believed to be more of a metaphor for oblivion; the idea that nothing happens when we die.

Some believe that our relationship with G-d will be reflected in how our soul is treated and what happens to it after the body dies.

You’d have to do a lot of digging to fully understand all aspects of Jewish ideas about “what happens when we die?” And often, even when someone favors a certain idea, they’ll likely take it more as a theory than a firm belief.

I think the only thing really agreed on is that what happens after we die doesn’t really matter until we’re dead. What matters is what what we do with life.

I hope this helped, at least a little. I might try to tackle this topic in a future post, when I’m able to dig into it deeper.