Above is my illustration, recreating a popular artwork of ‘Reincarnation’.
I came across a video entitled ‘Reincarnation in Judaism” by Efraim Palvanov, who staked a bold claim that the Tanakh hints explicitly at reincarnation.
Citing Job 33:29–30, the speaker says: “God does this twice or three times with a person… to bring back his soul from the grave… to the light of life.” to argue that reincarnation (gilgul neshamot) is not an exotic import but a current running through Jewish sources — later elaborated by Kabbalah and Lurianic mysticism.
In this essay, I expand that claim, set it alongside mainstream Jewish ideas of afterlife and judgment, and place the discussion in cultural context — Kaddish, Gehinnom’s famously “12 months,” and an apocryphal thread from the Book of Enoch about Nephilim spirits “roaming” the earth.
“Reincarnation is a legitimate Jewish thing … straight out of the Torah … once you know where to look,” Palvanov insists, framing Job and the 13 Attributes in Exodus as keys that unlock an old, occluded idea.
1) Where Palvanov points us?
Palvanov’s through-line is simple:
- Job says God may return a soul “two or three times.”
- Exodus 34 (“visiting the iniquity … to the third and fourth”) is re-read not as children being punished for parents, but as one soul rolling over its own unfinished business across lifetimes.
- Prophets’ refrains (“for three … even for four”) are read as a poetic cap on how many retries the wicked get, while the righteous may return “to thousands,” echoing “doing kindness to thousands.”
- Gehinnom (hell) is not eternal torture; classic rabbinic lore caps its purgative phase at 12 months, which is why mourners say Kaddish for ~11 months (to avoid implying the maximum sentence).
Whether or not you accept each interpretive step, this is recognizably Lurianic Kabbalah: sin and merit are rectified through cycles; most souls keep returning; and only when self-correction fails does postmortem cleansing finish the job. For readers who associate Kabbalah with pop-culture spirituality, it helps to recall how seriously 20th-century intellectuals took it: Gershom Scholem made Kabbalah a rigorous field, not a sideshow.
2) Kabbalah and cultural memory (beyond the stereotypes)
Western media often discovered Kabbalah through celebrity fascination — Madonna, splashy centers, and bottled “Kabbalah water.” Those stories undeniably shaped public perception in the 2000s and 2010s.
But behind the headlines, major outlets have profiled the older, deeper currents: Scholem’s archive-based history, modern mystical seekers, and Judaism’s living conversation with esotericism (and skepticism). These portraits show a tradition wrestling with metaphysics and meaning, not merely merchandising.
3) Afterlife, fairness, and the Jewish “maybe”
One reason reincarnation can feel “at home” in Judaism is that the tradition is famously non-dogmatic about the afterlife’s specifics. Popular explainers emphasize ambiguity: Olam Ha-Ba, resurrection, immortality of the soul — yes; schematics — less so. That open texture helps explain why ideas like gilgul take root in mystical strands without displacing the rest.
Philosophically, media essays across decades have noted how afterlife notions — reward, punishment, repair — answer a fairness problem: why moral calculus should balance beyond a broken world. That does not prove reincarnation; it shows the space in which such theologies grow.
4) Gehinnom, 12 months, and why Kaddish is 11
“Gehinnom is a washing machine, not a furnace without an off-switch,” Palvanov quips, summarizing a classic rabbinic limit: up to 12 months for the wicked. The cultural footprint of that belief is everywhere — journalism describing Jewish mourning cycles routinely mentions daily Kaddish for 11 months, the annual yahrzeit, and the daily minyan.
Contemporary features also unpack the pastoral rationale: eleven months signals confidence that the deceased was not among the worst — an affectionate restraint encoded into the ritual. Opinion essays and personal diaries in mainstream Jewish outlets explain this custom with precisely the “12-month cap” logic Palvanov cites.
5) “Kaf Ha-Kela”: the “slingshot” as reincarnation
“Kaf ha-Kela is just reincarnation — souls slung from body to body,” Palvanov argues, reading a biblical “sling” verse (1 Sam. 25:29) and Zohar passages through the Ari.
Even if you don’t follow the hermeneutics, the metaphor is striking: judgment as return to embodiment (to feel, heal, and fix), not disembodied torment.
That logic resonates with a famous Talmudic parable: the lame man and the blind man are judged together, which Palvanov quotes to argue that real moral accounting requires body and soul in tandem.
Culture pieces revisiting Talmud’s reach into modern life show how enduring such images are — difficult texts continue to anchor contemporary meaning-making far outside the beit midrash.
6) Enoch, Nephilim, and restless spirits
The Book of Enoch — preserved in Ethiopian Christianity, influential in Second Temple Judaism — supercharges Genesis 6’s cryptic tale of “sons of God” and Nephilim.
In 1 Enoch’s popular reception, the spirits of the Flood-slain giants don’t enter heavenly repose or Sheol; they wander the earth, harassing humanity — the seedbed for later demonology.
National Geographic’s popular treatments of Second Temple literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls (where Enochic materials appear) show why Enoch looms large in our imagination of ancient Judaism, even outside the Hebrew canon.
Culturally, Enoch rides waves — sometimes speculative or sensational — but the core point is historical: Second Temple Judaism was a busy marketplace of ideas, with apocalypses, sectarian rules, calendars, and competing maps of the unseen. That breadth is precisely why later rabbinic Judaism both absorbed and curated such materials.
7) How “reincarnation” is framed by Palvanov
“You get four chances,” Palvanov says of the wicked — original life plus three returns — and then Gehinnom finishes the cleansing.
“The righteous can return ‘to thousands’ — as long as they’re improving.”
“Most people are reincarnating,” and sometimes parts of a soul are mended through nonhuman states (a classic Kabbalistic idea called ibbur/gilgul in wider mystical literature).
While historians will debate whether the biblical verses themselves “say reincarnation,” Palvanov is faithful to Lurianic motifs: tikun across lifetimes, PaRDeS (learning Torah on all four levels), and soul-mate repair (zivug). Cultural journalism has repeatedly reminded readers that Scholem’s work — and many modern Jewish artists, poets, and seekers — found in Kabbalah a sophisticated language for repair, not mere superstition.
8) Ritual, grief, and what the living do
A striking practical claim by Palvanov is that suffering that truly atones is embodied — hence the moral force of returning (via reincarnation or resurrection) and the communal weight of practices like Kaddish. Long-form coverage — from travel pieces describing Kaddish recited at sites of atrocity to contemporary news from memorials — shows how the prayer functions as a public grammar of grief and hope.
Even secular or interfaith columns circle back to Kaddish as an ethical/memorial act, precisely because its meaning isn’t death-obsessed (the text magnifies God’s name; it never mentions death), yet it accompanies mourners through the wound. That’s why it appears in literary reviews, politics sections, and culture desks as often as in religion pages.
9) Why “no eternal hell” matters (and why it rankles)
“An eternal hell contradicts midah-keneged-midah,” Palvanov says — divine measure must be measured, not infinite punishment for finite sin.
You don’t need to endorse the rhetoric to see its pastoral logic: in modern features and interviews, rabbis and writers often reach for proportionality when explaining Jewish ideas of suffering, justice, and God.
That emphasis helps explain why the 12-month cap feels not merely technical but moral — and why many mourners stop at eleven months.
10) Back to Enoch’s Nephilim — what kind of “evidence” do we want?
Popular media sometimes runs beyond scholarship — ancient aliens, giant-hunters, and speculative “lost books.” Sorting the signal from the noise is part of responsible reading. The serious takeaway isn’t that archaeology has “found the Nephilim,” but that Enochic literature lets us see how ancient Jews made sense of evil, angelic transgression, and lingering harms — sometimes personified as restless spirits. Balanced coverage of the Scrolls’ discovery, authentication (and forgeries!), and ongoing research helps keep the conversation tethered to the best available knowledge.
11) A last word on sources, stories, and the Christian horizon
Mainstream outlets have tracked this terrain for decades — from Washington Post vignettes of Kaddish and mourning practice, to The New Yorker’s deep dives into Gershom Scholem, to National Geographic’s ongoing Dead Sea Scrolls reporting. Taken together, these pieces won’t adjudicate theology. They do show how Jewish communities and modern readers negotiate the afterlife’s maybes: reincarnation for the mystics; resurrection for the liturgy; Gehinnom as finite cleansing for mainstream halakhic frames; and an apocalyptic imagination (Enoch) that shaped the air of late biblical/Second Temple worlds.
For Christians, however, the conversation takes on a different dimension. The central conviction is that salvation comes through Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, and that faith in Him opens the door to eternal life. Yet the transcript’s insistence — “God brings back a person … to try again” — touches a dilemma Christian theology has long grappled with: What about those who never even had the chance to hear the gospel?
Early Church Voices
- Origen of Alexandria (3rd c.) speculated about the pre-existence of souls and hinted at corrective rebirths, though the Church later rejected reincarnation. Still, Origen’s concern was pastoral: God’s justice must allow genuine opportunities for repentance.
- Gregory of Nyssa (4th c.) entertained a form of universal restoration (apokatastasis), envisioning God’s love eventually bringing all into harmony with Him.
Later Theological Reflections
- C.S. Lewis famously suggested that some may come to Christ after death: in Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce, he imagined souls encountering Jesus’ truth beyond earthly life.
- Karl Rahner, a 20th-century Catholic theologian, introduced the idea of the “anonymous Christian”: someone who, without explicit knowledge of Jesus, nevertheless responds to God’s grace and thus implicitly accepts Christ.
- John Wesley, founder of Methodism, left room for God’s mercy to reach those outside visible Christianity, writing that God’s Spirit works “wherever He will.”
A Speculative Bridge
From this vantage point, some Christians have cautiously wondered whether reincarnation-like opportunities could serve divine justice:
- A person born in a remote region, centuries before missionary contact, might be “given another chance” to encounter Christ’s gospel — whether through another earthly life, or in a postmortem state of decision.
- This is not orthodox doctrine; traditional Christianity affirms resurrection, not cycles of rebirth. But the logic of mercy runs parallel: just as Jewish mystics held that God brings souls back until they rectify, Christian thinkers argue that God will not condemn souls who never had a fair chance to believe.
Justice and Mercy Aligned
Ultimately, both traditions — though very different in metaphysics — share a conviction that divine judgment is not arbitrary. As the transcript argued against eternal hell — “an eternal hell contradicts … measure for measure” — so too many Christian voices resist the idea that billions are doomed simply by birth circumstances. Instead, they trust that in Christ, God’s justice and mercy meet, ensuring every soul truly encounters His saving love.
In this way, the Jewish mystical image of a soul being “slung from body to body” finds an echo in Christian hope: that no soul is forgotten, and that the God who “desires all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4) will make provision — even beyond death, even across worlds unknown — for every person to meet Jesus as Lord and Savior.