Affirming Life: The Eternal Recurrence

In his work The Gay Science (Aphorism #341), the renowned 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) explained his theory of the “Eternal Recurrence”:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'

Nietzsche has us imagine what our reaction would be, if we were told that we were to relive our lives repeatedly for all time, and whether this would be heaven or hell, based on the life we had lived, including all the choices we had made in life and their consequences. Nietzsche believed that we must learn to embrace the radical freedom we have in every life choice we make, so we can make the right choices. “>gradually rising in levels of spirituality through a mystical study of the Torah. In doing this, we must also be perpetually aware of new ideas, senses, and emotions, always ready to reinvent or reawaken ourselves. Interestingly, the Zohar may be compared with Buddhism, where a soul is reincarnated until it is extinguished into the oneness of the universe. In the Zohar, however, the gradual rise leads to the Creator.

The prominent Transcendentalist American Henry David Thoreau (1816-1862) expressed a similar vision in his seminal work Walden (1854):

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Thoreau’s approach was from a belief system “>Uri L'Tzedek, the Senior Rabbi at Kehilath Israel, and is the author of ““>one of the top 50 rabbis in America!”