In the Moment magazine of July/August 2011, the
question “Is There Life After Death?” was posed to various Jewish figures, who
provided responses. Following is one of those responses:
A ZOMBIE LIFE
I have no idea if there’s
an afterlife. I’d like there to be. I’d like to think that when I said goodbye
to my mom, it wasn’t forever. But how would I know? Because some guy in the
desert wrote a book and told me so? I don’t go in for that stuff. I wonder
about it a lot, but there’s no proof. I’ll have to wait and see.
I’ve always considered
myself not Jewish enough for Israel, but Jewish enough for Auschwitz. I write
about zombies. I try not to get into the spiritual aspect. I focus on the
concrete: How do you not die when you’re supposed to? I grew up in California,
so it’s all about disaster preparedness for me. We had earthquake drills;
nuclear war drills, because it was the Reagan era; and then we had real
disasters, we had fires, we had the Rodney King riots. L.A. was never safe. And
now its even worse – 9/11, global warming. So I took that mindset of disaster
preparedness and applied it to a science fiction concept. Zombie culture has
really taken off in the last decade and it’s because of the times we’re living
in. The world hasn’t been this inside-out since the 1970”s, and that was the
last time zombies were popular.
There’s always a rise in
spirituality when there’s a decline in the physical comfort of the world.
Imagine if you lived in some village in Gaul, in the late Roman Empire, and the
sewer system had collapsed and the barbarians were everywhere, and you were
hungry and poor and terrified, and then along comes some pilgrim from Italy
with that Christian glow, and he says, “Don’t worry, after you die it’s all
going to be OK.”
I think Jews are probably
too neurotic to believe that. I know I am. We think too much, that’s our
problem. We sit around and debate, and wonder about the nature of reality, what
is justifiable, what is not, what is sin, what does it all mean? Any good Jew
by nature has to be a little bit conflicted. Being a good Jew means you don’t
sleep well, and you don’t take your rabbi’s view as gospel. We’re questioners.
So I don’t think the answer for Jews is heaven. I think the answer is Ambien.
--Max Brooks
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