In the World to Come, the Fig Tree Will Enforce Shabbat

Two Kings Who Asked the Same Question

Pharaoh stood before Moses and demanded to know: "Who is the Lord?" Nebuchadnezzar stood before the three men he had thrown into the furnace and said: "Who is the god who will deliver you from my power?" Both questions were answered. Neither king would have recognized the answer as an answer at the time. Both left the encounter diminished by exactly the gap between what they assumed and what was true.

Midrash Tehillim 73:3 opens with those two men not to mock them but to use them as a frame. What lies beyond the frame, what neither Pharaoh nor Nebuchadnezzar could see, was the shape of the World to Come, the world that Asaph glimpsed when his feet nearly slipped and then he understood why the wicked prospered and the righteous suffered. The World to Come is the answer to that question, and according to the rabbis it is stranger than any answer either king could have imagined.

The Direction of Longing Reverses

Rabbi Samuel bar Nahmani begins the description of that world with a reversal that sounds almost playful. In this world, the male pursues the female. In the future, the female will pursue the male. He draws the proof from Jeremiah: a woman shall surround a man.

He is not primarily interested in the mechanics of courtship. The reversal is a template. In the World to Come, the direction of longing flips. Israel, which has spent its history being called back by God, urged toward return, running from and toward the covenant, will itself turn and pursue. The people who always waited will stop waiting. The ones who were sought will become the ones who seek. The whole architecture of the relationship will have been turned around.

The Fig Tree Cries Out, the Stone Speaks

Then the passage becomes genuinely strange. Rabbi Samuel bar Nahmani describes what Shabbat will look like in the World to Come. A person who goes to pluck figs on the Sabbath will hear the fig tree cry out: "it is Shabbat!" The tree will enforce the law.

A person who tries to squeeze grapes on the Sabbath will hear the grapevine cry out in protest. The vineyard will be its own guardian. And a person who tries to carry firewood will find the wood speaking: "today is Shabbat, I cannot be carried."

The categories that organize human experience, who has moral authority and what does not, what can speak and what stays silent, what enforces and what merely exists, will be rearranged at the root. In this world, the law exists in human consciousness and human community. In the World to Come, it will be woven into the physical world so completely that nature itself will observe it.

What Moses and Daniel Saw

The midrash brings forward two witnesses who caught glimpses of this world while still alive. Moses, at the burning bush, saw fire in a thorn bush that did not consume the bush. This was not simply a miracle. It was a preview. In the World to Come, fire and the thing fire burns will coexist without destruction. The laws of this world, where fire eats and the consumed thing disappears, will be suspended. Moses saw the edge of that different physics.

Daniel's companions in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace saw the same thing from inside it. The fire was present. They walked in it. They were not burned. When Nebuchadnezzar looked in through the opening of the furnace, he saw four figures walking in the flames, the fourth with an appearance like a divine being. The three men came out without even the smell of smoke on their clothes.

The midrash reads both scenes as the same event occurring at different points in history: a temporary breakthrough of World to Come physics into this world, a moment when the future rules apply to the present material. Fire does not consume what it should consume. The laws that govern this world have been paused.