Judaism has always maintained a belief in an afterlife, but the forms which this belief has assumed and the modes in which it has been expressed have varied greatly and differed from period to period. Jewish wisdom offers no definitive answer about what happens when we die, but there is guidance in several core teachings. Here are some key beliefs about the afterlife in Judaism:

• There is an afterlife: Texts from every era in Jewish life identify a world where people go when they die. In the Bible, it’s an underworld called Sheol. In the rabbinic tradition, it’s known by a number of names, including the yeshiva shel mallah, the school on high. The Hebrew word for skies, shamayim, also came to refer to heaven.

• Heaven has an open-door policy: Heaven is not a gated community. The righteous of any people and any faith have a place in it. Our actions, not our specific beliefs, determine our fate. No concept of Hell exists in Judaism. The closest we get is the fate of an apostate, who is said to be “cut off from his kin” .

• The afterlife can take many forms: Jewish beliefs in the afterlife are as diverse as Judaism itself, from the traditional view expecting the unity of flesh and spirit in a resurrected body, to the idea that we live on in our children and grandchildren, to a sense of heaven.

• The afterlife is here on earth: One strand of Jewish thought sees heaven as a transitory state that we can experience in this life. It is a state of mind, a way of being in the world, rather than a physical place.

It is worth noting that the Torah, the most important Jewish text, has no clear reference to afterlife at all. It would seem that the dead go down to Sheol, a kind of Hades, where they live an ethereal, shadowy existence. However, later Jewish tradition developed several distinct conceptions about the fate of man after death, relating to the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, and the nature of the world to come after the messianic redemption.