They key to peace in the Middle East.

The beliefs of Islam regarding the afterlife are of great importance. Muslims believe in the continued existence of the soul and a transformed physical existence after death. Islam teaches that there will be a day of judgment when all humans will be divided between the eternal destinations of Paradise and Hell.

A central doctrine of the Quran and one of the most important teachings of Muhammad is the Last Day, on which the world will be destroyed, and Allah will raise all people and jinn from the dead to be judged. The Last Day is also known as the Day of Judgment, the Day of Reckoning, the Day of Separation, the Day of Awakening, the Day of Standing Up, the Encompassing Day, or the Hour.

Until the Day of Judgment, deceased souls remain in their graves awaiting the resurrection.

However, they begin to feel immediately a taste of their destiny to come. Those bound for hell will suffer in their graves, while those bound for heaven will be at peace until that time.

The resurrection that will take place on the Last Day is physical and is explained by suggesting that Allah will re-create the decayed body (17:100: “Could they not see that God who created the heavens and the earth is able to create the like of them”?). On the Last Day, resurrected humans and jinn will be judged by Allah according to their deeds.

One’s eternal destination depends on the balance of good to bad deeds in life. They are either granted admission to Paradise, where they will enjoy spiritual and physical pleasures forever, or condemned to Hell to suffer spiritual and physical torment for eternity.

The day of judgment is described as passing over Hell on a narrow bridge in order to enter Paradise. Those who fall, weighted by their bad deeds, will remain in Hell forever. The Quran specifies two exceptions to this general rule:

1. Warriors who die fighting in the cause of God are ushered immediately to God’s
presence (Surah 2:159 and Surah 3:169); and
2. “Enemies of Islam” are sentenced immediately to Hell upon death.
Paradise
“O soul who is at rest, return to thy Lord, well-pleased with Him, well-pleasing Him. So enter among My servants and enter My garden.” (89:27-30) Paradise (Firdaus), also called “The Garden” (Janna), is a place of physical and spiritual pleasure, with lofty mansions (39:20, 29:58-59), delicious food and drink (52:22, 52:19, 38:51), and virgin companions called houris (56:17-19, 52:24-25, 76:19, 56:35-38, 37:48-49, 38:52-54, 44:51-56,
52:20-21). There are seven heavens (17:46, 23:88, 41:11, 65:12). Hell, or Jahannam (Greek Gehenna), is frequently mentioned in the Quran and the Sunnah, using a variety of imagery. It has seven doors (Qur’an 39:71; 15:43) leading to a fiery crater of various levels, the lowest of which contains the tree Zaqqum and a cauldron of boiling pitch. The level of hell depends on the degree of offenses. Suffering is both physical and spiritual.
Being a Muslim does not keep one out of Hell, but it is not clear whether Muslims remain in Hell forever. Non-Muslims (kafir), however, will be punished eternally. A Muslim author says it this way: “Ultimately, God will remove from Hell those believers whose sins were not forgiven nor atoned for by good deeds in their lifetimes, and they will then enter Paradise. The remaining inhabitants of Hell will stay there eternally.”

Other Muslim commentators, noting that Allah can rescue people from hell as he chooses and that he is merciful and compassionate, have hypothesized that eventually, hell will be empty.  Alternatively, Hell can be seen as a place of progress where souls are instructed until they are fit to proceed to heaven: life after death is actually the starting point of further progress for humanity. Those in paradise are advancing to higher and higher stages of knowledge and perfection of faith. Hell is meant to purify those in it of the effects of their bad deeds and so make them fit for further advancement. Its punishment is, therefore, not everlasting.”

In Judaism, the belief in an afterlife is less a leap of faith than a logical outgrowth of other Jewish beliefs. If one believes in a God who is all-powerful and all-just, one cannot believe that this world, in which evil far too often triumphs, is the only arena in which human life exists. For if this existence is the final word, and God permits evil to win, then it cannot be that God is good. Thus, when someone says he or she believes in God but not in the afterlife, it would seem that either they have not thought the issue through, or they don’t believe in God, or the divine being in whom they believe is amoral or immoral.

According to Judaism, what happens in the next world? As noted, there is little material on this subject. Some of the suggestions about the afterlife in Jewish writings and folklore are even humorous. In heaven, one story teaches, Moses sits and teaches Torah all day long. For the righteous people (the tzaddikim), this is heaven; for the evil people, it is hell. Another folktale teaches that in both heaven and hell, human beings cannot bend their elbows. In hell, people are perpetually starved; in heaven, each person feeds his neighbor.

All attempts to describe heaven and hell are, of course, speculative, because Judaism believes that God is good, it believes that God rewards good people; it does not believe that Adolf Hitler and his victims share the same fate. Beyond that, it is hard to assume much more. We are asked to leave the afterlife in God’s hands.

This, then, is the main difference in the two great faiths. Islam is a faith that emphasizes reward and punishment. Judaism is a faith that believes in the unknown and perhaps unknowable, leaving such issues to a creator.
The Kabbalah teaches this: Evolutionary Man evolved from all that came before, was perfected, and after millions of years became a being capable of analytical thought, but without that spark of the unknown, known as the soul.

This creation process is known in the Hebrew Bible as Eloheim or plural forces, which are the forces that formed creation. The Hebrew Bible differentiates between the plural Eloheim and the singular YHVH Eloheim, which is the primary motivator and the intelligence that controls Eloheim in the mysterious expanding universe (s).

The Hebrew bible makes this clear when it states, after the creation of man, YHVH Eloheim breathed into the man the spirit, and man became complete: Neshamah (given by the creator when the vehicle was ready) Nefesh (the ID or the ego or the intelligence that developed in the animal called homo erectus over the millennium) and Ruach, the animal desire to survive which is important in the physical body and contains a lot of racial memory, or responses to danger, mating, search for food and so on.

We believe that everything has a part in the next stage or creation, since nothing is ever destroyed, and the conservation of all things is a part of our belief. So, in the next step of creation, called The Olam Ha-Ba, we see that everything continues, but in a higher state of evolution. 

In a concussion, any lasting peace the politicians dream of making must take into consideration the fundamental and ancient beliefs and rules of both Judaism and Islam, if a lasting political peace is ever possible.