In today’s page of Talmud we read of God’s promise to resurrect the dead.
פסחים סו,א
אָמַר הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא: מָה שֶׁאֲנִי מֵמִית — אֲנִי מְחַיֶּה, כְּמוֹ שֶׁמָּחַצְתִּי — וַאֲנִי אֶרְפָּא
The Holy One, Blessed be He, said: Those same people whom I put to death I will bring to life, just as those people whom I wounded I will heal…
Belief in and longing for the resurrection is a big deal in Jewish liturgy. Three times a day Jews pray to a God who promises to resurrect the dead:
מִי כָמֽוֹךָ בַּֽעַל גְּבוּרוֹת וּמִי דּֽוֹמֶה לָּךְ מֶֽלֶךְ מֵמִית וּמְחַיֶּה וּמַצְמִֽיחַ יְשׁוּעָה
וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים
Who is like You, Master of mighty deeds, and who can be compared to You? King, Who causes death and restores life, and causes deliverance to sprout forth. And You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead.
Today, let’s take a look at the long and fascinating history of resurrection, starting with the Bible.
Resuscitation in the Bible
The earliest successful resuscitation was performed by the prophet Elijah, and is described in the First Book of Kings. Elijah was fed by a kind woman in the village of Zarefath, but “after a while, the son of the mistress of the house fell sick, and his illness grew worse, until he had no breath left in him.”
18-23 מלאכים א יז
וַתֹּאמֶר אֶל־אֵלִיָּהוּ מַה־לִּי וָלָךְ אִישׁ הָאֱלֹהִים בָּאתָ אֵלַי לְהַזְכִּיר אֶת־עֲוֺנִי וּלְהָמִית אֶת־בְּנִי׃ וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלֶיהָ תְּנִי־לִי אֶת־בְּנֵךְ וַיִּקָּחֵהוּ מֵחֵיקָהּ וַיַּעֲלֵהוּ אֶל־הָעֲלִיָּה אֲשֶׁר־הוּא יֹשֵׁב שָׁם וַיַּשְׁכִּבֵהוּ עַל־מִטָּתוֹ׃ וַיִּקְרָא אֶל־יְהוָה וַיֹּאמַר יְהוָה אֱלֹהָי הֲגַם עַל־הָאַלְמָנָה אֲשֶׁר־אֲנִי מִתְגּוֹרֵר עִמָּהּ הֲרֵעוֹתָ לְהָמִית אֶת־בְּנָהּ׃
וַיִּתְמֹדֵד עַל־הַיֶּלֶד שָׁלֹשׁ פְּעָמִים וַיִּקְרָא אֶל־יְהוָה וַיֹּאמַר יְהוָה אֱלֹהָי תָּשָׁב נָא נֶפֶשׁ־הַיֶּלֶד הַזֶּה עַל־קִרְבּוֹ׃ וַיִּשְׁמַע יְהוָה בְּקוֹל אֵלִיָּהוּ וַתָּשָׁב נֶפֶשׁ־הַיֶּלֶד עַל־קִרְבּוֹ וַיֶּחִי׃ וַיִּקַּח אֵלִיָּהוּ אֶת־הַיֶּלֶד וַיֹּרִדֵהוּ מִן־הָעֲלִיָּה הַבַּיְתָה וַיִּתְּנֵהוּ לְאִמּוֹ וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלִיָּהוּ רְאִי חַי בְּנֵךְ׃
She said to Elijah, “What harm have I done you, O man of God, that you should come here to recall my sin and cause the death of my son?” “Give me the boy,” he said to her; and taking him from her arms, he carried him to the upper chamber where he was staying, and laid him down on his own bed. She said to Elijah, “What harm have I done you, O man of God, that you should come here to recall my sin and cause the death of my son?” He cried out to the LORD and said, “O LORD my God, will You bring calamity upon this widow whose guest I am, and let her son die?”
Then he stretched out over the child three times, and cried out to the LORD, saying, “O LORD my God, let this child’s life return to his body!” The LORD heard Elijah’s plea; the child’s life returned to his body, and he revived. Elijah picked up the child and brought him down from the upper room into the main room, and gave him to his mother. “See,” said Elijah, “your son is alive.”
Another prophet also resurrected a young boy. That prophet was Elisha, who was Elijah’s disciple. This is told in the famous story of the Shunamite woman whose son was brought home after spending too much time in the hot sun:
Elisha Raising the Son of the Shunammite. Frederic Leighton 1881. Oil on canvas, Leighton House Museum, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Culture Service, England.
מלאכים ב, ד
וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל־אָבִיו רֹאשִׁי רֹאשִׁי וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל־הַנַּעַר שָׂאֵהוּ אֶל־אִמּוֹ׃ וַיִּשָּׂאֵהוּ וַיְבִיאֵהוּ אֶל־אִמּוֹ וַיֵּשֶׁב עַל־בִּרְכֶּיהָ עַד־הַצָּהֳרַיִם וַיָּמֹת׃ וַתַּעַל וַתַּשְׁכִּבֵהוּ עַל־מִטַּת אִישׁ הָאֱלֹהִים וַתִּסְגֹּר בַּעֲדוֹ וַתֵּצֵא׃ וַתִּקְרָא אֶל־אִישָׁהּ וַתֹּאמֶר שִׁלְחָה נָא לִי אֶחָד מִן־הַנְּעָרִים וְאַחַת הָאֲתֹנוֹת וְאָרוּצָה עַד־אִישׁ הָאֱלֹהִים וְאָשׁוּבָה.
וַיָּבֹא אֱלִישָׁע הַבָּיְתָה וְהִנֵּה הַנַּעַר מֵת מֻשְׁכָּב עַל־מִטָּתוֹ׃ וַיָּבֹא וַיִּסְגֹּר הַדֶּלֶת בְּעַד שְׁנֵיהֶם וַיִּתְפַּלֵּל אֶל־יְהוָה׃ וַיַּעַל וַיִּשְׁכַּב עַל־הַיֶּלֶד וַיָּשֶׂם פִּיו עַל־פִּיו וְעֵינָיו עַל־עֵינָיו וְכַפָּיו עַל־כפו [כַּפָּיו] וַיִּגְהַר עָלָיו וַיָּחָם בְּשַׂר הַיָּלֶד׃ וַיָּשָׁב וַיֵּלֶךְ בַּבַּיִת אַחַת הֵנָּה וְאַחַת הֵנָּה וַיַּעַל וַיִּגְהַר עָלָיו וַיְזוֹרֵר הַנַּעַר עַד־שֶׁבַע פְּעָמִים וַיִּפְקַח הַנַּעַר אֶת־עֵינָיו׃
[Suddenly] he cried to his father, “Oh, my head, my head!” He said to a servant, “Carry him to his mother.” He picked him up and brought him to his mother. And the child sat on her lap until noon; and he died. She took him up and laid him on the bed of the man of God, and left him and closed the door. Then she called to her husband: “Please, send me one of the servants and one of the she-asses, so I can hurry to the man of God and back….”
Elisha came into the house, and there was the boy, laid out dead on his couch. He went in, shut the door behind the two of them, and prayed to the LORD. Then he mounted [the bed] and placed himself over the child. He put his mouth on its mouth, his eyes on its eyes, and his hands on its hands, as he bent over it. And the body of the child became warm. He stepped down, walked once up and down the room, then mounted and bent over him. Thereupon, the boy sneezed seven times, and the boy opened his eyes...
A belief in the divine resurrection of the dead is a pivotal traditional Jewish belief. Something like it can be found in the Book of Isaiah:
ישעיהו כו: יט
יִחְיוּ מֵתֶיךָ נְבֵלָתִי יְקוּמוּן הָקִיצוּ וְרַנְּנוּ שֹׁכְנֵי עָפָר כִּי טַל אוֹרֹת טַלֶּךָ וָאָרֶץ רְפָאִים תַּפִּיל׃
Oh, let Your dead revive! Let corpses arise! Awake and shout for joy, You who dwell in the dust!— For Your dew is like the dew on fresh growth; You make the land of the shades come to life.
Belief in Resurrection in The Talmud
The rabbis of theTalmud felt a belief in the resurrection of the dead was critical to Judaism. So critical that without it a Jew simply could not inherit the World to Come:
משנה סנהדרין 10:1
כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל יֵשׁ לָהֶם חֵלֶק לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (ישעיה ס) וְעַמֵּךְ כֻּלָּם צַדִּיקִים לְעוֹלָם יִירְשׁוּ אָרֶץ נֵצֶר מַטָּעַי מַעֲשֵׂה יָדַי לְהִתְפָּאֵר. וְאֵלּוּ שֶׁאֵין לָהֶם חֵלֶק לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא, הָאוֹמֵר אֵין תְּחִיַּת הַמֵּתִים מִן הַתּוֹרָה
All of the Jewish people, have a share in the World-to-Come… And these are the exceptions, the people who have no share in the World-to-Come: One who says: There is no resurrection of the dead derived from the Torah…
For the rabbis of the Talmud then, it was not enough to believe in the resurrection of the dead. The belief must be that this belief is found in the Torah itself. However, locating this crucial verse proved rather challenging, as we read in tractate Sanhedrin (91a). Rabbi Yohanan found it in one verse (Numbers 18:28), but his exegesis was rejected by the School of Rabbi Yishmael. Rabbi Simai found another verse (Exodus 6:4), but Rabban Gamliel used a completely different verse as his proof (Deut. 31:16), and when challenged had to change his answer (Deut. 11:21). Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya told the Romans that it was found in another verse entirely (Deut. 13:16) and in his theological debates with the Samaritans, Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei used his own favorite (Num.15:31). Still others claimed the verses in Deut. 4:4. How odd that for such a critical belief, none of the rabbis could actually agree on where it could be found.
resurrection in the world religions
The resurrection is described in the writings of all the Abrahamic faith traditions. In Islam, Yom al-Qiyamah ( يوم القيامة) is the Day of Resurrection, on which all those who have lived and died will be raised from their graves to be judged by Allah. And unlike the Torah, the Quaran mentions it explicitly.
“O People, if you should be in doubt about the Resurrection …. see the earth barren, but when We send down upon it rain, it quivers and swells and grows [something] of every beautiful kind. That is because Allah is the Truth and because He gives life to the dead and because He is over all things competent. And [that they may know] that the Hour is coming - no doubt about it - and that Allah will resurrect those in the graves” (Quran 22:5-7).
Christians of course have faith in the resurrection of Jesus. But Jesus himself resurrected Lazarus from the dead, after Lazarus had been entombed for four days. Here is the account, as told in John 11:38-45:
Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. Take away the stone,' he said. 'But, Lord,' said Martha, the sister of the dead man, 'by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.' Then Jesus said, 'Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?' So they took away the stone.
Then Jesus looked up and said, 'Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.' When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come out!' The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go.' Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.
“Debates over the details of bodily survival had marked the Christian views on reincarnation since earliest times. Such matters as the preservation of hair and nails and many other distinctive physical features had kindled perennial disputes. Shall we have the same height, weight and age as we did at our death? Would diseases and deformities disappear? ”
For Buddhism, there is an eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth known as samsara. Though you need to be careful, because the kind of rebirth you will have depends on the kind of life you previously led.
Resuscitation in the first textbook of pediatric medicine
Paolo Bagellardo. De infantium aegritudinibus et remediis. Padua 1472. From here.
Paolo Bagellardo was a pediatrician (though he would not have recognized the term) who lived in Padua in the late fifteenth century. In 1472 he published his treatise on pediatrics, De infantium aegritudinibus et remediis. (The book is remarkable for a number of reasons, the least of which is that it is an incunabulum. It was the first medical treatise [and probably also the first scientific treatise] to make its original appearance in printed form rather than having prior circulation in manuscript. It is also one of the two first books published in print by a living author. But that’s not important right now). In it, the good Italian physician gave some advice for midwives. “If she find it [the newborn] warm, not black, she should blow into its mouth, if it has no respiration.” This is good advice, though it was followed by some not-so-good advice: “or into its anus.”
The Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons
Today, Amsterdam’s canals are full of bikes. Three hundred years ago they were full of people drowning.
Amsterdam is a beautiful city, and the last time that I visited I took a couple of guided tours on its intricate canal system. Each year hundreds of bicycles are fished out of the water (as you can see in this photo I took). But back in the eighteenth century Amsterdam’s canals were full of different objects. People who fell in. The problem got so bad that in 1767 a group of generous citizens formed The Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons, having been “struck with the variety of instances in which persons falling into the water were lost for want of proper treatment.” Among the methods the the Society recommended were
warming the victim
rubbing the body with woolen cloths (“wetted with brandy and strewed over with day salt”)
positioning the victims head lower than his feet, to allow aspirated water to drain out
bloodletting and
stimulating the victim with rectal tobacco smoke
This last recommendation is demonstrated in the illustration below, courtesy of the Wellcome Institute.
Joseph Jacques de Gardane. Rectal smoke to stimulate respiration in a drowning victim. From the Wellcome Library.
Tobacco was recognized as a stimulant, and so why not use it to stimulate a victim of drowning? For example, in July 1768 a six-year-old boy “at play on a wharf, fell from a beam into the water, unnoticed by his playfellows.” Here is the rest of the account from the original, recorded by Alexander Johnson:
The use of tobacco-in-the-anus was not only limited to highly trained physicians. Bystanders tried it too, and with some success. One example is found in Rowland Jackson’s A Physical Dissertation on Drowning published in London in 1746. Jackson was keen to extol “the happy effects of the smoke of tobacco in restoring drowned persons to life” which is what saved a young woman who fell from a ferry and was dragged lifeless from the river. Read what happened next in the original. It is quite delightful.
After those “considerable rumblings” in the woman’s abdomen, “she discharged some water from her mouth and in a moment after returned to life.”
“When was the first successful resuscitation? Did it begin in biblical times? During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment? Or with the first human defibrillation in 1947? Or with the rediscovery of chest compression in 1959?...We could chose each of these dates - and for that matter, many others. ”
from tobacco smoke to electricity
And so the tobacco pipe became a forerunner of the external automatic defibrillator. The defibrillator, which is used to shock a quivering and useless heart back into uniform rhythm is now commonly seen in public places like hotel lobbies, sports arenas and airports.
Ever since its discovery, scientists had experimented with electricity as a way to heal sickness, cure disease, and yes, re-animate the dead. In 1784 one French physician summed up his efforts thus far.“I have electrified people attacked with gout and rheumatism with crippled extremities, and after exposure to electricity all were made more uncomfortable than before. Thus, electric commotion can only increase the pains of the afflicted.”
“The Grand Electrical Apparatus” of Francis Lowndes. It could cure everything from amenorrhea to ulcers.
But others claimed a better track record. In 1787 Francis Lowndes, a self-described “medical electrician” published his Observations on Medical Electricity. Lowndes listed no fewer than forty-three ailments and diseases that could be improved with electricity, “among them tapeworm, tumors, locked jaw, epilepsy (sleeping sickness), urinary obstruction, cataracts, and amenorrhea (lack of menstruation).”
Soon electricity was being used to try and resurrect the dead. One especially enthusiastic experimenter was Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) whose Italian birth did not prevent him from getting his hands on the corpse of a freshly executed criminal while visiting London. And applying an electric current to it. Here is the report of his work in the London Morning Post, Jan 22, 1803:
On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually open. In the subsequent parts of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life. This however was impossible, as several of his friends, who were near the scaffold, had violently pulled his legs in order to put a more speedy termination of his sufferings.
But Aldini was on to something. As Mickey Eisenberg wrote in his important book Life in the Balance; Emergency Medicine and the Quest to Reverse Sudden Death, Aldini concluded that life might be restored if electricity was applied to the heart, and therefore “was one of the first to advocate a combination that presaged modern CPR and defibrillation. Aldini freely admitted to ignorance about how electricity affects the heart, but “that it does affect it has, I trust, been sufficiently demonstrated by experiments.”
“Without any understanding of ventricular fibrillation or heart disease (he was primarily concerned with drownings), Aldini had realized that ventilation combined with rapid electric therapy could reanimate the lifeless.”
There followed a long period of what Eisenberg describes as “electroquackery” but the science continued to advance. In the 1920s and 1930s it was shown that electric current could zap a heart out of fibrillation (when, rather than beating in unison, the cardiac muscle quivers like a bag of earthworms) and back into normal rhythm. All this culminated in the work of Claude Beck, a professor of surgery at what would become Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, who was the first person to successfully defibrillate a human in 1947. The human in this case was a fourteen-year-old boy who was being operated on for a severe chest abnormality when his heart stopped. Beck administered some medications and a couple of rounds of electricity directly applied to the boy’s heart. This restored it to a normal rhythm. “The boy made a full recovery, with no neurological damage” writes Eisenberg, himself a widely respected emergency physician. “It’s not clear from Beck’s report if the child ever realized how amazing his survival was.”
The Reanimation of Dead Pigs
In April 2019 a group of researchers from Yale published a paper in the prestigious science journal Nature whose title was at once modest and remarkable: Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem. It is assumed that once a mammalian brain (at normal temperature) has been deprived of oxygen for more than about ten minutes, it could never recover. But here the Yale team was investigating whether any physiological and cellular functions could be restored in a large intact mammalian brain several hours after death.
They took 32 pig heads from an abattoir four hours after they had been slaughtered and, after removing the brains from the skulls, bathed them in a “proprietary perfusate solution” for six hours. A computerized network of pumps, heaters and filters controlled the flow, temperature and constituents of the special solution for six hours, a system they called BrainEx. As a commentary in the journal Nature noted, “there was no evidence of the kind of neural activity that is thought to signal consciousness, or the ability to perceive the environment and experience sensations such as pain or distress.” But
incredibly, BrainEx did restore and sustain circulation to major arteries, small blood vessels and capillaries, cellular responsiveness to drugs and cerebral metabolism. A drug that increases blood flow in people’s brains, for instance, dilated pig blood vessels and increased the rate of flow of the perfusate…
Electrodes inserted into slices of brain tissue detected electrical activity in individual neurons; neurons fired action potentials in response to an electrical stimulus and even displayed spontaneous synaptic activity.
“Simpliefied” diagram of the BrainEx system. From Vrselja, Zvonimir; Daniele, Stefano G; Silbereis, John; Talpo, Francesca; Morozov, Yury M; et al. Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem. Nature; 2019: 568: 336-3,343A-343.
Why would the researcher undertake such a complex trial? Because this work might in principle help investigators develop therapies for brain injuries resulting from a lack of oxygen. And in case you were wondering, the team noted that they used brain tissue “retrieved after death from pigs used for food production. No animals died for this study.”
“..we applied this technology to the isolated, and largely ex cranio, brains of 6-8-month-old pigs 4 h post-mortem. Using this approach, we observed attenuation of cell death and preservation of anatomical and neural cell integrity. We also found that specific cellular functions were restored, as indicated by vascular and glial responsiveness to pharmacological and immunogenic interventions, spontaneous synaptic activity, and active cerebral metabolism in the absence of global brain activity...”
Miracles and Misinformation
Survival after CPR in Three Television Series. From Diem, SJ. Lantos JD. Tulsky JA. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation on Television. N. Engl. J. Med. 1996;334:1578-82.
In 1996, right in the middle of my training in emergency medicine in Boston, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article that I recall to this day. It was a review of cardiopulmonary resuscitation on television, and found that the survival rates in TV-land (which consisted of Chicago Hope, ER and Rescue 911) were significantly higher than the most optimistic survival rates in the medical literature. “This portrayal of CPR on television,” wrote the authors, “may lead the viewing public to have an unrealistic impression of CPR and its chances for success.” I guess I remember the article so well because I spent so much time resuscitating patients in the busy ER, more often than not without success. I was no Elisha.
“Rates of long-term survival after cardiac arrest as reported in the medical literature vary from 2 percent to 30 percent for arrests outside a hospital, and from 6.5 percent to 15 percent for arrests that take place inside a hospital. For average elderly patients, the rate of long-term survival after cardiac arrest outside a hospital is probably no better than 5 percent. For arrests due to trauma, the reported survival rates vary from 0 to 30 percent. Clearly, the rates on television are significantly higher than even the most favorable data reported in the literature.”
CPR and Immitato Dei
Despite the biblical stories of resurrection, God does not seem to have done a whole lot of resurrecting. But modern medicine has. In this respect, learning how to resuscitate a person is one of the ways that we may imitiate the divine. And it is easy to do. Just sign up for an online course. They are offered by the Red Cross, Magen David Adom, and others. In the US most states require their students to take a class in basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation in order to graduate from high school.
In the US about 350,000 people each year have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, most of which happen at home. Ninety per cent of them die, but bystander CPR can increase the odds of survival by three-fold, especially if CPR is performed within the first couple of minutes. A recent review of the global survival rate among adult out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients who received cardiopulmonary resuscitation showed that the rates of survival is about 9% when bystander CPR is performed, and that the survival rate patients who received CPR, while low, has increased in the past 40 years.
Resurrection of the Dead and Seeing Friends
In an especially touching passage of the Talmud, we are reminded of the value of the connections with those we love.
ברכות נח, ב
אָמַר רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן לֵוִי: הָרוֹאֶה אֶת חֲבֵירוֹ לְאַחַר שְׁלֹשִׁים יוֹם, אוֹמֵר: ״בָּרוּךְ … שֶׁהֶחֱיָינוּ וְקִיְּימָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה״. לְאַחַר שְׁנֵים עָשָׂר חֹדֶשׁ, אוֹמֵר: ״בָּרוּךְ … מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים״
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: One who sees his friend after thirty days have passed since last seeing him recites: Blessed…Who has given us life, sustained us and brought us to this time. One who sees his friend after twelve months recites: Blessed…Who revives the dead.
If you’ve not seen a loved one for a year (does Zoom count?) you recite the blessing “Who revives the dead.” It’s a testament to the importance of physical connection. Let’s end with some wise words from Erica Brown’s recent article on friendship, published in First Things.
True friendship is a work of art, a thing of holiness. Its absence creates a void. Its renewed presence is worthy of prayer…The reunion of friends is a sublime moment of grace. These days it’s a miracle…The friend in question must be beloved and a source of happiness, writes R. Asher ben Yehiel (d. 1327). One must take pleasure, he comments, in a friend’s very existence…Very soon, I will have not seen many of my friends for a whole year. It may be, given long vaccination waits, that it will be far longer than a year until I have that fortifying hug…As we inch toward the end of this, over which relationships will we recite a reunion blessing? COVID has taught me that physical absence need not mean emotional neglect. “We really have no absent friends,” wrote Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. To those friends who were present for me during this long and tedious separation, I hope to say one day soon: Come near that we may make a blessing on each other.
וברוך מחייה המתים
