Is Judgement in GEHINOM Maximum of 12 Months? (The Modern CHABAD Confusion)

1:26And there are many, many other people, unfortunately, who wasted their lives and have no share in the World to Come, which means that they are in Gehinnom forever. Now, as far as the souls that go to Gehinnom, in essence, this is a soul that violated one of the 36 sins for which one receives karet. without doing teshuvah. If they did teshuvah, they could obviously avoid even going to Gehinom, depending on the level of teshuvah they achieved. They might be able to lessen the sin or completely erase it. But if they didn't do teshuvah for the issur karet, then they could go to Gehinom for eternity. ...until their soul is completely destroyed and the only thing that's left of it is the part of God that He instilled in it. That part returns to the original source, but their soul is destroyed completely. This happens after a lot of negative actions. This is one of the rules that Hakadosh Baruch Hu (the Holy One, Blessed be He) established in the world, that by...

2:34Preserving Pesach, you are testifying that you believe that God created the world and He is the one that took us out of Egypt. So, by preserving Pesach and complying with its commandments, you're agreeing with this and you're testifying, even though you may not remember it, you're testifying that you believe in it. On the other hand, if you eat chametz on Pesach, that means that you don't believe that God created the world and took us out of Egypt. And that's why you don't listen to him. And that's why Hashem says, this is one of the covenants. This is one of the deals. This is one of the ways that you testify that you believe in Me. If you don't believe in Me, then obviously we have a serious problem, because that's one of the 36. There are 36 times in the Torah that Hashem says that this specific sin is karet. He picked it. He picked 36 different times. A sin that He considers worse than everything else. The Zohar also adds another 12, saying that there's a total of 48, but l'ma'aseh, most understand that there's 36. Either way, a good part of those 36, more than half of them, are actually related to sexual crimes, meaning immorality, such as incest or a Jew being with a non-Jew, desecration of Shabbat, wasting seed, and things like that.

3:57What's metaphorical about a soul being burnt and then put back together and then being burnt again? No, no, these are, if you watch my shiur about Ge'enom, It's the Pirkei Avot, number 84, I believe. It gives details of each one of the chambers in Gehenom. And one of the chambers in Gehenom is boiling feces. Another chamber of Gehenom is boiling seed. Another chamber of Gehenom is fire, lava. But not lava like we have here. Lava like we have here is like a small little lighter next to the lava over there. It's not even 1/60th. The lava over there, because here the highest fire we have is blue. There, it is different types of fires that we have no concept of; we have green fire over there, all types of fires that we have no concept of what they are. So, yes, it's quite literal. Quite literal. I mean, it's worse, actually. We don't actually have a concept of how bad it really is because we think boiling — oh, it's like a tea bag. It's not.

5:18So that's a misunderstanding of a couple of places in the Gemara. One is in Masechet Shabbat, and one is in Masechet Rosh Hashanah. At least, to my knowledge, those are the two places where it says that the judgment is 12 months. The judgment is 12 months once somebody dies. If that person actually read the rest of the Gemara and the commentary on it as well, they would simply understand that it's not for everybody, and it's not always 12 months. So, there are a few things. Number one... If a person reads the rest of the Gemara in Masechet Rosh Hashanah, you will see that the judgment of 12 months is for a specific type of sinner. But then the Gemara continues and says that there are certain types of sinners whose judgment is for eternity. This means that those people who say 12 months probably never read the Gemara; they just heard about the 12 months from somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody else. The original somebody just told them one line and not the complete context. If you actually look at the Gemara yourself, you'll see in Gemara Rosh Hashanah 17a, it says that even after Mashiach comes, salvation comes to the rest of the world. Everybody gets good, yet their souls will continue to suffer. This means that even after Mashiach, and even after this world ends, the souls of certain individuals will never stop suffering. So, if someone simply reads the rest of that Gemara, they will understand it. Then, if you go to Gemara Masechet Shabbat, one second, where Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai says judgment for Reshaim...

6:4912 months. So they assume, oh, see, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai says wicked people, their judgment is 12 months. Misunderstanding. Why? The Ramak says that what Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai is telling us is not that their judgment is literally 12 months of time, but rather they get judged at a place in heaven called "12 Chodesh." It's a name of a place, not a time frame. This understanding aligns with various other Gemarot which indicate that many are judged in Gehenom for durations significantly longer than 12 months. It's like 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven doesn't actually mean 7-1-1. It's a location where you can buy Slurpees and fill your gas up too. So, "12 Chodesh" in the Gemara is an actual location, not a sentence. How do you prove it? By looking at other Gemarot that say many go to Gehinnom for much, much longer than 12 months.

7:50Exactly. It's also another thing. It's also another thing. The point is that anyone who studies the topic honestly arrives at a conclusion without a single shadow of a doubt. Not only does Gehinnom exist, but it has very, very long sentences, and it's not even the worst punishment. There's also something called Kaf HaKela, which you can also find in Masechet Shabbat, which we learn from David HaMelech. That, I think, was Avigail who tells them that all of the wicked enemies you have will be shot into Kaf HaKela. So the Gemara asks, what is she talking about? It says that a certain type of wicked people don't even have the merit of going to Gehinnom, so they end up in Kaf HaKela. What is Kaf HaKela? The Gemara explains that Kaf HaKela is when Hashem punishes someone to such an extent that he flings them in a type of spiritual slingshot. his soul from one end of the universe to the other end of the universe, and the whole time the different angels, what do they do to him? They make him into a little shakshuka. So, this rabbi does not require you to learn the secret parts of the Torah. This is literal Gemara. This is literal Chumash. This is literal Tanakh. This is everywhere. Now many people that reject it happen to be Chabad, unfortunately.

9:14Why do I say unfortunately? Because that means that Chabad in this generation has a few people that call themselves Chabad, but they're not really Chabad. Why? Because in order to be Chabad, you have to have chochmah, binah, da'at. You have to, obviously, use your brain, learn Torah. And the foundation of Chabad is two things: Rambam and the Tanya. If you look at Rambam, Hilchot Deot, and Rambam, Hilchot Teshuva, he talks about Ge'enom. What he says about Ge'enom over there is fascinating. You're going to have an enlightening experience once you go to Hilchot Teshuva and read what he says about Ge'enom. Or you can go to the Tanya; every Chabad Rabbi, every Chabadnik, loves the Tanya. Go to Tanya Chapter 8, Chapter 12, Chapter 11, Chapter 45, all these different places. He talks about Gehinnom in such a wonderful, wonderful way that it's not a confusion. He even gives you details of what happens if you eat treif, you eat non-kosher meat. He says for non-kosher meat, you go to the cold Gehinnom, not the hot one. Because there are just a couple of forms of Gehinnom: there's a Gehinnom of fire, and there's a Gehinnom of ice and...

10:23There's all for the derech you go today. They put you into the kollel, which gives you details. Unfortunately, many of these categories are neglected. They just skip those chapters, or they don't learn – they just call themselves baalei teshuva. We don't have anything against baalei teshuva as long as it's authentic. Of course, we don't have a house right now, but if it's honest baalei teshuva, we love baalei teshuva from all walks of life. Unfortunately, today there are many people that call themselves that, but they don't even learn a sefer. They don't learn their own books, so it's not my fault. I'm just the one that calls it out. Didn't tell them not to learn. If they want to go learn, let them go and learn. Oh, it's no problem. It's in their books. It's in the Gemara, it's in the Tanya, it's in the Rambam—it's everywhere. Everything that I say, literally 99.9% of everything I've said in all the thousands of hours of shiurim Torah we've done, is basic level Judaism. People think I'm some genius. I'm not. I'm not. I'm barely basic. It's just that we are in a generation where people don't know the basics, including sometimes rabbis.

11:26Not my fault. I didn't create them. I didn't tell them not to learn. The books are available to them for free, even. Go to Chabad.org. It's free. You go to the chapters as I tell you; you're going to find out. Or you go to the Chabad website and type "hell". You'll see a few things. Unfortunately, don't go to the articles. Go to the book like I told you. You don't learn from articles; you learn from books. You learn from the real, real books that were verified by authentic sources like the Tanya, like the Baal Shem Tov, like, you know, the Rambam, the Ramban. These are the people—these are the leaders—we learn from. We don't learn from some modern-day person that is a good speaker, just because they're a good speaker, whether it's me or not. I try to provide you, in essence, with an attempt to save you time by giving you the information that you can find yourself. Since you didn't go find it yourself, I'm providing it to you. If you want to verify it, you can go to those pages, you can go to those books, and verify it yourself. But the beauty of a lecture is supposed to be that I can save you a lot of time. For example, if you're going to learn the answers to...

12:38Everything that we talked about in this shiur alone most likely will take you between 8 to 12 months, or possibly longer. Because you'd have to read and write a lot of books just to find where these answers are. It's not like you just find the answer and leave, as you don't even know what you're looking for. So if you're really, really a heavy reader, it'll take you 8 to 12 months. If not, maybe 8 to 12 years, depending on your pace. But that's just the shiur. If it's last week's shiur, also, some shiurim, like for example, the Gehinom shiur, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten years. Not because of genius. It has nothing to do with that. It's just simply, I study a specific topic, I have a rabbi that knows what to tell me, where to go, where, you know, I do certain things, he does certain things, and Baruch Hashem, Put a lot of work into it, and we give it to you on a silver platter. People think that it's easy; people think, "Oh, yeah, you know, talking like it's easy," but it's not. It's just that you have to read a lot of information, and the information that you guys get is an accumulation of information acquired over an extended period of time in a hopefully understandable format.

13:48That's still somewhat interacting, and then that's it. You could verify all of it, or you could just comply with it and move on, whichever one you want, same price. Yes? Do all the people that die in the world of Gog and Magog lose their portion of the world completely, or, like, lavish their souls? No, not everybody that dies is going to Gehenom. No, some people that are going to die in Gog and Magog will be resurrected with the dead. Karet is not always the same; there are three different types of Karet. Some Karet is just a person dying prematurely, but he still has a share in the World to Come. Some Karet is when a person will actually live a long life in this world, but he has no share in the World to Come. And some Karet is that he not only loses a big part of his life by dying young in this world, but he also loses a share in the World to Come. These are the three different types of Karet.

14:49So some people who pass away may do so early, while others may pass away later, but the point is that it's not one size fits all. Some individuals who may meet their end at the time of Gog and Magog could even be among those resurrected from the dead, yet they may not merit to witness the Mashiach at that time.