Halakha Ulangan 12:8: Shulchan Shel Arba

And now that I have explained the topic of the world of souls, which is called “Garden of Eden” among our rabbis z”l, and I have revealed to you the reason why the Torah did not mention it explicitly except to the “engaged intellectual” (la–maskil ha-nilvav), I will now expand upon for you my explanation of the matter of the pleasure that will be experienced in the measure it was originally experienced by Adam in the Garden of Eden before the sin, in that you already knew that the nature of the pleasure there was very great and deep, and that the greater part of it was the soul’s pleasure, the lesser the pleasure of the body, which had quiet, ease, and peace of mind unlike any you can imagine, and because he was all intellectual -body and soul in complete agreement to conceive of his Creator, and even the power of the Tree of Life to cause eternal life was at first not kept from him, but after the sin, when he ate from the Tree of Knowledge – it was only after this eating that he was made to follow his desires and strive for the needs of the body more than the needs of the soul, acting “all as we act now here today.”¹³¹Dt 12:8 And therefore he had to have his days limited and for death to hold sway over him. But before the sin, he could take pleasure in the Garden of Eden and delight himself as he wished, and this it what meant by, “And He placed him in the Garden of Eden to till it and tend it,”¹³²Gen 2:15. that He placed him in the Garden of Eden so that he would work the soil of the Garden, and sow in it every kind of produce, and plant all kinds of fruit trees, and his sustenance came from the trees of the Garden, and his drink from the rivers of Eden. And his clothes were “the clouds of glory,” until the ministering angels got jealous of his status, and things changed for the reasons you know.¹³³According to the story in Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 13, it was the angel’s jealousy of Adam that led them to tempt Adam and Eve through the serpent. It is to this status and to this measure of joy that the dead who are resurrected will in time to come return, to take delight in together in both body and soul, and the greater part of the pleasure will be the soul’s, the lesser part the body’s, as it was with Adam before the sin. Therefore, it will be necessary for any one among those raised from the dead to live a long or eternal life, for thus the world will return to its perfection as its Creator (may He be exalted) originally intended.