Death vs Life

Poets and philosophers sometimes have to go at praising death, and they even strike off beautiful and convincing passages on this theme. It is all very well to say that death is what gives life its preciousness; that it is the condition on which life exists. That immortality on earth would be a worse horror than death; that one lies down to sleep with kings and with all the great of the earth; that one returns to the bosom of nature, to roll through eternity with stones and rocks and trees. Tell it to a wide-staring gray-faced person in a hospital bed in one’s last hours.
Moses said, I have put before you this day life and death; choose therefore life. The Psalmist begs for life. His gratitude flames at a reprieve from the grave. Ecclesiastes sees death as the last injustice in the unjust and futile parade of existence. And Job, whose ironic praise of death marshals all the known arguments for it in a few matchless lines, regards it as a catastrophe which has the sole virtue of ending all catastrophes.
Death is an random cutting-off that leaves questions unanswered, things undone, debts unpaid, virtue unrequited, crime unpunished, to stretch the accounting period into an unknown future, beyond death. There is a hereafter, another world, the world to come; and in that world deeds and consequences at last balance. The righteous receive the reward for their righteousness. The once-prosperous sinners encounter the punishment they deserve.
The Jewish doctrine of the hereafter develops mainly in the Talmud, on a basis of Scriptural interpretation. What the hereafter was like; what resurrection of the dead actually meant; where and how these things would happen; what one was required to believe; these things escaped definition. For even in the Talmud the idea of the hereafter is shadowed forth only in metaphors and parables. Paradise is a Greek word derived from the Persian, meaning park or garden.
The stretching of the accounting period beyond birth and death suffers because the living never sees the beyond. We can take it on faith that the hereafter is a fact. To cry questions into the darkness is to behave like a child. The reason for the prosperity of the wicked, and also for the troubles of the good, is not in our hands.
Job describes the living evil of the human lot with stunning power, opposes to it an even more stunning statement of the evident presence and might of the L-rd G-d, and leaves the matter there. Job the tortured questioner ends firmer in his faith than his narrowly pious friends. They, who offered him partial answers to the problem of evil, stand rebuked by the divine Voice out of the whirlwind. The enigma of existence remains, and back of the enigma, in the depths of the human heart, the sense that the Redeemer lives. Job said, Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him, hailing G-d out of the depths of catastrophes.
Bottom line is:
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? One must not be afraid of death, if they have lived righteously, for out of body is presence with G-d. But choose life, that you may still be used for His glory. When you have fulfilled your destiny, He will call you home, until them laboring in His service.