Rabbinic thought maintains that souls are not tortured in gehinom forever; the longest that one can be there is said to be eleven months, with the exception of heretics, and unobservant Jews. This is the reason that even when in mourning for near relatives, Jews will not recite mourner's kaddish for longer than an eleven-month period. Gehinom is considered a spiritual forge where the soul is purified for its eventual ascent to Gan Eden ("Garden of Eden").
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Such people prosper in this world to receive their reward for any good deed, but cannot be cleansed by and hence cannot leave gehinom, because they don't or can't repent. This world can therefore seem unjust where the righteous suffer, while the wicked prosper. Many great thinkers have contemplated this, but God's justice is long, precise and just.
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All classic rabbinic scholars agree that these concepts are beyond typical human understanding. Therefore, these ideas are expressed throughout rabbinic literature through many varied parables and analogies. Gehinom is fairly well defined in rabbinic literature. It is sometimes translated as "hell", but is much more similar to the Nicene Christianity view of Purgatory than to the Christian view of Hell.
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The afterlife is known as olam ha-ba the "world to come", עולם הבא in Hebrew, and related to concepts of Gan Eden, the Heavenly "Garden in Eden", or paradise, and Gehinom. The phrase olam ha-ba does not occur in the Hebrew Bible. The accepted halakha is that it is impossible for living human beings to know what the world to come is like.Steinsaltz, Adin Evan-Israel. Berakhot.
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If the repentance is not complete in this world, the suffering will continue in the life after (hell). After the repentance is complete they join the righteous. The completely wicked (a man who did nothing good in his life) cannot correct their sins in this world or in the other, and hence do not suffer for them here, but in gehinom (hell). The very evil do not repent even at the gates of hell.
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The three verses are: Psalms 119:142, 71:19 and 36:7. They are recited in this order by Ashkenazi tradition, while Sephardi tradition calls for reciting them in the order as they appear in Psalms. The Bach asserts that Moses did not die in the afternoon of Shabbat but of Friday; however, he wasn't buried until Shabbat afternoon. Some say that the recital of this is to recall just judgement because it is immediately after Shabbat that sinners return to Gehinom.
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Psalm 25 (Hebrew numbering; Psalm 24 in Greek numbering) of the Book of Psalms, has the form of an acrostic Hebrew poem. This psalm has a strong formal relationship to Psalm 34. Both are alphabetic acrostics, with missing each time the verse Waw, which was added a verse to Pe a prayer of deliverance of Israel. As an Acrostic the verses in the psalm are arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet, with the exception of the letters Bet, Waw and Qoph which together according to Jewish interpreters made reference to the word gehinom (hell).
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This view is shared by all classic rabbinic scholars. According to Maimonides, any non-Jew who lives according to the Seven Laws of Noah is regarded as a righteous gentile, and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot M'lakhim 8:14Encyclopedia Talmudit (Hebrew edition, Israel, 5741/1981, entry Ben Noah, end of article); note the variant reading of Maimonides and the references in the footnote There is much rabbinic material on what happens to the soul of the deceased after death, what it experiences, and where it goes. At various points in the afterlife journey, the soul may encounter: Hibbut ha-kever, the pains and experiences of the physico-spiritual teardown within the grave; Dumah, the angel in charge of graveyard things; Satan as the angel of death or such similar grimly figure; the Kaf ha-Kela, the ensnarement or confinement of the stripped-down soul within various ghostly material reallocations (devised for the purpose of punishment, re-vindication and chastisement); Gehinom (pure purgatory); and Gan Eden (heavenly respite or paradise, purified state).
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