אִם יִרְצֶה הַשֵּׁם
Techiyas ha-mesim is not the same happiness as the world the soul already enters at death. Rav Avigdor Miller zt"l opens the difference on Sanhedrin 91a. The world of neshamos has been going since creation. A soul is there now, without a body, in a joy that cannot be described. The rising is later, and it is greater, because it gives the soul back the body it lived with.
The Gemara will not let the two verses stand apart. One says the blind and the lame and the pregnant will be revived as they were. The other says the lame man will skip like a deer. Resh Lakish answers that they first rise with their blemishes and only afterward are healed. Rav Miller zt"l supplies the reason for the order. Soul and body were together for years. At death the soul sorrowed that it had to leave, and the body sorrowed that the soul was gone. Each wants the other back, not a stranger. The first moment of the rising is therefore the meeting itself, body as it was. After they have met, the soul sees that the body is not whole. Then the body is brought to the best it can be, and that is the state in which the happiness continues.
This rising is one of the thirteen foundations. Meisim yechayeh Kel is not a line that is sung and forgotten. A Jew is required to hold that the body and the soul will be joined again. The tape calls the matter past the senses. We learn the outside of the verses. The inside stays closed.
For Yisrael the verses go further. Death is swallowed forever. There will be no more weeping over the dead. The other verse, in which a man of a hundred is mourned as a youth, is parked on the nations that share the time. They are given long years. They are not given life without end. Virtuous families among them remain. They do the work of field and vineyard and laboratory. Their results go to mankind and to Yisrael. Yisrael itself is free for Torah, one house of study, as it was in the wilderness when there were no fields to till and the food was given. Those gentiles live out their span and die. They go to the world of souls, which does not stop during the rising. Their children continue here. The tzaddikim of Yisrael do not die.
Not every righteous person receives the same measure. One verse that shames the sun and the moon is answered, against Shmuel, by two camps at the rising. In the camp of the tzaddikim the lights are still opened so that nature can be learned more clearly. In the camp of the Shechinah the sun means nothing. The greater light is the knowing of Hashem, given so fully that every lesson nature can still teach is covered over. Rav Miller zt"l calls that knowing the happiness itself. He says he cannot describe it.
The last pair of clauses locks the claim on the same man. "I put to death and I bring to life" could have been read as one person dies and another is born. "I wounded and I heal" is wound and healing in one body. The two stand together. The One who ends a life is the One who returns that same life. The plain sense is the rising.
What a Jew carries into that rising is the garment acquired here. The soul as first given is pure and has no traits. Free will weaves a personality that is neither the flesh nor the original soul. A garment that does not fit is burned down. A garment of strength and beauty is what is rewarded. The kind of happiness the risen body can bear is the kind that garment can bear. The reunion is with the body that lived that life. The healing makes it able to bear what the life prepared.
The garment is Rav Miller zt"l’s own term for the personality the soul acquires by free will while it is in the body.
He is explaining the Antoninus mashal on Sanhedrin 91a. The body says it is only a stone once the soul has left. The soul says it never ate and never lusted. Rebbi answers that they are judged together. Rav Miller zt"l then asks what, exactly, is being judged. Not the chemicals of the body. Not the soul as it was first given. That soul is pure. Neshamah she-nasata bi tehorah hi. It has no traits of its own. It becomes fit for lasting life only after it has been in a body and has acquired what he calls a personality. He names that personality a levush. It is not the flesh and it is not the original soul.
Free will is what weaves it. A garment that does not fit is burned off in Gehinnom; something of the person remains. A beautiful garment is carried into olam ha-ba. He points to Eishet Chayil: oz ve-hadar levushah, va-tischak le-yom acharon. She faces the last day calmly because she goes with her garments. Those garments are the garments of the neshamah. What is rewarded or punished is that levush.
The kind of happiness the soul can bear is the kind its garment can bear.