That’s not how Jews see “the soul”.
I had started a very old thread, asking what Jews think about the soul and the afterlife.
One of them had reply, and said that the soul is the “breath” that give life to the body, but it belonged to God, not to the people who live and die.
The soul is not anyone’s spirit, the soul don’t contain your personality, your thought, your memories.
The soul is indestructible and immortal. So when you die his breath or the soul returned to God. You don’t go to heaven or to hell, because the soul doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to God.
So the soul only housed in these temporary bodies, while we are alive, but once we died, the soul would to God.
As far as I understand it (and any Jews can correct if I remember this incorrectly), there are no heaven or hell awaiting us. We only get one life, here.
The idea of the people having afterlife were foreign to early Jews. Jews began adopting and adapting pagan beliefs from the 4th to 1st centuries BCE Egyptian, Persian or the Greek religions, where the spirits of the departed being judged, and either been sent to paradise (eg Field of Reeds, Elysian Field, etc) or tartarus-like hell…which in turn, were promoted by Christians and later by Muslims.
The very idea of spirit or soul being judged, and ascension, actually have pagan origins from much older polytheistic religions, from Bronze Age Egypt and that of Sumer and Babylonia. Christian and Islamic religions have been influenced by these polytheistic religions.
Even so we are generally not on the same page, but I don’t recall that I ever saw you intentionally twisting the facts to advance a false narrative or impose an opinion merely because you said so. I appreciate your ethical debate. Compared to others, you’re honest and knowledgeable. These qualities are rare on this thread. I appreciate it.
Back to the subject, I’m not a Jew. I’m a Muslim. Islam teaches that all divine revelations are the same message and from the same source, the one and only God. Revelations have been sent to humans throughout history starting with Adam himself who was actually the first prophet to mankind. Many of the revelations got distorted, altered or totally vanished over the centuries; even pagan beliefs or ancient polytheistic religions may have deep roots in older divine revelations that have been altered to a great extent. Islam teaches that Judaism and Christianity as well even so are originally divine revelations but it was not immune to human manipulations/alterations.
That is why the final message of Islam was revealed to correct/restore the original message of older divine revelations that got distorted over the centuries. The difference this time is that the revelation of Islam through the Quran is entirely preserved intact and can be entirely memorized by heart and not a single letter is allowed to change, not even the specific pronunciation of a letter.
Islam teaches that God promised to preserve Quran and make it easy for remembrance. You can find 7 years old kids in the Islamic world who literally memorize Quran entirely by heart (even at Muslim countries that don’t speak the language of Quran/Arabic). It’s a living miracle; the same is not humanly possible with any other book of a comparable size. Imagine if I give you a comparable size book of a foreign language (Russian or Chinese) and ask you or any one else to memorize it entirely by heart, would that be possible?
Back to the spirit, Islam teaches that the spirit is from the command of God and we have not given knowledge, save a little. The nature of the spirit is beyond us but we know that the spirit is the source of human life. Without it, nothing remains other than a physical dead body without consciousness, thoughts or memories. A pile of physical earthly matter that can only decompose/disintegrate back to earth.
The spirit in the temporary physical body is like the driver in the car. The car appear to be alive as long as the driver is in charge, the characteristics of the car impose specific physical limits on the driver but the driver controls the car, if the body of the car is damaged, the driver can no longer use it, once the driver leaves, the car is a pile of dead matter. “Choices/actions" during the ride is not purposeless; it’s all about getting to the final destination.
See the link and quote below from a relevant article published by The New York Academy of Sciences about the nature of consciousness.
“Traditionally, researchers had proposed that mind or consciousness –
our self - is produced from organized brain activity.
However, nobody has ever been able to show how brain cells, which produce proteins, can generate something so different i.e. thoughts or consciousness. Interestingly, there has never been a plausible biological mechanism proposed to account for this.
Recently some researchers have started to raise the question that maybe your mind, your consciousness, your psyche,
the thing that makes you, may not be produced by the brain. The brain might be acting more like an intermediary. It's not a brand new idea. They have argued that we have
no evidence to show how brain cells or connections of brain cells could produce your thoughts, mind or consciousness.
The fact that people seem to have full consciousness, with lucid well-structured thought processes and memory formation
from a time when their brains are highly dysfunctional or even nonfunctional is perplexing and paradoxical."
Is There Life After Death? | The New York Academy of Sciences (nyas.org)
Wiki article below about the spirit is generally in line with the Islamic perspective.
Rūḥ - Wikipedia