Heaven Heist: Someone Else Is Spending Your Olam HaBa (World to Come)

Chagigah 15a: “Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: HaShem created the righteous, and created the wicked; He created the Garden of Eden, and He created Gehenna. Each and every person has two portions, one in the Garden of Eden and one in Gehenna. If he merits, by becoming righteous, he takes his portion and the portion of his fellow in the Garden of Eden; and if he is found liable, he takes his portion and the portion of his fellow in Gehenna.”

Read this as the real “Heaven Heist”: not a crime, a lawful reallocation. “Created…created” installs two safes—delight and fire—so choice has weight. Two portions means two accounts opened at birth: sweetness and heat. If you merit, you don’t only draw your own dividends; you receive the unclaimed credit your “fellow” left on the table. If you refuse, you inherit the surplus heat they no longer need. The “fellow” isn’t fixed; it is whoever leaves their share unsecured. Nothing is lost; HaShem’s ledger transfers value to the vessel that can hold it—Yud-Hei rising as delight, Vav-Hei descending as refining flame. Guard your account with deeds, or someone else will ‘spend’ the chelek you have in Olam HaBa that you never claimed.

From the inner dimension, this sugya is Acher’s transmission of his teacher’s derash on “zeh le’umat zeh asah HaElokim”—every created vector of kedushah has a counterweight of din; the twin “accounts” are baked into the architecture so bechirah is real. The text itself speaks of “his wicked colleague,” meaning the one who left sparks and merits unredeemed; the tzaddik’s avodah is birur—elevating those netzotzot—so the shefa originally routed to the rasha’s share is reassigned to the keili that actually did the work. In Lurianic terms, the residue of good that was mixed in the rasha is separated and annexed to the root-soul that refines it, while the refuse is left to the fires that launder and rectify—so the “heist” is disclosure of where the light truly belongs.