If not now, when?

 Why don't the Five Books of Moshe talk about reward in the World to Come?

“If you follow My statutes and observe My commandments and perform them, I will give your rains in their time, the Land will yield its produce, and the tree of the field will give forth its fruit. Your threshing will last until the vintage, and the vintage will last until the sowing; you will eat your food to satiety, and you will live in security in your land. And I will grant peace in the Land, and you will lie down with no one to frighten [you]; I will remove wild beasts from the Land, and no army will pass through your land; You will pursue your enemies, and they will fall by the sword before you; Five of you will pursue a hundred, and a hundred of you will pursue ten thousand, and your enemies will fall by the sword before you… You will eat very old [produce], and you will clear out the old from before the new.” (Vayikra 26.)

These are beautiful blessings, but material rewards have no comparison to the great spiritual reward that we will get in the next World.  The Mishna (Avot 4:17) says: “One hour of bliss in the World to Come is better than all the life of this world.” In fact, all of the rewards (and punishments) that Hashem promises for observing the Mitzvot and studying Torah are material blessings. 

It’s only in the books of the Prophets that the World to Come is mentioned. 

There are some classic answers.  For example, that a person is generally motivated by what he or she can see, and a reward or punishment in the World to come will not cause a person to do the right thing or stop them from doing wrong. (Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra.)  Another answer is that the Torah is not promising rewards per se. The Torah is saying that if we, as a community, follow the path of Torah, the world will change, and our physical and material will be taken care of in a miraculous way. (Ramban.)  Rambam says that the rewards discussed in the Torah are not really rewards but facilitation.  If we follow the Torah, he says, Hashem will give us everything we need in order to be able to pursue this path without any material worries.

The question remains: why not mention the rewards in the afterlife, as they are certainly much greater pleasure for the soul than anything in this world?  

Let’s take another look at the Mishna that I quoted before about an hour of bliss in the World to Come being better than the entire life in this world. That same Mishna also says: “One hour of repentance and good deeds in this world is better than all the life of the World to Come.”  

Chassidus explains that these two ideas are not a contradiction.  For the soul, the bliss in the afterlife is fantastic.  But from Hashem's perspective, the pleasure He derives from our service on this earth is the greatest thing imaginable.  

Hashem created the world as a place where His presence is concealed, and put us here in order to reveal it.  This is done through repentance and good deeds, which is our purpose and why we are here.  Yes, if we bring pleasure to Hashem and transform the world to a place of goodness, we get rewarded for it in the afterlife.  But our focus should not be on the reward and ourselves.  The Torah, our guide to life, tells us that our purpose and our greatness is to do Mitzvot in this world. 

This is also why we are so careful to preserve life. Jewish law tells us that we should violate Shabbat even to help a dying person live for one more minute - because a minute of life on this earth is the most precious thing.  The very fact that there is a soul in a body impacts the world.  (This is of course a huge subject that requires a lot more discussion. I am just touching on it here.)  

This is why the Torah focuses entirely on the physical world.  This is where our real work is, and the material things that Hashem gives us help us transform the material into channels for the spiritual, bringing the two together right here.  A single Mitzvah in this world has a power that nothing in the spiritual worlds can match!