Body and Soul

Image: A swirl of colors, deep and dark greens merging with yellows and golds and reds with something that looks like stardust around the edges.

 In New York, on the Lower East Side, at 12 Eldridge Street, there is a synagogue. Inside and upstairs there is a balcony. In front of you there is a 16-foot circular rose window, a blue field speckled with gold stars. It isn’t the window from 1887, but the floorboards creaking under our weight are. A right turn and a quick left and I’m sitting where she sat and I can feel her. I can feel her in the grooves under my feet where her feet shuffled and settled. I don’t know who she was, and maybe it’s all my imagination. It’s probably all my imagination. But, I think I can feel something of her having been here. A subtle and delicate residue of the breath and the touch of the woman. 

I think our culture, our society, encourages us - maybe in some ways requires us - to be desensitized to intimacy and connection and touch and soul. I also think the common image of soul might not be quite what I’m thinking about, so even though you’ve probably already got your own idea of what I’m saying, maybe just hear me out first. See, I feel there is in me a deep, personal Self that is always reaching in and out . . . or maybe just being in and out . . . and swirling throughout . . . well . . . me. When I come in contact with something, touch something, or someone, it’s my skin-and-bone self touching and it’s also that deep, personal Self. When someone touches me, the me they are touching is also both my skin-and-bone self and that deep, personal Self. I am a whole being: Skin and bone and soul.   

We have a prayer from 30 BCE - 200 CE called Elohai Neshamah that gives us some words and music for this body-soul dance, words that in their own way are like the grooves in synagogue floorboards. They are an imprint of the soul of one of our ancestors, and they go like this:

סידור אשכנז, ימי חול, תפילת שחרית, הכנה לתפילה, אלהי נשמה

(א) אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַֽתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא אַתָּה בְרָאתָהּ אַתָּה יְצַרְתָּהּ אַתָּה נְפַחְתָּהּ בִּי וְאַתָּה מְשַׁמְּ֒רָהּ בְּקִרְבִּי וְאַתָּה עָתִיד לִטְּ֒לָהּ מִמֶּֽנִּי וּלְהַחֲזִירָהּ בִּי לֶעָתִיד לָבֹא, כָּל זְמַן שֶׁהַנְּ֒שָׁמָה בְקִרְבִּי מוֹדֶה אֲנִי לְפָנֶֽיךָ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהַי וֵאלֹהֵי אֲבוֹתַי רִבּוֹן כָּל הַמַּעֲשִׂים אֲדוֹן כָּל הַנְּ֒שָׁמוֹת: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה הַמַּחֲזִיר נְשָׁמוֹת לִפְגָרִים מֵתִים:

Siddur Ashkenaz, Weekday, Shacharit, Preparatory Prayers, Elokai Neshamah

(1) My God! the soul which You bestowed in me is pure; You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me and You preserve it within me. You will eventually take it from me, and restore it in me in the time to come. So long as the soul is within me I give thanks to You, Adonai my God, and God of my fathers, Lord of all creatures, Master of all souls. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Who restores souls to dead bodies.

This prayer appears in the Talmud Berakhot 60b:4 and the Mishneh Torah, Prayer and the Priestly Blessing 7:3. According to Sefaria, the version cited above is from Siddur Ashkenaz Composed: Middle-Age France (c.1055 - c.1105 CE) and is a Translation based on the Metsudah linear siddur, by Avrohom Davis, 1981

The word for ‘soul’ in this prayer is neshamah. What is neshamah, anyway?

In a talmudic discussion from somewhere between 300 and 500 CE, the breath of life, nishmat, is given five names: nefesh, neshamah, chayah, ruach, and yehidah. It reads, “Nefesh is the blood, . . . Ruach . . . ascends and descends, . . . . Neshamah is the breath, as people say, God’s breathing is good. . . . . Chayah (which literally means living) because all the limbs are mortal whereas this is immortal in the body. Yehidah (unique) because all of the limbs are duplicated, whereas this is unique in the body.” (Ber. Rabbah 14:9) If that’s confusing to you, you are in good company. The next section of this page of Talmud is the rabbis trying to figure out what it means. I’m less interested in what it means and more interested in the conversation. I love that these rabbis got so deeply into it, and I find it provocative that the first word for the “breath of life” is blood. In the Torah, Leviticus 17:11, we read that the soul, the nefesh, is in the blood, and there are some who have even taken this idea and associated the different aspects of God associated with each of the letters of God’s unpronounceable name - yud/Chayah hay/Neshamah vav/Ruach hay/Nefesh - with platelets (Chayah), white blood cells (Neshamah), plasma (Ruach), and red blood cells (Nefesh). 

Whatever I actually think of all of this, and to be clear I am not sure what I actually think of all of this, I love thinking about all of this. I’m the recipient of over 36 units of blood transfusions and a bone marrow transplant, so maybe you can understand why. 

Years ago in my work in Jewish sex and sexuality education I read a text that has since been elusive to me. It was a work of Jewish mysticism, and I would love to find it again. If you have seen it and can give me some direction I would be so grateful. You see, it also spoke of these soul layers, but it understood nefesh with a different nuance. Soul-Blood, it said, meant the whole of our physical selves, everything corporeal, everything cellular about us in contrast with the more literal understanding in Leviticus. Our nefesh, it taught, is the outermost expression, the physical layer, of our soul. We are not body and soul, but body-soul.    

Which would mean, when someone donates blood, they are sending some of the outermost expression of their soul to help save the life or bring more comfort in death to the outermost expression of another’s soul in the most intimate and personal way possible. 

I needed to take a breath after I wrote that.
Anyone else need a breath?
There is time for a breath.
Take the breath you need.

I wasn’t surprised when I found that text. Judaism’s perspectives on bodies are foundationally positive. The Torah appreciates physicality. Sexuality is an open conversation. Physical mutilation is forbidden. It’s not that I don’t understand that we have complicated Jewish history regarding our physical existence, and it’s not that we don’t have spaces in our communities where bodies have been and are viewed and governed negatively. Rather, what I want to say is that at the core, the description of human life as “very good” in our creation myth includes our bodies. 

In our philosophical and mystical literature and our talmudic rabbinic literature our ancestors seem to consider, but not conclude, a variety of possibilities about body and soul and their relationship. For the talmudic rabbis, the soul is, in some sense, clearly separable from the body: God breathed the soul into the body of Adam (Gen 2:7, Ta’an. 22b). During sleep the soul departs and draws spiritual refreshment from God (Gen.R. 14:9). At death it leaves the body and waits to be reunited with it again when the messiah comes (Sanh. 90b-91a). That’s where we get the language from for our prayer, “You breathed it into me and You preserve it within me. You will eventually take it from me, and restore it in me in the time to come.” 

For these rabbis, the independent consciousness of the soul away from the body is unclear. They keep it vague: the body cannot survive without the soul, nor the soul without the body (Tanch. Va-Yikra 11), and yet, the majority view seems to be that the soul is capable of having a fully conscious life of its own (Ket. 77b, Ber. 18b-19a). It’s even maintained that our souls pre-exist our bodies (Chag. 12b). On the other hand, physical imagery is employed to describe the independent soul, so maybe these scholars assumed the soul has some kind of ethereal physical form, enabling it to parallel its experience in its embodied existence. Of course, imagery is imagery, and perhaps was never intended to be applied in that way. 

Or maybe the soul is a guest in the body (Lev. R. 34:3). Just as God fills the world and sees but is not seen, perhaps so, too, the soul fills the body (Ber. 10a). In this way, maybe the soul is our essence. But then, when we do wrong, they discussed, maybe we contaminate our souls, and for that we will be judged. Indeed, our souls will be our accusers. Still, our bodies won’t be able to plead that it was our souls that did wrong, and our souls won’t be able to blame our bodies, because at the time of the messiah God will return the soul to the body and judge them as one (Nid. 31a). 

For me, these wrestlings of our ancestors are fascinating, but they don’t help me live better. What helps me live better is the idea that when I touch someone, I am touching the outermost expression of their soul. What helps me understand my lived experience of being touched is the idea that another is touching the outermost expression of my soul. My body would be holy on its own because bodies are amazing and miraculous, but this body-soul idea helps me discern why it matters so much to me when my medical care providers ask before touching me. “Hey,” said Lana, my physical therapist, pointing. “I want to get a sense of what’s happening in your knee. Is it okay if I put my hand here?” And after more than a year of months of people drawing blood from me and transfusing blood into me and injecting me and poking and prodding me without asking if it was okay with me, body-soul me, tears spilled out of my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, it’s okay. And thank you so much for asking.” She handed me a tissue. “Doesn’t happen enough, huh?” she asked. I shook my head. 

Maybe when someone touches us, maybe they are touching our skin and bone and blood and soul selves. We are, after all, whole beings. 

Maybe, when our feet settle into the grooves in the floor and we imagine that we can feel the subtle and delicate residue of the breath and the touch of a life, maybe our skin and bone and blood and soul selves are on to something.

I wonder.
I am curious.
I don’t know.

But I do know this:
Sensitivity to intimacy and connection and touch is a gift.
One for which my whole self is grateful - skin and bone and blood and soul.