Body and Soul in Judaism

International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2008

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

In the post-enlightenment world, it is often overlooked that the world’s spiritual traditions possess a complete psychology or “science of the soul.” This understanding is the very antithesis of the desacralized and reductionistic outlook found in modern Western psychology. The Jewish faith embraces a more integrated understanding of who we are. Its rich mystical tradition clearly speaks to the fullness of what it means to be human. Although modern psychology is in quest of more holistic treatment modalities – seeking, albeit superficially, to draw upon humanity’s sacred wisdom – these attempts cannot remedy the foundational problem, which is the flawed ontological basis of the discipline itself.

This is a synopsis of my forthcoming book entitled The Malleable Self and the Presence of God: Ontological Aspects of Early Jewish Anthropology (The Brill Reference Library of Judaism series; Leiden and Boston: Brill, forthcoming). The book explores early Jewish beliefs about how the human self reacts ontologically in God’s presence. Combining contemporary theory with sound exegesis, it demonstrates that early Jews widely considered the self to be intrinsically malleable—its condition is such that it mimics the ontological state of the space it inhabits. In divine space, they believed, the self therefore shares in the ontological state of God himself. The book is critical for students and scholars alike. In putting forth a new framework for conceptualising early Jewish anthropology, it challenges current scholars to rethink not only what early Jews believed about the self but how we approach the subject in the first place.

W hile the ontology of the soul is something to be dealt within philosophy, the issue of the possibility of the post-mortem existence of the soul in the case of human beings seems to require venturing beyond the strictly philosophical works of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and into his religious writings. This is because claims made by Averroes in religious or dialectical writings regarding the human soul and its continuing existence after death have a role in the consideration of his ontology of soul. This is particularly the case since he explicitly refused to allow for a theory of double truth, one in religious matters and another in philosophy, thereby insisting implicitly that on issues such as that of the existence of the afterlife there is a single truth in a doctrine that can suitably be labeled the unity of truth. 1 And in his self-professed religious treatise Kita ¯b fas · l al-maqa ¯l wa-taqrı ¯r ma ¯ bayna al-sharı ¯'a wa-l-h · ikma min al-ittis · a ¯l (The Book of the Distinction of Discourse and the Establishment of the Connection between the Religious Law and Philosophy 2) as well as in his dialectical Taha ¯fut al-taha ¯fut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence) 3 both perhaps written ca. 1179–81, Averroes expressly states that the afterlife of the individual soul is a religious doctrine that must be affirmed, although he also holds that its precise nature is a matter of considerable variation of opinion. 4 But there is much more to this issue.

The Muslim World, 2012

Ontological Aspects of Early Jewish Anthropology: The Malleable Self and the Presence of God, 2017

This is the Front Matter and Introduction (ch. 1) of my book entitled Ontological Aspects of Early Jewish Anthropology: The Malleable Self and the Presence of God (Brill, 2017).

Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, 2023

A remarkable number of Jewish commentators today highlight the biblical phrase na'aseh ve-nishma, literally "we shall do and we shall hear" (Exod. 24:7), to affirm that theological truth is only intelligible through the prism of bodily events: in "doing," we "hear" or understand divinity. These often cite the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 88a) as a prooftext. However, my paper demonstrates that this interpretation is in fact distinctively modern, reflecting intellectual and political shifts in Europe, especially "enlightened" critiques of metaphysics and heteronomy. This modernness does not imply that the interpretation is therefore some invasive species, corrupting a pristine landscape of indigenous Judaism. On the contrary, Jewish theology unfolds diasporically and hermeneutically—and here is the very heartbeat of a living tradition. The new gloss emerges in late-eighteenth-century Hasidic mysticism and flows thereafter into other tributaries of Jewish thought, from Buber, Heschel, and Levinas through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Jay Michaelson, and Mara Benjamin. In tracing the hermeneutical afterlives of Exod 24:7, we unveil not only a striking mutation in modern Jewish exegesis but also a broader "embodied theological" turn in modern religiosity. This paper illuminates the intertextual and phenomenological textures of this transformation.

2012