Your Body Is Your Soul

A Feminist Doctrine of Spirituality

Judaism speaks of God as both transcendent and immanent. “Transcendent” refers to a deity above and apart from nature and beyond human comprehension; “immanent” refers to divinity that abides within the universe and speaks to the human heart. A corresponding distinction is that between the “physical” (associated with immanence) and the “spiritual” (associated with transcendence). Monotheistic culture harbors a bias in favor of otherworldly spirituality/transcendence, understood to be dissociated from this-worldly physicality/immanence.

Jewish tradition played some part in shaping this attitude. Midrash (Rabbinic Torah commentary) presents God as a physical person – whether king or father – in parables meant to teach lessons, but we’re not supposed to take those depictions literally. God, we’re taught, really has no body or tangible, material characteristics at all.

Being made betzelem elohim / in God’s image, human beings presumably take on the same divine abstractness. Here, use of the word “tzelem/image” appears self-contradictory since an image is obviously visible but divinity is supposedly extrasensory: Not our bodies but our souls, recognized as wholly incorporeal manifestations of divine spirit, are said to be the core of our true selves, our eternal souls. Accordingly, transcendence erases or overrides immanence. However, I disagree with that way of imagining both God and human.

The conventional preference for disembodied spirit arises, I believe, from norms prevalent within our larger culture and influencing religious belief systems particularly in the Western world. It is a male-dominant society, and there’s plenty of evidence to confirm how misogyny’s impact has been powerful, pervasive, and prolonged.

Men’s incomprehension at and jealousy of women’s reproductive capacities – the power, which women literally embody, to generate new life – sparked antagonism, and elaborate (however absurd) rationales for silencing and disparaging them arose, masculine aggressive instincts helping to facilitate sexist oppression. The disempowering of women reflects men’s fear of life’s natural, physical potentialities and consequent denial of divine immanence, holiness that resides in corporeal existence.

One of the things I love about Jewish life is its enthusiasm for physical experience. Such joie de vivre runs counter, though, to some of our most sacrosanct religious assumptions; the two orientations clash. To live fully, 24/7, as Jews, we’ll need to reclaim our heritage’s earthy qualities – redeem them from the prison-tower of abstract “heavenly” piety where they sit, shackled and abject, in exile. Doing so means reversing centuries of ingrained notions of what spirituality actually involves.

Kabbalists from the Lurianic school (16^th century and after) maintain exactly the opposite viewpoint. Through a primal cosmic accident, they say, ethereal divine sparks became trapped in kelipot, “shells” of worldly nature, corrupt through and through.

But no, our here-and-now bodily reality is not inherently corrupt!

It has been compromised through unworldly preoccupations: They sap us of energy, diluting, diverting and debasing a pure stream of living waters welling up from Earth’s depths to nurture, heal and reanimate. No accident that a modern Hebrew word for “materialism” or “earthliness” is gashmi’ut, which is related to geshem/“rain.”

Rain falls from clouds, cleanses the atmosphere, soaks into earth, and forms groundwaters, which help vegetation flourish and ecosystems thrive. Waters from lakes, rivers and seas evaporate and cycle back up, returning to the sky. The real spiritual realm – one of immanence – is a continuous life-sustaining flow; it knows no qualitative distinction between heaven and earth, above and below. There is no entirely transcendent, metaphysical truth – as further modern Hebrew word play suggests.

Water, whether it comes as rain falling from above or spring-water rising from below, is the most necessary of necessities for life as we know it; to survive, we need water. Gashum (from geshem) means “rainy.” Turn the letters (ג–ש–ו–מ / gimel-s[h]in-vav-mem) around, and you get musag, which translates as “concept” or “idea.” What we can mentally grasp is a reflection – like one gazed at in a fountain – of what refreshes our parched bodies and keeps us physically alive. Immanence embraces and integrates transcendence.

Centuries of male dominance dictated systematic exclusion of female voices and talent, but women are life-bearers, inventors, dreamers. Life as we know it is inconceivable without them.

We must turn to a God-concept that uplifts women and affirms physicality. Your body is your soul.

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