Kabbalah Teachings about the Man, Soul and Spirit
The psychology of the Kabbalah is closely connected with its metaphysical doctrines. As in the Talmud, so in the Kabbalah man is represented as the sum and the highest product of creation. The very organs of his body are constructed according to the mysteries of the highest wisdom: but man proper is the soul; for the body is only the garment, the covering in which the true inner man appears. The soul is threefold, being composed of Nefesh – Spirit (The vital principle or animating force within living things), Ruah – Air (A distinctive but intangible quality surrounding a person or thing), and Neshamah – Soul (the immaterial part of a person, the actuating cause of an individual life. Nefesh – Soul corresponds to the ‘Asiyyatic world, Ruah to the Yetziratic, and Neshamah to the Beriatic. Nefesh is the animal, sensitive principle in man, and as such is in immediate touch with the body. Ruah represents the moral nature; being the seat of good and evil, of good and evil desires, according as it turns toward Neshamah or Nefesh. Neshamah is pure intelligence, pure spirit, incapable of good or evil: it is pure divine light, the climax of soul-life. The genesis of these three powers of the soul is of course different. Neshamah proceeds directly from divine Wisdom, Ruah from the Sefirah Tif’eret (”Beauty”), and Nefesh from the Sefirah Malkut (”Dominion”). Aside from this trinity of the soul there is also the individual principle, that is, the idea of the body with the traits belonging to each person individually, and the spirit of life that has its seat in the heart. But as these last two elements no longer form part of the spiritual nature of man, they are not included in the divisions of the soul. The Kabbalists explain the connection between soul and body as follows: All souls exist before the formation of the body in the supra-sensible world (compare Preexistence above), being united in the course of time with their respective bodies. The descent of the soul into the body is necessitated by the finite nature of the former. It is bound to unite with the body in order to take its part in the universe. This necessity needed to contemplate the spectacle of creation, to become conscious of itself and its origin, and, finally, to return, after having completed its tasks in life, to the inexhaustible fountain of light and life—God. The Mosaic account of the creation of man speaks of a spirit or breath with which he was endowed by his Creator (Genesis 2:7); but this spirit was conceived of as inseparably connected, if not wholly identified, with the life-blood (Genesis 9 :4; Leviticus 17:11). Only through the contact of the Jews with Persian and Greek thought did the idea of a disembodied soul, having its own individuality, take root in Judaism and find its expression in the later Biblical books. For instance, in the following passages: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord” (Proverbs 20 :27); “There is a spirit in man” (Job 32 :8); “The spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastic 12 :7). The soul is called in Biblical literature “Ruah,” “Nefesh,” and “Neshamah.” The first of these terms denotes the spirit in its primitive state; the second, in its association with the body; the third, in its activity while in the body. An explicit statement of the doctrine of the preexistence of the soul is found in the Apocrypha: “All souls are prepared before the foundation of the world” (Slavonic Book of Enoch, xxiii. 5). According to II Esdras 4: 35 et seq. the number of the righteous who is to come into the world is foreordained from the beginning. All souls are, therefore, preexistent, although the number of those, which are to become incorporated, is not determined at the very first. As a matter of fact, there are souls of different quality. Solomon says (Wisdom viii. 19 et seq., R. V.): “Now I was a child of parts, and a good soul fell to my lot; nay, rather, being good, I came into a body undefiled.” The body returns to earth when its possessor “is required to render back the soul, which was lent him.” The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch 30: 2-3 distinguishes between righteous and common souls in the following passage, which describes the Messianic period and which is characteristic of the concept of preexistence: “The storehouses in which the foreordained number of souls is kept shall be opened, and the souls shall go forth, and the many souls shall appear all at once, as a host with one mind. And the first shall rejoice, and the last shall not be sad.”
Influence of Platonic Doctrine – Owing to the influence of the Arabic Neoplatonists, especially the Encyclopedists known as the “Brethren of Sincerity,” the Platonic psychology as interpreted and amplified in those schools prevailed among the Jews of the tenth and eleventh centuries. It was propounded in a special work attributed to Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda, and entitled “Ma’ani al-Nafs” (translated into Hebrew under the title “Torat ha-Nefesh“). According to him, man possesses three distinct souls, the vegetative, the animal, and the rational: the first two derived from matter, and the last emanating from the active intellect. At the moment of conception a ray of the rational soul penetrates into the embryo, where it supervises the development of the vegetative and animal powers until they become two distinct souls. The principal agent in the formation of the body is the vegetative soul, which derives its forces from the sun and the moon. Supervised by the stars and their spiritual principles, the vegetative soul constructs the body in the shape of the spheres, and exerts on it the same influence as that exerted by the universal soul on the spheres. Each of these three souls has its own attribute: that of the vegetative soul is chastity; of the animal, energy; and of the rational, wisdom. From these is derived another attribute, justice. Maimonides, except in a few instances, closely followed Aristotle with regard to the ontological aspect of the soul. The life of the soul, which is derived from that of the spheres, is represented on earth in three potencies: in vegetable, in animal, and in human life. In the vegetable it is confined to the nutritive faculty; in the animal it combines, in addition, the sensitive, the appetitive, and, in animals of a higher organism, also the imaginative; while in human life it comprises, in addition to all these faculties, the rational. As each soul, constituting the form of the body, is indissoluble united with it and has no individual existence, so the soul of man and its various faculties constitute with the body a concrete, inseparable unit. With the death of the body, therefore, the soul with all its faculties, including the rational, ceases to exist. There is, however, something in the human soul, which is not a mere faculty, but a real substance having an independent life. It is the acquired intellect, the ideas and notions which man obtains through study and speculation.
About Immortality of the Soul - While Neshamah ascends to God, Ruah enters Eden to enjoy the pleasures of paradise, and Nefesh remains in peace on earth. This statement, however, applies only to the just. At the death of the godless, Neshamah, being stained with sins, encounters obstacles that make it difficult for it to return to its source; and until it has returned, Ruah may not enter Eden, and Nefesh finds no peace on earth. Closely connected with this view is the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul (Metempsychosis ), on which the Kabbalah lays great stress. In order that the soul may return to its source, it must previously have reached full development of all its perfection in terrestrial life. If it has not fulfilled this condition in the course of one life, it must begin all over again in another body, continuing until it has completed its task. The Lurianic Kabbalah added to metempsychosis proper the theory of the impregnation of souls. That is, if two souls do not feel equal to their tasks God unites both in one body, so that they may support and complete each other, as, for instance, a lame man and a blind one may conjointly do. If one of the two souls needs aid, the other becomes, as it were, its mother, bearing it in its lap and nourishing it with its own substance. The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in the Tanah. As long as the soul was conceived to be merely a breath (”Nefesh”; “Neshamah”;), and inseparably connected, if not identified, with the life-blood, no real substance could be ascribed to it. As soon as the spirit or breath of God (”nishmat” or “ruah hayyim“), which was believed to keep body and soul together, both in man and in beast (Genesis 2 :7, 4:17, 7: 22;), is taken away (Psalms 144 :4) or returns to God. The soul goes down to Sheol or Hades, there to lead a shadowy existence without life and consciousness (Job 14:21; Isaia 38:18). The belief in a continuous life of the soul, which underlies primitive, Ancestor Worship and the rites of necromancy, practiced also in ancient Israel, was discouraged and suppressed by prophet and lawgiver as antagonistic to the belief in Yhwh. As a matter of fact, eternal life was ascribed exclusively to God and to celestial beings who “eat of the tree of life and live forever” (Genesis 3 :22), whereas man by being driven out of the Garden of Eden was deprived of the opportunity of eating the food of immortality. It is the Psalmist’s implicit faith in God’s omnipotence and omnipresence that leads him to the hope of immortality betrays only a desire for, not a real faith in, a life after death. Ben Sira still clings to the belief in Sheol as the destination of man. It was only in connection with the Messianic hope that, under the influence of Persian ideas, the belief in resurrection lent to the disembodied soul a continuous existence.
About Transmigration of Souls – The doctrine of Metempsychosis is highly controversial in Kabbalah teachings. According to Sa’adia Ha-Gaon, who says that he would not consider it worth while to show the foolishness and the low-mindedness of the believers in metempsychosis, were he not afraid lest they might exercise a pernicious influence upon others (”Emunot ve-De’ot,” VI.) The metempsychosis is the belief of passing of souls into successive bodily forms, either human or animal. According to Pythagoras, who probably learned the doctrine in Egypt, the rational mind (????), after having been freed from the chains of the body, assumes an ethereal vehicle, and passes into the region of the dead, where it remains till it is sent back to this world to inhabit some other body, human or animal. After undergoing successive purgation, and when it is sufficiently purified, it is received among the gods, and returns to the eternal source from which it first proceeded. the reasons given by the adherents of metempsychosis for their belief are partly intellectual and partly Scriptural. The former are as follows:
- Observation shows that many men possess attributes of animals, as, for instance, the gentleness of a lamb, the rage of a wild beast, the gluttony of a dog, the lightness of a bird, etc. These peculiarities, they assert, prove that their possessors have in part the souls of the respective animals.
- It would be contrary to the justice of God to inflict pain upon children in punishment for sins committed by their souls in a previous state. The Scriptural reasons are conclusions drawn from certain Biblical verses, such as: “Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; but with him that standeth here with us this day before the Lord our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day” (Deuteronomy 29 :14, 15); “Blessed be the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,” etc. (Psalms 1:1).
The doctrine counted so few adherents among the Jews that, with the exception of Abraham ibn Daud (”Emunah Ramah,”), no Jewish philosopher until Hasdai Crescas even deemed it necessary to refute it. Only with the spread of the Kabbalah did it begin to take root in Judaism, and then it gained believers even among men who were little inclined toward mysticism. Thus one sees a man like Judah ben Asher (Asheri) discussing the doctrine in a letter to his father, and endeavoring to place it upon a philosophical basis (”Ta’am Zekenim,”). The Kabbalists eagerly adopted the doctrine on account of the vast field it offered to mystic speculations. Moreover, it was almost a necessary corollary of their psychological system. The absolute condition of the soul is, according to them, its return, after developing all this perfection the germs of which are eternally implanted in it, to the Infinite Source from which it emanated. Another term of life must therefore be vouchsafed to those souls, which have not fulfilled, their destiny here below and have not been sufficiently purified for the state of reunion with the Primordial Cause. This is the theory of the Zohar, which says: “All souls are subject to transmigration; and men do not know the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He!. They do not know that they are brought before the tribunal both before they enter into this world and after they leave it; they are ignorant of the many transmigration and secret probation which they have to undergo, and of the number of souls and spirits which enter into this world and which do not return to the palace of the Heavenly King. Men do not know how the souls revolve like a stone, which is thrown from a sling. But the time is at hand when these mysteries will be disclosed” (Zohar, II. 99b). Like Origen and other Christian Church Fathers, the Kabbalists used as their main argument in favor of the doctrine of metempsychosis the justice of God. But for the belief in metempsychosis, they maintained, the question why God often permits the wicked to lead a happy life while many righteous are miserable, would be unanswerable. Upon the doctrine of metempsychosis was based the psychological system of the practical Kabbalah, inaugurated by the Kabbalists of the school of Luria. According to them, all the souls destined for the human race were created together with the various organs of Adam. As there are superior and inferior organs, so there are superior and inferior souls, according to the organs with which they are respectively coupled. Thus there are souls of the brain, of the eye, of the head, etc. Each human soul is a spark from Adam ( “Laurian Kabbalah”)
About Love - The Highest Relation to God – In regard to the proper relation of the soul to God, as the final object of its being the Kabbalists distinguish both in cognition and in will a twofold gradation therein. As regards the will, we may fear God and also love Him. Fear is justified as it leads to love. “In love is found the secret of divine unity: it is love that unites the higher and lower stages and that lift everything to that stage where all must be one“. In the same way human knowledge may be either reflected or intuitive, the latter again being evidently the higher. The soul must rise to these higher planes of knowledge and will, to the contemplation and love of God; and in this way it return to its source. The life beyond is a life of complete contemplation and complete love. The relation between the soul and God is represented in the figurative language of the Zoharistic Kabbalah as follows: “The soul, Neshamah [which proceeds from the Sefirah Binah, as mentioned above], comes into the world through the union of the king with the matrona—’king’ meaning the Sefirah Tiferet and ‘matrona’ the Sefirah Malkut—and the return of the soul to God is symbolized by the union of the matrona with the king.” Similarly, the merciful blessing that God accords to the world is symbolized by the first figure; and by the second, the spiritualizing and ennobling of what is material and common through man’s fulfillment of his duty.
The Ethics of the Kabbalah - It is seen hereby that ethics is the highest aim of the Kabbalah; it can be shown, indeed, that metaphysics is made subservient to it. The Kabbalists of course regard the ethical question as a part of the religious one, their theory of influence characterizing their attitude toward ethics as well as law. “The terrestrial world is connected with the heavenly world, as the heavenly world is connected with the terrestrial one,” is a doctrine frequently recurring in the Zohar. The later Kabbalists formulate this thought thus: The Sefirot impart as much as they receive. Although the terrestrial world is the copy of the heavenly ideal world, the latter manifests its activity according to the impulse that the former has received. Man, whose soul belongs to heaven, while his body is earthy, brings about the connection between the real and the ideal world. Man connects the two worlds by means of his love for God, which, as explained above, unites him with God.