An Open Door: Judaism and the Human Soul
Introduction
Jewish religious tradition and evolutionary biology point to a single truth: that we are fundamentally the same as our earliest human ancestors.
Undeniably the discoveries of science, countless technological advances, and a host of social, economic, political, psychological, and sexual revolutions have left their many marks, but at the deepest levels of our humanity, we homo sapiens are more or less the same creatures we have been for some 70,000 years.
Our deep kinship extends horizontally in time as well. We share with every other human being on the planet, with very minor variations, a common genome.
Since Judaism’s earliest beginnings thousands of years ago, Jews have wondered about our shared humanity. What does it mean to be human? What is our relationship with our ancestors, to our descendants, and to the worldwide human family alive today? What connects us to those we love, and to our enemies? Can language, our shared words, help us to overcome our deepest fears of each other?
The following brief meditations explore ways in which Jewish thoughts about the soul, from a wide range of sources, might illuminate the eternal human condition. They ask whether our old notion of “soul” might potentially bridge the widening chasm between contemporary human self-understanding and those of our ancestors.
We tend to perceive a radical discontinuity between our past and our present. Often, we feel that we have to choose: either to embrace ancient wisdom as sacred and immutable, or to reject the old texts as outdated and irrelevant. I have attempted to describe here a Judaism that is deeply rooted in our oldest words, but which is still fresh and alive, as when these words were first spoken.