Rishon Rishon

No sole soul

John Ray writes:

From what David Boxenhorn says, modern-day Jews cheerfully accept several quite different accounts of the afterlife all at once! I must confess, however, that I don't at all understand how serious Jewish students of scripture can accept belief in an immortal soul in view of the number of times that those same scriptures describe the "nephesh" as mortal. I guess they must place a lot of emphasis on uses of the word "ruach" but Ecclesiastes 3:19 must give them a few difficulties there. That scripure says that animals and people have the same "ruach" ("spirit" or "breath") so Heaven must be overrun with billions of rats, cats and dogs (just for starters). Good if you want to have a chat with a dinosaur or a pterodactyl, I guess. Very confusing!

Well, there's a very simple answer to this: Hebrew has three different words for soul, and they are not synonyms. The words are: nefesh (נפש), ruah (רוח), and n'shama (נשמה), in that order. The nefesh is the soul that all living creatures share, it is the feature which distinguishes life from not-life. Perhaps a better word for it would be: life-force. This word can also be used to mean 'beings' or 'human beings' as in the phrase, "there are 10,000 souls in the city". The word for 'mentally ill' in Hebrew is: hole nefesh - 'soul-sick' or 'life-force-sick'. In Hebrew, mental illness is a disease of the soul, not the intellect. N'shama (its root: n-sh-m is also used in nasham - to breathe) is the kind of soul that only people have. When we speak of the immortal soul we use this word. It is also used to describe a person's spiritual presence, e.g. n'shama tova - a good soul. Ruah, often translated as 'spirit', is the link between the nefesh and the n'shama. It is associated with emotions. The word can also mean spirit in the sense of disembodied spirit, e.g. ruah ra` - an evil spirit. It can also mean simply: wind. The Hebrew word for spiritual is derived from this word: ruhani (its opposite is gashmi: material).

But there is also a not-so-simple answer to this question: Judaism doesn't concern itself with these kinds of issues. It is for this reason that "modern-day Jews cheerfully accept several quite different accounts of the afterlife all at once". I hope to speak more about it in my next post.