TARRYTOWN, New York — The word “soul” is repeated in many different situations by the adherents of various religions.
But God has not given us the capacity to fully understand what a soul is.
Most religious people believe that humans are not just physical and biological creatures.
What makes us love or hate, experience different emotions, and have feelings?
Molecules and atoms, from which everything and everybody is built, don’t love or hate.
So we owe all the richness of our emotions to the spiritual part of us – a part which never dies and which we call the soul.
The soul is always with us, but what happens to the soul when a person is ill with Alzheimer’s disease, has a brain injury, or loses comprehension because of very old age?
Can the answer be that the soul, by triggering electrochemical signals between the neurons in our brain, causes us to experience different feelings and emotions, and causes our comprehension?
When the “tools” the soul uses are damaged and their function is impaired, a person loses a smaller or larger part of their intellectual ability despite the fact that the soul is still there.
The process of communication goes both ways – from the soul to our senses and from the senses to our soul.
Would it be reasonable to consider this process an interaction between our spiritual and physical being?
It would be relevant to comment on Birkhot Ha-Shahar, in which we thank God for the gift of the soul.
We pray: “One day You will take my soul from me, to restore it to me in life eternal.” We conclude by saying: “Praised are You Adonai, who restores the soul to the lifeless, exhausted body.”
If we think about people who are not with us any longer, we know what happens to their bodies after some extended time – and we also remember that the bodies of six million of our people were turned into ashes during the Holocaust. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to pray for the restoration of the bodies and uniting them with the souls which never die?
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Arkady Mamaysky is a mechanical engineer who immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1979. He has visited Israel once, and sometimes twice, during every year since then. To contact the author, email arkady437@gmail.com