God’s Mini-Me

Outside of the signature first line of the Shema – “Hear Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is one”, the opening line of the V’ahavta, the paragraph which follows the Shema, likely ranks as one of the most memorable verses of the Torah:

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your life (nafshkha) and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:5)

Much ink has been spilled trying to grasp and distinguish the significance of these three human expectations of love for God and no single dvar Torah can capture all that can be said on even one of these three so I have decided to focus on one particular midrash which captures some big rabbinic ideas. One biblical – rabbinic idea, which has captured the religious imagination of almost all generations, is the idea that human beings are created in the image of God (b’tzelem E-lohim). What exactly this means has for good reasons been defined and redefined throughout the generations.

Our focus will be to try to understand exactly what “to love God with all your ‘nefesh’ might mean. As is noted in the above translation, the likely biblical pshat or plain meaning of the word ‘nefesh’ is life force, namely, the ability to breath. Only later, under Greek influence did it come to mean “soul” – the inner spiritual element of a person’s being. This later meaning has come to play an enormous role in rabbinic thinking. The following midrash captures how the sages transformed the meaning of this term while also shedding light on how they understood the idea of “tzelem E-lohim”:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul…” (Deuteronomy 6:5) – What is “with all your heart, with all your soul” … The Rabbis say: Come and see. The Holy One blessed be He fills His world, and [a person’s] soul fills his body. The Holy One blessed be He bears His world, and the soul bears the body. The Holy One blessed be He is One in His world, and the soul is one in the body. The Holy One blessed be He does not sleep, and the soul does not sleep. The Holy One blessed be He is the pure One in His world, and the soul is the pure one in the body. The Holy One blessed be He sees but is not seen, and the soul sees but it is not seen. Let the soul that sees but is not seen come and praise the Holy One blessed be He, who sees but is not seen.

Israel said: ‘Master of the universe, this soul that praises you, until when will it be placed in the dust, [as it is written:] “Our soul (nafsheinu) bows down in the dust”’ (Psalms 44:26)? The Holy One blessed be He said to them: As you live, the End will come, and your souls will rejoice. That is why Isaiah comforts them and says: “I greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul (nafshi) will exult in my God” (Isaiah 61:10). (adapted from Tanhuma Vaetchanan 37)

It is easy to see in this midrash that human existence parallels that of the divine. God is, as it were, the “soul” of the world, just as the soul is the spiritual essence of the human body or, in other words, human beings are microcosmic models of the divine macrocosm – the human soul is God’s “mini-me”! Iti is for the author of this midrash what gives human existence, its sense of being “tzelem E-lohim”.

The implications of this analogy are obvious. Loving God with all of one’s “nefesh” means guiding one’s life according to God’s will, and thus, giving life a sense of God’s eternity, as well as expressing both in one’s body and in God’s world divine expectations. That, of course, is no small order, but, then again, neither is making a life worth living.