In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava
Bible, but I also explore the meaning of this concept from a more elevated, bird’s-eye perspective, one that surveys the dense, tangled forest of the soul from a literary and narrative perspective, in the last part of this chapter. Because the concept of the soul is the product of a story—a “living book” as Teresa of Ávila said—I do my best to unspool the narrative threads of this story, with a specific focus on the way the Bible commingles tragedy and comedy and hence weaves together its drama with high and low strands of thought. As I discuss later in the chapter, the result is a pattern that features, in bold color, the sensibilities of the outcast, the outsider, and the downtrodden, so that if one can speak of the heart and soul of the Bible, it will be found in the Bible’s predilection for these themes. Later interpretations of “soul” in Western history—say in African American or Latin American Christianity—addressed many of these themes when they spoke of “soul,” even when it was transfigured in a newer, more modern light. But here I begin with a discussion of some of the basic qualities, tones, and inflections of nephesh in the Bible.
NEPHESH AND THE BREATH OF LIFE
As an entry point, I begin with nephesh’s association with the life force of a living being: the soul is related to the needs and respirations of the human body, to the blood and oxygen coursing through one’s veins (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 17:11) or to the throat, where life is maintained by the absorption of food and respiration of air (Ps. 107:5; Eccles. 6:7; Isa. 29:8; Prov. 6:30). Nephesh is a source of life, the secret power that enlivens the body and spirit of a person, the gush of life vivifying and quickening the substance of man and woman, bringing it into being. More encompassing than corporeal or spiritual needs alone, the soul is a shrine or reservoir for a variety of passions and hopes, both sensual and intangible.
Because nephesh is connected to the breath of life (in its verb form, it can mean “to respire or breathe”), it also suggests something deeply intimate and interior to the human person and thus can be used in the Bible with a personal pronoun, as in “my nephesh” (Gen. 19:19; Judg. 16:30; Ps. 54:6). In this form the term seems to indicate the sanctity of personal identity, that which constitutes the unseen fabric of a singular human being. With this nuance added, nephesh is the life or spirit that defines and distinguishes one person’s existence from others, the quintessence that makes one unique and peculiar. As a product of God’s maternal care in the womb, the soul is irreplaceable and inimitable: “You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13). In this vein, Robert Alter notes that nephesh can mean a person’s essential self, in addition to “life force” or “vital spirit.”3
Notwithstanding this intimacy between God and the human soul, however, the Hebrew soul remains a creature of flesh and blood; it is not inherently divine. The Torah leaves no doubt on this point: Like the grass of the earth and flowers of the field, the human person will wither and drop its leaves, fade, and return to the dust, says the poet and prophet Isaiah (Isa. 40:6–7). The human soul is fragile and impermanent, vulnerable to events outside its control and always vexed by the burden of the grave (Josh. 2:13; 1 Sam. 19:11; Ps. 34:23). Given the omnipresence of death and destruction in ancient Jewish history (individually and collectively), it is only natural that nephesh would be marked by the heavy and at times awful destiny of Israel. If biblical authors speak of Israel as often tottering on the edge of ruin, it is scarcely different when they consider the human soul: it is human-all-too-human. Consider the distressed effusions of the soul in the following psalm:
For my soul is sated with troubles,
my life’s reached the brink of Sheol.
I’m counted with those who go down to the Pit,
in darkness, in the depths.
Your wrath lies hard upon me,
With all your breakers you afflict me. (Ps. 88:3–8)
The image here of descent into the Pit (similar to the “Pit” of lions into which Daniel is thrown or the “Pit” of the whale in the Book of Jonah) is of course a confrontation with the underworld. The psalmist here is in an existential struggle, fighting for his life, doing what he can to keep the breakers from submerging his soul. With troubles all around and God’s displeasure upon him, the poet seems to be dying many small deaths: “We consume our years like a sigh” (Ps. 90:10).
Although the author of the psalm directs his blackest emotions at the heavens here, we cannot overlook the fact that he (apparently miraculously) continues to live and write. It is impossible to read the scriptures and not notice the myriad forces that menace and threaten one’s personal identity, but at the same time, the Torah is a tribute to the remarkable capacity of the human soul to survive to tell the tale, an achievement of both grit and grace. Snatched from the grip of Sheol, these moments of survival suddenly become the occasion for praise by the psalmist. It is natural, then, that the Psalms pair, in almost exactly equal quantities, psalms of supplication with psalms of praise. (These two types comprise two-thirds of the Psalms.)4 While the psalms of supplication give voice to the crushing weight of sorrow and suffering, the psalms of praise are jubilant, celebratory, and restorative; the former describe the downward slope into the depths of anguish, and the latter record the capacity of the soul to ascend from the pits of life (Psalm 121 is specifically called “a song of ascents” in this regard). The Psalms represent the soul in rich, polyphonic notes, both high and low, exultant and downhearted, a rowdy mixture of fears and torments on the one hand and undaunted spiritual aspirations on the other.
NEPHESH AND TRANSCENDENT LONGINGS
Besides suggesting respiration, personal identity, and life force, nephesh is also associated with immeasurable and sublime longings. Derived from the root wh (to desire) and the verb ns (to rise), nephesh is related to hopes and cravings that would elevate the mundane existence of humanity. In this sense, while nephesh is as vulnerable as a naked body in the desert and as susceptible to decomposition as any other creature of earth, it also embodies the ethereal and transcendent desires of man and woman, their ferocious appetite for God. However brief and transient our lives are, human beings have inexhaustible desires that distinguish us from all other animals, and nephesh is the source of these emotions, the restless energy that makes us long and hanker for impossible things: love, righteousness, God. “As a deer yearning for streams of water, so my soul yearns for you, God. / My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. / O when shall I come to appear before God?” (Ps. 42:1–2; see also Ps. 25:1; 130:5; Song of Songs 1:7).
The nephesh represents the far-reaching and untethered desires of humankind, the Abrahamic drive to seek, to strive, to reach for the unknown. Insatiable and infinite in its hunger, the soul is forever wanting, forever roaming in search of new worlds and new possibilities. The soul stretches out and follows “knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”5 It is endlessly drawn toward God, a moth to the flame.
Because it is sealed with the imago Dei, the nephesh also participates in the divine nature of God and shares with him the uncanny powers of creation. Endowed with the ability to name the things of creation, human beings have been given the art of language, with the potential to make something out of nothing, life out of death, order out of chaos, and beauty out of a blank canvas. Lest this blessing become a curse, however, biblical thought is relentless in rebuking man for his vanity and actions that disdain mortal limits. The children of Adam are constantly reminded of their origins in the earth, that they are made of dust and ashes. (The name “Adam” is, after all, derived from the Hebrew adamah, or soil.) Recall this solemn moment in Genesis: “The Lord God fashioned the human from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature” (Gen. 2:4–47). Working with earth and clay, God infused this organism with his own spirit and thus imbued it with dignity and divine properties. The soul is thus bifurcated, a curious mixture of both chthonic and transcendent qualities.
NEPHESH AND THE HEART
Since the Bible often pairs soul and heart, we should consider the points of contact between these two, as in the great commandment in Deuteronomy, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all of your soul and