A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
perhaps to avoid the drawing of embodied human figures, and at other times had no compunctions about depicting God Himself in a straightforwardly physical guise.8 But for all the ambiguity surrounding their views of God’s body, scholars have tended to agree on Ashkenazic Jews’ attitudes toward mundane, physical, human bodies: namely, that they were committed to a dualistic anthropology that privileged the immortal soul at the expense of its disposable physical container. Such denigration of embodiment, it is assumed, explains the Ashkenazic propensity for martyrdom and extreme asceticism; as Joseph Dan has put it, “The sages of Ashkenaz agreed unanimously that … withdrawal from the world, sacrifice of the body on behalf of the soul, giving up one’s life for one’s faith … were the goal of religious life. This sensibility … impressed itself upon the teachings of the German Pietists … ensuring that their theological writings were imbued with a deeply pessimistic air.”9 Put differently, the Pietists, like their Ashkenazic contemporaries more broadly, “[posited] utter self-nullification and assimilation into the divine world.”10 These thinkers ruminated obsessively about the body of God (or lack thereof), but saw little of value in the human body itself.
But the notion that the physical body was dross to be discarded at the earliest opportunity does not accord with the diverse and overwhelmingly positive discussions of human embodiment found in a wide array of Pietistic texts. Nor, for that matter, does it do justice to the varied and complex notions of just what a “body” was for medieval thinkers. Just as “nature” had a range of definitions and uses in medieval thought, so too “the body” functioned simultaneously, and not always consistently, in overlapping physical, political, and theological registers.11 In recent years, practitioners of linguistic, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, and disability theories have shown that conceptions and definitions of human bodies are culturally constructed rather than essentially or transhistorically predetermined. Medievalists have profitably harnessed and contributed to these overlapping fields, producing a sophisticated “history of the body” that has demolished the longstanding truism that premodern thinkers privileged the soul at the expense of the body or, indeed, that the two could be sharply distinguished from one another altogether.12 Scholars of rabbinic and medieval Judaism have brought many of these insights to bear on their respective fields of study—but the valences and vicissitudes of the medieval Ashkenazic body has remained by and large unexamined.13
This chapter will survey a range of Pietistic writings that, far from bemoaning human embodiment, positively celebrate the body and its capabilities. A wide reading of Pietistic halakhic, moralistic, liturgical, and theological compositions reveals the human body to be an object of almost obsessive concern. This interest is reflected in passages devoted to the detailed workings of the physical human body—texts that revel in anatomical details, and methodically investigate the workings of the body’s physiological processes. But the Pietists also invoke the human body in more abstract, overtly theological contexts. In particular, they return again and again to the man’s status as an olam katan (world in miniature), a microcosm of the created world as a whole. Given that the Pietists saw the natural order as imbued with spiritual profundity, it should come as no surprise that the body which reflected and encapsulated that order was seen as reflection of God’s goodness, as theologically meaningful—indeed, as the very linchpin of creation.
In their nuanced approach to human embodiment, and particularly in their use of the olam katan motif as an organizing principle, the Pietists echoed discourses that were increasingly in vogue in high medieval learned culture. While their Sephardic coreligionists—“mystics” and “philosophers” alike—were increasingly imbibing a negative conception of human embodiment from currents of regnant, world-rejecting neoplatonic thought, the Pietists’ Christian neighbors—ironically, also under the influence of neoplatonic writings—were simultaneously lauding the human body as an encapsulation of and conduit toward spiritual profundity. The Christian natural philosophers, mystics, and exegetes among whom the Pietists lived extensively mined the correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm in a wide array of written and visual texts, depicting man’s body as a minor mundus, and hence as theologically meaningful. Christian attention to the spiritual value of physical embodiment was bound up in an incarnational theology that found theological meaning in both the human body as microcosm and physical universe as macrocosm. This rumination on “the Word made flesh” echoed the Ashkenazic interest in the human body as encapsulating the divine order, as a veritable “world made flesh.”
After outlining some of the general discussions of embodiment that appear in Pietistic theological and liturgical texts, this chapter considers in some detail the specific theme of man as olam katan. This notion has two interrelated components: a link between the human body and the physical universe, and one between the human soul and God. The Pietists’ Sephardic contemporaries increasingly emphasized the latter at the expense of the former, but by examining each of these correspondences in turn, it emerges that the Pietists saw the two as intimately, inseparably linked. The present chapter focuses on the correspondence between the physical body and the universe, while Chapter 3 explores the ramifications of the link between soul and God. The implications of this linkage, as we shall see, included an overriding concern with bodily stability and mutability—which are discussed extensively in Chapters 4 and 5.
“ALL MY BONES SHALL SAY LORD, WHO IS LIKE YOU?”
Once one reads Pietistic texts with an eye to the role of the human body, their concern with biological and anatomical details fairly leaps off the page. To begin with, Pietistic texts are full of lists—of the limbs of the human body, of its internal organs, of the bodily humors and the ways in which all of them function in the physiological workings of the body and its internal processes. Almost invariably, the contexts in which these lists appear make clear that the body is being invoked not as a source of abhorrence, but as a concrete manifestation of God’s goodness and beneficence.
Perhaps the most comprehensive example of the Pietists’ rumination on the body and its potentialities emerges out of an ostensibly minor passage in the Sod ha-Yirah, a section of Sefer Hasidim generally attributed to Samuel, Judah he-Hasid’s father. There, in the context of a discussion of what man’s attitude should be upon awakening in the morning, we are told that one ought to “bless the Holy One, blessed be He, for that over which one had no control [while he was asleep], when he had no control over his body. Bless Him for each and every limb…. Thus, the Sages established a blessing over each one, as is fitting. And a certain pious man used to bless [God] for each and every limb, and a verse supports him: ‘My heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God’ (Ps. 64:3), and it is [further] written, ‘all my bones shall say Lord, who is like You?’ (Ps. 35:10).14 Thus would he pray for all the limbs that were created in him.”15 On its surface, this passage seems merely to be a variation on a common theme, namely that the morning blessings (birkhot ha-shahar) were instituted so as to correspond to one’s physical actions upon awakening in the morning.16 What is unique, however, is the blessing that “a certain pious man” added of his own accord. As Malachi Beit-Arie has pointed out, this prayer, or one like it, survives in a collection of Pietistic prayers preserved in a Bodleian manuscript.17 The text of this prayer, which the copyist of the manuscript entitled Birkhot ha-Evarim (The Blessings of the Limbs), begins by praising God, who “opens [the ears of] the deaf and [the eyes of] the blind”18—paralleling Sod ha-Yirah’s description of one who, while sleeping, “has no control over his body.” The prayer then proceeds limb by limb and organ by organ through the entire (male) human body, describing the anatomical role played by each of the body’s component parts.19 Overall, the liturgical composition includes thirty-eight blessings (e.g., “Blessed are You, Lord, on account of the eyes and their sight”). Some of these formulae, however, refer to more than one body part, such that in sum the prayer specifies no fewer than sixty-nine distinct types of body parts.20
In his description of this liturgical composition, Beit-Arie has suggested that “the author of these blessings had no interest in the anatomy