Duet For Body and Soul

On Nadav and Avihu

Drink no wine or other intoxicant when you enter the Tent of Meeting…You must distinguish between the sacred and the profane, and between the pure and the impure. (Leviticus 10:9-10)

It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from a profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as a cosmic sacrality. (Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane)

Antoninos, the Roman emperor, said to Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi: The body and the soul are able to exempt themselves from judgment. How so? The body says: The soul sinned, as from the day of my death when it departed from me, I am cast like a silent stone in the grave, and do not sin. And the soul says: The body sinned, as from the day that I departed from it, I am flying in the air like a bird, incapable of sin. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said to him: I will tell you a parable. To what is this matter comparable? It is comparable to a king of flesh and blood who had a fine orchard, and in it there were ine first fruits, and he stationed two guards in the orchard, one lame, and one blind. The lame one said to the blind one: I see fine first fruits in the orchard; come and place me upon your shoulders. I will guide you to the tree, and we will bring them to eat them. The lame person rode upon the shoulders of the blind person and they brought the figs and ate them.

Sometime later the owner of the orchard came to the orchard. He said to the guards: The fine first fruits of a fig tree that were in the orchard, where are they? The lame person said: Do I have any legs with which I would be able to walk and take the figs? The blind person said: Do I have any eyes with which I would be able to see the way to the figs? What did the owner of the orchard do? He placed the lame person upon the shoulders of the blind person just as they did when they stole the figs, and he judged them as one.

So too, the Holy One, Blessed be God, brings the soul on the day of judgment and casts it back into the body, and judges them as one…(Talmud Sanhedrin 91a-b)

The soul never shows up on a brain scan. Romantic love refuses to be contained in the categories of evolutionary biology. Beauty has little time for aesthetics. And yet this is not because soul, love, and beauty are invisible objects that hover elsewhere, and which we might find if only we had the right magnifying glass.

Language fails us—forcing us to choose between a world in which transcendent phenomena are reduced to their material substrate and one in which they must be explained as visitors from a second, truer world (a metaverse, but then we would need another metaverse to explain that one). For the most part, we do not know how to talk about the relationship between body and soul, matter and spirit, holy and profane, in terms that are not either simplistically dualistic or materialistic. Experientially, however, we know ourselves to be a unity and a duality at the same time. It is this unity-in-duality and duality-in-unity to which I believe the Talmudic story above (adapted from Hellenistic folklore) gestures. Strict (Cartesian) dualism, the parable suggests, is a cop out, a convenient way to justify escapism.

This week’s parasha, Shemini (Leviticus 9:1–11:47) describes the death of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, who failed—according to the text—to distinguish between the holy and the profane (or failed to distinguish in the right way). Whatever they did—commentators debate the precise nature of their transgression(s)—all agree that they erred in their treatment of the holy. Perhaps they were too casual, too hubristic, too self-involved, in their approach. Perhaps theirs was an innocent mistake; or perhaps their hearts were in the right place. Perhaps they knew what they were doing and welcomed the all-consuming fire. Regardless of how you think of them, the text connects their death-by-divine-fire to an inability to separate the right things at the right time. Pointedly, Aaron is forbidden from publicly mourning their death. In stark contrast to his children’s laxity, Aaron is told to save his own emotional reality for another time. The high priest is a paragon of self-control, a master of order, even self-repression.

On a plain level, it’s easy to separate the holy from the profane. Certain activities are reserved for certain times and places; certain animals are permitted, others forbidden, etc. But on an existential level, it’s much more difficult. Legal codes dictate behavior—perhaps as a guardrail against practical and moral error—but they can’t direct understanding or comportment. In that sense, Paul was right that law has both a letter and a spirit. With all due respect to Paul, though, perhaps his outright opposition between letter and spirit is itself a hang-up of the dualism that we know, to be over-simplified. In any case, the commandment to distinguish between the holy and profane should be understood not just as matter of behavior, but of orientation.

Mircea Eliade notes that, to the average viewer, there is no difference between holy and profane objects or events. The distinction is an experiential one. The watch given to me as a gift is different than the same watch I find on a street rack, or see on someone else’s wrist. We often feel the singularity of the holy when returning to places that once held personal meaning, home towns, colleges we’ve graduated from, wedding venues. Is the hometown we visit 20 years later exceptional or ordinary? In a sense it is both, concurrently, perhaps more acutely than ever before. The differentiation between holy and profane, therefore, is not something that occurs at the level of substance, but at the level of perception. When we see what others think is ordinary as extraordinary, we ourselves become extraordinary.

The skeptic looks at the priestly vestments, the altar, the incense, the animal sacrifices, and sees an ordinary scene. The devotee beholds the same things and sees a matrix of possibilities, but also special rules governing a specific choreography. Is this formally different than when teenagers run around Central Park with AR headsets, chasing Pokemon?

Nadav and Avihu don’t seem to be skeptics; materialism is more of a modern vice than an ancient one. But their unscripted entry into the Sanctuary suggests that they either miss or flout the rules of the holy—the Temple, for them, is not categorically different than any other place. And if everything is holy, nothing is. Thus, it was that Spinoza, who was a pantheist, came to be charged in the 19th century with atheism (once a frontier of the culture wars). (Critics would argue “If God is synonymous with nature isn’t this the same as saying that there is no God?”) Allen Ginsberg channels the Spinozistic spirit of Nadav and Avihu when he says “the bum’s as holy as the seraphim.” Perhaps he means to elevate the bum; but in so doing, does he not desecrate the seraphim?

Why is it forbidden to enter the Tent of Meeting in a state of intoxication? One possibility is that drinking to intoxication is a profane activity; thought that seems like a strange one. Another possibility is that inebriation blurs our ability to judge, and thus to distinguish. If holiness and profanity must be separated, drunkenness entails their conflation. The Torah isn’t saying don’t drink or get drunk—Jewish custom, in fact, uses wine to mark festival days as holy. It’s saying that there are times in life when we must be able to see the holy where others do not. To do this, requires a clarity and rigor, a self-knowledge, that is rare and difficult. Jewish law extends the teaching—one should not teach Jewish law in a drunken state (though one is still permitted to teach other things, like moral instruction or narrative interpretation.)

But as I’ve suggested, Spinoza and Ginsberg, Nadav and Avihu, aren’t obviously wrong—because the holy and the profane can and do refer to the same set of things. The body doesn’t stop being a body when it is soulful. In German, two words describe bodies (Fleisch and Körper); one means “flesh” and refers to the animated and sentient aspect of our material existence; the other, from which we get the English “corporal” and “corpse,” refers to our bodies in terms of their “dead weight,” but not their subjectivity, their aliveness. In Hebrew, the word nefesh has come to mean soul or spirit of animation, but in the Biblical world, it can refer to the spirit of life possessed by animals. The original meaning of the word, scholars think, is neck.

At the End of Days, according to Talmud Sanhedrin, God places the body and soul together and judges them as one. Our ability to separate sacred from profane therefore cannot mean the severance of sacred from profane. It must mean the ability to find the sacred as both a part of and apart from the profane.

Note that this lesson appears in a dialogue between a Roman Emperor and a Jewish sage. A dualistic approach would posit Jew=Good, Roman=Bad; Rabbi=Good, Emperor=Bad. A nondual approach recognizes the Jew as an emergent property of the Roman, the rabbi as a gloss on, but not a refutation or denial of, the emperor. On a meta-level, Rabbi Yehuda Nasi’s parable teaches that we cannot separate Jew from Roman (or spiritualist from materialist) any more than we can separate soul from body or spirit from letter. The two belong together, need each other. But to reduce one to the other, to make the Jew a function of Rome or Rome a function of the Jew is to destroy both. To explain the soul on the basis of matter or matter on the basis of the soul is to destroy both.

We must live with the mystery that there is holiness in our world, and, that it is in our world. We must distinguish between holy and profane, not because the holy is good and the profane bad, but to facilitate the music that can only emerge from their duet.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh

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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.

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