More Than A Number

The Meaning of Life in Shemot

The total number of persons (vayhi kol nefesh) that were of Jacob’s issue came to seventy, Joseph being already in Egypt. (Exodus 1:5)

God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures (vaet kol nefesh) of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good. (Genesis 1:21)

God further said, “This is the sign that I set for the covenant between Me and you, and every living creature (u’veyn kol nefesh) with you, for all ages to come.” (Genesis 9:12)

But if you search there, you will find your God the Lord, if only you seek with all your heart and soul (u’vchal nafshecha). (Deuteronomy 4:29)

Exodus begins by enumerating the names and tally of those who came down to Egypt with Jacob. We already learned in Genesis 46:27 that Jacob’s household numbered 70. Thus, the repetition of this data-point, and in the same language as in Genesis is emphatic. Since it adds no new information it must be teaching us something else. To understand the lesson we need to listen to the language. What does the word nefesh mean? Why refer to Jacob’s household as kol nefesh (i.e., all the souls? all the persons?)

The first time we see the phrase kol nefesh it refers not to human beings at all but to animals. Thus, a nefesh is first and foremost an animal life. Animals move and breathe, they eat, they grunt, they toil. Nefesh means that which is vital, animate, but not that which is conscious or reflective or wise or free. In Genesis 9, God makes a covenant with all living beings not to destroy the world again in a flood. He makes this covenant not just with humanity but with animals, too. The phrase used in God’s promise is kol nefesh. In Kabbalistic conception, animals have a nefesh, but they do not have a neshama, a soul. Or in the terminology of Jacob von Üxküll, popularized by Heidegger, animals are characterized by Umwelt, an environment, but they are In-der-Welt, world forming. The language used to describe the quantity of people descending to Egypt is at once sterile—the language of a sociological report—and loaded.

In Deuteronomy, we are enjoined repeatedly to love God with all our heart, soul, and might (kol l’vavcha, kol nafshecha, kol m’odecha). There, a variation on kol nefesh suggests, in context, that we should commit to God with our vitality, our instinct, our beastly biological drive to survive. But it all suggests that what appears to be an interior experience (what could be more intimate than loving God) is really a collective one. Just as kol nefesh refers to creaturs as a class, or to Jacob’s household as a class, so must we (the Jewish people) love God as a class.

With this in mind, we can now appreciate the ominousness of Shemot’s beginning: is Jacob’s clan a mere herd? Are they, when viewed collectively, not different than animals? No! They are individuals, as their names attest. But do they appear this way to onlookers who are not a part of the group? Do they appear this way to the Egyptians? Of course. Kol Nefesh points to the dehumanization of life whenever we treat people as a class. Animals can be judged as a species or herd, but human beings cannot. Nonetheless, this is what we are taught to do in the social sciences. And the social sciences aren’t descriptively wrong, either. We can make observations about groups that hold up statistically. We can do population surveys and understand trends. It is descriptively true that the Israelites multiply in number at a remarkable pace, and that they do so under conditions of oppression and danger. They multiply the nefesh count of the clan eventually becoming a great nation. We go from Jacob’s 70 at the beginning of Exodus to 600,000 at the foot of Mount Sinai. Still, there is something animalistic in counting bodies. Life counts and death counts both turn man into a statistic. As Stalin famously said, “One death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic.”

The very proof of Israelite success—biological reproduction, birth rates well above replacement—conceals the unexpected qualitative suffering and cultural setback just around the corner. Numbers don’t tell the whole story. Names—as Shemot emphasizes—get us closer. A slave is still a nefesh, but slavery is no way to live. It is a categorical and moral error to treat a being-in-the-world as an animal, to reduce neshama to nefesh, culture to biology.

Giorgio Agamben writes that human beings can be thought of has having both a quality of life (bios) and a sheer or bare life (zoon). Thus, we describe the good life as bios agathos, but the political or social animal as zoon politikon. The latter refers only to our formal participation in the social order, irrespective of any creativity or meaning-making. Jacob came down to Egypt with 70 zoë. Seeing them this way, the King of Egypt turns them into a political enemy and calls them a nation (am).

My point is not that we are souls as opposed to animals, but that we are both neshama and nefesh, both bios and zoon, exalted and carnal, and that this duality poses both an ontological and political challenge.

We must defend the Jewish nefesh without treating ourselves merely as bodies. We must defend the Jewish nation without letting Pharaoh decide that a nation is merely a collection of people with Israelite DNA. If biology alone dictates Jewish survival we lose the Jewish neshama and we become servants to Egypt’s paradigm long after we have left. Torah comes after the Exodus to transform the bodies of Jacob’s household into embodied souls. Yet the body is a necessary starting point. The covenant begins with the body, with circumcision. The same mark was used by the Egyptians to identify Jewish babies and cast them into the Nile. The enslavement of the Jewish people brought both a spiritual malaise and simple back-breaking pain. This bodily turmoil is not to be discounted as a “dead letter.” The Torah does not ask us to martyr ourselves—to sacrifice our bodies—so that the sin of the Egyptians can be washed away. The war to leave Egypt is a just war even though as we diminish or joy upon seeing their pursuant horsemen swallowed by the sea. God hears the cry of the body. But the body in pain evokes only the compassion that we can have for the suffering of animals. It is the pain of the soul, the pain of bare life crying out for quality of life, that stirs God’s heart and leads the commuting of our enslavement.

The Israelites refused to pause having children even as they knew their boys would be sentenced to death. They refused not because because they wanted more nefesh—if this were the case their behavior was illogical—but because they wanted more nefesh-neshama. The act of life affirmation under conditions of hardship was itself a defense of the Jewish neshama and the mechanism throgh which they achieved Jewish cultural reproduction. Although we would not wish to be oppressed, Egyptian oppression provides the Israelites with a unique opportunity to be contrarian. Egypt forces Isarel to transform the reproduction of nefesh into the reproduction of nefesh-neshama. Instead of this insistence being automatic it becomes “resistance.” Life becomes not a basic instinct, but a choice.

Egypt represents the question “Better never to have been born.” Israel’s response is “Too late. We will choose life and then we will understand.” Egypt represents Malthusian pessimism: perceptions of a scarce pie lead to state-sanctioned eugenics. Israel represents faithful optimism rooted precisely in the appreciation that each new name is a world. Numbers matter. A small nation is more vulnerable, in a battle, than a large one. But numbers do not matter as much as commitment to life and purpose, as the endurance of the Jewish people attests.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh