Judaism when does the soul enter the body

If abortion is not murder in the rabbinic system, it is surely not worse than murder. At a conference on the subject several years ago, I stated that the discussion for the past several sessions, debating the time of ensoulment— whether the soul enters the fetus at conception, at the end of the first trimester, at birth—was monumentally irrelevant.

Classic Christianity has always said that the soul which enters the fetus is tainted and must be cleansed by baptism to save it from eternal perdition. According to the doctrine of original sin, each individual soul inherits the taint of its primordial ancestors.

When St. Fulgentius in the sixth century was asked when that stain attaches to the person, he replied that it begins with conception. This resulted in concern that the fetus be brought to term so that it might be baptized. Without baptism the soul is condemned to death in both worlds, making abortion clearly worse than murder. Our rewards for obedience to God and our punishments for disobedience all had to happen in our lifetime.

As the Book of Job shows, this is often untrue. Here in this life innocent people do suffer, and if God is powerful, just and good, that should not happen. If you want definitive proof that the Hebrew Bible has no idea of souls, re-read Job. When Job is suffering for no good reason, some friends visit him. Each offers an explanation of why Job, an innocent man, was suffering. Not one single visitor offers Job the explanation he needs. No one tells him that his soul will be rewarded for his righteousness in Heaven.

That explanation did not happen and could not happen until the year BCE, when Aristotle taught a bunch of early rabbis about his ideas concerning matter and form.

Matter is the principle of potentiality and form is the principle of actuality. In the case of a sculpture of a horse, matter is like the clay and form is like the idea of a horse that a sculptor imposes on the clay. Matter is obviously material, but form is immaterial. Form is of the same essence as God, who is pure thought. The rabbis of post-biblical Judaism in the Talmud immediately codified this Aristotelian dualism into the Jewish idea of guf Hebrew for body and neshama Hebrew for soul.

With the new doctrine that our souls survive the grave, new explanations for theodicy could be formulated. Innocent people suffer on earth because they are just clearing their accounts so that God can reward them completely in Heaven. Like birth and death, even temporary severings of the connection between body and soul require holy acts for example, the washing of hands or recitation of particular prayers.

The path of the soul following death was not a particularly significant matter of speculation for the Sages, nor is there consensus on the matter in the Talmud and Midrash. In Tanhumah, we read a vaguely worded passage suggesting that the body cannot live without the soul nor the soul without the body. On the other hand, many Talmudic Rabbis taught that the soul not only exists separately from the body, but also exists in a fully conscious state in an ethereal realm Ketubbot 77b, Berakhot 18ba, and elsewhere.

Saadia Gaon, a product of Greco-Arabic philosophy as well as Jewish tradition, presented his own view of the soul in the sixth chapter of his work Emunot veDeot. In it, he states that a soul is created at the same moment of the body, from a more subtle, but still material, element.

Despite this, he preserved the belief that the soul benefits from its partnership with the body. Without the body, the soul would be unable to do the holy, redemptive work of following the commandments. Maimonides developed a complicated Aristotelian model of the soul. He described a number of faculties of the soul, all of which are related to the relationship of a person to his or her material environment, perceptions, memories, creativity, and desires.

Most of these faculties of soul exist only in a living human body; with the death of the body, they too die. For Maimonides, the only eternal aspects of soul are the logical and spiritual speculations and learning of a person produced over his or her lifetime. Halacha Jewish law teaches us that the paramount holiness of human life extends to the human body. Mitzvot commandments cover mundane bodily matters such as clothing, eating, and sexual habits precisely because care of the body is also care for the soul.

Torah law prohibits mutilations of the body, including tattooing Leviticus , Deuteronomy Not only medical but even hygienic treatments are often elevated to the level of commandment. Maimonides deemed it obligatory to provide proper sustenance and respectful clothing for the body. Judaism offers an optimistic view of life, the union of body and soul.

The body is a gift from God to be protected and tended. Only with our pure, holy bodies can we bring the commitments and truths of our souls into every action.