So You’ve Got a Chunk of G-d Inside You

Imagine you woke up one morning to discover that G‑d had just placed a chunk of Himself inside you.

What would be your expectations?

That you would be invincible? Omnipotent? Capable of conjuring entire galaxies into existence with one “Let there be...?”

See that elderly citizen suffering from dementia? She has a chunk of G‑d inside her.

See that obnoxious bully making trouble in the playground? He has one, too.

And so do you.

It’s right there in the story of the creation of the first human being in Genesis: After G‑d created Adam, He “blew into his nostrils the breath of life.” The classic Jewish commentator, Ramban (13th century Spain), explains: G‑d injected a sample of Himself into the human being.

So too, every morning, as you awake, He blows that sample of Himself into you again and keeps breathing there every moment.

A sample. You can't have an actual chunk of G‑d because He's a perfect oneness and not a physical (or even spiritual) chunkable thing. But you can have a sample.

Like a sample of wine from a vat. You're not getting the whole thing. But you are. Because with one sample you’ve tasted all of it.

So too, with that one G‑d-chunk/breath/sample inside you, you've got all of Him. G‑d uploaded the essence of being G‑d into a human being. You.

But hey, if you can suffer pain and get in trouble, in what way is this chunk inside you a chunk of G‑d?

The G‑d Question

Really, we should be asking a bigger question: Doesn’t everything come from G‑d? What’s special about this chunk inside you?

After all, when He started, there was no gook to make a universe out of. There weren’t even any rules. He had to come up with the laws of physics from scratch. From His own imagination, so to speak.

If so, isn’t the entire universe made of G‑d?

No, actually, nothing is made of G‑d.

Rather, everything starts off in G‑d’s imagination and gets real from there. It would be cool if we could do the same thing—just imagine stuff and it's there—but like Isaiah puts it, our thoughts are not like His thoughts. We imagine, and it's just imagination. He imagines, and we're all here, for real.

But framing the origin of things as imagination does answer our question. Because there are two kinds of imagination. Which is not so hard to understand—with a little imagination of your own.

Let’s say you imagine a world you’ve never seen, but would like to create. You are thinking, “How do I make it feel real? How do I make it feel natural for the creatures inside it?”

Well, you do what every good artist does. As they say in the movie business, you aim for “suspension of disbelief.” Meaning: You keep to a set of internal rules and logic, and ensure your characters are just a little flawed and imperfect. That way, you stand a good chance that nobody will wake up and say, “Hey, this is just a story, and we are just the characters!”

In many ways, you are pulling yourself out of your story, ensuring that nobody notices you’re the one telling it. You’re saying, “It’s not about me. It’s about the characters of my world and their reality. Let me figure out what they would expect to occur next in their world, or what they would find believable, and do that.”

Now imagine you’ve got this world already, but you want to inject something of yourself into it. It’s an entirely different game now. You’re not pulling yourself out—you’re pushing your way in.

Your approach, too, is entirely different: You’re discovering yourself, ensuring that you always stay true to yourself within your own story. You’re thinking, “What would it be like to live inside this world knowing all along that it’s a creation, without disrupting the entire show—and yet remaining who I am?”

Words and Breath

That explains why the Torah describes the creation of everything with, “And G‑d said…”—except for this G‑d-chunk inside you.

Neat factoid: All the things of our world are called in Hebrew devarim, which literally means “words,” while that G‑d-chunk is called a neshamah, which literally means “a breath.”

Let’s look at the difference between speaking and breathing. G‑d is not a being that speaks with a larynx and mouth, nor does He inhale oxygen into His lungs. So we need to understand these two metaphors in a very abstract way.

Simply put, speaking is about communicating with the other, while breathing is about you being you.

You speak because there’s someone other than you there to listen. If you’re speaking well, it’s because your mind is more occupied with “What are they hearing?” than with “What am I saying?”

So when we say that G‑d speaks, we mean that He’s taking into account the existence of something other than Himself. That’s how He creates that “something else”—by thinking of it as a something else that needs to be spoken to.

By speaking to heaven and earth and telling them they “should be light,” they leave the realm of figments of His imagination and become significant beings that perceive themselves as something other than the One who is speaking to them.

And what are you transmitting with your words? Not yourself. At best, you're providing information about yourself. You stay inside yourself while these people outside of you are left to figure out what's going on inside of you from the information they have received.

Not so a breath. Let’s say you’re providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. You’re pushing whatever is deep inside your lungs to come outward and enter into someone else. It’s not about where this other person is at right now. They may have stopped breathing altogether. You’re sharing yourself, all of you. You’re sharing the breath by which you live because you want this person to live.

Of course, you’re really just exhaling the air you inhaled a few seconds ago. But that’s where the analogy breaks down, because there’s nothing outside of G‑d. When we say that He breathes into you, we mean He’s literally bringing out His own self and putting it inside you.

That’s the neshamah: A connection so intimate, the notion of “I and you” no longer holds meaning.

The neshamah is also compared to a thought, as opposed to a spoken word like all other creations. The same reasoning applies: Spoken words are to others. A thought, as it’s meant in this regard, is a private, personal thought. For example, you thinking about you.

Deep inside you is G‑d thinking about Himself.

Hearing the Music

All this explains how radically distinct the chunk of G‑d inside you is from everything else in the universe. No, it doesn’t make you invulnerable to pain, error, or even serious moral misjudgment. In many ways, a human being with a chunk of G‑d inside is not much different from other animals. We all eat, we sleep, we procreate, and we are mortal.

What is unique and most powerful about this neshamah-chunk is that it hears the music.

Let's keep imagining. Imagine that everywhere you went, you heard the magnificent music of your environment, as though the entire universe were one grand, immersive, multi-sensory, mind-blowing experience of one infinitely profound artist.

Now imagine everyone around you was perfectly oblivious to it all. They’re too busy eating their breakfast, chasing each other around, satisfying their every need, and pursuing their desires—too concerned with living to hear the song of life.

There’s a term for this. It’s called selective perception, also known as the invisible gorilla phenomenon. When fixated on a visual task, six out of ten people will not notice that a gorilla just walked through the very space they were tasked with observing. Similarly, every human being on the planet is staring at the miracle of continuous creation at every moment, yet all we see is our own egos. And the other creatures are no different.

Everything else hears itself. That’s what all the creatures of the world were created to do—to be themselves, sustain themselves, and make more of themselves. Wherever any one of those creatures looks, it sees either a threat to its existence or an opportunity for more of itself.

If you’re a beaver, wherever you look, you see an opportunity for more beaver. Wolves are interested in whatever makes for more wolf. If you’re a human being, wherever you look, you see some way to further expand the domain of me, myself, and I. There’s nothing pathological about that. It’s what we’ve been created to be.

But wherever this chunk of G‑d looks, it sees G‑d. That’s the fuel burning inside it, that’s what drives it, that’s all that interests it. It runs from anything that darkens G‑d’s light as one would flee from mortal danger and is pulled towards the divine like a diver surfacing to gasp for air. For it, nothing else really exists.

Not just because it understands and appreciates the oneness of the Creator and the beauty of the underlying harmony of the universe more than any other being, but because that’s what it is in essence: a breath of G‑d within His universe.

It is the only creation that can recognize that this is G‑d, and that there is nothing else that is absolutely true, absolutely real, absolutely forever. It is the only creation that’s not stuck on its own ego. For it, ego is just another temporal illusion that only serves to obstruct the reality that there is nothing else but G‑d.

And so it hears the music. Because it is the only creation that holds a memory of its origin in G‑d’s mind, where that music begins.

Now you have a picture of the exasperating experience of your neshamah, a kind of divine crystal resonating with a heavenly symphony that plays in a deaf world. If only it could get this human soul it inhabits on board, perhaps this human body could act as a kind of resonance chamber to amplify the signal. Perhaps the entire universe could ring with its own glorious music.

But no, the creatures of this universe are all too busy being themselves. They see no utility in this song of the neshamah.

Even the body she is stuck inside, including the human soul that dominates that body, is far too obsessed with being human to pay attention to the concert playing full blast around it.

Let It Breathe

So if it’s a chunk of G‑d, why doesn’t your neshamah get out there and disrupt the peace? Pull off a few miracles, blow the minds of all these dumb creatures, wake them from their dream?

That’s not the strategy. In the long term, it doesn’t help to abrogate the rules of the game. No lasting change comes out of that. And, at any rate, why would G‑d (or a chunk of Him) want to break the protocols He set in place other than for temporary measures? The neshamah, embedded at the key strategic positions of your inner mind and the quietest places of your heart, would rather attempt to create change from within.

Which allows the human beast to simply cut off all stimuli and confine the neshamah to lockdown.

So the neshamah falls asleep. That is its state in most of us. The deafening ego of this human animal and the constant roar of the instinct-engine that runs the world have overwhelmed its innate sensitivity. You no longer feel the tug upwards, and moral failure now becomes a possibility. It all comes down to one problem: The breath of G‑d inside you can’t breathe.

What does the human animal have to gain by suffocating the G‑d-chunk inside it? Absolutely nothing. And everything to lose.

So why do we persist in doing this?

Ignorance. Fear of the unknown. Dread at the thought of letting go of our own egos and perhaps thereby allowing some other human predator to swallow us alive. Which is all nonsense, since a chunk of G‑d is certainly interested in staying alive.

We need guidance and counsel from the wise and enlightened, those who are in touch with their neshamah, those who still hear the music and can tell us about it. That’s a good description of our forebears, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah.

And especially of Moses, who brought us all to the grand concert hall at Sinai to hear for ourselves, if but for a moment.

Since then, we have a Torah, a means to unlock the secret of each thing, crack its shell, and allow it to hear its own music. After three and a half thousand years of patient, diligent, inside work, it's time for the neshamah to go public. And shine.