We, the Jewish People, Are a Single Body

A pervasive theme in kabbalistic literature1 and chassidic thought2 is that all the souls of Israel form a single body.3 It makes a lot of sense. How else could the Torah command you to “love the other guy as yourself”4 if the other guy is not yourself?

The Torah goes so far as to demand, “Do not hold a grudge against anyone of your nation.”5 But we’re human beings. How can the Torah expect you to not hold a grudge against someone who has hurt you?

So the Jerusalem Talmud explains: “If you’re chopping a slab of meat and your right hand slips and cuts your left hand, should your left hand then cut your right hand back?”6 In other words, as the commentaries explain, we are all one body.7

That’s also why we say in our daily prayers, “We have sinned,” even if we haven’t. Because if one Jew messed up, we all did. And if one Jew does good, we did it with him. In very practical terms, it’s a basic tenet of halachah that all Jews are held responsible for one another’s behavior.8 Because it’s all one body.9

But why is a living body chosen as the epitome of the wholeness of a nation?

The Organic Wholeness of a Living Body

Some people think of a body as a kind of biochemical machine. A body, however, is not a mechanism, but an organism, which has an entirely different sort of wholeness than any device manufactured by human beings.

We build machines out of disparate parts, each with its own genesis—one part from Germany, another from China, one of plastic, another of gold. Examining any one part of a machine will tell you very little about any other part. Their only relationship is that they ended up working together in the same box.

A living body, on the other hand, begins as a single cell. That cell divides to form other cells, each new cell containing all the information necessary to build the entire body. Even as those cells divide again and again, building organs and structures varying greatly in form and function, they continue to behave, grow, and interact with their environment as a single entity.

All the cells are the same and different at once, like a very big family with many different characters and personalities that all work together. You can map them along a hierarchical order, from parent to child, from the most sensitive and versatile to the most rigid and seemingly lifeless.

When the human body begins to develop in the womb, the first cells to form from the initial zygote are stem cells, the original grandparent cells. Stem cells can divide and develop into any other type of cell, but their first project is to construct a central nervous system—the beginnings of the brain and spinal cord—out of neurons. Neurons are the sensitive personalities, highly complex cells that are responsible for transmitting information and controlling movement, sensation, memory, and learning.

Then, as embryonic development progresses, a team begins to appear—bone cells, fat cells, muscle cells, skin cells—about 200 different kinds in total.

Red blood cells are among the simplest. They have no nucleus or organelles (protein machines required for specific tasks within a cell), but they perform a vital job: Transport oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body and clear out the waste, mostly carbon-dioxide.

The toughest guys are the keratinocytes, in the nail matrix, who produce the hard protein called keratin. They start off as complex cells, but then give up their nucleus and organelles to move outward and become a protective layer of thick skin on your fingers and toes.

You couldn’t get a more diverse cast of characters. Yet all of them, from the neurons of the brain’s frontal cortex down to those toenail tough guys—about 30 trillion of them—act together as a single entity, just as that initial zygote cell from which they can all be traced.

We call that “life.”

What Makes You Alive?

What keeps you alive? Most of us think of oxygen and carbohydrates as the fuel of life, while amino acids, minerals, and vitamins provide the materials from which your body builds and maintains its complex structures. But a fire also burns oxygen and carbon, and crystals also form complex structures, yet we don’t consider either to be living beings.

Rather, it’s the body’s electrical circuits that render it a single, living whole.

Not only neurons, but every cell of your body both generates and receives electrical signals. Electrical impulses keep the heart and body synchronized, the body’s limbs and organs coordinated, direct cells to damaged tissue, provide information that directs the healing process, and generally keep every part of the body working cooperatively and constructively. When the body needs to grow or heal, electrical fields guide the way. When it is attacked by foreign bodies, the same occurs.

That is why, in any intravenous drip, the most vital ingredients are water and sodium chloride. Sodium is the major electrolyte of your body, generating and conducting electrical charges, and allowing life to keep flowing.

You might think that your DNA guides the growth and development of your body. Well, yes, those chromosomes contain information about details such as the pigment of your eyes, your fingerprints, or the size of your bones. But there’s nothing in any string of genes that says how many eyes you’re supposed to have or where they are supposed to go. Your chromosomes are like the numbers on a paint-by-numbers— the numbers are useless unless you first have the drawing to fill in.

That drawing of you is determined by your electrical fields. They guide your cells to the right places, making sure the heart is to the left, the liver to the right, and the eyeballs are in your head. Indeed, researchers have succeeded in coaxing cells in frog embryos to grow another eye on their bellies.

The Electric Body

Sitting at the top of this distributed electrical life-system is a control center called a brain. In a human being, this brain is particularly dominant, powerful enough to override, if deemed necessary, even the most frantic signals from other neuron-centers such as the heart and the digestive system.

The neurons of your brain are powerful, but excruciating slow to transmit a signal relative to silicon or copper wire. When a neuron gets a zap, it appears to be determining whether or not it wants to pass that charge along to its buddies.

The heart, on the other hand, can’t tolerate any delays. The muscles of the heart have to be exceptionally coordinated. Blood has to enter the atria, move down through the ventricles in one direction and one direction only, and exit from the other side about half a second later. Failure or even a slight mistiming can be fatal.

A cluster of cells known as the sinus node keeps the pace and initiates the signal. Anywhere else in your body, neurons would carry those signals to the muscles, zapping them into a contraction. In the case of the heart, that would deliver too little, too late, and too messy. Instead, those powerful and tireless muscles of your heart double as high-speed neural conductors.

The heart muscles receive and share an electrical charge together, lining up with one another through gap junctions—dedicated, high-speed lines ten times as fast as standard synapses—so that they are all in the same state at once. This way, all of them contract and release in perfect unison every time, all the time.

The Holistic Body

So is the body an electronic device? In a way, but not like any electrical system we could design. For one thing, there’s the utter chaos of it all.

If you’ve taken a basic course in electrical circuitry, you know that every circuit or motherboard can be reduced to a neat set of mathematical formulas. That’s good, because it means when you throw the switch there won’t be any unpleasant surprises.

But in your body, absolutely everything is swishing around in turbulent fluids. And we are speaking of some 30 trillion cells, no two precisely the same, and many of them as complex as a metropolis, replete with their own energy generators, factories, machinery, transportation systems, security and quality control—never mind the capacity to self-replicate.

Almost nothing in your body is predictable. Math is useless. When the Jewish-Russian physicist Israel Gelfand set his genius to biology, he concluded, “There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.”

At such a level of complexity, the body is a fitting medium for a quality that we call “volition” or “agency.” (For my take on this, see “What Is a Soul?”) All that means is that organisms, unlike mechanisms, do things now to get something later. We also call that “will.” Will, or desire, is the core feature of life, yet it doesn’t reside in any particular place in the body. It’s mysteriously distributed over the whole, from head to toe.

The Body That Is Us

Now let’s apply all this to the Jewish People, an integral whole in many ways—like a living body, but even more so.

For one, if you are a Jew, you carry within yourself the entire Jewish people, all those alive today and all who ever lived since the first Jew, Abraham. We call that your neshamah, a breath of G‑d, an inheritance every Jew has received from the original three fathers and four mothers of the Jewish People.10

That is why, when you hear that Jews on the other side of the world have been attacked, G‑d forbid, you intuitively feel that it happened to you. A Jew feels doesn’t only identify as a member of a people. A Jew feels “I am this people and they are me.” Because that is the reality and your neshamah knows it.

True, each neshamah comes to this world with a particular purpose, so that each has its unique qualities and strengths to math its job. Like the cells of your body, neshamahs are all the same but widely diverse.

Some are like neurons, cerebral beings with a keen sensitivity to the spiritual and the divine. Some are the heartbeat of the nation, both sensitive and powerful. Some are the nation’s muscles, others its tender skin. Then there must be those who carry life-giving oxygen from the heart to wherever it is needed. Others are more like bones, firm and unbending, or even nails, requiring a thick skin and dogged determination.

There are neshamahs that must follow and neshamahs that must lead, neshamahs that must accomplish their mission in solitude and neshamahs that must network and crowd together. Some roles make it easy to keep contact with the divine spark at the core-essence of the neshamah. Other roles make that a challenge at every turn. For many, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in the grind and details of their particular journey, they lose sight of where they came from, where they are meant to go, and what they are supposed to do when they get there.

What holds all these neshamahs together, even as they fulfill their individual roles, and even when they themselves lose touch with who they are?

In the second chapter of Tanya, Rabbi Schneur Zalman tells us that this is the job of the tzadikim and sages, the “heads of the people.”11 Perhaps they are the neurons of the nation. But if they are true leaders, committed to their people and G‑d’s Torah, then the place and purpose of every one of us, from the heart neshamahs to the toenails, is mapped upon their souls.

As long as a neshamah is receiving the life-giving signals of these leaders, it’s connected to its own true identity. It knows who it is and what it needs to do. It’s a healthy part of the whole.

And the truth is, there are no neshamahs that are not receiving from there. R. Schneur Zalman insists that even those who openly fight against the tzadikim can’t unplug themselves. They may not recognize it, but it will emerge at some point. It’s a subliminal signal that hits at the core of their very being.

Elsewhere,12 R. Schneur Zalman seems, superficially at least, to subvert this head-to-toe hierarchy. He explains that every neshamah is in its particular way the head, just as every part of the body rules supreme in its particular function. For example, your head tells your feet where they are supposed to go, but your head is helpless in getting there without them—rendering the feet, in that regard, the head.

So too, just as the simple Jew must learn wisdom from the sage, the sage must learn simplicity and earnestly from the simplest Jew. As in the body, there is no cell that only receives without giving, each generating its own electrical charge that it passes on to others.

This is the wholeness of the Jewish nation at its supreme height. We all need one another, and each of us is only complete through every one of us. The greatest tzadik is incomplete without the lowest sinner, as much as that sinner needs the tzadik.13 Because, within each of us is all of us, and in all of us, we each find ourselves.

The body embodies oneness in a physical, necessarily limited, form. Our neshamahs are one in a divine and most absolute way. A perfect oneness. Inextricably.