Adapted from: Infinite Love by Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller Gottlieb

Are you your soul? Are you your body? Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the Ramchal, says you are both.

Your body continually changes and ultimately dies. Does that mean you are your soul?

What is your soul?

It’s far easier to talk about what it is not. It’s not physical, and for that reason, it’s not drawn to physical experience. “Wait a minute,” you may find yourself saying. “If the soul is me and it’s not drawn to physical experience, who stood in line for pizza? Who diets endlessly to look better?”

You have a point. You are not only your soul. Your soul and your body are in partnership. They are like “two companions who never part.” They are like dough. You start with separate ingredients, but when you mix them, they morph into a dough and become inseparably one.

For body and soul, the partnership isn’t always a smooth one.

Your body is a constant actor in the play called Personal Reality. It is your constant companion. Hashem gave you your body to let you actualize yourself. It allows the most enduring part of you, your soul, to articulate your values concretely and express itself in this very physical place called earth. The soul realizes all this and identifies with the body enough to feel obligated to care for it, provide for it, and respect the partnership Hashem forged. Your soul was created with a strong intuitive sense of what the body needs and wants, and it’s programmed to be sensitive to its partner.

There is a bridge between body and soul. Your capacity to see more than coarse and transient reality is found there. Your love of nature, literature, art, music, are all part of both your body and your soul. The heart, the seat of emotion, uses physical imagery and experience to make the bridge real. When looking at this “bridge,” the question becomes whether these experiences use your senses to walk the bridge toward your higher self, your soul, or whether they take on a life of their own, perhaps enriching the body, but not touching the neshamah.

Your soul isn’t your body. It is the part of you that experiences Hashem both intuitively and intellectually. When your soul is exposed to inspiration, it can “forget” the body momentarily, just as the body can “forget” the soul.

The soul won’t let you forget it forever, and the body can’t let you forget it forever. The soul, by its nature, longs for a world of enduring light and ideals that have their roots in a higher plane. The body has its own needs and wants. There are people whose lives reflect their ability to see their core identity as their souls and, at the same moment, recognize that in this world, the soul needs to be in partnership with the body. Others make the mistake of thinking that the two can exist independently. They can’t. The body and soul “think” differently. The body is concerned with Now. It wants to take and make Now as rewarding as possible. The soul is concerned with being rather than having, and Now is not as important as longing for a bit of light or meaning.