ABSTRACT
What is the soul and where does it come from? According to a mystical tradition, G-d creates every soul from the letters of the holy tongue. He puts those letters together to form an utterance, so that, in the words of Adin Steinsaltz, “the soul of a [person] is the Divine speech that speaks the [person]” (Steinsaltz 1989: 32). The soul, therefore, is more an action than an object: it is a speech act of the Holy One. What we make of our souls lies in whether and how we join our speech to that Divine speech through our thoughts, words, and deeds. What is the Divine speech that is the substance of the soul? It is Torah. And the Torah is made of fire, as it is written in the Or HaChayim’s commentary on Genesis 23:2: “When man cleaves to G-d all his elements become transformed into the element fire, which forms the basis of the soul.” Thus the great sage and mystic Solomon ibn Gabirol (1022-1070) wrote a poem-or a prayer-on the soul, saying:
Thou hast imparted to it the spirit of wisdom And called it the Soul. And of flames of intellectual fire hast Thou wrought its form, And like a burning fire hast Thou wafted it And sent it to the body to serve and guard it, And it is as fire in the midst thereof yet doth not consume it, For it is from the fire of the soul that the body hath been created, And goeth from Nothingness to Being, “Because the L-rd descended on him in fire.”
