37 - The rabbinic theology of the physical: blessings, body and soul, resurrection, and covenant and election

Summary

THE RABBINIC THEOLOGY OF THE PHYSICAL

Rabbinic theology differs from contemporaneous Graeco-Roman theologies, Jewish or otherwise, in its emphasis on the physical as complement, not as contrast, to the spirit. It views the areas of corporeality, concreteness, and sensation as aspects of the religious realm. The rabbinic worldview focuses on the significance of the physical, whether it be the created world, the body, or the People of Israel. It affirms the physical as a medium of the spiritual. The physical is not overcome, superseded, or consumed in the spiritual. Rather the physical, the bodily, the carnal partake of the spiritual.

This appreciation of the religious significance of physicality is the hallmark of rabbinic Judaism and helps explain its approach to physical pleasure, the physical world, the physical body, the physical resurrection, and the election of the body of Israel. Indeed, it explains more about the distinctive theological positions of rabbinic Judaism than any other factor, for “rabbinic Judaism invested significance in the body which in the other formations were invested in the soul.”

This appreciation of the religious significance of the physical focuses on the distinctive elements within rabbinic Judaism. It contrasts with those passages in rabbinic texts that overlap with the dominant Hellenistic view in the Graeco-Roman world, or the dominant Zoroastrian view in the Babylonian world. The concern here is with those dimensions that managed to resist the hegemony of the dominant culture. Much of the authenticating material is cited from liturgical sources on the assumption that rabbinic liturgical theology embodies its consensual theology.