The embodied text

Whilst body-metaphors play a major part in the self-understanding of many religious traditions and such metaphorical themes are found in Judaism, there is a dominant Jewish tradition which links the human body with the text of the Torah. This article examines the correspondences drawn in rabbinic literature between body and the Torah-text, concentrating on the tradition of the identification of the component parts of the human body with the component parts of the Torah (as the 613 mitzvot or commandments). This identification is explored both in terms of its development and the way in which it read back into earlier rabbinic sources. It is contended that this tradition is more adequately understood as a significant element in the history of Jewish self-understanding rather than as a series of ‘homelitical flourishes’—for example, the perfection of the body is linked to the perfection of the Torah by the observance of the commandments. The biological and cultural continuity of Israel, it is argued, has been in part assured by this particular understanding of the relationship between body and Torah, as the invidividual Jew becomes incorporated into the ‘body’ of Israel by becoming an ‘embodied text’. This textual embodiment has been one of the principal strategies of Jewish survival as the natural body is overcome and the cultural/textual body created anew in each generation

Aesthetics · Art · Biblical studies · Biology · Covenant · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Identification (biology) · Judaism · Literature · Natural (archaeology) · Perfection · Ten Commandments · Theology · Torah · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · History · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy