GEN259 The Talmudic sage Rava compressed his understanding of the human condition into four Hebrew [(sic) - Aramaic - AJL] words: O havruta o mituta, “Either companionship or death.”  Without the possibility of human relatedness, man is empty.  Without an outside world of human beings, there can be no inside world of meaningfulness. Personality, liberty, love, responsibility—all that makes life worth living—depend upon a community in which man can locate and realize himself.  But man is more than the sum of his connections with others. There must be a self in order for there to be communication; there must be an inner existence to relate to the outer world.  If man is not an island, neither is he a switchboard, a maze of wires that transmits the messages of others but has nothing of its own to say.  God created man from the dust of the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, man became “a living soul” [this verse]. GOODSOC 3

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GEN252 [Compare Genesis 1:27-28]. Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik Lonely Man of Faith names these two creatures “Adam the first” and “Adam the second” and gives us a picture of the difference between them.  The Adam of the first creation story was given the mandate of living in the world and subduing it, while the second Adam had a living soul breathed into a body and was told to cultivate and protect a garden: “While Adam the first is dynamic and creative, transforming sensory data into thought constructs, Adam the second is receptive and beholds the world in its original dimensions.  He looks for the image of God not in the mathematical formula or the natural relational law but in every beam of light, in every bud and blossom, in the morning breeze and the stillness of starlit evening.”  These two Adams are not meant to be understood as different types of people but rather as two dimensions that live within – and often struggle within – each of us.  MORINIS 38-9

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GEN251 [A]s understood by Jewish authorities, the sacredness of human life inheres in the human being as a whole, both body and soul.  Indeed, the Hebrew term “nefesh,” used in [this verse] … refers to both the physical and spiritual dimensions of a human being.  Thus as one traditional scholar puts it, “Man is created…in the image of God; an assault upon the body of the deceased thus constitutes an act of disrespect toward God.” [Bleich, Judaism and Healing, 164] As a result, autopsies are permitted in very few circumstances, generally when the results will save another human life.  And this must be a specific individual; the possibility that the knowledge gained from desecrating a human body may one day help save some unknown person’s life is generally held to be insufficient warrant.  Similarly, organ transplantation, either from living donors or from cadavers, is permissible only when the recipient’s life is at risk.  Otherwise, this constitutes a violation of the sanctity of the human body.  [As an aside it should be noted that this view of the unity of body and soul has been challenged by recent efforts to define death in terms of brain activity. The status of a person whose bodily functions continue after cerebral cortex activity has ceased is not considered in traditional sources, which define death in terms of the cessation of breathing.  Some Jewish legal authorities have now accepted a brain death criterion, defined in terms of the cessation of all brain activity, though this remains controversial.]  Plastic surgery is problematic from a Jewish point of view because it involves unnecessary “wounding” of the body, which belongs to God.  Beautification in itself is not generally regarded as sufficient reason for cosmetic surgery, unless the psychological or financial well-being of the patient depends upon it. PASTIMP 110

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GEN255 See [[GEN33]] Genesis 1:20 living SACTAB 216

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GEN253 A person’s faculty of speech is a function of the life-giving soul within him.  We see this from the (verse), for the Targum renders the words l’nefesh chayim as “a speaking spirit.”  SEFER 22

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GEN254 Rashi explains that even the animals are called nefesh chayim – a living soul; but that man has more life than all of the others, for in him was infused, in addition, intelligence and speech.  What Hashem breathed into man’s nostrils was, as it were, His own divine breath, and this life principle of man added to him intelligence and speech.  This power of speech is the crowning glory of man, derived, as it were, from Hashem Himself.  If a king would place his own crown on the head of his son, the crown prince, and the son would then take that crown and throw it into the mud, what greater rebellion could there be, and what greater denial of the majesty of the king? When man takes speech, which is the crowning glory bestowed on him by Hashem, and profanes it with forbidden words, what greater statement is there than “Who is our Master (Psalm 12:5)?" SEFER xxi

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GEN256 See [[GEN161]] Genesis 1:28 rule SPERO 75-6

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GEN258 The soul is created from the place of the Holy Spirit. It is hewn from a place of purity and created from the Celestial Radiance, from the Throne of Glory.  And there is no falsehood above, in the place of the Holy of Holies, but all is truth.  Jeremiah 10:10. TZADIK 395

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GEN261 Whereas we have seen that the power of speech may act in the capacity of an indicator to other mitzvos, it obviously cannot act as an indicator for itself. When a transgression is committed with the power of speech itself, when the indicator itself has been corrupted there is a need for an external revelation of the crime which has been performed. Consequently, the person who speaks evil against his neighbor is afflicted with tsora’as, a disease which serves as an open demonstration of the nature of the sin of which he is guilty. Perhaps this is the spirit behind the law which states, “All plagues may a person inspect, except his own plague,” thereby implying that the victim of tsora’as is no longer sensitive to his own defects. The additional restrictions on the m’tsoroh which isolate him from human contact and oblige him to go about with his hair wild and his lips covered further serve to impress upon him the character of his transgression. His enforced loneliness reminds him of the social nature of his crime; the wild hair signifies his inhumanity; and the lips covered to conceal the instrument of his misdeed. Finally, the m’tsorah must cry tomai – unclean – and then again tomai; the first time because his entire being has been defiled by evil speech, and the second time because the very organ which is proclaiming the person’s crime must be purged by declaring its own unworthiness for having been the cause which brought about his degradation. Post –Biblical sources abound in reference to the primacy of speech. Perhaps the one most often quoted is Onkelos’ translation of a passage which appears in Genesis [this verse].  Where the text reads “and man became a living soul,” Onkelos translates “and man became a speaking spirit.” The obvious inference from this nuance in meaning is that man’s faculty of speech is the very essence of his being.  Another indication of the master-role that speech plays is in the early Jewish philosophical writings where we find that reason, which in the word for Rabbeinu Bachya ben Asher Rabbeinu bachaye Al Hatorah Exodus 2:14 is the life of the body, is denoted as “the speaking soul.” Reason, generally regarded as man’s supreme endowment, could not be conceived independently without relationship to man’s ability to speak. BUILD 216-7

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GEN260 In recent years [published in 1983 – AJL] the behaviorist approach in psychology has grown in popularity, mainly as a result of the work of B.F. Skinner. In a recent work, he argues that the real problems of society can only be solved by what he calls “behavioral technology,” a sort of conditioning in which desirable behavior is made to pay off.  New York Review of Books December 30, 1971  Skinner maintains that behavior is not determined from within but rather from without, by changing the environment. Man’s behavior, he claims, is completely predictable, and the knowledge already exists for a science of control. His conclusion is that man can no longer afford the illusion of freedom and the anarchy and disasters that it has spawned.  It is perhaps not completely coincidental that the most devastating critique of Skinner’s book was written by Noam Chomsky, whose work in linguistics had led him to a rather unconventional conclusion. Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975). Pp. 12, 40.  In the course of his work, Chomsky has been tremendously impressed by the complexity of human language. He finds it remarkable that a child can “learn” to speak a language; to understand the grammar on relatively slight exposure and without specific training.” Chomsky denies that there exists a “learning theory” that can account for the acquisition of language skills through experience. Instead, Chomsky prefers what he calls the “innateness hypothesis,” which holds that one of the faculties of the mind, common to the species, is a faculty of language that “provides a sensory system for the preliminary analysis of linguistic data and a schematism that determines a certain class of grammars.” If so, then it would seem that the language faculty is unique to human beings. “It is a reasonable surmise, I think, that there is no structure similar to the Universal Grammar in non-human organisms and that the capacity for free, appropriate, and creative use of language as an expression of thought with the means provided by the language faculty is also a distinctive feature of the human specifies having no significant analogue elsewhere.” [this verse]. This will come as no surprise to students of Judaism, who will recall that the words in Genesis, “And man became a living soul,” are translated by the Targum as “a speaking spirit.”  SPERO 273

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