As I watch the sun set on this beautiful Friday, I am present to the nearness of the Jewish sabbath day of rest – as well as to the last day of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. To my Jewish brethren, Shabbat Shalom. To those for whom G-d is One and Muhammad is his prophet, a late Ramadan Kareem and an early Eid Mubarak.
I was raised Jewish and continue to have a vibrant connection to Jewish heritage and practices. AND for a number of years, I have taken on a Muslim practice as well. I love what Yossi Klein Halevi said about praying with Muslims, that he “found their way of expressing devotion somehow familiar. The prostration in surrender to God was once a mode of prayer in Judaism [and ] joining the Muslim prayer line helped reconnect me to my ancient roots”. This feels true for me – Muslim practice not only as a way to connect with “the Other”, but to my own ancestry as well.
This Ramadan marks my 7th year observing that very holy and special, yet trying and disciplining, month. I’m remembering my first Ramadan, sitting on the carpet of a masjid in Berkeley and listening to the Imam during jumma – as he spoke of Ramadan as an opportunity to master one’s nafs. I understood through the context that this was apparently the word for our instincts and desires: the hunger, thirst, and sexual relations that practicing the Ramadan fast allows us to maintain command of. Although I hadn’t heard this Arabic word before, it was clearly a cognate of the Hebrew nefesh, one of three words for soul in the Jewish tradition.
As a depth psychologist, I have taken seriously the etymology of my field as “study of soul”. This is not “soul” in the sense of something tangible or a metaphysical reality, but a perspective. The early psychologists seemed to be clear about this – before the mainstream discipline attempted to accommodate itself to a medical model based on positivism and pragmatism. And while the psychological orientation to soul is quite different from a dogmatic religious approach, I am nevertheless interested in the way that spiritual traditions attempt to characterize those parts of us which are elusive and ethereal but which might be described as “soul” or “spirit”.
So I’d like to share a little bit about how the Judeo-Islamic traditions talk about soul. I will not be taking a very orthodox approach and those who do might consider me a heretic. I will admit that my knowledge on this topic is autodidactic,accompanied by Wikipedia searches. As a depth psychologist, I am interested in these topics as metaphor and, therefore, am interested more in exploration than exactitude.
As I mentioned above, I first learned that nafs is one’s animal nature, akin to what Freud called the id. This makes sense in Hebrew, as well, where nefesh is the aspect of soul most closely related to the body and the physical plane. What is most fascinating to me is that, upon further study, I understand nafs to be used in the Quran for both individual and collective purposes – similar to the way that we in psychology use the word psyche to describe one’s individual soul as well as the world soul.
The second level of soul in the Jewish understanding is ruach, meaning wind. It is also used, colloquially, to describe exuberance or energy. In the Quran ruh is used to describe the spirit that animates the inanimate – and is also the word for “angel”. Ruach and ruh are considered to be higher levels of soul – perhaps what distinguishes humans from other creatures. As far as I can tell, Islam maintains just the two levels of soul: nafs and ruh.
In some places, Judaism discusses 5 types of soul – but I will refer to just the main three. The last level of soul in the Jewish system is neshamah. While all three terms – nefesh, ruach, and neshamah – have to do with the breath, neshamah is literally and etymologically related to the word “breath”. I have read that nefesh is exhale while neshamah is inhale – inspiration. According to holy scriptures, the human soul came from Spirit breathing into the human body. For me, what’s most important is not what language we use to describe the ineffable or whether we identify as those who wrestle with the divine or those who submit (as humans, I believe we fluctuate between the two), but to remember that we are all made from the same image.
Community Alchemist 