Heads we're dancing

In my Chernobyler class we've been looking at some teachings about the body and the soul. (Some of you may have guessed that my recent post Body and Soul was adapted and excerpted from a paper I just wrote for that class. This is how I manage to continue blogging during this really dense rab school semester -- I repurpose rab school material as blog posts.) In our conversation about our papers this morning, Rabbi Bob shared a gorgeous little teaching from Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, which goes like this:

The soul knows things the body can never know: joy, sorrow, anticipation, yetzirah [the world of emotion] and briyah [the world of intellect]. But the soul is liable to sickness for that very reason, in a way the body is not; the soul can become depressed, forgetful, closed-off. So the soul's constant duty is to teach the body the habitual ways of dancing -- so that when the soul becomes sorrowful, the body can remind the soul of how to pull itself out of that.

(Alas, I can't offer a citation for this; if anyone reading this knows where I can find it, please let me know.) I really love this little teaching. Yes, the soul can know things the body can't access. The Chernobyler would say that the soul contains the chelek elohut, the spark of divinity or godliness, in each one of us; the body in which that soul is implanted can house that spark, but the spark isn't part of the body per se.

But it's exactly because of that body/soul distinction -- because the soul can access heights the body can't grok -- that the soul can become sick. (Yes, sure, the body can too, but physical sickness is different than soul-sickness. Haven't we all encountered people whose bodies are ill but whose spirits still soar? I wrote a poem once about how I'd rather have a splitting sinus headache than be depressed, because at least the headache is easily-treatable; depression, not so much.)

The job of the soul, therefore, is to teach the body "the habitual ways of dancing." He's talking here about mitzvot -- the practices that shape Jewish life, the connective commandments that link us with our Source -- though I think this can be generalized to work for non-Jewish readers, too. I love the way this turn of phrase frames mitzvot: they're not onerous obligations, not merely laws, but dance steps. When we live a conscious life of good deeds and connective actions, we're not just walking -- we're dancing.

And the answer for periods of depression, for the soul sickness Rebbe Nachman knew well, lies not in the mind or spirit but in the body. So when I feel too depressed to pray, the answer is to don tallit and tefillin anyway, because the physicality of the action may reach me when reason and emotion wouldn't get through. And when I feel sunk in sadness, the answer is to use my body: engage in some exercise (even though the days when I'm overwhelmed are the days when I feel least like moving at all), treat my body to a hot-tub soak or a massage, because it's the body which can pull the soul out of the pit. On good days, my soul elevates my body; on tough days, my body can elevate my soul.

What a gorgeous teaching -- and what a fortuitous one to encounter right now, as we work our way through the very darkest (and therefore sometimes most depressing) week of the year. Thanks, Rabbi Bob and Rebbe Nachman.

The title of this post is borrowed from a Kate Bush song. There's no real connection, except that as I was writing it I got the song in my head, and I like it, so there you go.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, RebNachman.