Q&A: What Use Is the Soul to Us in This Body?
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
What Use Is the Soul to Us in This Body?
Question
To His Holy Honor, our master, teacher, and rabbi, the Rebbe of Lod, may he live long and well (Gittin 47),
I wanted to ask regarding what the master has taught us in several places, that one takes into account the soul pulsing within the body: does it have any influence on our actions or thoughts? And perhaps this could explain, on his approach, the way the Infinite can govern this world of falsehood without changing the established laws of nature.
Answer
It has no influence on thought. Thought takes place within it. It is what thinks, not the body. And of course there are mutual influences between the body and the soul.
Discussion on Answer
Should read: why shouldn’t the soul be the…
That is intervention in free choice, and that is like intervention in nature.
Why should the soul be our Higgs boson,
where God would more plausibly be assumed to intervene,
since that would not change the laws of nature?