Q&A: Who Is the “I” According to Judaism?
Who Is the “I” According to Judaism?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: according to Judaism, who is the “I” in the sense of the one who experiences, thinks, and feels?
Is it defined as the soul? the spirit? or something else?
Until now I thought it was the soul, but apparently in the blessing “My God, the soul” it seems that this is not the case.
As it says “My God, the soul You placed within me”—which implies that I am not the soul.
And likewise “ You breathed it into me“—the soul is not me.
If so, then who is the “I”?!?
Answer
There is no such thing as the “I” according to Judaism. Who exactly is this “Judaism”? Are you asking what the Torah writes? Nothing. The Oral Torah? Nothing. So you are left to think and formulate a position for yourself, without any connection to Judaism. Of course, all this is really a semantic question, because it depends on what you define as soul or spirit in terms of thought or feeling.
Beyond that, even in “Modeh Ani” you could interpret it as: the soul that You placed in my body, and I created my “self,” which is soul + body. But I don’t see much point in such a discussion. There is no way to determine the meaning of these concepts here.
Discussion on Answer
The “I” is the result of the urge for pride that exists in every person.
http://hagut.org/h/index.php/2014-01-21-07-01-9/27-6983
http://hagut.org/h/index.php/2014-01-21-07-01-9/24-6980
Generally, these questions are discussed by Kabbalah and the doctrine of nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, and yechidah. But it seems to me that intellectual engagement with a question that the Eastern traditions have dealt with through thousands of years of meditative thought is a bit of a joke. It’s like talking about art or sports. You have to make art and do sports, and that is the full understanding of those fields. It may very well be that the “I” will become clear to you on the basis of many years of meditation directed toward that. The problem is that the phenomenon of the “I” as experienced in meditation is different from the Jewish conception. It seems that the Jewish “I” is experienced as an external gift or as part of a larger whole, namely God, from whom it was breathed, whereas the Buddhist “I” is not necessarily like that. In the language of the Ari, the Buddhist “I” is in Imma and not in Abba. They say that I am not I, so then who am I anyway?