At my birth, my mother named me. She gave me the middle name of Tanya. Later I discovered the Tanya in Hebrew means “compilation” of teachings from Judaic writings. God’s wisdom governs all that righteous Jews do.
There are many lessons in Tan
ya. One of them concerns our “soul”. In Hebrew it is called “nephesh”, or breath. It means further “life or power”. A breathing creature. The word appears 754 times in the Old Testament. Other definitions include self, life, creature, person, desire, emotion, the living substance. Clearly, we all have a nephesh and it is of the greatest value in our lives.
This is defined in Judaism as “apart of God above,” We have, in Judaism a primary or “ego” soul. God’s wisdom is one with Him. So our soul is rooted in His essence. Maimonides, a Sephardic medieval Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, said that the Creedal prayer of Judaism is the one all Jews must utter:
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
This is a Jewish soul’s knowledge of the primacy of one God.
Maimonides wrote that God’s knowledge is different from human knowledge, which is abstract and does not affect our behavior or our lives. But when we know what God wants of us, we are on the right track to filling our souls with His knowledge, His revelation and we delight in doing His works.
Knowledge, according to Torah study, has three components: 1)the person who comes to learn information that will be kept in his mind. 2)Then follows the intellectual material which a person has the ability to learn, to comprehend and assimilate. 3)They merge into a third component; the person who becomes the knower of temporal and spiritual information and who can never then deny what he has learned through his mind and also with his very being.
But God’s knowledge is eternal. It is revelation, the revealed mind and will of He Who is our eternal Heavenly Father. This kind of knowledge is not temporal but is spiritually unifying, settling deep within our being and filling us with light and truth. It dispels the dark of sinfulness, denial of truth, and ignorance of godly laws. To have gained wisdom is to enlarge our soul’s ability to make sense of this life’s meanings, purposes and consequences. In Judaism, we live and study to satisfy our souls with the knowledge and love of God. We consider that study our “Jewishness”, our nephesh, our particular, most recognizable characteristic as a people.
The Bible has much to say about man’s soul.
Proverbs 2:10 When wisdom enters into your heart and knowledge is pleasant to your soul;
6:30 Men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry;
19:8 He who gets wisdom loves his own soul: he who understands shall find good.
19:15 Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep; and an idle soul shall suffer hunger.
19:16 He who keeps the commandment keeps his own soul; but he who despises his ways shall die.
Jeremiah 4:10 Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! surely you have greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, You shall have peace; whereas the sword reaches to the soul.
Jonah 2:7 (8) When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in to you, into your holy temple.
To a Mormon, these things are also true, but we know it is the Holy Ghost, the third member of the Godhead, who imparts these things to our consciousness. The soul in Mormon doctrine is the body, the person, the spirit (personality) and the physical body or tabernacle of the individual’s spirit. The word “soul” is often used in place of the word “spirit” and can usually be accepted as the same entity.Soulfulness is not a temporal entity, but one which is imparted cell by cell into the essence of the breathing entity.
Doctrine and Covenants 88:15-16 tells us the “soul is the united entity of the spirit with the physical body (D&C 88:15-16). This concept is enhanced by an understanding of (1) the creation of humankind as a uniting of the spirit body and the physical body (Gen. 2:7; Moses 3:7; Abr. 5:7)(2) the knowledge that God himself is embodied (D&C 130:22); and (3) the doctrine that all mortals will ultimately undergo a literal resurrection of the physical body (Alma 40:17-23;41:2; 2 Ne. 9:13). Only in this resurrected and permanently united form can a soul receive a fulness of joy (D&C 93:33-34; cf. D&C 138:17). The glory with which the soul arises in the resurrection is related to the glory, form, and qualities of the resurrected body (1 Cor. 15:40-45; D&C 88:28).” This information adds information that Jewish studies do not give us.
We learn Also in LDS doctrine that our spirits existed before our mortal life, and that every living thing (plant, animal, human) has a soul (See Moses 3:9, 19 in Pearl of Great Price). Our individual soul is not perishable. It is of infinite worth. It is endowed innately with an agency for eternal growth and understanding. It cannot be fully destroyed but it can suffer a spiritual death through sinfulness which becomes an estrangement from Heavenly Father. We are all spirit children of our Heavenly Father and each soul is of infinite worth to Him. He is greatly joyous over the repentance of a sinful person – of any person –. To God there is no more important work than the saving of souls and bringing them back to His fold.
The wonder of LDS doctrine is that it is more clarifying than all or any other religions because its concepts, laws and rewards are given us through prophetic utterances from God and Christ, who are our Makers and Finishers and who may have conceived these truths, for they are eternally valid and come from their Perfect Minds. We would do well to heed these things, for we will be accountable for all we are given that is true!