Parts of Creation
From the Zohar, parashat Toldot:
Come and see: Everyone who busies themselves with the Torah, they preserve the world and preserve every single one of God’s works in its proper form. And there is not a single part of the human body which does not have an aspect of creation which corresponds to it. For indeed, just as a human is divided into many body parts, and all of them exist on their own level and are arranged in relationship to each other, so too is the world. All the aspects of creation are like body parts which are joined together and arranged in relationship to each other — it is a real body! And everything is like the Torah, since the whole Torah is divided into parts and sections joined together, and when all of them are arranged properly, they from a single body. When David saw this work, he opened up and said, “How great are Your works, Adonai – You made them all with wisdom. The earth is filled with Your creations!” (Psalm 104)
What Rabbi Chiyah is articulating here is a kabbalistic concept sometimes expressed in the form of the acronym עש״ן (ashan, “smoke”), standing for olam, shanah, nefesh — world, year, and person. The idea is that phenomena existing at all different levels of being, from the individual human up to the world as a whole and the cycle of the year, share a common structure.
Just as the human body is an organic whole comprised of individual parts with a defined relationship to one another, so too does the world constitute such an organic whole on a different scale. And not only that, but the distinct parts of the one correspond functionally to those of the other. In other words, there is a part of the world which is geographically equivalent to the back of my right knee. And similarly, there is a part of my body which corresponds anatomically to Mexico City.
The key takeaway from this way of thinking is, I believe, the idea that every part of the world is as necessary to the greater whole as each part of my body is for me. Some of humanity’s greatest moral transgressions arise from ignoring that principle. Every person is sacred and necessary to the organic being of the world, and every people likewise. For one people to attack or oppress another is as absurd, and as self-defeating, as if a person’s stomach determined to wage war against their liver. This is no mere metaphor. As Rabbi Chiyah forcefully asserts, “it is a real body!”
There is a blessing customarily recited in the morning (and also after going to the bathroom) which praises God as the former of the human body, asserting that if even one of the body’s many vessels and channels were to be inappropriately opened or closed, “it would not be possible to survive and to stand before you, even for one hour.” Just as we rely upon the interdependent network of our body in order to survive, we need to cultivate the awareness that we really, fundamentally, cannot do without each other. Because right now it seems like we are dying of the sort of autoimmune disorder where the body is at war with itself, and such a body cannot stand, “even for one hour.”
