The Meaning Of Life

Why is it that this imponderable essence we call life, we also call God? Jewish literature is abundant with references of how human souls contain a spark of the Divine. Life is that inaccessible, mysterious, unknowable quality, which we can best understand by its absence. When someone dies we know something has departed; we might say "that's Joe's body" knowing full well that Joe is not there, only his body remains. Jewish tradition reflects a deep concern for life. The number eighteen which is numerically equivalent to chai, the Hebrew word for life becomes our symbol for life; we toast l'chaim for life; many mitzvot are suspended in order to preserve life. Torah is our road map of life and how Jews view life. When a Torah scroll is paraded around the synagogue, everyone gathers to plant a kiss on its mantle for what else could be so precious other than life itself.

Judaism has much to say on the subject of life. In chapter four in his Book of Knowledge, Maimonides explains that life consists of four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. The Sefer Yezirah and the Zohar, both early kabbalistic texts, elaborate on the meaning of these elements. They say that these elements are the building blocks of life. Every living creature is composed of varying proportions of these elements and life embodies all four elements working together in harmony and balance.

Life implies movement, the element of air.  All living organisms move, in one way or another for survival: sometimes to obtain food, sometimes to evade a predator or sometimes to locate a more comfortable environment. Spiritually, all life moves towards its source, the return towards its Divine origin. The allusions to this principle embellish much of our literature: the return to the land that God promised Abraham, the return of the exiles from Babylon, the return of the Divine energy to its source as explained by the Kabbalistic doctrine of the Ten Sephirot.
The element of water represents the unconscious. It also stands for our sexuality, our relationships and our emotions. The unconscious is the source of our intuition our instincts and our creativity, but also it contains our demons in the form of repressed memories and bad dreams. That may explain why the Book of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is the story of a biblical prophet who gets swallowed by a big fish. The fish at the bottom of the sea symbolizes the deep unconscious and we can follow the path of Jonah into our own unconscious to learn what God expects of us.

The Book of Leviticus, the third book of the Torah, goes into detailed explanation of the sacrificial rite of the Temple. The Korban Oleh, the holiest of animal sacrifices was entirely consumed on the altar by fire. Fire represents change. It changes something into something else. Each individual life goes continually through such changes. We go from embryo to child, from child to adult, to marriage, and finally to death. Rites of passage celebrate these changes that we all go through: the circumcision, the bar/bat mitzvah, the wedding and the funeral. At each of the major turning points, some part of a person is left behind, it dies, it's sacrificed, and something new emerges.

Everything that's alive follows a rhythm. We breathe and our hearts beat.  The planet Earth expands and contracts continuously; economic cycles rise and fall and generations come and go.  Our Jewish nature experiences this by participating in the festival and holidays, which center upon the seasons. In winter the world is in a contracted state, we spend more time indoors, the animal world hibernates and the energy of the tree condenses toward its roots. In summer everything expands, plants bloom and we spend more time outdoors.
At times people feel as if life is meaningless; it serves no purpose. We're born, we die and that's it. Torah teaches something else. It commands us to be fertile and to multiply (Genesis 9:7), to populate the land. It also tells us that we were created in God's image and like God it is our responsibility to care for the entire earth, everything and everyone in it. (Genesis 1:26). That includes keeping our families and ourselves alive and well while maintaining the environment, in all its ramifications. After these basic responsibilities are met we're charged to transform and evolve intellectually and spiritually. Once in a while, out of this flux of humanity, a breakthrough occurs which causes creative innovation leading to advances in medicine, science, art, literature, social and religious understanding. One generation transmits to the next the teachings that have accumulated; by taking a role in this process, we satisfy the purpose of life.