theology that found theological meaning in both the human body as microcosm and physical universe as macrocosm. This rumination on “the Word made flesh” echoed the Ashkenazic interest in the human body as encapsulating the divine order, as a veritable “world made flesh.”
After outlining some of the general discussions of embodiment that appear in Pietistic theological and liturgical texts, this chapter considers in some detail the specific theme of man as olam katan. This notion has two interrelated components: a link between the human body and the physical universe, and one between the human soul and God. The Pietists’ Sephardic contemporaries increasingly emphasized the latter at the expense of the former, but by examining each of these correspondences in turn, it emerges that the Pietists saw the two as intimately, inseparably linked. The present chapter focuses on the correspondence between the physical body and the universe, while Chapter 3 explores the ramifications of the link between soul and God. The implications of this linkage, as we shall see, included an overriding concern with bodily stability and mutability—which are discussed extensively in Chapters 4 and 5.
“ALL MY BONES SHALL SAY LORD, WHO IS LIKE YOU?”
Once one reads Pietistic texts with an eye to the role of the human body, their concern with biological and anatomical details fairly leaps off the page. To begin with, Pietistic texts are full of lists—of the limbs of the human body, of its internal organs, of the bodily humors and the ways in which all of them function in the physiological workings of the body and its internal processes. Almost invariably, the contexts in which these lists appear make clear that the body is being invoked not as a source of abhorrence, but as a concrete manifestation of God’s goodness and beneficence.
Perhaps the most comprehensive example of the Pietists’ rumination on the body and its potentialities emerges out of an ostensibly minor passage in the Sod ha-Yirah, a section of Sefer Hasidim generally attributed to Samuel, Judah he-Hasid’s father. There, in the context of a discussion of what man’s attitude should be upon awakening in the morning, we are told that one ought to “bless the Holy One, blessed be He, for that over which one had no control [while he was asleep], when he had no control over his body. Bless Him for each and every limb…. Thus, the Sages established a blessing over each one, as is fitting. And a certain pious man used to bless [God] for each and every limb, and a verse supports him: ‘My heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God’ (Ps. 64:3), and it is [further] written, ‘all my bones shall say Lord, who is like You?’ (Ps. 35:10).14 Thus would he pray for all the limbs that were created in him.”15 On its surface, this passage seems merely to be a variation on a common theme, namely that the morning blessings (birkhot ha-shahar) were instituted so as to correspond to one’s physical actions upon awakening in the morning.16 What is unique, however, is the blessing that “a certain pious man” added of his own accord. As Malachi Beit-Arie has pointed out, this prayer, or one like it, survives in a collection of Pietistic prayers preserved in a Bodleian manuscript.17 The text of this prayer, which the copyist of the manuscript entitled Birkhot ha-Evarim (The Blessings of the Limbs), begins by praising God, who “opens [the ears of] the deaf and [the eyes of] the blind”18—paralleling Sod ha-Yirah’s description of one who, while sleeping, “has no control over his body.” The prayer then proceeds limb by limb and organ by organ through the entire (male) human body, describing the anatomical role played by each of the body’s component parts.19 Overall, the liturgical composition includes thirty-eight blessings (e.g., “Blessed are You, Lord, on account of the eyes and their sight”). Some of these formulae, however, refer to more than one body part, such that in sum the prayer specifies no fewer than sixty-nine distinct types of body parts.20
In his description of this liturgical composition, Beit-Arie has suggested that “the author of these blessings had no interest in the anatomy of the human body [per se]…. Rather, the text was composed for literary and liturgical reasons … and thus should not be treated as a source demonstrating anatomical knowledge among medieval Jews.”21 While the anatomical contents of the text are certainly not comprehensive—though it does contain material drawn from medical texts like the early medieval Sefer Refu’ot of Asaf ha-Rofe,22 the majority of its contents are paraphrased from rabbinic literature—the choice of the human body as the organizing principle for this prayer was not a random one. Pietistic sources recurrently invoke the limbs of the body in their praise of God, and suggest, as this prayer does, that man in his embodied state is best equipped to appreciate God’s goodness. Thus, Eleazar too instructs his readers to “praise God with all of his limbs” prior to listing the body parts that are “witnesses” to God’s grandeur,23 and he returns repeatedly to this theme throughout his writings.24
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