A simple yet elusive quest for an answer takes us from biology to kabbalah to the dance of the electron.
If a biologist knows about anything at all, he should know about life. Or so you would think. After all, biology is defined as the scientific study of living organisms. To distinguish biology from other scholarly 
disciplines, introductory textbooks tackle the terms of engagement right from the start. Typically on page 1, they take their own run at that classic, primordial question that has stymied philosophers since the dawn of civilization and that is: What is life?
Defining life is particularly daunting because it is a fundamental concept, rather like ‘time’ or ‘consciousness’. Each of these is a basic reality that doesn’t break down into parts. As such, the exercise of defining life leads us between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, you can’t define life in terms of itself, for that would be trivial. On the other hand, once you characterize it with a shopping list of descriptors, you’ve completely lost its essence.
What to do? Probably not what the experts do. Biologists, locked as they are in the outdated materialistic mindsets of the 19th Century, try to define something fuzzy like life in terms of rocks and hard places. “Life is the characteristic quality of living beings.” or “Life is defined by such features as homeostasis, metabolism, reproduction, mobility, and genetic makeup.”
It sounds okay for starters, but scratch the surface of these ‘definitive’ statements and the former is just a tautology (self-reference), while the latter is an elliptical trajectory around the missing focal point. Besides, do those qualities really distinguish living beings from others? Let’s take a look at a few.
Homeostasis is the maintenance of a constant internal environment by means of negative feedback. This means that if it’s too hot, you sweat and bring down the body temperature. Too cold? You shiver and warm up. That’s life. But what about my furnace, thermometer and thermostat? That’s a homeostatic system too! Too hot? The thermometer signals the thermostat to shut down the furnace. Too cold? The thermometer signals the thermostat to turn the heat back on. Voila! Thermoregulation, i.e., homeostasis, a constant internal environment. Does that mean my house is alive? Obviously not.
The same is true of the other ‘defining’ qualities of life. Crystals, too, reproduce. Automobiles can be said to metabolize. And viruses, which are considered nonliving, are comprised of genetic material just as living cells are.
So what is life?
To discover what life is, let’s probe the animal. The word animal is derived from the Latin, animus, meaning mind or soul, which is similar to the Latin anima, for breath or spirit. Hebrew also speaks of neshama and neshima, which are soul and breath, respectively. As well we have the related ruach, which is both spirit and wind. Similarly the English word inspiration refers both to physical breath and spiritual arousal.
A person that is animated, that has vitality, life, is recognizable by a dynamic presence, a spiritual investment that is quite beyond the physical yet expresses itself specifically through his body and its functions. It is an enigmatic fact of life that we recognize the transcendence of life itself by observing its investment in the physical bodies of living beings.
But how do these two worlds mesh? What is it that unites and harmonizes the nonphysical spirit with the corporeal body? Neither the body itself, nor the spirit alone, have the capacity to effect the integrated soul-body unity of a living being.
There must be something beyond both soul and body that creates them with the potential for unification and combines them as an organic unit. This is the logic of the Abraham Principle, and through it, the venerable patriarch determined that there is but a singular source of life, the First Being, whose Life is independent of both body and soul.
It is in celebration of this wonderful reality, that Jews begin each day with a prayer immediately upon waking up in the morning, saying, “I offer thanks to you, living and eternal King, for You have mercifully restored my soul within me; Your faithfulness is great.”
Loosely translated, Modeh Ani means, “Hey! I’ve got this body and this soul that really have nothing to do with each other. It’s just that some great Being beyond them both has made them and put them together so I can celebrate life itself. Thank you!”
Loosely translated, Modeh Ani means, “Hey! I’ve got this body and this soul that really have nothing to do with each other. It’s just that some great Being beyond them both has made them and put them together so I can celebrate life itself. Thank you!”
We then go on to acknowledge all the details of how that essential life is expressed in day-to-day existence. We have blessings for daybreak, for vision, for movement, for strength, for clothing, for identity and for freedom. But heading this long list of blessings is one for life.
“My G-d, the soul which You have given within me is pure. You have created it, You have formed it, You have breathed it into me, and You preserve it within me. You will eventually take it from me, and restore it within me in the Time to Come. So long as the soul is within me, I offer thanks to You, L- rd, my G-d and G-d of my fathers, Master of all works, L-rd of all souls. Blessed are You, L-rd, who restores souls to dead bodies.”
Chassidus explains this prayer in terms of the Kabbalah of Life. The stages of the soul’s descent into the physical world are described above as ‘pure’, ‘created’, ‘formed’, ‘breathed’, and ‘preserved’. The first four terms refer to its stepwise descent through the four spiritual worlds of Atzilut-emanation (pure),Beriyah- creation (created), Yetsira-formation (formed), andAsiyah-action (breathed). The fifth is the continuous miracle of sustained physical life (preserved). Before each term, the word Atah-You is used, indicating that G-d Himself, the Creator of something from nothing, is behind each quantum jump from world to world and is continuously involved in sustaining the soul-body unity.
If this sounds esoteric to you, don’t worry – it is. But as it turns out, physical reality is just as strange, for the particle physics provides a close analogy to this spiritual odyssey, and does so in the name of the ubiquitous electron. Indeed, quantum jumps within the atom lend credence to the sentiment that Adam and the atom have enough in common to warrant similar names.
Strange as it seems, when electrons move from level to level in their atomic orbits, they do so without covering the intervening space. Unlike larger objects that at least seem to obey classical laws of continuous motion, the electron jumps in a most radical fashion. It instantaneously changes state, so at the very same ,moment, it vanishes from one location and reappears in another. Moreover the electron not only jumps from place to place, but also from time to time and from energy level to energy level, all without ever traversing intermediate conditions.
In like fashion, the soul-jumps from world to world also occur in a marvelous, something-from-nothing manner which mirrors the mysterious leaps of the electron from level to level. On the other side of the mirror, in the spiritual realm, the Atah- power behind the soul’s quantum descents is called Atzmut-essence. This essence is the indivisible wholeness that is the ultimate reality of the world, putting it all together without being seen.
So too in the ‘life’ of the electron. Every electron leap is an expression of an indivisible wholeness, a creative force beyond space and time, which is the ultimate ground of reality, is conscious, and manifests in each and every particle in the cosmos, putting it all together without being seen.
It is here that faith and physics kiss. The life of the Adam and the life of the atom are one and the same, an unutterable essence that cannot be perceived directly but is somehow recognizable in every step in the dance of life, a dance that continues into the Days of Moshiach when the world will be filled with the knowledge of G-d as the waters cover the sea.
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Inspired in part by the sicha of 16 Teves 5750.