Rabbinic Bio-looping: Mind, Body, and Meaning-Making in Late Antique Rabbinic Conceptions of Embodiment

Religious healing has long been a subject of interest in both the sciences and humanities . How do rituals, prayers, and ceremonies—experiences without an obvious western biomedical intervention—lead to real therapeutic results including pain relief, remission, and recovery from illness? There is a strand in biomedical research that has framed these experiences as a “mere” placebo effect, dismissing the capacity of meaning-making activities to shape one’s health and state of mind. In recent years, historians of science and anthropologists have drawn on developments in neuroscience to refine existing conceptual models of embodiment by exploring the mechanisms of the relationship between the body and cognitive meaning-making as reflected in specific religious actions. The anthropologist Rebecca Seligman, building on Ian Hacking’s work, brings together research on religious healing, the placebo effect, and the somatization of discrimination by marginalized groups to develop a “looping model” of embodiment. Specifically, the placebo effect that comes from taking sugar pills is not a “sham” that tricks the body, but rather, it is the “embodied forms of cognition” and the unconscious meaning-making that affects the sick person’s physical state. Furthermore, she argues that in fact, all occurrences of healing likely involve these “placebo-like” mental processes. In the looping model of embodiment, the meaning-making activities of the embodied mind are linked to the physical wellness of the entire body through “circular and reinforcing patterns of influence."

This paper draws on these theoretical frameworks for embodiment to examine the connection between meaning-making activities and health in late antique Palestinian rabbinic literature. In Leviticus Rabbah, the rabbis discuss how morally and religiously righteous or transgressive behavior has the ability to impact the physical state of the body. In fact, in some texts, it is the physical body part involved in transgression that affects the physical state of the body, leading to a person becoming ill. And, specific transgressive actions associated with certain body parts—for example gossip performed by the mouth—leads to a person developing leprosy. Situation these texts within the context of late antique Greco-Roman medicine, this paper will explore the rabbinic conception of embodiment developed in these texts. This paper argues that in the rabbinic imagination, the surface of the body becomes a text that reflects the religious behavior of an individual. Furthermore, the rabbis see reading the body as in itself an important practice as it allows an individual to refine their behavior, resulting in both a righteous and healthy individual. Studying the rabbinic "looping" model of embodiment showcases how theories of the mind are intertwined with questions of political and moral responsibility. For the rabbis, this "looping" model of embodiment becomes tied to questions over personal responsibility for one's own physical state and the community's responsibility towards those who are sick.