I have a lot of pets, I've had a lot of pets. When giving my little 15 minutes to talk about myself at Pardes, I spent 10 minutes talking about all the pets I've had. I think its at 10 cats, 7 dogs, 2 toads, 2 gerbils, 1 guinea pig, and innumerable fish. I'm not one of those crazy cat people, I also live with humans. Maybe my mom is the crazy cat person. Anyway, when you grow up surrounded by pets, you can't help but develop a certain level of love for animals, and you also can't escape the inevitable passing away of those animals.
Two years ago, I crawled up to my room in the morning after a night out in Philly to discover my favorite cat, Dandelion, had died on my bed. I was quite devastated by it. Last weekend I came home from being away for a week to find out my favorite dog had been passed away earlier that day. Right now I'm still working on a theory that my favorite pets dies whenever my friend with the full sleeve tattoo of Noah's Ark visits from the navy... Not to be insensitive, but while it is definitely tough, you do sort of get used to the idea of pets passing on after you've had so many of them. We have a macabre little assembly of wooden boxes filled with animal ashes, and my family tends to fill the void with a new pet pretty quickly, like within a week or two. Anyway, something I need to ask myself every time one of them goes is whether or not pets have souls.
My answer doesn't particularly comfort me, as it's no they don't. It makes it a little worse, knowing that my little Dandy isn't going to be waiting for me up in some form of Jewish heaven, and that once they're gone they're gone. However, from what I've gleaned from the opening chapter of the Torah, humans and animals are different in that humans actually have this spiritual essence, an eternal soul. While animals have a nefesh (some sort of soul) it's no neshama (a different higher sort of soul). The way I was taught it is that a nefesh is really just willful movements, not something necessarily spiritual, and that's the way I've poskened for years. Doesn't mean I don't love my animals, or that I don't have a deep connection with some of them, but I do fully believe that humans are a higher life form.
I want to believe their nefesh is a little more than just the ability to decide whether they get up and go left or right, that animal souls have a basis in a higher realm and continue to exist after death, but I can't find any religious evidence for this, So I can't honestly believe this, and as per my earlier d'var on absolute good and truth, just because we want something to be true doesn't mean Hashem agrees. In this regards, I'm put in a situation where my beliefs and my desires are completely against one another, and belief wins out. Of course, I hope I'm wrong, which is part of why I'm writing this; I'm hoping someone can prove me wrong, but by doing so in a rational logical manner based on Torah not emotionally based off their desire to see animals as having a soul too.
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