The Order(s) of the Universe and the (Dis)Order(s) of the Body

The rabbis (both Palestinian and Babylonian) perceived the natural world as a kind of living organism structured as a human body. This model is quite different from the Biblical one and emerges in numerous sermons and stories, and appears to have been one of the central ideas of Rabbinic Judaism. The main aim of this chapter is to show how the human body, for Rabbis, was the major scale of their reasoning against which they measured perceiving the world. As I will show, the body was the starting point in their cosmographic and hydrologic speculations, and I aim to explore this phenomenon. The main difference between the two rabbinic cultures (Palestinian and Babylonian) is in the theological ex-planations of divine involvement in the functioning of the natural world. This contribution aims to explore the relationship between body experience and body-oriented concepts. I am interested in showing how natural phenomena were interpreted in the cultural world in which there were no articulated concepts of nature as we understand it. Despite the term for a body, there is no total separation of body and mind. I claim that the imagined analogy between the human body and the Universe led to a balance between mild anthropological dualism and some holistic concepts in rabbinic thought. By making this link, I aim to explore various aspects of rabbinic scientific approaches.