How Pixar’s ‘Soul’ Borrows From an Ancient Jewish Idea

“Soul” offers a variety of sweetly packaged, life-affirming answers to these big questions, answers that have resonances in a variety of world religious traditions. Certainly, in the Jewish mystical tradition, there is much ado about soul sparks. There are also cognate visions of the Great Before, my personal favorite being the Kabbalistic image of the tree of souls, hung richly with the fruit of future lives, which, when ripe, are blown down to earth by a light wind. This particular image doesn’t appear in Pixar’s version of things, but it is certainly of a piece with the gentle realm where new souls are nurtured before birth.

It doesn’t give too much away to tell you that one of the movie’s central messages is that true personhood is rooted in the union of body and soul, that they are both indispensable ingredients of life’s confection. If Joe Gardner’s adventure with an unborn soul named “22” yields any concrete moral, it is that corporeality and spirituality are intimately bound up with one another. Each is incomplete, perhaps woefully so, without the other. And of the many ideas that Pixar gracefully bandies about in “Soul,” it is this one that strikes me as the most profoundly Jewish.

On this very subject, there is a famous midrash, or ancient rabbinic homily, about a body and soul separated by death and standing before God in judgment. The soul, pleading her case, argues that all of her sinful behaviour was caused by the body’s base desires. The body, not to be outdone, makes the point that without the soul he would have been entirely lifeless and therefore unable to transgress. Accepting their arguments, God puts them back together and punishes them in unison.

I have always found this story irresistibly charming (very much like a Pixar movie) not because I am in love with the idea of divine retribution, but rather because, as an embodied soul myself — or, if you like, as a body who happens to be ensouled for the moment — it simply rings true. One of the enduring contributions of the ancient rabbis is their forceful insistence that we are Jews not only because we have Jewish souls (though they did believe that) but also because we have Jewish bodies, the product of Jewish families and pumping with Jewish blood. The human being, in this view, is not a metaphysical construct — as Tina Fey’s character somewhat derisively describes the realm of souls. Nor is the human being only a soft, perishable body. Rather, a human being is a luminous, fragile and ultimately temporary marriage of the two. In “Soul,” it is only when our heroes discover and inhabit this truth that they both get to where they need to go.

In a year in which so many bodies have been ravaged — and in which so many souls have been frayed — you can do a lot worse than sitting back and, for just under two hours, allowing Pixar to offer up some humane and very Jewish answers to some very deep questions. The movie itself is perhaps somewhat slight, given it’s rather weighty subject matter, and the answers it gives may not knock your socks off. But they just might soothe your soul, and, as we close the book on 2020, I say that’s plenty. I give it three out of four sparks.