When my son Jacob was a very little boy, I shared with him a practice for helping us ease our way out of agitating, seemingly insolvable dilemmas. The practice was to sit very quietly, with our eyes closed, and simply breathe, and wait, and trust that an idea would "bubble up." It always worked. For me, it still does. In Genesis chapter two, we read that God ceased on the seventh day after all the work of creation. The verb is often translated as "rested," but the plain sense of the root sh-v-t is to cease. This is the root from which we get the name sabbath, or Shabbat in Hebrew. A few verses later, in the account of the creation of humans, the Torah tells us that God formed the human from the dust of the earth. God blew into its nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a nefesh chayah - a living being. The root n-f-sh in biblical Hebrew signifies a person, but could also be translated as soul. These two root words - sh-v-t/to cease, and n-f-sh/soul - come...