Neshamah

Neshamah is the higher soul, the third of the five levels, from the Hebrew for breath or the divine soul, and the breath God breathes into the first human at Genesis 2:7, nishmat hayyim. Kabbalah takes it as the intellective and intuitive soul, the seat of higher understanding and of the direct awareness of God, holding that it is awakened by study and by the fulfilment of the commandments rather than possessed by nature; the sources speak of it as a level many never attain. It is associated with Beriah, the world of creation, and with Binah. The three-level scheme is the one the Zohar works with most, and Gershom Scholem traced its development and its relation to the Neoplatonic material that reached Jewish thought through Arabic philosophy.

A distinct and much older idea attached to this word is the neshamah yeteirah, the "additional soul" the Talmud (Beitzah 16a) says every Jew receives for the duration of the Sabbath and loses again at its close. The custom of smelling fragrant spices at havdalah, the ceremony marking the Sabbath's end, is traditionally explained as a consolation for that loss, reviving a soul suddenly diminished. The idea is talmudic rather than Kabbalistic in origin and predates the Zohar's graded five-level scheme by roughly a thousand years, but later Kabbalistic writers folded it into the neshamah level specifically, reading the weekly gift of an additional soul as a small, recurring taste of the higher awareness the level as a whole represents.

Sources The ZoharTraditionally attributed to Moses de Leon with Major Trends in Jewish MysticismGershom Scholem, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)

Jewish mourning custom draws on the layered soul the Kabbalistic sources describe, and Neshamah, the higher, intellective soul, is held in some sources to ascend more slowly and to a further destination than Nefesh or Ruach, its return described as a return to the divine source of understanding itself rather than a settling near the body or a resolution of emotional conduct. Because Neshamah is tied in the tradition to Torah study and higher understanding during life, mourning customs in some communities place particular weight on continued study undertaken in a deceased relative's name as an act that specifically benefits this level of the soul.

The custom of reciting the Kaddish, a prayer that does not mention death but praises the divine, is explained by some later authorities as directed toward elevating exactly this higher aspect of the soul, distinct from the more bodily focused practices associated with Nefesh.

This mourning centred use sits alongside Neshamah's more abstract place in Kabbalistic cosmology, where it corresponds to the third of the Four Worlds; the funerary application treats the doctrine as guidance for the living's ongoing obligations to the dead rather than only a map of the soul's structure.