The Man-metaphor in Kabbalah
Kabbalah, the central system in Jewish mysticism, uses subtle anthropomorphic analogies and metaphors to describe God in Judaism, both the God-world relationship, and the inner nature of the Divine. These include the metaphor of the soul-body relationship, the functions of man's soul-powers, the configuration of man's bodily form, and male-female influences in the Divine. Kabbalists repeatedly warn and stress the need to divorce their notions from any corporality, dualism, plurality, or spatial and temporal connotations. As "the Torah speaks in the language of Man", the empirical terms are necessarily imposed upon man's experience in this world. Once the analogy is described, its limitations are then related to, stripping the kernel of its husk, to arrive at a truer conception. Nonetheless, Kabbalists carefully chose their terminology to denote subtle connotations and profound relationships in the Divine spiritual influences. More accurately, as they see the emanation of the Material world from the Spiritual realms, the analogous anthropomorphisms and material metaphors themselves derive through cause and effect from their precise root analogies on High.
Describing the material world Below in general, and man in particular, as created in the "image" of the world Above is not restricted in Rabbinic Judaism to Kabbalah, but abounds more widely in Biblical, Midrashic, Talmudic and philosophical literature. Kabbalah extends the Man-metaphor more radically to anthropomorphise particular Divine manifestations on high, while repeatedly stressing the need to divest analogies from impure materialistic corporality. Classical "proof texts" on which it bases its approach include, "From my flesh I envisage God", and the Rabbinic analogy " As the soul permeates the whole body...sees but is not seen...sustains the whole body...is pure...abides in the innermost precincts...is unique in the body...does not eat and drink...no man knows where its place is...so the Holy One, Blessed is He..." Together with the metaphor of Light, the Man-metaphor is central in Kabbalah. Nonetheless, it too has its limitations, needs qualification, and breaks down if taken as a literal, corporeal comparison. Its limitations include the affect of the body on the soul, while the World affects no change in God; and the distinct, separate origins of the soul and the body, while in relation to God's Omnipresence, especially in its Acosmic Hasidic development, all Creation is nullified in its source.
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