The unique soul’s praise

For Ibn Ezra, a Neoplatonist thinker, the soul originates with God and will eventually return to its divine home. This poem plays with the Nishmat prayer (“May the soul [breath] of every living being”) but replaces that text’s traditional emphasis on communal praise with an individual perspective on the divine relationship. This poem, which introduces that prayer, stands in contrast to many of its themes, as does the philosophical language that Ibn Ezra adopts here (such as the terms proof and accident).