משיח והגוף

Most religious systems that take spirit seriously end up embarrassed by the body. The pattern is so common that its absence in Torah is genuinely unusual and worth stating directly.

The mitzvos are overwhelmingly physical. Not symbolically physical — actually so. Leather boxes on an arm. Wool with a particular kind of thread. Bread, wine, an animal, a coin, a house with a doorpost. A calendar governed by an agricultural year.

Eating

The tradition’s most concentrated legal attention falls on food, which is peculiar for a system supposedly oriented upward. And the treatment is not ascetic. There are laws about what may be eaten and a blessing structure that surrounds eating with attention rather than shame.

Taste and see that Hashem is good. The verb is a physical one and the tradition declines to soften it into metaphor.

Intimacy

Marital intimacy in Jewish law is a covenantal obligation, framed positively, with the partner’s wellbeing as an explicit requirement rather than a concession. This chapter will not develop the halachos, which are their own literature, but the framing matters here: in a system where the body were a problem, this could not be a mitzvah.

The Kabbalistic literature draws on the imagery of union extensively for the highest relationships it describes. A tradition that regarded the body as an unfortunate necessity could not have done that, and would not have wanted to.

Money

Tzedakah is the paradigm case and the sources say something startling about it: it is a mitzvah performed with the least spiritual substance available, a coin, and it is the one they describe as hastening the redemption. The lowest material and the highest effect — which is exactly what the chapter on Atzmus predicts.