Click on logo to return Home Click on logo to return HomeThe Torah lays out a
course of mental and emotional healing that may not be obvious from the
text
itself, but it served the Jewish people from before the pre-exilic
period until
the rise of modern psychotherapy. The Torah's call for loving your
neighbor as
you love yourself with the emphasis on ‘yourself’ is the foundation of
the
Jewish spiritual therapy.
Love, whether for yourself or for another, is not just
another feeling or
emotion; it is a form of divine energy. This energy that pervades
throughout
the universe and manifests in the form of caring, sharing, commitment,
healing, awareness, and
generates the special feeling we call love. This
awareness,
expressed consciously, is detached from judgment between good and evil,
right or
wrong, and is the basis for unconditional love. Its quality is that of
a
witness, an observer, a beholder of the events in our lives without the
need of
clinging to them. A hint of this self-love comes to us from the scribal
lettering of the Torah verse Sh'ma Yisroel Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai
Echad. The
Hebrew letter ayin of Sh'ma and the dalet of Echad are written
considerably
larger than the rest of the verse, one of those prominent Torah markers
which
signals something of great importance. These two letters spell the word
"ad" meaning witness in Hebrew, the source for unconditional love.
Romantic love, passionate love, and too often even marital or parental
love are
usually conditional; it depends upon the behavior of the other.
From Jewish mysticism, we find further sources for emotional
healing. The
Kabbalah teaches the concept of arba olamot, the Four Worlds. In
essence, it
states that everything in the universe was formed by or exists in four
levels
of energy that would include our emotional and mental life. Level one
relates
to survival and physical issues particularly those of money and health.
Its
symptom is fear and its remedy is feeling unconditionally loved—knowing
that a
loving, Divine power cares for our every need as expressed in the
Amidah (the standing
prayer) of the daily prayer service.
Level two deals in
relationship and sexuality issues, the fears, and related pain of
people not
getting along with each other. Again, unconditional love comes to the
rescue.
Consider for example, why we suffer from stage fright each time we are
called
upon to make a public presentation. Think of how relaxed and calm we
would feel
if we knew that everyone in the audience loved us regardless of any
blunders or
mistakes we might make.
Two other common
problems related to fear are worry and guilt. Worry is the
inappropriate fear
of events, which may occur in the future, and guilt is the overwhelming
concern
over what we did in the past. Adapting the observer principle, which
implies
detaching from past or future, both illusions of time and living in the
present
where love prevails, alleviates either symptom. From the over abundance
of
worry and guilt, we suffer from the problems, which made Prozac and
Valium
fashionable. Depression consists of a major loss of energy and anxiety,
and
vigorous symptoms of fear. All of this would be unnecessary with the
proper
dose of self-love, the basis of self-esteem.
The next of the four
worlds includes feelings of anger, that powerful hot flood of emotion
usually
generated by some kind of frustration. Its effects are devastating but
learning
to take a few deep breaths just before the explosion and stepping back
or away
from the offending situation just long enough to become lovingly
conscious of
the event can alleviate the explosion. Finally, we sometimes deal with
sadness,
the effect of loss. Sadness does not have to relate only to the loss of
a loved
one; it could be a simpler loss like that of money, friends,
possessions, or
even youth. We need to love ourselves enough for permission to grieve;
our
self-love enables us to fully feel and experience the loss and its
accompanying
pain.
This is just a glimpse
of the many possibilities of how Torah provided us with a system, which
kept
our people emotionally well since time immemorial. Except for those few
cases,
which may require psychiatric intervention, Jews could benefit from
Torah as an
approach towards mental health. Most of us could enrich ourselves by
finding
the right teacher to learn to love unconditionally while receiving a
good dose
of Torah.