Torah: Jewish Spiritual Therapy
by Velvel "Wally" Spiegler

The Torah lays out a course of mental and emotional healing that may not be obvious from the text itself but yet 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', which is the foundation of the Jewish spiritual therapy.

Love, whether for yourself or for another, is not a feeling or an emotion; it is a form of divine energy.  This energy which pervades throughout the universe and manifests in the form of caring, sharing, commitment, healing, and awareness, 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 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 is 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 which 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're 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 happened in the past. Either symptom is alleviated by adapting the observer principle, which implies detaching from past or future, both illusions of time and living in the present where love prevails. From the over abundance of worry and guilt, we suffer from the problems, which made Prozac and Valium fashionable: depression, the total 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 they can be alleviated by 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. Finally, we sometimes deal with sadness, the effect of loss. Sadness doesn't 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 with 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.