Torah from the Right Side of the Brain
by Velvel "Wally" Spiegler

I've been blessed with some good teachers in my days. One of them, a spiritually erudite rabbi, was living in Jerusalem, for a one-year sabbatical, when I first arrived in Israel years ago. Naturally he was the first person I called when I got to my hotel. He asked if I could get a cab to his house in the Jerusalem suburb where he was living.  The next day at noon my taxi arrived at his front door.  Being new to Israel, I was surprised to find a modern suburbia with neatly cut lawns and children's bicycles randomly scattered where I expected to find ancient stone buildings like those of antiquity. We greeted each other with hugs at the door and soon he asked "what will you be doing in Israel during your stay"? "I thought I would see the country for a while, I replied "and spend some time learning in a yeshiva". He quickly snapped back with a wave of his hand, "stay away from those places". "What did he mean by that?", I wondered. Today I think I know.

He was alluding to the teaching that there is more than one way to learn. The first is from left brain, where the intellect, reason, and logic dominates. This is our everyday consciousness which is very helpful in getting things done, day to day. We are taught to memorize and learn facts to become productive citizens. It's extremely valuable but there's one problem: we spend too much time learning and we forget too quickly. How much high school geometry or French can you remember? If you're anything like me, the answer is -not much. 

Right brain learning is the alternative. We learn from the intuitive, creative hemisphere where our imagination takes hold generating experiences that are absorbed deep within the body, at the feeling level, never to be forgotten.  You might wonder why we may forget the details of traumatic incidents from childhood--"the who said or did what to whom"  --but we never forget the feelings lying dormant in our bodies awaiting some provocation for them to suddenly strike.

But being who I am, I headed for the yeshiva anyway. I spent mornings there for weeks, scratching my head over frayed edges of time worn texts, trying to make sense of the hair-splitting debates of the Talmud. Until finally I came to the conclusion that I could spend forever learning seemingly useless details. It was as if I was studying law for a society that no longer exists. No wonder there has been such a decline in Jewish learning, and it's no surprise that adults are re-learning the lessons, forgotten from Hebrew school.

It wasn't until sometime later immersed in the depth of Jewish mysticism--which concerns itself with the dominant right and the receptive left side--that the light went on. Why should we struggle with a legal system written for survival, even if practiced for centuries, when we have already survived. Why not take Torah learning a step forward towards human growth possibilities, for which it was probably originally meant.   

I started thumbing blithely  through a Chumash (The Five Books of Moses), and, as fate would have it, I stumbled upon my own bar mitzvah portion, Terumah, of fifty two years ago. It speaks about the construction of the Tabernacle. I read about two pages. Then I read them over several times until I viscerally felt the sense of the text. Soon afterwards I pictured, in my mind, this embryonic Holy Temple organized in concentric squares with the innermost, the Holy of Holies in the center of the universe, and my own center there as well. I remembered this place, perhaps from dreams, where I encountered my spiritual Self, the gateway to the Source of Being. Subsequently, I approached my center like the High Priest on Yom Kippur in awe, an altered state of consciousness able to receive what I needed for spiritual guidance, sustenance and healing. I also remembered Terumah's linkage to Shabbat, whose laws were modelled after the construction of the Tabernacle proposing the eternal message, "don't tamper with Creation on the seventh day". I was now operating from the right side of the brain. I was visualizing the text in my mind and imagining how it all looked, how it all sounded in the words of Exodus 25-27. 

This learning, not only, eliminated those countless hours of unnecessary perusing--something Jewish people don't quite have the time for these days--and the message sank in deeply enough to enable the spiritual energy to perform its intended task.  I don't think I'll ever forget this morsel of Torah. It's embedded in my soul.







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