A Jewish View of Illness

Just as some people are blessed with a good ear for music, many are artistically inclined and others have talents in the literary arts. We’re not all the same: some excel in the intellectual arena, while others are at home in the esoteric—spirituality and healing. I got interested in healing through my far-reaching involvement with Jewish mysticism. That’s the kind of person I am—insatiably engaged in the esoteric, the unexplainable, and the mysteries of life. Illness and healing are among those phenomena. I don’t care that much for intellectual debate. I find sensible opinions, which can be reasoned or judged, have particular mental limitations, but the spiritual knows no such boundaries.

My earliest explorations into Jewish mysticism revealed that the first act of God’s creation, as reported in the Torah, was to give birth to light. The Kabbalah agrees with that narrative by responding with the doctrine of tsimtzum—how the Ain Sof (the One without limits) contracted Himself into a single point in order to make room for creation. From that point, the original light emanated the Ten Sephirot—the diagram of how God’s energy flows throughout the universe. Once the solitary original light unfolded, it split into two; that single act, recounted in the story of the Garden of Eden, ushered in the concept of duality. That’s how we understand our environment: good and evil right and wrong.  That’s the root of suffering. When we seek goodness, sometimes evil crosses our paths; when we pursue love, we often find detachment; when we want to be right, we often find we’re wrong. These opposing qualities are two sides of the same coin and when we receive the negative side, we feel pain. When we cling only to the positive and reject the negative, we’re in the realm of time and space where pain and suffering abound. When we’re in the space of the Garden before the fall, we’re in timeless eternity, the present moment, the place of healing. That energy flows through the universe and concurrently through each one of us, illustrating how we are made in God’s image

In the Divine version, the sephirot are in perfect harmony and balance with one another, but as the energy filters down to the human level, to the individual soul, they tend, for a number of reasons, to become skewed or unbalanced. These sephirot behave like high voltage transformers that step electricity down to usable levels.  The basis for these imbalances may relate to physical or emotional trauma, some to painful childhood experiences and some, which we may have brought along from life before birth. In that respect, illness arises from the misalignment of the energies and healing materializes by aligning our distorted energetic patterns with the perfect Divine pattern. The soul is then the interface between God and our own personal energy field, but the language the soul understands is different than the prose we mortals comprehend. The soul relates to images and symbols, rather than speech. The soul understands the imagery of stories, like the narrative of the Torah, which serves metaphorically as the link between God and us. The soul understands the movies of the mind, the continuous stream of pictures our minds invent as we go through the problems of the day. The soul speaks to us in the language of dreams and intuited messages and through this dialogue we are able to discover our energetic imbalances and take steps to correct them.

Diagnosing and treating illness is not unknown to Jews. We have been treating our people since biblical days. The author of Deuteronomy writes, “In cases of a skin affection, be most careful to do exactly as the levitical priests instruct you. Take care to do as I commanded them”.  What was it that God commanded them and how would they have received the instruction? Probably the same way prophets receive prophecy, though intuition. Later on, supernatural powers were the most commonly designated cause of disease.  The demons, in particular, are singled out as responsible brokers. The Talmud abounds with such diagnoses, and often identifies the ailment with the evil spirit. Our forefathers never had scientific terminology (like the psychologist’s DSM 111) to reference the myriad of diseases, so they stuck with “demons”. Today, we substitute “negative energy” for “demons”, and “therapist” for “exorcist”. Sometimes angels as well as demons assumed a share of the responsibility. The belief that sickness is a heaven-sent punishment for one’s sins required angelic intervention to execute the decree—certain epidemic diseases were thought to be transmitted by angels (messengers), especially appointed for that job.

Contemporary Jewish healing caters to the needs of the spiritual being. This can be attained through a toolbox that appeals to the soul—Torah narrative, self-awareness exercises, visualizations, meditations and intuitive training skills that we can all develop to communicate with our inner physician, our deep unconscious. The Jewish view of illness is not pathology—the inquiry into disease states, but a spiritual reckoning of the soul, the ability to determine what went wrong in our energy fields and take the necessary steps to fix it.