Tazria – Metzora
Leviticus 12:1- 15:33
The Energy Body We Are
The second Torah portion of the two assigned to this week’s reading is called Metzora.
I am one of many who are convinced that, 2500 years ago, the Middle-East and the Far-East were already intimately connected. Trade routes crossed through the known world from China and India, all the way to Egypt. Spiritual practices and healing techniques traveled along these routes as well. I checked in with friends, professionals in the arts of Chinese medicine, and asked them what was likely commonly known about the connections for these places on the body: ear, thumb and big toe.
The acupuncture chart for the ear reveals that its center ridge is directly related to skin diseases. The thumb point is the last point of the lung energy channel. The lung and large intestine are the organs containing the metal element in the body, and the tissue ruled by metal is the skin. So skin ailments are often considered to have lung and/or large intestine involvement. The big toe’s outside corner of the nail is the Spleen channel (digestion, absorption, assimilation of food/ideas/events; related to the earth, to harvest time); and the inside corner is the liver channel (harmonization and smooth flow of energy; related to springtime, vision and hope)–all linked to energetic imbalances expressed as inflammatory responses of the skin.
What our sages understood then, and we have lost touch with since, is that we are energy bodies. The Temple Priests practiced acupressure as a form of healing 2500 years ago because they knew our bodies were channels for the flow of Divine energy. They understood the energy lines that course through us, and saw each spiritual practice as a way to bring balance to the energy body. In fact, our sages divided the traditional 613 mitzvot/commandments into two groups: 248 were connected to what they saw as the 248 organs of our bodies, and 365 were connected to what they saw as the sinews or tendons, nerve connectors. Performing the mitzvot was not only a way to heal the world “out there,” to bring harmony into society; it was a way to heal our inner energetic world, to bring it into balance. Perhaps the time has come to reclaim these ancient practices, to shift our vision of the embodied beings we are to more holistic, integrated, multidimensional selves, and work through our prayers, our chants, our meditations, our songs and our spiritual practices to bring our energy bodies into greater wholeness, greater harmony, greater shalom.
Hello Rabbi Olivier,
First, let me express my sincere sadness at the loss of your Grandmother. It is a difficult time for you and your family. Even more difficult because your family is far away. Shalom.
Next, about this week’s Torah Reflections:
I find this totally fascinating as it is bringing together all of the pieces of what I think I have learned so far. I have tended to see myself and God as interconnected and part of the same energy system so this week’s reflections are very understandable to me.
I have long been of the opinion that there was significant interconnection among the ideas of the ancient Levant and the ideas of the ancient Far East, enabled by the lines of commerce that existed between them. Ideas as well as goods traveled the ancient routes.
But I would go even farther than that. Shamanic medicine is energy medicine. At some point all humans were organized in small groups ministered to by Shamans. Chinese thought and Middle Eastern thought could conceivably be elaborations over time upon some even more ancient forms of religion and thought.
I have books of maps of the putative wanderings of prehistoric populations, which I often consult. Reading about them, I often think that they brought their shamanistic ideas with them and lived them out wherever they, themselves, settled; some of them in Europe, some of them in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant, some of them in India. Since then there has been enough time for these ideas to grow and change into the forms of the great world religions that we now recognize.
What do you think of this?
Hi Valerie,
Thank you for your little note.
And, yes, absolutely, as humans have evolved the modalities of relating to the Divine have evolved as well. Era after era, we have reinvented God and created new ways of connecting to it. Animistic and Shamanistic modalities are very ancient and though we might have transcended them (evolved beyond them) wee still have included them in our make-up to this day. They held and still hold some deep and essential truths that are critical to keep alive.
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