Shalom my sisters and brothers,
There’s one topic I don’t talk that often about, but which is nevertheless an important one for a religious life, and that is mental health. A healthy spirituality and good mental health go together hand in hand. Fundamentalist religion, and religions that seek to control every aspect of your life, end up teaching sociopathic ideals and practices to each generation. Far from helping a person’s mental health, their approach is more likely to traumatise their followers.
Where the Holiness of Yahveh our God is concerned, this is an extremely undesirable state of affairs. An unstable and sociopathic mind will inject instability and injurious mental health into a religion – the Israelite Religion, the Way of Yahveh – that was originally intended to be an eternal showcase for the goodness, perfection and Holiness of Yahveh. If that unstable and sociopathic mind belongs to a religious leader, that can only lead to disaster for the community.
In Yahwist Israelite philosophy, there is the spiritual idea of wholeness or completeness. Some bibles translate it as ‘perfection’ – which, given the regular English meaning of the word, is a bit misleading. In Far Eastern philosophies, the daily goal of the spiritual life is to keep the opposing forces within you in balance; in Yahwist philosophy however, the daily goal is to maintain a state of wholeness or completeness.
What this means, is that the body, mind and soul function at their optimum capacity, and in their healthiest state. When you are in this ‘whole’ or ‘complete’ state, you are most able to fulfil your physical, mental and spiritual duties. When you are not in this complete state, you turn to Yahveh for healing – for restoration to wholeness.
Before I go into mental health specifically, I need to paint you a portrait of the whole healing industry in the 1st century CE, so that you get some context of Yeshua’s healing ministry, and why his deeds had to have been different from what we have been taught to believe they were.
Some cultural background
A significant part of Yeshua’s ministry was healing. The Israelite art of healing is called Marpei (pronounced, maar-PAY, from the verb rafa’: to heal). In Western medicine, physicians treat the specific part of the body that is not quite right, or the explicit symptoms that are being problematic. In Marpei, the healer (the merappei [m] / merappah [f]) instead treats the whole person – the body, the mind and the soul. Unwellness in the body can often be a symptom of a wider malaise, because in the philosophy of marpei, everything is connected; no part of you is an island.
In Yeshua’s time, there were indeed other secular (i.e. non-priestly) healers – Yeshua wasn’t the only person engaged in the task of healing the sick. The main difference was in how they went about their healing ministries.
Before I go any further, it’s vital to understand that the original Israelite religion had no belief in demons or evil spirits. In fact, that was a major difference between the Israelite faith and pagan religions. Unfortunately, under the influence of neighbouring pagan religions, by Yeshua’s time, many Jews had some belief in evil spirits. However, it did not reach anywhere near the level it did amongst pagans, who believed that every illness was caused by some kind of demon or evil spirit entering the body. If you had a mental illness, then that meant that, without a doubt, you were possessed by a demon or evil spirit – and therefore, someone to be shunned.
This is the world that Yeshua had to practise healing in. When non-Jews became Christians, without any background knowledge of the Jewish mindset, most of them carried over their former pagan belief in evil spirits, and so that is the cultural milieu that the Gentile Christian gospels were written in. If you know nothing about the original ideals of the Israelite religion, or about its views against the existence of evil spirits, your former pagan cultural upbringing would lead you to believe that Yeshua’s healing just had to be about control over demons and evil spirits, didn’t it? Well, if you believe that Yeshua was a prophet of Yahveh, then the answer to that line of pondering has to be: no, it didn’t.
The ways of other secular healers
In Yeshua’s time, there were admittedly honest healers, but there were also many charlatans. Some types would make a big show of their healing arts in front of astonished crowds by saying a particular formula of words (almost like a spell), or concocting potions, or by laying on hands and exorcising demons. After all their chicanery, they would pronounce the sick person clean. Then they would charge a small fortune for their services.
The main fault with this didn’t lie in their deception, but in their attributing their healing arts to their own powers and abilities. You see, a merappei who was faithful to God, would be humble and say that they have only been an instrument of God, and that it was God who had healed the sick person. In fact, the healing industry had become so full of charlatans, that once the Pharisaic rabbis had gained ascendency over the Jewish community at the end of the 1st century, then rather than reforming marpei, they instead banned its practice.
Yeshua’s healing ministry is portrayed inaccurately in the gospels
In the Jewish culture of that time, while belief in demons and evil spirits wasn’t overwhelming, there was one particularly negative attitude held towards the sick, and that was: ‘If you are sick, you must have committed a sin worthy of punishment. The worse your illness, the worse must have been your sin, and the greater has to be the punishment from God.’
To anyone who is familiar with the personality of Yahveh our God, the natural question over this attitude would be, ‘Where is God’s compassion in such a terrible way of thinking? Where is God’s love towards those who are suffering?’
If Yeshua were a true prophet of Yahveh, then he just would not have been exorcising demons (because they don’t exist); if he were a true prophet of a loving Yahveh, then he would not have believed that illness was always a punishment. Often, an illness is just an illness; stuff happens. Viruses and bacteria don’t have any moral or ethical code – they infect other organisms, and that’s it. When someone is sick, it’s an opportunity for God to show God’s compassion and tenderness through the care they are given by human hands.
In fact, there is one ‘parable’ that Yeshua told, that most people take at face value, but I believe it was actually about Yeshua mocking the very idea of exorcising demons:
‘When an unclean spirit leaves a person, it wanders through waterless places in search of a resting-place. When it doesn’t find any, it then says, “I’ll return to the home I left”. It then returns and finds it vacant, swept and refurbished. Next, it goes out and brings back with it seven other spirits even more vile than itself, who enter and settle in there. So that person ends up being worse off than when they started!’ (SY 114:4-7; cf Lk 11:24-26)
In effect, Yeshua was saying that the circular logic of demon-possession defeated itself. What matters is the content of your heart – to fill it with God’s good values and principles, and the reverent awe of God.
What Yeshua would really have been doing
If, as a Jewish prophet and healer, Yeshua didn’t actually go round exorcising demons, and if he wasn’t telling people they were being punished by God, then what might his healing ministry have really been like?
Well, imagine this: You are basically a good person, going about your daily life. Then you contract a terrible fever, and you feel really lousy – so bad, that it completely incapacitates you. Your Jewish neighbour tells you that you must have done something really bad, and God is punishing you. Your pagan neighbour tells you that your body has been entered by evil spirits – they are what’s causing the fever. A regular healer comes by and prescribes various herbs and ointments, but will charge you a hefty fee that you cannot pay.
Not only do you feel awful in body, but the people around you have now succeeded in making you feel thoroughly rotten in mind and soul as well!
Then there comes along a man who tells you that, no, you have not been possessed by demons – in fact, according to the Torah and the Prophets, there are no such things as demons. And if you know you have done nothing wrong, then your illness is not a punishment from God – because the God of Israel is not an unjust God.
He tells you that, on the contrary, when you are sick, your heavenly Father is closest to you, and that God’s ministering angels are ministering even to you in your sickness. It is your heavenly Father who soothes your pains, and tends to your ailments.
He administers a cooling ointment to your brow in a cloth; he gives you various herbs to drink in hot water; he gives you pungent oils to breathe in when you find it difficult to breathe.
Then you ask him how much this is all going to cost – because you are poor, and you will never be able to pay him. He tells you, ‘No cost. Just get better – that will be payment enough for me.’
In a short time, you do get better. This man – this prophet of God – has healed you in your body, your mind and your soul, and you are happier than you have ever been before. You have never seen a healer like this before – an honest man, who gives without want of reward, a man of God!
Does this not seem a more likely scenario, than some magician who exorcises demons? This is how, I believe, Yeshua had to have been different to the healers of his day.
The miracles in the gospels are purely written there for an ex-pagan audience, because a Jewish audience would not have been impressed by someone performing sudden, wondrous and showy healing miracles in front of a crowd. A pagan audience would have seen miracles and thought, ‘Wow, a god!’ For them, in their pagan culture, the miracle itself is proof of truth – proof of divinity. But a Jewish audience would have thought, ‘What’s he after?’ This is because Dt 13:2-4 (Xtian bibles 13:1-3) says that if someone comes performing showy miracles, in order to mislead, they should not be trusted. That is the skeptical Jewish mindset towards miracles that most Christians are not aware of.
Yeshua’s concern for the health of the mind
Now I want to turn specifically to the issue of mental health. One of the most heartless things that anyone can say to someone who is going through a really difficult time in their life, is, “Everyone’s got problems’. In other words, ‘I don’t want to hear about it, because I’ve got problems of my own.’ Such people have never heard the maxim, ‘A problem shared is a problem halved.’ Other people think it’s just a matter of telling someone to pull their socks up and snap out of it – also unhelpful. If you have gone through some psychological trauma, it’s like taking a sledge-hammer to a laptop, and then expecting it to work properly. Trauma actually changes and damages the neuronal architecture and connections in your brain, so that it can no longer function in the way it should.
The approach of the prophet Yeshua to life’s difficult problems, was to apply compassion and understanding to the one who is suffering. Mental illness has such a stigma in our society, that many people hide their suffering quietly, for fear of how they will be seen by others. Even back then, in Yeshua’s time, mental illness was viewed with superstition – someone who suffered epileptic fits was someone who was possessed by demons, and anyone who was mentally ill was being punished by God. Both of these stances are unenlightened, and do far more harm than good. They might help the bystander feel good about themselves, but they don’t help the patient.
We know that mental health was a concern of the Prophet Yeshua, because he taught such things as, ‘Believe me I tell you, don’t worry about your life, about what you’ll eat or drink, or about your body, about what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than just food and drink, and the body more than just clothes?’ and, ‘Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to their lifespan? If you aren’t able to do as small a thing as that, why be anxious about greater things?’ Most famously, he concluded, ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Let each day’s trouble be enough for that day.’
Is Yeshua’s teaching something profoundly new and innovative? Was Yeshua the sole origin of religious concern for mental health?
Not at all. Ps 34:18 says, “YHVH is near to the broken-hearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.” Ps 94:19 says, “When the sorrows of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.” Ps 55:22a says, “Cast your burdens on YHVH, and God will sustain you.” Through the Prophet Isaiah (41:10a), God said, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you.” Mosheh (Dt 31:8) taught us, “It is YHVH who goes before you. God will be with you; God will not leave you or forsake you. Do not be frightened or dismayed.” And David famously sang, “Even though I might walk through a valley of deathly darkness, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff – they comfort me.”
Far from being a God of wrath and unmerciful anger, the God of Israel is a God of deep concern for what troubles the human soul; Yeshua fully realised this. As a consequence of this awareness, the biblical prophets were not afraid to call out to God in their distress (eg Hab 3:16-19). David also knew this – just read his psalms! Anxiety and worry were not a stigma or a punishment from God, but something that God understood, and would heal with time.
For religious people who are sensitive to the needs and troubles of others, the problems of the world around us can sometimes become overwhelming. Sometimes what we have gone through in life, inflicts upon us long-term psychological damage. That is why the Israelite faith has certain techniques to help keep you positive, and your mind healthy.
The core of the Israelite approach to mental health is the creation of mental sanctuaries of peace – in the modern world, we would call them, ‘psychological safe spaces’. The most well-known sanctuary or safe space that most people know about, is the Sabbath.
How the Sabbath is a sanctuary of the mind and soul
Remember how the Israelite faith sees the human being as being an interconnected spiritual and physical entity? Well, one thing we are told about the Sabbath is that it is to be a rest. That rest is not just physical, but psychological as well. It is for refreshing the soul (Ex 31:15, 23:12).
One aspect of the Sabbath that most people outside of Jewish culture are unaware of, is that on the Sabbath, you are meant to leave your problems behind you. On the Sabbath, because of the physical laws on resting, there is nothing you can do about your problems, so why worry about them? Once the Sabbath is opened and sanctified, the door on your problems is closed, for as long as Shabbat lasts.
On the Sabbath, we are therefore not meant to present any problems or anxieties to other people. We are not meant to discuss our troubles either. Just leave them behind. The Shabbat is about creating a warm, cosy, comfy atmosphere in your home, your heart and your mind.
One thing I would suggest, by way of helping you to take a break from your troubles, is not to log onto the internet on the Sabbath. Don’t read or listen to the news (it’s mostly bad anyway, and likely to get you riled up). Don’t check your social media – don’t check Facebook, your Twitter feed, or anything else where the world’s problems are likely to intrude. And don’t watch films or TV series which are likely to contain violence or conflict.
Instead, do things that will give you a positive state of mind. Watch a funny or heart-warming film instead. Read some uplifting prayers, or an inspiring book. Listen to uplifting and inspiring music. Call someone on the phone you enjoy talking to – as long as they are aware of your restrictions on not discussing troubles on the Sabbath; or invite someone over whose company you enjoy (as long as they are aware that you cannot wait on them or serve them during the Sabbath). Go and sit somewhere in nature close by that is beautiful, calming and pleasing to the eyes. Shabbat is for calming the body and the mind.
The Sanctuary of the heart
In Israelite mysticism, there is something called, ‘the glory of the soul’ (see Pss 7:6, 16:9, 30:13, 57:9, 108:2 – these are the Jewish verse numbers; the Christian verse numbers are one less). This is the part of the soul which is most like what you once were in heaven, before you came to earth. It is your perfect heavenly self, that particular part of you which cannot be injured or blemished by the stain of sin. It is normally dormant in most people (Ps 57:9), but this is the part of you which has the potential to become a Sanctuary for Yahveh within you – this is the dwelling place of God’s kingdom within you.
To most people, ‘holiness’ is about people whose lives are dedicated to God, or about moral and spiritual perfection. In Rabbinic theology, it’s only about being separate and set apart. However, in the Israelite religion, holiness is something else entirely – it is an innate power of God. God’s Holiness is that quality of God which not only cannot be harmed by evil, but which actually obliterates evil. Yahveh is a holy God, because no evil can possibly come anywhere near Yahveh, because it will be annihilated. It is Yahveh, as a holy God, who makes us holy. The meaning of holy as ‘belonging to God’ is secondary.
The Temple was meant to be the dwelling place of God’s Indwelling Presence (Sh’khinah) on earth, a place which would be filled with God’s living holiness, a place which was protected, and where no evils from the world could enter. Without the Temple, that Sanctuary is within us. ‘Sanctuary’ becomes the idea of somewhere that evil, hurt and distress cannot permeate or intrude. Through prayer, we create an internal safe place to retreat to in our times of trouble. The very fact of the Temple teaches us something about what is meant to be created inside ourselves.
Being in the presence of Yahveh is meant to invigorate you, renew you, heal your mind and soul, think better of yourself, be the wonderful person that Yahveh created you to be.
When you find yourself being tempted by depression or low esteem, or the troubles of the world become too overwhelming to contemplate anymore, a good spiritual exercise is to find yourself a quiet place somewhere, preferably alone, where you will have only yourself and Yahveh.
Sit quietly, and take yourself to this safe space in your mind, this time of peace and quiet. Close your eyes. Remind yourself and tell God, “No evil can harm me, because Your Glory surrounds me.” Say to Yahveh, your heavenly Father, “Beloved Yahveh, You are my shelter and my refuge; there is nothing that can harm Your holiness, and I am safe in the shelter of Your holiness.”
Remind yourself that you are completely and totally loved by Yahveh, for whom you are a perfect creation, no matter what imperfections you think you have. In such a state of mind, you can feel God’s love surround you, cleanse you, heal you. The Glory of Yahveh pushes all worries and troubles away – it protects you, enfolds you, and brings rest and healing to your spirit. God’s Presence strengthens you, giving you courage and comfort.
Protecting our inner Sanctuary
One of the best ways to protect your inner Sanctuary, is to ensure that you feed your mind only positive things before you go to sleep, because your mind becomes what it consumes. In my books, I have specifically designed the night-time prayers to induce positive thoughts. When you pray for others at night, then think of the good things that you want for them, instead of dwelling on the cause of their problems. There are also a number of positive prayers and oracles in The Exhortations which you can read, to put you into a good state of mind before you fall asleep.
As I said at the start of this article, the mental health of a religious person is genuinely important to God. A Talmidi is an ambassador for God’s reputation through the life they lead, and you cannot do that job well if you are mentally unwell. In your times of unwellness, Yahveh comes to you, God’s precious daughter, God’s treasured son, and sits with you in order to comfort and heal you. Your mental health is as precious a concern to Yahveh as your spiritual health. In your times of mental unwellness, Yahveh will not spurn you, or ever resent caring about you.
In the Israelite faith, all things, all parts of life are the concern of Yahveh our God; there is nothing beyond Yahveh. The health of the innermost mind of one individual, is just as important as the social health of an entire nation – for our God is not a small god. No single matter is beyond God’s purview or majesty. Yahveh, your heavenly Father, wants you to be well, the best version of yourself, so that Yahveh can instil within you a small portion of God’s spirit.
Blessings in the Name of Yahveh our Great Healer
your brother, in service and humility
Shmuliq