Kabbalah and Medicine
The Colors of the Eye - Part 2 According to Kabbalah's analysis of Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, the four constituent components of the human body--bones, blood vessels, flesh, and skin--correspond to the four letters of the Name Havayah. The fifth, spiritual level that gives life to the body, the spirit ("From four directions, come, O spirit, and blow into these corpses, that they may live"), corresponds to the fifth, transcendent level of the Name Havayah, the upper tip of the yud. Similarly, with regard to the eye--the entire physical body and spirit of life is encapsulated in the eye--its four colors correspond to the four letters of the Name Havayah as do the four general constituent components of the human body: the white of the eye to the bones and the yud; the red to the blood vessels and the first hei; the color of the iris to the flesh and the vav; and the black pupil to the skin and the second hei. The eyes' power of sight corresponds to the life-giving spirit of the body and to the fifth, transcendent level of the Name Havayah, the upper tip of the yud. Here, the upper tip of the yud appears in the inner point of the second hei, in the secret of "the end is enwedged in the beginning, and the beginning in the end." Our sages establish the correspondence of the spirit of life to the sight of the eye, as well as that of the father (chochmah) to the color white and the mother (binah) to the color red in the following description of the formation of man:
To summarize (with regard to the eye):
In the Zohar, the secret of the eye, the secret of sight, is seen to relate to the holy day of Shabbat. In Hebrew, the word for Shabbat is composed of three letters: shin, beit, and tav. The letter shin is formed of three lines (three vavs, each with a head, a yud, at its top) rising out of a common base. These three lines allude to the three patriarchs of the Jewish people, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and so the letter shin is referred to as "the letter of the patriarchs." The two remaining letters of the word Shabbat, the beit and the tav, spell the word bat, "daughter." The shin of Shabbat thus alludes to the three colors of the eye around the pupil, while the beit and tav of Shabbat allude to the pupil itself. On Shabbat, the day that alludes to the revelation of the world to come, the rectified eye of man--which reflects all three patriarchs together with King David--merits to envision the Divine light of Shabbat, alluded to in the word Shabbat (which in the Zohar is taken to be a Name of God), which, when seen as a whole, manifests light that infinitely transcends that of its component letters. To summarize:
A new chapter is both uploaded to the web and sent out every week via the Inner Dimension (free) weekly Torah message email list. Click here to subscribe now!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Healing of Body and Soul 
