Rabbi Shimon.com

My niece died at age 40 from throat cancer. She left behind young kids not to mention the pain of parents that had to bury a child. Another close relative went through breast cancer and thank G-d she is well now and is a changed person. I have a close friend who used to be a pediatric oncologist until she had her own children. It was too painful for her to see children suffering and dying. She is now specializing in a different medical field.

I went to Israel to sit Shiva for my mother and on the last day of the Shiva we heard about the death of a 13 years old girl. She died from bone cancer. A day after her bat mitzvah she felt pain in her leg and the doctor diagnosed the cancer. A year later she was gone. There are support organizations in Israel that provide chairs and tables for families sitting Shiva and for the many people that come to condole.

When we rose from the sitting a truck came to take the chairs and tables directly from my mother’s home to this girl’s family.

I stood there looking how they load the chairs on to the truck. I was thinking about the cycle of pain, about mourners that sat and will sit on those chairs. What kind of memory those chairs have? If they could speak, how many stories of pain and tears could they tell?

When will it stop? I asked myself. Only G-d knows that. On those moments I remember Isaiah 25:8

Death will be swallowed forever and G-d will wipe tears from all faces.

Until that time we must accept the process. We are living under the shadow of the tree of knowledge good and bad. It is the reality of work and rest, joy and pain, smiles and tears, life and death. This is the world of time. Illusionary but controlling.

Now we are back to the parasha of Metzora and the secret of cancer. The story of Metzora begins in the previous parasha, Tazria. In Tazria only the first eight verses talk about the seed and birth of a child. A woman becomes impure immediately upon delivery. She needs to go to the priest with offering to cleanse her.  Why is that? If she delivers a pure infant, why does she need to be cleansed, what is wrong with that?

The simple answer is that when a child comes to this world it involves the negative side. The Zohar explains that when a woman starts screaming with contractions, G-d sends the snake to open the womb.

G-d brings in the soul. The primordial snake made Eve and Adam sin. They brought mortality to their life and to the world. 

The Snake caused “the process” (mortal life and time) by disconnecting Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life. He is now in need to open the physical gate so the soul and body can join the process.

The material, the physical body, belongs to the snake and when we die, the body goes to the ground and the spirit ascends. There is a separation between soul and body or light and vessel.

Please remember or underline this point. Body and soul are two separate elements. They are joined together by the power of Kabbalah (=137= the fine structure constant. See http://www.137.com/137/ on this special number). This constant is used to calculate the movement of particles inside the atom. It is like the soul of the matter. You are invited to go deeper into nuclear physics to discover the Light of the Creator. Discover G-d.

Some of you may want to read some answers about cancer by now. I promise to answer all the questions the way the Light guides me to. It is important to learn about the seed before you plant it. If you want to have an apple tree in your garden, you won’t pick just any seed and expect it to grow apples.

You will make sure that the seed is of an apple tree. You don’t want to wait months to find out that you have a spruce tree growing. It may be nice but not what you were expecting.

We established that the body and soul are two different elements joined together to make a human being. Again Genesis 2:7

 וַיִּיצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאָדָם, עָפָר מִן-הָאֲדָמָה, וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו, נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים

Then G-d formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

Biblical Leprosy and Cancer.

The disease described in Metzora is called Tzara’at, “צָּרַעַת”. This word is usually translated to Leprosy. One interesting point to discuss is that the Torah uses the same term for a house.

Lev.14:34 “When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give to you for a possession, and I put the plague of leprosy in a house of the land of your possession”.

I found many bible translations that use the word Mildew as a translation to Tzara’at.

This is bad translation. To get to the deeper meaning of the word, we take apart its elements and examine carefully. The key is in the word “צָּרַעַת”. It is built from “צָּרַ” (=enemy) and “עַת” (=time or period of time). From this we understand that this disease relates to an enemy that is created in time. When we look at another permutation of the name we see “רַע” and “צַָּת”. “רַע” translates to “bad” and also is abbreviation for “selfish desire” (Ratzon Atzmi). “צַָּת” has numerical value of 490, which is equal to 10 times “חולה” (sick) (=49). When we find 10 times of a word value, we know that it goes to the whole spiritual depth of its meaning.

The other important word mentioned in the parasha is “נֶגַע”, (=plague). It is the same root word as “touch”. The first two words are “נֶגַ” =53 and the third is “ע” = 70. The 53 is for the number of portions in the Torah and it is also the numerical value for the word “גנ”, which means gene. Also it is the abbreviation for “גלגול־נשמות” (literally means rolling of souls to describe reincarnation of souls). Our genes carry the history of previous lives. We find physical similarities between parents and children because of “the rolling of the souls” that come through the parents. The kabalistic term is “reshimu”. The meaning of it is like putting water in a wood barrel that was used to have wine. When you drink the water you can still taste the wine that used to be there. This is the “Reshimu” of the wine. Whiskey producers store it in used wine barrels of to give a deeper taste to their whiskey. The above examples relate to material things but it is similar with the souls.

During the year and in every Shabbat, we read from the Torah. The Torah scroll is rolled forward each Shabbat to advance to the end of the book. BUT there is no actual end to the Torah because at the same day (not Shabbat) that we read the “end” of the scroll we immediately connect it to the beginning. The Torah is rolled back from the “end” to the beginning to continue the reading.

 

I will continue with the exploration of cancer, causes, immune and the ultimate cure in coming articles.