Re: Resolution on Zionism Tainted U.N.

The Kabbalah Approach to Mental Health

Part 39

Job: Articulation and Sweetening

The book of Job is a virtual manual of psychology, describing in detail the
process of psychoanalysis.

Job suffers from a psychological anxiety, an existential pain that he cannot
bear. When he is first confronted with it, he behaves like a disconsolate
mourner, who cannot even voice his suffering. Even after sitting silently
for a prolonged period in the presence of his three friends who have come to
visit and comfort him, he is unable to shake himself of his pain, and begins
to speak by cursing the day he was born. There ensues a fruitless dialogue
between him and his friends about all his burdens and complaints against
G-d. After this there appears a new figure, Elihu ben Berachel, who speaks
with honest, unaffected concern, and finally G-d Himself addresses Job and
reproves him. Job recovers psychologically and physically and returns to his
former state of health and well-being.

Although Job did not blaspheme G-d, he did not accept his suffering as
justified, and therefore did not accept it with love and submission before
G-d. His three friends attempted to administer therapy to him (each using a
different psychological technique) and convince him unsuccessfully that his
suffering was not without cause. It was after all this that the young Elihu,
who had kept quiet throughout the preceding dialogue in deference to his
elders, offered his sensitive but convincing reproof.

Elihu prefaces his remarks by saying, I thought that age would speak, and
the passage of years would impart wisdom. But when he saw that they could
not answer any of Job's grievances, he became disillusioned with the elders
and concluded that rather, it is man's spirit and G-d's soul [within him]
that gives them understanding. Job 32:7-8. The source of the true answer to
Job is in Divine inspiration, which can rest on a young person as easily as
it can on an elder. Only through G-d's help and inspiration can a counselor
or therapist hope to penetrate the depths of a person's subconscious and
thereby help him solve his psychological problems.

Elihu, who begins the process of true healing, plays the role of Elijah the
prophet, the harbinger of the true and ultimate messianic Redemption.

Mashiach is the consummate psychologist who unravels all the convoluted
nightmares of the bitter exile, revealing their good inner core. Mashiach
will know how to open up everyone and enable them to wholesomely articulate
their anxieties; he will gather all the scattered fragments of everyone's
shattered soul and bring them back to the inner, unsullied kernel of their
heart, which was always true to G-d and His Torah. Like the Ba'al Shem Tov,
he will remind man of his forgotten identity, and thereby solve the riddle
of his psychological malaise. This is the psychological dimension of
Mashiach's task of gathering the dispersed of Israel back to Zion, for Zion
(which literally means point or marker ) symbolizes in Kabbalah the
innermost point of the heart. The exile of the Jews from their homeland is a
metaphor for the scattered consciousness of a person who has lost touch with
his inner being.

...to be continued

Next week, Part 40(Final Chapter): "Mashiach"




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