Born in Germany in 1929, Dr. Lasch fled with his family to Palestine in 1936. Following his medical training in Switzerland, Israel and the USA, where he specialized in pediatrics and public health, he spent three years in West Africa developing systems of child care where none had previously existed. After his return home he founded and directed a pediatric hospital for the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, while functioning simultaneously as Director General of the local health services.
Dr. Lasch has taught in many medical schools and has published over eighty papers in medical journals. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine, as well as of many other professional organizations and was once nominated for the prestigious Lasker Award (called the American Nobel Prize).
In 1984, Dr. Lasch realized that he had fulfilled most of his goals and started looking for new challenges. After a series of spiritual revelations, he left behind a thriving medical and academic career and went to stay with the Findhorn Community in Scotland. Here, during long periods of meditation and reflection, he was given insights into the hidden meaning of the Bible. This resulted in his first book about the Bible which is meanwhile out of print.
Back in Israel, Dr. Lasch started on a spiritual pathway which combined teaching of kabbalah, reincarnation therapy and spiritual healing. At the same time, he continued to develop his contact with the medical profession of Gaza. This included many visits of Arab physicians to his home. After the outbreak of the Intifada in 1987, Dr. Lasch found himself caught between the two fronts and decided to return to his country of birth. He settled in Berlin and developed a highly successful center for spiritual healing. His numerous appearances on TV and in the print media helped to advance the state of spiritual healing in Germany. During that time, he published two further books both dealing with different aspects of spiritual healing.
After reaching the age of 70, Dr. Lasch retired a second time. He recently published a book about his experiences in Gaza and re-wrote a new exegesis of the Bible.
Did we misunderstand God / the Torah / the Scriptures?by Prof. Dr. Eli E. Lasch dedicated to all skeptics and questioners Do not read charut (engraved) into the tables, but cherut (freedom) from the tables.[i],[ii] No-one can give humanity freedom. This is a contradiction in terms.
Installment One
Introduction
The Torah with all its commandments and prohibitions, is it a manifesto of freedom? Can this be possible? Could it even be comprehensible? Come, let us see!If somebody tells you: I have sought and did not find, do not believe; I did not seek and I have found, do not believe; I have sought and found, believe.[iii]Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.[iv]This is the conventional path to what is called enlightenment, but my way was different. Neither did I seek nor was there any door to knock on.The insights I put into writing on the following pages have their origin in a very sudden, spiritual experience that catapulted me literally within seconds from one reality to another: from the chains of tradition and convention into freedom. Looking back, I realize that my experience was similar to the one of St. Paul on the way to
Damascus. And like him I’m erring around and don’t come to rest. Everything began in March 1984, when I was invited to take part in a prayer for peace on
Mount Sinai. Three hundred members of various religions came in order to pray on the mountain, where according to Christian tradition Moshe (Moses) is supposed to have received the mission to deliver the Jewish people from slavery and to show them the way to a new level of consciousness.After my return, my son told me: Something is different. Your face has become radiant. What had happened to me at that time? Was it the first step on a new way? At that time, I still lived in
Israel as a normal physician and government employee. My position was, however, rather unusual. Though I lived with my wife and my three children in Israel, my workplace was in the
Gaza strip. I was chief of pediatrics for the Palestinian population, a rather unusual position for an Israeli physician. Later on, I also became the director general of the health services for
Gaza and the Sinai, a position with both medical and political implications. Inside
Israel, this position was, however, considered to be highly controversial. Many of my neighbors and colleagues considered me almost as a traitor who uses his medical knowledge to help the Palestinian enemy instead of exterminating him. When I was once faced with such a reproach, I answered: My name is Lasch and not Mengele, turned my back and walked away. Others who were peace-activists saw in me nothing but a tool of the Israeli occupation. I just couldn’t do it right a real Catch 22 situation. I started to look for a new way or rather for a way out and therefore joined a group of people who belonged to the American New Age movement. Shortly after my return from the Sinai, our group was invited by the Kibbutz movement to give a workshop about new approaches to life. At that time, I couldn’t imagine that this workshop would be a turning point in my life. One day before the beginning of the seminar, I had a meeting with a member of our group in order to finalize some details concerning the workshop. At that time, I didn’t know that the woman I met was a medium who had the ability to put people into a changed state of consciousness. And so I found myself in front of the Western Wall in
Jerusalem, the place which for 2000 years has been central to the Jewish religion. It must have been a holiday, because the place in front of the wall was filled with an enormous crowd, all dressed in their best. And then, suddenly, very suddenly, this ancient wall started to tremble and then collapsed with an enormous bang burying the people beneath it. I heard them screaming, saw the dust of the wall and smelled the blood of the victims. The Wall, sixty meters long, built from huge stone blocks, which had stored all the suffering of the Jewish people during the last 2000 years had disappeared as if by magic. But its downfall claimed the lives of many victims. But that wasn’t all that happened. Gasping for air, I returned to reality only to be straight away re-immersed into one more horror vision. I saw the whole
Temple
Mount of
Jerusalem exploding, as if an atomic bomb had been detonated in the center of mountain. The mosques, the walls, the gates everything exploded. The whole sky was black and the debris buried the whole of the
Middle East and later the whole world.
Only then did I wake up completely disturbed. I needed a long time to understand that everything I had experienced was nothing but a vision. One can say that I finally calmed down only after having seen the news on TV. This was the first time a wall appeared as a symbol in my life. At that period, walls didn’t yet have the meaning they took for me later on. The Wailing Wall, on the other hand, was already at that time for me a bone of contention. It symbolized the painful past of the Jewish people. For a long time, it was clear to me: The Jewish people will not be totally delivered from its past, as long as the Wailing Wall continues to be the center of its belief. As long as the Jewish people continue to be connected to the diaspora with all its pain and helplessness, the State of Israel will not have achieved its goals. After my vision, it also became clear to me that the Wailing Wall represents much more. It is a part of the retaining wall which Herod the Great had built in the year 20 B.C.E. Today, its place is taken by two mosques: the El-Aqsa Mosque which looks like a Byzantine basilica and the magnificent Dome of the Rock, the glorious symbol of the victorious Islam. Symbolically, the wall representing Judaism is thus holding up the other monotheistic religions: Judaism, is the source out of which Christianity and Islam came into being and exists up to this very day. Even Adolf Hitler knew that the destruction of Judaism would unavoidably result in the downfall of Christianity. The fall of the Wailing Wall would therefore not only result in the destruction of the mosques, but, as I saw in my vision, possibly conjure up a world-wide atomic holocaust.Today, I see my vision as a warning.
Jerusalem could be either the center of a world religion of peace as described by the prophets or the detonator initiating the destruction of the world the apocalypse. I had this vision twenty years ago not knowing, how close we are today, in the year 2007, to this vision. The name of the implacable war between Israel and the Palestinians is named after one of the mosques on the
Temple
Mount: El-Aqsa-Intifada. At the same time, the danger of the Iranian atomic bomb has become very real, exactly as in my vision: first the destruction of
Israel and then of the whole world. The workshop started the day after this meeting. I told the participants about my activities and my experience as the Israeli physician of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I described how enemies had become friends through understanding and acceptance. (That’s what the Bible calls loving thy neighbor) How I, the Israeli, had became their confident and could help them to take the next step into modernity how incredible does this sound these days!The reaction of the listeners was completely unexpected. In former talks, I had often been met with hostility. This time, my talk was received with a wave of sympathy and appreciation. I felt myself accepted by people whose opinion I appreciated very highly.While they were still discussing the implications of what they had heard, my personal world suddenly changed. I had a feeling as if I were ten meters tall. I passed over a series of walls similar to the walls of a town from the middle-ages and found myself at a place of light. It was a light different from and surpassing any description. It was so intense, that the light of a summer day in
Israel appears in comparison to be the deepest darkness. But contrary to the light in our everyday world, this light was not glaring, but irradiated nothing but love. I was filled with an unbelievable feeling of happiness and peace. For the first time in my life, I felt whole and free. The place was a garden filled with flowers, whose colors were so vivid that the colors I was familiar with up to that time were nothing but shades of gray. I had a feeling that I discovered the way colors really are or how they are supposed to be. I had known this, when I was a child, but over the years, only the memory had remained. I didn’t see any person, nor did I hear any voices. The only thing I saw was light, light, light! I was bathed in the light and I felt joy, joy, joy. For the first time in my life, I really felt whole. Only later on, I understood that what I had experienced was the presence of God. It was similar to the experience described by Blaise Pascal:[vi]God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars … Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy …My experience was the one described by mystics throughout the ages, but still not understood: Now I KNEW, what they were speaking about, now I could relate to it. I did not need to believe in the existence of God any more now I knew. From a Hasidic point of view, I had been in the Garden of Eden, where I had experienced HIM, HIS presence. How long did I stay at that place? A minute? An eternity? Who cares? I only knew that in that place I found myself, there is neither time nor space. And suddenly I was back again, back in the middle of the discussing audience. But I wasn’t the person I had been before. I returned as a new-born person, a person from whom all the personal and historical prejudices had been stripped off. The rational physician and scientist had turned into a mystic and a kabbalist I underwent a radical religious transformation, similar to the one experienced by Abraham, when he received the command to go and leave everything behind him. I heard the same words and like Abraham I left my home and followed the call.[viii] For three months, I stayed in an altered state of consciousness. I even lost the widespread feeling of fear that is an integral part of our life. I simply didn’t know fear, I couldn’t relate to that feeling. These three months drastically changed my life it was a period of grace in which one door after the other opened for me without the need to knock. I received a spiritual teacher (a so-called Maggid) who opened my eyes so that I was able to see, what normally remains hidden from us. I became that which is called in Hebrew navi.From that time on, I perceived the world and especially the Bible in a different light. This is especially true for the Torah, that part of the Bible which Moses received directly from God.Thirty-three centuries after being written, the Bible is still number one on the best-seller list and provides spiritual solace to many believers throughout the western world. Living in
Israel in the twentieth century I had difficulty in accepting the interpretations of the Bible which had their origins in antiquity and the middle ages. Again and again, I wondered what it was that gave the Bible its power. Could it be that all the accepted interpretations were meant to lead us astray? Could it be that at the core of the Bible there is something we no longer comprehend? And then one day a miracle happened. The walls built around the core of the Bible over the centuries seemed to fall away and I started to see it for what it really is. … Walls? What walls? After my experiencing the Divine, I received my first prophetic message. It was revealed that my conception wasn’t really so far out, that the Torah does have a core piece the revelation at
Mount Sinai. What happened there can be considered as multilayered. The deepest level can nowadays best be described as the explosion of a spiritual atom bomb. As a result, all those present were genetically transformed so that their descendants, the future Jewish nation, would survive for ever.[x] Not the individuals, but the nation as a whole. When I asked, what kind of energy was set free, I got the following answer: The energy of love, the energy which has created your world. The energy set free at that time was however too strong for the former slaves. When Moshe recognized that, he broke the first set of the Tablets of the Law. The second one was, however, not written directly by God it was a dictation written down by Moshe. After that he erected a wall around the core – the commandments or laws – and called this wall Torah. Though these commandments also came directly from God, they were transmitted through a human being, the man Moshe. This is shown by the following sentence from the Talmud: The Torah spoke in the language of man.[xi] Each generation added another layer so that the walls became ever thicker, harder. The first who tried to break through these walls were the prophets. Then came Jesus[xii], but all of them failed. The prophets were persecuted and Jesus crucified. Christianity had built different, walls and named them the New Testament. Walls protect, but they can easily become a prison. I then asked, whether the Talmud is also a part of these walls. The answer I received was the following: Yes, and even parts of the kabbalah. The reason is and was always the same: The Divine Light is supposed to be too intense for human beings. It would incinerate them. The continued blessing and praying are also based on the fear of Me and My light. Those are exactly the walls you passed over, when you went into the garden. Tell me, was the light you experienced too strong for you? NO, the opposite is true. I only felt love and through this love I became whole and free.The real reason for the wall was to avoid that which you have just mentioned: freedom. That is what the ruling powers are most afraid of and that is what the direct contact with God results in. Know that love produces love and healing. That is the first step into freedom. Fear and hate on the other hand produce what humans designate as the devil: destruction, chaos and finally slavery and death. That is what is symbolized by ancient
Egypt. In modern times, it was the holocaust, a spawn of fear and hate, which – to quote the Israeli author K.Tzetnik[xiii] – has given birth to a new devil called Nucleus, born out of the smoke of the children burnt in Auschwitz: the instrument of your final self-destruction. He has seen the truth.
What was the origin of my revelations, of the messages I received? Who or what was it that spoke to me? God? My spiritual teacher? Who cares? Even the famous German poet Goethe said: It writes. After this revelation, I had the feeling that scales had fallen off my eyes. I suddenly realized that the Hebrew Bible is not just a historical relic, a collection of ancient lore, of myths and laws good only for an ancient people, but a vibrant message which is as relevant today as it was thirty-three centuries before. I also realized that the part of the Bible which is known in the Christian world as the Old Testament is not the message of a cruel and vengeful God. Like so many scholars before me, I understood that it has many layers and that every era is shown another aspect. One can also compare it to a beautiful woman covered with many veils. That is the reason why the exegesis of the past is not relevant for our time. I was also shown that the Bible is not a religious book in the accepted meaning of the word. Neither is it mainly dealing with ethics, it is all that and more. It is rather a book dealing with survival, not survival as an animal, but as a human being. It is its core, the Torah, which kept the Jewish people alive against all odds, without any of the attributes usually defining a people or a nation. But it is more than even that. As shown by its name, it is a document showing us a way to real freedom.
[i] The Hebrew alphabet has only consonants and no vowels.
[ii] Mishna, Masekhet Awot, chapt. 6, Mishna 2 (Hebr.), also called Midrash
[iii] Megilla 6,72
[iv] Matthew 7,7
[vi] Pascal, B. (1623-1662), French mathematician and philosopher, one of the founders of modern science
[viii] Rav Kook on the Torah portion „Toldot
[x] Scientific research has recently proved that a „Jewish gene really does exist. Furthermore, the souls of all the Jews of all times are believed to have been present at that event.
[xi] From the Talmud, Brachot 31, 72
[xii] For me, Jesus was not the son of God, but somebody who came to take the Jewish people back to their original task. He certainly did not intend to create a new religion.
[xiii] K. Tzetnik, Shiviti, HaKibbutz Hameuchad Publishing, 1987 (Hebr.)
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