In the last post, we discussed the view of the Maharal of the Torah as a teleological text; the Torah contains instructions for how the universe and man ought to be. Maharal is careful to distinguish between chochma, or knowledge, and Torah, which literally means "instruction." The Torah says how things should be; it provides order. It is not necessarily a description of how things are.
To the Maharal, this is not simply an abstract philosophical claim. He believes that there are practical, real-world implications for the Torah being an organizing force in the universe. To this end, he cites the Talmud (Eruvin 54a) which states that if a man walks alone on a road (i.e. between cities, where it is uninhabited) and he is not accompanied by anyone, he should study Torah. Moreover, if a person has pain in his head, throat, internal organs, bones, or even his whole body, he should study Torah, as the Torah will heal him. Rabbi Yehuda the son of Rabbi Chiya adds to this that God is not like man, because when man gives a medical treatment, the treatment might be helpful in one way and harmful in another (i.e. medicine has side effects) but God's treatment, the Torah, is equally good for everything; it heals a person completely.
Maharal first focuses on the statement about walking alone on a road. Rabbinic tradition has it that "all roads are assumed to be dangerous" (Kohelet Rabba, 3:3). On Maharal's view, this isn't just because of the presence of highwaymen and dangerous animals and whatnot. Rather, there is a metaphysical sense in which uninhabited parts of the Earth are incomplete, or not fulfilling their teleological duty. [An aside: one of the interpretations of the story of the Tower of Babel is that the sin of the creators of the Tower of Babel was that they wanted to build a city to unify all of mankind in a single place, instead of spreading out over the entire world and inhabiting it.] The source text for this is Isaiah 45:18, "he did not create [the world] to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited." Parts of creation that are not in their teleologically optimal state, such as uninhabited roads, have a sort of inherent danger associated with them. A person thus either needs to travel with someone else (when multiple people travel together, they form a social entity, and are thus considered as turning an uninhabited place into an "inhabited" one) or to study Torah, which itself has the power to bring the world to its optimal state.
Fig 1. Here there be dragons.
The same reasoning applies, says the Maharal, to diseases of the body. The teleological state of the body is a healthy body, and bringing the Torah in contact with a sick body brings the body back to its optimal state. This is easier to understand with pain of the head, which is the seat of the intellect and thus would more naturally attuned to the Torah's healing powers, but it is true for the rest of the body also. In this context, Maharal mentions two kinds of intellect, the analytic intellect (שכל עיון) which resides in the head and the linguistic intellect (שכל דיבור) which is associated with the throat.
Regarding the difference between Godly medicine (the Torah) and man-made medicine, Maharal notes that all man-made medicine has some sort of physical properties, and those physical properties will necessarily be harmful for some things even if they are helpful for others. He gives the example of a "hot" medicine being good for limbs which are "hot" but bad which are for limbs which are supposed to be cold. The Maharal is working with outdated medical science and terminology here, but one can easily think of many examples of drugs with side effects due to the drug's adverse reactions with non-targeted organ systems. The Torah, in the sense of it being an organizing force that brings matter to its teleological state, doesn't have any of the downsides of physical drugs because it is not a physical substance, rather it simply reorients matter to its teleologically optimal state. (Evidence that this occurs and an explanation of the mechanism by which this occurs are conveniently not mentioned.)
Interestingly, Maharal emphasizes that the Torah has the same healing powers for psychological ailments as it does for physical ailments. The particular psychological issues that the Maharal mentions are "jealousy" and "desire", which are associated with the heart and liver, respectively. In other words, all of the body parts that the Talmud mentioned also have some association with a psychological ailment. While this may seem far-fetched, there is growing evidence that the enteric nervous system and the microbiome play an important role in psychological health, so at least in the case of the digestive system, there is an element of truth in the mind-body connection. In any event, it is worthwhile to note that the Maharal considered psychological ailments sufficiently important for them to warrant medical attention in an age where clinical psychology and psychiatry did not exist as medical disciplines.
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