Tag Archives: Chlorine

Kabbalah of Organic Chemistry

As someone who has taught organic chemistry for the past 15 years, I have always been amazed at the mystical nature of this particular science. The field of chemistry is typically divided up into two general areas: organic and inorganic. Organic chemistry is centered entirely around the element carbon, which serves as the backbone and “skeleton” for all organic compounds. Everything else is deemed “inorganic”. Incredibly, the number of known organic compounds far surpasses the number of inorganic ones.

The Ten Sefirot

Organic chemistry is fundamental to the functioning of our biological bodies, and generates countless products that we use every day from plastic to polyester, as well as essentially the entire pharmaceutical industry. Organic chemistry is absolutely vital for understanding life in this universe. Not surprisingly, it has a tremendous amount of spiritual depth as well. What particularly stands out is that we find ten major elements in organic chemistry, and they neatly correspond to the Ten Sefirot of Kabbalah.

First, of course, is carbon. All of organic chemistry is centred around carbon, and its ability to make four relatively strong chemical bonds with other atoms. Carbon corresponds to the first Sefirah of Keter, the “crown”, the starting point of all things. Keter is also referred to as the “skull” of the Sefirotic “body”, likened to a skeleton that holds the body together. (Recall that within the bones of the skeleton and its marrow are undifferentiated stem cells, the core “essence” of a person, or etzem in Hebrew—which amazingly means both “bone” and “essence”!) In organic chemistry, we typically draw chemical structures with skeletal diagrams for convenience, where every point on the diagram is one carbon atom. Carbon is the foundational “skeleton” of organic chemistry, as is Keter for the Sefirot.

Skeletal diagram of a large organic compound containing nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), and fluorine (F), in addition to carbon and hydrogen. Each “point” on the diagram is a carbon atom. Hydrogens are not depicted.

The next most important element in organic chemistry is hydrogen. By default, hydrogen atoms “fill” the space around carbon, and we typically don’t draw them in skeletal diagrams at all—they are just assumed to be there, wherever carbon looks like it’s “missing” a bond. It isn’t missing, we just know that there’s a hydrogen there! The most basic organic molecule is methane, a single carbon surrounded by four hydrogens. When we go back to the beginnings of the universe, to the start of Creation, hydrogen was the first element to exist. It was the first element to form following the “Big Bang”, and served as the building block for all other elements that were generated once hydrogens started fusing together. Today, hydrogen remains the most abundant element in the universe. Continue reading →

The Science & Kabbalah of Salt

Salt emerging from the Dead Sea

This week we begin reading the third book of the Torah, Vayikra, or “Leviticus”, which is primarily concerned with priestly laws and sacrificial rituals. We are commanded that “You shall season your offerings of grain with salt; you shall not omit from your grain offering the salt of your covenant with God; with all your offerings you must offer salt.” (Leviticus 2:13) As is well-known, the sprinkling of salt was an absolute necessity for the offerings brought in the Tabernacle and Temple. Incredibly, the Talmud (Menachot 20a-b) says that even if a person brought a wood offering, the wood had to be sprinkled with salt! The minimum wood offering was two blocks of wood, and some say a handful was chopped off and diced up to be burned upon the altar. Others taught that wood offerings do not require salting, just like wine libations didn’t require it, nor did incense offerings. That said, we know that melach sdomit, “Sodomite salt”, was added to the Ketoret incense as one of the additional ingredients. The big question is: why is salt so important?

In ancient times, salt was an incredibly valuable commodity. It had a wide range of uses, not only for flavouring food, but more importantly for preserving food (in an era without refrigeration), as a cleaning agent and an antimicrobial agent, as a weapon of war (to “salt” the earth of the enemy), and even as a form of payment. In fact, the root of the word salary is the Latin sal, meaning “salt”! Same is true for the root of soldier, from sal dare in Latin meaning to “give salt”, since soldiers were paid in salt. (Wrote a lot more about the fascinating history of salt, including Sodomite salt, in Secrets of the Last Waters.) Agreements and covenants were sealed with salt, which we find throughout the Tanakh. In commenting on the above verse in Leviticus, the Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, 1194-1270) points out that Hashem even forged a “salt covenant”, brit melach, with King David* to establish his eternal dynasty (as it says in II Chronicles 13:5). Similarly, the Temple offerings all had to be brought with salt to affirm that we have a binding and eternal “salt covenant” with God. Continue reading →