The Healing Thread

Judaism, Christ, and Our Forgotten Alignment

Recently, a friend sent me Rudolf Steiner’s lecture Judaism: Christ’s Placenta after reading my Substack reflection on the passing of the Pope and my novel The Seven Seeds. It arrived like a gift of confirmation—an echo from the deeper spiritual conversation I had been sensing but hadn't yet fully articulated.

In that lecture, Steiner paints a striking picture: Judaism as the nourishing placenta through which the Christ impulse could be born into the world. He suggests that Judaism was not displaced or negated by Christ, but served as the essential vessel—an organ of sacrifice, protection, and nourishment—that allowed the new impulse of universal love to enter human evolution. Just as a placenta is cast off after birth—not because it was wrong or unworthy, but because it fulfilled a sacred role—so too, Steiner says, was Judaism a profound part of preparing the soil for the next phase of humanity’s spiritual development.

Reading this, I felt a deep resonance with what I tried to explore in The Seven Seeds: that the Christ impulse is not owned by any one religion, but belongs to the unfolding journey of humanity itself. It is an archetype, a reality that speaks to the soul’s longing for compassion, courage, wisdom, and sacrifice—values that transcend dogma and bloodlines.

Steiner also touches on something else that stirred me. He remarked that during the time of Christ, healing was different. It was easier, more immediate. Not because miracles were more abundant, but because human beings themselves were more deeply aligned with their soul nature. The veil between body and spirit was thinner. The soul lived nearer the surface of life, not buried under layers of materialism, doubt, and abstraction as it often is today.

Healing in Christ’s time was a restoration of harmony—an act of remembrance between the body, soul, and spirit. Today, healing is harder. It demands conscious striving. The spiritual forces that once naturally guided humanity now require inner awakening, moral imagination, and will.

And isn’t that the crisis—and the opportunity—of our age?

We live in a time when ancient connections have frayed. When technology, while brilliant, often threatens to drown out the still, small voice within. When education races faster, but not always deeper. When healing has become not a reintegration of soul and body, but a management of symptoms.

Yet Steiner’s image reminds us that what once lived near the surface has not disappeared. It sleeps in us still. Waiting. Hoping to be remembered.

In my own journey—writing, living, reflecting—I find myself asking:

How do we bring the soul back into the center of life?

How do we heal not just bodies, but the breach between our outer lives and inner truths?

Maybe it begins not with grand declarations, but with small acts of remembering. With honoring the invisible nourishment that brought us here. With daring, as Steiner said, to lift the soul again toward the Spirit.

As I continue to walk this path—as a Jew, as a seeker, as a writer—I see more clearly now: we are not tasked with rebuilding ancient temples. We are asked to become temples.

To house, once again, the sacred in the human.

And perhaps the real healing of our time will not be found in technology, politics, or even in institutions, but in the slow, faithful act of remembering who we truly are.

Even now.

Especially now.