“Heart Disease”, Sometimes Called Yetzer Hara—the Imagination of an Unhappy Heart
week in review for the week ending june 8th, 2025
Matthew 15: 1-20 :: That Which Defiles
15 Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 2 “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”
3 Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? 4 For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’[a] and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’[b] 5 But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’ 6 they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. 7 You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
8 “‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
9 They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’[c]”
10 Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand.11 What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”
12 Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”
13 He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. 14 Leave them; they are blind guides.[d] If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
15 Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.”
16 “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. 17 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? 18 But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 20 These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”
Pastor Jeremy called Sunday’s sermon “heart disease”. The way he described it reminded me of the Judaic concept of Yetzer Hara, the imagination of an unhappy heart, sometimes called the evil imagination of the heart.
You can watch the video recording of Pastor Jeremy’s sermon below.
Last August I wrote about Yetzer Hara, because Lee Weissman covered it in a Duties of the Heart class.
What does Yetzer Hara sound, taste, look, feel like? I want to tell you because I struggle a lot with it and maybe my struggle might help you in yours or someone else’s.
To me Yetzer Hara often feels mundane, like an undercover spy. It can feel like seemingly reasonable overthinking. Seemingly because maybe it makes logical sense to my brain in the moment. It can feel like a veil over everything. From physical symptoms like a metal taste on my tongue that affects the taste of food and turns me off of everything, even foods I like. It actually alters my perception of food, often only curry spices can recalibrate it. Yetzer Hara as a physical sensation can cause me to feel vagalled out (ie like fainting) more.
This all tells me this is a neurobiological phenomenon. It’s a temporary thing, accompanying the unpleasant emotional state and horrible cognitive thoughts. Do thoughts generate this state of being? Good question, one for another time or maybe a podcast episode. What do you think, reader? Then it becomes a situation where I feel unreal, or removed from my Self. Disconnected. The voice says no one cares, you shouldn’t exist, etc etc. Limiting my speech, something that’s a good practise for the spirit, becomes stop talking it doesn’t matter you’re nothing keep silent it’s for the best.
There are many voices in society. Maybe mine isn’t important. Maybe it is though. Truth tellers aren’t prized by their contemporaries. Maybe I’m one of those deluded blah blah blah idiots who responds to everything and says nothing. Maybe I’m some outrageous mystic punk who says outlandish truths no one dares to express. Maybe either of these perceptions is egocentric. Maybe one of them is more accurate than the other.
I don’t know.
It paralyses me lately in human connection — often causes me to self select out of everything because I assume the inner voice is right and I don’t belong anywhere and should stop trying. My mother wanted me, no one else did until I won their favour. Favour is fickle, love is not. In recent years personal tribulations have been huge, I have been disposable to every living person that I love a lot whom I believed loved me. I now no longer want to believe in love, very often. I feel like the Book of Job is my book, it’s incredibly relatable to me. I often ask myself, now that mum is dead does no one want me? Does that matter in the scheme of things?
That is my Yetzer Hara.
It’s like the angel that Jacob wrestled only it never leaves me and never gives me even 5 minutes in the corner of the boxing ring to catch my breath and replenish. I am aware that I am living the life I prayed hard for, that my family has things I prayed for and blessings beyond what I imagined possible. I am deeply immensely grateful.
And yet I feel gripped by this heaviness of my heart.
I have no answer except to notice what makes it worst and better. I’m tired. Fighting is exhausting. Thinking is exhausting. The current sociopolitical environment is hell. Money is an eternal struggle and existential fear and the social isolation of living the cancellation of political and spiritual dissidence is hard. Wahhh, stop your whinging, cope and seethe I tell myself firmly, others feel this way too.
Anyway the default feeling today is this: it doesn’t matter stop talking and just stop trying to connect you aren’t a part of anything no one wants you just stop believing it’s possible. That’s my Yetzer Hara and it’s like wrestling a thousand Hulks and, really, why should I bother?
I’m happy to report that my heart doesn’t feel as sick as I described it nearly a year ago, several things have changed and some felt painful and some felt joyful and these evoked the change that I’m living today, now.
Reader, scroll up to line 18 in Matthew 15, the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. In My Jewish Learning, Jeffrey Spitzer writes Yetzer hara is not a demonic force that pushes a person to do evil, but rather a drive toward pleasure or property or security, which if left unlimited, can lead to evil … When properly controlled by the yetzer hatov, the yetzer hara leads to many socially desirable results, including marriage, business, and community.
So, reader, we aren’t talking about Original Sin, a thing Catholicism teaches, a thing Augustine of Hippo, following in the footsteps of earlier church fathers, first introduced into theology. In a 2003 article The Original View of Original Sin Peter Nathan wrote that Augustine’s association with philosophers led him to introduce the concept of dualism into theological writing. Nathan writes that Augustine hadn’t mastered the Greek language and therefore misinterpreted Paul’s Biblical texts. The notion of Original Sin had been developed by Irenaeus, Origen and Tertullian, who borrowed heavily from Stoic philosophy in their interpretation of the Adam and Eve Biblical story. The Judaic world sometimes refers to this phenomenon as Hellenisation of Biblical interpretation.
Augustine’s Neoplatonic, dualistic concept of physical being evil and spiritual being good does not coincide with Paul’s view. This leads us to a second influential idea of Augustine’s relating to sin. He proposed the concept of the “fall of man” as a result of sin. In Augustine’s view, humanity lost its spiritual relationship with its Creator and thus fell to a lower state. — Peter Nathan, 2003, in Visions[dot]org
In fact, Paul doesn’t agree with Augustine’s dualistic interpretation of spirit good and flesh bad. In Ephesians 6:12, Paul states his position clearly, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
So, let’s return to Pastor Jeremy’s sermon, Heart Disease.
Pastor Jeremy mentions that, in the passage from Matthew (above), Jesus speaks of the heart in a metaphorical sense. The thinking goes that Jesus means to instruct people on a spiritual matter by using the heart in a poetic sense —in the heart, intention bears itself into being. But wait.
Reader, perhaps Jesus did mean the physical pumping organ of our body. Indulge me, reader. What if Jesus did mean the heart, our physical pump? Remember, reader, what the heart does? The organ we call the heart has an electrical component which enables its cyclical contraction and relaxation, thus perfusing the body and also itself, with each cycle of systole and diastole. Reader, did you know that the heart has neurons that function independently from the brain? Yes reader, the heart does have its own capacity to “think”, call it the heart having its own brain, if you want. Reader, given that the heart has its own brain, so to speak, would it not follow that the heart has its own mind and spiritual connectivity—perhaps these things we call emotion and intention?
Raj Vadigepalli’s work suggests that the heart’s internal control operates in a far more nuanced and complex manner than we initially imagined. Stephen Porges’ work suggests that the vagus nerve impacts the heart through a thing called vagal tone, a measure of heart rate variability that indicates the level of adaptive capacity your heart has to environmental challenges such as stress, emotional duress, traumatic events, and the like. The vagus nerve acts to lower the heart rate, so a lower resting heart rate indicates a higher, ie better, vagal tone.
They found that unlike neurons of the brain, which are often defined by the chemical they release – either ones that augment or depress activity, etc. – neurons of the heart had much more fluid expression of these chemicals. It was as if the heart’s neurons contained multiple identities. The various permutations and combinations allow the neurons in the “little brain” to fine tune how the heart responds to signals from the brain. This validates Dr. Vadigepalli’s thesis work, which demonstrated this fine-tuning in mathematical models.
“The map demonstrates that the local control of the heart is much more nuanced than we’ve been able to appreciate,” says Dr. Vadigepalli. “It suggests that a single drug that turns heartbeats up or down, may not be as effective as one that hits the right combination of targets. There is much more to explore in developing new therapies for heart disease.” — Karuna Meda, Thomas Jefferson University
As an aside, the gut (called the enteric system in clinical-speak), also has neurons, giving new meaning to the phrase “gut sense.” You might see this called the second brain sometimes in literature.
Comprised of 100 million neurons, the network of nerve cells lining the digestive tract is so extensive that it has earned the nickname “second brain.” Technically known as the enteric nervous system, this network of neurons is often overlooked and contains more nerve cells than the spinal cord or peripheral nervous system.
Beyond the sheer volume of neurons, our second brain bears even more resemblance to the brain in our heads. The mass of neural tissue in our gut produces over 30 different neurotransmitters, which are signalling molecules typically associated with the brain. This includes a staggering 95% of the production and storage of serotonin, the neurotransmitter famously known as the “happy chemical” due to its role in regulating mood and wellbeing. — Heather Gerrie, UBC Neuroscience
I have a theory that the vagus nerve servers as the internal mammalian conduit between g-d and biological physicality — ie, the conduit for the soul. The vagus nerve connects the brain, heart, lungs, and gut—it serves as a superhighway of our physiologic self. We wear our heart on our face, for example. The same nerves that innervate the face muscles also innervate the heart. To further illustrate our connectivity consider breathing. On breathing in, called inspiration, our heart rate increases. On breathing out, called expiration, our heart rate decreases.
So, reader, don’t you think it’s possible Jesus knew things that his society didn’t know yet about the heart having a mind of its own? At any rate, it’s possible to conjoin the biblical mystical teachings on the heart with modern day clinical research + knowledge regarding the complexity of the cardiac system as well as it’s inner workings, local control mechanisms, plus its interactions with our safety regulation system. In fact, perhaps the writings of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus on the heart make profoundly and intensely more sense when we consider the complex physiology of the heart.
Spurgeon understood the heart to be man’s essential self. He writes, “The heart is the true man; it is the very citadel of the City of Mansoul; it is the fountain and reservoir of manhood, and all the rest of man may be compared to the many pipes which run from the fountain through the streets of a city.” — Spurgeon Center
Back to Pastor Jeremy’s sermon.
Pastor Jeremy mentions Jeremiah 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? He also mentions Proverbs 4:23, Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. He then mentions Samuel 1:16:7, The Lord looks at the heart. Pastor Jeremy doesn’t mention Proverbs 4:23, Hope deferred makes the heart sick, however I will mention it here, because I think it speaks to my description of my יֵצֶר הַרַע Yetzer Hara, excerpted above from August 2024.
Incidentally, reader did you know there’s such a thing called Broken Heart Syndrome? Takotsubo cardiomyopathy occurs when the heart becomes stunned and physically sickened by severe emotional distress. The left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber, changes shape, resembling a Japanese fishing pot used to catch octopus.
So what, reader? Where does this all lead? What does all this stuff about the heart have to do with what Jesus taught in the passage from Matthew above? How does this improve our understanding of scriptural advice such as guard your heart, keep your heart above all else, hope deferred makes the heart sick, above all the Lord look at the heart. Judaic tradition and mysticism consider the heart as the core of the person, the source and seat of character and personality and motive. The Bible Hub writes about this very thing, using the concept of monarchy as an allegory.
Our nature is evidently not a republic, but a monarchy. It is full of blind impulses, and hungry desires, which take no heed of any law but their own satisfaction. If the reins are thrown on the necks of these untamed horses, they will drag the man to destruction. They are safe only when they are curbed and bitted, and held well in. Then there are tastes and inclinations which need guidance and are plainly meant to be subordinate. The will is to govern all the lower self, and conscience is to govern the will. — Bible Hub
Reader, remember what Jeffrey Spitzer wrote in My Jewish Learning? Scroll up to remind yourself if you don’t. When properly controlled by the yetzer hatov, the yetzer hara leads to many socially desirable results. Yetzer Hatov יֵצֶר הַטּוֹב refers to our inclination towards good, that is the will of G-d. So, the untamed horses of our yetzer hara require reins, they require curbing and bitting like a horse, in order to serve us properly. When Jesus says that what comes out of the mouth of a human defiles that human because it comes from his or her heart, that’s what He was teaching.
Think about your physical heart. It’s caged inside a network of strong bones, it’s firmly anchored in your visceral body. Have you watched open heart surgery, reader? It takes a specially designed electric saw called a sternal saw to break open the sternum (this is called a sternotomy) so the surgeon can get to the heart. It’s a five plus hour long surgical procedure to perform a coronary bypass grafting. Reader, doesn’t this speak to the complexity and the power of the heart itself?
Why wouldn’t we think that our heart can waylay us, then, reader? And why wouldn’t we imagine that Jesus already knew that when He preached about the heart easily defiling the person whose life it perfuses?
How fearfully and wonderfully we are made!
Below the line you can read the missives from last week. The essays I wrote last week about all seem to have at their core the theme of the misguided human heart, that’s to say, misguided intentions. You can read about Olivia Chow and the WRDSB in their respective hypocrisies, as well as the human struggle to let go of the stories we tell about the people who’ve hurt us.
Olivia Chow Says Buy Canadian
Mayor Olivia Chow addresses corporate sponsors who pulled out of Pride, calling it “shortsighted” and suggesting it’s “because they just don’t know who they are.”
