The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly. — Proverbs 20:27
Every spring, on the night before Passover, my husband walks through our house by candlelight, looking for bread.
A child trails behind him with a feather; another carries a wooden spoon and a small paper bag. They start in the kitchen at sundown and work outward — into the bedrooms, the closets, the deep seams of the couches. They are hunting the last forgotten crumb: the cracker that fell behind the bookshelf in November, the breadcrumb hiding in a winter coat pocket, the cereal a toddler dropped into the sofa. Anything that has leavened, anything that has swelled with yeast, must be found. And in the morning, it must be burned.
The ritual is called the search for leaven, and the Torah is unusually severe about it. It is not enough to refrain from eating leavened bread during the festival. No leaven may be found — not in the cupboards, not in the pantry, not even in a sealed jar at the back of the freezer. Seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses. Not eaten, not seen, not present.
It’s a strange demand, when you stop to think about it. A few crumbs in a drawer poison no one. So why the candle, the feather, the patient search of every room?
The rabbis answered: the leaven in the house is the leaven in the soul.
Leaven is swelling. An invisible organism gets into the dough, consumes its sugars, breathes out gas — and the dough puffs up. It becomes more than it was. The rabbis saw the moral parallel. The puffed-up places in us — the arrogance, the resentment, the slow-fermenting grievance, the lie told so often it stops sounding like a lie — these are the soul’s leaven. They start small. They grow. And once a year, on the threshold of freedom, they must be searched out and burned, just like the bread.
Proverbs says it plainly: the spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts. The candle in my husband’s hand is the outer form of an inner flame — a small, steady light meant to be carried into the hidden chambers to find what was forgotten there. The candle goes through the house. The candle goes through the soul. What it finds is gathered up and given to the fire.
I tell you this because it is the structure of the book you are holding, Do This, Detox That. It is also the structure of my own life. This book carries the candle through the house, the plate and the medicine cabinet, room by room, looking for what does not belong there. You may be surprised by how much turns up. The search of the soul’s inner rooms deserves a book of its own, and I will leave it for another book.
The Search That Found Me
I did not begin as a teacher of healing. I began as a computer scientist, which is about as far from a jar of herbs as a career can get.
I was born in 1978. I went to college expecting to do something with science and technology, and that is exactly what I did. I worked at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, as a Computer Scientist. Yes, that NASA. The mind I had been given was an analytical one, the kind that wants to see the data before it believes anything. The career that opened up in front of me used that analytical mind the way it had been trained to be used.
I had long taken the question of food seriously. I lived a plant-based life with real conviction — I believed I was eating close to the way human beings were originally intended to eat. I read Genesis 1:29 — Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed… and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat — as God’s original and intended diet for humanity, with the introduction of animal foods after the Flood as a concession to human weakness rather than a positive instruction. I had no reason to doubt the framework. I had every reason to live it, and I lived it wholeheartedly.
I lived it through my early adulthood, through the years at NASA, through my marriage, through the beginning of motherhood. When my husband and I had our first child, a son, I was still eating with the seriousness of someone who believed she was eating the way human beings were meant to eat.
Then came the news that began everything that followed.
My husband’s grandmother had told one of his brothers that there was Jewish ancestry in the family. Word reached us, the way family news always does. We began studying together.
This was in 2005. I was twenty-seven years old, pregnant with my second child — my first daughter — and the news of Jewish ancestry in my husband’s line arrived at almost the same moment I learned I was carrying her. The body and the soul began preparing simultaneously. The daughter was being formed in my womb. The framework was being studied in my mind. Both at the same time.
I began studying Torah, trying to read the text on its own terms, in its own language, within its own tradition of interpretation. I read Genesis. I read Exodus. I read Leviticus and Deuteronomy. I read the Prophets. I read the Psalms. I began to learn Hebrew, slowly, with the help of patient teachers. I began to discover that there was a vast tradition of Jewish interpretation that had been reading these texts continuously for two thousand years and longer, and that this tradition saw things in the texts I had never seen before.
My daughter was born in December of 2005, into a household where the Torah study had been underway for many months. She was the first of our children born into the slow opening of what would eventually become a fully Jewish home. I held her, and I thought: I want this child to be raised inside the framework that I am only beginning to learn.
And then, soon after her birth, the migraines began.
The First Crisis
I want you to picture what this was like, because you will recognize some part of it in your own life or in the life of someone you love.
I was twenty-seven years old. I had a son who needed me and a newborn daughter who needed me even more. I was running a home-based business out of necessity, building websites and applications and marketing for high-technology companies in Silicon Valley, because we needed the income and I wanted to be home with the children. My husband and I were studying Torah together for hours in the evenings after the children were asleep. We were beginning to take on practices we had not grown up with. We were beginning to ask, of every framework we had inherited, whether it was the framework the Hebrew Bible itself teaches. It was a full life, and a full plate.
And in the middle of all of it, my head began to hurt.
The migraines were not what most people mean by the word. They were not headaches. They were attacks so severe that I could not function — could not care for my children, could not work, could not think. I would lie in a dark room with a wet cloth over my eyes and try not to move my head and wait for the wave to pass, and it would not pass for hours, sometimes days. The doctors I saw were concerned enough to test me for a brain tumor. The testing itself was terrifying. I was twenty-seven years old, a young mother with a baby in my arms, being told that the cause of the pain that was disabling me might be the thing every young mother fears most. I went through the imaging. I waited for the results.
When the results came back clear, the relief I expected lasted only as long as it took the doctor to explain that, with the worst possibility ruled out, he had nothing else for me. The system had performed its function. It had ruled out the catastrophe it knew how to recognize, checked its box, and moved on. What it could not do was tell me why I was sick or how to get well.
I went home with my babies and I sat with that, and I understood that if I was going to recover, I was going to have to learn how.
Picture it, for a moment. A young mother, exhausted, frightened, with a son who needed his mother and a baby daughter who needed her even more, with a body that was failing her in ways no one could explain, with the credentialed authorities of her time having told her, in effect, we cannot help you; we hope you feel better. This is the moment most of my students have lived through in some form. This is the moment that brings a person to a book like the one in your hands.
I did what people do who have run out of other options. I began to search.
The first room I had to search was my kitchen.
I had been living, for years, on the vegetarian framework I had adopted in college. I had believed the framework. I had defended it to others. I had assumed that any failure of health in my life would be a failure of something else — stress, sleep, a difficult pregnancy, the demands of motherhood — but never a failure of the diet itself, because the diet was the one thing I had been doing right. Or so I was sure.
What I discovered, when I finally began to study nutrition seriously rather than ideologically, was that I had been depleting myself for years of nutrients I could not obtain in adequate form from a plant-only diet. Vitamin B12 was the headline deficiency, but it was not the only one. Vitamin B12 is found naturally, reliably, and in bioavailable form only in animal foods. I had been running, for years, on a B12 status that had been slowly declining, like a car driven on a dwindling tank. The migraines were one of the late signals. They were not random. They were not bad luck. They were the body’s signal — its rising voice — that it had been starved of materials it required to function, and that the starvation had reached a point where it could no longer be ignored.
This was the first humility the search required of me. I had to put down a framework that sounded healthy, that came from a tradition I respected, that was held by people I loved, and look at what my actual body, in its actual life, was actually asking for. I had to reintroduce B12 in supplemental form, and then eggs, and then dairy, and then fish. The migraines began to recede.
The kitchen was not the only room. I was working long nights and pushing through exhaustion, burning the candle at both ends, with no Sabbath rest in the week as I had once kept it. I cut my hours. The work, it turned out, could wait. I began to sleep. I began to keep the Sabbath as it was meant to be kept — a full day of stopping, of stillness. The body that had been receiving nutrients was now also receiving rest, and the rest was nutrient too.
The migraines did not lift in a single moment. They lifted over the course of months — the second half of 2006 into 2007 — as the dietary correction and the rest and the slowly maturing Torah study all worked on me at once. By the time my daughter took her first steps, her mother was beginning to be a different person from the one who had given birth to her.
Years of Return
The years that followed were years of slow, shared work. My husband and I continued studying. We learned more Torah. We learned more Hebrew. We began to take on observance gradually, as we came to understand each piece — the Sabbath in its full Jewish form, the festivals, the daily prayers, the dietary laws of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 that govern what a Jew may and may not eat. We began eating clean meats and removing what the Bible identifies as unclean. We had more children. The household became Jewish in practice, in conviction, in rhythm — Jewish for years before any rabbinic court would have formally recognized us as such.
In 2009, when I was thirty-one, I founded Arukah.com. What had begun as my own desperate search for healing during the migraine years had become, by then, a body of knowledge I wanted to share. I had spent four years researching, reading, studying, testing on my own body and my own family. I had absorbed the orthomolecular tradition of Dr. Linus Pauling. I had trained in herbalism in the lineage of Dr. John Christopher. I had read the Weston A. Price literature and begun to understand ancestral nutrition. I had encountered the Mercola corpus and the Blaylock corpus and the work of dozens of physicians and researchers who were saying, in different vocabularies, what my body had been telling me through the migraines: that the modern food and modern environment had been making people sick, that the medical system did not know how to reverse it, and that there was a better way that ancient traditions had preserved and modern researchers were rediscovering. The old wisdom, it turned out, had simply been waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
The Hebrew word arukah means complete, enduring restoration. It appears in the Hebrew Bible at the moment of healing — For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD (Jeremiah 30:17). The word translated health in that verse is arukah. It carries the sense of new flesh growing over a wound, the body restored to its original measure. The ordinary biblical word for mending or healing is refuah; the two appear together in the liturgy, but arukah is the deeper word, the word of restoration to original wholeness. I chose it as the name of the work I was beginning because I wanted to teach the kind of healing that the Hebrew Bible describes — not symptom relief, not management, not the suppression of one problem with a pharmaceutical that produces three more (a bargain only the manufacturer could love), but the body brought back to its proper measure, the original shape of the thing it was always meant to be.
In 2016, when I was thirty-eight, my husband and I completed our formal conversion to Judaism. A rabbinical court examined our learning and our practice and our intentions. We immersed in a ritual bath. We accepted the commandments formally. By that point we had been living as a Jewish family for over a decade. The formal conversion was the technical confirmation of what was already true. My husband, with the Jewish ancestry his grandmother had named, undertook the path appropriate to his situation. I came to it from outside, as a convert, with the convert’s particular seriousness — the seriousness of someone who has chosen the tradition rather than inherited it, and who therefore carries no childhood ambivalence about it.
The scene of the search for leaven I described at the beginning of this Introduction is a practice I came to as an adult. I did not grow up watching my father walk through the house with a candle. I came to that ritual in my thirties, learned it alongside my husband and our growing family, and now I am the mother who watches her husband walk through the rooms with their children, looking for the last leaven of the year. The candle is in my children’s hands because we put it there. The festival that begins when the search is over is a festival we have chosen, with full knowledge, as our own.
I tell you this because I want you to understand the kind of teacher you are reading. I am not writing this book from the comfortable perch of inherited tradition, or from behind a glossy brochure. I am writing it from the position of someone who has tested, returned, tested again, and returned again. The frameworks I will teach you in the pages that follow are frameworks I have lived inside, sometimes painfully, and arrived at through evidence and study and the witness of my own body.
The Second Crisis
I would like to tell you that the lesson of the migraine years stayed learned in one round, and that I never had to search the house again. But that is not the story. The story is that seventeen years later, with seven children by then and an academy that had been teaching for over a decade, I came down with a crisis that frightened me more deeply than the migraines had.
It began with compassion. My husband and I took in two children who were relatives and who carried significant trauma. What began as an act of love became, over time, one of the most difficult seasons of our lives, and the strain on my body, eventually, was severe in a way I had not seen since the migraines.
In the summer of 2022, when I was forty-four years old, I developed severe hypothyroidism. The symptoms came on with a force that I cannot adequately describe to a reader who has not lived through them. I was exhausted in a way that sleep did not touch. My body temperature dropped. My weight changed without explanation. My eyesight began to diminish. My hair began to fall. My mind, which had been my best tool since I was a child, began to fog and slow. There were moments, in that summer, when I felt I might be close to death.
I had been teaching holistic healing for thirteen years at this point. I knew the herbal tradition. I knew the basics of thyroid physiology. I knew, in theory, more than enough to help someone in my situation. What I did not yet know was how to help myself, because the cause of the collapse was not simple. It was layered.
One layer belongs squarely to this book. The decades of modern environmental exposure to fluoride, bromine and chlorine — the halogens that compete with iodine, chemical cousins elbowing their way into a seat that was never theirs — had quietly displaced the iodine my thyroid required to function. You will read in Chapter 2 how fluoride got into the water and what it does to the thyroid. When I addressed that layer, gradually and with care, the recovery was profound. My energy returned. My strength returned. Even my eyesight, which had been diminishing, was restored.
The other layers — my diet, which needed simplifying for a season, the strain on my nervous system, and the strain on our home — I worked through with teachers and coaches, and they are a story for another book. The work is still ongoing. The candle is in my hand and I am still walking through the rooms. But the thyroid recovered. The body recovered.
What I Learned Across Both Crises
I want to step back now and tell you what I learned, across the seventeen years between the migraines in 2005 and 2006 and the thyroid crisis in the summer of 2022, that became the framework I now teach.
The first thing I learned is that the body is intelligent. It is not a random machine that breaks down for no reason. It is an exquisitely designed system that, when given the materials it needs and freed from the inputs that are damaging it, has remarkable capacity to heal. The body told me, through the migraines, that the vegetarian framework I had been holding so seriously was not feeding it. The body told me, through the thyroid, that something it needed had been pushed out by things it did not need. In both cases, the body was right. The body is, in my experience, almost always right, which is more than I can say for most diet books. The work of healing is largely the work of learning to listen.
The second thing I learned is that symptoms are messages, not enemies. The medical system I had been raised to trust sees symptoms as the problem. The fever is the problem; suppress it. The pain is the problem; medicate it. The fatigue is the problem; give the patient a stimulant. But the symptom is not the problem. The symptom is the body’s communication that something deeper is wrong. Silencing it is like pulling the battery out of a smoke alarm because the beeping is annoying. The wise response to a symptom is not to silence it but to listen to it. The medicine of suppression — which is much of modern Western medicine — is a medicine that has trained itself to ignore the very signal that would otherwise have led to the real cause. The medicine of restoration — which is what this book teaches — listens to the signal, traces it to its source, and corrects what is wrong upstream so that the symptom no longer needs to fire.
The third thing I learned is that the human being is not divisible. Mind, body, soul, family, work, faith — these are the names we give to different windows into the same single creation. The vegetarian ideology I held was not a religious commitment separate from my physical B12 status. The ideology was the thing that had caused the deficiency. When one window darkens, all the others darken with it.
The fourth thing I learned is that there is an order to the search. The family with the candle does not wander from room to room at random, and it does not stop at the first crumb it finds and declare victory. It starts where the leaven most often hides, goes through every room in turn, and does not call the house clean until the last corner has been searched. That is how this book is built.
The Order of the Search
Here is the path we will walk together, in thirteen chapters. Comfortable shoes recommended.
Chapter 1, Create Powerful Health, lights the candle. It gives you the one rule for healing that my teacher Dr. Richard Schulze brought every patient back to — stop doing what is making you sick, and begin doing what will heal you — and the idea of the Total Body Burden, the daily, decades-long load that wears the body down. It introduces the teachers whose work fills these pages, and four simple tests for weighing any expert, including them.
Then we search the house. Chapter 2, Fluoride: Poison on Tap, begins right at the kitchen tap, with what fluoride does to the brain, the bones and the thyroid. Chapter 3, The Toxic Home, opens the cabinets: the rest of what comes out of the tap, plastics and hormone disruptors, the “forever chemicals,” personal care and cleaning products, and the air inside the house. Chapter 4, Heavy Metals and Mold, goes into the walls and the old fillings, to mercury, lead, aluminum, arsenic and cadmium, and to the mold growing where no one looks (it counts on that).
Then we search the plate. Chapter 5, GMOs and Glyphosate, looks at how our crops have been changed and what they are sprayed with. Chapter 6, Industrial Seed Oils, clears the “vegetable” oils from the pantry, scare quotes and all, and brings back the traditional fats. Chapter 7, MSG and Excitotoxins, follows the flavor enhancers that overstimulate the brain and the many names they hide behind, like a suspect with a drawer full of passports. Chapter 8, Sugar, HFCS and Artificial Sweeteners, tells the story of sugar, the science the sugar industry shaped, and why diet drinks are no escape, whatever the can promises.
Chapter 9, EMFs: The Invisible Toxin, searches for the leaven you cannot see: the wireless radiation that fills the modern home, and the simple steps that lower it. No tinfoil hats required.
Chapter 10, Sitting, Sunlight and Red Light, steps outside. It shows how a life spent sitting indoors under artificial light keeps toxins in, and how getting up, walking, sweating and spending time in the sun, as Dr. Joseph Mercola teaches, help the body let them go. Bring a hat.
Chapter 11, When Medicine Harms, opens the medicine cabinet — not to empty it, but to understand it. It tells you how much harm medical care itself can cause, gives you Dr. Vernon Coleman’s most important law, and shows you how to become an informed partner in your own care.
Then, with the leaven found, we come to the fire, which is the satisfying part. Chapter 12, How the Body Detoxifies, teaches how a toxin actually leaves the body: the three stages of detoxification, the liver’s work, binders, sweat and the lymph, and what to do when a detox makes you feel worse. Chapter 13, Nourish and Cleanse, brings it all together: Dr. Schulze’s cleansing program to open the exits and clear the burden, Dr. Weston A. Price’s traditional foods to rebuild, and a simple first week to begin.
Do not try to do it all at once. The family with the candle searches one room at a time. Read a chapter, make one change, and then read the next. A candle, not a bulldozer. The rooms will get cleaner as we proceed. The body that lives in them — the body the Creator made for you, the body that has been speaking to you, perhaps for years, in the language of symptoms you have not yet been able to translate — will begin to be heard.
Light the candle. We begin.
Footnotes and sources for this chapter
Sources and Further Reading
On the biblical framework of the search for leaven
- Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 7a–8a, on the search for leaven the night before Passover.
- Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Leavened Bread and Matzah, on the laws of the search.
- The annual Passover Haggadah, for the liturgical context.
On the Hebrew word for restoration
- Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, entry on the word arukah.
- Jeremiah 30:17, 33:6; Isaiah 58:8; Nehemiah 4:1 (3:38 in some texts); 2 Chronicles 24:13 — the biblical occurrences of the word and its cognates.
On Mayim Vega and Arukah
- Vega, M. The Arukah Method: A Biblical Framework for Healing the Five Levels of the Soul. The author’s previous book, which lays out the full framework of the five levels of the soul.
- Vega, M. The Arukah Field Guide to Orthomolecular Nutrition. The companion volume to the present book, focused on the orthomolecular tradition.
- arukah.com — the Arukah Holistic Healer certification program, which trains students in Naturopathic Herbalism, Holistic Life Coaching, and Online Business and Marketing.