From Brain to Semen

Illustration of embryonic development

A saying attributed to Kabbalah says, “a drop exudes from the brain and develops into semen”.

We know full well from Judaic tradition that "the generations are declining", such that a modern-day savant is more akin to a donkey than to any of our sages. So what did they know that we don't know?

Torah needn't apologize to "modern scientific wisdom", when, in fact, the more science progresses, the more it inches closer to Torah truth. The great wisdom of science is, after all, a huge myth. In fact, if you survey the last 100 years, what you'll find is that most scientific discoveries proved to be counter-intuitive! (e.g., see here).

Those who never learned Tanya, chapter 2, will have missed another such reference. There it states clearly, "... the child is derived from its father's brain," meaning to say, "semen, from the father's brain". But since when does semen derive from brain? We, the enlightened generation, are entitled to ask. Does it not, in fact, get manufactured and stored in the testicles (or ovaries)?  Any student of anatomy or embryology would be bewildered to discover semen derives from the brain.

But if Torah-derived sources tell us so, we do not doubt their veracity. For that which manifests in physicality derives from its spiritual configuration. What is down here follows in step from what is up there.

I've read hard-pressed reasons such as - the pituitary gland secretes a hormone to effect testosterone and sperm production, so here we see the brain-semen connection. Perhaps, but the sages do not wish to mislead in their statements. If they say it derives there, that's what they meant.

One could explain the child resulted from a brain-triggered event, after all, because the father thought conjugally of the mother, which aroused him, which eventually led to offspring. Thoughts in the mind initiated the whole matter. But this isn't so because the Tanya specifically uses physical terms -- semen and brain -- rather than "thoughts".

So a strictly cellular, somatic mapping for what the sages meant might be explained as follows:

In my first year of medical school, some 40 years ago, I was selected to deliver a lecture on developmental embryology. In particular, it was about the development of the organism's testicular tissue, from its earliest stages onward.

By divine providence this lecture fell into my lap to deliver, something that perhaps now, decades later, lets me shed light on what I learned back then. Here's what I remember. (I was using then a textbook I've since lost. I couldn't find that textbook in used book stores or on the internet.)

The crux of it is: Migration is a ubiquitous feature of primordial development. The embryological cells that become the substrate for testicular or ovarian tissue begin their journey in the mostly undifferentiated embryonic mass from a location that later differentiates into brain tissue. These brain-region cells migrate down through the embryonic tissues, like salmon up a river, until they finally localize in what will develop thereafter into testes and ovaries.

This journey, from the brain area to the seat of sperm or egg cell production, this embryological ontogenesis of the gonads, is what I believe our sages spoke of. There is cell migration from the brain region to the testicle region, a move that happens in an early developmental stage of the embryo.

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P.S. Speaking of phenomenal medical insight provided by Torah, I remember visiting a Chabad shul in Israel and seeing high up, atop a high bookcase, two books hermetically placed. I climbed up, took them down and looked into each. My eye caught two items that blew my mind.

One sefer, by Rabbi Chaim Vital, who transcribed much of the Arizal's teachings, speaks of 3 layers of membrane over the brain. That he knew this stunned me. Surely he did not get his knowledge by sawing open skulls (a tough job, especially if you don't want to destroy the delicate wrappings of the brain), nor did he fix and stain tissues and examine them under a microscope.

The other sefer, by the Tzemach Tzedek, made mention of the number of vessels in the liver. I was flabbergasted. The liver is the largest internal organ of the body and entirely perfused with blood vessels going every which way. How anyone could arrive at a number from this amazingly complex vessel network seems outright preposterous! Yet here comes the prince in his generation and states something any professor of hematology would laugh at. The Tzemach Tzedek, however, will enjoy the last laugh.

I'm sure the Tzemach Tzedek never owned a microscope, dissected a liver, nor counted vessels to get to his number. Did Moses inspect every mammal in the world before he asserted the pig, and only the pig (from all the animals in the whole universe), has split hooves and chews its cud? Of course not! Similarly, the our sages get their "scientific" knowledge from special insight provided by Torah and Talmud.