Our Need For Physical Contact
Earlier in 2020, the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) was declared a global pandemic and affected the world in unprecedented ways. Stay-at-home orders were issued from national and local governments. Restrictions varied depending on region, but even the most remote locations took precautions to prevent the spread of the disease. The economy and worldwide travel slowed in a way that has never been seen before. Most people remained in their homes under self-quarantine. Physical contact with anyone besides immediate family ceased. Shaking hands with someone, whether you know them or not, became a questionable practice. I believe if people continue to distance themselves from one another even after the crisis is over, we will struggle as a society to build new relationships. It is important for us to understand why we need contact with our fellow human beings.
The quarantine changed the way we interact in our communities. Many of these changes have a negative impact. Social distancing has been implemented to prevent the spread of disease, yet it creates a psychological boundary and uneasiness when near other people. Schools closed, forcing students to complete their 2019/2020 school year from home. Sporting events were canceled. Places of conversation like offices, restaurants, bars, and barber shops locked their doors. The spiritual community suffered greatly as churches, fellowships, and Bible studies could not hold in-person meetings and were limited to online services if they had the means. The long-term effects on the economy from these closings are yet to be determined. Even more so, the emotional toll this situation has had on people is still weighing heavily. Individuals who have lost their jobs are struggling to find new ones. Students who lost education, proms, and graduations will have to live with the frustration of missing out. The isolation has caused some to go stir-crazy. Some of these issues are minor and have been remedied but some can be overwhelming. There is a fear the death toll from COVID-19 will rise due to suicides after the crisis is over. Only the LORD and His Spirit can bring peace to those in distress.
On the positive side, the quarantine required families to draw closer together. Children who typically attended public school were now receiving more attention from their parents than usual. Walks and bike rides as a family increased in the suburbs (family dogs also benefited from this greatly). Eating out less caused families to spend more nights around the dinner table for meals and board games. You could say this pandemic has simultaneously pulled our community apart while bringing families closer together. Some have found a greater appreciation for spending time with loved ones. This contact is essential to satisfy our basic need for human contact.
I recently developed a new teaching entitled The 21 Acts of Covenant. This is a message that I believe will have an incredible impact on how we interact and form relationships. I have identified 21 unique acts that we do with each other that build relationships. I have begun the long process of writing a book on the subject. The first of these acts of covenant has everything to do with physical contact and how it creates and affirms covenant relationships with one another. With COVID-19 bringing the avoidance of physical contact to the forefront of our thinking, I believe it is timely for me to share the first chapter of my project in this article. As society slowly reverts back to the way it was before this pandemic began, it is my hope that we all learn a new appreciation for the contact that we share with loved ones and brethren we are in covenant with.
21 Acts of Covenant: The Building Blocks of Relationships
Chapter 1: The Laying on of Hands
The “laying on of hands” is the first of the 21 acts of covenant. Placing your hand upon something establishes a connection between you and the item being touched. Examples of this practice can be seen throughout the history of mankind in all walks of life and in every culture. Perhaps the most common instance of this practice is the shaking of another person’s hand when meeting them for the very first time. Beyond that, what we do with our hands has a great deal of importance to the relationships we have with each other, our God, and the rest of creation.
One of the most common forms of greeting practiced around the world is the shaking of hands. Chances are you have shaken the hand of any person you have ever met in your life. Yes, it is possible to know someone without shaking their hand, but can you ever say that you have truly met them? Sure, you could meet someone online, but without making physical contact with them, it is hard for that relationship to seem ‘real.’ After your handshake with someone new, you have now entered into a covenant with that person (albeit a very weak covenant). If you were to never do anything else with that person you could at least say that you “shook their hand.” This is simply the first step in making a covenant.
Shaking hands is not just for greetings. It is also a sign of appreciation, congratulations, or an agreement being made. A handshake might even be the first and last act in the establishment of a new covenant, contract, or accord made between two parties, even ones that had previously been enemies (Picture world leaders signing a peace treaty or Sarah Connor shaking hands with the T-800 at the end of Terminator 2 if you wish). In many of these cases, a handshake is an act of covenant that often occurs alongside other acts of covenants such as the signing of a contract.
The intention in one’s heart impacts the degree of connection established by the hand-to-hand contact. There can be a good handshake and a bad handshake. You can feel a strong connection with someone from a firm handshake and a weaker connection from a timid handshake. There is also a big difference between the handshake of a boy and a girl meeting each other for the first time and when they hold hands for the first time on a date. The former act begins a covenant, the later act takes the covenant to a new level. In other cultures and countries, a handshake has a different significance based on which hand is used or how extended one’s arm is in offering the handshake. Without belaboring the point, there is much more to a simple handshake than you may realize.
The building of covenants goes beyond just hand-to-hand contact. A very emotional connection is made when a parent holds their newborn baby for the first time. Skin-to-skin contact between a mother and a newborn has been scientifically proven to have great benefits for both the mother and child. This increases the bond between them. A relationship between a man and a woman reaches new levels when the hands of one party makes contact with a shoulder, the back, a hip, the face, or other parts of the other. Each new contact increases the strength of the covenant between the man and woman. Both the nature of the contact AND the intent of the person are crucial to growing the relationship. They must work hand-in-hand [pun intended]. If the nature of the contact becomes more intimate yet the motives of the person are determined to be impure, then the new form of contact could diminish the relationship as opposed to strengthen it.
Covenants do not grow only from when first contact is made. Relationships grow every time subsequent contact is made, even if you have been in covenant with the other person for a long time. Everyone has relationships where you might shake one's hand or give a hug every time you see them. Covenants are affirmed and remembered every time contact is made. We will learn later that certain acts of covenant are established for the sole purpose of remembrance.
If physical contact can be a positive interaction toward the building of a covenant, then can a different form of physical contact be a negative interaction leading to the destruction of one? The answer is ‘yes.’ This is the first instance in which a negative act of covenant can abolish a positive act of covenant. Any form of physical contact with the intent of doing harm, physical abuse, or even physical neglect has the opposite effect when it comes to creating a relationship. These acts have the ability to destroy covenant relationships by undoing what has been done before. If a hand you once shook in friendship was suddenly used to cause harm to you, then the covenant-building benefit of that handshake is voided. Even minor actions performed by a small member of the body, your hands, can have great ramifications upon someone’s life.
This is why child abuse and sexual abuse are especially heinous. The hands of a parent that once held a new life and are intended to nurture, comfort, and care for a child should never be turned to cause trauma to that child. For the child, it is a shocking reversal of what the hands of a parent are intended to do. In the case of sexual abuse, such abhorrent physical harm destroys not only immediate covenant relationships, but also taints future covenant relationships. Intimate physical contact is intended to bring forth life and be joyful and pleasurable. A negative act in the same realm destroys life in the most hurtful and painful ways.
Have you ever considered the importance of a handshake between two opposing teams before and after a sporting match? Before a game, match, or contest, players may greet each other, shake hands, etc. knowing full well they are about to battle one another in a physical and/or mental contest. This is done to symbolize that each contestant is about to act against one another with the intent to best their opponent but not with malicious intent to harm them. Even in the most brutal of combat sports (boxing, mixed-martial arts, etc.) the act of “touching gloves” or a fist-bump in the first seconds of Round 1 is crucial to the sportsmanship of the contest. Equally important to the handshake before a match is the one after. Players from both teams just spent the last hour or more engaging in physical combat. An onlooker could conclude that players truly intended to harm individuals of the other team even within the confines of the rules. After the game is over, it is crucial for individuals to make amends following the ‘combat’ they had just endured for the sake of their relationship with one another. After any sport, you will typically see a smorgasbord of handshakes and greetings between coaches and players. In amateur sports, especially among children in Little League, the handshake is formalized by teams lining up along a baseline and walking past each other while giving high-fives to every participant and mumbling “good game” a dozen times.
This is an important lesson to learn from an early age. Some professional athletes have described what it is like to have friends on an opposing team. During the course of the game they are enemies and are friends again when the clock hits zero. I believe the aggressive physical contact made during a game (even if done within the rules for sport and entertainment) diminishes the covenant relationship between opponents. The handshake at the end of the game, in turn, restores the covenant relationship between those individuals. During the course of the game, emotions can run high and a real fight can break out. If you have ever seen a player storm off after a contest without greeting his opponent, it is a dead giveaway that harm has come to their relationship as a result of the contest. This is because a negative act of covenant that happened during the course of play has overridden or replaced a positive act of covenant (such as the handshake before the game). Instead of that, we should see players extend their hands to help even their opponent up off the ground during a sports contest. This shows true sportsmanship, a covenant between all athletes. (Even the high-fives in the course of the game are minor acts of covenant between teammates.)
Human beings have a need for physical contact. It says in Genesis 2:18, “It is not good for man to be alone.” We were created to be social creatures and to seek out relationships and build covenants. The sabbath and holidays listed in Leviticus 23 are all centered on “holy convocations” where we are commanded to join together with fellow brethren. One of the reasons these appointed times are given to us by God is to meet this primal need.
I am sure you or someone you know has said before, “I need a hug.” This is a result of realizing it has been too long since you last made loving physical contact. We may be able to survive without contact from others, we do, however, need it to thrive. I first learned about humans’ need for physical contact as a child watching the cartoon X-Men. The show had a character named Rogue whose superpower was to steal the abilities of another person by just touching them. This physical contact would also harm the other person. Unhappily for her, she couldn’t control her power and was forced to always wear gloves and be careful around others. The cartoon depicted her sadness when other characters were able to hold hands yet she was not able to share that connection with another person. Even though the cartoon was fictional, the portrayal of someone’s emotional need to make skin-to-skin contact was real.
Using your hands to touch and establish relationships applies not only to other people but to other parts of creation as well. You can even establish connections with inanimate objects. In many cases, picking something up takes ownership of the object (as the famous phrase goes, possession is 9/10 of the law). This is also why it is such an offense in some cases to touch something that does not belong to you; by covenant, it belongs to someone else. (Scotty Smalls knows this all too well when he took the Babe Ruth signed baseball in the movie The Sandlot.)
Have you ever noticed people taking note when they get to hold in their hands some significant object or historical relic? (This is a regular occurrence on History Channel shows like Pawn Stars and American Pickers.) Touching an artifact connects them to its history or even to the previous owner. This feeling can be very personal to an individual and be different from one person to the next. This can come from holding something that belonged to a distant relative or someone famous. One might feel excited holding the first edition of a book or touching an antique piece of furniture. A bond can form by placing your hand on a building, a rock, or even the ground in a particular place. This can make you feel like you are a part of what you are touching and what you are touching is a part of you. (I am reminded of a scene in the movie Star Trek: First Contact where Captain Picard goes back in time and gets to touch the first vessel to ever travel at warp speed. This was a moving experience even for a fictional character.)
Perhaps the most biblical example of laying hands upon something is the act of laying hands upon an animal intended to be sacrificed to God. In the first five chapters of the book of Leviticus, the Scripture outlines five types of offerings that a person of Israel could bring before God. In case of the burnt offering (ch.1), peace offering (ch.3), and sin offering (ch.4), the person was to lay their hand on the head of the animal that was to be sacrificed. Some people thought this act was to lay one's sins upon the animal to be sacrificed on the altar. The problem with this is that only one of those three offerings had anything to do with sin. The burnt offerings and the peace offerings were brought because the person wanted to worship and give thanks to God. So, what was the purpose of laying one's hands on the animal? It was to establish a connection between the offeror and the offering. This was done so the person was in essence giving a part of themselves to God. This ceremony illustrates just how important making hand contact with something truly is. Consider now the story of the woman with the issue of blood in the Gospel of Luke.
43 And a woman who had a hemorrhage for twelve years, and could not be healed by anyone, 44 came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His cloak, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. 45 And Yeshua said, “Who is the one who touched Me?” And while they were all denying it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing in on You.” 46 But Yeshua said, “Someone did touch Me, for I was aware that power had gone out of Me.” 47 When the woman saw that she had not escaped notice, she came trembling and fell down before Him, and declared in the presence of all the people the reason why she had touched Him, and how she had been immediately healed. 48 And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.” Luke 8:43-48
Just touching the hem of the Messiah’s garment brought miraculous healing to the woman. Even though Yeshua stated that it was her faith that made her well, it is clear that physical contact played a crucial role in the story of this healing. Great things happen when you come into contact with the power of God. Unfortunately, the Bible also makes it very clear that if you touch something that is unclean, then that uncleanness is transferred to you.
2 Or if a person touches any unclean thing, whether a carcass of an unclean beast or the carcass of unclean cattle or a carcass of unclean swarming things, though it is hidden from him and he is unclean, then he will be guilty. 3 Or if he touches human uncleanness, of whatever sort his uncleanness may be with which he becomes unclean, and it is hidden from him, and then he comes to know it, he will be guilty. Leviticus 5:2-3
Verse 2 refers to unclean animals that are detailed in Leviticus chapter 11. Verse 3 references human uncleanness that is detailed in Leviticus chapter 15. Entire chapters of the Bible are written for us to learn what is appropriate to touch and what is not. We are also warned about this matter in the New Testament very clearly by the Apostle Paul.
22 Do not lay hands upon anyone too hastily and thereby share responsibility for the sins of others; keep yourself free from sin. 1 Timothy 5:22
You may or may not know that Orthodox Jews prohibit handshakes with strangers of the opposite sex. This restriction is called the laws of Negiah (touch in Hebrew). This prohibition is derived from Leviticus 18:19 which states, “you shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness as long as she is in her customary impurity [menstruation].” Rabbis in Judaism state the primary reason for restricting this contact is that touching a person of the opposite gender is essentially a sexual act. Some may say shaking hands is a platonic courtesy while others may say physical contact desensitizes us to a connection that should be reserved only for immediate family members. These Scriptural interpretations clearly focus on the “you shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness” part of the verse. While I respect this interpretation, I believe the emphasis of the verse and the caution of the commandment is about avoiding the physical contact with uncleanness to keep one clean and pure before God. For either reason, we should respect and learn from the boundaries set forth by different religions and cultures.
Islam and other Eastern religions/cultures follow similar prohibitions on physical contact with members of the opposite gender or when greeting a stranger. This is one of the reasons bowing as opposed to handshakes is the appropriate greeting in some parts of the world.
The touching of unclean things has sinful consequences according to the Bible. Perhaps even more so, the touching of things that are holy before God has even more dire consequences. Commandments of this nature were given to keep that which is holy from being defiled. Examples of this are Mount Sinai and the Ark of the Covenant.
10The Lord also said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments; 11and let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. 12You shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, ‘Beware that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death. 13No hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through; whether beast or man, he shall not live.’ When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.” Exodus 19:10-13
1Now the Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they had approached the presence of the Lord and died. 2The Lord said to Moses: “Tell your brother Aaron that he shall not enter at any time into the holy place inside the veil, before the mercy seat which is on the ark, or he will die; for I will appear in the cloud over the mercy seat. Leviticus 16:1-2
We see in 2 Samuel 6:6-7 that a man of Israel (Uzzah) was struck dead simply by touching the Ark of the Covenant. This event showed the seriousness of respecting the boundary between what is holy and what is common. It should also make you realize the importance of what you do with your hands and how it can have great ramifications upon your life not only in the physical but in your spiritual life as well. The Messiah said this:
If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. Matthew 5:30
I have never met anyone who has done what this verse suggests they should do. If someone were to cut off their own hand for any reason, their sanity would immediately be put into question. I don't believe this is the intention of Yeshua's words. What I take from this verse is how we should be mindful of the actions of our hands. The fact that we commonly put our hands together when we pray shows to our God that we are mindful of our hands when entering the presence of His holiness. This ensures that we make no rash actions when our focus is 100% on the Lord. We affirm our covenant with God every time we pray.
So how do we make hand-contact with God? We do so when we hold the Word of God in our hands. This joins us to the Author and Finisher of our faith. Most believers can remember the first Bible they ever owned. Whether you realized it or not, it was an act of covenant between you and God when you first held that book. When you take hold of your Bible, you take ownership of the promises contained within. Your Bible is very personal to you and is a part of you. Many believers can even remember the look of their parents’ Bibles because they are essentially a part of who they are/were (if they have passed from this life). Touching the Word of God makes a connection between us and our Heavenly Father whether we are simply studying the Scripture or swearing to speak truth. It is like shaking hands with God. If you have ever made this connection to the Word of God, then may He be found in you and you in Him.
SideBar:
Now knowing the impact that hand contact has on the forming and affirming of covenants, consider these examples to take note of in the future:
A high five
A handshake to meet someone
A handshake to finalize a business agreement
A man asking a father for his daughter’s hand in marriage
A father placing the hands of his daughter in her husband’s hand at a wedding.
A couple holding hands on a date
A couple holding hands at their wedding
Intimate hand/body contact
Holding your baby for the first time
Putting hands together when you pray
Holding hands with others while praying
Placing your hands on someone you are praying for
Touching a Torah Scroll during a processional
Placing your hand on a Bible and swearing to speak the truth
