Imagine having your mother touch your cheek. Then imagine having your spouse or someone you love romantically touch your cheek. Then imagine having a baby touch your cheek. Then imagine having someone you hate and fear touch your cheek. They're very different feelings, aren't they? They all involve the same nerve endings, stimulated in basically the same ways, but with emotional content that varies to every point of the compass. This is because the sense of touch communicates and actually conveys emotion, communicates and conveys love (both good and bad) between people. That's why the Lord so often touched people as a way of healing them; through touch he could convey His love, which is life itself, to the people he touched. It's also why the people of Israel were not to touch the Ark of the Covenant -- their base loves would be conveyed to the holiness represented by the Ark.

140. Internal Meaning of Ezekiel, Chapter 17

How the Ancient Church was instituted by the Lord, and what it became among the Jewish nation (the eagle meaning the understanding, and Lebanon the rational of the church).

1-3 Those who were in the capacity to understand were brought to the church. (11, 2)

4-5 They were brought into the Lord's spiritual church, and instructed. (11, 2)

6 They became the church. (11, 2)

7-8 Others succeeded, who had not the rational of the understanding, of whom the church was to consist, and to whom all Divine truths were given, because the Word was given them, (11, 2)

9-10 but they utterly rejected all things of the church, so that they could not but be devastated of them. (2)

11-13 They destroyed them by reasonings from the natural man, (2)

14 excepting as yet a few, (2)

15-16 who, however, were natural external without an internal. (2)

17-18 Therefore they have destroyed those things which were of the church. (2)

20 They will perish by means of reasonings from the natural man, and will therefore be dispersed. (2)

22-24 The Lord will establish a new church of others, in their place. (11)