Q:
Is it true that good middos can make a person healthy?
A:
We have to know that the emotions and the body are built to cooperate. Good emotions are healthy for the body. When you’re calm and happy, it’s beneficial for your body. When you’re downcast and depressed, it’s poison. When you’re angry, it’s poison. When you’re jealous, it’s poison. When you hate something, it’s poison.
Now you might think that this is just evangelism, that it’s just propaganda, but you should know it’s not so. It’s been proven already by experiments. Beyond any doubt, a calm happy mind is the very best thing. Sometimes it’s better than vitamins. Sometimes it’s better than food. If people are happy, they can get along with much less nourishment.
Did I tell you once a story about the Vilna Gaon? Forty years ago (1930) I heard this story from a very old man, an old rav, and he told what he had heard from his great-grandmother. That’s a tradition! Forty years ago, a very old man—I think he was eighty years old—related what his great grandmother had told him from her mother.
Her mother was pregnant with the great-grandmother, and in those days the pious pregnant women went to take a look at the Vilna Gaon, zichrono livracha. That’s what they did. They hoped that some of the holiness of the Vilna Gaon would be impressed on their children. I’m just telling the story—it’s not important for our subject right now. And so, she went to see the Vilna Gaon but she discovered she wasn’t the only one. There was a whole crowd of women there waiting already; they were waiting early in the morning for when the Gra was going to leave his house to go to the beis hamedrash.
So the shamash came out first. “Ladies,” he said, “The Gra has to come out. You have to go away. You can’t stand around.”
So the ladies dispersed. But this woman—the great-grandmother’s mother—wouldn’t give up. So she went under a bridge of planks over which the Gra had to pass and she decided she’d look up from beneath the planks. They were open and she’d take a look at the Gra from underneath. And as the Gra was passing over the bridge, she looked up and she saw that under his beard, he wasn’t skinny. There was some fat there. That’s the tradition handed over.
Now to you it may not mean anything, but to those old generations, they understood this and they asked a kashe. It was well known that the Gra didn’t eat much. He ate very little, the bare minimum necessary for his health. But fat has to come from someplace after all and that was the puzzle. The great-grandmother’s mother was smart enough to understand that it’s a puzzle. How is it that the Gra was plump under his beard?
Now, the Gra wasn’t a man who lived in seclusion—he wasn’t someone who you couldn’t get in to see him unless you went through a battery of secretaries and gabbaim. You wanted to see the Gra, so you looked in through the window and there he was. He lived in a little house. He was accessible. There were no secrets about the Gra.
It could be if it was a tzaddik of today, nobody ever saw him eat but it’s no proof. Because when the time comes for him to eat, he locks all the doors and he gets busy. But not the Gra—he couldn’t do it. In the small towns, in the little houses, everybody knew everybody else’s business. They knew the Gra ate almost nothing. And that was the puzzle.
So the great-grandmother’s mother said—I’m not telling you anything of my own; I’m merely telling you the tradition—“We learn from this,” she said, “that kedushah macht fat; holiness makes somebody fat.” It means healthy fat.
That was the tradition of the olden days. Only I like to rationalize a little bit, so I added to this. Kedusha means a person has perfection of character too. And perfection of character causes such an equilibrium in the metabolism that on a smaller amount of food, a person is able to gain much more nourishment. The little that he eats is so well assimilated, it goes straight to the place where it’s supposed to go. When a person’s middos are in order, when he’s happy and has excellent character traits, his body functions well. He’ll be vigorous and healthy.
(June 1975)
