The Land of Healthy Jewish
Israel isn't just alive. It teaches health, balance, and wholeness.
Healthy Israel - Part 3 of 6
What does health mean?
In Jewish tradition, health means balance (Rambam [Maimonides]1 and Ramchal [Luzzato]2).
Life isn’t a building or machine with lots of unrelated parts. Life is a dynamic relationship of countless factors working together in seamless synchrony. If one element is lacking or over-expressed - even if it’s off-schedule - the entire organism suffers.
All life functions work well only within a narrow range. Biology calls this homeostasis.
Diabetes means too much blood glucose, anemia too little iron.
A weak immune system is vulnerable to infections, too reactive is prone to autoimmune disease.
Healthy lifestyle includes sleeping, eating, and moving at regular intervals, each activity in its proper time.
When balance is lost, we become sick. Healing results from everyone returning to playing their roles in harmony.
The Land of Health
Israel’s life role-models how health means balance.
Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi (1075-1141) wrote3 that Israel was chosen to be the Chosen Land because of its balanced climate and central location.
Israel isn’t extremely hot or cold, high or low, dry or wet, north or south, east or west.
The Negev in the south is a desert; the peak of Mount Hermon in the north has snow all year.
The middle of the country receives adequate rain in the winter to carry through the dry summer.
There are no violent hurricanes or tornadoes. (But there are earthquakes.)
Three Continents
As I explained several weeks ago, this tiny country contains geographical, meteorological, and biological elements of the three continents it straddles: Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Not far from where I’m sitting in Bet Shemesh, you can stand on a grass-covered hilltop that ends an arable landmass stretching all the way to Europe and Russia.
Looking down, you can watch the brown desert stretch out to Arabia and Africa.
Right here in Israel, the climates, plants, and animals of three continents flow into each other.
Jerusalem to the Dead Sea
I lived for the better part of a decade in a windy northeastern Jerusalem neighborhood, and was privy every day to a profound expression of Israel’s message of balance.
The Hebrew word for spirit, ruach, is the same as for wind and air. Not surprising, because we intuitively know that the spiritual rises upward, like wind and air. God is up in heaven, not down in a cave.
This explains the Talmudic teaching that the Temple Mount is the highest place in the world: it’s not physically higher than Everest, nor even nearby Hermon, but is where human consciousness beholds God’s heavenly presence.
In the Land of Healthy Jewish, such an extreme expression of spiritual height must be balanced by the other end of life’s spectrum.
For that reason, if you follow Highway 1 east of spiritually high Jerusalem, the road plunges downward, and then down some more, stopping only upon reaching the lowest place on physical earth, the Dead Sea. Right above the beach you can drink a beer at The Lowest Bar in the World.
Israel bonds the highest spirituality together with the lowest physicality, revealing to the world the inner nature of health.
Off Balance
Yet like every healthy body, Israel can become off-balance, and consequently unhealthy.
In Torah sources, Israel’s state of health is expressed by the winter rain cycle. When they come on time, nurturing the year’s new life, Natural Israel is healthy and thriving, and supports its children with bountiful harvests.
When they don’t arrive, or if they come at the wrong time, Natural Israel falls ill, and its children, in turn, suffer from drought.
Last year, Israel was dry for most of the winter. I shared then about the specific significance of rain in Israel:
The rains finally came, but very late. I showed you how that affected the annual plant growth in Natural Israel:
Several weeks ago I noticed some unseasonal wild sprouts. (This was before the recent rains.) In the land of health, every plant has a message about healthy living. Take a look:
May Israel and all its children be blessed with a year of rain, sustenance, health, and peace.
The Healthy Jew is supported by readers like you. If you find this newsletter interesting or helpful, consider a paid subscription. Proactively advocate for wellness: don't wait for illness. Israel Needs Healthy Jews!
Guide 3:11. See also Laws of Character Traits 2:1 and Introduction to Avos Chapter 4 where Maimonides compares in detail physical health with character health - while explaining at length that character health is the balance between extremes.
See Da’as Tevunos 128-130
Kuzari 1:95. Ramban [Nachmanides] made a similar comment to Leviticus 18:25.