Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. We continue to talk about the topic of Bitachon as it relates to anxiety. Many years ago, I read about a young man named David Rosmarin, who, as a college sophomore in 1999, began feeling anxious. Anxiety over academic performance and social life are fairly typical for college students, but eventually he had difficulty falling asleep, at which point he considered consulting with the campus psychologist. So after a weekly Torah class, he approached the rabbi of the Hillel House and asked if he thought it was a good idea to seek professional help for his anxiety. Without answering the question, the rabbi proceeded straight to the bookcase, took out a book and brought it to the photocopy machine. When he finished photocopying it, he handed David a 61 page document, the Shaar Bitachon/ Gate of Reliance section of the Hovot Halevavot, and told him, “I don't know if you should speak to a mental health professional about your problem quite yet, but I do know that reading these pages will help you. Learn this text for 10 to 15 minutes each night, before you go to sleep, and contemplate the concepts that you've read.” David followed the rabbi's prescription and later gave the following account of the results: “To my surprise, within eight weeks, not only wasI able to fall asleep without difficulty, but my anxiety had almost completely vanished. Even more remarkable, the improvement in my psychological state had occurred despite the fact that the anxiety producing factors had only gotten worse. I was faced with a grueling exam schedule, worse social roles than ever before, and complete uncertainty about my future. What changed was my attitude towards my difficulties and towards life in general. I'd increased my level of trust in Hashem and realized that the events in my life were ultimately controlled by Hashem and therefore, I had little to worry about.”
David eventually went on to become a psychologist, and he's been using Shaar Bitachon ever since. He began his practice to help people struggle with anxiety. Developing trust in Hashem is the greatest medication. There are no side effects and the cost is free.
After reading this article, I was a little intrigued by the seemingly magical powers of Shaar Bitachon, so
I reached out to this now, Dr. Rosmarin, who is now the head of the Center for Anxiety, currently nationwide, and I met with him. Since then, we’ve forged a friendship, and we'll see later on what I've learned from that friendship. But he continues to live that practice. What was more interesting was that when he was working in McLean Hospital in Boston, which is an affiliate of Harvard Medical
School's Mental Hospital, he was walking the halls as a on-staff psychologist with his yarmulke, when a non-Jewish patient said, “Are you a rabbi?” He said, “No, I'm a practicing doctor here,”
“But can I ask you some questions? Are you Jewish, are you religious?” He saw that many of the patients on the psychiatric ward were seeking spiritual counsel, so he started using a more spiritual, less religious approach.
And it was working, to the point that the higher administration of the hospital realized the need for it, and they eventually developed a Division of Spirituality and Mental Health. To this day, he runs that program, where they integrate spirituality into the hospital, which means that they ask patients, Would you like to have spirituality )they don’t use the word religion( in your care?
Their studies show that people that have spirituality in their care get better faster than those that don't. There's a lot of data on this, but the point is, we cannot underestimate the impact of our Torah and how it helps, not just our spiritual selves, but our physical selves and our human psyche as well, and will make us emotionally more healthy.
We'll explain how it works in a future class.
Have a wonderful day.