We continue our discussion of Bitachon and health.
There are certain biological/scientific systems that seem fairly clear. For the most part, if have strep, you take antibiotics and you are cured. (Of course, as we have already discussed, the invention of penicillin was an accident and so we see it was Hashem that created it)
But a Baal Bitachon knows that’s he’s relying on Hashem for his health.
Rabbi Moshe Kuessous a’h was a tzaddik in our times-literally (there should be a book about him). He was very ill and passed away some years ago. When son in law gave a hesped (eulogy), he related the following, which shows the depth of the Rabbi’s Bitachon.
When the rabbi was sick, he had difficulty sleeping at night. His doctor prescribed a sleeping pill. He took the pill and slept great. But he was very disturbed. Doesn’t Hashem put me to sleep? He thought. It bothered him that a pill worked so easily. As a Baal Bitachon he didn’t believe he should rely on a pill.
Some areas are black and white- like a sleeping pill that will automatically put you out, but there are areas that Hashem leaves to chaos.
The weather, for example, is all chaos, as our Rishonim tell us. Hashem can send the rain or withhold it, and there’s nothing we can do. You can try any thing you want. You can plan a big, beautiful, outdoor wedding. But if it rains, you’re in trouble and you have absolutely no control over that. Hashem is showing us that He in charge of storms, mudslides, all of it, and we can’t predict it. It’s chaos.
The same applies to the human body. We see this with dieting:
We can take ten people, give them the same food to eat, have them run the same amount and yet there will be one that loses weight and one that doesn’t. People may blame metabolism but its chaos.
Even the same person gets different results at different times. There is no clarity.
There’s even an ice cream diet says you can lose weight! We can send man to the moon but we can’t figure out how to lose weight in scientific fashion. What will do it definitively? There is no system. Hashem left the area of dieting to chaos on purpose.
The Atkins diet, devised and made famous by Robert Atkins, is a low carb, high fat, fad diet. When Atkins died at 72 years of age, he died from injuries sustained when he’d slipped on ice and fractured his skull. Someone with Bitachon realizes that a person can have the best diet in the world, but then slip on the ice and crack his skull. Your health is in Hashem’s hands. If you don’t add the element of Bitachon, you’re left with the chaos. Hence, our title today: Dieting and the Chaos Theory.