Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. We’ll continue to talk about the topic of bitachon (trust) as it relates to anxiety. Many years ago, I read it about a man—or a boy at that time—a young man named David Rosmarin, who was a college sophomore in 1999 and began feeling anxious. Anxiety over his academic performance and social life was fairly typical of the anxieties experienced by college students. Eventually, he was having difficulty falling asleep, at which point he considered consulting with the campus psychologist. 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 went straight to the bookcase, took out a book, and brought it to the photocopying machine. When he finished photocopying it, he handed David a 61-page document, the Sha'ar HaBitachon, and wrote it down on a piece of paper. He 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 10-15 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 8 weeks, not only was I able to fall asleep without difficulty, but my anxiety almost completely vanished. Even more remarkable was that 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 I remained completely uncertain about my future. What had changed was my attitude towards my difficulties and towards life in general. I had 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 ever since he began his practice to help people struggling with anxiety, he has been using Sha'ar HaBitachon to help me out. Developing trust in Hashem is the greatest medication. There are no side effects, and the cost is free. Now, as an aside, somehow, after reading this article, I was enthralled by the seemingly magical powers of Sha'ar HaBitachon, and I reached out to this now-Dr. Rosmarin, who was the head of the Center for Anxiety, which is now currently nationwide—Different Anxiety Centers. I met with him, and since then I’ve forged a friendship with him. We’ll see in later classes what I’ve learned from that friendship.
He continues to live that practice. What was more interesting was that when he was working at McLean Hospital in Boston, which is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School’s mental hospital, Dr. Rosmarin, the head of the Center for Anxiety, was walking the halls as an on-staff psychologist with his yarmulke. A religious patient saw him and said, “Are you a rabbi?” I’m sorry, a non-Jewish patient saw him and said, “Are you a rabbi?” He replied, “No, I’m a practicing doctor here.” The patient asked, “But can we ask you some questions? Are you Jewish? Are you religious?” He saw that many of the patients in the psychiatric ward were seeking spiritual counsel. He started using this approach in a more spiritual, less religious way, and it was working, to the point that the higher administration of the hospital realized the need for it. They eventually developed a Division of Spirituality and Mental Health, which he runs to this day.
They integrated spirituality into the hospital, which means that they asked patients, “Would you like to have spirituality?” Again, they used the word religion, but asked, “Would you like spirituality in your care?” Their studies show that people who have spirituality in their care do get better faster than those who don’t. There’s a lot of data on this. We’ll explain a little bit more in the next class how this works, or why it works. The point is that we cannot underestimate the impact of our Torah: it helps not just our spiritual selves, but our physical selves and our human psyche as well, and will make us more emotionally healthy. We’ll explain, as we said, later, how it works.