We are up to the second advantage of the Baal Bitachon over the alchemist (the first is that the alchemist needs materials to work with, Hashem is limitless)
Our Health is our second advantage. The alchemist may have magic formulas or money, he may even own 10 buildings in Manhattan. But just because you have money, that doesn’t mean you have health. There is a saying in Israel: העיקר, הבריאות. The main thing is your health.
The Baal Bitachon isn’t just about money. Hashem is in charge of our health too.
Not long ago, I went for a checkup to a local general practitioner. Afterwards, I stopped into a boutique fruit store a few doors away to buy a coffee. The owner, who was standing nearby, began to tell me about a customer he was just speaking with who likes to buy large blueberries for Shabbat. That week, they had a very hard time locating large blueberries anywhere. After many phone calls, they finally managed to find some a distance away, but they had no means of getting them. The customer asked the owner to have them sent by Uber. The owner hung up from the customer in disbelief, sharing that this customer was willing to pay $80 in order to have his large blueberries for Shabbat!
Wow, I thought, money is nice. But having just come from the doctor, I quickly realized, you can’t buy health. It’s another type of portfolio that we don’t always think about.
There’s a TV show I recall watching as a child called The Bionic Man. In case you’re too young to remember it, the show was about a man who had been in a parachuting accident and had damaged his body so badly that the cost of surgery to rebuild him with new, bionic features was $6,000,000!
We are all $6 million dollar men. I read an article one about Organ trafficking. You can go online and see organ traffickers listing the price of organs for sale! Kidney, liver...they list the prices of these things!
And there are some organs one can’t donate. Imagine what a brain would be worth to someone in a coma! Our health is truly priceless!
Rabbi Miller made famous the appreciation of every aspect of the healthy body.
We can start with the toes and work our way up: Let’s focus on our toenails. Some people have an unattractive nail fungus that requires a year of medication to treat. People would pay for healthy nails if they could. We can add that to our portfolio! Money can’t buy that. Then we can consider ingrown toenails and the pain they cause, and appreciate that our nails grow properly. We can consider a twisted ankle, etc. We can do this for hours! We have to acknowledge that we have a different type of portfolio- a portfolio of wealth, called our health.
This is the introduction to our second advantage over the Alchemist. In our next class we will go further and quote the Hovot HaLevavot but for now, we can remember that the Baal Bitachon can rely on Hashem for his health.