Health Is A Spiritual Necessity

Question: The great thinker and physician Rambam brought a set of postulates, one of which reads: “To live healthy is a spiritual necessity.” Could you comment on that?

Answer: Our health is one of the conditions of general equilibrium between man and nature, of the balance of the person himself and his adhesion with the Creator. That is why the balance on all the levels—mental, moral, physical, ethical, spiritual, and physiological—is one and the same system of complete equilibrium. There is no doubt that a person who in the future, together with the entire world, will reach complete correction, will receive from all the sides only positive feedback, and that overall balance will make him absolutely healthy.

We can talk about eternity, infinity, and eternal life, but all this is not for us at the moment. We do not understand all those beautiful changes that may occur in a person since according to our current notions, the material body cannot exist forever. But that’s not a point.

The fact is that this is possible only when the human being will be included in the general system, when all the people in the world will be interconnected correctly, will mutually complement and balance one another to such an extent that everyone’s health will be determined by the correct health of everyone else.

Question: When Rambam says that physical health is a spiritual necessity, what is meant by the word “spiritual”?

Answer: The world spiritual means the future spiritual state of a person, when he ascends above his animal part and begins to make his spiritual part healthier, the part at the moment is not felt by anyone but Kabbalists. Every person has it in some kind of internal latent, embryonic state, similarly to how a small child potentially incorporates his future child, that is, a person’s spiritual part is not manifested in any way.
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From KabTV’s “The Medicine of the Future” 4/7/13