It’s About Time! A Wake-Up Call To Take Care of Ourselves. What does it take to get your attention?

It seems to me that Jewish men—regardless of their profession or business, their training or education—tend to react more effectively to a major crisis than to the everyday situations which occur in our lives. Whether we are faced with a decision about our career, family wants and needs, or our participation in synagogue and community, we respond to the emergency, but pay little attention to the everyday matters that, over the long term, may have greater import. Our goals all too often have been set, our directions chosen; it requires a major event to force us to direct our vision away from the road we have chosen.

Is this the case in every dimension of our lives? How many of us are attentive when it comes to our physical selves? Does it matter if we are fathers or sons, husbands or single parents? Our bodies might provide us with a warning but all too often we pay attention to our health needs only after a major crisis. Even when we understand our potential ill-health, we don’t act until we must. We deny our vulnerability, our mortal frailty until we are forced to transform our life styles.[10]

Too many of us forget the relationship between our spiritual selves and our emotional and physical needs. “Hearing Men’s Voices: Body and Spirit”-a publication in FJMC’s Hearing Mens’ Voices series, was a reminder that it is a Jewish imperative to take care of our bodies. Hovat HaGuf,  is the obligations we have to God to care for our bodies and maintain our physical health. It is a mitzvah, a divinely endorsed obligation, because our bodies are gifts given on loan. If we abuse them, we abuse a sacred trust. Our tradition understands our physical vitality as a critical element in the binding covenant between man and God. Unfortunately it is all too common—all too easy—to forget to tend the body. As Jewish men, we are obliged to care for ourselves emotionally, spiritually and physically.

During the High Holy Day season, the well-known words han’shama lakh, v’haguf shelakh are recited. They mean that the spirit is God’s creation and the body is God’s creation. Our tradition teaches that we are expected to respect this gift with all our heart and might.

It is important as Jewish men to realize that the teachings of our Sages more than fifteen hundred years ago were amazingly on point regarding the close interrelationship of one’s physical health and one’s emotional and spiritual fitness.

Rav Yehuda bar Yechezkiel taught concerning a balanced lifestyle:

“Three things shorten a man’s days and years: to refuse the opportunity to read Torah, to refrain from saying grace over a *meal and to become arrogant through power or authority.”

Our Talmudic teachers taught, “do not rely upon miracles.” This tells us that we should not ignore our responsibilities because we expect God to always be gracious and kind. God has shown His kindness by providing us with the opportunity to choose to use our divine gifts of mind to share in our own welfare. We should thank God in daily prayers, that we are grateful for our mind and intellectual capacity, even as we should be thankful to God for our physical vitality. We can do better than words of gratitude.

We can—we should—we must become God’s partners in taking care of ourselves.

Solomon Schechter said it well: “Do all that you possibly can, and only then leave the rest to God.” It’s time to live those words in our daily lives and merit the old blessing: ad meah v’esrim — “may you live to 120.”

A longer version of this essay originally appeared in “Body and Spirit”, a publication in FJMC’s Hearing Men’s Voices series.