My childhood memories of being sick bring visualizations of a smaller me lying in bed listening to my sisters go off to school and later staying in bed in my pajamas drinking tea and feeling rightfully sorry for myself. “I’m too sick to get up and daven” I would tell my doting mother. Her rhetorical response completely in line with her no-nonsense Yekkishe upbringing was “Do you think not davening is going to make you better?”
The Midrash teaches that until the time of Yaakov Avinu people did not become ill before they died. There was no alarm system that reminded a person of his transient status on this earth. Yaakov Avinu asked for sickness as an impetus for self-introspection and evaluation. Indeed we find that in Parashas Vayechi Yaakov makes a cheshbon hanefesh as he prepares to leave This World.
Thankfully not every illness we face heralds imminent death. But every situation that reminds us of our ephemeral reality is an opportunity to embellish the part of us that lives eternally — our souls.
The Bond between Body and Soul
Rav Ephraim Waxman shlita shares a mashal that illustrates this point. Parents await the doctor’s evaluation of their only long-awaited newborn child. A doctor looks at them solemnly and proclaims “I’m afraid your child has been born with a serious condition from which there is no known recovery.”
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