Episode Summary

The second in a series of podcasts on popular sayings that are actually not true at all.

Episode Notes

The idea that health is everything causes people who are unwell to loose hope. This episode is about people who accomplished great things while also coping with illness and disability. The first reason that the saying, “If you have your health you have everything” is not true is that if it is true then it also true that if you lose your health you have nothing, and this is not only false, it is spiritually corrosive. Placing upon people the double burden of both their illness and the despairing conclusion that their illness has taken away from them everything important is much more than false. It is deeply cruel. 

I know that the saying intends to be positive. It intends to say something like, “Nothing we have is more important than our health.” Of course, I agree that we should strive to live healthful lives and avoid the trans fatty parts of the universe, but health is an evanescent thing, affected by environmental and genetic and even purely random factors. The fixation on health as the only important thing is what is behind this saying, and what is behind the unnecessary and often debilitating despair of sick people. 

I knew several remarkable people who accomplished amazing things. Hank Viscardi was the Martin Luther King of American's with disabilities. He was a driving force behind the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and the founder of the Viscardi School and Center for Disabilities. One day when Tom Hartman and I were visiting Hank, he said to us, “I never think of the people in this center as disabled. I think of you guys as just temporarily abled.” 

When Moses broke the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments because of his anger at the people for worshiping the Golden calf, God gave him a new unbroken copy, but God also commanded Moses to place all the broken pieces of the first tablets together in the same golden ark of the covenant that held the new unbroken tablets. The broken and the whole were together in the same ark. As it was so it is with us now. Those of us who happen to be disabled or sick and those of us who happen to be temporarily abled are together in the covenant of God’s love and must be together in the bonds of love and support we extend to each other. The broken and the whole are together in the same ark. 

I knew a woman named Pam Rothman who died of cancer after a long struggle, and although she eventually lost her life, she never lost her smile. One day sitting in her hospital room Pam said to me, “Rabbi, I can't be the best of the best any longer, but I can still be the best of the worst.” And she was the best of the worst, the very best of the very worst. She helped other cancer patients cling to hope, she held her family together by her embracing love and she read and wrote to the end. In the end Pam was taken, but she was never defeated. 

Add to Hank and Pam Beethoven and Kierkegaard and FDR and Stevie Wonder and Helen Keller and Steven Hawking and Christopher Reeve and Michael J Fox and my friend Tom Hartman. They all had everything except their health. The greatest modern Jewish theologian was Franz Rosenzweig and though he died in 1929 also from the predations of ALS, his illness did not diminish his brilliant translation of the Bible into German with his friend Martin Buber nor his philosophical masterwork, The Star of Redemption, which he wrote by holding a pencil in his mouth and pointing to the keys on the typewriter. 

We must also remember that God chose a disabled man, Moses, to lead the people out of Egypt. There are, of course, some things that if you do not have you really do have nothing. If you don’t have love, you have nothing. If you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. If you don’t have friends, you have nothing. If you don’t have people who need you, you have nothing. If you have no one to teach you, you have nothing. If you don’t have freedom you have nothing. 

The reason health is not everything is your health is about you and everything really important in your life is about others: Serving others, loving others and teaching others reveals our true purpose and ultimate destiny. 

The rabbis wrote, o hevruta o metutah, “Give me community or give me death.” Losing your health is a terrible thing but losing a community of love and purpose is fatal. Our only chance to find everything is to get out of ourselves. 

This episode closes with a moving story about Jacob and a homeless man sharing a pizza.