Jewbavitcher: Macrobiotics...and Torah?

Jewbavitcher: Macrobiotics...and Torah?
Macrobiotics...and Torah?
[Editor's note: The following story appeared in The Bay News, part of Courier-Life Publications]

By Erica Sherman

Say “so long” to the cholent, kugel and matzoh ball soup at Friday night Sabbath dinner—and “hello” to brown rice, barley and miso soup instead.

Health-smart observers were served food for thought as they examined the mystical forces of the body, mind, memory and imagination’s impact on our health during a “Torah Health Seminar” presented by macrobiotic maven Meir Michel Abehsera at the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center (MBJC), 60 West End Avenue.

Abehsera, one of the foremost pioneers of American macrobiotics—who received his boost early on in the form of a blessing from the beloved Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson—conducted a lively discussion in the Jewish center’s dining room and fielded questions from a curious crowd.

Born in Morocco and currently living in Jerusalem, Abehsera related that in 1969, when he went to visit Schneerson at Chabad Lubavitch headquarters on Eastern Parkway, the Rebbe, of whom he was very devoted, handed him a dollar. “This is for macrobiotics,” he said. “Figure it out,” he told the aspiring dietician with a smile.

Abehsera offered his take on a number of subjects, including the latest fashionable health crazes, sugar cravings (“If there is one food that is the worst in the world, it’s sugar”), and dairy (“cottage cheese—it’s invented by the Jews!”), and he urged his guests to, among other things, chew their food.

“People have lost this [ability],” he laments. “The neshama (soul), all life long tries to talk to the body and the body doesn’t listen.”

While the skeptical and the health conscious flocked to hear Abehsera’s ingredients for happy, healthy Torah living, Alan Weinberg, a member of the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center, noted that, “This is the first time they’re coming to a format of this nature so they would have to acclimate themselves to this kind of a diet. It’s new to them and they don’t know anything about this because they’re used to eating their meat, their sugars, and this a diet based on whole grains, brown rice, millet, oats, kashi, and salad, with very little animal protein.”

As the soft-spoken but oftentimes funny Abehsera tackled a variety of questions from the crowd about what they should and shouldn’t eat, the holistic healer gently explained to the gathering—among them MBJC’s own Rabbi Asher Vale and President Rubin Margules—that, “the best enzyme in the world is happiness.”

“America has lost laughter, lost happiness—and if you have happiness, you can eat anything you want,” he smiled.

Weinberg, the organizer of the event and himself a subscriber of Abehsera’s teachings, explains that he “is one of the most influential healers of the generation.”

Weinberg first met Abehsera in 1986 while living in Florida. He recalls, “I was involved in the Macrobiotic Foundation in Florida and that was like the mecca of the movement. There’s something very magical about Meir Abehsera.”

After changing his eating habits and studying with Abehsera, Weinberg reveals that, “I felt more centered, clearer…I wasn’t as tense.”

Richard Klinger, 63, also showed some interest in the macrobiotic way of life. The retired pharmacist admitted with a laugh and a shrug that as he gets up there in years, he seems “to be putting on more weight. I’d like to eat food that’s more healthy and nutritious. My cholesterol and triglycerides were high, so I’m willing to try to get on a better diet.”

While he is recognized as one of the healthy lifestyle’s earliest proponents, the website homemaker.org also hails Abehsera as “one of the most dynamic personalities of this era’s ba’al teshuvah movement,” which is a return to Judaism.

And what is the connection between Judaism and macrobiotics?

“There will come a time,” Abehsera explained, “when the body will be more intelligent than the intellect…and maybe, if you’re in the right place at the right time, a good soup is higher than Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism).”

Abehsera, a Kabbalist himself, also enjoys studying and quoting the chochema, or wisdom, of the Rambam, more popularly known as Maimonides, less popularly known as Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the influential 12th century Jewish sage who penned the Guide to the Perplexed, and the Mishneh Torah, the first systematic interpretation of the Torah. The Rambam also served as the prime minister of medieval Egypt’s personal physician and composed a number of books on medicine.

In the tradition of the great medical thinker, Abehsera has written five books of his own: Healing Ourselves; Cooking for Life; Biological Transformations; Our Earth, Our Cure; and The Possible Man, available in most book and health food stores. He has also compiled songs for a CD, one of which he collaborated on with his son in memory of the Rebbe, who died in 1994, and is presently working on completing a full-length film.
For more information about Meir Abehsera, visit http://www.kosherzone.com/abehsera/index.htm or http://www.homemaker.org/shavuos_57/cover.html.

posted by erica at 5/19/2005 08:57:00 P