How to Eat in a Healthy Way

Translated from Rabbi Arush’s feature article in the weekly Chut shel Chessed newsletter. The articles focus on his main message: “Loving others as yourself” and emuna. 

We Eat with Our Eyes 

You have probably seen a child filling his plate with food and in the end not eating anything, so that the food gets thrown out. The truth is that it happens to quite a lot of adults… What is this phenomenon called? “To eat with one’s eyes”. “He eats with his eyes.” 

Frequently, we feel badly about the food being thrown out, but the truth is that it hurts even more when the food is “thrown” into the body just because our eyes caused us to overload the plate; “bal tashchit” (the prohibition against wasting resources) of the body is worse than the monetary bal tashchit, as the Gemara says. 

How does one eat with their eyes? And what is the connection between the eye and food? 

It appears that the eyes play a big part in our eating, particularly in our feeling of satiation. On the one hand, the holy Torah praises the mann highly, “It tasted like wafers made with honey”¹, “It tasted like cakes made with oil.”² On the other hand, the Torah itself says about the mann that it was a form of torture: “He humbled you by leaving you hungry, then feeding you mann.”³ And also: “[He] fed you mann in the wilderness in order to humble you.”⁴ What was the suffering connected with the mann? 

The Gemara in Yoma explains that while mann contained all possible flavors, the experience lacked the visual experience – the mann always looked the same. Says the Gemara: “There is no comparison between one who sees the food and eats it and one who does not see the food and eats it… From here there is an allusion to the idea that blind people eat but are not fully satisfied.”⁵ The Gemara then recommends that one eat during the day, and not at night.  

Do you understand what is written here? What satisfies you is not what you eat, rather what you see. A person might think that food depends on the quantity that is eaten, but it doesn’t work like that! It all depends on the eyes! 

What and How 

Let’s take this one step further: The eyes influence not only the quantity and the degree of satiation, but also the quality, the health, and the contribution of the food to the body; they also have a say in the way the food influences us emotionally! 

Today this is even clearer than ever before, and there are many studies that explain how a person’s emotional state affects the quality of the digestion. If you eat only carrots and kohlrabi, but you’re all upset – the food will not be digested well and will have an adverse effect on your health. Not only will you not enjoy the qualities of the food, but it will just “get stuck” in the system and cause you harm. But if you “sin” here and there and eat something sweet or fatty, but you are happy and in a good mood – you won’t suffer any damage.  

In this article we will speak of another aspect relating to the connection between the eye and eating.  

The Most Harmful Food 

The holy Zohar teaches us something amazing: a person’s attitude towards food affects the food; it influences the quality of the food directly and makes it into a healthy food or a harmful one! 

We will bring the statement from the holy Zohar, and with Hashem’s help we will see its practical implications in the lives of all of us, in this generation of abundance: 

The wisest of all says: “Do not eat an evil-eyed man’s (ra-ayin) bread; do not crave his delicacies.”⁶ When a person is evil-eyed, the klipa (“shell”) is upon his eyes, and everything he looks at, be it bread or any other pleasure – the klipa rests upon it; and therefore, it is not a good idea to eat it or benefit from it; whoever eats from it will suffer harm.  

On this topic the holy Zohar says some revolutionary things, which cannot be brought here or explained here fully. But in order to demonstrate the extent to which one should avoid eating the food of the ra-ayin, the holy tanna, Rabbi Yitzchak, who was a disciple of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, said an amazing thing: “If you are a baal nefesh (have a refined soul) and somehow you have the opportunity to eat from the food of a ra-ayin, it is better for you to slaughter yourself than to eat from his food, because there is no worse food in the world than the food of a ra-ayin!!” 

Base Desire Harms One’s Health 

The big question is: Who is this “ra-ayin”? What does it mean to us? 

In the Zohar, Rabbi Yitzchak explains it simple and clearly: “The ra-ayin is one who eats more than other human beings, or who follows his innards, in other words, his cravings and his base desires!” In other words, a ra-ayin is a lustful, hungry, gluttonous person, a person who heaps food onto his plate and eats with his eyes… 

We are living in a generation in which the craving for food is in the air, surrounding us on all sides. We are in a generation where “ta’am hachayim” (a play on words: both “life’s flavor” and “the meaning of life”) is a carbonated drink with sugar in it, and billboards shout at us that “It is natural not to control yourself” – Heaven forbid. 

True, the food itself is extremely bad for one’s health, but the main damage is from the actual craving, being a ra-ayin, the desire to swallow everything the eye sees – that is the damaging factor.  

This is a revolutionary idea: not only does the craving cause us to eat unhealthy food in exaggerated quantities – but it changes the food itself and causes it to be bad and harmful and unhealthy. We have heard stories of tzaddikim who ate without any desire to eat, and the sugar had no harmful effect on them. 

And therefore, if you truly want to be healthy, the recommendation is to invest in the main point: to eat with a “good eye”, with gratitude to Hashem, with gratitude in general; and then, you can eat just a little bit and feel satisfied and there is blessing and health in the food, and as a result you eat more healthy and good foods and less harmful ones. 

Enticing to the Eyes 

Now you will see how this introduction illuminates our entire parshah with a new light. 

In parshat Behaalotcha there is a turnaround. The Jewish people are traveling towards the Land of Israel in full glory, and suddenly there is a crash – a series of sins that continue in the following parshah drags them down into a problematic state. One of the first sins is the sin of the mitavim – “the cravers”. 

The Jews reject the mann and long for the food they had in Egypt: “Our throats are dry. There is nothing at all but this mann to look at.”⁷ You have the mann and you say you have nothing?! What was their problem? The whole problem was just in the ayin ra’a, because, as we mentioned above, the only “drawback” of the mann was that the eye couldn’t see its many qualities. “Its color was that of bdolach.”⁸ 

All desire starts from the eyes, for “the yetzer hara (evil inclination) rules only over what the eyes can see.”⁹ The sin of Adam Harishon began with the eyes: “…and that it is enticing to the eyes.”¹⁰ 

In our parsha we see something amazing: Moshe Rabbeinu breaks down, and this too, is expressed in terms of the eye: “And in the eyes of Moshe it was bad”.¹¹ One of the hardest questions about the parsha is Moshe’s claim: How can I provide food for all these people? It seems to be a lack of emuna (faith), and indeed, Hashem’s reply was “Will Hashem’s hand fall short?!”¹² But it’s still difficult to understand: What was Moshe thinking? 

The answer is that Moshe Rabbeinu was telling us the simple truth – that someone who possesses an ayin ra’a and is ruled by his cravings, whatever you give him will never satisfy him; it will never be enough. 

The Revenge of the Craving 

And, indeed, the punishment of those who desired was simply to receive what they craved without limit: they received meat spread across a huge area – the distance one can walk in a day around the camp (almost 40 km in every direction), and one meter deep. Everything was full of meat – they didn’t even have to bend down to get it.  

Hashem says thus to the people: “Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow and you will eat meat”.¹³ Kedushah (consecration, holiness) is distancing oneself from the cravings, as Ramban says about the words “Be holy”. Whoever eats the meat because of his craving – the meat will cause him harm; but anyone who consecrates himself can eat and be healthy. Hashem is telling the cravers that they will eat for a month until it is for them “lezara”. Rashi explains there in the name Rabbi Moshe Hadarshan that zara means ‘sword’. The meat will turn into swords in the body; in other words, it will cause great harm to those who crave it. 

And what do they do? They engage in a madness of craving for thirty-six hours straight (!). They don’t sleep or do anything else – just collect meat, until the laziest and even the physically limited collect ten huge piles of meat! And what happened in the end? In the end they suffered from their own craving, and the craving itself killed them, because their ayin ra’a rested on the food and turned it into something very harmful.  

To sum up the issue: One should eat in a healthy way, according to the body’s needs. But the real effort is not the decision “what to eat and what not”; the real effort is to cleanse oneself from the craving, which is the ayin ra’a! And this is not the task of only holy people, rather, it is a task of anyone who wants to live well and enjoy good mental and physical health in this world. 

Editor’s Notes: 

¹ Shemot (Exodus) 16:31 

² Bamidbar (Numbers) 11:8 

³ Devarim (Deuteronomy) 8:3 

⁴ Devarim 8:16 

⁵ Talmud Bavli, Yoma 74b 

⁶ Mishlei (Proverbs) 23:6 

⁷ Bamidbar 11:6 

⁸ Bamidbar 11:7 

⁹ Talmud Bavli, Sota 8a 

¹⁰ Bereshit (Genesis) 3:6 

¹¹ Bamidbar 11:10 

¹² Bamidbar 11:23

¹³ Bamidbar 11:18