https://ohr.edu/this_week/insights_into_halacha/5717
The Gadol Hador, Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l, in a brief, albeit pivotal teshuva dated several months after the Surgeon General’s initial report,[14] wrote that although it is certainly appropriate to abstain from smoking, nevertheless, one cannot say that smoking is outright assur, as there are many people that smoke. Therefore, smokers fit into the category of “Shomer Pesaim Hashem, Hashem watches over fools.”[15] Rav Moshe adds that especially since many Gedolim smoked, it is impossible to say that such an act is truly forbidden.[16] This responsum seems to be the primary justification for many a smoker.
In fact, even Rav Moshe himself, in subsequent teshuvos dated 1981,[24] took a much stronger stance against smoking due to the health risks involved. Although he still would not call smoking outright assur, he nonetheless rules that due to the dangers of second-hand smoke, it is forbidden to smoke where it will bother others (a psak later echoed by many other authorities)[25] including Batei Midrash and shuls, and concludes with an exhortation that everyone, especially Bnei Torah, should not begin to smoke due to the chashash sakana, adding that it is assur to ‘get addicted’.
Several years ago, his son, Rav Dovid Feinstein shlit”a, was quoted as saying that with the current knowledge of the harm smoking causes, it is pashut that had his father, Rav Moshe, still been alive today, he would have prohibited smoking outright, as his dispensation was only based on the ‘fact’ that smoking endangered only a small percentage of smokers.[26] Indeed, in a newly discovered and recently published teshuva of Rav Moshe’s, dated Elul 5732, he himself wrote that his famous lenient psak was based on the facts as they were known at the time.[27] He added that if the metzius would change and the percentages of those proven harmed by smoking would increase, then certainly it would be prohibited to smoke, at least the amount the doctors considered harmful to one’s health.
"Rav Moshe adds that especially since many Gedolim smoked, it is impossible to say that such an act is truly forbidden."
ReplyDeleteA truly fallacious statement.
it's interesting that this is from Ohr.edu, I asked the Rosh Yeshiva
ReplyDeletethere in the early 90s about the halacha on smoking - his response was:
a) it can't be proven that smoking kills
b) you can't impose a gezeira on people if 50% can't keep it
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well sorry , but it can very easily be proven , and in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s that smoking is responsible for significantly more deaths due to disease for those who do smoke, than those who don't.
Also, it is not actually a gezeira, i.e.a rabbinic enactment, but a question of Torah prohibition of self harm. Indeed, the Talmud says not to walk under a weak wall - even though the individual who does this isn't guaranteed to have it collapse on him.
I wonder why the liars who try to convince people that mRNA vaccines "alter your DNA" (They don't) aren't sounding the alarm about smoking in the haredi community. Smoking actually does alter your DNA (and in a proven bad way).
ReplyDeleteWow!
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize that you are such a whiz kid!
Don't need to be a whizz kid.
ReplyDeleteThe substance is harmful, whether to a truck driver or a gadol.
When they started the habit, there was no information, so it is an inadvertent error.
BTW, rebbe Nachman of breslav said that smoking is a yetzer hara that he didn't need. A genius who understood human nature. Also understood addiction.
So you should join Breslov
ReplyDeleteOr Hafetz Haim, or Tzitz Eliezer
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yeshiva.co/ask/1130
It's a curious statement because one could easily say that reason many Gedolim smoked is because they didn't know about the harms since medical science hadn't yet determined them. Had they known, they might have forbidden smoking.
ReplyDeletethere is a HaBaKuk movement in Israel, of the RZ and and holy settlers who combine Habad, Breslav and Rav Kuk ideas and chassidus. I am not sure whether smoking is prominent amongst them.
ReplyDeleteA more comprehensive piece about smoking
ReplyDeletehttps://ohr.edu/this_week/insights_into_halacha/5717
Chiddush niflaoh though this be... There's actually a basis in the Rambam's halakhic health prescriptions (4th pereq of H' Deos) to permit smoking. (Yes, you read that right.) However, one has to accept the Rambam's health recommendations, which I'm aware many would not, having dismissed them as the concoctions of medieval medicine.
ReplyDeleteRecall, first, that our knowledge regarding the extent of smoking's physiological harm dates from relatively recently -- say, from 60s medicine onward, and basically thus amounts to medical knowledge that has been accumulated over a mere two recent generations.* My point is the latter knowledge regarding the precise extent of the risks posed by regular smoking only came to outweigh observed benefits. What benefits? The same that brought doctors in the 50s to advertise on behalf of cigarettes: digestive benefits. Tobacco is probably the single greatest laxative known in the world -- the fastest acting, most reliable, least disruptive. Interestingly, most folks these days, where smoking is so much the rarity, seem unaware of this fact, and, also interestingly, smokers who have quit seem to have forgotten it; but ask any smoker who has just quit, and they are all too aware of the constipation side effect that it takes their body a few weeks to adjust to, as the practice is also lightly addictive in this regard as well.
Anyway, the peshat that emerges thematically from the Rambam's whole chapter devoted to health is that good digestion insures a long, fruitful life; indeed, the large majority of his halakhos relate directly or indirectly to aiding good digestion. So that would be the basis for -- mind you, I say basis, not conclusion -- making a case from the Rambam in defense of smoking.
Of course, as we now know with a lot of confidence -- no, not certainty, despite what's been written in the thread here up until now -- the cost-benefit analysis of smoking ultimately weighs heavily, heavily against it. And the Torah counsels, "shmartem nafshosekhem", so at least in this one practice we have perhaps graduated past what the Rambam might have been apt to throw in with (together with 1950s mainstream physicians). It would be interesting to know if the Rambam had ever written anything on tobacco in his medical writings....
* (This is the case, even though one would think it to be pretty intuitive to anyone not entirely alienated from their bodily responses,, or incurably biased by taiva, to suspect there be some harm in the practice of smoking.)
He may have alluded to it when he spoke about spices / sense of smell , haha
ReplyDelete"However, one has to accept the Rambam's health recommendations"
ReplyDeleteWhy would one do such a thing?
Well, for whatever their reasons, many do. So the questions is pretty moot. Indeed, a couple books have been written on the Rambam's health recommendations.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, on one foot, I myself can fathom several fairly sensible reasons for someone looking seriously to those health prescriptions, each reason independently sufficient:
1) Many believe in the words of our Sages, among whom the Rambam figures prominently;
2) The Rambam's language of "guarantee" for good health is unusually strong there, and grabs the reader's attention;
3) The health recommendations listed there seem, by and large, excellent;
4) Many believe that while modern medicine may be the place to turn for immediate cures to precisely defined illnesses, folk-based medicine offers the better repository for advice re overall general longterm health, and the Rambam's halakhos listed there serve as a good distillation of just those essentials.
I'm sure there are many other reasons one could concoct for those so inclined.
You really needed someone to walk you through that?
First off, that's mighty questionable logic... sorta like pointing out how beneficial smoking is to the digestion. Way too much of a laserbeam focus on that one niqquda, Vitamin C, no?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, on that point I believe Rambam & modern nutrition would actually very much agree. The benefits of Vitamin C touted these days are in regularly consumed concentrations of daily 500mg and up. If you're getting that whopping amount from citrus fruit every day, well then hey you're definitely eating way too much fruit to be healthy. Remember that calorically it's all pretty much pure fructose, and not too great on the stomach either....
...all of which assumes that what Rambam refers to there'n'then at 4:11 as "חרובים" are the same as what we ourselves have available as "citrus". (It seems implicit, for example, that the "cucumbers" were black. I myself have never encountered such a thing.) Honing in on these nitty grittier foodstuff halakhos is not as simple as getting peshat in the broader ones re when to eat, going to bathroom, sequencing food types in the meal, overeating, how much to sleep, etc. etc.
So I count no less than three points of disconnect by which the Vitamin C qasha might be rejected.
I meant reasons that make logical sense, not reasons that I can cook up in my imagination if I'm playing devil's advocate on behalf of people who aren't very smart.
ReplyDeleteThere is no more reason to take Rambam's health advice than there is to take the Talmud's advice using burnt cat ashes and other remedies.
The fact that Rambam was a doctor and got some things right like advising people to eat healthy, doesn't mean everything else he says is right.
So it's not clear which fruit he refers to.
ReplyDeleteI agree in general. We have totally different diets today, live longer, and are immunised against many diseases.
What a straw man.... The reasons I listed are all sensible, as I expressly noted, so I don't know what you mean. (Ok, maybe we would have to combine the 1st & 2and together to make a truly defensible mehalakh out of them, but that still makes for three independent sensible approaches listed among the four reasons right there.)
ReplyDeleteIn addition, you have the various haskamos, rabbinical and modern medical, to the recent books published on the subject, along with their citations to all the literature, halakhic & medical research -- one from 2008, another from 2012, & still another from 2016. There are more out there, of course....
Additionally, in under 3min I located these review articles via Google, some of which offer yet more defense of Rambam's approach to health, each seemingly sensible to my silly little intellect: one from The Forward, a mid-90s article from the Jewish Weekly, & a review at Aish of the 2008 book just listed. There are surely others....
That's a lot of folks to dismiss as somehow stupid simply because you have a hard time relating to such an approach, personally. And here I had always supposed that essential to our avoda was seeing the sense in competing or conflicting viewpoints...? Well, certainly such a midda does seem to be becoming rarer; but, still, it's no less imperatively & essentially Jewish.
Do you include his medical writings as well? For example, he wrote a treatise on asthma - so it was a problem then as it is now.
ReplyDeleteNothing in his hilchot deot will prevent asthma so the guarantee is unfortunately invalid.
I'm not rejecting his many good ideas - he was the leading medical practitioner of his day.
I've never looked them over more than superficially, but to answer your question just on the face of it: Well, no I don't see why we would lump them together. As you note, the medical texts seem each to be geared to some specific condition or ailment, whereas the halakhic treatment claims to outline the guidelines for general good health.
ReplyDeleteOf note is that at the end of the pereq Rambam counsels that the needs of specific circumstances should trump the general outline he sketches -- i.e., nothing laid down in MT there should be taken as having been set in stone. Oh, and everyone should have his own personal physician; that the Rambam counsels as a matter of halakha. It is a fascinating pereq.
...But now that you mention it, one would think that the MD Fred Rosner, who seems to have made editing Rambam's medical corpus his life's hobby, must surely have weighed in on this subject as well with some article or interview, or even book. His opinion, obviously, would be a source on this subject. I do recall him once pointing, or once seeing it pointed out maybe in his name, that certain advice in the medical corpus contradicts what is written in the halakhic corpus; some bring that as a raiya that the Rambam did not see the material in Deos as purely medical in nature. But as arguments go, seems pretty speculative....
Your last point is very interesting, but perhaps my interpretation is different from yours.
ReplyDeleteSome of the advice - or medical treatments may even contradict other halachot. In particular, he invented a lotion which was , let's say a precursor to viagra. And he says it has to be applied --- and tha it is very effecttve. so here are the possible ways of seeing it:
1) he didn't apply it on himself, but gave to patients, who did, and hence he did not contradict halacha.
2) if he did apply it himself, the purpose was for a mitzvah, and hence allowed. However, that would also be problematic, since it is a severe aveira to cause that occurence by self-massage
3) Halacha is for angels, but in real life, it is not always tenable.
Isn't the work on impotence authored from treatment of the Sultan's son? If so, the first is the most natural resolution.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, as I said: all very speculative.