Part 7: A Guide to Spiritual Health | Avot with the Chief

What does it mean to be spiritually healthy?

The Rambam was a physician as well as one of our greatest sages. In his introduction to Pirkei Avot, he draws a remarkable parallel between the health of the body and the health of the soul, describing the sages themselves as "doctors of the soul."

But spiritual illness presents a unique problem. When something distorts our character or the way we see the world, it can also distort our ability to recognise that anything is wrong.

In this next part of our journey through Pirkei Avot, The Chief explores what it means for the soul to function as it was created to function, why we may need help seeing what we cannot see for ourselves, and how Avot offers us a path back to spiritual health.

Drawing on the Rambam and the great commentators on Avot, we discover a vision of spiritual health that reaches from our character and the way we see the world, to the very heights of what a human being can become.

KEY QUESTIONS

• If spiritual illness can distort our ability to recognise it, how do we know when something is wrong?

• We accept that the body sometimes needs a doctor. Why do we assume the soul does not?

• Anger, arrogance and envy are usually treated as faults. What changes if we understand them as symptoms?

• Is there a connection between becoming a better person and becoming a calmer one?

• The Mishnah says that the human being is created in God's image. The Sforno reads that not simply as a description, but as an instruction. What is it asking of us?