An email from BnaiDavid.com: “For those of you who may not have been in Shul over Succot, we are sending this e-mail to let you know that Rabbi Kanefsky underwent an angioplasty late Wednesday afternoon, shortly before Yom Tov. He is now home recuperating and is doing very well. His prognosis is excellent. Rav Yosef sends his love to everyone and appreciates all of your well wishes. At this point, we would request no visitors. If you would like to wish him well, please feel free to do so via e-mail at ravyosef@bnaidavid.com.”
Joe emails: Heart treatment now is really aggressive so that 45 is not young, it is just good medicine. And for good reason. The main symptom of heart disease is death. So, most cardiologists these days hardly operate. It is all stents, balloons, pacemakers, ablasions, all in an attempt to keep the heart healthy – a bypass is usually too late in terms of avoiding some permanent damage to the muscle. Open heart surgery is a bit of a barbaric procedure and once it is performed it is likely that the heart has suffered permanent damage.
Think of this parable. The body is a swimming pool and the toxins must be removed. The heart is the pump, and the liver/kidney are that filter at the edge of the pool. If the pump is strong, the blood flows nicely and is cleansed by the liver/kidney and removed. If the pump is slow, the filter is taxed. Modern medicine’s only real cutting edge capability is its work on the heart. There is no non-transplant effective means of repairing the kidney or liver or groin. Most old people with congestive heart failure never die of heart ailments, it is the liver or kidney that fail.
In any event, I recommend to many people like Kanefsky a strict vegetarian diet – maybe some fish – much like your Seventh Day Adventists, with perhaps one exception, namely, the Sabbath and Festival meal. The Rambam states that the way for a man to fulfill the commandment of being happy on the Festivals is to drink wine and eat meat. For us today, when meat is plentiful, it is hard to see the satisfaction derived from a brisket. But take away meat on non-festive days, promote your heart, and you may actually be able to more properly enjoy the Festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot with meat.
