The Beneficial Effects of Torah Wine on Metaphysical Heart Rate Recovery
Looking for a VERY weird article to prepare you for the upcoming holiday season? Look no further! In my effort to be spontaneous in my writing, this is what my brain generated this morning. Enjoy!
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The Beneficial Effects of Torah Wine on Metaphysical Heart Rate Recovery
Last week I began reading Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Towards the end of his introduction, Rabbi Sacks mentions a personal anecdote:
Once, when undergoing a medical checkup, a doctor put me on a treadmill. “What are you measuring?” I asked him. “How fast I can go or how long?” “Neither,” he replied. “What I want to measure is, when you get off the machine, how long it takes your pulse to return to normal.” [Rabbi Sacks then goes on write about his own metaphorical take on this.]
The doctor was measuring R’ Sacks’s Heart Rate Recovery (HRR). Here’s a layman’s explanation of what HRR is:
After you finish exerting energy through aerobic activity, your heartbeat eventually returns to baseline. Health care providers often check heart rates at the one-minute mark post-exercise and use that number to calculate your heart rate recovery (HRR). In other words, heart rate recovery is a measurement of your heart’s ability to return the rate of pumping blood that it is used to when you are at rest. (How to Calculate Heart Rate Recovery After Exercise)
I mentioned HRR on Shabbos when explaining to my hosts why I decided a few months ago to stop drinking wine on Friday nights. My Oura Ring sleep tracker has provided me with undeniable evidence of how evening wine keeps my heart rate elevated long into the night, delaying the onset of the restorative stages of my sleep.
This recent conversation brought to mind Yeshayahu ha’Navi’s comparison of Torah to wine: “go and buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Yeshayahu 55:1). One pshat explanation (which I elaborate on in my article Torah as Water, Wine, and Milk) is offered by the Radak:
Torah is compared to wine, for just as wine gladdens the heart – as it is stated: “wine gladdens the heart of man” (Tehilim 104:15) – so too, words of Torah, as it is stated: "the statutes of Hashem are upright, gladdening the heart" (ibid. 19:9).
These three associations led to my own quirky take on the Torah-wine metaphor. All mitzvos are designed to affect the heart, as Chazal say: “God desires the heart” (Sanhedrin 106b). Ibn Ezra explains this concept as follows:
“for the matter is very close in your mouth and in your heart to do it” (Devarim 30:14) – for the root of all the mitzvos is in the heart; some mitzvos require a verbal utterance which strengthens the heart, and others consist of actions so that a person will make these verbal utterances.
The moadim (“appointed times” of Shabbos, Rosh ha’Shanah, Yom ha’Kippurim, Pesach, Shavuos, Sukkos, etc.) are rich in mitzvos, ideas, and themes. They hold great potential to make a lasting impression on our hearts. The problem is that their impact tends to wear off soon after the holiday is over. But it’s all too easy to overlook this phenomenon when preparing for these holidays and observing them. When it comes to High Holiday services, or simchas Torah dancing, or the Pesach seder, people tend to ask themselves questions like Rabbi Sacks asked: “What matters? How fast I can go or how long?” The answer, to borrow the phrasing of Rabbi Sacks’s doctor, is: “Neither. The key metric is what happens after the holiday: how long it takes for your heart to return to normal.” When it comes to physical health, a quick HRR time is optimal, but in metaphysical health, it’s just the opposite: the longer it takes for your heart to return to the baseline after a mitzvah-workout, the better.
How does one achieve this extended HRR time? The answer is: the wine of Torah. Just as drinking too much wine can increase your physical HRR time in a manner detrimental to your physical health, so too, indulging in the wine of Torah can extend your metaphysical HRR time long after the holiday has ended. The more we prepare ourselves by learning about an upcoming moed, the deeper our experience of its observance will be, and the longer its impact will last. This is why we begin studying the halachos of the holiday thirty days before (see SA OC 429). So this Sukkos, remember to imbibe your actual wine responsibly, but drink in your Torah wine with abandon.
Pretty weird, right? Regardless, let me know what you think!
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