The days of Yaakov’s life were one hundred and forty-seven years (Bereshis 47:28)

Yaakov was supposed to live to the age of 180 like his father Yitzchak, but he lost 33 years of his life. He lost these years because when he met Pharoah in last week’s parsha, he complained about his life. He said his years were “few and miserable”. This discussion with Pharoah has 33 words; Yaakov lost one year of his life for each word.

A few months ago, I started a food elimination diet. For numerous years, I have been getting aches and pains at certain times but I did not know why. My wife finally convinced me that the aches could be because of an intolerance or an allergy to some of the foods I eat. Therefore, last spring, I removed many foods from my diet and slowly added them in. This way I would be able to see which foods affected me.

At first, when I eliminated many foods I had always eaten, I began feeling better. As I started to add in foods, I started getting the aches again – so my wife was correct; certain foods were affecting me. The problem was I could not figure out which foods were causing problems because I kept finding new foods that were possibilities of causing of pains. I was able to find a few foods which were problems, but I still had aches. After months of trial and error, I finally decided I needed to go the more expensive way… I had to go to a doctor and get an allergy test.

I spoke with a doctor and he told me that before I take the test, I should eat all of the foods I had eliminated from my diet. The reason is because they need to be in my system. If they were not in my system, then they would show up as not being a problem on the test, when in fact they are a problem. So I began eating all foods again and especially made certain to eat the foods I knew to be problems.

One day, I ate numerous foods which I had not eaten in a long time and a few minutes later, I had terrible aches. It was very painful. But, I was very happy and had a huge smile on my face. You might wonder why I was so happy that I had pains? The answer is because this means that I ate something that I was allergic to, which means it was now in my system and would show up on the allergy test. If I did not eat that food, it is possible it would not have shown up on the allergy test. If that happened, I would continue to eat the food after I get the results and not understand why I feel aches again. Now I have a less likelihood of this happening.

During the past few weeks when I’ve been eating everything, every time I felt a pain, it was joyous because I knew that the allergy test would now show another food as being an issue. Then, I could avoid the food and feel better. Each ache I experienced was a good thing.

This is the way we need to go through life. It is easy to constantly complain about all of the bad things going on in our lives. But if we fast forward to the future and look at what happened because of the aches we had, we will see that ultimately it is for our good. Everything is for the best. Whenever we feel aches and pains it is a good thing because it will avoid more aches and pains that would have occurred. This is what we must train ourselves to realize.

Good Shabbos!
-yes
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