Divine Knowledge In The Torah: Anesthesia & Liposuction (5 minutes)

1:28And the Gemara, again the Oral Torah, the tractate of Bava Metzia, page 83b, discusses Rabbi Eliezer, the son of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the one we celebrate on Lag BaOmer. Everyone knows Lag BaOmer, but not everyone knows Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. So Rabbi Eliezer, his son, was, one day, called wicked by someone. He says, you are vinegar coming from wine. Your father, Rabbi Shimon, he's wine, he's a tzaddik. But you're vinegar. The reason why is because Rabbi Eliezer would actually help the goyim by sending all the Jewish criminals to them. If there were Jewish criminals, he would send them to the goyim. Who wants a Jewish criminal? Someone that's hurting other Jews. You have to arrest them, so he would inform on them. And this guy said, what are you telling the Goyim about our nation? Even though they're wicked, you shouldn't say anything. So Rabbi Eliezer was questioning himself. He said, you know what, maybe there's something to what he's saying, but I have to check this. Now I know that according to the Torah, someone that's truly righteous, truly righteous, very, very high level, after they get buried, the body doesn't disintegrate. It remains intact because of their immense virtue and connection to holiness.

2:46The body doesn't get eaten up by the worms, the maggots, and the snakes. There's proof of this phenomenon. Even today, when they uncover graves of certain individuals and major sages, it's technically not supposed to be done, but it has happened many times. When they open the graves of Tzaddikim, they find the bodies appear as if they passed away just five minutes ago. According to science, this is considered a scientific impossibility, yet it has been documented. The Gemara, written nearly 2,000 years ago, already mentions this occurrence. He says, I have to check this out. So how do I know if the maggots and the worms are going to eat me? So I'm going to have surgery. He was very, very heavy. He was very fat, according to the Gemara. And he says, I want you to take out the fat from my body. And then I'm going to put it out in the sun to see what happens to the fat. If the bugs are going to eat it and it becomes smelly and rotten, just like everybody else's fat or meat, or even if you just put a piece of steak outside for five minutes, there are already maggots coming out of it. He says, "I want to see it." So he underwent a surgery. We call it today liposuction.

3:58But the beauty of it is in the Gemara Bava Metziah, page 83, it gives you all of the details of what happened in this surgery. And what do they say? They say we gave him a certain drug to put him to sleep. We call this anesthesia. And what do we give him a surgery on? On a table of granite. Why? Because granite doesn't absorb all the germs. We only discovered this again in the last 100 years or so. And he goes through this whole procedure, And they took out, I think it's two or three bucketfuls of fat from his body, which according to today's medicine, you cannot do. Meaning they had more advanced medicine back then than we have today. And then, as the story goes, he put those buckets outside. No one touched them. No bug touched them. They stayed fresh. But nonetheless, again, all the credit we give doctors, God bless them for helping save lives. But listen, you gotta give credit where credit's due.

4:59Rabbi Eliezer deserves the credit. He was the first one to practice anesthesia, not Dr. Williams.