When Meir Abehsera was a 10-year-old boy in Morocco, he fell on his head, and doctors told his parents he wouldn't survive. An Arabic woman saved his life with some potent folk remedies, while his father promised that if his son ever walked again, he would take him to every accessible tzadik and to the graves of all the tzadikim. One year later, the young Meir did walk again, and the connection to tzadikim-those of the generation who epitomize love, justice, total devotion to the spiritual, while steeped in G-dly teachings-is still his lifeline over fifty years and countless adventures later.

    For the thousands of people whose lives he has touched, Meir Abehsera is one of the most influential healers of the generation. Many know him as a founder of macrobiotics in America; others consider him one of the most dynamic personalities of this era's ba'al teshuvah movement. Indeed, in the thirty-plus years since Meir (Michel) Abehsera arrived in the U.S. from Paris, he has become renowned for his incisive ability to read both a person's physical and spiritual vital signs together. A macrobiotic healer who cut his teeth on the '60's counterculture and is still going strong in the '90's, Abehsera has emerged as the healer/philosopher of the day, encouraging people to let go of linear, rigid ideas of alleviating symptoms and instead to look for a cure of the whole self, the neshama as well as the body.

    Abehsera, 63, was born in Morocco to the Abuhatzeira family, a clan known for their tzadikim and mystics, the most famous of whom was Yisrael Abuhatzeira zt"l, the "Baba Sali," leader of the Moroccan Jewish community who died in Israel in 1984. The family moved to France when Meir/Michel was a teenager. There he became a successful civil engineer, but his heart was attracted to the French intelligentsia, the world of writers and good literature, which he says "is not too far away from Judaism, as a writer is also trying to fix up the world with words. At the time, that was my goal too-to fix up the world with words."

    From 1967 to the early '70's, Abehsera did become a prolific writer, although not the author of the Great American Novel. He penned eight books, including Healing Ourselves, Cooking for Life, Biological Transfor-mations, and Our Earth, Our Cure. He became a nationally sought-after lecturer and ran macrobiotic seminars around the country.

    It was on one of those retreats that he had a realignment of priorities. At the end of a talk, a woman, whose husband was a wealthy banker from Oklahoma, came up to him and, overwhelmed with emotion, cried out, "Master!"

    "I knew I was no master," Abehsera recalls. "In America in the '60's, if you spoke with common sense they thought you were a guru. In fact, I didn't even consider myself that knowledgeable. What I did have was enthusiasm, which I found people respond to better than knowledge. This woman wanted to offer me a mansion, an empire. It made me nauseous."

We Want to Show G-d That We Are With Him    In the thirty years that Meir Abehsera has been involved in macrobiotics, he's seen it grow from a rigid discipline of eating strictures to incorporate more creativity and less dogma. For Abehsera, macrobiotics is the way to health, yet unless he is treating a patient with an acute condition, he says, "Keep it in context. Let's not turn it into an avoda zara."     "Once, two people who had started eating macrobiotic came to visit us on Shabbat for dinner. We had a nice organic chicken on the table and I took a piece and held it up to show G-d that we are with him and we won't let him down. And there is wine on the table, the best wine. Even though it is Shabbat, still we do not go berserk and eat all kinds of rich food. We are still conscious. So now these people are looking at the chicken and they are suffering. They are looking at the chicken and the chicken is looking at them. Suddenly, they pounce on the chicken and devour the whole thing. Nothing is left for anyone else. And the wine, they finish it without taking a break. What happened? They think that there is something holy in the meal so they feel no guilt, but they went too far. Of course if you eat a whole chicken and drink a whole bottle of wine you are going to get sick.     "So for us, when you eat a small piece of chicken the body says-the liver tells the kidney-'Did you see anything?' and the kidney says, 'No I didn't see anything.' In macrobiotics you can take a small amount of food that you normally don't eat and it can be a catalyst for health. A small amount creates a dynamic in the body and it broadens the mind. With brown rice and carrot juice you can make a lot of people suffer. You become very serious and start hating people who smoke or eat chicken and you become very judgmental-it's New Age hatred."     Abehsera says his most difficult problem is when he meets a patient with a serious health condition yet has resistance to changing his diet. "They see a huge gap between what I am asking them to do and their potential. So you have to create a new possibility. Maybe there is another way. Not the severe macrobiotic way of only brown rice and chewing, chewing, chewing, but using herbs or whatever, so that they can do it, get started, and then they can continue."     Abehsera says that number one is diet, although unlike many macrobiotic practitioners, he is also generous with acupuncture, homeopathy and herbs. "G-d wants to be known everywhere, through acupuncture, through herbs, through homeopathy, or whatever, otherwise it is like we are a bunch of cultists or robots who can't think.     "When I do a consultation, I charge $100. And that's what I've charged for years. Macrobiotic people tell me, 'Michel, you are messing up the macrobiotic business because other counselors are charging $300? Who are you that you value your time for so much? Are you G-d?

    As he knew he was no master, the incident provoked him to look for a real master, a tzadik, the true masters of his youth and his heritage. So he decided to go to Jerusalem and study Kabbalah with the Masters. But first, before he made such a move, he knew he needed a blessing from a tzadik where he was-which led him to a meeting that would change his life forever: an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe answered not with a yes or a no, but with the statement: "I too wish I could go." Abehsera understood that the Rebbe was telling him to stay, that there was still lots of work to be done where he was. He still wasn't satisfied with the answer and told his mother to ask the Baba Sali, a cousin, for the same blessing. The Baba Sali's response, however, was surprising. He relayed that Meir should stay with the Lubavitcher Rebbe (yet he hadn't been told that Meir had already contacted him). The Rebbe needed him; he spoke the language of the East. He spoke the language of the thousands of young Jews who were going to the East to find themselves.

   Abehsera and his wife Esther moved to Binghamton, a college town where they had constant interaction with students and other young people in the area. Great food, wholesome soups and good bread made fresh with stone-ground flour was the pull. "You can get to the soul of a person through food," says Abehsera. "Never ask questions, just serve your guests.

    "One thing I've learned in all the years of kiruv," says Abehsera, "is not to read people's minds, overpower them, psyche them out. Just stay outside and knock. Then the person is comfortable. You aren't reminding him of his past or his dirt, you're accepting him how he is now. Then you can say things to him that no one else would dare say and he takes it from you, because he knows you're his friend, that you're not manipulating him."

   "Once a very religious Yeshiva teacher came to my home in Flatbush at midnight. He says that there is a woman who needs a place, if I can take her in. Why can't you take her, I ask? Well, he says, you are known for this. So I think to myself, so I'm known for being a pushover, and he's a learner of Torah so he doesn't have to be kind? So I tell him no problem, we'll make room (even though we didn't even have a bed for her, with seven children), but tell me, why didn't you take her? Well, he says, you don't really know who she is. Maybe she's dangerous. Maybe she will harm my children."

    Abehsera says the ultimate Jewish home is an open one, with many people going through.

    While Meir Abehsera is a natural healer to some and a spiritual mentor to others, for many Chassidim, he was known simply as "the whistler." The story of "the whistler" is an enigmatic one, befitting Abehsera as one of today's most complex, creative, and spiritual personalities. It was Purim of 1971, and Meir Abehsera was at the Lubavitcher Rebbe's farbrengen, standing in his usual place behind the Rebbe's table. Standing next to him was a guest, a young man who was about to convert to Christianity. "He was my houseguest, but you know, when a person gets such an idea into his head, you can't talk him out of it. It is a 'wind' and it has to be combated with another type of 'wind,' a wind of holiness." After several hours, the Rebbe turned to Abehsera and put his fingers to his lips, as if to signal to him to whistle. "I knew what he wanted," says Abehsera, "but I wouldn't let myself know. I couldn't believe the Rebbe was asking me to whistle. I wanted more signs. He kept insisting. I turned around and all the Chassidim were looking at me to see what I would do. So I put my fingers to my mouth to show that I understood, and the Rebbe nodded in excited encouragement. So I let out a whistle. At first very timidly, and with the Rebbe's continued prodding, I began to let it out full force."

    Soon, thousands of Chassidim were whistling, shooing away the evil forces of the world with their individual shofars that rose from the breaths of their lungs.

    "In Kabbalah, it is taught that a person only sins when a ruach shtut -a wind of folly-penetrates him. There is a wind whistling in his head that logic cannot get rid of," Abehsera explains. "The only way to combat this wind is with a wind of holiness. What the Rebbe did was give permission to go wind against wind. Wind against wind for my houseguest, and wind against wind waging a war against all the powers of defilement in the world."

    Since that Purim night, at special peak moments during weekday farbrengens throughout the year when a war was to be waged against the forces of the "other side," as the thousands-strong crowd reached electrifying heights of spirituality with frenzied song, the Rebbe would turn to Abehsera as a conductor to a lead violinist, signaling the whistle.

    "I was devoted to the Rebbe with my entire essence. I was ready to be the Rebbe's buffoon," he says. "Perhaps the Rebbe saw that I was a good carrier of spirit."

    Abehsera talks at length about this episode in his only non-health book, The Possible Man. The book, sometimes overt autobiography, often cryptic hints and self-analysis, but always incisive analysis as to man's spiritual condition, established Abehsera among the top Jewish philosophers of the day.

    Of his devotion to the Rebbe, Abehsera says he was born into it. "I come from a family and a country where we run after tzadikim. I spent my vacations in cemeteries at graves of tzadikim. The tzadik enriches me. He is my life. You must have a tzadik to cling to. Our ego kills us. Nullifying ourselves to a tzadik gives us life."

    Abehsera recalls an incident that took place over 20 years ago, when he went swimming with a group of Lubavitcher Chassidim in the Catskills. "Here we were in bathing suits, with wet beards and no kipot on our heads, splashing around and having a good time. It was very weird. Suddenly I had a flash of the Rebbe in his office. I got out of the pool and got dressed. To this day, although I am very exercise conscious, I won't go swimming in a group for fun."

    Along the walls of his Jerusalem kitchen, next to the shelves of pots and woks, is a gallery of photographs of the righteous greats of this and the previous generation. In the center are the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Baba Sali, surrounded by Rav Shalom Sharabi zt"l, Rav Gedalia Kenig zt"l, the previous Gerer Rebbe and others. "It is my farbrengen of tzadikim," Abehsera smiles.

    What are his plans for the future now that he has fulfilled his dream of living in Jerusalem? "I hope that Yerushalayim doesn't expel me," he says. "You have to have merit to live here. Yet America is a very seductive country. When I go back I am always seduced by its people and its beauty."

    One thing he has put on hold is his macrobiotic healing work. Although he is in constant demand, he only sees clients when he travels abroad. In Israel, he says, he wants to devote himself entirely to kiruv, to spiritual healing, although he was taken by surprise at his last audience with the Rebbe. The Rebbe gave him a dollar. "This is for macrobiotics," said the Rebbe.

    "I thought macrobiotics is just something I do for a living. I didn't understand what he meant. The next week, another dollar, and he said the same thing. The same thing the third week, and then on the fourth week, he gave another dollar and said, 'for all of macrobiotics.' I think what the Rebbe was telling me was that what we need isn't high Kabbalah teachers. We have them. Don't go into that. Now we need vessels-not necessarily brown rice and seaweed, but vessels to contain spiritual light. For the Rebbe, macrobiotics meant life, he was telling me to create vessels within people for life."

    Abehsera is currently working on a movie. About? "Well, it's a lot of dance, which is really a metaphor for the Rebbe. If you can't explain him, you dance him. Dance is war, like prayer is war, war against evil, like the whistling. A religious Jew doesn't dance to show off his body, he dances to nullify himself. An entertainer dances to show off. A Chassid dances because his cup is overflowing with joy and he has no other mode of expression.

    "Here I am in Jerusalem," he says. "My dance is just beginning."