Prayer Suggested Against Flu

By COLlive reporter

Rabbi Anchelle Perl, Director of Chabad of Mineola, NY, has sent his members practical suggestions to fight swine flu, following the first U.S. death being reported.

This strain of the flu is suspected to have killed more than 150 people in Mexico and has been confirmed in at least seven countries around the globe, from Spain to Canada to New Zealand.

In France, the health minister took the extraordinary step of calling for a suspension of all flights from the European Union to Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak, even as a Mexican health official said that the death toll appeared to be stabilizing.

Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday in an interview with CNN that the first American death of the disease was a 23-month-old child in Texas. He gave no other details about the child.

In an email to fellow Jews in Long Island, Rabbi Perl said that doing a favor for another Jew is “a spiritual vessel to receive G-d’s blessings for good health.”

The Lubavitcher Rebbe has written about this in Igros Kodesh, Vol, XVIII, p.138: “Such conduct has a direct or [at least an] indirect effect on the improvement of one’s health, as well as in more accurately assessing all that is happening to oneself and around him.”

Perl has also sent a prayer composed by Rabbi Chaim Joseph David Azulai (1724 – 1807), commonly known as the Chida, a rabbinical scholar and a noted bibliophile, who pioneered the history of Jewish religious writings.