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other wonderful and useful activities. Fortunate are they! My rabbi
and mentor, Rabbi Yaakov Mutzafi (may his merit protect us),
slept between one and two hours a night (as testified to by Rabbi
Mordechai Eliyahu). And I know a tzaddik who slept only one hour
a day—seven hours a week. What a wonderful life!
I Forgot to Sleep
It is told that Rav Ovadiah Yosef once told his son that he had
not slept for the last two days. His son asked him why, and he
answered that he had forgotten to do so. Have you ever heard of
someone forgetting to sleep for two days? Is that natural? People
say: “The body has its own demands,” but don’t these tzaddikim
have a body? In fact, generally speaking the body of a tzaddik is
weaker than that of an ordinary person, as is known.
But certainly, this indicates that the body receives its life from
knowledge and from its bond with the Creator. It is not sleep that
gives life to the body, but wisdom. As the verse states, “Wisdom
gives life to those who possess it” (Ecclesiastes 7:12). And as we say
in the evening prayer: the words of Torah “are our life and the
length of our days.” And so too Rabbi Nachman teaches in Sefer
Hamidot: “The Torah, tithing and the Sabbath grant physical life
as well [as spiritual life]” (Limud part 2). Thus, the soul, which is our
bond with Hashem, gives life to the body. As our sages say: “Just
as the Holy One, blessed be He, sustains the entire world, so too
the soul sustains the body” (Berachot 10a). And as Rabbi Nachman
learns from the verse, “Seek Me and live” (Amos 5:4), we receive
life from searching for Hashem (Likutei Moharan 27).
That is why, after Rabbi Nachman revealed Likutei Moharan I
60, he told his students “that by means of revealing this teaching
to them he could have put them in a state in which, for three
days and three nights, they would not know the difference between
night and day at all” (Chayei Moharan 356). And he also said that
if he would begin to reveal a little of the wisdoms that he knew,
“they could live by means of the delight of the attainment of these
wisdoms alone, without eating and drinking” (Sichot Haran 181).
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Length of Days
Such a state of being is called “length of days.” Every day of
the tzaddikim is long, filled and overflowing with holy deeds, and
filled with clinging to Hashem and to the Torah. Therefore, they
barely need to sleep, and their sleep is entirely different than that
of others. With it, they attain wonderful attainments and perform
awesome rectifications. Regarding this, the verse states: “The fear
of Hashem increases days, whereas years of the wicked are cut off”
(Proverbs 10:27).
The midrash relates that, regarding the verse, “Jacob woke from
his sleep” (Genesis 28:16), Rabbi Yochanan says that “from his sleep”
means “from his learning” (Bereishit Rabbah 69). This seems difficult:
Why did Rabbi Yochanan have to learn this verse homiletically?
What was difficult for him about the simple meaning of the words,
“Jacob woke from his sleep”? The answer is that we certainly cannot
say that Jacob slept in the simple sense, because the midrash says
(ibid. 68) about the verse, “he lay down in that place” (ibid. 11),
that only in that place did he lie down, but for the 24 years that
he learned Torah in the study hall of Shem and Eber he did not lie
down to sleep even once! Therefore, we must conclude that here
“sleep” means something else—and that is “learning.”
With Little Sleep
The mishnah in Avot (6:6) lists 48 conditions for acquiring the
Torah, one of which is “little sleep.” One could challenge this: the
Torah is profound wisdom and requires maximal clarity. As the
Gemara states, in order to learn we need accuracy, tranquility,
and a great deal of energy and focus (Eiruvin 65a and Megillah 28b).
Experience tells us that a person who is tired and sleep-deprived is
unfocused, confused, and so forth. That being the case, it would
seem fitting to demand that a Torah sage make sure to get a
reasonable amount of sleep, so that he will concentrate and reach
proper conclusions without erring in his learning. So why is little
sleep one of the conditions for acquiring the Torah?
The answer is that paradoxically a minimum of sleep increases