A Torah of "Life"

We know that Torah and Mitzvos keep a Jew happy and healthy, physically and spiritually. The Rebbe writes in many letters that this is very literal. It express itself in our day to day lives. For example, the Rebe responds to an individual who is trying to decide about if they should send their child (who seemingly was ill) to a school that the "Yiras Shamaim" (fear of heaven) is not that great but the air quaility there is better as opposed to the other school that does have "Yiras Shamaim" but the air quality is not as good. The Rebbe answered that it it says "yiras Shamaim Lechaim" fear of Haven is what gives life therefore send the child to the school that has more fear of haven even thought the air is not as good, because ultimately that is what contributes to more life.
We also know that in the times of Moshiach the whole world and the Jewish people in particular will be healthy and happy etc.. the closest we got to something of this sort was during the times of king Solomon when the world was at peace and "people sat under their vine and under their fig trees. ( I.E in peace and happiness)being that now we are closing in on the Geulah (redemption) The New York Times is helping us "open our eyes" and see the geulah is on the way...
because lo and behold the New York Times reported on March 7th of last year that the happiest man in America is an observant Jew. This is based on the Gallup-Health ways Wellbeing Index... Here is the article.... if you keep in mind what percentage of the population is Jewish and what percentage is observant the results are even more amazing.

For the last three years, Gallup has called 1,000 randomly selected American adults each day and asked them about their emotional status, work satisfaction, eating habits, illnesses, stress levels and other indicators of their quality of life.
It’s part of an effort to measure the components of “the good life.” The responses are plugged into a formula, called the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and then sorted by geographic area and other demographic criteria. The accompanying maps show where well-being is highest and lowest around the country.
The New York Times asked Gallup to come up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America, based on the characteristics that most closely correlated with happiness in 2010. Men, for example, tend to be happier than women, older people are happier than middle-aged people, and so on.
Gallup’s answer: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year. A few phone calls later and ...
Meet Alvin Wong. He is a 5-foot-10, 69-year-old, Chinese-American, Kosher-observing Jew, who’s married with children and lives in Honolulu. He runs his own health care management business and earns more than $120,000 a year.
Reached by phone at his home on Friday (and referred to The Times by a local synagogue), Mr. Wong said that he was indeed a very happy person. He said that perhaps he manages to be the happiest man in America because “my life philosophy is, if you can’t laugh at yourself, life is going to be pretty terrible for you.”
He continued: “This is a practical joke, right?”

In another related article the author dissects some of the data
ttp://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/the-happiest-man-in-america-annotated/her
she makes some fascinating points

1. Jews in general and religious Jews in particular scored the highest in happiness. in her words....RELIGION: On average, Jews have higher levels of well-being than their counterparts of every other major faith in America. ( to quote from the other article she writes..The index itself is composed of six components, shown below. Jews scored the highest of any group on half of those sub-indices).

2. she also breaks down the marital status and it shows that the top of the list are married people next are singletons. what i find interesting is that all the other kinds of relationships not sectioned by the Torah are lower on the list then the singletons! which tells us that although people will tell you that they want to live their life as they choose and that is what will make them happy, we see in reality the opposite is true.
To summarize what does all this tell us. that as we get closer to Moshiach the world itself will say Torah is true and here we see that keeping Torah and mitzvoth will keep you happy! so its not something that your rabbi or teacher tells you. its the Gallup poll! so will you trust me know:)
we are not saying all the data here is accurate or that all the components are correct or suggesting that people model all the aspects of the index. We are just pointing out that throughout the generations Jews were considered the most persecuted people and now Gallup reports that the observant Jew is the happiest and the Jews in general are affluent. which are all precursors to the real thing.