What I’m about to say now probably should have been mentioned a little earlier, but I found it later. Rabbi Chaim Vital, in his Sefer Sha'arei Kedushah, Section 1, Gate 1, says, “It is well known that the body of a man is not man himself. The body is called Besar Ha'adam, the flesh of man.” He quotes a Pasuk (verse) in Iyov 10:11, which says, “Flesh and skin you clothe me in.” So that means flesh and skin are no more than clothing. Furthermore, Shemot 30:32 says, “On the flesh of man you should not anoint,” referring to the anointing oil that was meant only for holy items. Man’s flesh was called the flesh of man because he is not man. Who, then, is man? Man is his penimiyut. Man is his internal self. His body is only clothing that his spiritual, intellectual soul is wearing. And that’s the true man.
In the next world, that clothing is removed, and then he wears another pure and clean spiritual cloak. As it says in Zechariah 3:4, “Remove the dirty clothing from yourself and put on clean clothing,” which is referring to this spiritual clothing. Rav Dessler said that a person should look at this world, when a person passes away, as if somebody is going to a wedding wearing a heavy fur coat. When he gets to the wedding, he checks his coat at the coat check, and from there he goes on to the ballroom. Nobody cries when you take off your fur coat. It’s only a coat. And that’s the same with the physical body. It’s a coat. It’s not really us. The problem is that many people identify themselves with their body.
I’d like to share a little anecdote that I remember hearing many years ago. There was an actor known as Christopher, or his name was Christopher Reeve. Maybe that was his name or his stage name. And he played the part of Superman. Powerful Superman. Maybe it got to his head, and he was riding a horse one day, not properly protected. The horse came to a short stop and threw him off. He became a paraplegic and was never able to walk again. It took him a year before he was comfortable enough to present himself to the public, still on a ventilator and unable to go for more than 30 seconds without being connected to a machine. The interviewer asked, “How did you have the strength? What gave you the ability to finally come out into the public light after this year?” He said, “It took me a year to realize that I am not my body.” That’s an epiphany: I am not my body. They might say, “That’s pretty simple.” But how many of us really live that? People get very upset when they gain weight. Of course, we’re supposed to be healthy and take care of ourselves. We have to remember, we’re not our bodies. And how we look doesn’t define who we are.
My Follower, Rabbi Nosson Scherman, says over that he once visited a relative of his in Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), 60 years ago or more. He was a holy man, a simple man—I mean simple, meaning he didn’t have any position. And he had a lot of warts on his hands. My Follower could not help but notice the warts on his hands. The man obviously picked up that My Follower was looking at the warts. He said, “You’re wondering why I have all these warts on my hands and haven’t removed them?” He said, “I asked the Chevra Kadisha, which is the burial society, and they told me they don’t charge more for warts.” Which means, in a very morbid way, we’re all going to die anyway. It doesn’t make a difference in the grave whether one has warts on their hands or not.
So it’s up to us: What do we identify with? Our bodies, our cars, what’s inside of us? Even what’s inside of us is a mixture of our desires: the true me, the not-real me, and what the Yetzer Hara (evil inclination) is trying to project on me as me. There’s another aspect, which you could for a moment call the greater self, or the super self. In the introduction to Sefer Sha'arei Yosher, Shimon Shkop says that the ultimate level of freeing oneself from all selfishness, from all egotistic behavior, is that you can’t break the desire to love yourself. That’s put into man. That is a natural instinct: you love yourself. If there’s a fire in a nightclub, there’s a stampede, and people step on their loved ones because there’s nobody you love more than yourself. The question, he says, is: Who are you? You could be yourself. Some people extend the you to their family. Some people extend the you to their community. Some people extend the you to their city. And some people expand the you to the entire Jewish people. That means he loves himself, but myself is not limited to just little old me. Myself is much bigger than that. So who we are is really an ongoing question of who I identify myself with. And the greater and more lofty the parts of ourselves that we identify with, the greater we are.