Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. I appreciate the exercise of listening to our esteemed Chief Clinical Officer, Dr. Katzenstein, and responding, based on a Torah lens. As I mentioned before, Dr. Katzenstein learned in Chaim Berlin. He's a ben-Torah. He even has a beard, but in these lessons, he's approaching the topic of Emotional Wellness from a secular lens. And a lot of the things he discusses, as we have pointed out, can be sourced in the Torah.
His main point of in discussing the downsides of social comparison is that it has a negative effect on your own productivity. He gave the example of climbing Mount Everest. It's you and the mountain, but if you start comparing yourself to those that are faster or slower on the mountain, you're not going to do as well. The impact, in real life, he says, is on your self-esteem and self-worth. You start comparing yourself to others and your self-esteem and your self-worth go down.
That's all encapsulated in one statement, from the wisest of men, Shlomo HaMelech. In his words, “Rekev Atzamot Kin’a/Jealousy causes the bones to rot.”
What does that mean? There are different explanations. The literal explanation is that after a person is buried, if he felt jealousy, his bones rot. His bones will rot, and he'll be eaten up. There are stories in the Gemara of when they uncovered a body that was completely intact and whole, and it was explained that these people did not have any jealousy. But there's obviously a deeper spiritual level, so what’s the correlation? The answer is that when a person has jealousy, and looks at everybody else, it eats up what he has, it eats up his own internal qualities. Rekev Atzamot Kin’a/Jealousy causes the bones to rot means that you are looking at somebody else, and your own qualities are going to rot. If you're trying to be somebody else and you're not flexing your own muscles, you're going to have what we call muscle atrophy, or what we can call, “your- quality atrophy.” By looking at everyone else's qualities and not your own, you eat yourself up, and there's nothing left to you. That's the negative side of social comparison. You have so many good qualities, but you can't see them when you are looking through someone else's lenses. Like Rav Wolbe says, you're measuring yourself with someone else's measuring stick. So it shows up physically that the body rots, and it shows up spiritually that your spiritual qualities disintegrate and are no longer.
And that's really what it means that,
הַקִּנְאָה וְהַתַּאֲוָה וְהַכָּבוֹד, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם /Jealousy, desire and honor take man out of the world.
The Midrash Shemuel in Pirkei Avot 4,21 explains that ‘Jealousy takes you out of the world,’ because jealousy causes a person to be eaten up from the inside, and he quotes our pasuk, Rekev Atzamot Kin’a.
Rav Simcha Zissel of Kelm, in his ma’amar 338 in his book Or Reshaz, says that logic tell us to L’Smoach B’Helko/Be happy with your lot, and that will cause you to exist. That makes you dependent on yourself and not on others. You'll start enjoying your life because you're measuring yourself with your own measuring stick, and there's no greater happiness than freeing yourself from the measuring stick of the world.
What's most difficult, in our times, is that we use social comparison constantly, looking at other people, especially in the world of social media, and we compare ourselves to the unrealistic lives of others.
Rav Simcha Zissel, in that same piece, adds that jealousy is illogical because you want what someone else has but wanting it is not going to get you it; it's not changing anything.
You’re just, as we said, destroying yourself from the inside out. That is social comparison.
There's no solution, other than just to realize that, as we said, everything boils down to the spiritual lens. The only real answer is, as the Ibn Ezra asks on Lo Tachmod, how do you not covet? How do you command someone not to covet? And he says, Just like the farm boy does not have jealousy for the princess, or the fellow that's driving a Corolla might want to drive a Lexus, but he's not thinking about driving a Maserati, because that's totally out of his reach, so too, anything that someone else has is totally out of your reach. But with that Emunah can a person make it.
Have a wonderful day.