Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of Simha, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. We’ve been giving a Torah/ psychology blend, split between myself and Dr. David Katzenstein. Yesterday, Dr. Katzenstein spoke about the concept of emotions, explaining that human beings are not just logical beings. We are not artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is strictly logical. Artificial intelligence doesn't have feelings or emotions. Emotions are a human factor, and Dr Katzenstein gave two examples that show where emotions are apparent in our lives. One is in emotional eating- people don't always eat because they're hungry, and they don't eat solely based on their caloric intake. People sometimes eat with what’s called emotional eating.
Emotional eating is eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness, or loneliness. A person feels a certain emotion and tries to soothe or suppress that emotion by eating.
I feel down, I feel bad, I need a boost-I eat.
That is what's called emotional eating. It's not logical. Logic says, Don't do that. But I need to feel good. That’s a human drive. Where exactly does this come from? We have to go all the way back to Adam HaRishon, the first man, before he sinned.
Rav Chaim Volozhin says, based on the Rambam and others, that Adam HaRishon, before the sin, was truly a logical man. His decision had to be between true and false. He had to decide that God was true and the snake was false. Evil was outside of him. The snake was a force that came from the outside. But once man sinned, desire moved inside of him, and now man no longer looks for true and false. He gets involved in good and bad. He gets involved in his senses and makes sensual decisions.
Before the sin, if Adam HaRishon would have looked at a sizzling steak, he would have seen just the cold facts on the nutrition label. How much calcium, how much potassium, how much magnesium, and exactly what it would supply for his daily nutritional intake. He wouldn’t be affected by the sizzle, the smell, the texture or anything like that. He simply looked at it as true and false. That's a logical man.
But we are no longer purely logical beings. God now created us post-sin with a brain and with emotions. Of course, emotions also are positive things. We use emotions to connect with people. But what we are discussing now is emotion involving what we call a ta’ava/desire, a desire to eat, past the amount that you're supposed to eat. Rav Wolbe says these emotions are a little tricky. Eating is a little tricky because you have to eat. God put inside of us a desire to eat, with the reward that food tastes good, because otherwise, we wouldn't eat. We have to eat to survive. But there comes a point when it's no longer necessary, and that's where our logic and our desire and emotions start playing. As human beings, we are in a constant struggle between our brains and our hearts. And it goes a little further than that. Our rabbis tell us that there are three aspects in man- the logical brain, the emotional heart, and what the rabbis of the Kabbalah call the instinctive liver- where another level of the soul dwells, which is almost an animal instinct. So we have our Moach/ brain, which is the center of intelligence, we have our Lev/heart, which is the center of emotions, and finally, we have our Kaved/ liver, which is where our instincts are located. The first letter of Moach is a מ Mem, the first letter of Lev is ל Lamed, and the first letter of kaved is a כ kaf. These letters spellמלך Melech /king. A king is one whose brain controls his emotion, which controls his instincts. But if it works in the opposite way, and your instincts control your emotions, which control your brain, it spells כלם kalem/destructive.
So human beings are logical and emotional beings, and our job is to have our logic control our emotions. Have a wonderful day.