Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
In our previous lesson, we discussed the beautiful analogy comparing body and soul to two guards, one that’s able to walk but can't see and one that can see but can’t walk. We described the human instincts in the body as blind forces. They don't know why they do what they do. They're just there- the drive to eat, the drive to have children, the drive to build a house, the drive to build a career, the drive to protect yourself. These are just natural instincts that God put inside of us. They don't know the end goal. They don't realize what they were given for. These forces that are inside of us are all necessary. Don't think that you can get rid of them. That’s a mistake. We can only channel them properly.
God, in His tremendous love and kindness, created the following system: Every time you fulfill one of these drives, there's a little prize. It's called pleasure. We'll use eating as an example. There's a cycle. The cycle is, I'm hungry-that's a natural instinct.
I have an appetite.
I then eat the food, taste the food, get a pleasure from the food, get satiated.
I get a satisfaction from the satiation, and then rinse and repeat. That's the way all natural human instincts go.
Why did Hashem make it this way? The Hovot Halevavot says it's a reward. You did your job, you ate, so you a get little reward, like a mother that wants her child to eat and says, “If you eat your spinach, you'll get dessert.”
Well, God built it in dessert.. It has flavor. It has pleasure. But what happens is, we're like Pavlov's dog. We start getting conditioned to the pleasure. And with the conditioning comes imaginary images of delights and pleasures. It's not just that I'm going to eat the steak. I start imagining the sizzling steak and all the ambiance of the restaurant and all of the atmosphere and all the preparation for the pleasure.
None of this imagination is real. Real is calories, carbs, and protein. That's real. But the imagery and fantasy around the pleasures turns the pleasure into its own end goal. Now, I'm not eating so that I will have strength to do my job in life, I'm eating to eat! As the saying goes, Do people eat to live or live to eat?
And now this force is no longer just a drive and a guard for our health, which what it was originally was. We aren’t eating to satisfy our hunger. The end goal is now the pleasure. Instead of the guard working to protect the orchard, the guard is now out for himself. The eating and the pleasure is not there to get me healthy, to do my job in life. It became its own end goal.
The turning of the means into an end is what starts corrupting the human being.
Eating is not meant to be an end goal. Eating is a means. All of these forces are deep inside of us. We cannot hope to uproot them or annul them. They're there to protect us. Our job is to make sure that they don't become a goal unto themselves. I once heard a beautiful explanation of the word רע Ra/evil in a pasuk in Tehilim:
תְּ֭רֹעֵם בְּשֵׁ֣בֶט בַּרְזֶ֑ל
Break them with an iron staff.
The word rah means broken.
That means there's nothing wrong with pleasure- pleasure's great. Pleasure's great when it's part of a process. Rah רע is evil because you broke the process. You're not eating to be healthy; you're not sleeping to be energized, you're not getting married to have children. Everything is now for the pleasure itself. I'm eating to have pleasure. The ancient Greeks would eat and throw up, just so they could eat again. The goal was eating. That's evil.
Good is when everything fits into its proper place. The pasuk says
יוֹצֵ֥ר אוֹר֙ וּבוֹרֵ֣א חֹ֔שֶׁךְ עֹשֶׂ֥ה שָׁל֖וֹם וּב֣וֹרֵא רָ֑ע אֲנִ֥י ה׳ עֹשֶׂ֥ה כׇל־אֵֽלֶּה
God created light and created darkness. He makes peace. He created evil.
But the rabbis didn't want use that. So they kosher it and say, ובורא את
הכל
He created everything.
Why is does the word everything replace the word evil? Because what turns evil into good is when it's part of the whole picture. The Kol/everything takes on meaning when it becomes the means to the end.
In our Shabbat prayers, it says the word הכל /all many times, because Shabbat has that concept. The whole week could become a week of evil.
Sunday just k for Sunday. Monday just for Monday. Tuesday for Tuesday. I'm just doing it for myself. But if I have a Shabbat as the end goal, and the end goal of everything is to sit by my Friday night table with my family around me, singing songs, hearing Divre Torah, having the family together in one unit, then I have an end goal. I took the whole week and made it part of the larger picture. All those drives now became holy, because they're all the means for the end goal.
This is a heavy topic but it’s important for us to understand where all of our internal urges are supposed to go.
To be continued..