Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. We're now going to talk a bit about the concept of knowing yourself, which means understanding what's going on inside of you- understanding all your different feelings, urges, drives, character traits and the like.
Rav Wolbe, in sefer Alei Shor (vol 1 page 143) has a beautiful approach to understanding natural, human drives and their place in the human psyche.
He quotes a Gemara in Masechet Sanhedrin 91A that discusses two men who had a strong connection. One, Rebi, who wrote the Mishnayot, was a leading Jewish figure, and the other was Antoninus, a leading Roman figure. They had many discussions, and in one, Antoninus asked Rebi the following question: After 120, both the body and soul can exempt themselves from any judgment. The body will say that the soul was responsible, “Look,” it will say, “Now that the soul has left my body, I'm lying here like a rock in the cemetery. I can't do anything.” And the soul will say, “It’s not my fault. It's the body's fault. Now that I’ve left the body, I'm just flying around the air like a bird. I can't do anything wrong.”
Rabbenu Hakadosh answered with the following mashal/parable:
There was a king who had a beautiful orchard with beautiful trees and beautiful fruits. He didn't want to put just any guard there, because the guard would eat the fruit. So he placed two guards there. One of them was lame, he couldn’t walk, and the other was blind, so that neither of them could eat from the orchard.
One day the lame man told the blind man, “I see beautiful fruit in the orchard, but I can't get there because I don't have the ability to walk. If I get on your back and direct you, you can walk us there and we'll both be able to eat the fruit.” And that's what they did. When the king came to the orchard and saw that the fruit was missing, he interrogated the guards. The lame man claimed it wasn’t he that ate the fruit, because, “My feet don't work. I can't walk to the fruit…”
The blind man claimed, “I can't see the fruit, I can't get to them.”
The king understood what happened. He put one on the other's back, judged them together and punished them together.
So too, Hashem puts the body and soul together and judges them.
Rav Wolbe sees a very, very deep concept in this analogy.
Which guard is the body and which is the soul in this mashal?
He says the body is the blind man. He's able to move, but he can’t see, and the soul is the seeing, lame man. He sees, but he can't move. These are the two guards of the beautiful orchard called man.
All of our natural drives and desires are just that- drives. They're engines that move, but they can't see. When you want to eat, it’s because you're hungry and your body needs food. But your body doesn't know that. Instincts are blind. When you're in a room and you want to save yourself, that's a blind drive that's there to protect you. The desire to get married and have children, that's a drive. It’s not a logical drive. People with low IQs also want to procreate, because it׳s a drive. Jealousy is a drive. It’s why we want to work and build houses. These are all drives that really don't understand. They don't really get why they do what they're doing, or what what the drive is there for. We love our children, and therefore we take care of them. That's just a natural drive that a mother has- it’s a motherly instinct. All of these instincts are great guards.
They watch us, but they don't know why, because they're blind.
Along comes the seeing guard, which is the soul. The soul understands the end goal. The soul is able to give direction to our life. What are we striving for? Who are we serving? What is our goal? That is where the neshama comes in, guarding this beautiful garden, so that we shouldn't misuse our talents and our drives; so that we use them for the proper end goal.
The soul is like the lame man. It doesn't have the ability to fulfill its drives. It needs to use the body. Body and soul together are the perfect guards for the human being in his life.
The body gives the strength, and the drive, and the soul gives the structure and direction. And when these two work together, we create a beautiful person.
In our next class, we will discuss how things go wrong in this wonderful partnership.