Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. (This lesson probably should have been discussed a little earlier, but I found it later.)
Rav Chaim Vital, in his Sefer Shaare Kedusha (Section one, gate one) says,
“It is well known that the body of the man is not man himself. The body is called Basar HaAdam/the flesh of man. He quotes a Pasuk in Iyov (10, 11) which says, “Flesh and skin, you clothe me in, which means flesh and skin are no more than clothing. Furthermore, in Shemot 30,32, it 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 it’s not man.
Who, then, is man?
Man is his Pinemeyut/ his internal self. His body is just the clothing that his spiritual, intellectual soul is wearing.
In the next world, that clothing is removed and he he wears another, pure and clean spiritual cloak, as it says in Zacharyah 3,4,”Remove the dirty clothing from yourself, and put on clean clothing,” which refers to this spiritual clothing.
Rav Dessler said that when a person passes away, we should look at it as if the person is going to a wedding, wearing a heavy fur coat.
When he gets to the wedding, he checks his coat, and from, there he goes on to the ballroom. Nobody cries when you take off your fur coat. It's only a coat. It’s the same with the physical body. It's just a coat. It's not really us.
The problem is that many people identify themselves with their body. There’s an anecdote that I remember hearing many years ago that relates to this concept:
Christopher Reeves was an actor who played the part of the all-powerful Superman, and maybe it went to his head. One day, he was out riding a horse, without proper protection, when 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 to feel comfortable enough to present himself to the public. He was still on a ventilator and unable to go for more than 30 seconds disconnected from a machine.
The interviewer asked him, “What gave you the ability to finally come out into the public light after this year?”
And he answered, “It took me a year to realize that I am not my body.”
That's an epiphany. I am not my body. Some 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.
But we have to remember, we're not our bodies. How we look doesn't define who we are.
My father-in-law, Rabbi Nosson Scherman, says that he once visited a relative of his in Eretz Yisrael, about 60 years ago. This relative was a holy man (but simple in that he didn’t serve in any formal position) and he had a lot of warts on his hands.
My father- in-law could not help but notice the warts, and the man obviously picked up it and said, “You're wondering why I have all these warts on my hands and I haven't removed them? I asked the Hevra Kaddisha/ burial society, and they told me they don't charge more for warts,”
which is a very morbid way of saying, We're all going to die anyway, and it doesn't make a difference in the grave if one has warts on their hands or not.
So it's up to us to decide what we identify with. Do we identify with our bodies, with our cars, or with what's inside of us. And even inside of us, there's a mixture: my desires, the true me, the not-real me, what the Yetzer Hara is trying to project onto me as me….
And there's another aspect, which we will call the greater self or the super self. In the introduction to the Sefer Shaare Yosher, by Rav Shimon Shkop, he says that you can't break the desire to love yourself. It’s put into man, as 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 mean just you yourself, but some may extend you to their family. Some people extend the you to their community. Other people might expand their you to their city, and some people expand their you to the entire Jewish people.
He loves himself. But myself is not limited to just little old me.
Myself is much bigger than that. So Who are we? is really an ongoing question of who we identify ourselves with. And the greater and more lofty parts of ourselves that we identify ourselves with, the greater we are. Have a wonderful day.