Believe it or not. Good morning, gentlemen. We’re continuing our study of Mesilat Yesharim. Yesterday, we started discussing the sugya, the subject of pleasures. As we mentioned yesterday, not all pleasures are created equal. That’s one of the first lessons a person needs to know about pleasures: they’re not all the same. I mean, they’re different pleasures, but they’re not all at the same level or the same experience. There are higher pleasures and lower pleasures.
As an example, if a father saw his four- or five-year-old building Legos all day and enjoying the experience, the father would be ecstatic that his son was enjoying the toy he bought for him, and that his son was accomplishing something, building, and growing. But if the father saw his 45-year-old son on the floor all day building Legos, in the same spot he was 40 years ago, doing that every day, the father would be extremely hurt, disappointed, and in pain. His son is having tremendous pleasure and loves it. He says, “Dad, I can’t get away from this Lego item. It’s been 40 years already. It’s the 40-year anniversary. That’s all I do all day long. I’m just building Legos. I can’t help it. I love it.” The father would be very, very upset.
The obvious question is: if a father wants his son or daughter to have pleasure, and here the child is on the floor playing Legos and enjoying it, why is the father upset? What’s bothering him? You want your kids to have pleasure. They’re having pleasure. Be happy. Be excited.
The answer is that it’s obvious to us, even though maybe we can’t express it as we’re expressing it now, that not all pleasures are equal. While the five-year-old on the floor is enjoying the Lego set, and that’s good for the five-year-old, we know that a 45-year-old is capable of much more pleasure. There’s the pleasure of marriage, the pleasure of building a home—not just a physical home, but a home for a family. There’s the pleasure of raising a child. There’s the pleasure of building a business. There’s the pleasure of learning wisdom. There’s the pleasure of growth in many ways.
A father wants his son to have pleasure. That’s all a good father or mother really wants for their children. They don’t want anything from their children; they want things for their children. What do they want? They want them to be happy. They want them to enjoy life. They want them to have pleasure. But it’s not just pleasure that a father wants. He wants higher pleasures. When given the choice of Lego pleasure, marriage pleasure, or wisdom pleasure, there’s no question that the father would be very disappointed if his son chose the lower pleasure, even though he may be enjoying it. There are much higher pleasures, much more enjoyable ones. Why would you waste your time with a lower pleasure if you could have something higher?
It’s like a person who could either buy a small house for $200,000 and turn it around for $300,000—a beautiful thing, making $100,000—or buy a building for $200,000,000 and flip it for $300,000,000. It takes the same amount of work. Now, if you can’t afford it, if you don’t have $200,000,000, then you have no choice. You buy a $200,000,000. That’s all you can do. So if a father sees his son involved in buying a building for $200,000,000 and turning it into $300,000,000, he’d be very proud and very happy. But if the kid is sitting on billions of dollars and could do the same work and put in the same effort, turning a $200,000,000 into $300,000,000, the father would be very upset. Why is my son wasting his energy on something so minute? Yes, it’s nice to make $100,000,000, but it’s much nicer to make $100,000,000. Why are you wasting your time? That’s called wasting your time. That’s not called taking advantage and enjoying your life, even though you’re doing something that may be enjoyable. Compared to what you can do, you can do much more.
So it’s obvious to all of us that not all pleasures are created equal. But we have to really study and understand the difference between each kind of pleasure. Yesterday, we said that we could look at pleasures in five categories. We’ll start with the bottom one. For fifth class, we gave the example of the guy in the airplane. The fifth guy is hanging off the ropes of the airplane. He’s flying on the plane. He’s going to get to his destination at some point. Like I said, we’re not going to discuss what happens at the destination. Right now, we’re just talking about the flight. There are people flying through life with a rope off the tail of the airplane. That is how they live life. It’s a pretty rough trip: a lot of complaining, a lot of issues, a lot of rockiness. Sometimes they make a very bad move and they’re hanging on for their life. Sometimes they lose their life altogether.
When you live in fifth class, you’re one move away from saying goodbye to all the people around you. I saw a statistic about how many people in this country—I believe this is the right statistic, but don’t quote me—tried to commit suicide last year. I believe it was over a million Americans. That’s a lot of people: a million Americans. Not the whole plane of Earth, just one section of the plane: the United States of America. One million people attempted suicide. Not all of them were mentally ill. But you have to understand what kind of pain a person has to be in. It’s the most natural thing for a person—the most natural desire of a person is to stay alive. The most natural desire. That’s why you’ll see a little kid, when a car is coming, run 100 miles per hour. It’s a natural desire. People want to live. For a person to get to the point where they want to give up their life voluntarily, you have to understand what kind of pain they’re in.
More is less. There are many, many dangers in living life hanging on to your life. What is the rope of the airplane? Who is this guy? Who is this person in the real world that we can look at and say, “This guy is hanging on to the rope”? What is he doing? The plane and the rope are obviously only an example. It’s a mashal (example). But what is it in real life? Which person will I look at and say, “Oh, that’s the rope guy. This is the guy. What is he doing, this guy? Which area of pleasures is he involved in?”
The answer is that this is a person whose physical pleasures are his only pleasures in life. He wants pleasure like everybody else. We’re all equal in that. While not all men are created equal, unlike what it says in the words of the founding fathers—it’s not true. All men are not created equal. There are tall men and short men, smarter men and less smart men. Actually, the Torah tells us that there isn’t one person created equal. Forget that all men are not equal: there isn’t one person like you in the whole world since Adam and his children. So maybe they mean to say—to give them the benefit of the doubt—that all people should be respected equally, given rights, and treated equally. That’s probably what they meant. But the words are misleading. All men are not created equal. That is not true. Shake it.
While nobody is created equal, we all have a common-denominator desire for pleasures. But you will find people in this world, not too far from us, whose only pleasures they can implement and imagine, and therefore the only pleasures they pursue, are physical pleasures. I mean, they want pleasures like everybody else. That’s human. But their understanding of pleasures is limited to physical pleasures. They understand physical pleasures, and therefore, because that’s what they understand, that’s what they pursue. Their whole life is in the pursuit of physical pleasures: eating, drinking, relaxing, and all kinds of other physical pleasures available to the average, healthy, normal person. This is all they can understand. They can’t see beyond that.
Remember I told you: in the world of pleasures, you can’t understand pleasures intellectually. You just can’t do it. I can’t describe the great taste of a watermelon from my brain to your brain. No matter what I say about the watermelon, you’ll never be able to understand what it tastes like. You just can’t do it. I can say it’s like this, it’s like that, it’s a little like that, it’s a lot like this. But you can never taste a pleasure unless you taste it. That’s how it works.
Intellectually, I can explain many things to you, and you can understand them as if you experienced them. But when it comes to pleasures, if you don’t experience it, you don’t know what it is. So there are people who can understand only physical pleasures because those are the only pleasures they’ve basically experienced. Therefore, they don’t know anything else and can’t even imagine anything else. Even when someone tells them about other pleasures, explains them, and gives them a whole session on them, they would not know what he is talking about. They’ll hear, “Well, there’s this kind of pleasure, there’s the fourth-class pleasure, and then there’s the third-class pleasure, and then there’s second-class, there’s even first-class.” They’ll sit in the class, and while they can understand everything the person says, they have no connection to, and no idea in reality of, what he’s talking about. That’s the uniqueness of the world of pleasure. You can’t learn it from the book. You can learn the rules from the book; you can understand the principles from the book. But you can never appreciate the pleasure and understand it until you have it.
So who are the people hanging off the rope of planet Earth and moving along in that manner? They are people involved in physical pleasures, and that’s all they know when it comes to pleasure. Because that’s all they know, they can’t imagine anything else, and that’s the type of life they lead. That’s a lot of people, a lot of people out in the world. That’s all they can imagine: physical items. Physical means an item. It’s a shirt, a tie, a dress, a car, a house, a dinner, a lunch, a party. It’s physical.
There are many variations in the physical pleasure world. If you open your eyes—and don’t open them too much, or you’ll see too much—you’ll see a society that’s running for physical pleasures. They used to have retail stores, I don’t know if you remember. Years ago, they used to have retail stores. People actually sold things physically in the street. People would walk into the stores and buy things. Today, all the retail stores became restaurants. You walk in New York City, and it’s all restaurants. The world has moved toward more physical pleasures, not less. Our society is moving more toward physical pleasures. In fact, all the ideas in entertainment are trying to figure out how much more we can offer experientially.
We have this kind of restaurant now. It used to be that you’d go to a restaurant and could order a hamburger, a hot dog, or a steak. Today, we have a steak restaurant. That’s all we do, but we have all kinds of steak. We have this kind of steak, that kind of steak, or this one, and then we give you an experience before that. Before the steak, you have to have certain foods that bring out the taste of the steak on a different level. If you want that steak, you have to have this appetizer. If you want the other steak, you have to have that appetizer.
The market today, if you want to make money, is giving people more experiences in the world of physical pleasure. It’s taking something and figuring out how to make it unique from a different angle, from a different place, from a different taste. There are all kinds of gimmicks and strategies to give people more excitement in the physical world. As we’ll soon see, the physical world needs that. The physical pleasure world needs variations all the time. The more people are in it, the more they need variations, because at some point they no longer enjoy the thing they used to enjoy. You can’t go to the same restaurant every day, so you need a different restaurant, a different kind, a different item, a different thing, a different sell.
Before we go into the physical pleasure department in depth—and we’re going to go into depth in it—we first learned today that when you see people whose pleasure GPS is physical, you know you’re looking at a person hanging on to the rope of this planet. You can assume, you can assume that it’s not a simple ride. We can assume there are a lot of rocky situations in that person’s life.
That doesn’t mean that physical pleasures are bad, wrong, or things we should stay away from. That’s not what we’re coming to say over here. Physical pleasures are actually a part, an important part, of our daily existence and an important part of our mission in life. Because when it says in the words of Mesilat Yesharim that we were created to take pleasure in this world and the next world, as we’ll soon see, that includes physical pleasures too.
In fact, it says that a person who makes a vow to be a nazir (Nazirite), after he finishes his nazirut (Nazirite period), has to bring a sin offering. It’s his choice how long he wants to be a nazir, with a minimum of 30 days. After he finishes his 30 days, or whatever he committed to, he has to bring a sin offering. A sin offering? What did the guy do? He did a beautiful thing. He wanted to be holy. He wanted to be special. He got the recipe for how to do it, followed through, and he’s done. What do you bring a sin offering for? Usually, you bring a sin offering if you do something wrong. What did the nazir do wrong that he brings a sin offering? He brings a sin offering.
Chazal said it’s because Hashem gave wine to enjoy, and this guy decided to take a vow not to have wine. Because Hashem gave him something to enjoy and he abstained, that’s considered not so good. But we use wine on the most important occasions of our lives. Anytime we have an important occasion, there’s wine there. Kiddush (sanctification) Friday night, the holiest day of the week: the first thing, how does it enter? Wine. You could theoretically make Kiddush without anything. You’re sanctifying the day. That’s words. But no. Wine is the entry point of Shabbat. Wine is the entry point of a young man into the Berit (covenant) of Avraham Avinu. First thing: wine. Wine is the entry point of a holy marriage. First thing they do is get married. Pick up the cup of wine.
We celebrate the birth of our people on the night of Pesach, the birthday of the Jewish nation. Not just one wine, four wines. Wherever we find something valuable, we bring wine. We don’t preach abstinence from physical pleasures.
A person should not make a mistake and think that when we talk about physical pleasures being number five, we mean that physical pleasures are bad or wrong. That’s not what we’re saying. All you need to know right now is that they’re at the bottom. But they’re important pleasures. So now we’ve identified fifth class. Now we have to go into fifth class in depth. First, we divided the pleasures. Before you can go into depth with something, you have to separate things that may seem all the same. Then you have to zone in on each one and all its parts.
You have to know a few rules when it comes to the world of pleasure. These rules will apply in every class of pleasure that we learn. We’re learning fifth class right now. We’re going to learn fourth class, and we’re going to hit even first class. We’re going to first class. These rules have to be used when we analyze and hyper-focus on each individual type of pleasure. In order to focus inside each pleasure, we need certain principles to guide us so we can take full advantage of the area of pleasure we’re learning about.
Rule number one. We’re in physical pleasure, so we’re going to use it here. Rule number one is that you have to beware of the counterfeit of this pleasure. The word “counterfeit” means something that looks very much like the real thing but is fake in reality. This rule means, basically, in a deeper way, that Hashem made the world with free choice. If the choice you have is only good, then even though you chose it, it’s not called free choice. The actual choice doesn’t mean you had free choice if that was the only choice. The only way you can have free choice is if there’s an equal opportunity to do something else.
So in order to provide free choice, so people can have pleasure in their life, there has to be a decoy, a misrepresentation, a counterfeit. There has to be one. There has to be one. It has to be intriguing, saying, “Oh, you want physical pleasures? I don’t even like that. Here it is. This is the way you do it. This is the way you enjoy it.” There has to be something misleading you from taking advantage of physical pleasures that are good for you. Physical pleasures are good, but there’s going to be a misrepresentation, and if you fall for it, it’s going to take you far away from what you thought was going to happen and will be destructive in your life. That counterfeit has to be there.
Remember, if the counterfeit isn’t there, choosing to enjoy the world and every class will be automatic. So in every class of pleasure, there’s going to be something that misleads you, and you have to be aware of it. If you’re a cashier collecting money from consumers, the worst thing that can happen is that you don’t know how to tell the difference between a real hundred and a fake hundred. The first rule for a cashier is to know what looks fake. Maybe you give them an item to test it, but what good is a cashier if he thinks he’s taking in real money and it’s all paper? Therefore, the first rule in any pleasure that we study and focus on is that you have to know where the area is that will mislead you.
Now let me add a little more. Usually, the area that misleads you is stronger and more attractive than the good way to take care of your desire in this area of pleasures. I said before that there has to be an equal choice. But in reality, to make it an equal choice, the negative has to be more attractive than the positive. Because if the negative and positive were equal, it’s again not obvious: if I could do the right thing and enjoy it, why would I do the wrong thing? So again, there’s no free choice. By nature, the negative has to be more alluring. It has to be more exciting, at least in its raw form. Therefore, I have to make a choice. Remember that for every class of pleasure that we study: as we focus on that pleasure, the first thing we have to learn is what may lure us away from enjoying the pleasure in that class.
So let’s go to physical pleasures. The physical pleasure world has one area. There’s one area in the physical pleasure world that is extremely misleading. Logically, it makes perfect sense. However, in reality, it leads to what is wrong, dangerous, and disastrous in this area of pleasure. That counterfeit, as I call it in my own words, is “more is more.” More is more. It makes sense. More is more means that in the physical pleasure world, the more physical pleasures I have, the more I’ll be able to enjoy my life. That makes perfect sense. Logic. More is more.
So you have a person in this world whose goals are more. Whatever they can afford—not always can they afford more, and not always are they able to do more—but whatever more they can get their hands on, they’re going to get more and more and more. That’s their goal. More is more. In reality, this is a huge mistake, because in the physical pleasure world, it actually goes in the direction of less. You want more pleasures, so you follow the more mindset. I need more. When you follow the more mindset, you’re actually getting less.
I’ll give you an example, a very simple example. Obviously, there are many variations in this example. You have a guy who works very hard for his money, making ends meet. One of his favorite foods is steak. He loves steak, a nice piece of fat steak. He has steak every Rosh Chodesh (new month). Why does he have steak only on Rosh Chodesh? Because that’s what he can afford. Once a month, he goes to the butcher and goes all out for the steak. He loves it. He waits all month for the steak.
One day, the guy hits the jackpot and has all kinds of money. He’s still having his steak once a month. He says to himself, “Tipesh (fool), what’s your favorite food? What do you look forward to the most?” Steak. “So why do you have it once a month, then? You can have steak twice a day. What’s the problem?” So he gets all excited. He goes to the butcher, buys an entire cow, and puts it in the freezer. He’s ready to have steak twice a day. He’s excited. He’s so excited. If he had excitement for one steak in a month, imagine what 60 steaks are going to do for him. Unbelievable. It’s gorgeous.
So he goes. Day one, afternoon: barbecue. He loves it. He comes at night: another pound. Again, he’s still enjoying it. By the seventh day, the guy is done. Now, what does “done” mean? Let me explain what “done” means. It’s very important to know what happens. At some point, he’ll no longer be able to enjoy the steak. That means that instead of enjoying steak more, he now actually enjoys it less. A month later, he goes to a restaurant with his friend. His friend orders a big steak and is going crazy, can’t wait to eat it. This guy says, “I wish I could enjoy that. I can’t look at it. I can’t. I’m not getting next to it.” That means the pleasure of steak is no longer available to him. Hashem made a pleasure called steak in the physical world, but now you no longer have the ability to enjoy that pleasure. Why? Because you thought more is more. You thought the more steak, the more pleasure. Actually, the more steak, the less pleasure. As you did more, you lost your ability to enjoy that same item that others are enjoying and that you used to enjoy. It’s no longer available.
So now, now steak is gone. Now you have to look for something else. Then you go there, and then you continue with more is more, and you burn that out too. Then you go to another one. As you go through life, you actually have less and less opportunity for pleasures. The same pleasure you used to enjoy, you can’t enjoy anymore. God, you have to be careful in this physical world of the counterfeit. More is more is fake. It’s not true. It’s actually more is less.
I told you once about a guy and his friend. They were away in school, and the place was no kosher no kosher years ago. One day, the box never came. Their parents used to send them meat with every shipment, every month, but it didn’t get there. So they went to the store, these guys, looking for something kosher they could eat. They couldn’t believe it. They found turkey, kosher turkey, in some random city. They bought it whenever they could find it. The guy told me turkey is his favorite item. He ate it for 37 straight days. He said, “I look at turkey today, I need to go to the doctor.” In the physical pleasure world, more is more is fake. It’s not true. We’ll continue tomorrow. Have a good day.