Did you ever wonder why eating is such a challenge for most people. Sarah Yehudit Schneider has written a wonderful booklet explaining the spiritual basis for the challenge and how we can use eating as a tikun. You can purchase the book from Amazon or directly from Mrs. Schneider.
Here’s an excerpt:
Humanity’s first sin, teaches Rav Tsadok HaKohen, was Adam and Eve’s eating without right intention. The Tree of Knowledge, says he, was not a tree or a food, or a thing at all. Rather it was a way of eating. When ever a person takes self conscious pleasure from the world he falls, in that moment, from G-d consciousness and eats from the Tree of Knowledge.
All neuroses, personality imbalances, and existential dissatisfaction, teaches Torah, have their root in this sin of unholy eating. Its impurity lives inside each of us as a fact of the human condition. Every person has an eating disorder, for “eating†is a much broader activity than simply taking food into one’s mouth.
Since our first sin was unholy eating only its opposite can fix it. All of life and all of history are training us for one end: to learn to “eat†in holiness, to not let the world’s pleasures wrench our attention from G-d (even for an instant). The moment we grasp this in holiness the labor of this world will end.
See more at: http://astillsmallvoice.org/?page_id=381
