By Rabbi Shafier
www.TheShmuz.com

ספר דברים פרק יב

(כ) כִּי יַרְחִיב יְדֹוָד אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֶת גְּבֻלְךָ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר לָךְ וְאָמַרְתָּ אֹכְלָה בָשָׂר כִּי תְאַוֶּה נַפְשְׁךָ לֶאֱכֹל בָּשָׂר בְּכָל אַוַּת נַפְשְׁךָ תֹּאכַל בָּשָׂר:

רש”×™ על דברים פרק יב פסוק ×›
(×›) ×›×™ ירחיב וגו’ – למדה תורה דרך ארץ שלא יתאוה אדם לאכול בשר אלא מתוך רחבת ידים ועושר.

“When HASHEM your G-d will broaden your boundary as He spoke to you, and you say, “I will eat meat,” for you will have a desire to eat meat, to your heart’s entire desire you may eat meat.” – Devarim 12:20

For forty years in the midbar the Jewish people ate mon. Guided by Moshe Rabbeinu, engaged in constant Torah study with every physical need taken care of, the Klal Yisrael lived on a lofty spiritual plane. Now that they were being ushered into a different era – entering Eretz Yisroel where they would begin living in a natural manner – they were given many directives to retain their status as an exalted nation.

One of the points that Moshe Rabbeinu made to the Klal Yisrael is that when they settled the land and followed the Torah, they would find success in their endeavors, and HASHEM would expand their borders. When this would occur, they would desire meat. And they would be allowed to eat it anywhere they wished.

Rashi is bothered by the relationship between the expanding of borders and the “desire to eat meat.” It almost implies that the expansion of borders brings on the desire. Rashi explains that the Torah is teaching us a principle in derech eretz. A person should only desire meat when he can afford it. When HASHEM expands our borders and we enjoy financial success, then it is appropriate to desire meat – not before.

This Rashi seems difficult to understand. What is wrong with desiring meat? The Torah might tell me that if I can’t afford meat, I shouldn’t eat it. If it is beyond my means and purchasing it would create an undue expense, I shouldn’t buy any. But what is wrong with just desiring it?

Pleasures and Passions

The answer to this can be best understood with a moshol. Imagine that you find yourself shipwrecked on a desert island. You haven’t eaten in three days, and you are driven by one burning desire – food. As you hobble along the island, you notice a brown paper bag under a palm tree. You open it up to find a dry peanut butter sandwich that has sat out in the sun for three months. You gulp down that sandwich with more gusto than anything that you have ever eaten in your life.

Here is the question: how much pleasure did you derive from eating that sandwich? There is no question that you had a powerful urge, a very real desire, but how much enjoyment did you receive from that activity? The answer is not much. It certainly relieved your hunger, and in that sense brought a release from pain, but it would be hard to imagine that for the rest of your life you would be reminiscing back to the sensation of the bitter, spoiled peanut butter and dry, cracked bread as it scratched your throat when you swallowed it.

This is a good example of the distinction between pleasure and passion. You ate that sandwich with great desire – a lot of passion – but you didn’t derive much pleasure from that activity. Passion is the pull to engage in a given activity. Pleasure is the amount of enjoyment you receive from it. As unusual as it may sound, most people fail to make a distinction between pleasures and passions.
HASHEM wants us to be happy

This seems to be the answer to the Rashi. While it is true that life is a battle, and exerting self-control is the primary vehicle of growth, HASHEM created us to be happy. If you bring new desires into your world, desires that you can’t possibly fulfill, you are destined to be miserable. You will be constantly wanting, constantly hungry. Your life will become the opposite of a pleasurable existence.

The Torah is teaching us that our desires are things that we can and need to control. If you have the capacity to meet the desire to eat meat, and it is within the parameters of your purpose in life, there is nothing wrong with allowing those desires to surface. HASHEM created many pleasures for man to enjoy, and you should use those pleasures to better serve Him. But if you don’t have the means to fulfill those hungers and you allow them to be present, then you will be living a very uncomfortable existence, constantly hungering for something that can’t be met.

When HASHEM grants you abundance and you can afford luxuries, then you will desire meat – but not before. The Torah is educating us into a higher form of living. When you enjoy the pleasures and control your desires, you use this world for its intended purpose, thereby living b’ shleimus – complete, not lacking.

Consumerism – a national culture of competitive acquisitions

This concept is very applicable in our times. Economists refer to us as the consumer generation. The word consumer is a derivative of the word “consume,” which means to eat, to use up. And it is very telling. The culture we live in breeds the need to consume, whether it be food, clothing, appliances, electronics, cars. . . These products aren’t acquired. They are used up – and at an ever-increasing rate. It has been said that progress today can be measured by the speed by which yesterday’s luxury becomes today’s necessity.

But it is more than simply being cultured into the need to acquire material possessions. Spending has become the vehicle to establish social position. For many people, their personal identities are tied up in the type of car they drive and the brand of clothing they wear. Their entire sense of self is based on an image sold in the marketplace.

We are the Chosen Nation – expected to live above the rest of the nations. Unfortunately, that sense of living at a higher standard can become perverted into materialism, where the expectation is that for people like “us,” nothing less than the best will do. And so our weddings, our wardrobes, our homes, and our cars have to be the best. The way our children dress and the types of toys that they expect are nothing short of top-notch. And we find ourselves with an ever-increasing cost of living. When barely surviving in our communities means that we are expected to earn three to four times the national median household income, something is wrong with our lifestyle.

But what can we do about it? We can’t be expected to live with less than everyone else. And so we find ourselves caught in this ever-increasing spiral of earn and spend, earn and spend, until no matter how much money we make, we never seem to make ends meet.

While only a Navi can define for us why HASHEM does what He does, when we witness “market corrections,” and a general sense of “we must cut spending” arises, we might conjecture that it is a great chessed to us. It teaches us to enjoy what we have without creating new desires and expectations – to break out of this culture of spending, and the baggage that it brings.

We live in times of mass prosperity where the average person is rich, but to enjoy that great bracha, we must maintain control. The Torah’s goal is for us to be live an exalted life, to be the Chosen Nation, to be happy and satisfied in our existence. Everything in this world was created for man’s use – but it must be used properly, in balance, in the right time, and in the right measure. When man does that, he enjoys his short stay on this planet and accomplishes his purpose in Creation.

For more on this topic please listen to Shmuz #156 Get out of Debt

This Shmuz sponsored: Li Ilui Nishmas Shayna Necha Bas Shalom. To sponsor a future issue, please contact Sponsorships@theShmuz.com

By Simon Synett

Rabbi Akiva had 12,000 pairs of students and they all died in one period because they didn’t treat one-another with respect. In Hebrew shelo nahagu kavod ze-lazeh. (Yevamos 62b) The gemara continues that from that time, the entire world was desolate until Rabbi Akiva took on the five apprentices who would later become the leaders of their generation. Clearly then, Rabbi Akiva and his students were considered as the transmitters of Torah of their time, the greatest scholars and teachers.

Given that, it’s hard for us to grapple with the idea that people of such stature would sink to such a low level of behaviour in their interpersonal relationships that they deserved to be killed off by the Angel of Death. It must have been some deep and pervasive character flaw that was so destructive that they simply weren’t capable of transmitting Torah to the next generation. They had to be wiped out and Rabbi Akiva’s legacy would be passed through a new set of students. Can we put a finger on what the problem was? More importantly, can we make sure we’re not suffering from it?

In Avos 2:2, Rabban Gamliel tells us that Torah study is greatly enhanced by making an honest living, the idea being that combining the two keeps one from pursuing his baser desires and makes him far less likely to transgress the mitzvos. In fact, continues the author, Torah study that isn’t accompanied by work will no doubt lead to a rotten, sinful life.

The text of the Mishna is a little puzzling: For one thing, if the author had intended to point out that you need a livelihood before you can engage in study, then why does he emphasise the need to be doing both? As if to say that even if you have wealth, you need to work, not in order to make a living, but to prevent a descent towards a sinful life.

Secondly, Rabban Gamliel points out the flip side, that any Torah study that isn’t accompanied by melacha – work – is ultimately doomed to bring you to bad ways. He clearly wants to emphasise that it’s not that the lack of work brings you directly to sin, but that the lifestyle will eventually bring you down.

I’d like to suggest a novel way of understanding this that will help us make sense of the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students for not giving respect to each other.

Given that there are whole communities of Jews who champion a lifestyle of Torah study without work, I think we can learn something by making some observations…

This choice of lifestyle is justified by reference to the mystical tradition of the kabbalists, as expressed by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin in his Nefesh HaChaim. The theme of this work and the underlying philosophy is the idea that the physical world that we exist in is really a means to the end of achieving spiritual delight in the spiritual world.

The spiritual world is the real world and the physical world is a low resolution reproduction, to use a modern analogy. You have to see your actions, not as mundane physical, mechanical processes, but as spiritual levers that make things happen in a Spiritual Reality. True, you can’t see it now, but when your time’s up here, you will see how every single thing that ever issued from your feeble mind, let alone mouth or hands, has contrived to create an Eternal Life that you have to live out forever!

Given that, it’s hardly surprising that if you take this to heart, you’ll want to make sure that everything you do has spiritual significance, and you’ll want to minimise your involvement with mundane activities.

When studied in depth and in context of the entire oral tradition of Judaism, this idea gives us an exhilarating way of looking at everything we do in life, how everything we do has knock on effects way beyond the immediate visible results. It can and should bring us to a fine tuned sensitivity to everything and everyone around us.

With a focus on the spiritual realm, we can come to convince ourselves that any bodily discomfort we’re feeling right now isn’t real, or that the desire to sit and play computer games instead of working isn’t real. This can be a very useful way of thinking. And it really gives us an edge of self control that would otherwise be hard to achieve.

But there’s a danger…

In the hands of lazy people (and aren’t we all a bit lazy) this way of thinking becomes a way of shrugging off the things that happen to us in the here and now, shirking responsibility and ultimately complete disregard for other people and the whole environment.

You see, if you’re trying to place your life’s daily events within a narrative that takes place primarily in the unseen spiritual world, then you must be telling yourself quietly but constantly that “what’s happening now isn’t really happening or at least it isn’t what it seems to be”.

Do you see how if you do that consistently enough you’ll really experience life differently? It will really matter much less to you whether your food is tasty, or whether your clothes are ironed, whether your streets are clean, or whether your kids are screaming. And again, there’s something to be said for being able to achieve that kind of personal peace. I can see the attraction of it.< /sarcasm>

But it doesn’t end there. For so many good people it becomes such a way of life that not only do these things cease to matter to them but they stop even noticing them.

Then, from not noticing your own discomfort it’s so easy to belittle other peoples’ troubles, and especially easy because it’s done in the name of holiness. “After all didn’t we learn that this world is just a means to an end? Don’t you see that if you could overcome your small minded worries you could achieve eternal spiritual bliss?”

Do you see what I’m getting at? The more you focus on the spiritual “reality” the more you numb yourself to physical sensations and eventually you come to care much less about life itself. After all, what could be better for you than to free your soul from the bounds of it’s very mundane and needy body. Why shlepp this lump of meat around with you when you could be soaring in the heavens.

This, I think, explains what Rabban Gamliel is getting at in his Mishna. Torah study, that is engagement in the spiritual world, does go a long way towards freeing you up from your more basic urges. It gives you an outlook that strengthens you when you’re confronted with an internal battle. No doubt.

But without derech eretz – working hard for a living, your disregard for the mundane will bring you down.

Sorry to be trite but we need to get back to basics: “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) – this is a summary of the Torah, says the great sage Rabbi Akiva. Interestingly, the same Rabbi Akiva whose students perished for not showing respect. In fact it may be that he came to recognise this only after that trauma as I’ll show you in a moment.

The self esteem gurus will tell you that from here there’s an imperative to love yourself, for otherwise how are you to love your neighbour “as yourself”.

But Judaism is primarily a call to action so love isn’t defined by a purely psychological idea. Rather as Hillel the Elder explains, the deal here is that if you wouldn’t want something done to you, DON’T do it to others. Full stop.

That means that instead of trying to minimise your sensations of things that you’d rather avoid, you should actively cultivate a sensitivity to them, otherwise how will you know what not to do to others? You have to be 100% present in the here and now, feeling pleasure and pain with full sensation. If you do that you can start “loving your neighbour as yourself”.

Lo nahagu kavod – they didn’t treat each other with respect. Kavod, the word used for respect, comes from the Hebrew word meaning weight. This indicates that at the root of giving respect to someone or something is giving it the appropriate weight. You have to see the whole picture and you also have to get to the heart of how that person fits in, who he is and how he is important. When you do that, kavod, or respect flows naturally.

Perhaps Rabbi Akiva’s students were such scholars, so immersed in spiritual pursuits that they just weren’t able to engage one another in a way that led to true kavod. They related to one another as they related to themselves, as primarily spiritual beings. They didn’t pay much attention to the outer features and it didn’t occur to them that they were missing out. But they were. Completely. They could not possibly be trusted to transmit the Torah to the next generation because they would transmit their warped world view along with it.

Rabbi Akiva himself needed to come to the recognition that love your neighbour as yourself was the axis upon which the Torah turns, and to transmit that through his new students.