With Heart in Mind

He who loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich.

JUDAISM is not at all opposed to pleasure. We have no tradition of monasticism or celibacy or much of an ascetic tradition. Self-denial is generally limited in scope and application, which is part of what makes Yom Kippur stand out on the calendar. The Jerusalem Talmud even says, “On Judgment Day, a person will be called to account for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed in life but did not.”¹

If there is no objection to pleasure, why the caution to limit it? The answer is that when we are heavily involved in seeking pleasure, the physical inevitably supplants the spiritual as the guiding principle in our lives. The Jewish way is to enjoy the pleasures of the world within the context of a spiritual life. That way of living requires that we be the masters of our sensory pleasures, rather than having them rule over us.

It’s so easy to lose ourselves in a bag of potato chips or a chocolate bar and more so in more intense forms of physical sensation. Not only lose ourselves, but become devotees of the perfect cup of coffee, the smokiness of a single-malt scotch, the thread count of organic cotton sheets. We are being asked to be conscious and make wise choices about where we direct our desire for pleasure and to be careful that we not allow physical pleasures to occupy the center of our lives.

The Maharal explains that the more one indulges the body, the more bodily one becomes, and that impedes connection to the spiritual.² The Talmud tells of Rav Kahana sitting in front of his teacher, Rav, and fixing his hair and pampering himself, whereupon Rav castigated him, saying, “The Torah is not found in one who indulges physically.”³

Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz asked why the Torah was given in the inhospitable desert.⁴ Why not give it once we had made it across the Jordan to the Promised Land, where people could embrace the Torah with settled minds? He explains that having inner calmness does, indeed, facilitate acquiring Torah, but people mistakenly think that indulging the body is the way to achieve that inner settledness. The truth is that the more one indulges the body, the more comforts we become accustomed to, the more dependent we become on these things, and the harder it becomes to maintain a calm frame of mind.

Rabbi Yerucham compares a person who tries to settle the mind by indulging the body to a thirsty person who drinks salt water, or one who throws oil on a fire that he wants to extinguish. For a brief moment it seems that the goal has been accomplished, but then the thirst comes back even stronger or the fire rages out of control. The desert was the perfect place to receive the Torah because the desert is a place of limited physical pleasures. If you are less attached to gratification, external circumstances will have less power to throw you off the inner calmness that is so necessary for spiritual growth.

We find this idea echoed in another teaching of the Maharal. He asks why matzah is the symbol of freedom on Passover? He answers that matzah is made of only flour and water, just the bare necessities and no more. The more one establishes physical needs, the more a slave one becomes, but if one can subsist on the bare necessities, one can be truly free.

We should not be more involved in the physical than we need to be. And where we do seek pleasure, it should never be an end in itself. Any experience of pleasure can be “lifted” to a higher level. A delicious flavor, a beautiful sight, or a fine sensation can and should be an inspiration for awe and awareness of the Divine. This is a teaching of the Slonimer Rebbe,⁵ who invokes Jacob’s dream to teach that whereas Jacob’s ladder “stands on the earth” (the starting point is our earthiness), nevertheless its “head reaches up to heaven.”⁶ He teaches that “when a person follows the Divine Will and raises this attribute to its source, he reaches up to heaven.”⁷

The Slonimer understands that having desires is an inescapable aspect of being human, but he guides us to become the stewards of those desires so that they are sources of elevation, not debasement. “The quality of yearning is one that completely encompasses a person; it begins in the recesses of the mind, and continues through one’s emotions and one’s actions. A person’s spiritual state is wholly dependent on the nature of his yearnings. The holy Torah phrases the commandment [to be holy] in the positive for this reason. The commandment is to direct one’s yearning toward the holy—toward the Blessed One, toward delight in God, toward pleasure in the radiance of the Divine Presence.”⁸

Indeed, the entire universe exists for the sake of our pleasure. This is the remarkable opening teaching in that pillar of Mussar Path of the Just. In it Rabbi Luzzatto acknowledges that we are creatures of pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure is our purpose, but the test in life is to choose spiritual pleasure over physical gratification. “Our Sages of blessed memory have taught us that man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in God and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His Presence; for this is true joy and the greatest pleasure that can be found.”⁹

In line with this concept, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe agrees with Freud that pleasure is the determining factor behind all of our actions. Where he differs, however, is in seeing the true pleasure as spiritual and the ultimate pleasure as being close to God. Physical and earthly pleasures offer a faint shadow of this truest pleasure, and a person who settles for that level of fulfillment has exchanged the real thing for a poor substitute, trading living waters for cracked cisterns.¹⁰ The question is only what gives a person pleasure—“Tell me what you enjoy and I will tell you who you are!”¹¹

At the core, each of us is a holy soul, but this truth is hidden and elusive. The more we give ourselves over to the captivating pleasures of the tongue and skin, the more our soul-nature is obscured. Then we forget who we are, and we lose sight of the spiritual journey we are on. Moderate your investment in pleasure and earn a spiritual dividend. Reawaken the awareness of your spiritual nature, using your physical desires to ring the wake-up bell.

PRACTICE

There must be many things you do in your day that you enjoy. In fact, if you take a good look, you may have to admit that you organize your hours around various pleasures, be it a morning coffee (and perhaps not just a coffee, but a specific blend with certain ingredients prepared a certain way) or a particular lunch you enjoy, or perhaps it is someone you count on speaking to every day, or a television show you watch.

Make note of what you do in your day that you enjoy. Then determine how you could limit that pleasure without eliminating it altogether. How can you “tone it down” in such a way as to reduce your attachment to what the physical delivers to you?

If you think you can’t cut back like that, you will discover that you can. When you try, you will see how strong are the attachments to pleasure that bind you to your habitual indulgences. Let that insight be a motivator to pursue the spiritual more than the physical.