The Path of the Just - Or ahayim

The Path of the Just

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Chapter 15 (Part 1)

It’s one thing understanding that we’d all need to abstain from something or another if we’re to grow in our being, especially if we hope to be pious. But it’s quite another thing knowing how to actually do it. We always want more and more (especially in our age, when so much is within reach and so many things seem to call out to us), so what practical advice can Ramchal offer? “The best way to acquire abstinence” he says, is to “realize the crassness of the pleasures of the world and their inherent inferiority, as well as the great harm that can so easily result from them.” That’s to say that we’re to reformulate our attitudes and priorities. If we’d only realize just how crass some of our desires are -- how beneath us, how soiled and unsavory they are and how harmful, he asserts, we’d surely come to our senses. Now, many have tried things just like that, the truth be known, and have failed. What then is the shadowy, veiled mechanism in the mind that allows it to be fooled like that? “The seductive powers” of the things we crave, Ramchal declares. Things side up to us, if you will, whisper in our ears and charm us into hearing them out, and we succumb. In fact, it’s a primal problem that goes back to Adam and Eve (see 2:1-2 above for a lengthy discussion of that; also see Da’at Tevunot 40). “Seduction is in fact what caused the first sin to be committed” Ramchal reminds us; for as the Torah attests, "The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and that it was pleasing to the eyes ... (so) she took from its fruit and ate from it" (Genesis 3:6). (Ramchal offers several fascinating Kabbalistic insights in Adir Bamarom pp. 177, 273, and 309 into the unique role that eyes play in being tempted.) He seems to offer that we’re to actually picture ourselves as being attracted to something or another that we should avoid (when he says that the object at hand is to become “clear to you”, that is, in your mind). Do that, he offers, and you’ll see the foolishness of your attraction to it from what’s termed a critical-distance and that will convince you of just “you how utterly false, unreal and ephemeral its pleasures are, yet how real and immanent the harm that will come from them is to you”. You’ll get to the point, he says, where you’ll “certainly be disgusted” and off-put by your cravings. And you’ll find it far easier to abstain from them.

The Path of the Just

Rabino Yaakov Feldman


Ch. 3 (Part 3)
Even though we’re advised to catch sight of what we do in order to set things right, that doesn’t mean to imply that we truly see things for what they are! In fact, our sages likened this world -- reality as we know it -- to night-time (Baba Metzia 83b), which Ramchal takes to mean that the world is mired in darkness. And as a result of that, he asserts, we simply don’t “see what’s in front of us” or understand what we’re looking at.


So we lose sight of the glorious fact that we were placed in this world to perfect our beings and to do as much good as we can (Adir Bamarom, pp. 458- 460), and we tend to flutter about here and there as a consequence.


Indeed, Ramchal says here that “the coarseness and materiality of this world” in fact “doesn’t allow you to notice the (ethical) stumbling blocks along the way” and has you “misinterpret things so that what’s actually bad seems to be good, and vice versa”. And all because we’ve become so ensnared by our yetzer harah that we’re incapable of making rational decisions. So we’d need the advice of those who are able to see things for what they are if we’re ever to grow.


We’ll return to that last point shortly; for now though it would do us well to see how Ramchal explains our “night-blindness” in more detail. He says elsewhere that G-d actually restricted our insights on purpose by creating us with our five senses (though we think that they are what we depend on for our insights in the first place!).


As he explains it, “the soul itself actually sees and hears everything” as it really is, “because it isn’t subject to the (influence of the) senses”. It easily sees what “impels everything from the inside-out”, which our five senses prevent us from doing. That’s why we misread signals, miss cues, and make wrong ethical decisions (Adir Bamarom, Ibid.).


That isn’t to imply though that that’s a universal phenomenon. For there are some rare individuals who do see things as they are -- people who “have been freed from this state of imprisonment and can see the truth for what it is, and who can advise others” about how to grow. They know very well that we were created for the higher purposes we’ve indicated and that most of us only see the outer reaches of things. And they also know what has us make the sort of mistakes we make as a consequence of that (Adir Bamarom, Ibid.). Hence, we should seek them out and ask their advice.