The Unvoiced

It is a bitter observation. Life is constant peril, moral or even
physical security is a myth. Few of us know what to do with
our lives, with our power and will, with our intelligence and
freedom. The heart is frail and blind; unguided, it becomes
savage and forlorn.
      It is easier to cope with viruses and germs than with callous-
ness of heart or with imperceptible inner decay. Unaided, what
would we do except trample and impair? Who would attend
us when we were about to wreck that which no person can ever
reconstruct?
      Our hearts do not breed the desire to be righteous or holy.
While the mind is endowed with a capacity to grasp higher
ends and to direct our attention to them, regardless of any ma-
terial advantage, the will is naturally inclined to submit to
selfish ends, regardless of the mind’s insights. There is nothing
which is less reliable that a human’s power for self-denial.
      Nor is the mind ever immune to the subtle persuasions of
the vested interests of the self. The ultimate goals remain,
therefore, either unapprehended or unvoiced by the mind. It
is religion that must articulate the universal.
      Peace with all our needs would mean surrender to the ego.
It is easy to convert the soul into a madhouse and think it is a
sanctuary. The spirit that gasps for a breath of the divine, to
be stronger than the ruthlessness of passions, must be equipped
with weapons that the mind alone cannot produce.
      A human’s cry for inner freedom goes together with a feeling of
disgust with artificial needs. Every one of us, at one time or
another, realizes the wisdom of the ancient maxim “that to have
no wants is divine; to have as few as possible comes next to
the divine” (Diogenes Laertius, Socrates, sec 11). While only
saints can be like Rabbi Hanina, about whom every day a
heavenly voice issues from Mount Horeb and proclaims: “All
the world is nourished for the sake of My son, Hanina, but my
son, Hanina, is satisfied with a small measure of carobs from the
Sabbath-eve to the next Sabbath-eve” (Berakot 17b), it is
possible for all people to accept the advice that “we should aim
rather at leveling down our desires than leveling up our
means.”

Neither Deifying or Vilifying

Throughout the ages two extreme views about our problem
have most frequently been voiced—one deifying desire, the
other vilifying it. There were those who, overwhelmed by
the dark power of passion, believed that they sensed in its
raving a manifestation of the gods and celebrated its gratifi-
cation as a sacred ritual. Dionysian orgies, fertility rites, sacred
prostitution are extreme examples of a view that subcon-
sciously has never died out.
      The exponents of the other extreme, frightened by the de-
structive power of unbridled passion, have taught humanity to see
ugliness in desire. Satan is the rapture of the flesh. Their
advice was to repress the appetites, and their ideal, self-
renunciation and asceticism. Some Greeks said: “Passion is a
god, Eros”; Buddhists say: “Desire is evil.”
      To the Jewish mind, being neither enticed or horrified by
the powers of passion, desires are neither benign nor perni-
cious but, like fire, they do not agree with straw. They should
be neither quenched nor supplied with fuel. Rather than wor-
ship fire and be consumed by it, we should let a light come out
of the flames. Needs are spiritual opportunities.

Spirit and Flesh 

Allegiance to Judaism does not imply defiance of legitimate
needs, a tyranny of the spirit. Prosperity is a worthy goal of
aspiration and a promised reward for good living. Although
there is no celebration of our animal nature, recognition of
its right and role is never missing. There is an earnest care for
its welfare, needs and limitations.
      Judaism does not despise the carnal. It does not urge us to
desert the flesh but to control and to counsel it, to please the
natural needs of the flesh so that the spirit should not be mo-
lested by unnatural frustrations. We are not commanded to
be pyromaniacs of the soul. On the contrary, a need that
serves the enhancement of life, without causing injury to
anyone else, is the work of the Creator, and the wanton or
ignorant destruction or defacement of God’s creation is vandal-
ism. “It is indeed God’s gift to humanity, that they should eat and
drink and be happy as they toil.” (Ecclesiastes 3:13)
      Good living obviously implies control and the relative con-
quest of passions, but not the renunciation of all satisfaction.
Decisive is not the act of conquest but how the victory is
utilized. Our ideal is not ruthless conquest but careful altera-
tion of needs. Passion is a many-headed monster, and the goal
is achieved through painstaking metamorphosis rather than
by amputation or mutilation.
      Judaism is not committed to a doctrine of original sin and
knows nothing of the inherent depravity of human nature.
The word “flesh” did not assume in its vocabulary the odor
of sinfulness; carnal needs were not thought of as being rooted
in evil. Nowhere in the Bible is found any indication of the
idea that the soul is imprisoned in a corrupt body, that to seek
satisfaction in this world means to lose one’s soul or to forfeit
the covenant with God, that the allegiance to God demands
renunciation of worldly goods.
      Our flesh is not evil but material for applying the spirit. The
carnal is something to be surpassed rather than annihilated.
Heaven and earth are equally God’s creation. Nothing in crea-
tion may be discarded or abused. The enemy is not in the
flesh; it is in the heart, in the ego.
      To the Bible good is equated with life. Being is intrinsically
good. “God saw it was good.” The Torah is conceived as a 
“Tree of Life,” advancing the equation of life and goodness;
“In the way of righteousness is life” (Proverbs 12:28).

In the Neighborhood of God

There is no conflict between God and humanity, no hostility be-
tween spirit and body, no wedge between the holy and the
secular. Humans do not exist apart from God. The human is
the borderline of the divine.
      Life passes on in proximity to the sacred, and it is this
proximity that endows existence with ultimate significance.
In our relation to the immediate we touch upon the most dis-
tant. Even the satisfaction of physical needs can be a sacred
act. Perhaps the essential message of Judaism is that in doing
the finite we may perceive the infinite. It is incumbent on us
to obtain the perception of the impossible in the possible, the
perception of life eternal in everyday deeds.
      God is not hiding in a temple. The Torah came to tell in-
attentive humans: “You are not alone, you live constantly in
holy neighborhood: Remember” ‘Love thy neighbor—God—
as thyself.’” We are not asked to abandon life and to say fare-
well to this world, but to keep the spark within aflame, and
to suffer God’s light to reflect in our face. Let our greed not
rise like a barrier to this neighborhood. God is waiting on
every road that leads from intention to action, from desire to
satisfaction.
      A human is endowed with the ability of being superior to their
own self. They do not have to feel helpless in the face of the
“evil inclination.” They are capable of conquering evil; “God
made humans upright.” If you ask: “Why did God create the 
‘evil inclination’?”…Says the Lord: “You turn it evil.”
      One can serve God with the body, with their passions even
with “the evil impulse” (Sifre Deuteronomy 32); one
must only be able to distinguish between the dross and the
gold. This world acquires flavor only when a little of the other
world is mingled with it. Without nobility of spirit, the flesh
may, indeed, become a focus of darkness.
      The road to the sacred leads through the secular. The spirit-
ual rests upon the carnal, like “the spirit that hovers over the
face of the water.” Jewish living means living according to a
system of checks and balances.

The Holy Within the Body

Holiness does not signify an air that prevails in the solemn
atmosphere of a sanctuary, a quality reserved for supreme acts,
an adverb of the spiritual, the distinction of hermits and priests.
In his great code, Maimonides, unlike the editor of the Mish-
nah, named the section dealing with the laws of the Temple-
cult The Book of Service, while the section dealing with the
laws of chastity and diet he named The Book of Holiness.
The strength of holiness lies underground, in the somatic. It
is primarily in the way in which we gratify physical needs
that the seed of holiness is planted. Originally the holy (ka-
dosh) meant that which is set apart, isolated, segregated. In
Jewish piety it assumed a new meaning, denoting a quality
that is involved, immersed in common and earthly endeavors;
carried primarily by individual, private, simple deeds rather
than public ceremonies. “A person should always regard themself
as if the Holy dwelled within their body, for it is written: 
‘The Holy One is within you’ (Hosea 11:9), therefore one should
not mortify the body” (Tsanit 11b).
      A human is the source and the initiator of holiness in this world,
“If a person will sanctify themself a little, God will sanctify them
more and more; if they sanctified themself below, they will be
sanctified from above. (Yoma 39a)
      Judaism teaches us how even the gratification of animal
needs can be an act of sanctification. The enjoyment of food
may be a way of purification. Something of my soul may be
drowned in a glass of water, when its content is gulped down
as if nothing in the world mattered except my thirst. But we
can come a bit closer to God, when remembering God still
more in excitement and passion.
      Sanctification is not an unearthly concept. There is no
dualism of the earthly and the sublime. All things are sublime.
They were all created by God and their continuous being,
their blind adherence to the laws of necessity are, as noted
above, a way of obedience to the Creator. The existence of
things throughout the universe is a supreme ritual.
      A human alive, a flower blooming in the spring, is a fulfillment
of God’s command. “Let there be!” In living we are directly
doing the will of God, in a way which is beyond choice or
decision. This is why our very existence is contact with God’s
will; why life is holy and a responsibility of God as well as
humanity.

Not To Sacrifice But To Sanctify

The giver of life did not ask us to despise our brief and poor
life but to ennoble it, not to sacrifice but to sanctify it. Rabbi
Hananyah ben Akashyah said: “The Holy One, blessed be
God, desired to purify Israel; hence God gave them Torah and
many mitzvoth (ways of conduct), as it is said: ‘The Lord  
was pleased, for the sake of (Israel’s) righteousness, to render
the Torah great and glorious (Isaiah 42:21). Before fulfilling
a commandment, we bless and praise God ‘who hast sanctified
us with Thy commandments.’ On Shabbat and holidays we
pray: ‘Sanctify us with Thy commandments.’”
      To the votaries of the ancient orgiastic cults wine was an in-
toxicant used to stimulate frenzy, ‘that which makes a human
delirious” (Herodotus 4.79). To ascetics wine is pernicious,
a source of evil. To the Jews wine is more than anything else
associated with the term and act of sanctification (Kiddush).
Over wine and bread we invoke the sanctity of the Shabbat.
“Sanctify thyself in things that are permitted to you” (Yeba-
mot 202), not only in ritual, in ways prescribed by the Torah.”
“In all thy ways know God” (Proverbs 3:6)
      Sanctification as a reason for walking in God’s ways is not a
concept of religious pragmatism—the theory according to
which the tangible effects would serve as the criteria for the
validity of commandments. The good is to be done for God’s
sake, not for the furtherance of a human’s perfection.
      “It says: ‘The wise person’s eyes are in their head.’ (Ecclesiastes
2:4). Where, it may be asked, should they be if not in their
head?… What it means, however, is this. We have learned
that a person should not go four cubits with their head uncov-
ered, the reason being that the Shechinah rests on the head.
Now a wise person’s eyes…are directed to their head, to that
which rests on their head, and then they know that the light which
is kindled on their head requires oil, for the human body is a wick
and the light is aflame above it. And the king Solomon calls
and says: ‘and let thy head lack no oil’ (Ecclesiastes 9:8),
for the light above their head requires oil, which consists in
good deeds, and therefore the eyes of a wise person are towards
their head, and no other place.” (Zohar III, 1872.)

Needs as Mitzvot

We are taught that a human is needed, that our authentic needs
are divine requirements, symbols of cosmic needs. God is the 
subject of all subjects. Life is God's and ours. God has not thrown
us out into the world and abandoned us. God shares in our
toil; God is partner to our anxieties. A person in need is not the
exclusive and ultimate subject of need: God is in need with
a human. Becoming conscious of a need, one has to ask themself: Is
God in need with me? To have God as a partner to one’s ac-
tions is to remember that our problems are not exclusively
our own. Jewish existence is living shared with God.

Living Within an Order

The quest for right living, the question of what is to be done
right now, right here, is the authentic core of Jewish religion.
It has been the main theme of Jewish literature, from the
prophets till the times of the Hasidim, and it has been explored
with a sense of urgency, as if life were a continuous state of
emergency.
      With quiet sadness and rich with strenuous lessons of
defeat, we learn today to understand that there are no extem-
poraneous solutions to perpetual problems: that the only safe-
guard against constant danger is constant vigilance, constant
guidance. Such guidance, such vigilance is given to them who
live in the shadows of Sinai; whose weeks, days, hours are set
in the rhythm of the Torah.
      What constitutes the Jewish form of living is not so much
the performance of single good deeds, the taking of a step
now and then, as the pursuit of a way, being on the way; not
so much the acts of fulfilling as the state of being committed
to the task, of belonging to an order in which single deeds,
aggregates of religious feeling, sporadic sentiments, moral epi-
sodes become parts of a complete pattern.

All of Life

The pious person believes that all events are secretly interre-
lated; that the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the
horizon of our comprehension; that everything in history
throws its weight into the scales of God’s balance; that every 
deed denotes a degree in the gauge of the holy, irrespective
of whether the person who performs it is aiming at this goal or
not. It is just the nonritual, the secular conditions, which the
prophets of Israel regarded as being a divine concern. To them
the totality of human activities, social and individual, of all
inner and external circumstances, is the divine sphere of in-
terest. The domain of the Torah is therefore all of life, the
trite as well as the sacred.

The Unheroic

Judaism is a theology of the common deed, of the trivialities
of life, dealing not so much with the training for the excep-
tional as with the management of the trivial. The predomi-
nant feature in the Jewish pattern of life is unassuming,
inconspicuous piety rather than extravagance, mortification,
asceticism. Thus, the purpose seems to be to ennoble the com-
mon, to endow worldly things with hieratic beauty; to attune
the comparative to the absolute, to associate the detail with the
whole, to adapt our own being with its plurality, conflicts and
contradictions, to the all-transcending unity, to the holy.

The Inner Authority

Psychic life, too, is a constant process of growth, and waste,
and its needs cannot be satisfied by scanty, desultory injec-
tions. Not being a hibernating animal, a human cannot live by
what they store away. They may have a full memory and an
empty soul. Unfree people are horrified by the suggestion of
accepting a spiritual regimen. Associating inner control with
external tyranny, they would rather suffer than be subject to
spiritual authority. Only free people, those who are not prone
to canonize every caprice, do not equate self-restraint with
self-surrender, knowing that no person is free who is not a mas-
ter of themself, that the more liberties we enjoy, the more disci-
pline we need.
      Laissez-faire, the absence of control or government in the
private realm, is a dream. Inner life is populated by numerous
insatiable and competitive forces. There can be no power
vacuum. Where principles are suppressed, a petty desire
climbs to power. The immense realm of living, if it is not to
be stultified, cannot be placed under the control of either
ethics or jurisprudence. How to invest a person with the ability
to master all of life is a supreme challenge to intelligence.
      The answer to that challenge is a life of piety, and it is the
pious person to whom we must turn in order to learn how to
live.