A limitless pleasure

There is something about five over the limit that feels so right.[1]  Limit means an end point that one must not overstep, yet everyone knows that there is an invisible plus five written visibly underneath the stated speed limit.  I remember that when I first learned to drive I had the gall to ask my driving instructor whether five over was acceptable.  He curtly replied, ‘no’.   But, that did not revoke the obvious- people have a need for five over. 

                So where does the veracity of the dictum ‘rules are meant to be broken’ come from?  As soon as there is a new rule, the mind conjures up expansions and exceptions to it.  Where does this abhorrence for limits come from? I asked a parachute instructor once about the attraction of jumping out of a plane at ten thousand feet.   He looked at me sheepishly and said, ‘it is better than relations with a woman’.  What is commonly viewed as the acme of human pleasures is in reality supplanted by one of the expressions of overcoming limits, jumping out of a plane.  This is the drive that humanity strives for more than any other; we want to live longer, be stronger, and run faster.  For humanity, the motivation for advancement is ‘limits are meant to be broken’.

                Here we meet a robust conundrum.  If it the Torah is a litany of ‘rules’ or mitzvahs, then why would the Jews say, ‘We will do and we will listen’?![2] Wait a second.  Humans hate limitations, as we just established, and these Jews were no different.  Perhaps, we need to reexamine what a mitzvah is?

                We need three axioms to move forward:   G-d is the only limitless entity in the universe.  A being’s will is his essence.  A mitzvah is an expression of G-d’s will.  With this in place, we can understand what the Jews realized back then.  Mitzvahs are not really rules, but a ticket to the ultimate pleasure in the world.  By doing a mitzvah, a person aligns his will with the will of a limitless reality, thereby becoming temporarily limitless.  These are the only rules in the universe that act this way, because these are the only rules that are really portals to a limitless reality, and hence, a pleasure that is beyond anything that this finite world can offer. 

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[1] Based on the Alter of Slabodka’s Pleasure of Mitzvahs Page 166 Part two of Or Ha Tzafon

[2] Shemos 24:8