Perhaps, this will be taken as a way of moralizing what is in a way a moral failing, but hear me out. After a long, belt stretching three-course meal, the host brings out dessert. During the last course, you complain about how full you are and that you can’t imagine eating even one more crumb. Then something remarkable happens, the smell of dessert hits your nose. The melted chocolate looks delectable and you notice a small nook in the recesses of your stomach magically appear. When the host asks who wants dessert, you respond in the affirmative. The Talmud corroborates this story in Megillah 7a: ‘There is always room for sweets’.
What has happened is that you’ve expanded your desires. In the previous course, your desires were finished, and hence, there was no more room. After the dessert comes out, a new desire accompanies it and the human being has the ability to expand with that desire. What this reveals to us is that a human being is on some level only limited by the amount of desire he has and desire technically has no limits. It is a divine feature of our humanity- a limitless sense of possibility. In that sense, we can justify what dessert teaches us, but as we’ll see, we should appreciate the desire and turn down dessert.
When this ability is channelled towards spiritual things, there is no end to what we can become and achieve. If channelled towards physical things, we are taking a limitless aspect and putting boundaries on it- that is a tragedy. This is what the verse means when it says, ‘be Holy, for I am holy’! Be limitless for I am limitless. Holiness is something set apart from the person and in that sense, our relationship to it is aspirational. It is where we are meant to grow so long as we have a desire to.
No comments:
Post a Comment