Our Bodies, Our Souls

Tziporah Heller

Here You Are

Tziporah Heller

Rebbetzin Tzipora Heller, the popular Jewish women's author-lecturer, teaches Jewish self-improvement. Learn how to confront and embrace life's most important challenges.

Let's face it - life's a challenge. How do we handle life's most important challenges? Do we approach them like an Olympic runner at the starting line, waiting in anticipation for the race, or do we run away from situations that seem too painful or too difficult to face? In Let’s Face It! we learn how to confront and embrace the eight essential challenges of life - including anger, relationships, parenting, and even happiness.

THE CHALLENGE OF ANGER

The Talmud equates an anger-prone person to an idol worshiper, because his own will has become sacrosanct to him, and on the altar of his will he is ready to sacrifice his spouse, his children, his friends, and eventually his whole world. The eighteenth-century mystic, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, wrote: "A furious person could destroy the whole world if he were able, because his intellect is not ruling over him at all, and he actually loses his rationality and becomes like all carnivorous beasts."

The anger being excoriated here is the anger which destroys relationships, drowns out rationality, and makes a person say and do things she will later regret. The antidote to such anger is not repression, which often leads to greater problems, but to put the person back in charge of her own reactions.

Impulsiveness

The Maharal of Prague, the great sixteenth-century mystic, wrote that anger is an attribute which is linked to impulsiveness. Let's examine the quality of impulsiveness. According to Mishlei, there are three types of fools: one who is easily convinced of anything, one who trivializes what is ultimately important, and one who is impulsive, who acts on the appearance of the moment.

From these examples it is obvious that being a fool has nothing to do with intelligence. Some very intelligent people are gullible; they can see an ad on the bus, and dial that 800 number to receive their thirty-day free trial of "Hollywood makeup" which promises to make them look twenty years younger. Some very intelligent people will trivialize and joke about everything from decency and modesty to treating the world with respect, to the point of even trivializing murder, oblivious to any genuine sense of values. And some very brilliant people, notably great artists and writers, have destroyed their family lives by acting on an impulse of passion.

Foolishness is not a function of stupidity, but rather a function of the balance between our minds and our bodies. In each of the above cases, the body is acting without the scrutiny of the mind. Although the mind seems to be functioning, presenting justifications for the body's actions, in fact the body is feeding the lines to the mind, which has suspended its intellectual process: "The makeup looked so good on those women in the ad." "Of course I believe that decency is a value, but I can't resist a good laugh." "I don't know what got into me." In every case, intellectual scrutiny would put the mind in control of the body and radically alter the course of action.

THE CHALLENGE OF HAPPINESS

One of the most fascinating scenes I have ever witnessed took place when I was in Las Vegas for a speaking engagement. A friend took me to see the inside of a casino. I was overwhelmed by the excitement, the flashing lights, the neon signs advertising the big name entertainers, the array of food being offered at amazingly cheap prices. Here was an entire district created for no other purpose than to give its denizens pleasure (and to give the casino owners profit, of course). Everything was structured to give people joy, so that they would look back and say, “That was my happiest weekend.” But when I actually entered the casinos, I didn’t see a single smiling face. The people sitting at the gambling tables looked either anxious, or bored, or jaded. I felt like calling out, “Hello! Is anybody here having a good time?”

There’s an inherent irony in the subject of this chapter: Why should being happy be such a challenge? Never before has the world spent so much of its resources and energy in the pursuit of happiness. Billions of dollars are spent annually on the entertainment industry, spectator sports, hobbies, and the acquisition of objects whose sole purpose is to delight their possessors. Yet observably people seem no happier today than a century ago when people spent twelve hours a day working on the farm, ate supper, and went to bed without watching television, surfing the Net, dining at a gourmet restaurant, or shopping at the mall. Why, despite all our prodigious efforts, is it so hard to be happy?

The crux of the problem here is that most people view happiness as an elusive goal which only the fortunate few will ever really attain, like earning a million dollars or weighing 110 pounds. In truth, happiness is a state of mind which every human being can develop with relative ease. It is not dependent on owning anything, and can be attained without having a personal trainer or a custom makeover, or knowing the difference between one vintage wine and another.