[Avodah] Lo Sachmod

[Moshe Y. Gluck]

Ibn Ezra famously gives a parable of a villager seeing a princess, and it
not even occurring to him to desire her, as she is so far above his station
that it does not even enter his mind as a possibility; so, too, he says, we
must consider something which is forbidden to us as so beyond the realm of
possibly being ours, that we refrain from even desiring it.

 

I was thinking about this, and I think that the society we live in conspires
to make this Mitzvah much harder to keep. The American Dream is all about
upwards mobility; the "princess" is not beyond us - we are taught from the
youngest age (explicitly or implicitly) that we can achieve our dream and
that no goal is beyond our ability. Did the Shtetl Yid - the "Ish Kfari" of
the Ibn Ezra - dream of moving to the Big City? But today, we are all
looking for the next big thing, another opportunity, a way to advance. So
how can we be expected to understand how to curb our desires?

 

Also, how does the Ibn Ezra jive with the Sifra (Kedoshim) that says that R'
EBA sad that a person should not say, "I don't want to wear Shaatnez,"
rather he should say, "I want to, but my father in heaven decreed upon me
that I can not!"?

 

KT,

MYG

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