[Avodah] Must we agree with the Torah?

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2013 at 04:32:19PM +0000, shalomyitz at comcast.net wrote:
: I want to know if we have to be happy about everything that HaShem commands 
: us (or, at least try to)...

RMYG and I discussed this in Jun 2010
<http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/getindex.cgi?section=L#LO%20SACHMOD>
and I'm pretty sure we've had other iterations.

RMYG opened asking about lo sachmod eishes rei'ekha:
> 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...

> Also, how does the Ibn Ezra jive with the Sifra (Kedoshim) that says that
> R' EBA

R' Elazar ben Azarya

>         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!"?

I replied:
: What does R' Yisrael Salanter do? He makes a chiluq between kibush hayeitzer,
: doing the right thing despite taavos otherwise, and tiqun hayeitzer, which
: is getting the taavos in line. (And primarily a consequence of the hergel
: set up by kibush).

: The Rambam is usually explained as making a chiluq between mitzvos sichlios
: and shim'iyos. IOW, the Sifrei bedavqa applies to shaatnez or maachalos
: asuros, but not to something people have a native understanding of, like
: arayos.

In a later post, in reply to a question about seeing RYS inside, I quote
Immanuel Etkes's translation of a snippet from Kisvei RYS, pg 165 (taken
from his "R Israel Salanter", pg 294):

    There are two kinds of [character] transmutation: one, in which man
    turns the powers of his soul to the good, so that the power of evil
    is totally uprooted and not seen at all. To accomplish this, it is
    insufficient for man to improve his general will, to long for the
    good and to despise evil, but he must seek the means of correcting
    each individual trait of his soul. This is required in the case of
    the rational [ethically self-evident] commandments, pertaining to
    man and his fellow.... The second way involves the "transmutation"
    of his general will, to love and to heed that which comes out from
    the mouth of God in the traditional commandments [ritual or ceremonial
    law reflecting arbitrary, Divine will] known to us by revelation, and
    to seek out and reduce the power of the appetite in each detail....

I also encountered the idea more than once when learning Or Yisrael, but
(as I noted back in 2010) I couldn't find them again for the discussion.
(I don't know of a searchable copy of OY.)

RMYG refuted my attempt to answer his question:
> that your p'shat won't answer my question as the Sifra specifically uses
> these three examples: 1) Shaatnez 2) Chazir 3) _Lavo Al Ha'ervah_. You can
> see for yourself here, Perek 9, Halachah 10:
> http://www.hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=14026&pgnum=222

Which leaves us stuck, in that the usual understanding of the
Rambamidoesn't fit the Sifra.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The waste of time is the most extravagant
micha at aishdas.org        of all expense.
http://www.aishdas.org                           -Theophrastus
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