This is the second of an occasional series of short essays, collectively entitled “Restoring sanctity to eating…and to the rest of our lives” Like many other people, I am overweight and have been obsessed in one way or another with food and with trying to lose weight for many years. In the last few years, I have realized something important. It struck me that the struggles I have with eating are very similar to the struggles that we have in moving forward and growing (in a ‘weightless’ sense) in our lives in general. Since it is one isolated, but ever-present, realm of our lives, sometimes it is easier to see the specific difficulties we are having, but these difficulties play out in many other aspects of our lives as well. There are many Torah thoughts that apply to our difficulties with controlling eating that also apply to the rest of our lives. Hence the title of the series. The first essay appeared in WWW in December 2011.
The gemara (Sanhedrin 102b) describes a dream that Rav Ashi, the compiler of the gemara, had. In it, the king Menashe, who practiced idolatry in his earlier years, appears to him. Rav Ashi asks Menashe how, if he was so wise, did he worship idols. Menashe replies that had Rav Ashi been there, he would have lifted the bottom of his robe and chased after him.
The yetzer hara for idolatry was indeed so strong that the Men of the Great Assembly, in the early years of the second Bais Hamikdash, asked Hashem to abolish it because people had such difficulty resisting it. So, we no longer have any sense of what the attraction of idolatry was, and the strength of that attraction. I often think that on a day to day basis today, the drive that comes closest to the drive for idolatry is the drive and compulsion surrounding eating. The compulsion to eat has taken over the role of being the primary yetzer hara (evil inclination) for many people.
But it doesn’t seem like a yetzer hara to us. After all, does it make us do sins? What’s wrong with a little overeating here and there? It is easy to dismiss overeating from the category of sinning. So, since we think of it as not leading to sin, we can call it a Yetzer hara Dati–a religious yetzer hara that we don’t put in the category of leading to sin.
But we are wrong in this reasoning.
First of all, the Torah clearly identifies the urge to eat with the yetzer hara. The first sin that Adam did involved eating. (There certainly are deeper issues involved in Adam’s choice as well, which are not the subject of this article.) The temptation to eat is strong, and can be a yetzer hara for us. Adam sinned by going against Hashem’s authority. Everything else could be eaten, except the fruit of the one tree. Does it sound familiar? You are on a diet, and you can eat a lot of different foods, but you can’t eat ____ (fill in the blanks, cake, ice cream, chocolate, etc). We too have this tremendous desire to eat what is forbidden to us. In today’s more liberal food plan programs, like Weight Watchers, many foods are freely available to us—fruits, vegetables, etc, and yet this does not do the trick for us and we find ourselves dreaming about the foods we can’t have, or having them in excess.
Second, the role of the yetzer hara is that of making us deviate from what we should be doing and from the type of person we should be. In this context, what is a stronger yetzer hara than compulsive overeating? This undermines us in a number of ways. It distracts us from what we should be doing and how we should be growing. We become consumed with thinking about what we want to eat, what we should eat, what we can’t eat, etc. Instead of thinking about ourselves, how we can grow spiritually, what should we be doing with our lives, thinking about weight and food assumes the predominant position. I have spent too many Rosh Hashanas thinking about how heavy I am and that by next Rosh Hashana I will be thinner, etc. It’s not that I didn’t think about more important issues as well; it’s just that the concern with eating distracts from the things we really should be concentrating upon.
Another way that compulsive overeating detracts from our overall goal of becoming a better person is by giving people the feeling that they cannot make progress. Repeated cycles of trying to diet, then breaking it and bingeing, and then trying to diet again, make us feel that we cannot move forward and accomplish. (See December’s article) This sense can diffuse into other areas of our lives, and other goals that we have.
Finally, we are to view ourselves as being b’tzelem Elokim, in Hashem’s image. When we are disgusted with ourselves and how we look, how can we possibly think of ourselves as being in the image of Hashem? If we are bingeing, can we really feel that Hashem is opposite us at those times (Shivisi Hashem l’negdi tamid)?
So, although compulsive overeating by itself may not be a sin, in some sense it may be the worst yetzer hara operating today. It takes us away from what is important for us to do with our lives, and interferes with our ability to grow in closeness to Hashem. It obviously violates taking care of our health (v’nishmartem m’od…), but it violates us in many other ways as well. We have to approach the issues of eating with a knowledge that this is impacting the rest of our lives, and not just physically.
Biographical information: Janet Sunness is medical director of the Richard E. Hoover Low Vision Rehabilitation Services at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center. She gives lectures on Tanach, on Judaism and Women, and on other topics in the Baltimore area.
I am interested in your feedback; please email me at jsunness@gmail.com with your thoughts and comments
Copyright Janet Sunness 2011
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