“The Point of It All”

To my mind, one of the more pithy and fecund statements of our raison d’etre is Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s following remark.

“The root of Divine service lies in your constantly engaging yourself with your Creator” he says, “and comprehending that you were created to attach yourself onto G-d, and were placed in this world to prevail over your yetzer harah, subjugate yourself to G-d through reason, overturn your physical cravings and inclinations, and to apply all your activities to this end without ever wavering from it” ("The Way of G-d" 1:4:6).

I maintain that it’s worthwhile reading this Jewish “mission statement” again and again, and to use it as a gauge for our being on or off the mark in our life. So I thought I’d offer these insights into just what we’re being told here in the hope that we’ll indeed draw from it regularly and grow accordingly.

“The root of Divine service lies in your constantly engaging yourself with your Creator...” Something very, very deep in the human soul somehow finds great satisfaction in *serving* -- in being subordinate to something or someone, in fulfilling another’s wishes, and in being relieved of authority. Something else very, very deep in the human soul, though, is only happy in fact when it seizes authority. Ironically, though, the part of the soul that seeks power is often *over*-powered by the part that runs from it. And the whole of our beings is best satisfied (both in Heaven and on earth) when the need to serve holds sway.

The struggle between those two forces, though, is real. And it goes to the very core of every ambivalent feeling anyone has ever had. The greatest resolution of all human ambivalence thus lies in our *allowing* our power-hungry side to acquiesce to our need to serve. And the greatest Entity we could ever subordinate our beings to is G-d. The realization of that leads to the sort of “Divine service” spoken of here.

As it’s said, that service “lies in your constantly engaging yourself with your Creator“. How stunning a revelation! We’re to “engage”, i.e., experience, interact with, and subject ourselves to G-d Almighty. This, too, is a very deep and latent human dream hardly spoken of in our day and age. Few among us dream of engaging with G-d in our day-to-day life; and fewer yet are those who have dreamt that since they were young, and thus tally their successes and failures in life on that basis.

Nonetheless you and I were “created to attach ... onto G-d“ at bottom. And to thus enjoy the sort of familiarity just alluded to -- and then some. For being *attached* to G-d doesn’t just come to “encountering”, “interacting” with, and “subjecting” yourself to Him in the sort of ways we indicated. It also involves being His confidant, if you will; and accepting Him alone as your confidant (which goes even deeper yet).

Our quote then goes on to say that it’s important to realize in light of the fact that your deepest aspirations actually hinge upon such a degree of intimacy with the Creator that “you were placed in this world” specifically, with all its noise and clutter, in order “to prevail over your yetzer harah“. That calls for explanation.

What characterizes our lives in this world is one struggle after another followed by one more-or-less-of a resolution after another. We’re taught, though, that that’s not only true of the *outer* world, which is to say, life “out there”. It’s also true of our *inner* world, where we experience other sorts of struggles and quasi resolutions. That inner struggle-resolution paradigm is coined the battle between one’s “yetzer harah” and “yetzer hatov”.

Our “yetzer harah” is usually taken to be our untoward, feral impulses; while our “yetzer hatov” is usually taken to be our G-dly, devout impulses. But in the context of our quote, our yetzer harah is our above-mentioned need to take control, and our yetzer hatov is our need to acquiesce. And while the need to acquiesce (our yetzer hatov) often overpowers the need to take control (our yetzer harah) on its own, as we said above, it’s up to us to set out to *consciously* “prevail” over that need to take control. We were thus “placed in this world” of discord and conflict (control and acquiescence) to do just that. For by doing that we manage to “subjugate (ourselves) to G-d” rather than try to have Him subjugate Himself to *us*, if you will, as we all do.

We’re then told that we’re to do that “through reason“ rather than through brute determination and resolve. For “reason” doesn’t only entail conscious thoughts and conclusions. It also includes solid and heartfelt realizations of what’s holy and what’s not; what serves one’s ultimate aim in life, and what thwarts it. Thus Luzzatto’s point is that we’re to strive for such realizations and act on them.

He then goes on to say that we only manage to do *that* by “overturn(ing our) physical cravings and inclinations“ and replacing them with G-dly, holy ones. That again suggests that we’re to consciously prevail over our need to take control, as spoken of before. But his point now is that not only are we to do that consciously within our beings. We’re also to do it on a practical level, in the world. By teaching ourselves to yearn to succeed at G-dly things just as much as we now yearn to succeed at unG-dly ones.

And the only way to do *that*, we’re then taught, is to “apply all (our) activities to this end” alone “without ever wavering“. Which is to say, to make holiness our aim and greatest dream. May G-d grant us the capacity to do just that -- and may we take Him up on the offer!

(c) 2005 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman