Today is Day One of Week Four of the Omer. That is Twenty-two Days of the Omer. The Theme continues to be Happiness.
My thoughts for this evening’s installment come from our
discussion of the Torah portion, during the morning service earlier today.
As I asserted this morning, the laws found in the
weekly Torah portion Kedoshim, which we read this morning, are purely
rational. I’m talking more about the mitzvoth
shebein adam lechavero – commandments [concerning behaviours] that are
between a person and his/her fellow – to put it differently, the ‘ethical’
commandments. When I say that they are
rational, I mean that they are not subject to how one feels about the behaviour
or one’s fellow at the moment. To remind
us that they are absolute, most of the laws in this portion of Torah are
followed by: I am Hashem your G-d. In other words: This law is by Divine decree. It is not subject to how you might feel, by
the affection or loyalty – or lack thereof – you may feel towards your specific
fellow-man at the moment of the behaviour.
To use one of these commandments as an example: we’re told that the wages of an employee will
not remain with you until morning. In
other words, in the Torah’s ethical universe, an employee must be paid at the
end of the work day, what he earned during the hours of that day. That isn’t dependent upon how good the
employer feels about that worker; it is an absolute obligation. No matter how little affection a particular
employee might evoke in his employer’s mind, for whatever reason, he is owed
his wages before he leaves the employer’s premises for the night. The employee’s ability to buy food lest he go
hungry that night, or firewood lest he go cold, cannot be held hostage to his
employer’s feelings.
(Here I’ll add for the benefit of my reader who didn’t
worship with us this morning; this does not mean that a Jewish employer in our
day and age is obligated to pay his employees in full every day. Halachic authorities today understand
that it is seldom the custom in most employment marketplaces to pay daily, and
that to do so, with all the employer’s obligations regarding the deduction of
taxes and what-not from an employee’s pay, could be onerous. On the other hand, it
does counsel due consideration for the employee who needs a partial
advance on his pay already earned, until the official payday. Lest he go hungry or cold. And that consideration on the part of the
employer should not take into account how he feels about that particular
employee.)
So, with whatever adjustments today’s halachic decisors
have made to account for he ways things are done today, the laws presented in Kedoshim
are absolute. They are rational; they
ae not subject to the way one feels. And
in reality, Happiness is similarly rational.
People are subject to emotional swings. That’s part of being human. Whenever I meet someone who is emotionally flat,
who displays no emotion at all, it frightens me to no end. People who have somehow learned not to
experience emotions, are dangerous. They
can be conditioned to do just about anything.
It is the human emotions that prevent us being turned into machine-like
automatons. When I meet someone who has
been ‘brainwashed’ to act automatically through their exposure to, say, a
religious cult…well, let’s just say it leaves me feeling cold all over. So in extremis, it is our emotional response that
makes us human and not machines.
But in normal circumstances, it is a mistake to
rely too much on input from our emotions.
Because emotions are incredible fallible and un-reliable. In normal, non-emergency situations, it is
always best to rely upon one’s rational response. We can easily learn what is right and wrong,
but if we rely upon our feelings to guide us they will fail us time and time
again. So the solution is not to suppress
our emotions since they are what we need to respond to extreme situations that,
after all, do come up regularly.
Rather, the challenge is to master our emotions, which can so
easily lead us astray.
This mastery is a key to Happiness. Reliance upon our emotions to make decisions –
to put it differently, to let our heart, not our head lead us – will lead
to bad decisions time and time again.
Especially in situations – and most are like this – where how we handle
a particular situation bears consequences not only for ourselves but or someone
– or someones – else. So when we feel
those powerful emotions begin to well up in us, we need to step back and ask
ourselves: what’s the correct
decision, the correct course of action here?
And if we do this, what we end up doing will seldom be what
our first impulse was. And that will be
a good thing. Because that first
impulse, whilst it make have felt really good at the time, will often carry
negative consequences that can last a very long time and impede our Happiness
interminably. It’s definitely something
to think about. A Good Week, everybody!
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