Man is a composite

If one  eats in order to live, and then lives in order to eat— he testifies that all that exists is his body and its nutrition, nothing more.

This worldview was taken to its pinnacle by the ancient Greeks.  They valued the human body for its form, its strength, its aesthetic beauty:  for itself.  The Olympics were their paean to this view, athletic prowess performed naked.  Bread with bread.   And yet, we Western moderns look longingly to the “Greco-Roman” ideal!

I was inspired to begin my spiritual journey, many years ago, when I accepted the bedrock intuition that what I experienced as “ beauty” had its roots in something deeper than endorphins in my frontal cortex.  When I thrilled at a majestic mountain view, I was connecting the physical world  with something else, with its spiritual  underpinnings.  As mentioned in a previous post, the earth is only physical, but at those moments my spirit connected with the spirit animating all of Creation, with G-d.  This part of me yearns to take the physical and use it for the spirit.  When I sit awestruck at a Pacific sunset at the beach in Venice, I’m doing just that. 

In perhaps the most mundane, yet sublime expression of the perception of spirit within the physical, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, the RM’A, wrote in the 16^th century of the miracles in the act of removal of waste from the body.  He comments on the text of the blessing ordained by the Sages of the Talmud following going to the bathroom, “Blessed are You, who Created Man with wisdom, by endowing him with myriad orifices and hollow tubes, so that if any opening were closed, or any of these closures were opened, man could not exist for an instant.  Blessed are You, the Healer of all Flesh, Who Does wonders.”

For He performs wonders in that he protects the spirit of Man within his body and unites a spiritual entity with a physical one .

The  choice mentioned at the outset of this Weblog  is a historic one, of the Greeks or the Sages of old:   To be blind to the spirit, emphasizing only the body, or to elevate the body with spiritual action. 

Tomorrow, let’s take this a bit deeper, into the Divine commandment of fringes, tzitzis, the lights of Channuka, and the nature of clocks.