{"id":63882,"date":"2019-10-03T13:23:59","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T10:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=63882"},"modified":"2019-10-03T13:23:59","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T10:23:59","slug":"we-need-the-eggs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/we-need-the-eggs\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need The Eggs!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"63882","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":63587,"related_cahpter":"322","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Special High Holidays feature","content":"<p>There is no such thing as original sin in Judaism. We are not born sinners. The Hebrew word for sin is \u201c\u1e25et,\u201d which refers to something that misses the mark or goes astray\u2014it is something we do, not something we are. According to Jewish tradition, we each have two competing inclinations: the good inclination (the \u201cyetzer hatov\u201d) and the bad inclination (the \u201cyetzer hara\u201d). \u2026At each moment of our lives, we have the freedom to choose which of these two impulses we will honor. As the God of the Torah puts it when Cain\u2019s jealousy of his brother, Abel, threatens to turn fratricidal: \u201cSin crouches at the door, its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.\u201d Cain can exercise self-restraint and contain his envy and rage . . . or not. (He chooses the latter and kills his brother, much to God\u2019s anguish.)<\/p>\n<p>By self-restraint, I don\u2019t mean asceticism\u2026. Judaism is not based on the idea that the body is dirty and bad, the soul is pure and good, and the key to cultivating the soul is to renounce the pleasures of the body by taking vows of poverty, abstaining from sex, and sequestering ourselves away for a lifetime up on a mountaintop.<\/p>\n<p>Quite the contrary: sex is not viewed as inherently dirty or bad\u2026.And they even state that in the World to Come, people will have to answer for all the times when they could have enjoyed life\u2019s pleasures (within the bounds of Jewish law, of course), but decided not to\u2026<\/p>\n<p>But while asceticism is not our thing, neither is hedonism. We cannot just do whatever we want\u2014say whatever we want, treat people however we want, make money however we want. There are limits, and a core purpose of Jewish law is to articulate those limits, helping us discipline ourselves without becoming ascetics and enjoy ourselves without becoming hedonists.<\/p>\n<p>Judaism sees the yetzer hara, the bad inclination, as the source of our most base, animalistic impulses\u2014to be selfish, gluttonous, lustful, greedy, and aggressive. And the Rabbis believed that this inclination, when properly managed and channeled, can actually be quite constructive&#8230; Indeed, they observed that were it not for the evil inclination, no one would get married and have children or build homes and businesses. There\u2019s even a charming story in the Talmud about people who caught and imprisoned the yetzer hara for three days\u2014and as a result, all the chickens stopped laying eggs\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Rather than acting on every urge and indulging every appetite, we refuse to be at the mercy of our most base instincts, and we take the needs of others into account. This approach definitely bucks modern trends in spirituality that emphasize freeing ourselves from limitations and obligations and are more about self-discovery and self-expression than self-restraint. But it is very much in line with the approach that many of us take to other areas of our lives.<\/p>\n<p>Excerpt from Sarah Hurwitz,\u00a0<em>Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life\u2014in Judaism (after\u00a0finally\u00a0choosing to look there),<\/em>\u00a0Random House, 2019, p.\u00a0105-107<\/p>\n","image":{"ID":63589,"id":63589,"title":"Sarah Hurwitz cover","filename":"Sarah-Hurwitz-cover.png","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Sarah-Hurwitz-cover.png","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/discovering-millions-of-pages-and-new-old-ideas\/sarah-hurwitz-cover\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"sarah-hurwitz-cover","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":63586,"date":"2019-09-26 15:33:44","modified":"2019-10-22 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