Who are You?
Rabbi woke up this morning and dragged himself to the bathroom. He looked in the mirror and was startled to find someone looking back at him. He asked the image:
Who are you?
Simultaneously, the image said to him, Who are you?
Rabbi answered, “Yisroel Roll.”
Rabbi was startled, as the image then said, “I didn’t ask you your name. I asked, ‘Who are you?’”
Rabbi responded, “He is a psychotherapist.”
The image said, “I didn’t ask you what you did for a living. I asked, ‘Who are you?’”
Rabbi tried again, “He is the husband of Julie and father of…”
It said, “I didn’t ask what your relationships were. I asked, ‘Who are you?’”
Persevering, Rabbi ventured, “He has a home in Baltimore, he drives a…”
The image cut him off. “I didn’t ask what you owned. I asked, ‘Who are you?’”
Exasperated, Rabbi responded, “Ok, he gave up. Who am I?”
The image said, “You are a horse.”
Rabbi replied indignantly, “A horse! What in the world do you mean?”
He explained, “Horses like to graze on the meadow. And I happen to know that you like to graze over a well-done rib steak with Southern barbecue sauce.” (My wife is from the Deep South).
Rabbi said, “That’s a pretty broad comparison. You’ll have to do better than that.”
He boldly replied, “When horses run in the meadow, there is always one horse that tries to run ahead of the pack, chased by the others. In your career, you always try to come up with new ideas and programs so that you too can run ahead of the competition. So, you are just like a horse.”
Getting a little nervous, Rabbi stuttered, “Not bad. What else do you have?”
He said, “When a filly enters the meadow, the stallions get up on their hind legs and begin to neigh. It’s their way of reacting to the filly. Rabbi happens to know that when your wife enters the room, you adjust your tie.” You act differently when your wife is around. So, you are a horse.”
After having been compared not too inaccurately to a horse, Rabbi defiantly said, “Just a minute. He may have certain basic qualities similar in nature to a horse, but he is not a horse. He is the rider of the horse. He can direct and determine what and when he eats, what career he pursues and how he develops it, and he can control his inner passions and desires. He can direct his ‘horse-like’ tendencies and guide them. He can raise himself above the level of the horse within him by reminding himself it is he who is in the saddle. So he can direct himself to meaningful activities because he is in control of the reins.”
This odd encounter in the bathroom mirror was a revelation. He understood that the horse within me is only Level One of my psyche—the animal-like part of his being. It is true that, like a horse, he has instincts, lusts, and passions that drive him. He has to admit that those impulses for self-preservation (i.e., food), self-gratification (i.e., pleasure), and power (i.e., money), rage so powerfully within him that he is sometimes convinced that these drives make up the sum total of his being. But that is not all he is the rider within him can direct these passions and animal instincts. The rider is the core of his real self—the part of him that decides which passions to pursue, which to delay pursuing, and which not to pursue at all.
The rider within him allows him to discern between worthwhile and meaningless activities. It allows him to appreciate sensations like beauty, symmetry, and harmony. It allows him to “choose” to pursue spiritual endeavors like kindness, empathy, and fairness. It inspires him to pursue values like truth, honesty, and loyalty. It allows him to look inward and to become aware of him “self.”
This core, this rider within him, is his soul. It is the source of his decision-making process. It is the life energy that activates and motivates him. This is the source from which he can draw his hidden strength in order to help him deal with and meet life’s challenges. The ability to access and activate his soul is his inner strength.
If we stop running through life in the “fast lane” and take a moment to reflect upon our inner values and character, we will be able to get in touch with our souls. By so doing we will be able to get to know more of our authentic selves. What a wonderful self-empowering feeling to be able to perform a quick “quality control” check on ourselves to ensure that we are channelling our drives and passions in the direction that our soul wants them to go, rather than allowing our passions to drive us.
Our soul enables us to summon all of the strengths, passions and drives within us to deal with a challenge from a position of conscious choice rather than with our usual knee-jerk instinctive reactions. Our soul—which is our decision-making headquarters—ultimately gives us the strongest resource at our disposal—it provides the power and inner strength for us to choose how to deal with a challenge from a considered, informed vantage point. And we can access and activate this inner strength at will, any time we choose.
The soul is God’s ambassador. When you listen to your soul’s yearnings and nourish them, then you are relating to the Godliness within you which develops your spirituality. The soul is not nourished with the same things that the body may crave. A new car, a steak or a beautifully remodelled kitchen will not do anything to satisfy the soul.
A story is told of the king’s daughter who fell in love with a peasant farmer. They got married and he tried to provide for her needs. He brought her the things that made him happy—finely ground alfalfa, an aged and masterfully dried out the salami and some fresh fish just caught down by the creek. But no matter how hard he tried to please her, she was never satisfied, because she was used to the finer things in life.
The king’s daughter represents the soul and the peasant farmer is the body. The body tries to satisfy the soul by bringing it physical pleasures. But the soul is not rooted in the physical world, but in the spiritual world. The soul, therefore, craves spiritual satisfaction. It wants to be nourished by things like honesty, kindness, wisdom, and truth.
If earthly pleasures are all we know, though, how can we ever hope to satisfy our soul? The answer is that lust, passion and a kosher hot dog at the ball game are not the only pleasures we know. There are deeper, more meaningful and more lasting pleasures—spiritual “delights” that are even better than a refreshing swim on a hot day. It may be hard to believe but it’s true.
There are two ways in which the soul reacts. At the soul’s core is the decision-making center of your being. You can decide to act instinctively or impulsively, or you can look at a given situation and choose to react spiritually. The act of deciding between right and wrong, between spiritual and physical paths, is the soul’s domain.
The decision-making part of our soul—although given by God—is not controlled by God. God has given us free will (also known as free choice) to develop ourselves as we wish. If we choose to live our lives satisfying only our physical desires, or if we choose to act destructively or to cause others pain, then God will not intervene because this would mean we do not have free will. We would be preprogrammed robots. God wants us to make freely-chosen moral choices since it is only through exercising our free will that our souls can grow and achieve their potential.
Another dimension of exercising our free will is how we react to the challenges that God sends us. We can choose to be angry with God for giving us a rough ride and expend energy being depressed and frustrated. Alternatively, we can access our soul and discover what God wants us to learn from this situation. We can thus choose to exercise our free will proactively and positively, by working through the issues God presents to us and growing through the experience. We must realize, though, that God does not benefit from our choosing the spiritual pathway. We do. We get an opportunity to grow in personality and character.
If God preprogrammed us to act as He wanted, the world might be a nicer place, but it would be a preprogrammed “God-made” world, which would have nothing to do with you or me. But that is not the purpose of the world. God created the world so that you and I could choose to make it a decent place out of our own free will and thereby earn our spiritual reward. This world is for choosing between good and evil, and the world after this one—the World to Come is for receiving rewards for the choices we have made.
Of course, we may get certain physical rewards in this world as God’s investment in us, to allow us to continue to choose correctly in the spiritual aspects of our lives. But the ultimate reward for our positive choices will be in the World to Come, which is also a world of body and soul, albeit on a much higher level than the current world. As Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato (Rmachal) states, “…in the renewed world, man will enjoy his reward with body and soul.”
Where on earth, then, is this “World to Come”? It is right here. When we perform positive acts of kindness or make other spiritual choices, we create positive spiritual energy. This spiritual energy accumulates in the spiritual dimension that co-exists simultaneously with This World. This spiritual energy is our World to Come.
That is why the next world is not called “That World.” Rather, it is called the World to Come, which comes out of This World. It is The World which “comes out” of This World. When we transition from This World of trial and travail into the World to Come, we will be able to access and we will live in this spiritual energy, that we ourselves have created, while in This World. It is in the World to Come that we will awaken to full consciousness and enjoy the true root of our actions in this world.
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