A foundational teaching in Chassidus is that in addition to serving Hashem through Torah, tefillah, and other spiritual pursuits, we can also elevate physicality, turning the mundane into the spiritual. Sometimes our avodah is to hold back from physical pleasures, and sometimes it’s to elevate them.
Everything around us has a spark waiting to be elevated, and we free that spark when we enjoy the gashmius around us with holy intention. The holy intention can be very simple. For example, when eating a delicious schnitzel sandwich, you can think, “I am eating to have energy to serve Hashem,” or “Thank You Hashem, for this scrumptious schnitzel; I know that it is from You and there is a spark of G-dliness within it!”
Now, ideally, we don’t overdo it with the gashmius. It’s not our personal mission to elevate every schnitzel sandwich, candy bar, and chocolate in the world. Our tzadikim teach us about the importance of prishus, of holding back even from the permitted pleasures of the world. The Mishnah in Avos says, “Such is the way [of a life] of Torah: you shall eat bread with salt, and rationed water shall you drink; you shall sleep on the ground, your life will be one of deprivation, and in Torah shall you toil.” I’m not quite there yet, but I do try not to indulge in everything I see just because “it’s allowed.”
But sometimes the yetzer hara is real. Have you ever ended a particularly long and stressful workday at the gas station, staring at the ice cream, chocolate, and chips, trying to decide which one will make you feel better (all three?)? So you buy yourself a little feast, enjoy it in the car, and carefully dispose of the evidence before heading home. But somehow, you end up with a stomachache and a guilty conscience, leaving you wondering how your brilliant stress-relief strategy managed to make you feel worse. How did something meant to relieve stress become so stressful?!
Recently, I heard a shiur about a much more geshmake way to stress-eat. Let’s take chocolate as an example. Why did Hashem create chocolate? So that we can never eat it, because it’s not very healthy? So that we can eat it by the bar to numb a bad day, which only makes the day worse? Nope. Hashem didn’t create chocolate just to make life more difficult.
Let’s add a scientific fact: it is well known that chocolate can lift one’s mood. Now let’s ask the question again: Why did Hashem create chocolate? To lift up one’s mood. So why would someone eat chocolate and end up feeling miserable afterwards? This seems like a chilul Hashem!
The answer lies in how you take your gashmius. Next time you have a tough day and feel a need to eat the whole gas station, make one small change instead: don’t hide it, and don’t feel bad or ashamed about it. ENJOY IT!! Take it home, eat it on your living room couch, tell your wife you had a rough day and you need a shtickle pick-me-up. Thank Hashem for the gift of delicious gas-station food, make a geshmake brocha, and ENJOY IT!!
I’m telling you, it’s mamish life-changing advice. If you take your gashmius with this attitude, you are far less likely to go off the deep end. Overdosing on gashmius just leads to more stress, and the very problem you were trying to numb often ends up getting worse. But when we take our gashmius in moderation, aligned with the actual needs of our nefesh, we can use Hashem’s gifts exactly the way they were intended.
Hashem created a lot of awesome gashmius out there. If we indulge too much, we’ll lose track of our spiritual mission. But if we actually need it, then that’s what it’s there for. And if you’re going to have it anyway, why not bring Hashem into the picture? Doing so will make it that much more geshmake and can actually bring you closer to Hashem.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 105.