General Stanley McChrystal may be a familiar name to you. In 2009, he was appointed by President Obama as a four-star general and the head of military operations in Afghanistan. Before that, his team was responsible for the strike that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into what we now call ISIS. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called him the “perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat” he had ever met.
Due to inappropriate comments he allegedly made about Vice President Biden, McChrystal ended up resigning from his position and replaced by the now disgraced General David Petraeus. Since then, he has become a successful author, business and non-profit leader, and professor at Yale University. Ironically, when the New York Times wanted to introduce him to the public in 2008 as the future commander of America’s longest war, none of his talents were reflected in the headlines. Instead, he was described as an ascetic, as someone who ran 12 miles a day, slept no more than 3 or 4 hours a night, and ate only one meal a day.
The truth is, as that 2008 mini-bio notes, he is not the first warrior to take upon himself a life of self-denial. From childhood, the Classical Greek Spartans are said to have walked barefoot, worn no more than a single piece of clothing, and were purposely underfed to teach them. To the ancient Greeks, the ascetic lifestyle led to strength and power.
Contrast General McChrystal with another ascetic, the נזיר. The Torah describes a נזיר as a man or woman who dedicates themselves to a higher level of sanctity, temporarily or permanently. They deny themselves any grape products, may not cut their hair, and cannot come into contact with the dead throughout the period of their Nazirite vow. The גמרא and commentaries indicate that the purpose of this vow was to intensify the Nazirites religious commitment and spirituality. This is not unlike the abstinence of Christian or Buddhist monks, who take vows to abstain from many of life’s pleasures to achieve a higher spiritual attainment.
On Pesach, I mentioned one such נזיר, Rav David Cohen, who only passed away in 1972. A distant relative of mine through marriage, Rav Cohen, known by Israelis as the נזיר, was a Talmudic prodigy who struggled to find a place in his life, moving from Volozin and Slobodka in Northern Poland, to the University of Freiberg in Germany, and finally to Rav Kook’s tutelage in Europe and Israel. Along the way, as he encountered the mystical figures of Menachem Mendel Neu of Sandomir and Rav Kook, he decided to embrace a life of asceticism and humility.
In 1948, the נזיר vowed not to leave his home until Jerusalem was reunified in 1967. When his brother-in-law, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, sent a jeep to bring the נזיר to the Kotel during the Six-Day-War, the נזיר was speechless, not because of shock but because he had taken a vow of silence. So how are we meant to look at the ascetic lifestyle? Is it something for which all should strive? If not, is there anyone for whom it is appropriate?
The evidence in Rabbinic literature is certainly mixed, especially in the גמרא in נדרים. The debate centers around how to understand a particular phrase we read this morning:
וְכִפֶּר עָלָיו מֵאֲשֶׁר חָטָא עַל־הַנָּפֶשׁ
And he will atone for him for having sinned for the soul
This verse could refer to: a נזיר bringing a sin offering for having becoming impure through a dead body, a נפש, during his Naziriteship, A נזיר bringing a sin offering for having denied his own soul the freedom to become impure, drink, or cut his hair
On the one hand, רבי יהודה says that those חסידים, those extra pious, who wanted to bring a קרבן חטאת without sinning would vow to be a נזיר and bring a קרבן חטאת at the end. They would accomplish achieving a higher spiritual state and bring a sacrifice for not being able to maintain it longer. On the other hand, רבי שמעון and רבי אלעזר הכפר understand any ascetic vow to be inherently sinful. Self-denial, in their view, is a dangerous thing, something from which to stay far away.
When it comes to healthy living, at least, research seems to support this second view. Time magazine recently published an article explaining why most weight-loss programs do not successfully help people keep weight off. Many programs require participants to live a life of extreme self-denial, with intense workouts or very strict and specific diets.
Ultimately, research shows that people who eat breakfast, reduce their TV time to less than 10 hours per week, and get sleep, exercise regularly, tend to be the most successful at keeping a healthy weight.
This kind of golden-mean approach to healthy living reminds us of Aristotle and the Rambam’s concepts of the Golden Mean, of living a life of balance.
In fact, Rambam writes:
“A person may say: ‘Desire, honor, and the like are bad paths to follow and remove a person from the world; therefore, I will completely separate myself from them and go to the other extreme; I will not eat meat or drink wine or marry or live in a nice house or wear nice clothing, but rather wear sackcloth and harsh wool…This is an evil path and it is forbidden to walk it, as it says about the נזיר…The Torah says not to deny oneself except that which is forbidden by the Torah.”
The problem is, there is plenty of evidence supporting the other side. First of all, שמשון הגבור and שמואל הנביא were both required to be Nazirites from before they were born. Second of all, עמוס indicates that Nazirites were a positive force in Israel:
וָאָקִים מִבְּנֵיכֶם לִנְבִיאִים וּמִבַּחוּרֵיכֶם לִנְזִרִים. וַתַּשְׁקוּ אֶת־הַנְּזִרִים יָ֑ין וְעַל־הַנְּבִיאִים צִוִּיתֶם לֵאמֹר לֹא תִּנָּבְאוּ׃
And I raised up prophets from among your sons And nazirites from among your young men. But you made the nazirites drink wine And ordered the prophets not to prophesy.
It sounds like the נזיר was a positive force within the Jewish People, on par with the prophets who spread G-d’s word. Most significantly, the רמב״ם himself seems to contradict himself in another discussion about the נזיר:
“Whoever dedicates himself to Hashem by way of holiness as a Nazirite, is pleasant and worthy of praise…he is equivalent to the prophet.”
So who’s right, רמב״ם or רמב״ם? Is asceticism good or dangerous?
Rabbi Sacks and Dr. Erica Brown give different but complementary answers to this contradiction. Rabbi Sacks focuses on the distinction between the sage and the saint, between the ideal individual and the ideal community. As an individual, a saint can be a positive force, can achieve personal levels of piety and closeness to G-d impossible without some sacrifice of comfort. In that sense, a נזיר to dedicates him or herself to Hashem is doing a positive thing. But רמב״ם also points out that a society cannot function on the back of saints alone; who would bury the dead, say קידוש, who serve as a political leader? For a society to achieve its highest goals, its citizens cannot withdraw from normal life.
Brown emphasizes that though a community cannot be comprised of Nazirites, a community with no room for them will fail as well. She suggests that the נזיר was the spiritual gadfly of the Jewish People, someone whose unique relationship with G-d is both attractive and repulsive, charismatic and quixotic. Through the restraint of his passions, she writes, the Nazirite prompts us to question our own. The נזיר breaks the mold, searching for a personal style of divine connection, one that may not be strictly prohibited, but at the same time should not be applied universally. In this sense, the נזיר is like the prophet, in that she is a nonconformist, someone who challenges the status quo and demands more. She writes:
Successful leaders should be judged, in part, by how they manage those on the margins of their jurisdiction, on the place they create for dissenters and the most vulnerable, and on how they welcome them into the community when they are ready to join or come back.
Last week, we discussed the fact that the challenge of counting in the desert is to make sure to acknowledge the uniqueness of every person. We pointed out that there are many who we sometimes fail to count among us or to acknowledge their presence, whether because of their gender, age, disability, or ethnicity. But there’s another kind of tolerance – tolerance of eccentricity, of the diversity of personalities and styles of living among us. We judge someone else’s spiritual path to be too restrictive or too fluid and undefined, too legalistic or too esoteric and mystical. Perhaps the נזיר should remind us that while we may not embrace every path ourselves, there are many ways to dedicate one’s life to service of Hashem.
דורש לנפשי 