Question: How should one serve Hashem through emotion
or intellect?
Answer: It is written on almost every page of the book
"Mesillat Yesharim" that one must serve Hashem through
intellect. A person is obligated to be
good and to distance himself from evil.
How can a person improve himself?
Answer: through intellect. The
intellect is the main power of a person.
The fact that you have emotions does not make you a man. Animals also possess emotion. Apes,
for example, have an incrediblely strong motherly emotion, to the point of
self-sacrifice. They hold their babies
for five years even when they are gathering food or fighting off an enemy. Like us, animals have emotions, a body,
desires, imaginations, etc. The Rambam
therefore writes in "Shemoneh Perakim" (chapter 1) that the intellect
must reign over all of these powers. The
intellect is the king. Not a ruler who
murders all of his citizens so he can reign all by himself, but one who takes
care of them. Rabbi Yehudah Halevi also
wrote this in the book "Ha-Kuzari" (in the third section) when he
discussed the righteous person, one who is similar to a king who provides for
the needs of his citizens. When he asks
them to rally around the flag, they come running. The same applies to the intellect which gives
each human being his status and role.
The intellect examines if a given emotion is positive or negative. If you are excited about our state and army,
this is a good emotion. But being
excited by some actor – what kind of emotion is this?! A person certainly needs to be excited – if
he does not he is not human – but the question is what is he excited
about. How can we know which emotion has
deep meaning and which does not? This is
the job of the intellect. We learn Torah
and know what is right and wrong. To our
distress, it is true that emotion and imagination control most people of the
world, but we are not discussing what exists, but what should exist. What should exist is the intellect as the
main power. The intellect is the company
commander which gives the orders.
Emotion began ruling the world with the sin of Adam. Hashem said: do not eat from this tree. "But it is beautiful…" and so he
ate from the tree. From that time, man
has not been directly controlled by his intellect, but has been enslaved to
emotions and imagination. But Hashem had
mercy on us and gave us the Torah which teaches us what is good and evil, what
is a mitzvah and what is a transgression, what is a law and what is a
stringency, etc. We therefore know how
to act in the world, and we can examine an emotion through the intellect. For example, "I hate you" – the
Torah says "Do not hate people."
"I am jealous" – the Torah says "Do not be
jealous." "But I have a
powerful emotion" – the Torah says "Do not be jealous of another
person." The Torah clarifies for us
prohibited emotions which must be eliminated, permissible emotions which can
remain, and supreme emotions which should be strengthened.
