Halakhah sobre Provérbios 3:6

Bar Kappara expounded: Which is the small section upon which all substantive principles of Torah are contingent? "In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths " (Proverbs 3:6).

And it is necessary that you know that human eating is nothing but an illusion, that it is not a true thing or a real activity, that it is something deceptive, something that keeps changing as it goes through the internal organs in a sequence of causes and effects. But ideas refined through wisdom, and by the attachment of one’s thought to the light of the intellect to the Upper Wisdom is itself “real and lasting eating,” as in the way that our Sages of blessed memory interpreted the verse: “‘And they envisioned God, and they ate and drank.’¹²Ex 24:11. R. Yohanan says, ‘real eating,’ [akhilah vada’it], as it is said, ‘In the light of the face of the King – life!’¹³Prov.16:15. And it is necessary for you to think hard about this verse, why it was necessary to say, ‘they envisioned,’ and why wasn’t it written as it was just before, ‘they saw?¹⁴Ex. 24:10. But rather because it specified ‘they saw’ so you would not understand [what happened next] as actual seeing with the sense of your eye, it follows that it was necessary to say ‘they envisioned’ immediately afterward to teach you that this wasn’t this prior kind of ‘seeing’ [re’iyah], but rather seeing by means of prophecy, and that is why it said, ‘And they envisioned [va-yehezu] God, and they ate and drank,’ from the term for prophetic “vision” [mahzeh]. And the explanation of the Scripture ‘And they envisioned God, and they ate and drank,’ is that the leaders merited to see with the prophecy of ‘a glass that does not reflect,’ without a barrier, while the rest of Israel had a barrier, and Moses really “saw” directly.¹⁵That is, the leaders’ prophetic vision was better than the Israelites’, but not as direct as Moses.’ “And they ate and drank,” that is to say that their eating and drinking by this vision was indeed “real eating.” And it is also possible to interpret “And they ate and drank” as that they saw by prophecy the very attribute from which they “ate and drank,” that is, from the very same attribute from which the manna came to them, which is the principle behind all their material support, about which matter it is written, “She rises while it is still night,”¹⁶Prov. 31:15. and it is written “Here I am causing it to rain down.”¹⁷Ex 16:4. And you already knew that this was material support that occurred at night, for this is to what ‘She rises while is still night’ is referring. And thus the manna used to come down during the third watch of the night, when the Israelites were sleeping in their beds in the desert. And on the next day they would get up early in the morning and find their sustenance ready for them. This is the meaning of what is written: “So they gathered it every morning.”¹⁸Ex 16:21. And thus you will find in First Temple that the rains used to fall on Wednesday and Shabbat nights, and on the next day they would get up early in the morning to do their work, without wasting any time. And so you also find with King Hezekiah, who said, “Master of the World, I myself don’t have the power in me to pursue enemies, or to sing a victory song, but I sleep on my bed, and you do it.” And the Holy One Blessed be He replied to him, “You sleep in your bed while I do it,” as it is said, “That night, an angel of the Lord struck down 185,000 in the Assyrian camp.”¹⁹2 Kings 19:35. This story about Hezekiah is a midrash from Lam. R. 30. It was about him (or this) David spoke when he said, “In vain do you rise up early and stay up late…He provides as much for His loved ones while they sleep.”²⁰Ps 127:2. The meaning of the Scripture is that what the other peoples achieve through hard work, by getting up early and staying up late to eat the bread for which they toil,²¹An allusion to Ps 127:2. R. Bahya hints here that food “served” to Israelites without any toil, that is, good things God prepares for them while they are asleep, is angelic food. As R. Bahya put in his preface, “Our food is not their food. Their [the angelic beings’] food is conceived in their mind, when they see the face of their Maker. Our food is meager bread, water, and tears, gotten by hard work and toil.” It is like the food Adam ate before the Fall.God provides to His loved ones while they sleep! This is the thing the Holy One provides to the one He loves, at the hour when he’s asleep, with no need to bother about it at all. And from now on any reference to “they ate and drank” means nothing other than a reference to “real eating,” or to eating the manna that was the offspring of the Upper Light – which is “real eating.”

Therefore the reverent person ought to have his intention connected to the higher things, and have his eating be to sustain his body alone and not to be drawn to physical pleasures, for being drawn to physical pleasures is the cause for the loss of both body and soul, and the cause for forgetting the point, for out of eating and drinking he will become full of himself [lit., lift up his heart] and stumble into great pitfalls and sins, and do things which should not be done. See how Joseph’s brothers sold him only in the middle of eating and drinking, as it is said, “They sat down to a meal, and looking up…”²²Gen 37:28. While eating the brothers looked up and saw the Ishmaelites to who they sold Joseph. R. Bahya expands upon this more fully in his commentary to the Torah on this verse. And for this reason the Torah said not to eat on Yom Kippur, which is the day of judgment for criminal cases involving people, because one’s eating might cause his soul to sin. And they even said in civil cases dealing with monetary compensation: “akhal ve-shatah al yorah” – “Don’t instruct right after eating and drinking!”²³A rhyming proverb in the Hebrew. Yorah, which means to instruct or teach, is the same verb used in the Biblical passage from Lev. 10:11 that R. Bahya cites. It is from the same Hebrew root as the word Torah. R. Bahya subtly makes another point here besides the obvious one that people are inclined to make bad judgments right after they’ve eaten and drunk. Namely, with this wordplay and the analogy to the Biblical priests, he’s reiterating his general contention that engaging in torah is a sacramental priest-likeactivity, even when done by non-priests – i.e., rabbinical torah scholars, or even ordinary Jews fasting on Yom Kippur. Why is this so? From what is written, “Drink no wine or other intoxicant, you or your sons,”²⁴Lev 10:9, addressed to Aaron and his sons, that is, the priests. and connected to it, “to instruct [le-horot] the Israelites.”²⁵Ibid., 10:11. When they were commanded to instruct [le-horot], they were warned to avoid wine, because wine confuses the mind, and it does not distinguish between the holy and the profane, which is why it is written “to distinguish.”²⁶Ibid., 10:10. All this is proof that eating and drinking causes human beings to move themselves away off the track of Torah and worship, and to cast aside all the statutes of Ha-Shem, may He be Blessed. All this is caused when one has eaten and is satisfied, and therefore the Torah commanded, “And you shall eat and be satisfied, and you shall bless” (Deut 8:10). That is to say, after you will have eaten and have been satisfied, and you are close to throwing off the yoke of the commandments, “You shall bless YHWH your God” at the very moment you need to bless Him, so that you will take upon yourself the yoke of His rule and bless His name. And this in my opinion is the meaning of the Scripture, “In all your ways, know Him;”²⁷Prov 3:6. it means even at the time of eating when you are close to forgetting Him and to severing your reason from your mind, at that very moment, “know Him” and cleave to Him. And if you do this, “He will straighten your paths,”²⁸Prov 3:6. He will straighten your ways on the paths of life, namely, the soul’s successful attainment of the world to come. If so, then a person ought to eat only for the sustenance of his body alone, and it is forbidden for him to pursue any sort of pleasure unless it is to make his body healthy and make the eyes of his intellect clear-sighted. In order for his body to be healthy and strong, he should pursue what pleases [his intellect] and his Creator, for his organs are combined and possess the capacity exactly in the measure that enables him to bear the yoke of the Torah and its commandments, which is the point of the verse written about the tribe of Issachar, “he bent his shoulder to bear the burden” (Gen 49:15), which is the same language used to refer to the giving of the Torah, “He [God] bent the sky and came down” (2 Sam 22:10). And anyone whose intention is this, is an angel of the Lord of Hosts, but whoever does not direct their intention to this end, is “likened to the beasts that perish.” (Ps 49:13,21). “You can see for yourself”²⁹1 Sam 24:12: Re-eh gam re-eh – “you can see for yourself” (JSB). Joseph the righteous, who was noted for his quality of reverence [yir’ah], from what is written, “I am a God-fearing man”³⁰Gen 42:18. and “Am I a substitute for God?”³¹Ibid. 50:19. hinted at this point when he said, “take something for the hunger of your houses and be off.”³²Ibid. 42:33. He comes to instruct and to teach people to know that they should only eat to break their hunger, not to fill their belly and be drawn by the taste, which is base and to be scorned, because that is a disgrace to us, utter waste, and a thing which has no point to it. And do not say that this because it was a time of famine, because when Joseph was “a prince and commander of peoples,”³³Is 55:4.and the treasuries of the king were under his control, he had the power to supply bread and food to his father and brothers, as in the other the years of plenty. However, instead he made it known to us that this is the way of Torah and fear of Ha-Shem (may He be blessed!), that a person should only eat, satisfy himself, and fill his belly to satisfy his soul.

And know indeed that what kind of person one is, is determined at the table, for there his qualities are revealed and made known. And thus our rabbis z”l said, “By three things a person is known: through his purse, through his cup, and through his anger.”³⁴B. Erubin 68b. The clever wordplay of be-kiso, be-koso, be-ka’aso of the saying is lost in the translation. For being drawn to wine and other pleasures – surely these are “the drippings of the honeycomb”³⁵Psalm 19:11, that is, the flowing “honey, the drippings of the honeycomb” than which the “fear of the Lord” and “judgments of the Lord” (19:10) “are sweeter.” – is one drawn to the drug of death, and by his grasping this path he will die an everlasting death. But whoever wants to live ought to keep far from this path; “he will eat and live forever.”³⁶Gen 3:22, an allusion to the immortality that would have come from eating from the Tree of Life. In other words, unlike the way Adam and Eve chose, there is another way one can and should eat to gain eternal life. And thus our rabbis z”l said in tractate Gittin of the Talmud, “A meal for your own enjoyment – pull your hand away from it,”³⁷B.Gittin 70a. and similarly said, “‘You shall be holy,’ that is, ‘you shall be abstemious (perushim),'”³⁸Sifra on Lev. 19:2. and “Make yourself holy through what is appropriate for you.”³⁹B. Yebamot 20a: “Make yourself holy through what is permitted to you.” And the author of Ecclesiastes said, “I said to myself, ‘Come, I will treat you to merriment. Taste mirth!’ That too, I found was futile.”⁴⁰Eccl. 2:1. And after that, he said, “I ventured to tempt [limshokh] my flesh with wine.”⁴¹Ibid. 2:3. Limshokh here is from the root of the same verb R. Bahya used above to refer to being drawn to wine, i.e., “being drawn [he-hamshekh] to wine and other pleasures…is one drawn [nemshakh] to the drug of death.” Thus, R. Bahya is using Eccl. 2:3 as a sort of prooftext for his point about wine. And in tractate Sanhedrin of the Talmud:⁴²B.Sanhedrin 70a. “Thirteen woes are said about wine, and they are specified in Parshat Noah. It is written, ‘Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard,’⁴³Gen 9:20. which means from the moment he began to plant, he made his holiness profane. That is the point of the expression va-yahel – “he began”- which includes both the connotations of “beginning” (tehilah) and “profanation” (hillul). And because of wine, one third of the world was cursed.⁴⁴That is, the descendents of Ham were condemned to serve the descendents of his brothers Shem and Japhet, because when Noah, after drinking his wine, fell asleep in a drunken stupor, Ham “saw his nakedness.” Normally this is a Biblical euphemism for having sexual relations, hence the severity of the curse. The curse was actually directed at Ham’s son Canaan, most likely to justify morally the Israelites’ subsequent subjugation of the Canaanites and their land. However, the whole account is ambiguous and full of apparent non-sequiturs, prompting a quite a fruitful growth of midrashic attempts to explain the story. One unfortunate stream of interpretation, that Ham’s curse not only involved eternal servitude but also the blackening of his skin color, was later adopted in Christian and Muslim traditions, and used to justify the enslavement of Black Africans well into the 19th century – the so-called “Curse of Ham.” And they also taught in a midrash, “Don’t eye the wine, as it reddens…,”⁴⁵Prov. 23:31. that is, it yearns for blood.⁴⁶B. Sanhedrin 70a. And likewise Bathsheba warned King Solomon not to tempt his flesh with wine,⁴⁷B. Sanhedrin 70b.when she said to him, “Wine is not for kings, O Lemuel; not for kings to drink, nor any beer for princes.”⁴⁸Prov. 31:4. The midrash above identifies “Lemuel’s mother” (Prov. 31:1) with Bathsheba, the mother of King Solomon. And so he said, “I ventured to tempt my flesh with wine,”⁴⁹Eccl. 2:3. and “for who eats, and who feels the pleasures of the senses but me?”⁵⁰Ibid., 2:25. and then remarks after that, “That too is futile.”⁵¹Ibid., 2:26. For it is well known that someone in whose heart reverence for HaShem and fear of Him is strong, will reject and separate himself from the pleasures of the world, and will scorn them to the utmost, for he knows and is familiar with their consequences, while others who are lesser or worthless will fill their bellies with what delights them, and their vessels will return empty; they’re empty because they lack sense “They neither know nor understand; they walk about in darkness.”⁵²Ps. 82:5. About this, Solomon said, “When you sit down to dine with a ruler, consider well who is before you.”⁵³Prov. 23:1. He said, “If the wrath of the ruler rises up against you”⁵⁴Eccl. 10:4. and you go out to eat “the king’s food or the wine he drank”⁵⁵Dan. 1:8. in the house of the king who rules the land, understand well and look at those who were before you who chose this way- “what they saw in that matter and what had befallen them.”⁵⁶Esth. 9:26. Doesn’t the high status and greatness of most of them end up in humiliation and submission, “wholly swept away by terrors”?⁵⁷Ps. 73:19. Just what is written right afterwards in Proverbs, “Thrust a knife in your gullet!”⁵⁸Prov. 23:2.And our rabbis z”l said, “Do not yearn for the tables of kings, for your table is greater than their table, your crown greater than their crown.”⁵⁹M. Avot 6:5. Therefore, a person should not seek excessive gains and pursue them, for if he does, his days will be painful and he will never be satisfied, because there is no end to these gains, and whoever pursues things that have no end – is he not sick, blinded by his stupidity? For “every fool is embroiled.”⁶⁰Prov. 20:3. It goes without saying that he has no share in the Torah, because if he were rich and used to eating and drinking with silver dishes, he would be liable to think little of them and become unsatisfied until he had utensils of “turquoise, sapphire, and diamond,”⁶¹Ex 28:18. and as soon as he obtained one of them, he’d want two or three, and this would go on without out end. And therefore a person with good qualities must not in his heart crave for excessive gains, and should be satisfied with a little.

Therefore, they used to come to Him three times a year for the pilgrimage festivals: Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot – on the holiday of Passover because it is the month of Aviv, the time for the barley harvest; on the holiday of Shavuot because it is the time for the wheat harvest, and on the holiday of Sukkot because it is the time of gathering when all the fruits were gathered into the home. And this is why it is written, “[three time a year all your males shall see] the face of the lord YHWH, the God of Israel,”⁷⁵Ex 34:23. and it is written, “none shall see My face,”⁷⁶Ex 23:15. that is to say, without a sacrifice, because they would need to bring in any case the olah and shlemim offerings, and through this the world would be blessed with its meals and sustenance from the flow of blessing from the source to the well, and from the well to the garden, and from the garden to the four rivers of the garden of Eden of the lower world, whose inhabitants are blessed from there throughout the four corners of the world. So you find yourself learning that when a person stands over his table and eats with this thought in mind, see! This eating is indeed physical and a natural activity, but see! It also revolves into a higher, intellectual form of worship, and this is the reason why it is written, ‘In all your ways know Him,’⁷⁷Prov 3:6. as I discussed above. And if so, you see how one’s eating is thought to be a perfect act of worship like one of the forms of divine service [i.e., the sacrifices], and the like quintessential commandment of all the commandments. And this is the point of having the right intention at a meal at the table – that the body be nourished by it and take its bodily portion from the bodily eating, and the soul by this act of thought is filled, fed, and satisfied as if from the choicest parts of “real eating” of the ways of Ha-Shem and His pleasantness, and regarding this it is said, ‘Your table is laid out with rich food.’⁷⁸Job 36:16.

Our Rabbis of blessed memory said,¹Berachos 63a. "Upon which short verse are all the principles of the Torah" predicated? [It is] "In all your ways acknowledge Him."²Proverbs 3:6. It means that even in those things that you do for your personal needs, you should acknowledge God, and do those things for the sake of His Name, blessed is He. For example, eating, drinking, walking, sitting, lying down, getting up, sexual intercourse, and talking—all these physical needs should be done for the sake of serving your Creator, or for the sake of [doing] something that will be conducive to the service of Him.

“In all thy ways acknowledge Him” (Prov. 3:6). Let every God-fearing man, when angered because of transgressors, weigh his anger, so that his mind is (remains) settled. Let him learn from Moses, our teacher, when he became angry with the children of Reuben he said, “a brood of simple men” (Num. 32:14). Therefore, his grandson became a servant to the idol of Micah,¹J. T. Berakoth 9:2. even though he became angry for the sake of heaven, nevertheless, everything requires a balance. And so with festivities that involve the performance of a (religious) command, let him not remove anger completely. (This refers to) those who perform a command with overmuch gaiety, let his anger not be distant.²Berakoth 30b.

That all of one's intentions be for the sake of Heaven. And there is one paragraph in it.
If it is impossible for him to study without sleeping in the afternoon, he should sleep. Gloss: And when he wakes from his sleep, he does not need to recite the blessing, "My Lord, the soul..." (Beit Yosef). And some say that he should read, "May the pleasantness..." before he sleeps (Kol Bo). [And this is] so long as he does not make it long; as it is forbidden to sleep during the day more than the sleep of a horse, which is sixty breaths. And even in this little, his intent should not be for the pleasure of his body, but rather to strengthen his body for the service of God, may He be blessed. And likewise with anything that is pleasant for him in this world, his intent should not be for his pleasure, but rather for the service of the Creator, may He be blessed; as it is written (Proverbs 3:6), "In all of your ways, know Him." And the Sages said, "Let all of your actions be for the sake of Heaven." As even optional things – such as eating, drinking, walking, sitting, getting up, sexual relations and conversation – all of them should be for the service of your Creator or for something that enables serving Him. For even if one was thirsty or hungry – if he ate or drank for his pleasure, it is not praiseworthy. Rather he should intend to eat and drink for his sustenance, to serve his Creator. And likewise even to sit in the council of the righteous, to stand in the place of the saintly and to go in the path of the straight – if he does it for his own pleasure and to fulfill his desire, it is not praiseworthy; only when he does it for the sake of Heaven. And likewise with laying down: There is no need to say that at a time when he is able to be in involved with Torah study or with commandments, he should not entice himself with sleep to enjoy himself. Rather even at a time when he is weary and needs to sleep in order to rest from his weariness – if he does [so] for the pleasure of his body, it is not praiseworthy. Rather he should intend to give sleep to his eyes and rest to his body for the requirements of health, so that his mind not get jumbled during Torah study on account of sleep deprivation. And likewise with sexual relations: Even at the time [prescribed] by the Torah, if he does [it] for the pleasure of his body, it is disgraceful. And even if his intent is in order that he will [produce] children that will serve him and take his place, it is not praiseworthy. Rather he should intend that he will [produce] children for the service of his Creator; or he should intend to fulfill the commandment of the [prescribed] time, like someone who is paying his debt. And likewise with conversation: Even to recount words of wisdom, his intent must be for the service of the Creator or for something that leads to serving Him. The principle of the matter [is that] one is obligated to put his eyes and his heart to his ways and evaluate all of his actions on the scales of his intellect: So when he sees something that will bring him to serving the Creator, may He be blessed, he should do it. But if not, he should not do it. And one who acts like this will be serving his Creator constantly.