We'd learned that a healthy Spirit is one that's "predisposed to doing good, benevolent and comely things" while an ill Spirit is "predisposed to doing bad, harmful and disgraceful things". Now, needless to say, that leaves a lot up in the air. What sorts of things are in fact "good, benevolent and comely" and which are "bad, harmful and disgraceful"?

Our tradition has long laid out just what's ethically and spiritually "good" and "bad", but that's not at all what Rambam is referring to here. For he dedicated the full thrust of his magnum opus "Mishne Torah" to explicating just that, setting out there which actions we're to take and which to avoid in a halachic context. His point here, though, isn't about that so much as about the caliber and character of our good deeds.

For while all good deeds are good, by definition -- some are ... better. And it's incumbent upon us to know what sets them apart from the others if we're ever going to achieve the sort of piety and spiritual excellence this work challenges us to achieve.

Rambam contends that our deeds are truly good when "they lie midway between two extremes, both of which are bad -- one because it goes too far, and the other because it doesn’t go far enough". And he adds that our "dispositions are 'virtuous' when they lie midway between two bad dispositions, one of which is excessive, and the other of which is inadequate".

In other words, we're off the mark both if we don't quite go far enough in our efforts to be righteous or if we go too far. And our dispositions or characters can be too extreme or too subdued. That's to say that we're to fine-tune our makeup and strive for equibalance throughout. That all obviously calls for a lot of explanation, which Rambam will indeed offer in the course of this chapter; but let's allow the points to stand as they are for now.

Rambam then offers as an aside the fact that too extreme or too subdued dispositions foster too extreme or too subdued actions. All that means to say is that our deeds are directly linked to the quality of our character, as most know; but the implication is that we'd need to hone our character en toto in order to improve our ways.

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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Now, many otherwise fine and unimpeachable people are fools, the truth be known. They suspect that something about them is in disrepair and doesn't square with who they want to be, but they do nothing about it. They even rationalize how actually *right* they are not to change, and they're satisfied with that. For as Solomon the wise put it, "The fool’s ways are blameless in his own eyes" (Proverbs 12:15).

"But ...", Solomon then offers, no matter how true that is, it's nonetheless also true that, " ... one who takes counsel is a sage" (ibid.). That's to say that there's indeed a way a headstrong person like that can change -- by taking any advice the sort of Spirit-healer we'd cited before would offer him.

Impartial, learned, and caring only for your well-being, such a person would set you straight if you're in that situation. He or she would point out where and how you had in fact come to "imagine bad ... to be good, and good ... to be bad", and would offer what you'd need to do to get back on course.

And that's just the sort of advice Rambam himself will provide us with in the next pivotal chapter.

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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Text Copyright © 2007 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org.

We live in a cynical, distrusting age in which everything is suspect and little seems assured. Let anyone in authority say something -- nearly anything -- and he or she is immediately open to question. Yet we're usually quick to see a doctor if we're ill, and while we might ask for a second opinion or challenge particulars, as a rule we succumb to a doctor's advice in the end.

Now, what doctors do, at bottom, is determine just what's wrong, tell us how to treat it, and advise us about changes we might have to make in the future. The doctor might, for example, warn us not to eat this or that or to avoid doing certain things that we'd like to go on with, or to do or ingest things we'd rather not. And while we might cringe or avoid following orders at first, when we do though, we (generally) find ourselves feeling better and are glad we assented.

In much the same way then we're counseled to go to a sage -- a healer of the Spirit -- when our Spirit is unwell and our very being is off-kilter; when as we said above, we "imagine sweet things to be bitter, and bitter things to be sweet", i.e., when we make poor ethical and spiritual choices, and "imagine bad ... to be good, and good ... to be bad".

Along the same lines as the above instance, a sage will then determine just what's wrong in our Spirits, tell us how to treat it, and advise us about changes we'd need to make on whole other levels. And we'd be wise to acquiesce.

But sometimes we just don't know when our Spirit is off, or we refuse to submit to treatment since we'd have to change one way or another, and our inner-inertia gets the best of us. We're warned here though that while we might think at least we wouldn't have affected our health and well-being, in truth spiritual mediocrity can be fatal, too! And that in the end we'll be glad we decided to heed a sage's warning.

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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Text Copyright © 2007 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org.

What is "health" exactly? Is it merely the state in which each part of us runs well and is on equal footing with every other part -- or is that simply "well-being"? Is health a sense of robustness, vigor, and might -- or is that only heartiness (since the truth be known we could be harboring some terrible disease and still flourish for the longest time)?

As many know, Rambam himself was a physician, and a rather successful and sought-after one at that. He speaks of medicine a number of times in this work and elsewhere in his writings, and even wrote whole medical texts that were studied up to the modern era. Still in all, as he put it here, "the health or illness of the body is something that the art of medicine delves into", and that isn't our concern here. What we'll be delving into is the health of the Spirit.

So, what in fact does it mean to be healthy in Spirit or to have a sound disposition? "A healthy Spirit", Rambam declares, is one that's "predisposed to do ing good, benevolent and comely things" while "an ill Spirit ... is predisposed to doing bad, harmful and disgraceful things." That means to say that good and generous people are healthy, spiritually speaking, while bad and onerous ones are ill.

But a lot could be said about this. For, in truth, one could be partially ill and mostly well, or vice versa; or one could have a dread chronic disease and still manage to function quite well in the world, or suddenly become terribly ill with a simple cold or flu and not be able to function at all. That's to say that we each have faults (illnesses) and virtues (health). And that while some faults are serious and ingrained (chronic), others are lighter and more easily gotten rid of (acute). The wise would want to know the difference and "treat" each accordingly, because both can be debilitating as we pointed out. Rambam will discuss treatment later on, in fact.

There's another important point to consider. It's that when we're ill in Spirit we often think we're healthy and make wrong decisions accordingly. (Some people who are healthy in Spirit think they're ill, on the other hand, and consequently make other sorts of poor judgments. But that's beside our concerns here.)

Rambam then delves into an interesting phenomenon. He points out that "when they’re (physically) ill and their senses are off kilter, people imagine sweet things to be bitter, and bitter things to be sweet". They then "take pleasant things to be unpleasant, and they crave and enjoy things that healthy people would never enjoy". In fact, "they might eat minerals, charcoal, soil, very pungent or sour foods, or other such things that healthy people would find revolting and never want".

In much the same way, he says, "those whose *Spirit* is ill ... likewise imagine bad things to be good, and good things to be bad, and always pursue goals that are actually harmful which they imagine to be good, simply because their Spirit is ill".

So the only way for us to avoid making poor judgments like that is to know the true state of our Spirit and to act accordingly. We'll soon see how we're to do that.

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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As everyone knows, the busiest, noisiest, and most complex aspect of our beings is our emotional center. Everything we do, experience, think about, and yearn for passes through it and leaves its mark. Though most are dim and mundane, some of the marks left there are quite stunning and affect us on a very deep, recondite level. The lot of them, though, are the stuff out of which our characters are made.

For as we learned above, our emotions are the one aspect of our Spirit that are most directly related to our ethical and Torah-based choices that touch on character virtues and flaws. (We also learn that our senses, the final aspect of our Spirit, merely feed our emotions, as when we hear something off-putting and either respond angrily or with equanimity, etc.)

Now, there's an overabundance of emotional traits open to us, including but certainly not limited to the ones Rambam will be concentrating on here: temperance, generosity, justice, patience, humility, goodwill, courage, and sensitivity. None is inherently good or bad (though some are better than others), and all can serve either good or bad ends. In any event Rambam's major contention throughout this work is that a character trait is flawed only when it's either overdone or underdone -- when too minimal or exaggerated. We'll delve into this at great length later on.

The underlying point for now, though, is that our free choices are more relevant to our emotions than to any other aspect of our being.

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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Text Copyright © 2007 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org.

Those of us in search of spiritual excellence would naturally want to acquire virtues and avoid flaws. But we'd need to define just what true spirit-based virtues and flaws encompass rather than material ones. For while being "good" or "bad" at one's job or social interests, for example, certainly matters, it doesn't touch on our quest.

So we're taught that there are two sorts of virtues and flaws germane here: those touching on our ideas (which obviously affect our intellects) and those relevant to our character (which affect our emotions and senses, as we'll learn). Let's concentrate here on the first. Since we don't tend to think of ideas as being "virtuous" per se (though we do speak of "flawed ideas", interestingly), so we'll just label them "lofty".

Rambam contends that it's lofty to learn how to determine the cause-and- effect relationship between things (i.e., knowing which of these two brought the other about and is thus more significant). It's likewise lofty to hone and purify our reasoning processes, and to think adroitly and swiftly. Contrarily, our thinking, and thus we ourselves, would be flawed if we dwelt on incidentals, if we allowed our minds to stagnate, or if our thinking was muddled and sluggish.

Though he doesn't speak of it until much later in the work, Rambam also maintains that lofty thoughts are ones that are in tune with the ultimate truth about our situation in this world and in a relationship to G-d, and it also has to do with understanding certain truisms about Him.

Without spending too much time on it at this juncture, suffice it to say that those with lofty minds come to know that we're expected to try to grasp as much as we can about G-d; that with notable exception, as we'll see, we've each been granted the freedom to act as we see fit based on our own judgment; and that it would behoove us to use that freedom to draw close to G-d. They also know that though G-d is basically unfathomable in His essence, there are certainly things that we can say about Him from our perspective, including the facts that He's Omniscient and Almighty. But this will be explained as we go along.

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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Text Copyright © 2007 by Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld and Torah.org.

Let's now tie-in some more of what we'd learned about our makeup to our search for spiritual excellence. We'll find that there's a lot more to be said, and that much of it has to do with our free choice -- our sovereign right to make ethical and mitzvah-based decisions on our own.

"It’s important to know" Rambam says, "that all acts of disobedience and obedience mentioned in the Torah" that is, all the sins and mitzvot cited there which we can choose to act on or not, "actually apply to only two parts of your Spirit: your senses and emotions" and not to "your digestive system or imagination" (though they also apply to our minds to some degree, as we'll see).

What that means to say is that, despite what’s commonly thought and widely rationalized, we can indeed decide to adhere to G-d's wishes for us when it comes to our five senses and our emotions. We can truly learn to quash feelings that run counter to G-d's requirements of us by managing to control our anger, squelch our pride, or by becoming magnanimous, for example. And we can likewise manage to avert our eyes or close off our ears in order not to look at or listen to things we shouldn't be concerned with. Even when those things seem to go against the grain.

None of that's beyond us, and most of it comes down to finally and consciously deciding to do it.

We're not free to make ethical choices when it comes to our digestive system or imagination, though. Simply because we can't *decide* to digest one way or another, as those kinds of things tend to happen despite us (though we can in fact help them along medicinally, mechanically, and the like, but that has little to do with ethics per se). Understand of course that we can choose what to eat and drink, which indeed touches on sins and mitzvot, but that's not the point at hand, since those are emotional and sensual decisions, which we learned we have control of.

And we can't decide what thoughts or images are going to occur to us all of a sudden. We can, though, decide to reject or quell the ones that the Torah disallows us, like idolatrous thoughts for example. (The operative point here is that oftentimes in fact "bad thoughts occur to good people", to coin a phrase, but that we can then reject them out of hand, and not at all be blamed for them.)

"There’s some confusion, though, when it comes to the intellect", Rambam avers. Nonetheless he contends that personal choices apply to it as well. Since we can consciously and freely decide to adopt what he terms "sound or unsound" (i.e., good or bad) ideas which then touch upon sins or mitzvot.

As such, we can decide that eating kosher isn't a good idea and fall into that trap easily enough; or contrarily we can decide that it's a good idea and follow through on that. It's just that "the intellect (itself) can’t do anything per se that can be said to be either a mitzvah or a sin", so on that level the intellect itself can't be culpable for anything, only the person who uses his or her intellect to do wrong.

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

For any comments, questions or topic requests, please contact Rabbi Yaakov Feldman.

Text Copyright © 2006 by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman and Torah.org

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Text Copyright © 2007 by Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld and Torah.org.