At the beginning of Rav Dessler’s essay on free will (Kunteras Habechira), he talks about a cigarette smoker. This person already has respiratory problems, and knows that smoking will only make him feel worse, immediately and in the long run. Yet he convinces himself that he will have only “one more” and then stop, a strategy that has never worked for him in the past and does not work now either. How does the smoker do it? By wrapping himself in a haze of willful blindness, in which state he can do what he wants and ignore repercussions.
It is not hard to extend this example to eating behavior. Most people easily disregard the long-term health effects of being obese. (Aside from the frequent and well known outcomes, like heart disease and diabetes, obesity itself is now considered a disease according to the American Medical Association). But what about the immediate effects? Here, too, it seems we manage to convince ourselves that there are no consequences.
This ability to act against our best interests seems to defy the general rule about bechira, free will. We have often heard the idea that immediate reward and punishment for our acts is not consistent with the idea of bechira. If a bolt of lightning were to strike a person whenever he sinned, he would naturally never sin. So why is it that, with eating, although the “punishment” is a natural consequence of the sin – one gains weight, does not feel well, etc. – we nevertheless retain our bechira, choosing to continue to overeat? It is because, at the moment we are tempted, we inhabit another realm, where we do not allow the simple reality to penetrate. Willful blindness has taken over.
How can we overcome willful blindness in regard to eating? As I explained in the first article in this series, the difficulties we face relative to eating can be viewed as a microcosm of the challenges we face in the larger world. The validity of this approach was highlighted for me recently by studying the first element in the process of acquiring shleimus halev, wholeheartedness in serving Hashem, as presented in Mesillat Yesharim, The Path of the Upright, which presents a path to general character development, and can serve to overcome overeating as well.
This the basic mussar (ethical) text, first printed in 1740, was written by the Ramchal, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, who was only 33 years old at the time. The writing is beautiful and merited great praise from the Vilna Gaon, who said that it contained not an extraneous word. Reading it, its immediacy and applicability to essentially every aspect of our lives lead us to imagine that it was written in the 21st century, not the 18th.
The primary goal, says the Ramchal, is for each of us to understand that our duty in life is to achieve a level of middos that allows us to come close to Hashem and take pleasure in that closeness. While the ultimate objective is only attained in the world to come, the path there takes us through this world, with all its difficulties and struggles. Our job is to persevere, face our challenges, and continue to grow. The Ramchal elucidates a number of principles, each based on the preceding ones. Acquisition of these principles results in elevating the person to merit closeness with Hashem in the world to come.
The first principle to acquire is zehirus, or vigilance. The description of this principle, its components, and the factors that work against its acquisition, also provide direct instructions to us in terms of our relationship to food.
Zehirus means, practically speaking, that we scrutinize our deeds to determine if they are good or not, so that we don’t walk in darkness by habit. A person who does not scrutinize his deeds is like a blind man walking along a riverbed, for whom disaster is more likely than deliverance. Willful blindness – i.e., closing one’s eyes by one’s own choice – is equivalent to natural blindness. And if we have any doubt as to our ability to willfully blind ourselves, so that we walk in darkness, we need go no further than to look at our eating behavior.
The tactic of the yetzer hara, the evil inclination within a person, is to keep a person so busy (not hard in today’s world) that he does not have the time or the spirit to pay attention to his deeds. In order to oversee himself, a person must constantly ponder two things: First, what is the true good and the true evil? Second, do my deeds belong to the category of good or evil? And there are two times to weigh one’s actions: at the time of action, and after the action. After the fact, one can determine what evil deeds he should eliminate, what good he should fortify, and what strategies might work to help us abandon evil and be purified.
This accounting (din vecheshbon) must be done daily, at set times, just as a merchant tallies up his day’s outcome. The problem is that, if one is imprisoned in the jail of the yetzer hara, he can’t see the truth; he is walking in darkness. When walking in darkness, one can make two errors: He may not see obstacles at all. Worse than this is to be deceived into thinking that one thing is something else (e.g., that a pillar is a person). This is worse because it allows one to find proofs to corroborate an evil, so that it is not perceived as evil.
It is not easy to get in the habit of doing a daily din vecheshbon, a daily accounting of our deeds, especially since this willful blinding takes place both during the action and afterwards. But essentially every mussar guide recommends that we do this, and taking account of how we behave with respect to eating may be easier than looking at other, more subtle or complicated aspects of our lives and can provide good training for acquiring this habit.
One last thing thought about blindness: As an ophthalmologist, many of the patients I see have macular degeneration, a disease that causes a blind area in the center of the vision. If a person looks straight at something, as he did when he did not have a blind spot, the object will fall on the blind area and not be seen. Patients must learn to move their eyes and put the object of interest onto an area of the retina that is not blind. Some posters that try to show what different vision abnormalities are like show a picture with a black splotch in the center, to indicate how the world looks to someone with a central blind area. Interestingly, this is not what patients perceive. If they did see a black splotch in their blind area, that would actually make it easier; they could say “Hey, there’s that black splotch, blocking off what I want to see. I have to move my eye to get it out of the way.” But in reality it is rare for someone to perceive a black splotch. The brain activates a process called “filling in,” so that, rather than seeing a black splotch, the person sees the area as blurry: a blurry face, blurred words, etc. I tell my patients that blurriness should be a clue to them that what they want to see is falling on the blind spot, and they have to move their eye to fixate the object on a seeing region.
I think that, in the same way, we can become sensitive to our areas of blindness. If something becomes blurred or unclear, we should take this as a sign that our ‘willful blindness’ is kicking in, and change our perspective so we can perceive things more clearly.â—†
