Hashkafa with a Heretic: Mesilas Yesharim, Chapter 2

Translated text of Mesilas Yesharim in this font.

My commentary in this font.

CHAPTER II

CONCERNING THE TRAIT OF WATCHFULNESS

THE IDEA OF WATCHFULNESS is for a man to exercise caution in his actions and his undertakings; that is, to deliberate and watch over his actions and his accustomed ways to determine whether or not they are good, so as not to abandon his soul to the danger of destruction, God forbid, and not to walk according to the promptings of habit as a blind man in pitch darkness. This is demanded by one's intelligence. For considering the fact that a man possesses the knowledge and the reasoning ability to save himself and to flee from the destruction of his soul, is it conceivable that he would willingly blind himself to his own salvation? There is certainly no degradation and foolishness worse than this. One who does this is lower than beasts and wild animals, whose nature it is to protect themselves, to flee and to run away from anything that seems to endanger them. One who walks this world without considering whether his way of life is good or bad is like a blind man walking along the seashore, who is in very great danger, and whose chances of being lost are far greater than those of his being saved. For there is no difference between natural blindness and self-inflicted blindness, the shutting of one's eyes as an act of will and desire.

On the one hand, I think the overall point is a fair one: that people should examine why they do what they do. On the other hand, the language is hyperbolic and insulting to those who don’t – and those who don’t are the vast majority of people. Most people just aren’t interested in examining why they do what they do. Most people are just trying to live their lives, to get by as best they can and try to get some joy from the world. If anything, this is even more true of the average religious person, who has ready-made, all-encompassing explanations for everything in the life, and so has less motivation than they might have otherwise to examine their habits.

Jeremiah complains about the evil of the men of his generation, about their being affected with this affliction, the blinding of their eyes to their actions, their failure to analyze them in order to determine whether they should be engaged in or abandoned. He says about these men (Jeremiah 8:6), "No one regrets his wrongdoing, saying... They all turn away in their course as a horse rushing headlong into battle." He alludes here to their running on the impetus of their habits and their ways without leaving themselves time to evaluate their actions and ways,, and, as a result, falling into evil without noticing it. In reality, this is one of the clever devices of the evil inclination - to mount pressure unrelentingly against the hearts of men so as to leave them no leisure to consider and observe the type of life they are leading.

It’s unclear what he means by “pressure,” and what his conception of the yetzer hara is. Does he imagine it to be some sort of demon, orchestrating events so that most people have to spend most of their time on surviving and daily chores, with what little time they have left after that devoted to recreation so that they don’t go crazy from unrelenting work? Or does he mean that the yetzer hara is innate part of the human psyche, the part which inclines us to be lazy, to busy ourselves with various pastimes and not bother thinking about why we do what we do?

For it realizes that if they were to devote even a slight degree of attention to their ways, there is no question but that they would immediately begin to repent of their deeds and that regret would wax in them until they would leave oft sinning altogether.

Maybe, maybe not. People are very good at justifying what they do. The Ramchal couldn’t have known this, of course, but there is now a significant body of research that shows people usually do things first and then come up with reasons for why they did those things later. Cognitive dissonance is also a factor. Holding the ideas, “X is bad” and “I do X” together causes dissonance. The dissonance may be resolved as, “I will no longer do X, and never should have,” but it may also be resolved as, “X isn’t bad after all.” In fact, this is the core of the taivos canard, the accusation that people go OTD because they want to throw off the ol hatorah, and so convince themselves that the Torah is false. I don’t know if the Ramchal repeated the canard, but it is widely accepted as truth in the frum world, and cannot be reconciled with this statement here.

It is this consideration which underlay the counsel of the wicked Pharaoh in his statement (Exodus 5:9), "Intensify the men's labors..." His intention was not merely to deprive them of all leisure so that they would not come to oppose him or plot against him, but he strove to strip their hearts of all thought by means of the enduring, interminable nature of their labor.

That’s a nice vort. Almost certainly not what the story originally meant, but still, a nice vort.

This is precisely the device that the evil inclination employs against man; for it is a warrior and well versed in deception.

Again, I can’t tell if he means this metaphorically or if he thinks the yetzer hara is a devil sitting on our shoulder.

One cannot escape it without great wisdom and a broad outlook. As we are exhorted by the Prophet (Haggai 1:7), "Give heed to your ways." And as Solomon in his wisdom said (Proverbs 6:4), "Give neither sleep to your eyes nor slumber to your eyelids. Rescue yourself as a deer from the hand..." And as our Sages of blessed memory said (Sotah 5b), "All who deliberate upon their paths in this world will be worthy to witness the salvation wrought by the Holy One Blessed be He." Clearly even if one superintends himself, it is not within his power to save himself without the help of the Holy One Blessed be He.

Grace through God alone? Or an iteration of the idea that people are incapable of achieving anything meaningful without God’s intervention? Neither are great.

 For the evil inclination is extremely tenacious, as Scripture states (Psalms 37:32), "The wicked one looks to the righteous and seeks to kill him; God will not leave him..." If a man looks to himself, the Holy One Blessed be He helps him, and he is saved from the evil inclination. But if he gives no heed to himself, the Holy One Blessed be He will certainly not superintend him; for if he does not pity himself, who should pity him? This is as our Sages of blessed memory have said (Berachoth 33a), "It is forbidden to pity anyone who has no understanding,"

After looking at the gemara, I think what’s translated here as “understanding” is really “wisdom” in the sense the word was used in antiquity: as something with its own ontology, something that was often anthropomorphized, that someone could “have.” In any case, the gemara is horrifying. If one doesn’t have wisdom, according to the gemara, one shouldn’t have compassion for them! The gemara isn’t talking about someone who lives an unexamined life and whose yetzer hara distracts him from contemplation, as the Ramchal is using it here. That would be bad enough. The gemara is discussing brachos, and goes off on a tangent about wisdom. According to the gemara, one should not have compassion for someone who doesn’t have wisdom in the abstract. This is not something that will help people who have questions about Yiddishkeit come back to frumkeit, as the Mesilas Yesharim is often used, nor is it something that will refine one’s behavior, as the Mesilas Yesharim was written to be used.

and (Avoth 1:14), "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"