Obesity Epidemic isn’t a failure of Temperance (NE III.11) – Transcript

The Hierarchy of Human Goods: From Pleasure to Honor and Beyond

The Question of Enjoying Life

Instructor: Yeah, good. So, we’re exploring the subject of enjoying life, which according to America means, what is life? What is enjoying life? Having fun. Having fun. What does fun mean? Wow. Even Aristotle didn’t know what having fun was. He didn’t have any sex. So, we still don’t know. That’s what Aristotle, that’s what most people say, right?

Student: Yeah.

Instructor: Nochon? Nochon? Odmashu? Does anything apply to those two things? Power? Power?

Aristotle’s Hierarchy of the Soul

The Lowest Level: The Taste of Pigs

Instructor: So, as we’ve discussed, there’s a few levels of people corresponding to us, like levels of the soul, and most people, as Aristotle says in Book One [*Nicomachean Ethics*], which have the taste of pigs, and they think that the good things in life are food and sex. And actually, even some powerful people think that the purpose of power is to accumulate as many women and food as possible. So it’s not really only the masses that think that.

But a person who accumulates power is Sholeh Shema [שלא לשמה: not for its own sake]. Yeah. Then there are some people—so those are, well we’re not proving it, but we’re just claiming it, the lowest kind of people. That’s who we called the G word [goyish] before, right? That’s what it means to be a G guy, actually, like one level of it. And that’s most people—seem to can’t conceptualize of anything better.

The Inability to Understand Higher Goods

Instructor: Even go so far that most people seem to think that even if they find someone who’s after glory, like heroism—like you want to be a hero, you want to find glory, honor, right? Golden called honor or glory. They don’t understand that. They’re like, what kind of itch does that scratch? What kind of, how does that feel? Does that make you, does it give you an erection or something? Like, that’s basically what some people ask about, like, why you’re after glory. Not the same exact as power, but anyway.

There are people who can understand it unless it’s instrumentalized towards women’s sex. Yeah, either, oh, I get it. If you win the war, you get all the women. Okay, I get it. But since nowadays, even when you win the war, they don’t give you all the women. I mean, they do, but not directly, right?

The Decline of Martial Virtue

Instructor: This is why, no, it’s very sad. There used to be this—I don’t know if it’s sad, but the archaic—there used to be all cultures used to have this great virtue of, maybe the main virtue or one of the main virtues for a man was being a warrior, being a hero, which is gaining glory, having honor, like some kind of, not the same thing as fame, right? Nowadays we have fame as a very poor substitute for honor. And then obviously you would be rewarded for that and that would help also the people that don’t really understand what that is. Okay, you’ll go to war and then you’ll, you know, as it says about, and you’ll get a, you’ll capture the women there. That’s why people used to go to war.

Student: Is that why sports is so glorified today?

Instructor: I guess, I guess sports is the closest we can get to that kind of martial law, yeah.

Student: No, because literally that’s the path to get tons of food and women.

Distinguishing L’shma from Shelo L’shma

Instructor: Well, no, so that’s what I’m trying to get at. So you can separate those things, then you can, like we said, the shema and shaleh, the shema [לשמה ושלא לשמה: for its own sake and not for its own sake]. The real people that like it, they would like it even if it costs them their food. To go to war, you don’t get the best food during the battle.

Student: I think in certain domains of competitive business it’s like this also.

Instructor: Also, like some people are after, like, yeah, they want to, you know, they want to win so that they can get, you know, they can take their paycheck and get women and food. And other people just don’t even care about the paycheck.

Student: Right, right, right.

The Concept of Slaves and Mercenaries

Instructor: So that’s what I’m saying. It’s the lowest, the slaves, basically, what Aristotle calls slaves or Plato, what people used to call slaves. Slaves are the people that are mercenaries. They go to war for pay. It’s very common to denigrate mercenaries, right? You go to war just for the pay or just for the prize. You’re not supposed to go to war for pay. That’s below a man. That’s a slave’s job.

A slave—he gets paid, he goes to war. You give him a woman, you give him food, you give him money, whatever, which is just way to buy food. Doesn’t really understand money either, right? Then you go to war for that. But the real hero, they don’t go to war for that. They go to war because they find, like, there’s value, right? There’s a good, right? There’s something good to them in just having honor and being the one that saves, like, right?

The Nature of Honor

Honor as Intrinsic Good

Instructor: And then on their—not just to be clear, not honor not in the sense like, well, you’ll get a big parade and everyone will smile at you. That’s the representation, that’s like how the honor gets expressed. But it’s really just like the act of honor, like being honorable, becoming this person who has done these great, great things.

Student: Wait, it’s one—it’s a little better, it’s a little more interesting, at least. It’s a little more human, let’s say.

Instructor: It’s more human, therefore more honorable. Yeah, it’s more human than being only after food and sex. Yeah, because food and sex pigs know how to get. But pigs don’t actually fight for honor. Like, they might fight for women. It’s very different.

Critique of Reductionist Theories

Instructor: And there’s all these, like, nowadays we’re very used to these like, how do we call them, like reductionist theories. Like, you know, wars—Freud says everything is about sex and whatever. And that’s like assuming that there isn’t really another thing that you could like and want besides for these, like what we discussed last week, is like a sense of touch, right? So that’s with the sense of touch, pleasures.

Pleasures of the sense of touch, which are food and sex, that’s the only thing you can conceptualize as being good. But people, greater people, they actually conceptualize and believe and live that there’s things beyond that that are good. Just being considered a good person or having honor, which is a specific way of being considered a good person, I guess, would be something to lust after, something to want, something to dedicate your life to. That’s another level.

And the people that do that, l’shma [לשמה: for its own sake], as we said, they’re—now, I think that that’s still goyish, because—

Student: You’re arguing with that Freud thing by saying that?

Instructor: Yeah, I think it’s wrong.

Student: Why?

Instructor: I don’t have an argument now, I’m just making statements now.

Student: Oh.

Why Reductionism Fails

Instructor: I think it’s wrong because, what I told you, because it’s—if you’re a slave, if you’re an animal, then you cannot conceptualize of anything being good if it doesn’t make you feel good in the sense of sense, sense, right? In the sense of touch sense. But it’s not hard to just stop thinking that way.

Student: I guess I’m making it sound easy.

Instructor: And just understand that there are goods beyond that. There are human goods beyond that. They’re human lives.

Student: But he’s saying the conceptualize and feeling it.

Instructor: Yeah, yeah, we feel it. But you definitely feel it. Like, honor is better than sex, much better. Of course.

Student: It’s a social—honor is a social thing. You need other people to understand what honor is and give it to you.

Aristotle’s Critique of Honor as the Ultimate Good

Instructor: This is why Aristotle said in Book One, if any one of you remember, that honor cannot be the goal of life, because the goal would be sad for everything to be contingent on other people, and we want to be happy. So that can’t be the real good life. But it’s still, like we call it higher. It’s different and higher than being after food and sex.

And it’s possible that now, nowadays you can’t even get it if you want it, because the other people believe that everything is food and sex and there’s no honor among slaves, right?

Student: But it’s only if you believe that, if you don’t believe that, then what’s the honor for you?

Honor as Social Reality

Honor as Social Practice, Not Individual Belief

Instructor: No, what do you mean by believe? These are social practices. Like, a pig type of person, right?

Student: How do you get to that place of—

Instructor: Well, I think it’s a social practice. Not everything about humans subsists in one person’s body, in the sense of his sense of touch, which is what we call a body. It does consist in between people. If I give you honor, if I honor you for being a courageous person—like you’ve got courage—and then you could be after, you could do courageous things for the purpose of honor. If there is no honor in your society, if you live in a society of slaves, then yes, I agree it’s not about belief.

What I’m saying, I don’t think it’s about belief. But other people—there’s a big difference between beliefs and other people. When you say, when you say everything can only be about beliefs, then you’re back to not precisely believing that everything is about people’s sense of touch. But you’re back to believe that everything is about some person’s, you know, he gets touched.

Modern Reductionism to Brain States

Instructor: Nowadays we have this idea that everything touches you in your brain. Your, your, your what’s it called, your dopamine gets touched, which is just another way of talking about the sense of touch conceptually. It’s not different, even if it’s not a touch in the literal physical way. Which conceptualizing it has some like two things touching each other in your brain which makes you feel good—that’s the easiest to conceptualize. It’s not easy to conceptualize. It’s a feeling. It’s a very good—

So you for some reason think that feelings and the physical sense make more sense than social things. There’s no reason to think that. But we’re trained to think that by the hasidim [חסידים: here, the elites/leaders] that lead our society who have no honor. And therefore it’s very hard to get honor. And this is like very famously one of the things that we have a hard time even understanding.

Honor in Ancient Texts

Instructor: The ancients talk about honor. In the Tanakh [תנ״ך: the Hebrew Bible], your soul is called your honor, even sometimes. And what is this honor thing? People are like, well, is it the good feeling that I get when someone gives me a compliment? No, it’s not that.

Honor is a social practice. It’s something that subsists. Nowadays, we call it sometimes intersubjective. That’s a way for modern people to understand even what we’re talking about. Something that’s not objective in the sense—you’re not going to find it if you, although that’s not what objective means, but we pretend that objective means something that you’ll find if you, like, dig through the mountains, you’ll find it somewhere.

No, you could know all the atoms in the universe and you won’t find honor among them. But it’s not subjective in the sense of being the belief of one person, that’s what I’m saying. It’s the belief of the whole society. The belief of the whole society is a big fat reality.

The Reality of Other People’s Beliefs

The Fundamental Rule of Social Life

Instructor: Once you’re talking about other people, the big, big rule about social—he said that social is not interesting—the big rule of social life and of social work is that other people’s emotions and feelings and beliefs are real. Your own are not real, because you could change them insofar as you want to conform better with reality, or maybe even can change them contrary to reality.

But other people’s are real. That’s why any theory that tries to talk about humans, human society, without—

[End of Chunk 1]

The Three Levels of the Soul: Bodily Pleasure, Social Virtue, and Intellectual Pursuit

The Antisocial Nature of Pure Bodily Pleasure-Seeking

The Person After Bodily Pleasure is Antisocial, Not Just Anti-Intellectual

This is also why, just to be very clear, this is why we talked about this sometimes, this is why being a person who’s after his own bodily pleasure is antisocial besides for being anti-intellectual. It’s antisocial, right? The guy in front of the television with his Doritos is being antisocial, not only being like a guy. He’s actually not being a bad guy. That’s why honor, that’s why I’m disagreeing with that guy. So the guy that said that a guy is a guy that’s sitting all day in front, like the movie, what’s it called? *Idiocracy*, right? That’s like the ultimate Americana, Americanish guide. It’s just like the ultimate pig, just sitting in front of your TV and being aroused and eating popcorn or drinking Gatorade. But I’m watching the most simplistic movies. Remember that movie? Action movies. Yeah, where you don’t even have to work, you don’t have to do any work to follow the story because there’s no story. Like shorts, right?

And the short takes less than 29 seconds, and nothing happens that takes more than two seconds, right? You don’t even have to have a story in your head, like short-term. You don’t even have to use your short-term memory, let alone your long-term memory. Like, you want to watch an opera, you got all these long-term memories. It takes two hours. It’s like, wait, who’s the guy that came three hours later? What’s going on?

And anyways, where am I doing this social criticism? What I’m saying is, so a *goy* [non-Jew; here used more broadly to mean someone focused purely on bodily pleasures] is someone that’s only after his own body’s senses is actually evil also in the social sense because you can’t work with that guy. He doesn’t have—and this is like what I like calling like a level of the soul, like another soul, another self that you’re talking about, right? The self that you’re talking about is not just the one that likes food and like a little baby.

Developmental Stages: From Bodily Needs to Social Awareness

You watch kids, right? A little like two-year-old or something. Like when you’re two you start realizing there’s a social world. Like when you’re one you don’t realize, you’re just about your needs and your body’s desires. And we can’t even call them desires at that stage, right? Like something like needs or instincts. And that’s antisocial. You can’t work with that guy. As a baby, we have a system to provide for babies. But once you’re an adult, that’s why we kill a *ben sorer u’moreh* [בן סורר ומורה: the rebellious son, a legal category in Jewish law]. Not because he’s a *ba’al ta’avah* [בעל תאוה: one controlled by desires/appetites], but because he’s antisocial, right?

The Rambam [Maimonides] says *ben sorer u’moreh* is a *ba’al ta’avah*. We’ll talk about this soon a little more. I have another part about *ben sorer u’moreh*. But he’s not killed for eating, right? He’s not killed for being a *fresser* [Yiddish: glutton], like who’s not a Muslim, who doesn’t *freshen* [eat gluttonously], like a *scafia* [possibly Yiddish/Chasidish term for glutton], as they call it in Chabad. No, he’s being killed because of not listening to his parents, right?

So like the first stage of socialization, of attaining a social soul, like becoming a social self, has to do with this realizing that life is not about me satisfying my base desires, as we call them, right? Life is about, yeah, I’m not saying you can’t eat, but you can still—your calculations that you do to do things and not do things can’t be only—your motivations can’t be only what makes you feel good. That’s antisocial.

Critique of Utilitarian and Liberal Social Ethics

And although, you know, so supposedly right now of course we have to remember that we live in a system that’s based on the premise that it could be right—utilitarianism and like I won’t say democracy but the version of democracy that we live in and like how do we call it, like the liberal version of social ethics which says that everyone can only be after their own sensations of pleasure, right? Their own sensual pleasures. And somehow since we’re going to still have some kind of system, that’s still going to be the final end that we recognize. We don’t really recognize any other ends.

But since everyone wants that, we’ll try to create a system where we’ll have the most pleasure for the most people, right? The Bentham [Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism] formulation of ethics, the most good, meaning the most pleasure for the most people. And somehow this will cause people to cooperate, which is what we call the social dynamic, the social system will still work because everyone wants to eat as much pizza and we’ll tell them that if you don’t work, you don’t get pizza, and if you don’t, what else? If you take other people’s wives, they won’t give you their daughters, all kinds of rules, supposed thoughts like that.

But in reality, we seem to, it seems to not work as well. It works, but that’s a different discussion. But at least theoretically it doesn’t work. Theoretically meaning, you lose the ability to talk about what it means to be a person, a social person, which is needed, at least to be able to talk to, right? If the metaphysics works is one other question. But it seems like in order to be able to cultivate social virtues, to be the kind of person that you want to be his friend, you need something more than being a good—

Student: A *fresser* cooperator?

Instructor: Yeah, exactly. Like a good person who’s after his own needs and somehow realizes they shouldn’t harm anyone else because somehow we have this social contract that says that’s how you’re going to provide for your own needs better, things like that. But we do have a very impoverished world where it’s hard even to talk about it.

The Problem of Courage and Honor in Modern Discourse

This is why the hardest thing to talk about mostly nowadays is this question of courage. We should have talked about that first. But the question of courage, which is mostly after honor. Courage means enduring pain for yourself for a social good. That’s usually what it’s about. Like the primary example of courage is in war where like heroism, right? Where you’re enduring or even not in war in some kind of way of enduring pain for the benefit of the group. And you don’t have to say it that way that sounds too altruistic and that’s also because that’s a bad way of saying it. We have to say for the benefit of honor. And honor is the representation of your status, right?

Nowadays we call, we say status and when people say status they make it sound like something very, very bad, like something irrational. It’s just your honor is your representation of your standing in the group. And what kind of a social being are you? What kind of social person are you? There’s good ones and bad ones. The good ones are the ones that do the good things for other people, and are not afraid, and so on, when they shouldn’t be afraid. And we did lose a lot of that language. That’s why we tend to talk about everything in terms of, do you overcome your own sensual pleasures for the purpose of having more sensual pleasures, I guess.

Like the Marshmallow Test [the famous psychological experiment testing delayed gratification in children], right? Very bad for ethics. Because Marshmallow Test is just saying, can you overcome your current sensual pleasure for tomorrow’s sensual pleasures? There will be two of them. You still don’t have an actual framework, an actual soul that can carry, that can be the bearer of an ethics beyond what animals will deserve, like smart animals, okay?

The Three-Tiered Framework of Human Goods

Anyways, where am I? And then, so we have that. And then we have, it’s very important to get this. I have discussed this more Thursday night also. So it’s very important to realize this, that we have this, like, when we talk, that’s why, when we talk specifically about physical pleasures of the body, by which we mean literally pleasures of the body, so pleasures of the sense of touch, we mean something very, in this sense, we could call it egoistic, right? Something that’s not even the social body. Make sense?

And then of course there’s people that have other even higher things, right? Like intellect, like knowing things, which is even beyond social, like something third. It’s all really where you think that that’s good or something good about knowing truths, something valuable, something that makes life worth living, right? The goal in life, an end in life. And that’s again not social, right? So not making the social the end of everything, just talking about different levels of good. For what? Good for the body is maybe these kind of things. Even that we have to talk about.

Good for the social soul would be the social good mostly, and in the ancient terminology it’s usually said to be honor because honor is what tracks your social being. And what is your own soul, your own, how would we call it, your own—no, what makes you, you, not as a body, but as something different, more interesting than a body, is what we call intellect, what we call intellectual pursuits or kinds of goods that have to do with understanding, with knowing and things like that. Stay there?

Anyways, that’s the very general story of three lives. And as we said most people, the like a bad, like a low, the lowest kind of person that would or the most slavish kind of person, right—

Temperance and the Distinction Between Natural and Cultivated Desires

The Three Lives and Social Freedom

Instructor: They’re not a free person. It would be someone after pleasure. The free person, right? Ben-Hodin [בן חורין: literally “son of freedom,” a free person]. Aristocrat. Someone who has, like what we say, social standing. He has some level of power that would be interested in honor, interested in what tracks your social standing. And then someone even freer, like even freer of the social world, would be someone interested in the intellect. That’s called Enan Ham Ben-Hodin [a person who is even more free than the Ben-Hodin].

Of course, Ben-Hodron [another form of Ben-Horin] is really… It’s a different statement from saying that if you’re a slave to your passions, you’re enslaved, right? It’s saying you’re also not a slave to your… Ben-Hodron is someone who’s not a slave to his passions. And that’s true socially also. It’s not only a muster of art [a matter of art/metaphor]. It’s true that being a slave means being someone who cannot conceptualize of something beyond his immediate… And not only being, like I said, it’s not only in his head. It’s not only in his head. It’s in the social reality he lives in. And he can’t really pursue anything beyond that, for the most part, unless he’s religious and he has something else to create that. It’s another discussion. But in Ulm Azzah [בעולם הזה: in this world], he can’t.

Or being a free person, a person with political agency, social agency, it means being interested in honor. Being an even freer person, or a free soul, might even stop saying the word person, is being interested in intellect. And then there’s higher things even than that, and we’re not talking about that now.

Returning to the Virtue of Temperance

Instructor: So, what are we talking about? What I started talking about was about this particular virtue that has to do with controlling, not controlling, controlling is not the wrong word, the correct measure, right? The correct behavior relative to this physical sensations, right? And we try very hard, very hard, last week we did more of this, trying very hard to think about that in particular, not as don’t go, like not be selfish or something like that, not as that as like a way of talking about everything, because then it’s not very interesting and it becomes very hard to talk when we do these generalizations.

So we narrowed it down to the pleasures of the sense of touch, as we’ve just repeated also. And now we have to try to talk about what would be the good pleasures, and what it would mean to talk about. Again, we can’t give an actual like shulchan aruch [שולחן ערוך: the authoritative code of Jewish law], like halacha [הלכה: Jewish law], like this is good and this is bad, but we have to start talking about what would be the good way of behaving within this pleasure, this kind of pleasure, and what would be a bad way, like how do we talk about this.

Aristotle’s Distinction: Natural vs. Chosen Desires

Instructor: Okay, so we’re gonna do like this. We’re gonna do like this. We’re gonna try to think about a distinction that Aristotle makes between different kinds of these pleasures or these desires. He calls them like these loves, these likings. And we’re gonna say like this: there seems to be two different kinds of them. I think that this distinction is very useful to try to get at it and try to see what kind of fruit it can bear us.

Natural and Shared Desires

Instructor: One kind is natural and shared. Natural meaning something inborn, something that belongs to being a human body, to having a human body, depending on what you think. And shared, therefore, all humans, it’s not like something that only some cultures have, you don’t need education for it, it doesn’t differ between cultures, between people, between men and women, children and adults, things like slaves and free people, it doesn’t differ among them. It’s therefore natural, belongs to the human nature, belongs to the general human nature.

Chosen and Specific Desires

Instructor: And then there are some, like now, remember that, let’s notice something, then there are some physical pleasures, right, pleasures of the sense of touch that are not natural. You’re not born with them. They need to be educated. They need to be chosen. The opposite of natural here might be something like chosen, reasoned about in some sense, right? Wanted, not just born. And also not therefore, or maybe these are two signs for the same thing, I’m not sure, but also we could think of them as not shared, not universal, right? Not human universal.

Only in some cultures do they like to drink beer. Only some people like to eat rare steaks. Only some people like fine wines. Only some people like specific kinds of women, or specific shapes, or specific colors, or specific whatever else, differences there are, specific personalities. These are things that vary between people. They vary between cultures. And they’re therefore not natural desires in that sense.

Qualification: Not Pure Social Construction

Instructor: They’re somewhat natural, right? I’m not going to say that they’re entirely like socially constructed. We’re not so, we’re not socially constructionist over here. We’re not saying your love for women was entirely taught to you by your mother, otherwise you wouldn’t have. No, you probably would have. But the way in which you would, and therefore it’s not unlimited, right? We can’t convince people to start liking chairs in the same way they like women, or liking, I don’t know, seaweed in the same way that they like steak. Maybe you could do that. I don’t know, some very fancy chef can figure that out. But, okay, but you got the point.

There’s some limits to it. Nature does give limits to it. But we’re trying to distinguish the natural desires, the natural ta’avot [תאוות: desires], right? From the chosen and specific ta’avot. Specific as in different people, and specific as in pertaining to specific things, right?

The Object Side of the Distinction

Instructor: Now we could also make the same distinction about the object of the ta’avah, right? The person who has only the natural ta’avah, like, not cultured, right, we call this not educated, he, you give, you put anything to stuff his face, he’ll take it, in the same way, in the same thing in sex, right, doesn’t matter, anyone is good.

Person who is cultured, his desires pertain to a specific thing, like, I don’t like that, or I don’t want that, I don’t have the ta’avah for that, I don’t have desire for that, I have desire for a kugel [קוגל: a traditional Jewish baked pudding/casserole], but not for a sushi, who eats sushi, that’s disgusting. And so on, or the opposite, like who eats kugel that’s oily and sushi is such a refined food, not like kugel. Anyways, these would be specific things. Do you get what we’re getting at?

Why This Distinction Matters

Instructor: I think that this distinction is very interesting. Why is it interesting? Because it’s already, again, it’s taking us away a little bit from our too much naturalistic and like materialist, over like super duper materialistic ways of thinking, right? Because usually when I talk with people about desire for food they tend to think about the first thing, not about the second thing, right? We talk, if we give a shiur [שיעור: a Torah lecture] about, the mitzvah [מצוה: commandment] of not being, about eating, people talk about liking pizza and not like pizza. People talk about like the desire for food, which is this desire, natural desire, like the bigger, right? And we sort of think again because of this reductionist thought we generally think that yeah it’s true that different people like different things and you could culture yourself to like different, like different cultures, like, but somehow we don’t take that seriously. We don’t think of that as a different category. I don’t know how do we think about that. We don’t think about that as different category of desire. We think about that as just like, I don’t know, random, or why would it matter?

Student: Why it matters?

Instructor: Yeah, because then, but it matters more, well matters a lot of like a palette within a certain…

Student: Because when we’re gonna work, what we’re trying to get at, because when you don’t have this, this concept, this distinction, you end up talking about the end of thinking of asceticism, like, officers it was a wrong word, when they’re talking about temperance as something non-human, as like not liking food, not wanting to eat, and that’s obviously wrong. And now let you could read what I’m not reading. I don’t read things inside because I mean…

Instructor: The restriction of taste in some domains is natural thing that just occurs at random by socialization or some other…

Student: Yeah, but when we talk about like the virtue, right? We’re talking about a virtue of not being, of acting correctly even in the area of physical pleasures. People are like, okay, so that means I shouldn’t like eating as much, right? This is the question that you have.

Instructor: Yeah, well, I just need to be balanced.

Why Balance Cannot Operate at the Natural Level

Instructor: But it’s not that you shouldn’t like as much as you should like eating as much. So let’s just be clear, because there’s something wrong here. Let’s understand. We want to talk about a balance or a right way or a correct measure, right? And now the problem is that that balance cannot really be talking about the first level, cannot really be talking about the natural level.

I can show it to you very easily from the too little, like from the too little. And in other words, if we say something like the perfect, like some people seem to believe, right? Rambam [רמב״ם: Maimonides] is already arguing with those people. But some people, I think, believe that liking things of the body is bad, right? You should like only things of the soul. And therefore, the perfect person, or in other words, the perfect, just once you say that, you’re already lost. You’re not talking about this kind of temperance anyways because this temperance is how to relate to these kind of desires. It’s not about destroying them entirely. So that would be entirely wrong anyways.

But even if we do, if we do talk about it this way, both people will imagine that someone who has no appetite for food, who has no desire for food, is the perfect person. And that’s very weird because that person is obviously, firstly, he’s obviously not a perfect person. He’s sick.

Temperance, Bodily Pleasure, and the Obesity Problem: A Structural Mismatch

The Paradox of Bodily Pleasure and the Limits of Temperance

The Rambam’s Concession: Beyond Instrumental Justification

Instructor: And the Rambam says you can’t feed yourself if you don’t feed your body. Also. Okay, that’s not the excuse. Okay, because you won’t be able to think if you don’t have your body. But besides for that, let’s talk about just about the body itself. Let’s talk about exactly this pleasure of the body.

You seem to need, it seems to be correct to like certain foods. And even, we can even go further. Even if, like I say, I don’t know the difference between a sweet and a salty thing, that’s even worse than some animals. Like, many animals do distinguish between sweet and salty things, and like, it sounds, we end up saying things very weird, we end up thinking about this *middah* [character trait/virtue], we end up thinking about this virtue in a very weird way.

The Obesity Problem: A Different Category Entirely

And therefore I think that, now, it is possible to be too much about this, I think, right? It is possible. In other words, and this is where I said I want to talk about obesity, because I think and what we nowadays call obesity or overeating but most people that we talk with struggle like most people struggle with in the United States and in the Western world or maybe in their own world is not the *middah* [virtue] of *perishus* [abstinence/temperance].

Me absolving you, making it worse. I don’t know if it’s worse or better. It’s probably worse. But it’s not that if you have a problem with your diet then you should not come to the *shiur* [class/lecture] on *midas hazahirus* [the virtue of temperance], or temperance, or whatever.

Why not? Because your *baya* [problem] is below this level. Okay? You get it? But by below, it also means that the tools that work at this level don’t work for it. You have to work on different tools. Or maybe they work in a very limited way, which is why…

The Systemic and Individual Dimensions

No, I’m saying this because I think this is true. You can disagree with me. You can start arguing with me and start screaming back at me. But it seems to me, because it seems to me, well, besides for there being a lot of reasons why we have an obesity epidemic, and it’s hard to blame, we shouldn’t probably blame individual people mostly for it, as to do with lifestyles, and with culture, and with what kind of food they sell in the supermarket, and with how they sold it, and all kind of things like that, that smarter people than me are busy with. But smarter people in the sense of knowing more facts, and in the sense of being smart. Ah, that’s a show.

But even if we do want to talk about the individual nature that that is, it seems to me very obviously, now that I’ve read this chapter, based on these thoughts, it seems to me that that is not related to this concept. It’s related to some, it’s not related to what we primarily talk about.

The Empirical Evidence: Great People Who Cannot Control Their Weight

I think for example, you go around and you see people, because this is something I wonder about and it bothers me. Maybe I’m crazy for being bothered by it. But I know people that are great people. Okay, great guys. Very smart, very accomplished, and so on. And they still can’t control their weight.

I’m not talking about myself right now. That wouldn’t be interesting. Many great people. Now, besides for if they take that shot, right? That’s the solution. No, it might seriously be the solution, in some sense, whatever. Find out if it’s safe, if the doctor recommends it, but why? It’s something that I’m getting at.

The Cycle of Blame and the Question of Basic *Middos*

One of the big, maybe this is in general, I believe that this cycle of blaming yourself and blaming other people, obviously you’re lacking some very basic *middah* [character trait]. If this has something I like I very much believe in, especially since we’re doing Rambamistic Aristotelian ethics, and not like platonic extreme ethics right now. Athletic ethics, right aesthetic, which is another word for athletic ethics, like being the best athlete, we’re not talking about being the best athlete, we’re just being like in shape.

It seems to be like, to me that that like cycle of like saying, Okay, yeah, of course, most people even like very great and good people in the sense of being self-controlled, like self-controlled people. You meet the guy in any context, he’s a self-controlled person. Of course, he can get angry sometimes, but I’m not talking about like… But in general, he’s a self-controlled person. He’s a person that is reliable, right? And he has all the social virtues, let’s say, of being temperate. Like, he’s a temperate guy. He’s not murdering anyone, not even thinking of it. He’s not too depressed, not too happy. He’s a temperate guy.

And he’s still obese.

The Paradox: Temperance in All Areas Except One

And people… I think people often think of this, like, that guy is such a big *rav* [rabbi/teacher] or such a big… eat some whatever, but look at him, he’s fat, he must be not controlling himself in some basic way. It’s true, I mean, the question is a good question. Like, if you can’t control yourself in such a basic way, then you don’t deserve to talk about anything like that, right?

Like we say, the problem with not being tempered is like, you’re animalistic, you’re slavish, okay, let’s stop talking about animals. You’re like a slave, okay, you’re a slave, you’re not a serious guy, basically, you’re not a human being, so what’s going on here?

Like, it seems to me, now of course, I’m sure some people or maybe many of them are *avadim* [slaves] because they’re slaves and people can be imbalanced and have this virtue and not that one. They can’t according to the *Rambam*, but in reality they could, and whatever, okay.

The Methodological Principle: Things Have to Work

But it still seems to me that all the kind of ways in which we speak usually about temperance, about *perishus* [abstinence], about controlling your *tayvos* [desires], are not related to this. They’re not. At least they don’t, they don’t seem to work, right?

You’ve got people reading the same *sefer* [book] or whatever book they read, try to *preach* [practice] this and they still don’t get skinny, right? Doesn’t help. So obviously something is mismatched. Like this is my *mussar* [ethical teaching] always works based on this like things have to work. At least for the month that you read that *shiur* [class/lecture] you should be, you should be controlling your weight better and you’re not.

Even that, like either you’re learning is, which is another way of saying like it’s not relevant to you, but I think that usually there’s a real intellectual mismatch. It’s not just like that’s what I’m saying. We have, we’re very used to the cycle of like yeah of course I should be, I should be, whenever you say I should you’re being lazy because well you shouldn’t. Maybe it’s just something basically wrong here, right?

Articulating the Distinction Through Questions

So in this tonight, I’m trying to describe, I’m trying to like express, trying to bring out somehow by asking these questions, what is wrong here? And I’m using this distinction maybe to try to figure that out, right?

Returning to the Positive Account: What Temperance Actually Is

Aristotle’s Framework: Chosen Pleasures of Touch

Because we’re saying here like this, when we talk about, when we talk about, how do you call it? When we talk about temperance, right? Well, how do we, I need a nicer word on temperance. I don’t know. Restraint? No, restraint is even worse. So *sofrosene* [Greek: temperance/moderation], right, we can talk, say the Greek words, because nobody knows what it means. Might as well use that.

Yeah, again, we discussed this with all these translations. None of them are good. So anyways, and we talk about this thing. We’re talking about, according to Aristotle’s interpretation, at least, right? Aristotle’s limiting of it. We’re talking about the correct behavior relative to bodily or the sense of touch pleasures and we’re talking about specifically and for the most part talking specifically about the chosen ones, right?

The Centrality of Choice in Ethics

Because you remember very important rule about ethics, right? Ethics is only about what you choose. We had a lot of class there about what choice might mean and having a preference like two is choose. Choice means something rational in some sense, not entirely rational because we’re not talking about like knowing the truth but something rational, something that we can give an account of in some sense, something that is, how do we how did we describe it, something that depends on you, right? Something up to you in some sense. All these, all these words.

Education and Habituation: The Test of Applicability

And that makes sense for things as we discussed at length that makes sense for things that you are educated into, right? That you can educate yourself out of, right?

So for example now let me give you an example different example. So therefore when we talked about having the correct *sofrosene* [temperance], we’re talking about liking fine wine and not being the kind of guy that gorges himself on, how do you call it, on bleach or whatever they drink when they spray, right? Because that’s being the low kind of person, that’s being slavish, you just want to feel like buzz of the alcohol or whatever, like Aristotle would say the natural, okay, alcohol is a little more complex, but like the natural filling of your stomach with food, like that’s what you want to feel, right?

The Wine Example: Slavish vs. Temperate Consumption

It doesn’t really matter what it is, you go to the store and you buy the cheapest box of wine and you drink it up. That’s not a good thing. But the correct way of doing it is maybe of course you have to add more limitations within the correct time and the correct amount with the correct people in the correct situation on *Shabbos* [the Sabbath] not on the weekday, I don’t know whatever the rule would be, and like enjoying the fine wine. That is being a *sofron* person [temperate person], a temperate person, guy that has the culture person, *sofrosene*, *sofron* [Greek: temperance, temperate person] in Greek is the kind of person that has that.

Anyways, makes sense? That’s what it would say.

The Validation: This Model Actually Works

And now that makes sense. You know how I know it makes sense? Because it works. I can take myself, I can take people and give them education of sorts, right? What does education mean? It means habituation and some teaching also, but mostly habituation and you could, you could see people maturing, right?

Education, some of maturation happens naturally but mostly by exposure, by habituation. He stops being the kind, like when it was a *bochur* [yeshiva student] that he was like just fill it up and then he grew, he habituated himself, he was taught not to be that kind of person and now he’s the kind of person that it has a measure to his *tayvos* [desires], right? They’re measured, they’re not animalistic, they’re not slavish, they’re measured.

The Measured Person: Concrete Description

Measured, he drinks only in the correct times, and only in a certain amount, doesn’t drink four bottles at a time, only two, or whatever, I don’t know, one and a half, whatever the measure is according to him, and according to the space and the time, and he knows that we, you know, like it doesn’t, I don’t know why I’m talking about getting drunk, it just seems to be easier for me to imagine what the limits of it would be, but something like, right, is not, he holds himself, not trying to like get, you know, how to call it, I don’t, like blacked out or whatever is using it in…

Distinguishing Natural Desire from Qualitative Desire: Aristotle on Temperance and Modern Eating Problems

Social Drinking as a Workable Measure

Instructor: He uses it for social environments where it’s, you know, if you drink alone, you’re never allowed to drink alone. Only in social environments, one of the rules of drinking, right? So, okay, that’s the measure. And I can see people getting that. It’s possible. We only talk about humanly possible things, right? Things like Yafi and Malach [supernatural beings/angels], whatever, that’s for a different guy. Shall she this [mystical matters]? Whatever. We’re talking about human things, right?

And that works. It works. I can see people getting worse. I can see people getting better. I can see people working on that. And I can tell you what to do to work on it. Yeah, how about you know, and so on.

The Problem of Obesity: A Different Kind of Challenge

But I don’t see people getting better at controlling their obesity for the most part. Only in very extreme ways. You can go on a diet and limit your calories, which is not normal, right? Just to be clear, a healthy person is supposed to be satiated every day. He’s not supposed to be in caloric limitation. Maybe you have to as an intervention, but it’s hard. It’s hard because your body needs more than that. And when you’re obese, your body needs to sustain the whole obese body. It’s not what your body wants. It’s not that your body wants to be at its ideal weight, right? So you’re in the fight. Okay, maybe you have to do that, but that’s an extreme thing. And you shouldn’t expect even a good person to be able to do that.

Aristotle’s Distinction: Natural Desire as Purely Quantitative

So because of this, I think—and here we see, so now let’s go back to our distinction—so there’s this natural wanting, natural desire for food, right? We can say the same thing about sex. I’m not going to go on to describe examples, but you can think of the same kind of analogies.

And you could see that there’s this natural desire for food, where Aristotle says, I don’t think anyone—there isn’t any good and bad in it. That’s the important thing, because it’s just an amount, right? It’s just a quantity, right? There’s a certain amount of nourishment that your body needs. A certain amount of food, almost an amount of water, a certain amount of protein and starch and whatever it is. You ask the nutritionist exactly what it is.

Now, some people are—there’s basically nobody that’s eating less than that, not eating, right? You could force yourself to eat, but nobody that wants less than that, right? Because unless he’s not healthy, which would be a failure in that sense, but you got to go to a doctor at that point. For the most part, I mean, people that literally lose their appetite because they’re sick or something. I guess things like that happen, but nobody would even think that that’s not only a virtue, it’s also not a problem that we’re talking about.

But there also isn’t a good and a bad. There isn’t “eat this and not that.” There’s just eat less. Just count calories, right? Counting calories is what your nature needs you to do.

Aristotle’s Observation About His Own Time

Now, Aristotle says—he literally says this—that he thinks that most people don’t have a problem with this. Most people don’t eat more than they need to. And I was really wondering if that’s because he didn’t live in 2000 America, or it’s also true. But there were fat people always. It could be a little too fat, but maybe that’s not considered—okay, there’s levels of being obese and being overweight and so on. But also—

Student: And food wasn’t as abundant.

Instructor: Yeah, yeah. We have all these—I know all these answers. I don’t know. But let’s talk about—well, let’s talk about the one thing, right? Even then, we’re talking about the one thing, not about the eating, the factual eating, the actual, right? Do you want to eat more than you need? It feels like something is wrong with that also, something basically not in your soul, something in your body, right?

The Theory of Bodily Miscalculation

And there might be some training in this. I know people—there’s some people, there’s a book, I forgot. There’s books that talk about people that talk about this. There’s, right? Because let’s say something like this: Everyone’s hunger or appetite stops at some point, right? Everyone’s. The fact that people overeat is for some—there’s some theories that say it’s literally a physical miscalculation because of whatever lifestyle or kinds of food or seed oils or whatever nonsense it is, that causes your regulation, your body’s regulation for what it likes, for when it wants, to be messed up.

Maybe something in our culture. Pretty sure that something like that is going on, because I don’t think it’s a failure of temperance. That’s what I’m trying to get at. There’s maybe a social, a natural failure, right? It’s a natural failure. There’s some kind of failure of regulation, but almost like bodily regulation, right?

The Water Analogy: Natural Desire Self-Regulates

Most people are not—let’s say like this, right? Does anyone drink more water than they need to because they love drinking water so much? Very few people, right? We have the opposite problem. Most of us don’t, because also very weirdly, people for some reason don’t feel thirst, but they do feel hunger. Don’t ask me. Something’s wrong with our bodies, or at least in our culture, the way that it works. Not everyone is—making generalizations, right? But just to understand, you understand that me talking about people drinking too much water would sound very weird, right? Who drinks too much water?

I can get someone to drink too little water. Sometimes they’re too lazy, or sometimes something’s wrong with them. Yeah, I guess there’s a correct amount of water to drink. Yeah. What is it? I don’t know. Ask your doctor. For the most part, people are drinking the correct amount. Okay? And people are drinking less. Yes, that’s already a problem. But for the most part, let’s not believe those doctors that say that people are mostly drinking too little. There’s a controversy about this in nutrition science, but let’s assume that most people are—nobody’s dropping dead from dehydration. That’s the reality, right?

So at least at that level, nobody’s drinking too little or too much. You drink too much, what’s the worst thing anyway that happens? You go to the bathroom too much. Not—but for the most part, people are not doing that either. For sure not doing that out of relief time, right? If they’re doing that, it’s because they have so much gas or something.

Where Temperance Actually Operates: Qualitative Choices

But I could very easily talk about people drinking the wrong things. That makes a lot of sense. People drink the wrong things. You should be drinking water, but you’re drinking soda. That would be the uncontrolled person or the failure of temperance. Probably being about taivah [desire/craving]. Or you’re drinking wine, and you should be drinking water. Or you’re drinking water in the middle of the seudah [meal], and you should be drinking it before eating or after or in the wrong times. Things like that. You’re drinking dirty water, and it has whatever chemicals in it, and you should drink pure water. Things like that, they make sense.

The Modern Food Problem Is Not a Temperance Problem

When we talk about food, there’s something very messed up with our bodies in that it doesn’t work like this. You realize. Aristotle is literally making this for food. He says, yes, most people don’t eat way too much than they need to. Some people eat the wrong food, or they like the wrong kinds of food.

Now, you realize, right, because a gentleman, a refined person, is supposed to like a certain kind of food. You’re not supposed to be eating—we also have things like this, right? You’re not supposed to be eating junk all day, or nash [snacks], or candy bars. Candy bars are for children, or for dessert once in a week, or whatever, right? They’re not for being your daily food.

But failure of that, and that’s what we talk about when we talk about not being temperate, right? Someone that’s just eating all the candy bars. Well, he became the king, and now he’s built himself a huge—I know that all people that act this way—not a king, he didn’t become a king, but he got a little richer and he built himself this huge ice cream freezer with everything that he dreamt of as a kid. We’re not talking about that. That’s about taivah.

Eating According to One’s Station

And someone who, by the way—and Aristotle says eating correctly is also according to your station. If you’re richer, you should be eating better food. Why would you say, “I’m going to buy the same cheap one”? You should buy the expensive one. That’s correct for you. But too expensive, more than you can afford, is being well-timed [intemperate]. There we go. There’s other problems with money management. There’s another middah [character trait/virtue] that has to do with that. But how much you can afford is also part of controlling your pleasures, right? How much can you afford?

In the olden days, if you’re a king, you could afford a few women. But if you’re a plain person and you have a few women, you can’t afford them. There’s something wrong, right? It’s going to mess up your life because you can’t pay so much child support. It’s a problem, right? If you’re very rich and you could make a million dollar deals with every girl, that’s whatever. Okay, maybe. Don’t ask me. Probably intemperate also, but at a different level, right? The problem is not—the problem is that it’s something messed up.

The Core Distinction: Two Layers That Must Not Be Confused

So what am I saying? Therefore, since we have this distinction, we can talk about—the questions that we have usually are not about that. I don’t think about that. I’m sure—I’m not claiming that we’re all perfect or anyone of us has perfection about this. But I’m claiming, assuming that there’s two different layers of the story, we shouldn’t confuse them.

We shouldn’t talk about the questions that people talk about—overeating and obesity and maybe emotional eating, all kinds of excuses that people nowadays talk about. Those are not problems of taivah. That’s not being about taivah. It’s firstly living in a society that has a very weird food culture going on. And very weirdly, eating kosher didn’t help us at all. So sad.

The Puzzling Case of Kashrut and Obesity

Isn’t it sad? Did it at any point? I don’t know. It’s sad. We have all these crazy food restrictions and it can’t help at all. Hello? You would expect at least you should be a little less obese. No, we’re more obese. I don’t know. More, maybe. At least the same. Something is very weird. I’m not saying that that’s the taivah of the event or something, but it should restrict something.

And I’m pretty sure that—let’s go back to it. I’m pretty sure that it still does. I mean, nowadays maybe even that. But I’m pretty sure that it still does in some sense give you the virtue of temperance. Because eating kosher means that whenever you eat meat, you don’t eat milk for the next whatever your custom is—a few hours or whatever, something, right? So there’s some structure in your food intake. Or if you keep neder [vow], whatever. I think halakha [Jewish law] is that there’s some control. There’s some humanity in it. There’s some story in it. Some logos [reason/rational structure] controlling it. It’s not in control, right?

Student: Yeah, and that’s how it should be.

Instructor: That goes back to Rambam’s [Maimonides’] theory that the halakhot [Jewish laws], the kashrut [kosher laws] and the kashrut—

[End of chunk 5]

Temperance in Modern Society: The Distinction Between Qualitative Order and Quantitative Control

Kashrut as Human Temperance and the Modern Abundance Problem

The Qualitative Nature of Jewish Dietary Laws

Instructor: So there’s some control in your food intake, or if you keep niddah [the Jewish laws of family purity], whatever. I think halakhah [Jewish law] is that there’s some control, there’s some humanity in it, there’s some story in it, there’s some logos controlling it, it’s not in control, right? Yeah, and that’s how it should be.

That goes back to the Rambam’s [Maimonides’] theory that the *luchas kasheras* [laws of kashrut/kosher dietary laws] and *luchas arayas* [laws of forbidden sexual relations] are themselves the training and in some sense the *middah* [character trait] and the virtue itself of temperance. And to us it sounds very weird because temperance is eating less. No, eating less would be the natural temperance, which is the lowest, barely deserves the name of temperance. Eating correctly is human temperance.

And that literally means don’t eat *chazer* [pig/pork]. And the Rambam says *chazer* is what *Goya* [non-Jew] eats, by the way. That’s a very real, interesting definition of what a *Goya* is. A *Goya* is a guy that eats *chazer* and that has an *arlah* [foreskin; is uncircumcised]. Okay, that’s a *Goya*. And if you do all those two things, you for sure deserve the title *Goya*. Why? Because for some reason the Jews think that that makes you into like a more slavish person—like you’re not controlled in your sensory intake. You shouldn’t be eating *chazer* and so on.

But what am I saying? So those are precisely the kinds of things that we’re not saying, it’s not an amount, it’s a how and what and which one and which time, things like that. And in that sense, maybe eating kosher does work.

The Problem of Modern Abundance

Nowadays, I’m not sure because there’s too much stuff in the supermarket or even in the kosher supermarket. Like, God, you go to the store. Either you should be very happy about it or like thinking we’re nuts because you go to the food store, and like the smallest supermarket, I guess it’s not the smallest, but like the random supermarket here has I think 6,000 different items. I made up that number. I used to work connected to inventory systems. A number like that. Like a big store has 30,000 different foods. I’m like, what? What is going on? A human being needs six kinds of food. I don’t know, 30. How many kinds of food do you eat in a week?

And you literally go to the grocery, you know how many items I buy every week? A lot of ingredients. Most of them are ready stuff. Like with the ingredients, okay I get it, the ingredients are the smallest number of things because we don’t like—yeah Jewish, we make challah [braided bread traditionally eaten on Shabbat], we make some kugel [traditional baked pudding or casserole] and stuff. But like you buy a hundred different things every week in the supermarket, something like that. Hello, it’s not temperate.

But, and sadly, all our laws didn’t save us from this.

The Pesach Example: When Restrictions Multiply Options

We used to have Pesach [Passover]—like on Pesach you only eat four things. Turns out you could eat everything on Pesach also because we don’t know the *fachumris* [possibly referring to stringencies/chumrot]. Okay but like be a human being, figure out something. At least once a week only eat four foods. I don’t know, that’s not four, it’s 14.

Worst of all, the impersonation foods. Like there’s nothing wrong with meat, chicken and vegetables. Like you eat it all the time. What right now do you have to like make bread out of like cashew husks? Like can you go—not like you eat so much bread all year. Yeah, what’s going on?

But anyways, yeah, so I think that that can be said as a failure of temperance.

Separating the Quantity Problem from Temperance

And the quantity, which is most weird in the obesity realm, is probably a failure of the bodily regulation. And it could be solved with like extreme will, I’m not saying it can’t be solved with what we call will, and it could be solved with temperance, with being self-controlled, but that’s not what the *middah* is really about.

And that’s basically my *darsha* [lesson/sermon] for today. If you disagree, and if you think that we could solve obesity with temperance, tell me because I wonder how. But I don’t think we could. And then temperance would be this other thing, this question of how much. And as I showed you, I think it works in many ways. It’s not impossible.

The Puzzle: Where Are the Temperate People?

This is my problem when I talk about temperance. Nobody has that, right? What are we talking about? People are more stingy. Every other minute, it’s very weird. Every other minute that you read, people have more courage, less courage, more stingy, less stingy, more friend, less friendly. Okay, all those things seem—and nobody is temperate. Like besides like real *tzaddikim* [righteous people], then it’s only two pieces of bread a day, which is just a weirdo. Besides for that, like nobody, right? So what’s going on?

Student: So you just said that’s not temperate anyway.

Instructor: Yeah, right, right. I’m saying it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I think if we understand that this way we’ll get a little more closer to what we’re talking about. And it doesn’t take away the problem. As I said, the kinds of problems that we have are real problems. They’re even bigger problems. They’re like even a horse would get sick from eating as much as we eat usually. But that’s a different problem. That’s a horse problem.

Practical Application: Becoming Temperate in Modern Society

The Question of Attainability

Student: Practically and realistically speaking, how does one become temperate in such a society where like, yeah, you have your grocery store has 30,000 items? Like what?

Instructor: No, I do think that this kind of temperance—like have—if you become—you have to have the *tzaddik’s* temperance to have this temper—

Student: No, so no, but—

Instructor: No, but I think that what I’m describing is somewhat attainable. Like don’t be—yeah, like are you the guy that you could be or not be the guy that eats all the *nash* [snacks/junk food]? I don’t think it’s hard. It’s not impossible. Not making anyone perfect.

Student: But then you need the *tzaddik’s* temperance.

Instructor: No, no, I don’t think so, because it becomes the kind of thing that you don’t like.

The Coffee Example: Habituation and Ordered Preferences

Like, I don’t like to drink, I don’t know, I’ll take an example. Like, at some point I stopped putting sugar in my coffee, and it doesn’t taste better without the sugar, you know? According to me, not according to everyone. For example, or if I have a good coffee, then I don’t even put milk, because it’s just a different drink, and coffee is better without milk.

That’s an example of what I would be calling temperance. Other people consider it *bal ta’avah* [indulgence/following one’s desires], you buy the fancy coffee from French press, and then you—no, it’s not. It’s being—it’s having more order in the way you eat. Like there’s order. It doesn’t—not just throw a bunch of whatever. It’s not—yeah.

Student: No, through habit.

Instructor: Now if you give me the like very sweet coffee drink basically, I can drink it, but I basically don’t like it. So it did—it does work that those kind of things work. Even though you go to the Starbucks or whatever, they have how many kinds of drinks do they sell? Like 56 different kinds of drinks that none of them like are good. Like kids like them. Like yeah, you could grow out of it.

So I think that that’s attainable even though there’s a thousand things. I think the quantity problem is a different problem and it’s different level of problem. And I don’t have at the moment the solution for it.

The Ozempic Solution: Medical Intervention for a Physiological Problem

When Medication Succeeds Where Virtue Fails

I’ve maybe—what’s it called—Ozempic [GLP-1 receptor agonist medication] is the solution because it makes you—it basically makes you not able—not want to eat that much. That’s basically what it does. It also does change the kinds of foods you like.

Student: It does, yeah.

Instructor: As they say, like at least some of the food companies are now—

Student: Which is unnatural.

Instructor: Like who said it’s natural? It’s opposite, it’s unnatural. Like humans are the things that are more than natural. But that’s just natural. It’s like you have your body is broken, so—

And it happens to be way better than a diet. It works. If diets don’t work and this works, then—I think you’re saying like 0.3% of diets succeed. Something like that.

Student: Yeah.

Instructor: But I think they don’t succeed because of physiological reasons, not for psychological, not for moral reasons. I mean, again, everything is—like you said, you could solve everything by being extremely moral, but I don’t think that’s what we need.

The Anger Analogy: Suppression vs. Reordering

Student: There’s this theory of once that, you know, when you go against, let’s say, your need of anger, right? Don’t be angry, don’t be angry, don’t be angry, right? Maybe the approach of how we diet today is like don’t eat, don’t eat, don’t eat.

Instructor: Could be. But I don’t—people should have figured out the other ways that none of them—like such a universal, like a very major issue, and like almost nobody is solved it. Like something is wrong. Okay?