Is Ascetism the Life that God Wants for Us?

D’var Torah 5/22/18

שבת שלום

We have reached נָשׂ֗א, Numbers 4:21 – 7:89, the longest parasha in the Torah. It is chockful of commandments. The Tribe of Levi is divided into family subgroups and each is assigned duties. Impure (diseased) citizens are made to move outside the camp to protect the others. Restitution should be made if somebody harms another. If a woman is suspected of adultery, she undergoes a test very similar to determining whether somebody is a witch; I studied the portion relating to a sotah, a woman suspected of adultery, a few summers ago. Nazirite vows are discussed. The blessing Aaron gave the people had been mentioned earlier in the Torah, but now we are given the words of the now-familiar Kohenic blessing. The Levites get carts and oxen for their duties. Representatives of each Tribe come to make their offerings. We are told that when God speaks to Moses, it is from above the Ark, between the Cherubim.

Out of all of these various threads, I would like to talk about Nazirite vows. This is a vow that a person makes to observe certain restrictions for a set period of time, not less than 30 days. The restrictions are that the person must refrain from wine and other intoxicating substances, including anything at all made from grapes; not to cut his or her hair for the duration; and not to have any contact with the dead. At the end of the period covered by the vow, the person offers up a sin-offering, which includes cutting off and presenting for burning his or her hair.

The rabbis of course wrangled about this for years. It is blessed and holy to take a Nazirite vow, and the sin offering at the end is for resuming a normal, less pious life. No, it is not a good thing to take a Nazirite vow, not what God wants from people, and the sin-offering is to atone for having done this thing contrary to what God would like to see in us.

I side with those who think that a Nazirite vow is an aberration and the life we are meant to live is one of full appreciation of all of God’s bounty. There are many cultures in which choosing an ascetic life, depriving oneself of the usual pleasures of the world, is admired and looked up to. That is not the case in Judaism. It is an exception to practice this kind of self-denial, and the Nazirite vow is limited in scope, both in time – the only two people in the Bible who were lifelong Nazirites, Samuel and Samson, were promised to that life by their mothers before they were even born – and in breadth – even Nazirites can eat whatever anybody else eats (except for grape products), are not expected to fast or flagellate themselves, can marry, etc. The extra piety that they might experience is offset by the expectation that we are to enjoy all of the bounty of the world that was created around us. Rav said that a person will have to account in the World to Come for everything that he saw but did not eat (which I take as a metaphor for the broader “did not enjoy”).

Jonathan Sacks suspects that the fact that Jews are not sympathetic toward a life of self-denial probably indicates that this concept entered Judaism from the outside and is not inherently Jewish. Movements in the begininng of the Common Era saw the physical world as a place of corruption and strife, to be rejected in favor of a spiritual realm where God is. You either have physical pleasures or you deny yourself everything and are spiritually more advanced.

Etz Hayim reports that Simeon (a High Priest during the Second Temple period) wouldn’t eat Nazirite offerings because he thought they made their vows in moments of excessive guilt or enthusiasm and not as a reasoned conscious choice. Plaut asks, if you don’t even take care of your own needs but deny yourself some of the ordinary pleasures of life, can you really be counted on to take care of others?

I looked into whether somebody could make a Nazirite vow today, and the thought is that you can – you can give up alcoholic beverages and not cut your hair and avoid contact with the dead. But since the term has to end with a sin-offering at the Temple and we have no more Temple, the vow would have to last for the rest of your life.

What can we learn from this today? God has provided us with a bounty of food and drink and pleasureful experiences. If we abstain from some of them, we are in effect rejecting part of God’s creation. In the context of living as a caring person in a caring community, we can each live AS the rest of the community lives, not hold ourselves apart even in minor areas. Self-denial sets us apart, pulls us out of the community, and this does not seem to me to be how God wants us to live our lives.

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