We now understand how according to Rambam the עץ הדעת טוב ורע did not give them moral awareness where they had none before. Rather it transformed this awareness from one kind into another where our own subjective desires come into play.
Is desire more a good thing or a bad thing? What would life look like without your desires?
Due Monday, Nov 16th, 9am.
Desire isn’t a good thing or a bad thing it’s just something that is. In class I feel that we gravitated more towards that desire was a bad thing. We had said that our own personal desires cloud our judgment of what is right and wrong. I feel that without desire one isn’t living a life of themselves. They are just doing what is right and following the rules. One isn’t doing something based off of their own morals or ideals they are doing it based off of others.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, desires could be good or bad, depending what you make of them. Everyone has realistic desires, which they know is good for them. For example, the desire to go to college and get a job is a positive desire and a realistic goal. However, there are desires such as wanting to steal, kill, or other illegal "desires" in which they would have to control. If the world had no desires, what would we all be doing? There would be no desire to learn torah ;), gain personal achievements, and things like that. Desires are of course a great thing, depending on what you make of them.
ReplyDeletea cliche point of view would be that everything happens for a reason. true, God only put our desires into play as a punishment but by now, would we not have evolved/made up for the sins of the very first man and woman? As Jews, we are expected to ignore our inner most desires and follow the right path. however, as human beings, our desires contribute to each of our unique/quirky personas. it is my opinion that without want, without yearning, without impulse, we lose our enthusiasm and aspirations, we become just like one another as though we are all the same person. "Freedom from want" is not to be interpreted as an unreachable luxury, to not have to want. i see it as freedom to want, the ability to decide our own futures and hence forth to decide who we are and who we want to be.
ReplyDeleteMany times, desires can distract us from our goals and lead us on the wrong path. However, our goals themselves are products of desire. The two are even synonyms of sorts. For example: One's goal might be to loose weight, or in other words, he/she desires to loose weight.
ReplyDeleteA world without desire would be utterly boring, not to mention depressing. We might lay in bed all day because we have no desire to get up. On the one hand, without desire, it would be impossible to feel sadness, stress, anger, etc, because those are normally products of loss of, or interference with our desires. But on the other hand, what would be the point of living if we had no desire to do so? Without desire, we would have nothing to live for.
I don’t think desire is necessarily a good thing, because only following one’s desires can lead to selfish, even dangerous behavior. On the other hand, I don’t think desire is really bad either. I think what makes people as complex as they are is this question of wrong and right and the sometimes blurred line between them. Part of what makes good people so good is that they went through the work of finding, and putting into action, the right choice, regardless of their desires/outside factors. If we never considered our own desires, maybe life would be a lot more clear cut, but at the same time choices would be a given, so what’s the value in making them?
ReplyDeleteDesires are a bad thing. I believe that desires are a manifestation of our Yatzer Hara. Desires can be confused with motivation and goals. One should most certainty have dreams and hopes and work towards those dream. However, I associate desires with having a negative connotation, going after a desire would typically be going after something that is morally or lawfully wrong. While having motivation and pushing oneself to achieve their dreams is good because one is not doing anything wrong when it comes to pursuing one’s dreams. In my analogy of desires= yetzer hara therefore one cannot imagine what it may be like in a world without desires because that would mean a pre-etz hadat tov v’ra world. As Jews of the current century we are not at the level to have the capability of truly and completely understanding the Gan Eden world before Adam and Chava sinned.
ReplyDelete-Anna Kaplan
Depending on the situation desire can be good or bad. It can be what helps you physically,mentally and emotionally or it can do just the opposite. It can just as well be something very natural and neutral that people choose to look at very closely,maybe too closely. For example: the snakes "desire" to have Chava eat from the tree was not that much of desire as it was his nature and his instinct. Everyday is shaped by what a person chooses to do with their wants, if you take that away then life becomes ordinary and planned. We would just be doing the same thing everyday in the same manner since without desire there is no good or bad. There will only be right and wrong.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine the world without desires. Without desires, we wouldn't be challenged and be able to grow as people. When people sin its because they DESIRED to do the wrong thing and couldnt pull themselves away from it - not because they knew it was the right choice. If we didnt have desires, we'd pretty much all just be robots because we would know what the right thing to do is and we'd have no desire to anything differently. If i didnt have desires, i would daven everyday instead of staying in bed, i wouldnt speak lashon harah, i wouldnt eat dairy only two hours after eating meat instead of three. Yes that all sounds good, but it would be bad in the sense that i would never really face any challenges that are hard to overcome since nothing would make me want to do anything the wrong thing.
ReplyDeleteI feel that desires help make decisions in life. Without them, we wouldn't be able to choose and one cannot fully live their own life. Everyone has their own morals and ideas that they decide to live in. Desires can be seen as both good and bad. They can help you make the right decision or cause you to live in regret. If the world had no desires, then there would be no opinions and it wouldn't be realistic.
ReplyDelete-Tamar Shoen
Desire is what makes people who they are. It is what makes people realize what they want and how badly they want it. Without them, everyone would be doing the same thing and people wouldn't have their own dreams and aspirations, they'd only strive to do what is "right." While our desires do have the potential to be bad, our ability to understand what we want is a good thing. They give us a sense of free will.
ReplyDeleteOrly Mobilio
Desire are often incorrectly seen as bad. People often blame their desires for the bad things that they do. That being said, people most often do not accredit their desires for the good things they do. People do good things because they desire to be better people. People build communities and families because they desire to be included and loved. Without desires, people would not be motivated to do all the great things that they can accomplish. A world without desires would be a stagnant world. Each generation would not improve or change from the last.
ReplyDeleteEden Mendelsohn
I believe a desire has the ability to be both a good and bad thing. It depends how you act upon you desire. Everyone has good and bad desires and its up to you to realize when you should act upon them. Life would be boring and ordinary without desires. Desires make everyone unique. They cause drama they cause love and they cause sadness and happiness but without desires we would all be the same individuals and life would be boring.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, desire is not a good or a bad thing it is what you do with those desires that can be good or bad. Desires are what most human beings base their choices off of even if they know what they are doing is wrong. We convince ourselves that what we desire is the right thing for us to do. A life without desire would be so different from the life we live now and I don't think we can really understand what that life would be or even look like. We live in our world and do not know what life without desire would be because we have never experienced it. This can be compared to when the snake did not understand why Chava would not eat from the tree because it did not have free will and therefore could not imagine a life in that way.
ReplyDeleteDesire can't be labeled as anything. It simply IS. it helps us grow but can also lead us down a bad path. Without it, we would simply be robots just following everything that our rabbis said. Now we have a tool and something helping us grow and change. It also very much depends on wether you think people are born naturally evil or naturally good. That will influence which ways our desires take us.
ReplyDeleteDesires can be good and bad. For example there is a desire to be a good person and a desire to help people, but then there also is a desire to steal. The trick is to give in to your good desires and not your bad ones.
ReplyDelete