Take the Maimonides Challenge

Maimonides, the 13th century Talmudist, and philosopher presents the following challenge: Is it better to give one hundred dollars to one person or to give one dollar to one hundred different people? Most of us would certainly think that giving one hundred dollars to one person would make a bigger positive impact on his or her life than many individuals receiving a nominal sum! Isn’t the one hundred dollar gift more meaningful?

Well, maybe, but only if you look at charity from the perspective of what it does for the recipient. The purpose of charity, though, is not only to provide for the needy but also to benefit the giver. Obviously, if God wanted to, He could provide everyone with a comfortable living, and without the need for charity. However, He chose not to set up His World that way, in order to challenge both the wealthy and the poor to grow. The wealthy grow in humility by seeing themselves as beneficiaries of God’s kindness rather than being “self-made” men. The poor grow in faith by accepting God’s Will and refraining from expressing anger at God.

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As Maimonides puts it, if each of us gives one gift of one hundred dollars to one person, then it is considered that we have performed one act of kindness; but if we each give one dollar to one hundred different people, and have put our hands in our pockets one hundred times, then each one of those times has made a spiritual impact on us. This way, we’re not just giving charity, rather we are training ourselves to become more charitable. We transform our personalities by toning down our natural inclinations to treat everything we have as “mine,” and we begin to see ourselves more as a conduit or trustee of our possessions, which we can manage with kindness, and thereby help to develop our personalities. That is what is meant by personal or spiritual growth.

Because we are a combination of horse and rider, body, and soul, it’s up to us to decide whether our lives will be impulse-or body-driven or spiritually-soul-driven. The Torah—the Five Books of Moses—in the very first verse of Genesis, gives us guidance as to how we can best fulfill our potential and destiny: “In the beginning, God Created the Heaven and the Earth.” In other words, God created the world with a duality—spirituality, and physicality—represented by Heaven and Earth, respectively.

The spiritual dimension is meant to take precedence over the physical dimension. After all, the order of the words in the verse suggests that God first created the Heavens, and only then created the Earth. Through the exercise of our FreeWill, we can choose to be “earthly— physically-oriented, or we can, instead, elevate our physical dimension by focusing on the spiritual.

This is not to suggest that we should deny our physical side. After all, God Himself created both spiritual and the physical aspects of the world, both the soul and the body. However, God’s very first communication to us sets out this fundamental guideline for humanity: let your spirituality lead your physicality. Let your heavenly dimension guide your earthly dimension.

The soul, as it operates within this world, has three parts to it:

1) Nefesh—the animal soul; our physical instincts.

2) Ruach—the emotional soul; our appreciation of the aesthetic—art, music, harmony, and symmetry.

3) Neshama—the access to our creative soul dimension- our pursuit of truth, wisdom, and values.

Normally, most of us operate on the level of our emotional soul. Sometimes we react from our earthy, instinctive, “body” selves. Other times, we rise to our first-class “soul,” selves, and we allow our higher, intellectual, spiritual selves, guide us.

God challenges us to choose, through our God-given Freewill, which dimension to live in.

Besides the financial aspect of charity, where we just donate money, another aspect of charitable pursuit is dedicating our time and energy to a cause outside of our own immediate needs. This kind of selflessness often gives life a sense of purpose and meaning. We can make a major impact on our community by dedicating, for instance, one-tenth of our time and energies to community needs, and, at the same time, we will find that it profoundly helps in the development of our own spirituality.

Spiritual growth also applies to other areas of our lives—in “passive,” as well as "active" ways. What I mean by “passive” is that if we “work on ourselves” by stopping ourselves from just acting instinctively, with knee-jerk reactions to events or comments, we thereby exercise our free will and behave spiritually.

Each of us has a God-Given reason that God sent us into this world at this time. A person can discover his raison d’etre-reason for being, by discovering his best attribute and actualizing it. And, he can discover his most glaring weakness, by finding some character flaw that really bothers you to your core, and rectifying it. This is called Tikun Hanefesh-rectification of the soul. Instead of hiding behind our “natural” state of reacting angrily to a frustrating situation, rationalizing that “that’s the way I am,” we could choose to do something about the way we instinctively react to life’s challenges. In order to do this, though, we need to identify which areas of our personalities need refinement and to develop a strategy to modify those behaviors.

The first step is simply to become aware of our reactions, without trying, at first, to change them. We must try to notice every time we lose our temper or react angrily. We must step out of ourselves at those moments, and watch ourselves from a corner of the room, and observe our reactions.

We also need to watch others interact with us and observe how our behavior affects them. If we see something unpleasant in our actions, we need to ask ourselves how we could handle this situation differently in the future. Learning from our past mistakes and trying to rectify our behavior is acting spiritually. Even if we repeat the same mistake, as long as we are at least trying to control our behavior and improve, we are still being spiritual. Of course, all this takes effort and a tremendous investment of energy. No one said it was going to be easy.

Rabbi Yisroel Roll is a psychotherapist and author who lives and works in Baltimore, MD. subscribe to Yisroel Roll YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ8pANGsa4SeF3Ga293k3Iw

Check out Rabbi Roll's book, When the Going Gets Tough. https://www.amazon.com/When-Going-Gets-Tough-Adversity/dp/1881927261