Q&A: Emotions
Emotions
Question
Hello Rabbi, I heard from some rabbi that a person’s intellect, by nature, needs to experience emotional excitement, and therefore someone who does not experience these things and get emotionally stirred by prayer, Torah study, and the fulfillment of commandments will look for it elsewhere, in places outside the Torah and sometimes forbidden ones. So he concludes that one should become emotionally stirred in the service of God so that we won’t go looking for it in forbidden things.
Is the Rabbi in agreement with this? If so, how does that fit with the Rabbi’s very intellectual approach? If not, why?
Answer
Very amusing. What does it mean that every person needs to get emotionally stirred? If he gets excited, then let him get excited. Good for him. Does a lack of emotional excitement in serving God cause other kinds of excitement? Maybe, but what’s wrong with that? As for the claim itself, it would be worth asking a psychologist. At first glance it doesn’t seem that way to me. If a person is not emotional, then he won’t get excited by other things either, and if he is emotional, then he will probably get excited here too.
Discussion on Answer
This is a psychoanalytic claim about the “law of conservation of matter” of instinctual drives. Freud argued that any drive that sought fulfillment and was denied does not disappear but rather “takes on” another form. There are various mechanisms that cause this, such as displacement. But according to Freud’s psychoanalysis, that applies to a denied drive, not just to a simple lack of emotional excitement. I’m not sure that an intellectual person is denying drives. Maybe his psyche is simply less driven. Of course, each case has to be judged on its own, but it doesn’t seem to me that there’s any need to worry about this… At most, the urges will find expression in other ways, culturally adapted. Sublimation, in the non-Hebrew term.
It’s no coincidence that there are some who sway during prayer in a way that recalls sexual movements.
Those are the great ones when it comes to getting emotionally worked up.
The difference is that emotional excitement in spirituality requires a lot of effort, unlike other kinds of excitement…