Natural feeling of love
Hello Rabbi,
As I think you once wrote (if I’m not mistaken, it was in a column on the virtue of Israel) that you do not see the feeling of love for family as anything more than a fact, that is, it is not a value. You commented that it may have technical importance for the purpose of doing certain things that are worth doing for their benefit, but in fact the emotional love for them has no value, and therefore it is not correct to say that ‘they should be loved.’ Can the Rabbi explain why? I simply think that it is something meaningful right now, the very feeling of connection and love for family members, and even if I do ‘everything necessary’ and ‘I’ with a cheerful face but it is not accompanied by a feeling of love, it seems lacking to me.
In my opinion, emotions in themselves have no value. This is a fact, and as such there is no point in seeing value in them.
Perhaps there is value in a person working on developing their feelings for their family members (and not in the actual existence of such a feeling). Although, regarding this too, I tend to think that the feeling itself has no value. There is value in actions for their sake.
See column 22.
Is there a difference between the mere existence of a high IQ and the mere existence of emotions? Neither came from the progress of man through free choice. And I did mean the work and development of emotion (although you disagree with that too).
Do you see a distinction between the very existence of emotion and the very existence of reason? In my opinion, even a certain level of intelligence has no value if it is not the result of a person's choice and progress (and I understand that you do distinguish between them when they are the result of work).
In any case, a person who has corrected his mental dimensions and is altruistic and not egoistic (which is actually the essence of love) can be seen as a more noble and corrected person.
As I wrote, it is indeed possible, because it is his work, but it is not necessary. If it is not a fact but the work of the person, it is a necessary condition but not sufficient for the thing to be valuable. The question of whether it is truly valuable or not, I am a little confused about and tend to think not.
For some reason, my response to Harel's questions does not appear here.????
I wrote to him that the existence of a brilliant mind has no value, because that too is just a fact. But unlike emotion, in my opinion, developing the mind does have value.
Now I think that it is not necessarily a moral value but a human one - self-realization. And according to this, the development of emotion should be discussed again, which perhaps has value because it also constitutes self-realization (the development of another part of the personality that was planted in us and deserves to be developed). I don't know. In any case, even if so, it seems that the value is actually the development of that part of the soul (self-realization) and not precisely in the emotion itself, being an emotion. In other words, according to this, intensive training in some sporting field is also a value, because they also develop parts of our soul and body (a high level of sports is not just the body, of course). And Rabbi Kook's words on this are well-known. See, for example, here:
https://www.yeshiva.org.il/midrash/4234
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