The Endgame of Lust

The Tanya teaches us that the key to connecting to Hashem is to restrain ourselves from physical delights. The Gemara goes so far as to tell us to even restrict ourselves from permitted desires like food and drink.  

Rabbi Yehoshua Gordon, of blessed memory, put it this way: It’s one thing to enjoy a slice of chocolate cake for Shabbat, but do you really have to have seconds? 

As long as we practice the advice of the Rambam and practice the middle road of moderation, we should be fine. For those of us who feel the need to do more, we can pick our battles and see where we can really jump high and connect with our King.  

The Tanya helps.  

The Alter Rebbe tells us to think about the endgame of food. Food, whether a fine steak of a felafel pita, goes in one opening up top, and eventually leaves the body in another opening down below – and often adding blubber to the middle along the way. 

That’s the key.  

When you think of food, specifically overindulging, think of the endgame. If you want to moderate your physical pleasure to make way for the greater delight of enhancing your soul, consider food as a form of preprocessed you-know-what that leaves your body.  

It’s a hint to the greater scheme.  

For all physical pleasures, the endgame is pretty much the same. Our bodies get old, and our ability to enjoy such pleasures decline. The pleasures only exist in this world, for us to enjoy during those few years we occupy this specific existence. And even while we do enjoy them, the pleasure is short-lived, while the effects are long-lasting. 

Unlike the house, the stocks, and the lifetime supply of all the Starbucks coffee we want, which stay in this world after we leave it, knowing God is a pleasure that we take with us everywhere we go. 

The Tanya advises us to always keep in mind the endgame of food so we can meditate on the endgame of all physical pleasures.  

What’s the Endgame of Sex? 

When I think of physical pleasure that we desire in thought, speech, and deed, the number one answer is sex. We don’t have to make it with Paris Hilton to dream about doing so. We don’t need Beyonce on our speed dial to talk about what we would do if she were standing right here, open to any and all suggestions.  

The fulfillment of our lives is based on our thoughts, speech, and deeds.  

Even if none of us ever meet a full-on diva, we can enjoy the experience with the majority of our being.  

But this isn’t like enjoying a hamburger. Eating is permissible. We can satisfy deep urges for food by having a healthy meal.  

Sexual thoughts are a sin. These urges cannot be negotiated with. They have to be overcome and defeated. Rabbi Arush says that the mitzvah against adultery includes thoughts and looking. That means that just as if someone holds a gun to a man’s head and says “Have sex with that married woman or I kill you” the man needs to be prepared to die first – so too he needs to be prepared to die if he is only instructed to enjoy looking at her pinkie finger! 

If the endgame of food is the waste product, what is the endgame of sex? 

When we are reading the news, and the headline sports a picture of a half-naked woman who got arrested for doing something crazy enough to get our minds wandering in a thousand directions – all out of bounds, what must we think about? 

The Tanya tells us to imagine the most repulsive things and apply them to her: 

•  The endgame of food 
• Something in your nose 
• A foul stench 

In our age of hyper-sexuality, this isn’t enough. In the heat of a moment, it’s hard to apply such matter to a model in a bikini, even if it is fecal matter.   

The problem is that sex is like cigarettes. 

The impact on your body is deadly and incapacitating, but it’s not immediate. You don’t feel the effects of smoking until you have done it for a while. You might not feel the impact for a long while, but when you do it could be too late.  

In the meantime, you just sit back and enjoy, unaware of the massive level of self-destruction you are unleashing on yourself.  

The endgame of sex is decay. Unless you are in the act of intimacy with your husband or wife, you are spilling seed. This includes hookups, one-night stands, and self-gratification.   

What happens to you when you spill seed? What is the decay after sex? 

• You lose your money. 
• You lose your memory. 
• You become addicted. Neurological scans of crack-addicts and sex-addicts are the same. Spilling seed is an addiction.
• You lose your life. If you dedicate your energies to a single activity that serves no productive purpose – you are dead even if you are alive.  
• You lose your vitality. It’s harder to get up in the morning. It harder to get out of bed or off the couch at any time in the day. 
• You age prematurely. 
• Health problems accelerate, most of which you cannot directly link to this behavior. The ill-effects of spilling seed weaken your entire system. The result is that small ailments that your body could typically fight off, it can no longer resist, so you get sick more.  
• A portion of what comes out of you originates from the brain. You are literally spilling a piece of your brain to the ground. 
• You become vulnerable to depression, which brings down every other part of your life. 

 Some of this happens right away, most of these disasters accumulate gradually.  

The good news is that like smoking – where the majority of the damage to your lungs is undone if you go clean for a year, if you make changes to your actions, these damages also reverse.  

This is better than quitting smoking.  

If you quit forbidden sexual acts, you are transforming your personal darkness into great light. You are turning your own slow death into a massive self-revival.  

The worst tragedy is that most of us never learn what we are truly capable of! 

When we are teenagers, we discover porn. We discover self-gratification. We spill seed.  

Before our body and mind reaches full maturity, we are self-retarded by actions that stunt our minds, cloud our memory, and destroy our concentration.  

By taking steps to fix this, the first thing you discover is your own God-given potential. It was always there – waiting for you to grab it. It makes you far greater and able-bodied than you ever thought you were.  

People who took on this mitzvah of personal holiness very quickly received blessings in health, happiness, and personal ability.  

One person started waking up at 4:15 AM every morning. Another stopped watching TV and built a thriving business. Many of the finest Rabbis today are people who took this amazing pivot in their life.  

Our Daily Climb 

Every day we recite the Shema. The first paragraph begins with the commandment: 

And you shall love your G-d with all your heart. 

This is the commandment to turn your heart away from things that take you away from Hashem, and pivot your heart to those things that bring you closer to God.  

In today’s world, infected with every sort of sexual temptation coming at you from all corners, this commandment is easier said than done.  

But it’s not impossible. The fact that it is so difficult brings even more blessing to our life because G-d rewards the effort.  

The effort we make to serve Hashem in this manner is so challenging, we can transform our lives, and the lives of the people we love and the entire world with our everyday toil.  

All you have to do is remember what the endgame of food is, and that the endgame of sex is you taking on its full form.  

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David Ben Horin lives in Afula with his family, millions of sunflowers, and Matilda, our local camel. David’s Israeli startup, Center Stage Marketing, is a lean marketing agency for startups and small businesses that creates and promotes SEO optimized ROI-driven to the right audience on LinkedIn to make your business the star of the show.