There is a deep connection between chessed and a rectified eating. An act of eating that lacks generosity and chessed leads – like any other primal instinct – to sadness, chaos and disappointment. Only chessed – faith in being – leads to a fullness and a joy
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Eating on Shabbat
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In this Torah, Rav Nachman describes a specific kind of tikkun (rectification) of eating, one achieved through faith, and connection to our forefathers. Eating takes on the quality of eating on Shabbat. Perhaps this seems like something reserved for tzaddikim like Rav Nachman. In my opinion, however, this is real, practical guidance. Faith, in this context, is the sensation of fullness and harmony – this is why the believer does not eat to fill a lack, nor does he try to ‘dominate,’ control the food. The aspect of domination is transformed via the attribute of chessed (loving-kindness). This is why further along Rav Nachman discusses tzedaka (charity) in paragraphs 7-8 of Torah 47:
But for an abundance of peace it is necessary to increase charity, as in the teaching of our Sages, of blessed memory: The more charity, the more peace (Avot 2:7)… And they said: Sun on Shabbat is charity for the poor (Taanit 8b). “Sun” is the aspect of peace… i.e., peace—is achieved only by means of “charity to the poor.”
Know, too, that there is a difference between the peace of fasting of the weekdays, and the peace of the delight of Shabbat. That is, the peace of fasting lacks the aspect of speech, [in] the aspect of “they could not speak a word of peace [to him]” (Genesis 37:4). But by means of the delight of Shabbat eating, speech is executed in peace, in the aspect of “For the sake of my kin and my companions, I will now speak peace” (Psalms 122:8). This is the aspect of “or speaking of [weekday] matters” (Isaiah 58:13), which is said with regard to Shabbat, because the mouth is made whole through the great light [that shines] at the time of Shabbat eating.
-Likkutei Mohara”n 57:8 (Translation from Sefaria.org)
There is a deep connection between chessed and a rectified eating. An act of eating that lacks generosity and chessed leads – like any other primal instinct – to sadness, chaos and disappointment. That type of eating is a desire that cannot be satisfied, because it seeks something absolute through control. It is pulled into a cycle of external control that perpetuates the basic duality which characterizes humanity after Adam’s first sin. This is why such an instinct can never leave a person fulfilled and leads to a lack of satisfaction; for its source is absence. Only chessed – faith in being (and through this, a connection to faith in the sages), recognizing the divine side of the other – leads to a fullness and a joy. Faith is the path for emerging from our usual nihilistic mindset; it brings us to the experience of divine reality.
One who eats in a way that is oriented towards ownership and possession will always be hungry. The desire to eat will overcome him – “the belly of the wicked is empty.” (Proverbs 13:25) But “the righteous man eats to his heart’s content” (Ibid.): the tzaddik’s eating activity is different, it doesn’t stem from a feeling of lack.
According to Lacan, Freud’s ‘pleasure (oneg) principle’ is enclosed in the symbolic, a constructed world built of language which deforms the Real, which cannot be expressed through words. This is why he says: ‘The role of the pleasure principle is to cause man to always seek that which he must find again, without ever reaching.’ This constant searching desire is caused by language, and by the creation of a world of objects beyond man.
Lacan is not speaking in a religious language, but my sense is that we can translate it into those terms, exchanging the term ‘the Real’ for the divine. According to hassidut, speech creates a situation of loss, of the tzimtzum – contraction – that is necessary for the world’s creation. Human perception cannot integrate something that is has no name, something unverbalizable. Yet the practice of giving names and labels prevents us from encountering the real, which is always whole. There is, then, a silence that expresses a great insight that we cannot say in words, one which Admu”r hazaken often describes in his writings.
Even before Lacan, Freud argued that instinct’s longing expresses a loss, one which by definition cannot be satisfied. Chaza”l also claimed that with the evil instinct, ‘he who starves it is full, he who satisfies it is hungry.’ That’s why only the tzaddik – whose eating does not come from a place of lack – can reach a state of fullness, a possibility that Freud and others could not recognize. Faith enables an encounter with the Real, and in doing so puts to rest an instinctual hunger.
The importance of generosity, as it is mentioned here, is also based upon this principle. The instinct represents the burning of gvurah (strength), which is why it must be fixed with tzedaka, with chassadim (and this is the aspect of ‘two hands,’ right and left, described above). The separation between one person and another is symbolic in origin; in the Real there is unity. As Rabbi Nachman explains in the eighth section, the difference between weekdays and Shabbat is that in Shabbat there is speech, a turn to the Other and faith in it. This is a speech that belongs to the concrete. That is why eating on Shabbat reveals the quality of oneg. Oneg is not pleasure; it is rather a state in which we are wholly in something, overpowering the duality that was formed with Adam HaRishon’s sin.
