Koach haTaanug

00:00 Everything has the power of pleasure in it. Pleasure is higher than will. Chassidus discusses this at length and explains that will comes from pleasure. [unclear] the powers of the soul: there are intellect and emotions, and the order is first pleasure, then will. In practice, we know that [unclear]. Pleasure, and then will. That much we know for certain. In any case, regarding pleasure, I remember that at a farbrengen during a sheva brachos celebration, [unclear] he said, “A person is limited.” Every person is limited. A person looks for pleasure, for geshmak. If you find geshmak in learning, in davening, in Yiddishkeit, you naturally don’t look for geshmak in other things. A person is limited. There are bochurim, and there are Jews—not necessarily bochurim—who find geshmak in other things. But the way to correct that is not [unclear] to sit and think about how [unclear]. You have to uncover the pleasure. There is pleasure in everything. You learn a maamar—there is pleasure in the maamar itself. A bochur says, “You learn a passage of Gemara; even in that there’s geshmak.” The truth is that there is pleasure in everything. And the pleasure in that is [unclear] pleasure from learning Torah. A person finds pleasure in learning Torah, geshmak. [unclear] pleasure from learning Torah. And pleasure in G-dliness is higher still. As [unclear] Aristotle, in Aristotle’s writings: the lowest line of the wisdom of G-dliness is higher than the highest line of other fields of wisdom. And here we are talking about the wisdom of G-dliness that—

01:43 Aristotle understood. He says: the lowest line of the wisdom of G-dliness is higher than the highest line of other fields of wisdom. How much more so with the wisdom of Torah, the wisdom of Chassidus, the wisdom of Kabbalah—there is pleasure in every line. You just have to uncover it. You have to learn it again and again and again, until you get geshmak from that maamar. Once you get geshmak from a maamar, you no longer crave other pleasures. There’s an old saying among chassidim: the yetzer hara, the yetzer hara is a person’s greatest enemy. The greatest geshmak there can be is when you learn a maamar of Chassidus, [unclear] delve more deeply into its ideas, and then there is pleasure. We have to devote ourselves to serving Hashem, and we have to uncover it; we have to work on the fundamentals and essentials [unclear]. The shortcoming is that we don’t use our capacity for pleasure in G-dliness. Sometimes we don’t use it even in Torah. Of course, if one chooses to find geshmak in other things, there is no shame in it; there is geshmak in everything. [unclear] pleasure in something, and then the geshmak in lower things falls away. Chassidus explains [unclear]: when you take hold of a higher pleasure, you feel that the lower pleasures are nothing at all. What [unclear]. But in any case, what is the avodah? [unclear] As we all know, among chassidim, at a chassidic farbrengen, people daven differently, with the davening of chassidim, and—

03:22 [unclear] of Rosh Hashanah in Chassidus, a revelation of G-dliness, what is revealed [unclear]. What is the way forward for us? The way forward is to learn the maamar again, so that we feel the geshmak in it. When we feel the geshmak in the maamar, we naturally don’t want other things. There is no other way. The point is—a person is limited; a person has limits. When we use our capacity for pleasure in the things we should, we naturally don’t become enslaved to other things. L’chaim, l’chaim.