There is a widespread practice to adopt Halachic stringencies incommensurate with an individual's true spiritual level. The detractors of this practice highlight its inherent inauthenticity. Its supporters and practitioners claim that by acting as if one is on a lofty spiritual level, one will eventually come to actually achieve a lofty spiritual level.
So what does God want us to be: authentic or aspirational? To express our real selves or our ideal selves?
I think this is one of the easier questions you have asked. If you want to know what our "authentic" nature is, look no further than children without the benefit of positive parental influence: completely self-centered.
ReplyDeleteIt takes years of careful parenting and growth for most infants to genuinely care about anyone else.
If G-d didn't want us to aspire to be better, He wouldn't have given us the capacity for growth. If expressing our ideal selves helps us get closer to that level, then we should do it.
The Romantic idea ("we should be natural") has almost completely destroyed Western civilization. We should strive to keep ourselves apart from that process.
I was not suggesting that one not aspire to grow; the question is whether it is appropriate to adopt stringencies that are far beyond the level of one's internal struggle, in the hope that his internal self will eventually live up to the ideal self being expressed in action. For example, is it appropriate for a person who does not even think about the words that he utters during shemoneh esrai to add to his daily prayers the recital of three more chapters of tehillim?
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