David Blaine is currently encased in a human aquarium at Lincoln Center in New York City doing another one of his stunts. Although I am not impressed by the showmanship of the man what he says does impress me. When asked about his 44-day stay without food in a box above the River Thames in London a few years ago he said it was the easiest stunt he had ever done. He gave the following rationale, “For some reason when your body is in starvation mode. When you take away every extravagance that you exist by, you’re ironically in the purist state that you will ever be in, which is, I assume, the reason monks and religious people fast – because it brings them closer to God.”
This is a truth that many of us are oblivious to. Common wisdom tells us that the more we accumulate the happier we become. So when people are depressed they will often eat to gain comfort. The truth however is, that the more we feed our bodies and our ego the more we drag ourselves downwards. The concept is rather simple: the less we serve ourselves the more we are able to focus on others. We humans are limited; we cannot be selfish and selfless at the same time. So when we stop eating and taking care of our own bodily needs a vacuum appears, and this empty space allows God to enter, hence the feeling of being close to the divine while fasting.
David Blaine’s antics demonstrate that the body can survive perfectly well in extremely adverse conditions. He proves that we do not really need all the luxuries that we have become accustomed to. In fact he actually says that when mundane pleasures are removed one is overcome by a sense of purity and closeness to God. But do we really need to go to the extents David Blain has gone in order to feel purity and closeness to God? The answer is that there are two ways to reach this. The first way is through action as Blain described. By forcing the body not to indulge the individual opens a space where divinity can enter.
The second way is to engender a cognizance of the deeper reality of existence where divinity is all there is. When an individual is able to achieve that kind of realization their behavior is affected as well. The following Talmudic story exemplifies this (Taanit 24a): “When the charity collectors would see Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa, they would hide from him, for whatever he had he would give to them. One day he went to the market to buy a dowry for his daughter. The charity collectors saw him and hid from him. He went and ran after them. He said to them: “I beg you to tell me what you are engaged in?” They said to him: “With an orphan boy and orphan girl.” He said to them: “By [the Temple] service! They take precedence over my daughter.” He took everything he had and gave it to them.”
The philosophy behind Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa’s attitude towards giving charity is found in Ethics of the Fathers (Chapter 3:7): “Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa would say: Give Him what is His, for you, and whatever is yours, are His. As David says: "For everything comes from You, and from Your own hand we give to You" (I Chronicles 29:14).”
In other words, Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa’s selflessness was the result of his deep and profound understanding of reality. Although the empirical reality appears to exist independent of divine energy, he recognized that that is only a façade and in reality nothing exists without God. When reality is perceived from this angle, the ego ceases to sense itself as an autonomous entity and thus even when the individual participates in bodily activity they do so in service of a higher cause rather than to serve their themselves. In this way ones deeper perception of reality causes a vacuum in which the ego ceases to exist and space for closeness to God is made.
Since Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa saw everything as being dependent on God he was able to say that we should give to God everything we own. In his reality since everything is dependent on God it belongs to God and therefore must be used accordingly. Although Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa actions were extreme his philosophy should not be lost upon us.
If Blaine’s stunts have any redeeming factors they are that they make people think about how the lack of materialism can bring one to a state of purity. But we do not have to go to such extents to achieve this. Using Rabbi Elazar of Bartosa’s method and contemplating on the theology he suggests we can achieve a sense of divine closeness without having to suffer without food for any length of time at all. On the contrary by using this method one elevates the food which one eats. Indeed this is the authentically Jewish way of connecting to God. In Judaism we do not shun the physical, instead we try to make its divine reality our reality. A different method to Blaine’s but one that is just as effective.