In this week’s Parsha the Torah describes the Sotah, the unfaithful wife and the priestly ceremony that she could voluntarily undergo to be exonerated if she were innocent.  This is followed by the Nazir, the nazarite who electively enters an ascetic state forbidding wine upon himself, as well as refraining from cutting his hair and becoming impure through contact with the dead.

Rash”i comments on this juxtaposition: “This is to tell us that whoever sees an adulteress in her disgrace would vow to abstain from wine, for it leads to adultery.”

Rav Moshe Feinstein asks why this is the reaction to seeing the sotah, in fact the nazir can drink other things to make himself drunk besides wine.  Rav Moshe answers that it is not a one to one correlation, the nazir wanting to be sober to avoid being unfaithful, rather the nazir has seen that even though all Jews are holy, nevertheless they sin.  So the nazir wishes to go beyond and add a greater level of holiness.   His is not asceticism for asceticism’s sake, or a bringing to bear of will against desire, rather it is an act of sanctification, to enter a higher level and thereby refocus his values and see beyond the physical.

C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain (1962) wrote:  “Fasting asserts the will against the appetite -the reward being self mastery and the danger pride.  Involuntary hunger subjects appetites and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger of rebellion.  But the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will.  Ascetic practices which in themselves strengthen the will are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole man to God.  They are necessary as a means; and as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self.”

The nazir’s asceticism, and for that matter our own on fast days, is only spiritually productive insofar as it helps us to raise our level of holiness and connect to that which is higher.  As a feat of endurance itself, even as a practice of self control alone, it is not only not spiritually edifying, but runs the risk of self centeredness and hubris.

Shabbat Shalom