Why yes?

In parshas Vayeira (yes, I know, I am a week late), Avraham tells Sara (translation from Chabad.org):

Behold now I know that you are a woman of fair appearance.

And it will come to pass when the Egyptians see you, that they will say, ‘This is his wife’, and they will slay me and let you live.

Please say [that] you are my sister, in order that it go well with me because of you, and that my soul may live because of you.

A Midrash asks: what does this mean that “now he knew” that Sara was a beautiful woman? He hadn’t known it before? It answers: when they were crossing Nile to go to Egypt, Sara dropped something (I think a scarf) in the water. Avraham bent down to pick it up and saw Sara’s reflection in the water. Then he realized that she was a beautiful woman. Before that, apparently, he had not looked at her to see if she was beautiful or not.

My rabbi asked the question: there are so many requirements and prohibitions in Torah, and a Jew has to keep them all. Let the man look at his wife. Why not?

And the answer is that Avraham did not live his life like everybody else. Before doing something in life, he didn’t ask “why not?”, he asked “why yes?” If he was able to achieve his purpose in any area (e.g., having a loving marriage) without something (e.g., focusing on physical attraction), he didn’t need this something in his life.

This lesson is directly applicable to us. OK, we are on a completely different level from Avraham, and in order to have normal marriage, we cannot be like him. In fact, Jews were already on a different level in Egypt, and that is why Jewish women’s mirrors (with which they beautified themselves) were accepted as a donation for building of the mishkan.

But in our lives in general, before doing something, we have to ask a question: why yes? Not desire to do something and do it, unless it is prohibited by Halacha (and if it is, find a loophole out of the prohibition, ask three, five, ten rabbis, until one gives you a heter), but do the opposite. Ask yourself: in what way does this connect me to Hashem? And if it doesn’t, why am I doing it?

This is the standard shpil, you can hear it from many Chabad rabbis, in many a Chabad House.

But there is something more. There is a difference between Avraham and us. He lived before Mattan Torah, and we live after. We live after the time when it became possible to make mundane holy.

Furthermore, we live after the revelation of Chassidus. After revelation of Chassidus in a form that can be internalized: through Chassidus Chabad. And learning Chassidus Chabad allows you to answer the question “why yes”. It allows you to find a way “how yes”. Not so that you can do already whatever you wanted to do and not feel guilty about it (even on the most Chassidish, most eidel level).

But so that you can bring G-dliness into one more aspect of this world’s reality. Make holy one more thing that was mundane.