When our soul was up in Heaven before it was placed into our physical body it was unfathomably high. Literally at the throne of Hashem. But now our holy soul confined itself in our physical body, limiting its power tremendously. The goal of the soul is to refine our physical being to a level that our physicality becomes like the soul itself, so pure, constantly climbing higher – this is our Godly soul. But we have two souls; the Godly soul and the Animal Soul. The animal soul is what draws us away from Hashem. It takes us places the Godly soul has no business being, it craves physicality while our Godly soul craves a better relationship with The One Above.
We would hope that the spiritual soul is stronger than our animalistic soul but in reality this world has so many physical pleasures to offer, our physical soul is practically drunk on life while our spiritual soul is thirsting for a drop of water!
Our spiritual soul is searching for those hard to find moments of Godliness in our lives, the Torah learning or the sincere prayers. We may think like in other cases it would be wise to strike a balance between the Godly soul and the animal soul but Moshe warns us of just that concept in our Parsha this week, as the pasuk says not to “add the drunken to the thirsty.”(29:18) Beyond the fact our animal soul is getting drunk all the time on the physical pleasures of this world this animal soul further attempts to get the Godly soul drunk on physicality too, a little peer pressure. The animal soul will try and get us to add the drunk to the thirsty. We know the desires of the animal soul never leave us fulfilled, the more we give the animal soul to drink the thirstier it becomes and it just gets drunker and drunker. The Godly soul on the other hand allows us to feel satiated even with a little learning or davening but we must be careful not to follow the words of the animal soul enticing us to chase those worldly desires, claiming that we can quench our spiritual thirst with the physical world. It is our mission in this world to surround ourselves with Torah and Mitzvos – the water which our Godly soul thirsts for, by doing so we feel fulfilled, drowning out the pleas of the Animal soul to chase after the next good time. This level of spirituality is not so far off, as our Parsha says, “It is not across the sea… it is very near to you.”(30:13,14), but it also cannot happen overnight, we must take steps in the right direction. We could take five minutes more and spiritually indulge ourselves instead of using those five minutes to indulge our physical desires. Hopefully with our continued efforts Hashem will bless us that our spiritual souls are drunk on the waters of Torah and we will merit to drown our animal soul in the many waters of spirituality.