What’s in a Word?

emotion

desire

תאוה · חמדה · חפץ

Bottom line

Taavah is craving, and in a mussar context lust: the desire whose fulfillment is direct bodily pleasure, born of the man's own appetite and imagination, and in Scripture almost always the desire for intimacy (Vilna Gaon; Malbim). Chemdah is coveting: desire drawn by the object's own worth and roused by seeing it, typically for money, a house, fine clothes (Vilna Gaon; Rabbi Pappenheim and Rabbi Mecklenburg; Malbim). Chefetz, the Vilna Gaon's word for desire for food, seems to sit between them; render "desire" and see the ratzon entry. Chazal pair them: chemdah with theft, taavah with illicit relations (Chagigah 11b). Do not let "desire" flatten the two; the contrast is inside (taavah) against outside (chemdah).

Distinctions

taavah (תאוה)

Root א-ו-ה. The Vilna Gaon: desire whose fulfillment leads directly to bodily pleasure; sensual desire; Chagigah 11b attaches it to arayos. Rabbi Pappenheim and Rabbi Mecklenburg: a desire not derived from the object itself but from an alignment of other factors, the subject's own proclivities, the time, the place. Malbim: created by the man's own power of imagination, whether or not he ever saw the object; not a reaction to outside stimuli but something that comes from within. Both taavah and chemdah are self-damaging desires for Malbim. The column's opening case: the erev rav "desired a desire", התאוו תאוה (Bamidbar 11:4). The literal text has the dispute centering on the mann, yet the mesorah holds that the core of the clash was the refusal to accept the Torah's laws of whom one may marry, and Chazal find the allusion in the weeping "according to its families" (Bamidbar 11:10), read as crying over family matters. The column suggests that the basis for that reading seems to lie in the Torah's word choice here, since taavah almost exclusively conjures intimacy-related desire while other desires take other words. The Yiddish tayvuh keeps the same range.

chemdah (חמדה)

Root ח-מ-ד. The Vilna Gaon: desire for something whose attainment is not itself a bodily pleasure: elegant clothes, a nice house, a lot of money; Chagigah 11b attaches it to theft, and in another place the Gaon calls it monetary desire. Rabbi Pappenheim and Rabbi Mecklenburg: the desire follows from the inherent, universally recognized properties of the object, so the man who covets is responding to real advantages of possession, not to his appetite. Malbim: created by visual stimuli; one sees and then wants. The column reads the later two as falling in with the first: Rabbi Pappenheim and Rabbi Mecklenburg's account can be understood as somewhat of an expansion on the Vilna Gaon's, and Malbim's too is in consonance with it, since on the Gaon's approach chemdah is the desirer's recognition of the desired thing's goodness while taavah in certain ways ignores the thing and fixes on the desirer's own predetermined craving for it.

chefetz (חפץ)

Root ח-פ-ץ. The Vilna Gaon, contrasting three words: taavah sensual, chemdah monetary, chefetz culinary. The column suggests that chefetz seems to be the happy medium between the other two: the delectable taste of good food is indeed an inherent value in the food (like chemdah), but the desire to eat it is also tied to the eater's own appetite (like taavah). Malbim sets chefetz against ratzon rather than against these two: chefetz is an emotional desire, ratzon an intellectual one and usually positive. The full treatment is in the ratzon / chefetz entry.

Rendering guidance

  • taavah: "craving" as the neutral word; "lust" where the object is intimacy or the register is mussar; "appetite" for the bodily faculty in general. Plural taavos: "cravings", "lusts". Baal taavah: "a man of appetite".
  • chemdah: "covet" as a verb, "coveting" as the noun; the adjective nechmad is "desirable" (the thing's own worth, which is the point). "Greed" is acceptable when the object is money, since that is the Gaon's own example.
  • chefetz: "desire"; never "lust".
  • Together, Chagigah 11b: "coveting leads to theft, craving to arayos." Keep two English words; the Gemara's whole point is the pairing.
  • Trap: "desire" absorbs all three. A second trap: "lust" for chemdah. The Gaon's rule is that chemdah is never a bodily pleasure, so "lust for money" is a mistranslation of the Hebrew even where it is idiomatic English.
  • The inside/outside test settles hard cases: if the passage stresses that the man wanted before he ever saw (imagination, appetite), it is taavah and reads "craving"; if it stresses the thing's attractions, it is chemdah and reads "coveting".

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Deleterious Desires," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 16 Sivan 5777 (2017-06-10): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/7292-deleterious-desires.md. Primary loci the article cites: Bamidbar 11:4 and 11:10 with Chazal's reading of "family matters"; Chagigah 11b (chemdah and theft, taavah and arayos); the Vilna Gaon's two-way (taavah / chemdah) and three-way (taavah / chemdah / chefetz) distinctions; Rabbi Pappenheim and Rabbi Mecklenburg on object-derived against subject-derived desire; Malbim on visual stimulus against imagination and on chefetz against ratzon.