What does “Like a dog returns to its vomit, a fool repeats his folly” mean?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau explains Shlomo HaMelech's verse, k'chelev shav al kei'o, k'sil shoneh b'ivalto, as a description of why people keep going back to what hurts them. The fool doesn't repeat his folly “because he wants pain,” he says, but “because he doesn't know who he is without it.”
Chaos has become home, “the only language they really understand and trust.” So when life gets calm, “the mind starts screaming, ‘Something is wrong!’” and the person returns to what is familiar.
As his caption puts it, not out of desire for pain, but out of comfort with it. And the way out, he says, is a decision: “the moment you decide you deserve peace, the war ends.”
Related concepts: The struggle is the life · Selfawareness
In A Soul at Peace: The Fear of Peace
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
The fool returns to his folly out of familiarity, not desire for pain.
What may be behind it
Why go back after already being burned?
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that he goes back not because he loves pain, but because the struggle is his home.
Deepest human truth
Deciding you deserve peace ends the war.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Boundaries, Healing, and Emotional Resilience · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz