The Perfect Piña Colada (Doesn't Exist)

Originally posted in September 2009

The Experience

We recently came back from a trip to Hawaii. It was a short trip, but I managed to get in some solid relaxation time on the beach. On one particularly beautiful day I saw people walking around sipping piña coladas from hollowed out pineapple shells, like the one in this picture. It was such a hot and sunny day and those piña coladas looked so cool and refreshing that I decided to buy one for myself. 
I went over to the bar and asked how much a piña colada costs. The bartender responded, "$13". My first reaction was "!!!" but then I told myself, "What the heck. I'm on vacation," and placed my order. He handed me my cocktail and I eagerly went back to my beach chair to enjoy it. 
It was the perfect piña colada ... for about 30 seconds. Then reality kicked in. 
First of all, the thing was massive. Technically speaking I could hold it in one hand, but it was so big and unwieldy that I was afraid I would drop it, so I held it with both hands instead. This severely compromised my bodily position, making it difficulty to recline in my beach chair and drink at the same time. I was forced to hunch forward in my chair while holding the pineapple in both hands. So much for the drinking-while-luxuriating.
Shortly thereafter I began to get annoyed by the freezing temperature of the shell. You see, it would be inefficient to hollow out a fresh pineapple on the spot for every customer, so instead, all of the pineapple shells are hollowed out ahead of time and then frozen until an order is placed. When I first got my piña colada, the pineapple shell was actually encrusted with ice. This made my grip even harder to tolerate.
Then the pineapple started to thaw. If I were drinking from an ordinary glass, I would just get a little bit of condensation-water on my hands, which wouldn't be a big deal, but this was not an ordinary glass; it was a natural fruit co-opted for an unnatural purpose. As the shell thawed, the pineapple juice began dripping onto my hands. That alone wouldn't have been so bad, but as it continued to thaw, the juice ran down my arms, reaching my elbows and quickly drying into a sticky residue.
That wasn't the only ill effect of the melting fruit. As I continued to sip the piña colada, I started to detect the taste of old, freezer-burned pineapple. Apparently, these fruits were not frozen that morning, but were prepared days or weeks in advance. I suddenly realized that the thawing pineapple put me on a clock: the slower I drank, the more my piña colada would be polluted by freezer-taste, but the faster I drank, the less I would enjoy it. It was a lose-lose situation.
Then there was the act of drinking, itself. If I were drinking from an ordinary glass, a straw would have facilitated drinking, but this was not an ordinary glass. The bottom of the hollowed-out pineapple shell was uneven and chunky with shredded pineapple flesh. As I got towards the bottom of my drink, my straw started to get clogged by strands of pineapple, making it necessary for me to periodically cleanse my straw by forcefully and repeatedly expelling air. This became a task in and of itself: to maximize the liquid intake and minimize the pineapple blockage in each sip. Eventually, I realized that I was so caught up in the tedium of this chore that I wasn't even enjoying my drink anymore; I become so preoccupied with the means of drinking that the end became meaningless.
Finally, after resigning myself to the fact that it wasn't worth it to try to get the rest of the liquid, I decided that I was done. But could I then sit back in my chair and resume my relaxation? No sir. My hands and arms were covered with sticky pineapple juice, remember? I had to go and find water to wash them off. As I got and tossed the emptied shell into the trash, I kept on asking myself, "Was this worth $13?"
The Insight

Later on that day, I remembered the piña colada ordeal and decided to reflect on it to see what I could learn from the experience. I recalled the Rambam's definition of imagination (koach ha'dimayon or "the imaginative faculty") as stated in the first chapter of Shemoneh Perakim: 

The imagination encompasses the capacity to retain impressions of sensory experiences when they have vanished from the senses involved, and to combine some and separate others. It is the capacity that enables a person to combine certain experiences he has had along with others he never had nor ever could grasp - for example, to imagine an iron ship sailing [translator's note: sailing, not flying!] in the air, or an individual whose head is in the heavens while his feet are on the ground, or an animal with a thousand eyes, as well as many other such impossible things that are remembered when the imagination combines things and produces a fantasy.

Rabbi Yoni Sacks once compared the imaginative faculty to computer imaging software, like Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop allows you to take an image and manipulate it at will. You can turn it this way and that. You can crop the image, blocking out the parts you don't want to see. You can enlarge one part and make the image sharper while diminishing and blurring another part. You can even import other images from your memory and combine those images with this one to produce new creations. But unlike the images edited on Photoshop, which we know to be false, the images produced by our imaginative faculty can seem very real - so real, that we often mistake them for reality itself.

My experience with the piña colada - well, I should say, my fantasy of the piña colada prior to the actual experience - is a perfect example of the imaginative faculty in action. Rewind to beginning of the story. There I was, happily relaxing in the sun, when I saw people drinking piña coladas out of pineapple shells. These sense impressions were recorded and preserved in my memory as raw material for my imaginative faculty, which then proceeded to select only those images which I found pleasing, ignoring the unpleasant details. My imagination conjured up a tantalizing fantasy, in which I was the one relaxing and sipping my piña colada - an experience which, in my fantasy-world, only enhanced my relaxation without adding any pain or conflict.
But this fantasy was just that: a fantasy - a nonexistent product of the imagination. Had I subjected this fantasy (or the initial sensory data) to the light of reason, I could have easily detected the inevitable, unpleasant aspects of purchasing the piña colada. I could have foreseen the consequences of the decision, weighed them against the pleasure to be gained, and made an informed, reality-based decision. [I'm not saying that the decision to buy the piña colada was intrinsically bad. I might have even concluded that the piña colada would have been worth it, but I would have at least known what I was getting myself into: that in paying $13 for a tasty drink, I was also buying the experience of cold fingers, sticky hands, a frustrating straw, and a time-limit on my enjoyment.]
The Principle

What is true for piña coladas is true for all pleasures. Human beings are driven to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. The Rishonim refer to the source of this drive as the koach ha'misorer ("the emotive faculty) or the koach ha'misaveh ("the appetitive faculty"). If the appetitive faculty only drove us to seek real pleasures, that would be difficult enough to contend with. Unfortunately, most of the pleasures we seek are not really existing experiences, but fantasies - figments of our imagination. Not only do these fantasies greatly exaggerate the amount of pleasure to be gained, but they gloss over all of the painful details and harmful consequences and present the imagined experience as flawless, as my piña colada fantasy illustrates.
At the same time, we mustn't forget that the imaginative faculty is not intrinsically bad, and that without our imagination, the pursuit of human perfection would be impossible. The imaginative faculty is what allows us to recall sensory data which we can analyze in order to gain knowledge and understanding. Without the imaginative faculty, learning would be impossible; the rational faculty would have nothing to work with. Without the imaginative faculty I would not have been able to learn anything from the piña colada episode. I would have had the experience and immediately forgotten it. The same imaginative faculty which produced the fantasies that led me away from reality also functioned as a tool used by my mind to gain insight into reality.
The Ralbag summarizes all of these points in his introduction to the story of Gan Eden:

It has already been explained in On the Soul (3:7) that the imaginative faculty and the emotive faculty are the causes of motion in animals, be it moving towards an object or away from it. This occurs when the imaginative faculty generates a certain image of a perceptible thing, which causes the appetitive faculty to move the animal towards this image or to flee from it. Since it is in this manner that a person can be drawn after the physical pleasures, which remove him from his proper course of human development, the appetitive faculty is the yetzer ha’ra ("evil inclination"), and the imaginative faculty is its guide. It is therefore clear that the imaginative faculty can function in two separate frameworks: either as an instrument utilized in man’s development, or as an instrument which removes him from his path of proper development.

Sforno (Bereishis 3:1), citing a pithy allegory of the Sages, explains this idea in reference to the nachash (snake) in Gan Eden: 

"The Satan, the yetzer ha'ra, [and the malach ha'maves] are one and the same" (Bava Basra 16a) ... The yetzer ha'ra which causes one to sin is called "nachash," since it resembles a snake, which yields minimal benefit, causes great harm, and is almost completely unseen. The Sages said that Samael rides on top of it (Pirkei de'Rebbi Eliezer 12). [In other words,] the appetitive faculty causes one to sin by means of the imaginative faculty, which incites it with fantasies of physical pleasures, causing one to deviate from the path of perfection intended by God, Blessed is He. The appetitive faculty, along with the fantasies of physical pleasures which incite it, commands the bodily powers and causes them to stray from the objective and from the will of God, Blessed is He, unless the rational faculty stands firm against it and opposes it. Accordingly, the Sages say, "The eyes and the heart are the agents of sin" (Talmud Yerushalmi, Berachos 1:8). Concerning this, the Torah warns us, "And you shall not stray after your hearts and after your eyes" (Bamidbar 15:39).

The Sages refer to the imaginative faculty as "Samael" (suma + El) - that which blinds us to God's reality, or deceives us into believing that God is blind. The snake-like appetitive faculty, or yetzer ha'ra, is allegorically described as a nachash. Samael rides on top of the nachash and steers it in its pleasure-seeking with alluring fantasies. Together, they cause us to sin. The internal forces which moved me to seek out that piña colada are the same forces which cause all sin.

So in the end, considering all of the insight I gained, was the piña colada worth the $13? You bet. Every cent, and infinitely more.