We know that people do not value things that come easily. This is especially true when it comes to people — villains like Andrew Tate coldly manipulate women in order to pimp them out. To Tate, a woman is not an object of love. She is instead merely a potential source of revenue.

Tate is in good company in human history. The Torah tells us that a king should not acquire too many wives, because “it will remove his heart.” When we commoditize other people, we become heartless. Or as Gasset (channeling Balzac and Kierkegaard) is credited as saying: “He who loves one woman has known them all. He who loves many women has known none.”

I find a wealth of wisdom in this aphorism. A man who is truly and deeply in love with one woman will, over the course of their lifetime, come to know all women. But the people I know who are opportunistic philanderers (or worse) have only a shallow understanding of the fairer sex. Women who are in the position of merely trying to gain the attention of a man do not reveal their depth or complexity: they are selling what the men want to procure, nothing more or less. And, over time and experience, they become nothing more or less than what they sell. The corruption of the man, of an Andrew Tate, is also a corruption in the women he has manipulated.

This is of fundamental importance for today’s diseased society. We know that the more sexual partners a person has, the less likely they are to have deep and fulfilling relationships of all kinds.  But with the aid of contraception and the rise of libertinism, people have tried to divorce what they do with their bodies, with the impact that those acts have on their souls — and the rest of their lives. The short-term expediency of scratching an itch still comes with a lifetime of consequences, even if those consequences no longer necessarily result in pregnancy or incurable STDs.

The example of the king with the removed heart is misunderstood generally, as translators work backward from King Solomon. Solomon was known for having a thousand wives, and we know he married in part for political alliances, which meant he married non-Jewish outsiders who brought idol worship with them. So translators of the verse read backward from Solomon, and translate the text as “And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray.” The assumption is that women somehow steer us away from G-d. But this is not what happened to Solomon — indeed, it is not even what the text is saying!

This is because the word for “go astray” is actually much more commonly used in the text to mean “remove.” So, for example:

when Noah removed the covering of the ark, he saw that the surface of the ground was drying. 

Similarly, Jacob removed the spotted and speckled sheep from the flock, as well as urging his family to remove the idols they possessed, before he went back to Bethel.

This is what an Andrew Tate or a king with too many wives does: he removes his heart, leaving man controlled only by his most basic animalistic tendencies. Such a man does not love: he uses. And all for the purpose of pursuing, pardon me, his naked self-interest.

There is the other facet to this word translated above as remove, the word that translators generally conclude means to “go astray.” In the text, this word also is used to mean “turn” – though not necessarily in the wrong direction. Instead, the word consistently refers to a life-changing, irrevocable change in the person: the angels with Avraham; Tamar changing her garments before and after meeting with Judah her father-in-law; Pharoah giving Joseph his signet ring; Moses turning aside to see the burning bush. Once a person “turns” there is no turning back.

Hence the Torah warns us: if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods…

Both meanings work to understand what happens to a king’s heart when he acquires many wives. We can understand that in some sense, a king who has many wives has symbolically removed his heart. That is also a form of categorical transformation: from loving to cynical, from investing in relationships to superficial.

And how can having many wives not make one cynical? The more wives a man has, the more the parts of a relationship that are meant to be intimate and confidential become commoditized. And the less likely he is to delve into the intrigue and mystery and romance in a single relationship. A man with too many wives no longer bothers to invest in any relationship. So while he may love many women, he knows none of them.

Women in that situation are devalued and stripped of their power and dignity. While a normal married man seeks a relationship with his wife, once a man has more than one wife, the tables have turned: the women seek his affection and time, not the other way around. Even Rachel and Leah barter for Jacob’s marital affections!

They are cheapened by it, but so is Jacob: he becomes colder toward them both (his response to a Rachel who pleads: Come-now, [give] me children! If not, I will die!

But Jacob has more than one wife. And so he is comfortable responding, “Am I in place of God, who has denied you fruit of the belly?”

The power imbalance uncovers his heart. It perverts the way men are supposed to see women. Because we devalue the things that come easily.

We can see all around us what happens when men truly devalue women, treating them as baubles to be flaunted. In the most primitive, male-dominated environment, the woman is seen as nothing more or less than the sign of a man’s power — which is why certain men parade their wives around naked, like King Ahashverosh tried to do to Vashti in the Book of Esther.

The more a man openly flaunts his woman, the less interested his heart is invested in the woman herself as opposed to how others see her. A man who treats his wife in this way does not understand what relationships are supposed to be. A man like that does not even know how to begin to love another person properly.

Which is problematic as a life story as well. A king should treat his people writ large as he treats the people he knows best. So a removed/turned heart has national as well as personal repercussions. A king who does not treat his own family as individuals is surely incapable of doing any better with his people.

There is at least a symbolic connection with our relationship with G-d: we want G-d to treat each of us as an individual, not a mere commodity. The least we can do is to model that same behavior ourselves.