In response to your post on vegetarianism, is the Torah asking us to conquer a desire for meat?

The short answer is yes. Actually, that is only one of the behaviors we are to restrain ourselves from doing. Hashem wants us to conquer all desires of the body.

When Hashem (G-d) made humanity (odom or Adam), He stated that mankind would have a specific power over the creatures of the earth. The verb "ridu" is in the plural, so it refers to all humankind, not to some man called Adam who is going to be put in charge of the animal kingdom. This principle of ridu means to make the animal kingdom subservient to man. That does not mean that we use animals as slaves or force them to serve us. Rather, the principle refers to the animal kingdom within a man that man would be able to keep under his control.

Like the fish, we love the water and like to swim in it. Like the birds, we love to fly. Even lions and horses have inspired people. Humanity throughout history in various places has even made these creatures into their gods, just the opposite of making the animals subservient to humanity. One of the reasons we sacrificed animals in The Temple was to make clear to ourselves and to other peoples that animals were not gods but were subservient to us. If they were gods, they would not be dying by our swords just as Abraham’s father’s idols could not resist his hammer that broke them.

Hashem's plan for Adam is to overcome the animal kingdom within himself, within every human being. In part, this was why Hashem did not want the Hebrew people to have a human king. No man should make another man subservient to himself or to others. This is in part the problem with what we call homosexual behavior between men. A man is not allowed to put another man by force into the position of a woman, women being subservient to men in a patriarchy. That includes men of his own position in the community, slaves and children. The Torah never said that homosexuals were evil or bad news or different in the sight of Hashem. The Torah did not even discuss them. The principle was all about power and subservience. This is also why a man should only have one wife and a woman only one husband. No man should treat his wife like anything but his mate. She is not his pet or his servant that he should allow himself to dominate her. Women also must not dominate their husbands.

This is our challenge to become divine-like by having power over all our animal compulsions. That includes resisting eating meat, having power over others, selling our children into slavery (just one way to sacrifice them to our lusts for power or money) treating slaves and debtors badly, and practicing any form of incest that is forbidden in the Torah. It also includes not stealing, murdering or doing any of the other do-not commandments that come later.

To place someone above oneself is to demean oneself and descend spiritually—to become like a beast. That is why someone who wanted to be a slave was to be marked like a beast with a tag attached to his ear. His behavior would not be seen as befitting a human station. This should remind us that free will involves only two choices. We can aspire to divinity or we can descend to the level of the animal kingdom within us, a realm of behavior which is far lower spiritually and behaviorally for humanity than even the animals demonstrate in their behavior.

How bad can we humans be? Consider the flood that Hashem caused in the time of Noach. Whatever men wanted, they took and did, and they thought of everything. There was no restraint at all. Rashi says that the behavior of humanity was rebellious against Hashem's laws and that the heroes of the time, the giborim, gained fame for the scope of their degeneracy. It was not a matter of one law or two but of whatever men could imagine doing. The broadness of their behavior did not exclude any one behavior. They were so bad that it was a mercy to the earth to destroy them. Consider how we behave in the world today, polluting the earth the way we do and hurting each other, committing genocide the way we do. What we eat is the least of our evil, although eating meat is a behavior that increases pollution of the air and water. We humans still do not restrain ourselves as Hashem wants us to do.