Rabbi Gidel was a sage of the third century CE, a disciple of Rav in Babylonia, known for his rigor in halakhah. He also had a peculiar habit. He used to sit at the door of the women's mikveh, the ritual bath, and quietly instruct the women as they entered and exited about the correct way to perform immersion for the sake of ritual purity. He was, in modern terms, offering free halakhic consultation at the door.
Another rabbi, Tabillath, found this extraordinary and confronted him. How can you sit there, he asked, at the door of a women's bathhouse, watching them come in and out, and not be overcome with temptation? Are you not a human being? Do you feel nothing?
Rabbi Gidel gave an answer that startled the rabbinic world and ended up preserved in the Talmud. They are to me as so many white geese, he said. Meaning his awareness had been trained to such a level that he no longer registered the women at the bathhouse door as sexual beings. He saw them, instead, as fellow Jews performing a mitzvah, and he was helping them do it correctly. He felt about them roughly the way he felt about a flock of domestic birds in a barnyard.
The Talmud does not necessarily endorse this as a model for every rabbi. Rashi notes that a lesser man who tried to imitate Rabbi Gidel would likely fail and cause scandal. This is the attainment of a particular kind of saint, not a policy for ordinary people. But the rabbis preserved the line because it captured something real about the transformation of desire through long spiritual training. What is molten in one generation becomes cold stone in another.
This exchange from tractate Berakhot 20a, preserved in The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), teaches a stern lesson about discipline and a gentler one about self-knowledge. Most of us cannot stand at the door of that bathhouse. And that is precisely the information we need.