Likkutei Amarim Tanya - Chapter 1 - Part 6

00:00 We’re on page nineteen—page 5b. Sorry, page ten. Ten. Page 5b, at the colon before “But to explain the matter.” Here the Alter Rebbe has raised various questions from teachings of our Sages. The point is that the Alter Rebbe wanted to demonstrate, even according to the revealed dimension of Torah, that being a beinoni is not just a matter of conduct. A beinoni does not simply mean someone whose deeds are half good and half bad, with half merits and half sins. That isn’t right. In fact, even one transgression makes a person a rasha. Rather, a beinoni is someone whose thought, speech, and action are impeccable. So we have to say that the distinction between a beinoni, a tzaddik who has good, and a tzaddik who has bad—all these levels—is not a distinction in conduct. It is an inner distinction. Even a beinoni has no transgressions at all, and yet he is called only a beinoni. So that’s where we have to look. Up to this point, the Rebbe wants to show, even according to the revealed dimension of Torah, that we cannot say all the levels mentioned in the Gemara relate only to actual deeds: more mitzvos, more transgressions, fewer mitzvos, fewer transgressions. Here we have three levels—a beinoni, a tzaddik who has good, and a tzaddik who has bad—and none of them has any transgressions. They have only mitzvos, yet one is called a beinoni, another a tzaddik who has bad, and another a tzaddik who has good. So what distinguishes them? We have to say it is something more internal. This is the foundation of the entire Tanya, and of Chabad Chassidus in general: inner work. Our avodah has to be internal; it isn’t only about what a person does outwardly. In actual practice, a person may behave well, but there is still inner work, which is

02:32 work of the mind and heart. That is where the distinction is made between a beinoni and a tzaddik, or between a tzaddik who has bad and a tzaddik who has good. Here the Alter Rebbe begins his explanation, at the colon on page 5b: “But to explain the matter.” He begins with a general introduction that runs through several chapters. The Alter Rebbe sets out to explain, in broad terms, what goes on inside us—how a person works. He gives a detailed analysis of how a Jew’s soul works. What is a Jew? What is a soul? What is the soul of a Jew, and how does it work? What are the soul’s faculties? What are its garments? What are Torah and mitzvos? In roughly the first nine or ten chapters of Tanya, the Rebbe gives this general introduction, analyzing in detail what a human being is. Before beginning the work, before the Alter Rebbe starts telling us what to do, we first need to understand how a person works. Once we understand that properly, we can begin talking about what to do and how the struggles play out. But first: what is a person? Chassidim would say that the opening chapters of Tanya are about “a person knowing his own soul.” There is such a concept: a person needs to know himself before he begins serving Hashem. Before he starts doing things and learning what to do, he first has to know himself. If he doesn’t know himself or understand what is going on inside him, then he lacks that self-knowledge. A person without it is confused; he doesn’t know what is happening within him. He might perform a mitzvah when, in truth, it is

04:28 a transgression. He might do something he thinks is a transgression when it is a mitzvah. He might be happy when he shouldn’t be, or sad when he shouldn’t be. All kinds of things happen because a person doesn’t know himself or understand how his soul works, so he becomes confused. That is the foundation of the Tanya’s wonderful approach: the Rebbe first spends several chapters explaining exactly what the soul is, what a Jew is, what goes on inside, [unclear], and all these things. Then we can understand how to serve Hashem, what we should be looking for, what should matter to us, and what shouldn’t. For example, a person may have a distracting thought in the middle of davening. Some people become completely upset by that and think it proves there is something seriously wrong with them, that they are entirely beyond help. So the Alter Rebbe explains where that thought comes from. And the same applies to all sorts of other things. A person may become sad; at other times, the opposite happens—he becomes too happy. Or sometimes a person doesn’t attach importance to a particular mitzvah. He thinks, “What difference does it make if I actually perform a mitzvah without feeling anything? Who cares?” Because we lack an understanding of how things work—what is true, what isn’t, what the soul is, and what is expected of us—we make all kinds of mistakes in everyday life. That is why the Alter Rebbe devotes the opening chapters of Tanya to explaining what goes on in a person’s soul, how it works, what a Jew is, and what the life

06:05 of a Jew and its purpose are, and so on. Everything relevant is included, as an introduction to explaining what serving Hashem should be and what the avodah of a beinoni—an ordinary person, each and every one of us—should be. The Alter Rebbe begins: “But to explain the matter, based on what Rabbi Chaim Vital, z”l, wrote in Shaar Hakedushah and in Eitz Chaim, Gate 50, chapter 2.” What did Rabbi Chaim Vital write in the name of the Arizal? It says: “Every Jew, whether righteous or wicked, has two souls.” Every person, both a tzaddik and a rasha, has two souls. In other words, the novel point applies in both directions: even a tzaddik has an animal soul, and even a rasha has a G-dly soul. Everyone has both. That is a major point: there are two souls. And it is written, “And souls I have made.” We learn this from a verse. The verse says, “And souls I have made.” What is the proof from the verse? You could say that “I have made” means Hakadosh Boruch Hu made many souls. Some indeed say this is an asmachta—a supporting allusion, not a conclusive proof—since “souls” is plural. But apparently the point is clear. The Rebbe explains that the beginning of the verse says, “For the spirit before Me shall be enwrapped,” and then it says, “And souls I have made.” It starts in the singular and ends in the plural. So it is clearly not speaking about the Jewish people as a whole. It speaks about each Jew individually: “For the spirit before Me shall be enwrapped.” It speaks of each individual soul in the singular, and afterward says “souls.” Each person has souls; Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave him two souls. So we see that every Jew has two souls—“And souls I have made”—which are two nefashos. The Alter Rebbe writes “souls”; that is the wording

08:12 of the verse, “And souls I have made.” But he then says they are two nefashos. Here “souls” means nefashos—life forces, sources of life. What does the Alter Rebbe want to emphasize by calling them two nefashos? Anyone who studies Chassidus knows that neshamah is a very high level. Neshamah relates to binah, to comprehension; it is a high level. It is like the passage from the Zohar quoted in Maaneh Lashon, which is recited at the Ohel: when a person is born, he has a nefesh. If he merits more, he is given a ruach. If he merits still more, he is given a neshamah. In other words, not everyone receives all these levels. A person receives only a nefesh at first. When he refines himself, he reaches the level of ruach; when he refines himself further, he reaches the level of neshamah. That is regarding the G-dly soul—if he merits it. The same applies to the animal soul. Not every person necessarily has all the levels of the animal soul in their full development. There is an animal nefesh, an animal ruach, and an animal neshamah. Here the Alter Rebbe wants to emphasize what everyone has. What everyone must have is the level of nefesh. That is what we mean when we say everyone has a nefesh: the life force. Ruach relates to middos, the emotions of the heart. Ruach—yes? Ruach relates to middos, to the emotions of the heart. In the G-dly soul, middos means love and awe; in the animal soul, it means love of [unclear]. Not everyone necessarily has that—not in the soul, not anywhere. Some do, and some don’t. Some have

10:01 This exists on the side of holiness, and it exists on the side of kelipah. The same is true of the neshamah, which involves understanding. Some people have an understanding of G-dliness; others have an understanding of worldly matters. But what everyone must have is the level of nefesh. Nefesh means life-force, and every single person has two souls. But seemingly the Alter Rebbe is introducing something new here. What is he introducing? He cites Shaar Hakedushah. After all, earlier in the chapter the Alter Rebbe himself cited the Gemara’s teaching that there is a yetzer tov and a yetzer hara. He brought it from the Gemara in Berachos—yes, the end of chapter nine. It says that every person has a yetzer tov and a yetzer hara: some are judged by the yetzer tov, some by the yetzer hara, and some by both. It’s written in the Gemara. So what is Rabbi Chaim Vital adding? What does the Alter Rebbe cite here in Rabbi Chaim Vital’s name that isn’t in the Gemara? We see two main differences between the Gemara and Rabbi Chaim Vital. The first is simply the name. In the Gemara they are called the yetzer tov and the yetzer hara. Here in Tanya, citing the Arizal, they aren’t called inclinations; they’re called souls. That isn’t a small difference. It isn’t just a difference in terminology. It changes the whole meaning. Chassidus, based on Kabbalah, gives them a new name. They aren’t the yetzer tov and the yetzer hara; they are the G-dly soul and the animal soul. That is a very big difference. The second difference is that, regarding the yetzer tov and yetzer hara, the Gemara explicitly says that not everyone has both. The righteous are judged only by the yetzer tov; the wicked, only by the yetzer hara; and the beinonim have both. Here, by contrast, the Alter Rebbe says

12:07 explicitly that everyone has both souls, whether righteous or wicked. What becomes clear here? Really, it comes down to one word. Here lies the whole remarkable insight the Alter Rebbe introduced on the foundation of Kabbalah—the remarkable insight of the inner dimension of Torah, which reveals the inner dimension of everything. When we say “yetzer tov” and “yetzer hara,” we’re speaking only about what the inclinations do. An inclination is a force that pulls a person toward certain things. It paints pictures for him—bad pictures—and draws him toward bad things. That’s the yetzer hara. The yetzer tov is the force that draws him toward good things. In other words, when I say “yetzer tov” and “yetzer hara,” I’m speaking only about the active force of the two souls, the force that brings them into action. There is an active force called the yetzer hara. It is like an offshoot, a branch of the animal soul, whose job is to work on behalf of the animal soul. It paints the pictures. Chassidus alludes to the connection between yetzer, inclination, and tziur, a picture. The yetzer hara paints bad pictures. It puts all kinds of unpleasant images into our heads, images of this world’s pleasures—bad pictures—and that makes us chase after worldly things. That is the inclination that pulls us toward evil. The yetzer tov is the active force on the side of the G-dly soul. It shows a person the beauty of G-dliness, of serving Hashem—how good it is to be a Chassidic Jew, and so on. It paints him a good picture and draws him toward good. That, generally speaking, is the yetzer tov and the yetzer hara. Until the inner dimension of Torah was revealed, that was what people knew: every person has a yetzer tov and a yetzer hara. How did they understand it, then? They understood that, as far as life-force, as far as the soul was concerned,

14:24 there was only one soul. And was that soul good or bad? Neither good nor bad—something neutral. Every person has a soul. That soul gives life to the body, and it is neither bad nor good. It is neither kelipah nor holiness. It’s a soul. Life is natural; the person is alive. Then he has an inclination: the active force that pulls him toward evil is the yetzer hara, and he has an inclination that pushes him toward good—the yetzer tov. The Alter Rebbe came here and, building on this, explained something new. What did he reveal? That there are actually two souls. Every Jew has two kinds of life. One kind of life is called... In a moment we’ll learn inside what the difference between them is. It’s an enormous difference. There is the life of the animal soul, a particular kind of life. That’s the difference. It isn’t just a matter of the pictures it paints or the actions it brings about. The difference lies in its entire essence. It’s a completely different essence. A Jewish person is divided into two essential realities, two fundamental aspects. He has one form of life connected to the side of kelipah, and another form of life connected to the side of holiness. It’s an entirely different life-force, and the first isn’t necessarily evil. It can even be good, but it has its own essence. There is an essence of kelipah and an essence of holiness. In a moment we’ll look at this more closely inside, and we’ll understand the difference and how far it reaches in practice. But in any case, the first difference we see is already in the name: this name describes a different, inner essence. There are two souls, two kinds of life—life on the side of holiness and life on the side of kelipah. Every Jew has both kinds of life, two souls that everyone possesses. And from what we’ve explained—that nefesh has to do with

16:18 life—we can understand why everyone, both the righteous and the wicked, has both souls. If we speak of an inclination, that means something that paints a picture of evil or a picture of good: a yetzer tov and a yetzer hara. So it makes sense that a person who reaches the level of a tzaddik no longer has a yetzer hara. As we said earlier about someone who says he has no yetzer hara: in Tanya too, his yetzer hara is gone. He has no image of evil and no attraction to it whatsoever. With a wicked person it’s the reverse: he has no yetzer tov. He is so wholly given over to evil that his yetzer tov is, in effect, dead. Such a situation is possible. But if we’re talking about a soul that is a source of life, then it follows that even a tzaddik has the life of the animal soul, and conversely, even a wicked person has the life of the G-dly soul. What does that mean? Even a tzaddik, whose whole being is bound up with G-dliness and all that, ultimately has a body that needs to be kept alive. The G-dly soul is too spiritual to give life to the physical body. So even the greatest tzaddik must also have a vital soul. He cannot have only a G-dly soul. The G-dly soul is too exalted, too spiritual, too holy and too lofty to enter and give life to a physical body. So even a tzaddik must have two souls. The second soul is the vital soul, which enters the body and gives it life. It’s just that, of course, in a tzaddik the vital soul is entirely a vessel for the G-dly soul. It has no sense of itself, no desires of its own. It is completely nullified. But he has two souls.

18:12 The tzaddik has a G-dly soul. He also has a vital, animal soul, but he has transformed it into good, and the G-dly soul enters the animal soul and gives life to the body. With a wicked person it’s the opposite. His primary essence is the animal soul. He has animalistic desires and so on, but he also has a G-dly soul—a life of holiness. The Rebbe will explain this later. This is one of the main points, one of the new ideas the Alter Rebbe is teaching us here in Tanya: we must know that we have two souls. Every one of us, every Jew, has two kinds of life. Just as we say there are animals, trees and inanimate things, and each has its own soul, what distinguishes an animal from a human being? The soul. One has the soul of an animal, and the other has the soul of a human being. A soul is a life-force; it gives rise to a different essence. It isn’t just a difference in details. No one would say that the only difference between a human being and an animal is that one walks on two legs and the other on four. The difference between a human being and an animal is an essential difference. It’s an entirely different essence. It’s a matter of life: one kind of life belongs to an animal, and another kind belongs to a human being. It’s a completely different kind of life. So what did Chassidus reveal? That every Jew has two kinds of life. A Jew’s being has two aspects: the life of the animal soul, like every human being, like an animal and like a non-Jew—though there are differences here too, as I’ll explain later—and another kind of life, the life of G-dliness. These are two souls, two kinds of life. By the way, chassidim tell a story about—what was his name?—Aristotle. Aristotle was one of the Greek philosophers. They tell that he had

20:07 Once, he gave a class on the study of animals. It’s called, it’s called zoology. What do they call it? Zoology, zoology. It explains the different kinds of animals, how they function, what each one does, what its characteristics are, and the differences between them. So he went through the various kinds of animals—domestic animals, wild animals, birds, and fish—and explained the differences between them. When he got to human beings, he said that a human being is an animal belonging to the family of birds and chickens. Why? Because he has two legs. They both have two legs. So he said a human being belongs to that family, something like that. Except that he also has the faculty of intellect, or something like that. I don’t remember the details of the story. I just remember that they say one of the students took a rooster and plucked its feathers. Ah, he had said that a human being is like a rooster, except for certain differences: one has feathers and the other doesn’t. And he listed the differences between a rooster and a human being. So the student took a rooster, removed its wings, put a hat on it, brought it up there, and said, “Here’s your human being. This is the human being.” He was saying that all the differences were just things you could add or remove. It’s a rooster—there you have it, call it a human being. What does that mean? It means looking at a human being as an animal that happens to walk on two legs. But the truth is that a human being is an entirely different kind of being. It isn’t just a difference in outward form. It’s something completely different. This one is an animal, and this one speaks. It’s an entirely different kind of being. And now we come to a Jew. What the Alter Rebbe revealed, what the Alter Rebbe brought into this, is that a Jew has

22:24 two aspects in his very essence, [unclear] two foundations of life, the life of the intellect [unclear]. Now we’ll learn inside what that means. The Alter Rebbe says as follows: “One soul derives from kelipah and the sitra achra.” We say that every Jew has two souls. So first of all, the Alter Rebbe—first of all. You’re selling books over there, are you? So the Alter Rebbe says that every Jew has two souls, and the first soul is the animal soul, which derives from kelipah and the sitra achra. The first soul comes from kelipah and the sitra achra. What is kelipah? Everyone knows what kelipah is. Yes, everyone learns what kelipah means. It’s actually very interesting how students usually explain it. Kelipah means that, just as in the physical world a peel covers the fruit, so too in this world there are things that conceal G-dliness. Anything that hides and conceals G-dliness, the truth, is like a peel that conceals the fruit. There’s fruit inside, but you can’t see it from the outside. In that sense, we call our whole world kelipos. Everything in the world is a kelipah. What does that mean? It conceals the truth; it conceals G-dliness. You look at it and see something separate. That’s what kelipah means. The Rebbe Rashab brings up another interesting point about kelipah. What is a kelipah? It has no moisture. It’s something dry. When we speak of a kelipah, we generally mean the shell of a nut. A walnut shell has no moisture; it’s dry. And in the walnut itself, you can see that there are four layers of shell. The walnut’s covering is divided into four. Have you ever seen a walnut when it’s taken from the tree?

24:53 When it grows on the tree? We know walnuts as they look when we buy them in a store. But on the tree, the walnut grows inside a casing. There are these casings. A green casing grows on the tree, and inside it grow several walnuts. That casing is the outermost covering. Then there’s the walnut’s own hard shell. When you crack the walnut, there’s another covering. Yes, inside, between the hard shell and the fruit, there’s a softer covering. That’s another kelipah. Then there’s the walnut itself, and even the walnut has a thin skin that you can eat. Yes, that thin brown skin is part of the fruit, but it isn’t the fruit itself; it’s a covering, and you can eat it. People do eat it. Some people prefer to remove it and not eat it. Yes. So the Rebbe explains that these things are an analogy for what the sefer says about the three impure kelipos and kelipas nogah. They have no moisture. Moisture indicates G-dliness; moisture shows that something has life in it, G-dly life. The kelipos, as it were, have no moisture: you don’t see G-dliness in them at all. The three coverings that aren’t eaten correspond to the three impure kelipos, while the thin skin corresponds to kelipas nogah. That’s why it can be eaten: it’s kelipas nogah, something that can be elevated to holiness. In any case, what is the Alter Rebbe saying here? One soul comes from kelipah and the sitra achra. What is sitra achra? Sitra achra means “the other side.” The other side isn’t necessarily evil. It’s the side that isn’t nullified to G-dliness, that isn’t openly holy. That’s called sitra achra.

26:58 The Alter Rebbe will explain this later, in chapter 6. Sitra achra—anything that isn’t nullified to G-dliness is called sitra achra. “And it is clothed in the blood of a person, giving life to the body.” The Alter Rebbe says that this soul, which comes from kelipah, is clothed in the blood and gives life to the body, as it is written: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.” The soul of the flesh, this soul, is clothed in the blood and gives life to the body, “and from it come all the evil character traits.” Evil traits come from it as well. But what’s the first thing the Alter Rebbe says here? When I start talking, it gets late already. In any case, what we need to understand here—and we’ll leave it for the next class—is this: Why is the soul’s giving life to the body considered part of kelipah? Why? Why is the fact that a person is alive called kelipah? I can understand why the Alter Rebbe says that evil traits belong to kelipah. But why does he say that the soul’s clothing itself in the body to give it life is part of kelipah and the sitra achra? A person being alive—that’s kelipah? Sitra achra? Why? Why should a person’s being alive have to be kelipah and sitra achra? Why does this matter of the soul giving life to the body come from kelipah and the sitra achra? What’s strange about living? Living is kelipah? Living is sitra achra? What does that mean? So let’s continue in the next class. There was just one mistake I made in the previous class, and I want to correct it now that everyone is here. Yes, it was my mistake. In explaining the Tanya, I said that the Rebbe had corrected the words “and my heart is hollow within me.” I said it had read “a dead hollow space,” and the Rebbe crossed that out and wrote that it should be “an empty hollow space.” But the story was actually the other way around. That’s what it says in the lesson in the Tanya. Yes, the story was

28:52 the other way around. It had read “an empty hollow space,” and the Rebbe crossed out “empty” and wrote “dead.” Yes, so that’s what actually happened. Is that how we learn it in Tanya? The question is the other way around: Is that how it’s explained in Tanya? It’s simply an embarrassing mistake. So if you remember what we discussed, please correct that mistake now. Yes.