Likkutei Amarim Tanya - Chapter 1 - Part 8

00:02 Speaker 1 We’re talking here about the character traits. So in the previous class we reached the laziness and sadness associated with earth. I couldn’t remember what it was; I said there were two explanations. We discussed why laziness and sadness are connected with earth. I said there were two explanations, but in fact, in the end we explained only one. The explanation we gave in the previous class was that earth has a heaviness to it, that it is drawn downward, and that is essentially laziness and sadness. They have a natural heaviness, the opposite of energy, doing things, and taking action. The second explanation found in Chassidus for why laziness and sadness are associated with earth is that earth is where things grow: it is the source from which all things grow. It says there, “Everything came from the earth.” Just as in holiness everything came from the earth, and there is an aspect of holy earth, which is bittul, there is also earth of kelipah, which is the source of all kinds of evil. That is the idea of sadness, the trait of laziness and sadness: it comes from earth, the foundation from which all the problems in serving Hashem grow. When a person reaches a state of despair and sadness, that is where all the other problems come from. As the Alter Rebbe explains in Tanya, chapter 26, when a person feels sad—even when the sadness is sometimes over a sin he committed, meaning that it is sadness about matters of holiness—the Alter Rebbe says in chapter 26 of Tanya, as is well known, that it is a ploy of the yetzer hara. It is a ploy of the yetzer hara to bring him down afterward into desires. In other words, the yetzer hara takes a person and instills sadness in him, and through that sadness, through his becoming sad and despairing of himself, he will afterward fall into all the bad character traits and all the desires. We see plainly that sadness leads to every kind of evil, and that is another reason it is connected with earth. Just as earth makes all kinds of things grow, so too

02:21 Speaker 1 sadness is what all the problems and all the bad things that come afterward grow from. In kelipah, this is called, in the language of Chassidus, “the trampled threshold.” It is discussed in the maamarim, particularly in [unclear]. There is something in Chassidus called the trampled threshold. The trampled threshold is like the threshold of a doorway. When you enter through a door, there is a threshold there. It is the place people step on, where your foot steps as you go in through the door of—I don’t know what you call it—a casino. Huh? So there’s the threshold. What do you call it? There is the trampled threshold, and everyone steps on it. Similarly, the yetzer hara has this matter of sadness, and sadness is called the trampled threshold. In short, it’s called a floor rag. He feels like a rag, like he is nothing, and so all the kelipos trample on him. When a person becomes sad, he feels that he is nothing, that he is a zero. [unclear] And so it’s no problem: all the other kelipos come and trample on him, use him, and do whatever they want with him. That is where all the troubles we see, G-d forbid, in matters of serving Hashem come from. So that is another reason laziness and sadness are connected with the element of earth. But the Alter Rebbe says that all of this comes from it. It all stems from this animal soul. Now he continues with a third point. We have already mentioned two things that come from the animal soul, from kelipah. First, a sense of self comes from it. The fact that a person lives with a feeling of himself, that he exists, that he is an entity—that is kelipah; that is the root of everything. Then the second point was the bad character traits that come from it. They emerge from that feeling of “I,” that sense of self, and from it stem all the bad character traits he has just discussed.

04:30 Speaker 1 And now the Alter Rebbe comes to the third point and says: “And also,” says the Alter Rebbe, “the good character traits that are in the nature of every Jew, such as compassion and acts of kindness, come from it.” The good character traits that a Jew has naturally also come from the animal soul. That is already a very great novelty, yes: even when a person has a good character trait, it does not necessarily come from the G-dly soul. A good character trait can also be in the animal soul. That is why they used to say—a person can live, as was said many times in a sicha, a person can live for seventy years and never serve Hashem. A Jew who observes Torah and mitzvos and does everything according to halachah can live seventy years and never have served Hashem. Even if he does acts of kindness and helps everyone, it can come from the nature of his animal soul. Yes. In other words, it does not necessarily come from holiness; it can also come from kelipah. The Alter Rebbe says here: “And also the good character traits that are in the nature of every Jew”—traits a Jew has by nature—“such as compassion and acts of kindness.” The Gemara says there are three distinguishing signs of this nation. Jews have three signs: they are compassionate, they do acts of kindness, and they are modest. These are traits a Jew has by nature. And these too, the Alter Rebbe says, come from it. They too stem from the animal soul. Why? Because in Jews, this soul of kelipah comes from kelipas nogah. In Jews, this kelipah is kelipas nogah, which also contains good. We say that the animal soul comes from kelipah. But which kelipah? Not just any kelipah,

06:38 Speaker 1 but kelipas nogah, which also contains good. Good is mixed into kelipas nogah, and it comes from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Kelipas nogah is connected with the Tree of Knowledge. Before the Tree of Knowledge, evil and good were separate. When Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world, He also created evil. “He forms light and creates evil.” In the prayers we say, “creates everything,” but the verse says, “He forms light and creates evil.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu created evil from the outset, but He created it separately. He created holiness on one side and evil on the other; He created them separately. Then Adam HaRishon came, and through the sin he brought about the mixture. He mixed good and evil, and since the Tree of Knowledge, there is no good without evil and no evil without good. Good and evil do not exist separately in the world. They are always mixed together, and this came about through nogah. You see evil in a person’s nature, and a Jew’s animal soul comes from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. So it is not only evil; it also contains good, and consequently good character traits are also present in the animal soul. In other words, what is the whole explanation here? When we say that good character traits also come from the animal soul, that the good traits in a Jew’s nature come from the animal soul, it is connected with something explained in Chassidus. This too is a fundamental point in Chassidus: a Jew may do good things in serving Hashem, but if he does them because of his nature, then he is not serving Hashem. A person can do good things because of his nature and not be serving Hashem.

08:32 Speaker 1 Chassidus explains this with two examples. One is Avraham Avinu. It says that Hakadosh Boruch Hu told Avraham Avinu at the Akeidah, “Now I know that you fear G-d.” Chassidus asks: What does “Now I know” mean? Only now, at the Akeidah, when Avraham was 137 years old, did Hashem discover that he feared G-d? What about everything Avraham Avinu had done until then, all the mitzvos and good deeds? Chassidus explains that Avraham Avinu naturally had the trait of love. So it could be that everything he had done until then came from his nature, from his natural love. Avraham had that nature, so until then it was not clear that he was doing it for Hashem. But when the Akeidah came, Hakadosh Boruch Hu told Avraham to do something contrary to his nature. A person who is naturally kind cannot bear the sight of blood; he cannot act with gevurah. Here Hakadosh Boruch Hu came to Avraham and told him to slaughter his son—an act of gevurah within chesed. And Avraham went and did it joyfully. Then it was revealed that “you fear G-d.” In other words, it was then revealed that Avraham did what he did for Hakadosh Boruch Hu. With the same joy with which he did everything in the manner of love, he also did the opposite, an act of gevurah. A second story is also brought in Chassidus along these lines. This second story that Chassidus brings along these lines is the story of... The Gemara tells a very interesting story, a very strange story that is hard to understand at first glance. The Gemara tells of Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma and Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon, two Tannaim. It says that Chanina...

10:16 Speaker 1 Ben Teradyon was one of the Ten Martyrs whom the king had killed, as we read on Yom Kippur. So there was Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon. He had been imprisoned, and they were taking him to be executed. They were going to kill him. He called out to Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma and asked him, “What about my share in the World to Come?” Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma meets Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon. They had imprisoned Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon because he taught Torah publicly. He showed mesirus nefesh to teach Torah publicly, and they imprisoned him. Now they were going to kill him. So he asks Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma, “What about my share in the World to Come? Will I have a share in the World to Come?” Here is a person showing mesirus nefesh to spread and publicize Torah and mitzvos, yet he doubts whether he will have a share in the World to Come. So Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma asks Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon, “Tell me, have you ever done a mitzvah in your life? Did any particular deed come your way? Was there ever a mitzvah you did?” Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon tells him, “Yes, there is one mitzvah I did. Once, some of my own money got mixed up with money for tzedakah, and I took it all and gave it to tzedakah. I didn’t know which money was mine, so I gave it all to tzedakah.” So he told him, “If so, you have a share in the World to Come.” That’s what the Gemara relates. At first glance, the Gemara is impossible to understand. What is going on here? Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon, for all his greatness, is now going to his death with mesirus nefesh, and he has doubts. Chassidus explains that, in contrast to Avraham Avinu, though the point is the same, his natural disposition was one of gevurah. Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon was naturally inclined toward gevurah, so for him, acts of mesirus nefesh were not

12:05 Speaker 1 so difficult, given his natural disposition toward gevurah. He didn’t mind if they killed him. So that was no proof that he was serving Hashem. But when he went and gave away money specifically—when he had his own money, and he was a person naturally inclined toward gevurah, naturally restrained, so he would be particular about his money and so on—he could have found grounds to permit himself to keep it. Instead, he went and gave it all away, against his nature, an act of chessed. That revealed that he served Hashem, that he studied Torah not for his own sake but for Hakadosh Boruch Hu. In other words, sometimes a single act can reveal whether a person serves Hashem or serves himself. Of course, there we are talking about very lofty levels. It’s just an example to give us some understanding of what this means. Here, of course, we are talking about a lower level. The simple meaning is that if a person’s animal soul is naturally inclined toward kindness, that does not necessarily have anything to do with his G-dly soul. He may engage in acts of kindness because that is the nature of his animal soul. His animal soul comes from kelipah, and kelipah does not contain only bad things; it has good things too. So he naturally likes doing good things. He likes helping people; he is drawn to doing good; he likes to do it. He feels compassion for people—he is compassionate by nature. A Jew is naturally compassionate, so he feels compassion for another person. Now people ask here, and all the commentators ask this about the Tanya: Why does the Alter Rebbe mention only the compassionate and those who perform acts of kindness, but not those who are bashful? It’s a well-known question: Why didn’t the Alter Rebbe mention bashfulness? After all, the Gemara says there are three traits in a Jew’s nature. So if the Alter Rebbe wants to mention only some of them, he could mention

13:40 Speaker 1 just one, and leave it at that. Why mention two? If the Alter Rebbe wants to list them all, he should write all three. What is the criterion? Why these two and not the third? Why did the Alter Rebbe take only two from the Gemara and leave out the third?

13:55 Speaker 2 A good trait?

13:55 Speaker 1 Of course it’s a good trait. What’s the question?

13:58 Speaker 2 Huh? It could be a weakness.

14:02 Speaker 1 Bashfulness is a very good trait. It is the opposite of brazenness. Brazenness is a bad trait; its opposite is bashfulness. It’s a little hard to define bashfulness. It doesn’t simply mean that a person is embarrassed to speak in public, or is shy. Bashfulness means that a Jew is ashamed to commit a sin, or is ashamed to act insolently toward someone greater than himself. The opposite of shame, chutzpah, is brazenness. That is what bashfulness means here. A Jew has bashfulness in his nature. It is a kind of natural bittul, a softness, a gentle nature, a nature of bittul and softness, so that he cannot be brazen to someone’s face. It’s like the saying that a person cannot be brazen-faced before his creditor and lie to his face. When a Jew tells a lie, he turns red. He can’t... it’s hard for him. It’s hard for him to lie so brazenly. That’s the sort of thing we mean by bashfulness. It’s a very good trait, and yet the Alter Rebbe does not mention it. There is a wonderful explanation of this from the Rebbe. The Rebbe writes about it in several places. The Rebbe explains that there is actually a contradiction in the Gemara. The Gemara says Jews are bashful by nature. On the other hand, the Gemara says, “The Jewish people are the boldest of the nations.” The Gemara says the Jewish people are the boldest of the nations—brazenness, a naturally bold disposition. A Jew by nature is, on the contrary, bold. “The Jewish people are the boldest of the nations, the dog is the boldest of the animals, and the rooster is the boldest of the birds.” There is also another view about the boldest of the small livestock. The Gemara lists several that are bold. “The Jewish people are the boldest of the nations.” So the Maharsha asks: Isn’t this a contradiction? Here you say the Jewish people are the boldest of the nations, and there you say Jews are bashful. The explanation is that they acquired the trait of bashfulness at the Giving of the Torah. In other words, Jews do not have bashfulness by nature. On the contrary,

16:11 Speaker 1 a Jew is naturally brazen. But at the Giving of the Torah, through the thunder and lightning, as the verse says, “The people saw, trembled, and stood from afar,” the Jews were shaken. It broke their brazenness. The purpose of the thunder and lightning at the Giving of the Torah was to break the brazenness that Jews had by nature, and it gave them a nature of bashfulness and gentleness. “So that His fear will be upon your faces, so that you will not sin.” That is the verse, and that was the trait of bashfulness. In other words, bashfulness is not actually natural to a Jew. On the contrary, they acquired it through the Giving of the Torah. Here, though, the Alter Rebbe is talking about the nature of the animal soul. Bashfulness is not part of the animal soul’s nature. Its nature is to be compassionate and to perform acts of kindness. Bashfulness, by contrast, is not in the nature of the animal soul. It is something they acquired at the Giving of the Torah. The Rebbe explains this similarly in several letters. So the Alter Rebbe’s wording is precise. Every word in Tanya is precise; this is precise too. Why didn’t the Alter Rebbe mention bashfulness? Because it does not belong here, in a discussion of the animal soul. There is another difficulty. Huh? There is another very strong question that all the commentators raise here too, and most leave it unresolved. They ask a very strong question. Here in Tanya, the Alter Rebbe says that the traits found in the nature of every Jew—compassion and kindness—come from the animal soul. But if we look at Igeres Hakodesh, chapter 12, in Tanya, the Alter Rebbe says explicitly about these traits: “It is known that the Jewish people are compassionate and perform acts of kindness by nature, because their souls are drawn from His blessed attributes, in which chessed prevails over the attribute of gevurah.” He is speaking about the G-dly soul: the reason a Jew is naturally compassionate and performs acts of kindness is that the Jew’s soul is drawn from His blessed attributes. He means the G-dly soul, which comes from the attributes

18:16 Speaker 1 of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. And with this whole matter, when you look inside the Tanya there, you see that the Alter Rebbe says that the trait of compassion, which is part of a Jew’s nature, belongs to the G-dly soul. It seems to directly contradict what it says here. In several places, the question is left unresolved. The Rebbe resolves it in a few ways. According to at least one of the Rebbe’s explanations, there is no contradiction: there, the Alter Rebbe is speaking... In fact, these traits—a Jew’s compassion and kindness—are present in both souls. They are present in the G-dly soul and in the animal soul. What the Alter Rebbe emphasizes there is a different point. In Igeres Hakodesh, he emphasizes that for a Jew, because the G-dly soul comes from the attribute of kindness, kindness is stronger than severity. That is what the Alter Rebbe is discussing there: a Jew’s tendency toward kindness is stronger. Why? Because the G-dly soul is more closely connected with the attribute of kindness than with the attribute of severity. He explains it there. There is no contradiction. Both the G-dly soul and the animal soul have natural traits. The G-dly soul has natural traits too. Why? Because it comes from His attributes, because it comes from G-dliness. The animal soul also has natural traits, stemming from its own nature, in which evil predominates. Both have traits by nature, but the difference is that in the animal soul, they are “the nature he was born with.” That is the precise wording the Alter Rebbe uses here: “the nature he was born with.” In other words, his compassion and kindness do not come from G-dliness, but from the way he was born. “That’s how I was born.” With the G-dly soul, by contrast, its natural traits come from His attributes, from Hakadosh Boruch Hu. So he feels that his kindness comes from G-dliness. On the contrary, that is the whole distinction between the natural traits of holiness and the nature

20:06 Speaker 1 of kelipah: with kelipah, the traits are simply part of one’s nature, whereas with holiness, they come from the attributes of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. That is all in brief. Now, this idea that there is no good without evil and no evil without good. We said that since the Tree of Knowledge, evil has become mixed with good, and in everything there is a bad side and a good side. There is a powerful point the Rebbe made once in a sicha to children. It is a very powerful point, and it is relevant to chassidim. The Rebbe says in the sicha that since the Tree of Knowledge, evil has become mixed with good, so there is no good without evil and no evil without good. Everything, even the best things, has a bad side. So the Rebbe says: Chassidus, the path of Chassidus—Chassidus itself is a good thing. That is certain. It is a good thing. But since everything has a little bad in it, there is a certain bad aspect even here. What is the bad aspect? What the Rebbe says about it is very powerful. He says that we see boys, children who grow up in a Chassidic home and a Chabad cheder, in an environment of Chassidus, who are somewhat lacking in their manners toward their parents, toward teachers and rabbis, and toward people who, according to halachah, deserve respect. There ought to be respect. Nevertheless, we see a weakness in this, and the reason, the Rebbe says, is that Chassidus demands bittul, self-nullification. All of Chassidus, its entire foundation, is bittul: “There is nothing besides Him.” Chassidus teaches that everything is G-dliness and G-dliness is everything. So there is nothing besides Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and consequently, from the perspective of bittul, everyone feels equal. And from that, through a chain of consequences, there can also arise

22:32 Speaker 1 a situation where a student who grows up in a home where they always speak about bittul thinks: If everyone is nullified, then his father, his teacher, his rabbi—everyone is nullified. Everything is nullified. And that leads to insolence, to a lack of manners and respect. So the Rebbe says we must understand that this is not what “There is nothing besides Him” means. Certainly everything is nullified, but Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave us the Shulchan Aruch, and the Shulchan Aruch contains laws. It speaks of honoring one’s rabbi and teacher, and of “Honor your father and your mother,” and so on. That is why it is one of the Ten Commandments: Hakadosh Boruch Hu—the very same Hakadosh Boruch Hu besides Whom there is nothing—asks us to honor our parents. Similarly, teachers and great Torah scholars must be honored, as must various other people to whom respect is due. The Rebbe urges the children there to be careful: even though we learn in Chassidus that everything is nullified, we must still understand that there is respect, there are laws, and we must conduct ourselves according to Torah law. Now, the Rebbe asked that we study the laws of the Beis Hamikdash. So are we studying Rambam’s Laws of the Chosen House here, or have we started? I’m not exactly sure. There was a class today, but perhaps we’ll use these weeks to spend a minute on one point in Chassidus connected with the laws of the Beis Hamikdash. Just one point. Why are they called the Laws of the Chosen House? There is a question: Why did Rambam call it the Chosen House? Why not the Beis Hamikdash? It is the Beis Hamikdash, yet Rambam specifically called it the Chosen House. So the Rebbe explains the difference between “chosen” and “sanctuary”: a sanctuary means holiness—the thing itself is holy. Being chosen means that the thing is not holy in itself; it was chosen. Choice means that it has no inherent advantage. Its entire distinction is that it was chosen. In itself it has no

24:30 Speaker 1 holiness; it comes to have holiness, and that is where choice applies. Choice means that the thing’s only distinction is that He chose it. As is well known, Chassidus discusses—and those who have studied it have learned this—a dispute. Several maamarim discuss whether the Beis Hamikdash was intrinsically a holy place, whether it had holiness of its own, or whether the Beis Hamikdash itself had no holiness and the holiness merely passed through it to the Jewish people who came there. There is a dispute between Rambam and Ramban as to whether the holiness of the Beis Hamikdash was invested in the place—whether the holiness of the Shechinah became invested in the site of the Beis Hamikdash—or whether its holiness merely passed through, passing through the Beis Hamikdash without residing in the site itself. After all, it was a physical place. That is the dispute between Rambam and Ramban. Rambam holds that a physical place cannot contain holiness, G-dliness or the Shechinah, because it is physical. Those things do not go together; the holiness only passed through that place to the Jewish people. Ramban disagrees, holding that the Shechinah was invested in the Beis Hamikdash itself, in its physical site. So the Rebbe says that Rambam’s wording precisely reflects his position: since Rambam holds that the Beis Hamikdash was only a place through which the holiness passed, he called the section the Laws of the Chosen House. “Chosen House” emphasizes that the entire distinction of the site of the Beis Hamikdash comes from Hashem’s choice of it, not from the place itself being intrinsically holy as a sanctuary, but from its being a house that was chosen. Hashem chose it from Above. Well, there is more to this, but that was just one short point for now.