Likkutei Amarim Tanya - Chapter 3 - Part 2

00:00 We said that in chapter 3, the Alter Rebbe explains the faculties of the soul—the ten faculties of the soul. The Alter Rebbe explains that there are ten faculties, which derive from the ten sefiros of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. And just as Above, the ten sefiros are divided into two groups, three “mothers” and seven “doubles,” so too, in the human soul, they are divided into two groups: intellect and middos. Three mothers and seven doubles. In the human soul, this refers to the intellect—the three intellectual faculties, Chabad—and the middos, which are seven. Why are Chabad called “mothers”? Because they are mothers. What does “mothers” mean? As we explained, it means sources. They are the sources of the middos, because the middos depend on Chabad. In the previous class, we explained the point under discussion here: the Rebbe wants to be precise that the middos are not brought into being by Chabad. That is not what it means. One might think that Chabad, the intellectual faculties, brings the middos into being. The intellect does not bring the middos into being. The root of the middos is in the soul, not in the intellect. They have their own distinct root in the soul. Rather, the intellect brings the middos into expression. If a person wants to have a particular middah, he needs to know how to bring it out and awaken it, and especially how to guide it. Without that guidance, the middos might lie dormant or become confused. He won’t know what to love and what to hate, what to draw close and what to distance. So, to awaken the middos and direct them along the right path, there is the intellect—the mother that gives birth to the middos. The middos depend on the intellect for their expression. It reveals the middos, guides and directs them, awakens them and brings them out. That is what the intellect does. But their essential source is the soul itself. They tell of a time when the Rebbe Rashab, of blessed memory, was sitting

02:26 with the Raza at a farbrengen, and they were speaking about the purpose of Chassidus. What is Chassidus meant to accomplish? They discussed the teaching, explained in several places, that the whole purpose of Chassidus is the middos. The whole purpose of Chassidus is to refine the middos. They spoke about refining the middos through Chassidus: what did Chassidus introduce into this work? The Raza was sitting there. Generally, he did not speak much. He was known as a person of great intellect. He was a person in whom one almost never saw the yetzer hara at work. Even the Frierdiker Rebbe describes how the Raza endured great difficulty. He was firm in his views, and even though he suffered greatly in all kinds of ways, one never saw him [unclear]. He never showed any… He was a man of firm convictions and great intellect. The only times people saw tears in his eyes were when he heard of another Jew’s distress. He was a great man, an exceptional man. In any case, the story goes that they were sitting at a farbrengen and discussing Chassidus and the refinement of the middos. The Raza explained that Chassidus introduced the idea that the intellect keeps watch over the middos, so that they are not merely natural middos. They are middos guided by the intellect. That is one of the things Chabad Chassidus demands: that the middos be guided by the intellect, rather than just being natural feelings. Sometimes you see people come into shul and immediately begin davening with tremendous enthusiasm, right? Natural feelings. They have great love and awe during davening, but without any particular [unclear], and so on. Chassidus demands that the middos be guided by the intellect. Not only

04:30 the middos of love and awe—even the quality of [unclear], and not necessarily awe. These, too, should not be merely natural: “I’m a warm person by nature, so I like helping.” Chassidus demands that all the middos be guided by the intellect. So what is an example of this? To explain it, the Raza gave an analogy: a person walking on a tightrope, knowing that he could fall. A person walking on a rope—an acrobat, as it’s called—knows he could fall to either side and [unclear]. What keeps him steady? His head has to maintain his balance. His head looks after his equilibrium, his balance, so that he does not lean to either side and fall. Similarly, the head—the intellectual faculties—looks after the equilibrium of the middos. It keeps the middos balanced, so that they are as they should be. That was his example of how the intellect directs the middos. But the Rebbe Rashab, of blessed memory, told him that this is not Chassidus—not yet. It would mean that his middos themselves are coarse, unrefined middos. He has to keep them in balance, like someone guarding a prisoner to make sure he doesn’t escape. The prisoner himself is a kind of terrorist; he simply has a guard to stop him from escaping. The same would be true here. According to this, the middos are in danger of falling at every moment. They are the sort of middos that need something—the intellect—to guard them so they won’t get away. That is not yet Chassidus. Chassidus works through the intellect, through a higher understanding. The teachings of Chassidus bring about refinement in the middos.

06:32 So that the middos themselves become refined middos, good middos, gentle middos, as they ought to be. In any case, that is what the Rebbe is saying here: the middos are offspring of Chabad. They need to be not merely natural middos but middos shaped by the intellect, which reveals and awakens them and guides them along the right path. In any case, let us continue in Tanya. Now to explain the matter. We said that Chabad is the source of the middos, and the Alter Rebbe explains what Chabad is. Something interesting we see here in chapter 3 is that most of the lengthy explanation concerns Chabad. The Alter Rebbe does not elaborate nearly as much on the middos. He says just a few words about them; the main discussion concerns the intellectual faculties. That, too, relates to the whole idea of Chabad Chassidus: that the middos should be guided by the intellect. So most of the explanation addresses what the intellectual faculties are and how they affect the middos. That itself is what he discusses at length, as we will see. “Now to explain the matter: The intellect of the intellectual soul, which apprehends any matter, is called Chochmah—koach mah.” Here he begins to explain why so many “mothers” are needed. Surely one mother would be enough. Why do we need three mothers? We speak of three mothers. So he explains that each of the three has a different role. He says: “The intellect of the intellectual soul, which apprehends any matter.” There is the essential power of intellect, the source of all insights, from which all insights come. This is called Chochmah, koach mah. That is what is called Chochmah. What is Chochmah? Chochmah is koach mah, “the power of what.” In other words, the Alter Rebbe is giving you a definition of Chochmah. It is not the way the word is translated into various languages. Even in editions of Tanya, in Spanish and in English, they translate Chochmah as sabiduría. I don’t know how you say it

08:39 Here in English, but something similar. In both cases, that is not necessarily the word’s actual translation; people use a word because that is what everyone calls it, but it is not its proper name. How does the Alter Rebbe define chochmah? The Alter Rebbe explains what chochmah is. Chochmah means koach mah, “the power of mah.” Chochmah is the essence of the intellect. Before any understanding or comprehension, the very point of intellect, the initial insight—that is called chochmah. There is more to explain about why, but first let’s learn the plain meaning of the whole passage. Afterward we’ll see how much we can explain. In any case, the Alter Rebbe says that the faculty that conceives any idea is chochmah, koach mah. And when a person brings that faculty into action—when he takes this source of intellect, the potential in his mind to conceive ideas, which is the chochmah within him, the essence of his intellect—and develops it and brings it into action, he contemplates an idea with his mind to understand it accurately and deeply. He takes the insight and examines its details, to understand accurately and deeply the idea that his mind has conceived through chochmah. That is called binah. So that is binah. Now, the way everyone learns the plain meaning of Tanya—and this is also how most maamarim of Chassidus are learned—is that the difference between chochmah and binah is that chochmah is the point of insight, while binah is its details. That is the straightforward understanding. This is also how it is presented in most places in Chassidus. What is the difference between chochmah and binah? Every idea has its central insight. It is like what they call “el concepto” in Castilian: there is the concept, the point of the matter. That point is chochmah. It has no expansion, no breadth, no depth; it is just the point itself. That is why it is called koach mah, because there are no details yet. There is no depth

11:02 or comprehension or breadth; there is only the point itself. Once I have the point, I begin to develop it in detail and understand its details. Within this, there are three aspects, as they are called in Chassidus. You’ve already learned this; you know it: length, depth, and breadth. These are three aspects of binah. You take the point of insight, and depth means delving into the abstract essence of the idea—stripping away its concrete form and concentrating it all in abstraction. Delving into the depth of the idea. Length means bringing it down through analogies to lower levels. That is length: finding analogies and examples on a lower level for someone who does not relate to that world of intellect and needs examples involving more tangible things. That is length. And breadth means expanding the details within the subject itself, developing the idea into many details. But it all remains on the same intellectual level. You are not moving down or up; you are elaborating more details within the same subject. These are length, depth, and breadth, and this defines binah. On the plain level, that is the difference between them. It is also alluded to by the two letters, yud and hei, of Hashem’s Name. The letter yud is a point, the point of intellect. And the letter hei has breadth, indicating binah. But when we look at Tanya, we see that it does not say that. Look at the wording of Tanya: it says no such thing. The Alter Rebbe’s wording in Tanya—what does he say chochmah is? He says, “The intellect of the intellectual soul, which conceives any idea.” He does not say that chochmah is the point of an idea, the beginning of an idea, intellect in the form of a point. He says that the intellectual soul has the faculty to conceive an idea. There is not even a point yet. It is the power to conceive. The soul has a faculty for conceiving ideas, from which all ideas come. This is not the concept of an idea, some particular concept or particular intellectual notion

13:15 that exists in the form of a point. This is something general—the source of intellect altogether, so to speak. That is what the Alter Rebbe is saying here. That is chochmah. And when he brings that faculty into action, then binah begins. This is indeed how some of the commentators explain it. The Rebbe also refers to the commentary of Reb Gronem, one of the heads of the yeshivah, who was a mashpia in Lubavitch. Today we are celebrating the birthday of Lubavitch [unclear]. The Rebbe Rashab sent Reb Gronem to Zhembin to organize things there, to start the yeshivah, and Reb Gronem was a profound scholar of Chassidus. There are many points in Tanya that we understand thanks to Reb Gronem: he explained and wrote about them, and his students recorded a number of his explanations of Chassidus. He explains it this way; this is also the plain meaning of Tanya. What the Alter Rebbe explains here in chapter 3 as chochmah is actually a higher level of chochmah than the one usually described. It is the power to conceive. That is the definition we are discussing here. And the actualization of chochmah is already binah. That is the meaning here. This rules out the usual explanation—or rather, it adds to it, not rules it out. In general, this is how it works. The overall difference between chochmah and binah, the essential distinction between them, is that chochmah is ayin, nonexistence, and binah is yesh, existence. That is the deeper difference between chochmah and binah. So you can see that the two explanations do not really contradict each other. The essential distinction is that chochmah is ayin and binah is yesh. In other words, within intellect itself there is an element of ayin. For a person to understand something, there has to be a certain element of ayin, of self-nullification. After all, what is intellect? Intellect

15:23 means that I am seeking the truth. I want to know the truth. If I do not want to know the truth, that is not intellect. If I know what I like knowing and do not know what I dislike knowing, that is not intellect; that is emotion. Intellect—pure intellect—means seeking the truth. So at the deepest level of intellect, a person completely sets himself aside. I do not exist here. Only the subject he is studying exists. This aspect of intellect is complete self-nullification, ayin. That is the true definition of chochmah. It is a point of what? Of complete self-nullification, where his own sense of self does not exist; only the faculty that conceives the idea exists. For example, Chassidus says—actually, this is not just an example; it is the point itself—that reaching the faculty of chochmah requires effort. What is effort? Chassidus says that effort means refining the faculties of the mind. Effort means self-nullification. When they say that a student needs to toil in his studies, what does it mean to toil in his studies? To toil means to set oneself aside before the subject. When I study something, I want to understand it. As long as I work with my unrefined intellect, I will not be able to understand it. I always want to understand it the way I want to understand it, according to the way my limitations work, according to the way my rules work. I want to understand my own rules, so I will never understand the maamar—or the Gemara—that I am studying. Yes, effort means that I step outside myself. I leave myself behind for a moment and ask: What does the maamar say? Not what I want it to say, not what I would have thought, or what I understood on another occasion. What does the maamar say? Maybe

17:11 One of the things I didn’t know until now was something that didn’t fit with my rules. What is it saying? It’s a matter of setting oneself aside for the subject. That’s the point of effort and bittul, self-nullification, and then the idea reveals itself to him. That is chochmah: koach mah, the power of “what?”—the power of bittul. And so it can also be understood as the initial point of an idea, because that point, too, involves bittul. At that point there is no “me” yet; there is no question yet of how I understand it. I’ll come to that in the end. At the initial point of an idea, there is only the truth of the matter as it is, without adding Rashi, explanations, or elaborations, without bringing it down into my world. It is the idea in its purity and truth. That is why the initial point of an idea is called koach mah. And the same applies to what the Alter Rebbe calls here koach hamaskil, the power that generates understanding: there, too, the “I” does not yet exist. Koach hamaskil is the capacity for an idea as it is, before it is clothed in the individual person’s particular way of thinking—that is, in the way I take the idea. So that, too, is koach mah. In general, then, chochmah refers to this entire stage of understanding, where there is only the truth in its purity, not my own reality or the way I grasp the matter. Binah, by contrast, is the opposite. Binah already involves a sense of self. It means taking an abstract idea, a concept, and making it into something I can understand, bringing it down into my world, into my reality. This is what the Alter Rebbe also says in Tanya, chapter 35: chochmah is “He alone, and there is nothing besides Him.” Divine chochmah, chochmah as the way of G-dliness—because of the bittul there, the truth that “He alone, and there is nothing besides Him” shines forth. Complete bittul. With binah, by contrast, there is already another reality. There is already a human

18:58 being. In chochmah there is koach mah, complete bittul. I once heard—I don’t know exactly where this story comes from, but it was told once in a Tanya class in connection with this emphasis on chochmah as nothingness and bittul—a story about the Shach. The Shach was a tremendous Torah genius; he wrote the commentary on Yoreh De’ah. He was one of the great Torah scholars, a towering figure, and so on. The story goes that one summer, the Shach was sitting on the roof of his house, deeply immersed in his commentaries and writing them. In short, in the middle of the night, while he was sitting and writing, he found himself on a completely different roof, on the other side of town. What happened? He had become absorbed in the subject. He began concentrating and walking around on the roof of his house, and he was so deeply immersed that he didn’t notice where he was. He walked... It was a miracle from Above that protected him: he walked through the air without falling. He went from roof to roof, and even though there was open air between them, he didn’t fall. Chassidim said this wasn’t an accident. They said it was a miracle from Above that kept him from falling. They said that the Shach, in the greatness of his understanding, was on the level of chochmah. The root of chochmah is nothingness and bittul, so in a sense he wasn’t there. When he was so absorbed in the intellectual matter, his own existence was not present at all, and so he didn’t fall. It was as though he was entirely given over to what he was studying. That was what carried him, what kept him from falling. That is chochmah, koach mah. So that is the defining feature of chochmah, of koach mah: the matter

21:07 of bittul. Nothingness. Binah is a sense of self: it does the opposite, understanding and grasping. That is why the Alter Rebbe continues, “And they are father and mother.” We therefore call these two faculties, chochmah and binah, father and mother. Father and mother work in the same way. What did we learn earlier, in the previous chapter, about father and mother? The father provides the single point, the drop that contains all the details without any individual detail being discernible. What is felt is one point, without details. That is the idea of bittul: there are no separate details here, only a single point. That is the father’s contribution. The mother’s contribution is a sense of self—an actual existence with details, with vessels and lights. That is the difference between father and mother reflected in chochmah and binah. This is why chochmah and binah are called father and mother. Everything then emerges from them; all the aspects of father and mother come from them. Reb Nissan Nemenov would also explain this passage, focusing on the wording. Reb Nissan would ask: What is the precision in the Tanya? Every word in Tanya is precise. Why does the Alter Rebbe say, “And they are father and mother”? “They are”—there seems to be a repetition in the Hebrew. Why the double expression? Reb Nissan said the meaning is that the Alter Rebbe is telling you: know that they are father and mother—the real father and mother. The people we call father and mother are only an analogy. They’re only... Who are the real father and mother? Chochmah and binah. A physical father and mother are only an analogy. The real father and mother are chochmah and binah. That is Chassidus and that is the Rebbe. Yes, the Rebbe, the Chassidus

23:20 we study—that is the real father and mother, chochmah and binah. That is the work of learning, the endeavor of study. That is the point of “and they are father and mother.” That is what father and mother allude to. Physical parents are an analogy for this idea, giving us an example we can relate to. So there are physical parents. Of course, G-d forbid, this is not meant to diminish the mitzvah of honoring one’s father and mother, which refers to them in the literal sense. It is a mitzvah everyone is obligated to fulfill: “so that your days may be prolonged.” Especially since we studied Tractate Kiddushin, which contains wonderful and awe-inspiring teachings about honoring one’s parents—how far it extends and how important it is. Nevertheless, as students of Tomchei Temimim, the Chassidus of Tomchei Temimim teaches us that there are real father and mother: “And they are father and mother.” That is why they used to say in Tomchei Temimim—and this expression appears in a letter of the Frierdiker Rebbe—that when a young man entered the yeshivah, he knew that his father was the Rebbe and his mother was the yeshivah. From then on, that was his situation. “We are all the sons of one man”: the father is the Rebbe, and the mother is the yeshivah. There is a phrase in a letter the Frierdiker Rebbe wrote to students of Tomchei Temimim—apparently to men who had already studied there. He writes to them, “Your mother, Tomchei Temimim, sends her regards.” Those are the Frierdiker Rebbe’s words: “Your mother, Tomchei Temimim, sends her regards.” That’s how he puts it: “Your mother, Tomchei Temimim, sends her regards.” Tomchei Temimim is the mother. Who is the father? The Rebbe. The Rebbe is the father. What does that mean? According to what we’re learning here, there is the Rebbe’s role,

25:11 which is chochmah, the initial point—yes, bittul. That is what we receive from the Rebbe. And there is the yeshivah, which creates the vessels. That is binah. It gives us food, a bed, hot water, tea, and a schedule. The yeshivah builds the young man, like a mother who develops and forms a person. That is the mother’s role. The father’s role is to provide the point of chochmah and the bittul within it. And when we have both of these—the Rebbe as our father and the yeshivah as our mother—and devote ourselves to our real father and mother, “and they are father and mother,” we can be sure that this will produce offspring. In other words, each and every student of Tomchei Temimim will become a worthy fruit. We’ll take a break now to give the young men a little time to rest or study Rambam and the like. And we ask most earnestly that by nine-thirty we can all be downstairs and begin the farbrengen and the meal, with joy and gladness of heart. Hm? Hm? Not necessarily. But the main thing is that everyone should be here with us, body and soul—in keeping with the principle that action is the main thing.