Likkutei Amarim Tanya - Chapter 42 - Part 7

00:01 Speaker 1 We’re up to subsection seven here in Tanya, line four. The Alter Rebbe begins explaining the statement of the Gemara. Let’s go over the point again. The Gemara says that “for Moshe, it is a small matter.” So the Alter Rebbe asks: What does “for Moshe” have to do with it? The Gemara means that every Jew has something of Moshe Rabbeinu within him. From that perspective, it is a small matter. The Alter Rebbe gives three details. What does it mean that everyone has Moshe Rabbeinu within them? First, Moshe Rabbeinu is a collective soul, and he is the faculty of daas. Moshe Rabbeinu embodies daas, so he drew down daas for all the Jewish people, enabling them to have daas of G-dliness. Second, the Alter Rebbe also said that in every generation, sparks are drawn down through the sages and tzaddikim of the generation, who teach the people daas. And third, the Alter Rebbe said that the main aspect of daas is not what one receives from the tzaddikim and leaders; it is that each person must connect his own mind. There is daas that we receive from the Rebbes, but the main aspect of daas is not what we receive from above. It has to come through work and effort. That effort means a person must connect his mind. What does daas mean? It means he must connect himself to the concept of G-dliness he is studying, until it is as real to him as something physical he sees with his own eyes. The faculty of daas is the soul’s power of connection, the power through which a person connects with things until they become truly tangible to him. Then genuine fear of G-d can come from it. This power of daas, the Alter Rebbe also says,

02:25 Speaker 1 we receive from Moshe Rabbeinu. This, too, we receive from Moshe Rabbeinu. As we said earlier, since Moshe Rabbeinu is essentially the soul of the entire Jewish people, he drew down daas of G-dliness to all souls, in every generation. And of course, there is an extension of Moshe in every generation. The Moshe Rabbeinu of each generation is the Rebbe, the leader, who draws down daas to Jewish souls so that they can connect to G-dliness. This also connects with where we are now, in the days of Purim. The Purim maamarim discuss this at length in connection with the war against Amalek. “Remember what Amalek did to you”—the whole subject is discussed at length. There are several Purim maamarim that begin with the verse, “When Moshe raised his hand, Israel prevailed.” That is in Parshas Beshalach. There are several maamarim on “When Moshe raised his hand,” and several that discuss Amalek in connection with Purim. What is the point? They explain that Amalek opposed the faculty of daas. What does Amalek do? Amalek separates. That is why he is called Amalek, related to the word melikah, which means cutting between the head and the heart. That is precisely where daas comes in: daas creates the connection between the mind and the heart. Amalek makes that cut, severing the connection between the mind and the heart, so that what one understands intellectually does not reach the heart. A person can therefore study Torah, one subject after another, without developing any feeling for G-dliness. We’ll learn about that tomorrow. So Amalek opposes the faculty of daas. This is daas of kelipah—I won’t go into its spiritual root now, but this is one of its aspects. And Moshe Rabbeinu, who is daas

04:21 Speaker 1 of holiness, is the one who fought Amalek. That is why it says, “Choose men for us.” What does “men” mean? It says in Parshas Beshalach, in the passage of Zachor—you know, in Parshas Beshalach it says, “Choose men for us.” Moshe’s men: spiritually, that means daas. Moshe Rabbeinu represents daas, as we said, and being Moshe’s men means receiving daas from Moshe Rabbeinu. Through that, we can overcome Amalek. So that is what the Alter Rebbe is saying here as well: the power of daas, the power of connection, is something we receive from Moshe Rabbeinu. The Alter Rebbe says: All of that is well and good. From this perspective, we have all the necessary powers—but that is on the level of the soul. Our soul has the power of Moshe Rabbeinu within it, the power of daas. What is the problem, then? The problem is that the soul is clothed in a body, and the body conceals the soul. Therefore, the Alter Rebbe says that tremendous effort is needed, as will be explained, to awaken this power. Although we have it from Moshe Rabbeinu—each of us has it inside—we do not need to look for some seventh point. It is within the soul; we received it from Moshe Rabbeinu. But because of the concealment caused by the body, releasing it now takes tremendous effort, as he says, to awaken it. So there are two sides to this. On the one hand, the Alter Rebbe reveals that everyone has this power. It is within us, this power of connection, and through it we can attain fear of Heaven. On the other hand, we must know that work and effort are needed to reveal it—to remove the things that cover and conceal it. In other words, the work and effort are not needed to acquire this power, but to remove the

06:08 Speaker 1 things covering it. Then it reveals itself, because we already have it inside. Now the Alter Rebbe will explain in practical terms what kind of effort is needed. What effort does it take to awaken fear of Heaven? So let’s pause here again and start at line fifteen. The Alter Rebbe speaks here about two kinds of effort needed to awaken fear of Heaven, to awaken this power we received from Moshe Rabbeinu. The Alter Rebbe says: “The effort of the flesh: to subdue the body and humble it, so that it does not darken the light of the soul.” The first thing needed is effort—the effort of the flesh. What does that mean? The Alter Rebbe says there is effort of the flesh and effort of the soul. First, he will explain the effort of the flesh. The Alter Rebbe says that it means a person must subdue the body. How do you break down the body? The Alter Rebbe immediately explains: “To subdue the body and humble it, so that it does not darken the light of the soul,” as it says: “A body in which the light of the soul does not shine must be subdued.” The Alter Rebbe brought this in chapter 29. He explains there that the body is like a piece of wood. If you have a large piece of wood and want to light a fire, it will not catch. You have to chop it into small pieces, and then the fire catches. So in chapter 29, he says that just as the light of the fire does not take hold in the wood until you break it into small pieces, so too with a person, who has a body and a soul. When a person’s body is coarse, the body must be subdued so that the soul’s light can enter it and the body will not darken the soul. What did the Alter Rebbe explain about this in chapter 29? Here he briefly repeats the point. There

08:15 Speaker 1 the Alter Rebbe explained it at length. Chapter one—chapter 29. Here he just states it briefly. That is, through thoughts of teshuvah from deep within the heart, as the verse says. Thoughts of teshuvah from deep within the heart—that is how it is done. How do you break down the body? How do you break down the body? By reflecting on the matters discussed in chapter 29, matters that arouse thoughts of teshuvah. Through those thoughts, a person subdues and humbles the body. When we say “body” here, the Alter Rebbe wants to make clear that this should not be taken literally, as though it means breaking the body through fasting and self-mortification. We are not talking about physically breaking the body, because that is not the way of Chassidus either. The Baal Shem Tov revealed that the body should be healthy and whole. Yes, this work has to be done with a healthy body. So the Alter Rebbe emphasizes what “effort of the body,” or “effort of the flesh,” means. The effort of the flesh is not physical punishment; it means thoughts of teshuvah. Why is it called the effort of the flesh? It’s simple: all the concealment comes from the body. “Body” does not mean merely the physical body, its flesh. It means the body’s demands. The body is the source of all those demands, desires, self-importance and coarseness. A person’s body makes him what, in Castilian, they call ego-céntrico. I don’t know how you say something like that in English. Remind me. Huh?

09:56 Speaker 2 Egocentric.

09:57 Speaker 1 Is that a word in English?

09:59 Speaker 2 Egocentric.

10:00 Speaker 1 Huh?

10:02 Speaker 2 How do you say it in Hebrew?

10:03 Speaker 1 Huh?

10:03 Speaker 2 How do you say it in Hebrew?

10:06 Speaker 1 Egocentric. Definitely. Selfish.

10:10 Speaker 2 Selfish.

10:17 Speaker 1 Yes. Anochi—in Hebrew, we say anochi, “I.” The point is that the body has this quality of self-centeredness: thinking about oneself, only oneself—what do I want, what do I like? What is that? It is the root of arrogance and desire, and so on. That is the root of all evil, of all kelipah. It all comes from the coarseness and sense of self of the “I.” So breaking the body means breaking that sense of self, breaking its materiality. How do you break that materiality? Through thoughts of teshuvah from the depths of the heart. A person thinks, takes stock of himself, and reflects on his state and situation—all the things the Alter Rebbe explained in chapter 29. Through this, he breaks the materiality of the body’s sense of self, of the animal soul. That is what is meant by exertion of the flesh. So this is the first condition needed to awaken yiras Shamayim. The Alter Rebbe also cites, in Igeres Hakodesh, a saying of our Sages on this subject, though its exact source is not known. The Alter Rebbe cites it as written. [unclear] The saying of our Sages is: “Woe to the flesh that has not exerted itself in fear.” That is the wording quoted: “Woe to the flesh that has not exerted itself in fear.” The Alter Rebbe cites it in Igeres Hakodesh, because there is a person who has not exerted himself in yiras Shamayim. So the wording is “Woe to the flesh.” In other words, we see from here that there must be exertion of the flesh. This expression appears often in mussar works. They would explain it literally: breaking the flesh, or undertaking all kinds of fasts and self-mortification—mortifying the body, rolling in snow, this kind of ordeal and that kind of ordeal, all sorts of things that break the flesh. But in Chassidus, it means what the Alter Rebbe says here. There is also a source for it in

12:02 Speaker 1 Yes, in the Gemara. The wording is not exactly the same there, but the Gemara says that the soul ascends above, and on the day of judgment it is asked all kinds of questions. [unclear] There, too, we find the expression “Did you exert yourself in fear?” So there as well we find that exertion is needed specifically in fear. In other words, it is especially with regard to fear that the need for “exertion in fear” is emphasized. Exertion. And what is exertion? This is what the Alter Rebbe is discussing: exertion of the flesh, exertion of the flesh. As we said, it means breaking the body’s materiality. Through that, its coarseness is broken, and the body becomes a vessel; its sense of self no longer conceals things from it. It can become a vessel for what comes from Heaven. That is one kind of exertion: exertion of the flesh. Then there is another kind: exertion of the soul. Another kind of exertion, the Alter Rebbe says, is exertion of the soul—working with the soul. What does exertion of the soul mean? As we will now see, it means working with the soul’s faculties. Besides the effort needed to break down the flesh—the body and its sense of self—so that it does not conceal the light or darken the soul, one must also work from the other side: exert oneself with the soul’s faculties. The Alter Rebbe will now explain how that work with the soul is expressed. What is exertion of the soul? The Alter Rebbe says: “That it should not be burdensome for him to exert his mind, to delve deeply into and contemplate the greatness of the Creator for a long, uninterrupted hour.” A person must train himself, train the faculties of his soul, so that it is not burdensome to exert his mind and concentrate deeply on a subject for a long, uninterrupted hour. What does that mean? There are two details here. The Alter Rebbe explains two ways in which

14:01 Speaker 1 exertion of the soul is expressed. First, he says, “That it should not be burdensome for him to exert his mind, to delve deeply into and contemplate the greatness of the Creator.” That refers to depth. Second, “for a long, uninterrupted hour.” A person must train himself to go deeply into a subject, to become accustomed to it so that delving deeply is not burdensome. Delving deeply is not easy. Studying something in depth is not easy. Sometimes you want to study Gemara in depth: you pick up the Gemara or a maamar and want to really get into it. That is harder. For in-depth study, you have to be ready; you have to be alert. You have to be in the right frame of mind. Often you pick up a text, something to study, and it is difficult. You need to be immersed in it. Otherwise, you start wandering around outside, drinking coffee, looking for your friend, talking a little about the hotel, I don’t know. Yes, because to exert yourself, to study something deeply, you need to be prepared for it. It takes a special effort. That is the qualitative aspect: depth. Second, the Alter Rebbe also emphasizes the amount of time. There is effort involved here too. A person must train himself to be able to think for a long, uninterrupted hour. As the Frierdiker Rebbe once said in a sicha, the meaning of “a long, uninterrupted hour”—the Frierdiker Rebbe stresses—is an actual hour of sixty minutes. “Hour” is not just a loose expression. It can also mean a period of time in general. In the Torah, “hour” does not necessarily mean a measured amount of time; it can be a general word for time. Here the Alter Rebbe wants to emphasize that he really means an hour of time. Yes. That is why he says “a long hour.” He means an actual hour, an hour in the literal sense, sixty minutes—that

15:48 Speaker 1 is, a full hour. Elsewhere, the Frierdiker Rebbe says: Why specifically sixty minutes? It can be even longer.

15:54 Speaker 3 Simply, more than an hour remains. Another five minutes.

15:58 Speaker 1 Soon, soon, soon. Soon. So first, this is the point he emphasizes here: both things are needed, exertion of the flesh and exertion of the soul. In exertion of the soul, there are two points: the qualitative aspect, depth, and the quantitative aspect, that it should be a long, uninterrupted hour—a continuous hour spent contemplating a subject with the faculties of understanding. This is what the Alter Rebbe calls exertion of the soul. And the wording the Alter Rebbe uses is “that it should not be burdensome for him.” What does that mean? A person’s effort should bring him to the point where thinking for an uninterrupted hour is not burdensome. What does “not burdensome” mean? It is like this: we see something similar in physical life. For example, when a person exercises, does gymnastics. Say he starts running. A person wants to learn how to run. Nowadays it is fashionable for people to buy a machine and run, run, run without getting anywhere. They run for the health of the body. There is a machine you can run on. You can run for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a quarter without stopping. And we see this clearly: a person starts running because he wants to train his body to run. He has never run in his life. He has lived in yeshiva, walking from the fifth classroom to the third, and from the third to the second as well. He is used to sitting all the time without moving his body, and he has become stiff. His body has turned to stone. When he wants to start getting a little healthier and do some exercise, he starts running. He runs for two minutes and already cannot go on. He feels like he is going to die. He starts panting, panting.

17:54 Speaker 1 And his instrument—his body—won’t cooperate. He’s no longer used to running. When he was a child, he could run nonstop without even noticing it. Suddenly he’s gotten older. His body runs for a few minutes, and he already feels like he’s at the end of his rope. But if he does exercises every day, then after a week or two it will already be easier for him. Five minutes, ten minutes, perhaps twenty minutes or half an hour. The more you accustom your body to it, the more you can do. That applies to all kinds of exercise. We’re not giving an exercise class now, so we won’t get into the details; we’ll speak broadly. But it’s obvious to everyone. In physical matters, when you first begin doing something that demands effort from the body and the soul—whether physical strength or some other kind of effort—at first it feels heavy. There’s a feeling of heaviness. The body doesn’t go along with it. Sometimes the heaviness comes from the body, and sometimes it comes from the soul: a person is lazy, has no energy, has no desire. He looks for excuses: tomorrow, the day after tomorrow—and he keeps putting it off. But once he makes himself do it, day after day after day, little by little it becomes easy for him. It no longer feels heavy. That is what the Alter Rebbe means here by “the work feels burdensome to him.” A person has to train himself to use the powers of his soul, the deeper powers of his soul. That takes a great deal of effort, even more than running with your legs. It’s a much deeper inner effort. So it takes a great deal of concentration and exertion for a person to

19:39 Speaker 1 train his mind to think and reflect deeply. And likewise, to think about one subject for a continuous hour, for an uninterrupted stretch of time, without leaving that subject. We’re not used to that. It’s easy to think about one thing for a moment, then something else, then a third thing. Now his mind is in America, now it’s in Africa, now it’s somewhere else. What does that mean? Now it’s breakfast, now lunch, now tomorrow’s game or yesterday’s. The mind runs from one end of the world to the other. For a person to be able to focus his mind for a whole uninterrupted hour, both in duration and in the quality of his thought—at first, you see, that’s hard. And for that, the Alter Rebbe says, one must toil so that the learning won’t feel burdensome. A person has to reach the point where it no longer feels heavy to him. He can sit down for ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, and think about a subject in Chassidus with concentration—and do it easily. It’s no longer so difficult for him. That takes effort of the soul. What does “the soul” mean? Effort with the soul’s faculties. Reb Mendel Futerfas always used to tell a story about Chatshe Feigin. Reb Mendel Futerfas would say that Chatshe Feigin was his mashpia. Chatshe was a young man when he was among the shluchim whom the Rebbe Rashab sent to Toras Emes. This was the first group of shluchim who established Toras Emes as a Chabad yeshivah, a hundred years ago. They came to Toras Emes and founded the yeshivah there. The Rebbe Rashab sent his most outstanding students, among them Chatshe Feigin. He related that when they arrived in Eretz Yisroel, they saw for the first time houses with flat roofs. In Russia, all the houses were built with sloping roofs. There weren’t houses with roofs like that, where you could sit on the roof.

21:37 Speaker 1 In Eretz Yisroel, the roofs were flat, as they are today—roofs you could sit on. So they would go up onto the roof of the yeshivah. Here, young men go up onto a yeshivah roof to get a suntan, a little sun, a little fresh air. There, they went up onto the roof of the yeshivah to think about Chassidus. It was peaceful and quiet up there, with good air, so they would go up and contemplate Chassidus. Reb Mendel would tell how Chatshe Feigin said that he sat on the roof of the Toras Emes yeshivah and contemplated the Hemshech of 5664 forty times. Just imagine—he contemplated the Hemshech of 5664 forty times. I don’t know what it was like to do it even once. I don’t know exactly how he did it, but he contemplated the Hemshech of 5664 forty times on the roof of Toras Emes. The Hemshech of 5664 is four or five maamarim. This isn’t something simple; these are deep subjects. Imagine contemplating the Hemshech of 5664 forty times. So he explained. They asked him, “How can you keep your mind focused and think through an entire Hemshech for several hours, and then think it through several more times? That could take hours upon hours.” He said that he started with one minute. When he began to contemplate, he started with one minute. When he began learning the main point, he started with just one minute. But that minute had to be uninterrupted. The Alter Rebbe speaks of a long, uninterrupted hour. He started with only a minute, but that minute had to be continuous, without interruptions, completely absorbed in it. Once he had trained his mind to think continuously for a minute, he moved on to two minutes. Then he began doing five minutes. He progressed gradually until

23:34 Speaker 1 he could sit for hours with ease, contemplating a subject in Chassidus without interruption for hours on end. This shows us something in Chassidus and teaches us this point: in avodah, one must train the power of thought to think. A person has to train his power of thought to think. This is one of the fundamentals of Chassidus. Certainly, Chassidus must be learned with understanding. Chassidus tells us all the time that every maamar calls for contemplation. But to contemplate, a person has to know how to do it—to train his mind to concentrate and think continuously for a period of time. A person has to work on himself and train himself in all these things. So this is the point the Alter Rebbe is explaining to us here: because the body and the yetzer hara conceal and obscure, a person needs effort of the soul and effort of the body in order to awaken his fear of Heaven. Effort of the body has more to do with the body: dispelling the darkness of the body’s concealment so that it becomes pliant and submissive. Effort of the soul means additional inner work, training oneself to contemplate a subject of G-dliness for a long hour. Actually, there is a passage in Hayom Yom where the Rebbe also discusses effort of the soul and effort of the body. The Rebbe says there that effort of the body means working to take the pleasure out of this world’s delights—to remove the material gratification from worldly pleasures. Effort of the soul means awakening a taste for intellectual matters in general, and for G-dliness in particular. There it is presented differently. It isn’t the way the Alter Rebbe puts it here in Tanya; it’s quite different. There,

25:36 Speaker 1 he’s speaking more about working to develop a geshmak, a sense of enjoyment, in something. To have a geshmak in G-dliness, you have to take the geshmak out of this world’s pleasures. There, in the plain sense, it isn’t about self-mortification or asceticism. It means physically holding back: simply refraining from improper things, from sweet foods and foods one doesn’t need to eat, and things like that. It means taking the pleasure out of material things and awakening pleasure in matters of G-dliness. But here the Alter Rebbe is speaking about something else. Here he’s speaking about revealing fear of Heaven. He isn’t speaking about geshmak. He’s speaking about fear of Heaven, and that requires effort of the body—to remove the coarseness of the body that conceals fear of Heaven—and effort of the soul to awaken an awareness of G-dliness.