Likkutei Amarim, Chapter 29 - Part 3

00:01 So in chapter 29, on page 36, the Alter Rebbe brings the Zohar, which says that when fire will not catch in a log, you have to break it into small pieces, and then the fire takes hold. The same applies to a person. The light of the soul does not take hold in this body; it has to be struck and broken into pieces, and then the light of the G-dly soul shines within him. What does that mean? The Alter Rebbe explains that this is why a beinoni experiences a dullness of the heart. It is because the coarseness of the kelipah raises itself up to obscure the light of the G-dly soul, so that coarseness has to be broken. How does a person break it? He brings the verse, “A broken heart, a broken spirit.” By breaking his own heart—by having a broken heart—he breaks himself. As the Alter Rebbe will explain later, a person must make an accounting of his soul in order to attain that brokenheartedness. By breaking his heart, he breaks the spirit of the sitra achra. What is the connection? Why would breaking my heart break the spirit of the sitra achra, which raises itself up like an eagle? Why should the sitra achra be broken when I break my heart? This is what the Alter Rebbe now explains in the following lines. The Alter Rebbe says, “A broken heart, a broken spirit.” When a person breaks his heart, he thereby breaks the spirit. And “the spirit” means the spirit of the sitra achra; it is the sitra achra. Why? What is the connection? The Alter Rebbe explains that it is the person himself in the case of a beinoni. Because that spirit of the sitra achra is the person himself—it is the person’s essential self in a beinoni, and all the more so in people below the level of a beinoni. What

02:09 is the person’s essential self? The person himself is the sitra achra, the kelipah. This is what the Alter Rebbe now comes to explain: that the vital soul which gives life to the body... There is a remarkable insight here that the Alter Rebbe is about to tell us: the person himself, his essential self, is the animal soul, the sitra achra. Therefore, by breaking his heart, he breaks the sitra achra, because that is the person himself. What is the reasoning? The Alter Rebbe explains that the vital soul which gives life to the body remains in the heart in its full, original strength. After all, we said that a beinoni has not yet completely transformed his heart. So the vital soul, which is part of the animal soul, is still there in his heart in its full, original strength. As we said in the earlier chapters, in chapters 12 and 13, where the Alter Rebbe spoke about the beinoni, he explained that the animal soul still resides in the left chamber of the heart, its dwelling place, in full strength. All the beinoni has is control over the body’s faculties—thought, speech, and action. There, the G-dly soul rules. But in the left chamber of the heart, the animal soul remains in its full strength and power. As the Alter Rebbe even said in chapter 14—those were his words there—“when the heart desires and craves.” Why is that? In other words, the heart can still be in full force, and in his essential self he has not yet changed. It follows that this soul is the person himself. So what is his essential self? His essential self is the animal soul. And of the G-dly soul within him it is said, “The soul You have given me is pure.” When we speak of the G-dly soul in a beinoni, the wording is “You have given me.” He has a G-dly soul, and in practice his conduct in thought, speech, and action

04:19 is governed solely by the G-dly soul. We are speaking here about a beinoni: in thought, speech, and action, he has never committed a transgression and never will. But ultimately, that is not his essential self. It is like something added to him. Of the G-dly soul within him it is said, “The soul You have given me is pure.” Notice the precise wording: “You have given me.” It is a gift from Above. The wording itself implies that the person himself is not the pure soul. That is not his essential self. “You have given me”—who is this “me”? The animal soul, the body, the sitra achra, the sense of a separate self. “You have given me”—within my own being, there is a G-dly soul. And it is the beinoni who says this, because this is, after all, part of the prayers. You know that the wording of the prayers is intended for most people. Since most people are not tzaddikim, the wording is “You have given me.” With tzaddikim it is the reverse: the pure soul, the G-dly soul, is the person, and their body is called “the flesh of a person.” For a tzaddik, it is the other way around. His essential self has been transformed; the G-dly soul has become his essential self, his very being. The body, by contrast, is like something distinct and separate. He calls his body “the flesh of a person.” As Hillel the Elder said to his students when he went to eat: he was going to perform an act of kindness for the poor and lowly one—his body. Hillel the Elder was at the level of a complete tzaddik. So when he went to eat, he would say he was going to do kindness for the poor and lowly one. He was talking about his body, saying that he was doing it a kindness. He referred to his body as something apart from himself. But he did not say it as some clever teaching about serving Hashem, or as a joke or a novel idea. When he needed to eat, he genuinely felt that he was doing kindness for his body.

06:13 Just as you do kindness for a poor person. The poor person’s situation is outside of you, and you do kindness for him. The body and the vital soul need to be given what they require. So he goes to feed it, because he regards it as a stranger. That is why he said he was doing kindness by feeding it: he himself was nothing but the G-dly soul alone, for it alone gave life to his body and flesh. So what is the fundamental point the Alter Rebbe is making here? What is the Alter Rebbe saying? In these lines, the Alter Rebbe is expressing a very powerful point about a person’s essential self in his service of Hashem. In a moment we will explain what it is and why I am going into all this at such length. But what is the fundamental point here? The Alter Rebbe is now telling us about a fundamental difference between a tzaddik and a beinoni, beyond everything we have learned so far. We already learned about the differences between a tzaddik and a beinoni in chapters 11 and 12; the Alter Rebbe explained the whole subject there. What is he adding here? What he is adding is the question of who the “I” is. A person says, “I want,” “I love,” “I eat.” What is this “I” of mine? When I say “I,” who is the “I”? Who is the person one is referring to? What is my own reality? A person’s “I” is whatever he naturally identifies with. In other words, if I want to know whether my “I” is the G-dly soul or the animal soul, the question is: What do my instincts, my nature, seek on their own? And what are the things that require a second thought, that I have to work and toil for because they do not come naturally? This is the key difference between a tzaddik and a beinoni—all the more so when it comes to someone below that level. But here, in Tanya, we are speaking

08:05 about a tzaddik and a beinoni. Heaven forbid, when we speak about a beinoni, we mean a person for whom any thought of sin or wrongdoing is out of the question. We are not talking about an ordinary person. In thought, speech, and action, the beinoni has never committed a transgression and never will. And the meaning of “has never and never will” is that actually committing a transgression is completely out of the question for him. That is why it says “has never and never will,” as explained in the commentaries on Tanya, chapter 12. Look at the state he is in: any act of sin or wrongdoing is entirely out of the question for him. But what does “entirely out of the question” mean? It is not the very existence of the wrongdoing that is out of the question for him. What is out of the question is committing it—putting it into practice. But the thing itself is not out of the question. The beinoni does not loathe evil, and since he does not loathe evil, evil itself, the transgression itself, is not inherently beyond him. What is beyond him is doing the evil. A beinoni will not, under any circumstances, do something contrary to the Divine Will—whether it is desecrating Shabbos, eating something forbidden, or any other sin, a matter of kashrus, even a Torah prohibition, or something for which one must give one’s life, and so on. He will under no circumstances do something contrary to the Shulchan Aruch. But the thing itself is still not beyond him. It exists in his world. A tzaddik, however, loathes evil. He does not merely loathe committing a transgression; anything that is kelipah and sitra achra is out of the question for him. Its very existence is out of the question. So when it comes to desires, since the tzaddik’s essential self has become the G-dly soul—that is his entire being—G-dliness is the only reality for him, and anything outside of G-dliness is out of the question for him. Consequently, his natural desire is

10:13 G-dliness. His natural desire is the supernal will. That is his natural desire, his essence, and what “the person” means here. Who is the person? Who is the “I”? Who is the soul? For a tzaddik, his soul is G-dliness, and that is his first thought, his initial outlook, his first instinct. Not so for a beinoni. In his essential makeup, he is a separate entity, a self. What he feels first is the “I”—the “I” that is not G-dliness, the “I” of the animal soul. He overcomes it and says, “No, I won’t do what I want; I’ll do what Hakadosh Boruch Hu wants.” Sometimes that means doing something, and sometimes it means refraining from something. But his natural inclination is still toward material things, things of this world, ordinary concerns. That is his makeup. He overcomes it, and in practice he keeps Torah and mitzvos and commits no transgressions. That is true of his actions and his decisions, but it does not mean that the very idea of doing otherwise is unthinkable to him. That is what the Alter Rebbe is saying. So for an ordinary person, who is “the person”? The animal soul is the person; it is what comes naturally to him. G-dliness is something additional. That is why the Alter Rebbe brings the example of Hillel the Elder, who was a tzaddik. When he spoke about the body’s needs, he spoke about them as though they belonged to something separate from himself. Because he was a tzaddik, G-dliness was his essence, his very being. Anything that was not G-dliness was, to him, something distinct and foreign. The body—yes, one must care for it and keep it healthy and whole. But that was like a duty, a mission, something he had to attend to, not his sense of “me.”

12:14 That is the essential difference between a tzaddik and a beinoni. When the Alter Rebbe says here that “the person” is the animal soul, what does he mean? How does this fit into what he is saying? On the simplest level, the Alter Rebbe wants to explain why a broken heart and a broken spirit help. Why do I say that when I break my heart through self-examination and so on, breaking the coarseness of the heart, the sitra achra is thereby broken? The Alter Rebbe says: Because the person—the sitra achra—is my makeup, my sense of self. So breaking my own coarseness is, in effect, breaking the sitra achra. And when the sitra achra is broken, that allows the G-dly light to shine. That is how the light of the soul can shine within a person and dispel the dullness of the mind and heart. That is one side of it. On the other hand, this whole lengthy discussion by the Alter Rebbe is also an introduction to what he is about to explain in the rest of the chapter: exactly what one’s self-examination should involve. This itself is part of that self-examination. Contemplating who “the person” is—that the person is the animal soul—is part of the contemplation one needs in order to bring oneself to a broken heart. When you grasp deeply that the person you feel yourself to be is the animal soul, the sitra achra, rather than G-dliness, that itself breaks down a person’s coarseness. As the Alter Rebbe will explain in the rest of the chapter, this itself is part of the contemplation that produces a broken and contrite heart. But what does it mean to say that the soul—the person—is the animal soul? When we read these words, a question arises. We learn Chassidus, and it says

14:12 the opposite. Everywhere in Chassidus it says the opposite. It always says: What is a Jew’s essence? “An actual part of G-d above.” A Jew’s essence is the G-dly soul. That is his essence, his core, his inner self, his true self. The animal soul is a kelipah. And this is clear from Tanya itself, earlier on. The true reality of a Jew is that he does not want to, and cannot, be separated from G-dliness. The Alter Rebbe explained this in chapters 18 and 19 and throughout the chapters where he discussed the G-dly power within a Jew. How did the Alter Rebbe convince us that every single person can be a beinoni in the fullest sense? Because G-dliness is your essential being. The G-dly soul is who we are. The animal soul is only a kelipah, like an outer covering, an external garment. It is something there, but it is not your essence. And here the Alter Rebbe says the opposite: Who is the person? The animal soul. This is explained in maamarim in several places. The Rebbe discusses it in sichos, and it appears elsewhere as well. These are two different matters. The mistake is to mix up two distinct ideas, both of which we need to understand. One distinction is between the essence and what it manifests. In other words, what is a Jew’s essence? When we speak of the essence, the true being of a Jew, then certainly a Jew’s essence is an actual part of G-d above—the G-dly soul. A Jew does not want to, and cannot, be separated from G-dliness. That is speaking about the essence. Here the Alter Rebbe is not speaking about the essence. He is speaking about what is revealed: what is felt within a person? We are not discussing what is ultimately true. There is the truth, and the truth of a Jew is G-dliness. The truth of a Jew is that he does not want to, and cannot, be separated from G-dliness. That is his essential self. Here the question we

16:16 are asking ourselves is: What do I feel my makeup to be? What do I actually feel? And here we say that what you naturally feel is the animal soul. That is my first sense of myself. Matters of G-dliness feel separate, something added on. So who is “the person”? The animal soul. The G-dly soul feels hidden to me. With a tzaddik it is the opposite. What he feels to be his very being is different, because his animal soul is like a garment to him. As we say of a tzaddik, the animal soul is like a garment for him. “You found his heart faithful before You”—“his heart” alludes to both hearts, for even the animal soul has been transformed toward G-dliness. That is the point the Alter Rebbe is making. Elsewhere it is put in different words. I don’t know whether this exact wording appears in a maamar, but this is a way chassidim explain it: there is the essence, the inner dimension, and the outer dimension. Sometimes it is described this way, divided into three parts. There is the essence, the inner aspect, and the outer aspect. The essence of every Jew is truly an actual part of G-d above. For example, when the Rebbe cites the Rambam—as the Rebbe often does—that every Jew’s true desire is to do what Hashem wants, what the Creator wants, and if he does not, it is because his yetzer has coerced him: a Jew’s essence wants to fulfill the will of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. That is a Jew’s essence, and in that sense we say that his essence is a part of G-d above. At his core, a Jew wants only Hakadosh Boruch Hu; if he does not act that way, his yetzer has coerced him. That is one level. But we are speaking about avodas Hashem as it is expressed in practice. Then there is an inner dimension and an outer dimension, and the question here is: Which is your inner dimension and which is your outer dimension? In the inner dimension there is love. And the question becomes: Where is your inner self? Not your essence—your inner self, the self you feel to be your being.

18:25 Where are you living? What are you absorbed in? So when it comes to the inner self, there is a difference between a tzaddik and a beinoni. With a tzaddik, his entire inner self becomes bound to G-dliness, and therefore G-dliness is his whole reality; nothing else is relevant to him, even openly. With a beinoni, it is a battle; that bond is hidden. Now we come to the external level, the third level. The external level is the garments. There we see that even a beinoni has that “he will neither want to nor transgress.” In practice, serving Hashem, committing a sin is unthinkable for him. The level of a beinoni is not merely that he does not actually sin. In his practical service of Hashem—in thought, speech, and action—we say that committing a sin is unthinkable for him. It is not something he would do. He will neither want to nor transgress. But that concerns, as we said, the act of committing the sin. The very concept of a transgression, the very concept of a sin, the very concept of something forbidden, is not unthinkable to a beinoni. So these are the three levels we are discussing here, to understand exactly how the whole subject is laid out in Tanya. In any case, that is the point the Alter Rebbe explains to us in this part of the chapter. He comes to clarify that since we are speaking here about a beinoni, whose essential nature still involves a sense of self and independent existence, when he breaks his material coarseness—through breaking that coarseness, through a broken heart—the sitra achra is thereby broken as well. And once the sitra achra is broken, the light of the soul can shine within him, and through that he can overcome it. This is the advice the Alter Rebbe gives for breaking the dullness of the heart, and sometimes also the dullness of the mind when speaking about a person who is not a beinoni, so that

20:33 the light of the soul—the G-dly light of Chassidus, of prayer, of serving Hashem—can shine within him in an inward way. So I’ll finish with at least a few lines from the Alter Rebbe. The Alter Rebbe says, “For he himself is nothing but the G-dly soul alone.” And regarding Hillel, and regarding the tzaddik: “For it alone is clothed in his body and flesh, since the vital soul clothed in his blood and flesh has become attached to the good and is included in the very holiness of the G-dly soul in tzaddikim.” So with tzaddikim, it is transformed completely. And regarding the animal soul of a tzaddik, just one more point: The Alter Rebbe says that through his service, the tzaddik has brought his animal soul to the point where it “has become attached to the good and is included in the very holiness of the G-dly soul.” That means a tzaddik also has an animal soul, but his animal soul has been transformed into good. This relates to what is explained—the Rebbe cites it several times, in several places. It is not so explicit in Tanya, but it appears several times in the Rebbe’s maamarim: the difference between King David and Avraham Avinu. Of King David it is said that he killed his evil inclination; he killed it through fasting. That was what he accomplished—he killed it. By contrast, about Avraham Avinu it says, “And You found his heart faithful before You.” “His heart” indicates two hearts, which he transformed. The Rebbe cites the Jerusalem Talmud as saying that Avraham Avinu was on a higher level than King David. King David killed his evil inclination. Avraham Avinu did not kill it; he made it into something that loves Hashem. He transformed his evil inclination into love of Hashem. These are two levels in the work of tzaddikim with the animal soul. There are tzaddikim whose work is

22:59 to kill the animal soul. Both are tzaddikim. In both cases, the evil within them is completely nullified, to the point that any notion of evil is utterly unthinkable in their inner selves. But this itself can happen in two ways: by nullifying the evil, a kind of negation, or, conversely, through transformation, where the animal soul itself becomes something that loves Hashem and turns toward G-dliness. But those are the two levels. It does not mean that a tzaddik has no animal soul. If you look at the beginning of Tanya, in chapter 1, the Alter Rebbe says that every Jew, whether a tzaddik or a rasha, has two souls. So chapter 1 of Tanya states explicitly that a tzaddik, too, has two souls. The Alter Rebbe says it right at the start: “Every Jew, whether a tzaddik or a rasha, has two souls.” So clearly the tzaddik also has two souls. How, then, could we say that a tzaddik has only a G-dly soul? From this we understand that the animal soul is something everyone has, including the tzaddik. The question is what the animal soul has become.

24:16 With a tzaddik, through his service, he has accomplished so much that his animal soul, in its entirety, has become a garment for the G-dly soul. His whole being has become G-dliness. And the tzaddik, too, has—perhaps we shouldn’t call it an animal soul; let’s call it a vital soul. The tzaddik, too, has a connection to the world. He has a body, and he eats and sleeps. He does physical things, and these are done through the vital soul. So the tzaddik also has a vital soul. The question is what defines that vital soul. With a tzaddik, the vital soul is entirely a garment for the G-dly soul. There is nothing else to it. And this itself can happen in two ways: either by killing it, as with King David, or by transforming it, as with Avraham Avinu. Among tzaddikim, this means there are those whose service of Hashem was more a matter of abstaining from the world, and those whose service of Hashem was more a matter of engaging with it. Like the story of Reb Avraham the Malach and the Alter Rebbe: Reb Avraham the Malach did not understand why the Alter Rebbe, in the middle of their learning, in the middle of their explanations, in the middle of their deep attachment to Hashem, went to eat a bagel with butter. It is the well-known story in which the Alter Rebbe explained to him that this was the intent. It is another approach, along the lines of the difference between King David and Avraham Avinu. The path of abstention is a way of serving Hashem that negates the physical. Reb Avraham the Malach was on that level. For him, it was “whip the horses—but no horses”: the horses must cease to be horses. Nullify the horse, nullify its independent existence by killing it. By contrast, with Avraham Avinu, the horses themselves were transformed: “Whip the horse until it knows it is a horse.” It is the service of transformation—to transform the horse,

26:13 to make it into a vehicle for G-dliness, and so on. In any case, that is the point.