Likkutei Amarim Chapter 31 - Part 3

00:00 We’re up to chapter 31 of Tanya, page 39b, halfway down the page. In this chapter, the Alter Rebbe discusses how a person makes the transition from a state of bitterness to a state of joy. In the last few chapters, the Alter Rebbe explained that sometimes, to break one’s sense of self, the dullness of the heart, the heaviness in the heart, a person needs to break his heart through self-examination and contemplation. It’s like wood: we break it into small pieces so the fire will catch. In the same way, we want the soul’s divine fire to catch, but the body is coarse and material, and it doesn’t let G-dliness penetrate. It has to be broken. That breaking comes through contemplation. In chapters 29 and 30, the Alter Rebbe explained how this breaking of the heart is done. Then, in chapter 31, the Alter Rebbe asks: What will happen if a person contemplates everything we discussed in chapters 29 and 30? He’ll become sad; he’ll fall into depression, as people say today. He’ll be sad, and sadness is the opposite of everything holiness is about. Sadness belongs to kelipah, while holiness calls specifically for joy: “Strength and joy are in His place.” How can a person be told to do this kind of work if it brings him to sadness? So the Alter Rebbe said that this isn’t a problem. Why not? Because when you want to break the kelipah, you have to take something from the kelipah to break it. It’s like taking wood and making the tool used to cut the wood—the handle of the, what’s it called, the axe. You use wood to break wood. Here too, you take something from the kelipah—the coarseness, the sadness, which is

02:21 a trait belonging to this world—and use it to break the kelipah. This is the meaning of “In all sadness there will be gain.” King Shlomo says that sadness has an advantage, because through it a person comes to a broken heart, and through a broken heart he will afterward come to true joy, as the Alter Rebbe will explain later in the chapter. Here the Alter Rebbe continues, halfway down the page in chapter 31, page 39b. “But in truth,” the Alter Rebbe continues—he says that it isn’t quite the same thing. What we’re discussing here is not sadness; it’s bitterness. Let’s first look at his words inside. The Alter Rebbe says: “But in truth, a broken heart and bitterness of soul over its distance from the light of Hashem’s countenance and its being clothed in the sitra achra are not called sadness at all.” The Alter Rebbe is saying: Know that everything we’re discussing here—a person contemplating until his heart is broken and he feels bitterness over his distance from G-dliness—isn’t really sadness. That isn’t what it’s called. As he puts it: “For sadness means that his heart is dull as a stone and there is no vitality in his heart. But bitterness and a broken heart—on the contrary, there is vitality in his heart, so that he is stirred and feels bitter.” He has a great deal of vitality. His vitality expresses itself in being moved and feeling bitterness. This isn’t a movement of death or dullness. On the contrary, it’s a movement of life. “It is only that this vitality comes from holy gevurah, while joy comes from chessed, for the heart includes both.” What is the Alter Rebbe explaining here? He is explaining that, in the spiritual work we’re discussing, we’re not talking about sadness. We’re talking about bitterness. What is the difference between sadness and bitterness? Sadness is a matter of

04:29 kelipah, because sadness means a heart that is dull as a stone, an absence of vitality. That is the difference between holiness and kelipah: holiness is alive. “But you who cleave to Hashem your G-d are all alive today.” The hallmark of holiness is vitality. The hallmark of kelipah is death. The Alter Rebbe said earlier in Tanya that the wicked, even during their lifetimes, are called dead. You see, ... death and impurity. Kelipah is, in essence, the absence of life. Holiness is, in essence, life. That’s the difference between sadness and bitterness: sadness is a movement of death; bitterness is a movement of life. So they’re complete opposites. They have nothing in common; they’re two different things. We’re talking about the word “sadness” in the Holy Tongue. The word carries a sense of constriction. In the Gemara there are cubits—what is it called?—different kinds of handbreadths and cubits. The term used there is “atzuvos.” It discusses how things are measured: constricted cubits, constricted handbreadths. That’s the wording there, meaning compressed or contracted. There’s a cubit of six handbreadths, and a cubit of eight handbreadths, seven handbreadths—yes, different kinds of cubits mentioned in halachah. So that’s what “atzuv,” sad, means: contracted, constricted. That’s the word in the Holy Tongue. When we say a person is sad, we mean that the person is contracted. This contraction, this feeling squeezed, is the opposite of life. That’s one of the differences we can see between a person in a state of sadness and a person in a state of joy. Joy is expansiveness; joy is a movement of expansion. When a person is joyful and experiencing pleasure, the soul is in a state of expansiveness, what’s called expansiveness of soul. Chassidus says that by nature, pleasure and joy put the soul in an expansive state. Everyone knows the story in the Gemara, in Gittin,

06:52 where he told him the good news about the ruler in Rome: he told him that he had become king. When the good news arrived, his foot became... “Good news fattens the bone.” He actually grew wider physically. We see that pleasure causes expansion, so much so that even the bones expand, and he couldn’t put on his shoes. Afterward, when something unpleasant happened and the news brought on a feeling of sadness, there was a contraction, and his foot contracted again. From this we understand that sadness is, by its very nature, the opposite of life, pleasure, and joy. It is a movement of contraction, a kind of absence of vitality. Bitterness, by contrast, is something entirely different. Bitterness means that a person isn’t satisfied with himself; he demands more of himself. He makes demands. That’s the nature of bitterness: it is a demand. On the contrary, when a person lacks vitality, there can be no demand. He can’t demand anything of himself. He’s sad; he’s despondent. That’s a state of inaction. We understand this in practical terms, yes, we can see the difference between sadness and bitterness plainly. There’s a well-known saying of the early chassidim. Some attribute it to Reb Yankel Yener[?], and others to Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, one of the Baal Shem Tov’s students. He said: What’s the difference between sadness and bitterness? In sadness, a person goes to sleep; in bitterness, a person goes and does something. That’s the difference. After feeling bitterness, a person will say a chapter of Tehillim, or go daven, or go do something. When a person is in a state of sadness, he gets into bed, and that’s it. That’s what it means that sadness is an absence of vitality, a movement

08:50 of death. Dull as a stone, an inanimate stone. And this is what the Alter Rebbe said at the beginning of Tanya: laziness comes from the element of earth; laziness and sadness come from the element of earth. When a person is sad, he becomes heavy, and that heaviness is the opposite of life. He has no hope; he doesn’t want to do anything. He’s depressed, sad, lying in bed, sleeping. He gets up late, has no strength to do anything, no desire. The opposite of life. That is the movement of sadness, and it belongs to kelipah. The opposite of life is kelipah. Bitterness, on the other hand, he says, is just the opposite: there is reflection here, there is movement in a person. The point of that reflection is not to go to sleep. Bitterness is a movement of reflection in the opposite direction: he wants to do more; he demands more of himself. If we go deeper into the root of the matter, why is that, really? What makes the difference between sadness and bitterness? Seemingly, it’s all the same reckoning—the reckoning he discussed in chapters 29 and 30. A person reflects on his animal soul and on all the transgressions he has committed in thought, speech, and action, and he reflects on how he is worse than the lowliest people. What makes the difference? When does reflecting on these things bring a person to sadness, and when does it bring him to bitterness? How does that work? What’s the practical difference? Seemingly, it’s the same reckoning: he is thinking about the things that are not good in himself. So there are two very important points here. One is whether you emphasize the past or the future. In sadness, a person is more immersed in his past. He thinks about how much he has fallen short, how much he has failed to do good, how much he has failed. The whole emphasis

10:41 of his reflection is on the past. When you’re immersed in the past, you’re immersed in garbage, in dirt; and when we get into dirt, we get dirty. With bitterness, on the other hand, he also reflects on things in the past, but that isn’t where his emphasis lies. His emphasis is on looking ahead and demanding something of himself for the future: How can I get out of this? That is a simpler, more basic point. But more deeply, the difference between sadness and bitterness in this reflection is that sadness emphasizes the ego. In sadness, a person thinks about everything he didn’t do, or about the bad things, but what is he mainly thinking about? His own self, his “I.” He is immersed in himself. I’m not okay, I’m no good, I’m not succeeding, things aren’t working out for me, I’m a failure, I’m a piece of garbage—all kinds of names a person uses to put himself down. But the emphasis is on my condition. He is immersed in his own self, and because he isn’t happy with the picture he has of himself, the result is a movement of dejection. That is why it belongs to kelipah. With bitterness, on the other hand, the reflection is on G-dliness. Its emphasis is not on my ego, on my picture of myself. The emphasis in bitterness, the reflection, is on G-dliness. He reflects on the fact that he has a soul. He reflects on the enormity of its captivity, and on how his conduct distances him from Hakadosh Boruch Hu. So he asks himself why he is far from Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and then he seeks to draw closer to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. At the root of reflection that leads to sadness lies ego: he is immersed in his “I,” and that brings a person to dejection and so on—the opposite of holiness. Not so with bitterness. At the root of that reflection is something G-dly, something holy, Hakadosh Boruch

12:48 Hu, and he feels bitterness over his distance from G-dliness. This is the Alter Rebbe’s wording, as explained here: “Bitterness of the soul over its distance from the presence of Hashem.” His bitterness is about his distance from the presence of Hashem. What matters to him is the presence of Hashem. He reflects on how deeply the presence of Hashem is concealed, and he comes to see how far he is from it. So he wants to draw closer to the presence of Hashem. These, then, are two main differences between sadness and bitterness. Sadness focuses more on one’s past, while bitterness puts more emphasis on the future. In sadness, a person is more immersed in himself, in his ego; in bitterness, he is immersed in G-dliness. He feels his distance from G-dliness and wants to draw closer to it. There is a passage in Likkutei Torah where the Alter Rebbe speaks about sadness. The Alter Rebbe says that sadness is when a person thinks about how he is not on the level of the Baal Shem Tov or Reb Shimon bar Yochai. In other words, what concerns him isn’t G-dliness; it’s his picture of himself. A person builds up a picture of himself: I would like to be the most chassidish student in the yeshivah, the most learned, the most well-liked, the most whatever. Everyone wants some picture they have imagined for themselves, and when a person sees that he hasn’t managed to become the person he pictured, he feels he is worth nothing. In other words, the point here is not Hakadosh Boruch Hu. The point is my picture of myself, my own identity, my ego—the way I would like to see myself. And because I haven’t managed to live up to that picture, I feel dejected. So it’s clear that the underlying issue here is ego, and that is why sadness belongs to kelipah and the sitra achra. This also helps us understand what is said in the name of the Baal Shem Tov’s disciples

14:41 about the difference between sadness and bitterness. There’s a saying chassidim used to repeat—earlier chassidim would say it: “They rise to the heavens; they descend to the depths.” That’s a verse in Tehillim. “They rise to the heavens; they descend to the depths,” something like that. Yes, they say that this is the difference between sadness and bitterness: sadness is “they descend to the depths”; bitterness is “they rise to the heavens.” In other words, bitterness is a force that lifts a person up and demands that he do more. That is why it belongs to holiness. On the contrary, it brings a person to a stronger drive to serve Hashem. He demands more of himself. Sadness, by contrast, is “they descend to the depths”: it casts a person down into the lowest pit. There is another saying attributed to the Baal Shem Tov’s disciples. I think it is also attributed to the rabbi of Karlin. He spoke about sadness and the mikveh. He said that sadness is not a transgression, but what sadness can cause a person—no transgression can cause that. Sadness is not a transgression. The Torah doesn’t say that it is forbidden to be sad, but no transgression can bring a person as low as sadness can. As for the mikveh, going to the mikveh is not a mitzvah. But no mitzvah can lift a person up, elevate him, the way the mikveh can. Two matters in Chassidus: the mikveh in relation to holiness, and sadness in relation to kelipah. There is also a chassidic vort about sadness. They say this is the meaning of what we say in the morning prayers: “Do not bring us into the hands of sin or into the hands of transgression.” What does “into the hands of sin” or “into the hands of transgression” mean? There is the transgression, and there are the hands of transgression. What are the “hands of transgression”? Hands are what extend outward. Hands are like what it says in the Gemara,

16:53 In the Mishnah, yes, there is a concept of “handles.” It means something that extends from an object, like the handle of a vessel, or the stem of a fruit. So when we say, “Do not bring us into the hands of sin or into the hands of transgression,” what are we asking Hakadosh Boruch Hu? We are asking not only about the transgression itself, but about its “handles”—what follows from it. A transgression can cause a person to become sad. For the transgression itself, a person can do teshuvah. But after a person falls into a transgression, the yetzer hara comes and tells you, “You’re a piece of garbage. You’re worth nothing because you failed.” Then you sink into sadness. That is worse than the transgression itself. That is why chassidim say that the yetzer hara is not so interested in transgressions. It wants them because of what it gains: through the transgression, a person falls into sadness. A transgression is one particular thing. You committed a transgression; you need to do teshuvah. But afterward, a person feels sad, feels so sullied, or feels that he himself is no good. That fall after the transgression—into bitterness, into sadness—is what the yetzer hara wants more than anything, because that is bound up with death and impurity. In any case, this is the point the Alter Rebbe explains here: everything we have discussed until now, in chapters 29 and 30, is not meant to bring a person to sadness. It is meant to bring him to bitterness. And if it is bitterness, bitterness is holiness. As he says, within holiness there are gevurah and chesed. Holiness comprises sefiros, emotional attributes. So there are chesed and gevurah. The chesed of the higher soul is joy

18:43 in serving Hashem. The gevurah of the G-dly soul is bitterness in serving Hashem. In any case, that is the point he explains here. But there is a very difficult question here, something in Tanya that is hard to understand. The early chassidim already asked it. Seemingly, there is a contradiction in Tanya between the first part and the second. The Alter Rebbe begins chapter 31 by saying that even if contemplating all this brings you to sadness, “nevertheless, he should not be concerned.” Sadness should not trouble you. Why? Isn’t sadness kelipah? The Alter Rebbe says that is not a problem, because we also need to draw strength from kelipah for serving Hashem, and to break kelipah we need to use kelipah—in this case, sadness. So what do we understand from the first part of the chapter? That the Alter Rebbe is speaking specifically about sadness, which belongs to kelipah, and says not to be concerned, because sadness can also be used. Then the Alter Rebbe begins to say: actually, this is not called sadness; it is bitterness, and bitterness is holiness. If so, that contradicts what he said earlier. First you said that sadness is kelipah, but that it is still useful, because kelipah too is needed to break evil. So what was he explaining? At the end he says: no, actually it is not kelipah; it is holiness. If it is holiness, then what was he explaining at the beginning? There seems to be a contradiction between the first part and the second. In Hatamim there is an extensive discussion—a very interesting letter. Not a letter; what should I call it? An explanation. In Hatamim, the journal published before the war in Poland, there is a very beautiful explanation by Rabbi Chetz[?]

20:39 P'[?]. He explains this entire passage in Tanya, the difference between sadness and bitterness and so on, but the question remains unanswered. He tries to explain various things that we discussed earlier, but in practice, Tanya is still difficult to understand. It opens with sadness, says that sadness is useful, and says at the beginning of the chapter that it is kelipah. Later in the chapter it says: no, actually it is not sadness; it is bitterness, and bitterness is holiness. So if it is holiness, what were you saying earlier? That is the contradiction between the first part and the second. The explanation can be found in the Rebbe’s commentary on Likkutei Amarim in Shiurim B’Sefer HaTanya. There the Rebbe offers a remarkable new insight. Until then, people had not understood it this way. The Rebbe’s explanation simply illuminates the plain meaning of Tanya. What does the Rebbe explain? Briefly, the point is this: the Rebbe says that in the process of contemplation, when a person contemplates chapters 29 and 30—if you study chapter 29 of Tanya as something that applies to you, and especially chapter 30, and you truly believe what is written there—you come to recognize that, in your service of Hashem, your state is worse than that of the most lowly people. That is the conclusion the Alter Rebbe reaches in chapter 30: the gravity of the failing for a beinoni, the fact that you are not serving Hashem inwardly as you should, and all the other points the Alter Rebbe makes. So when a person truly contemplates chapters 29 and 30 of Tanya, the natural first response of his soul will be sadness, not bitterness. He will feel despicable and lowly, the lowest of men. That is the soul’s first response. It is a downward movement, a negative movement—sadness and withdrawal. About this the Alter Rebbe says at the beginning of the chapter: it is kelipah, it is sitra achra. Sadness is the opposite of holiness. How can there be sadness?

22:45 The Alter Rebbe explains that this is not a problem, because even this is needed for teshuvah. But that is only the first moment, the initial response. As the Rebbe says in his explanation, the person then immediately takes it further and contemplates the Divine purpose in it. He takes this whole explanation and says: the issue is distance from G-dliness. No, this is not about my ego; it is about G-dliness. Then it immediately becomes a matter of holiness, and it turns into bitterness—and bitterness is holiness. So when a person contemplates matters of teshuvah and self-examination, this truly is the sequence: the first response is sadness, and the second is bitterness. That is what the Alter Rebbe explains here. When we reach that first response, sadness, the Alter Rebbe explains that it too has a virtue. We need it to break kelipah. We need an element of kelipah as well, but afterward we must not remain there, because it is the opposite of G-dliness. One must immediately contemplate matters of G-dliness and turn sadness into bitterness. The focus should no longer be on myself and how I am no good, but on how distant I am from G-dliness. That will awaken in a person the desire to move beyond himself and draw closer to G-dliness, and then his service will be specifically with joy. Of course, to complete the picture, we should add what the Rebbe spoke about in later years and repeated many times: in our generation, after all the troubles and undesirable events our generation went through—the Holocaust, rachmana litzlan, and the like—we must be very careful with an approach based on sadness, and even with one based on bitterness. The Rebbe spoke very strongly about this many

24:49 times. Our generation is not suited to it. It is very easy for people today to become broken, and that brings no benefit. Instead of leading to holiness, it turns into the opposite of holiness. As chassidim put it: instead of decay that leads to growth, it becomes decay that leads only to decay. In other words, decay is bitterness. There is the idea of “he will surely come back rejoicing”: a seed is placed in the ground so that fruit can grow from it, but that works only when its decay leads to life. If one does not know how to approach it, it becomes the opposite. Therefore, the Rebbe said that in our generation the main emphasis in our service must be specifically on joy, and even teshuvah must be done with joy. It is an approach of “Tracht gut, vet zain gut”—think good, and it will be good. That is what the Rebbe asked of our generation: the emphasis should clearly be more on joy. Nevertheless, we also need to know what the Alter Rebbe says here: in the work of teshuvah, there are times for contemplation, and a person must know the difference between bitterness and sadness. Even then, the emphasis is not on sadness but on bitterness, so that the bitterness brings you closer to G-dliness and not, G-d forbid, the opposite.