Likkutei Amarim Chapter 31 - Part 6

00:01 So let’s continue in chapter 31, at the bottom of page 40. “And this is the service of his entire day.” Here the Alter Rebbe teaches us how a person moves from bitterness to joy. After all the bitterness—no, bitterness is not the goal. Bitterness is only a means. Right? “In all sadness there is gain.” In other words, the point is not the sadness itself. The point is the gain, what comes out of it: the genuine joy that follows the sadness. This is what the Alter Rebbe began explaining earlier on page 40. After all the soul-searching, and after a person contemplates everything discussed in the preceding chapters, he comes to realize that all of that is only me myself—it comes from the body and the animal soul. But within me there is a higher soul, a part of Hashem, and it is in exile and captivity. So, on the contrary, the whole purpose and aim of his service must be to take the soul out of confinement, to free it from imprisonment and exile, and bring it back to its father’s home as in its youth. This is accomplished through Torah and mitzvos in general, and especially through the service of prayer, when a Jew cries out. In prayer, he prays to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, crying out to Hashem—one of the ten expressions for prayer mentioned in the Midrash. It is a cry, an outcry. Of course, not an audible cry. In Chabad, we are not talking about crying out loud, but about the cry of the heart. A person cries out inwardly, in his soul, asking Hakadosh Boruch Hu to help him free the higher soul from the imprisonment of exile and cleave to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. This itself is the meaning of “teshuvah and good deeds”: the good deeds bring about the return. They return the soul to its root and source, the source and root of all worlds. The Alter Rebbe continues, in the third line here: “And this is.” “And this is the service of his entire day, with great joy: the joy of the soul as it leaves the loathsome body.” So—

02:18 This is how one should live all the time: a person’s daily service should be filled with great joy. There are two teachings of our Sages. One says that a person should spend his entire day in teshuvah, and another says that his entire day should be filled with joy. How do these two work together? From what the Alter Rebbe explains here, we can understand it. The Gemara says—yes, the Gemara says—that Rabbi Eliezer told his students to do teshuvah one day before a person leaves this world: “Repent one day before your death.” The students asked: But a person doesn’t know when he will die. So he said: That is precisely what I meant—that one should do teshuvah every day. That is where the expression “his entire day in teshuvah” comes from. On the other hand, we say that the service of Hashem must be joyful. Serve Hashem with joy, for one should begin praying only in a state of joy, along with the other teachings of our Sages that the Alter Rebbe cited here. So how do these two go together? According to Chassidus, it is clear. On the contrary, genuine teshuvah is a joyful return. Genuine teshuvah is the return of the soul. True, the feeling of bitterness must come first in order to reach joy. First a person must clear things away and reach a broken heart so that the soul can shine within him. But that is only a means, to remove the concealment caused by the coarseness of the body and the animal soul. Once he has managed to break through the barrier, break down that coarseness, chop the wood into small pieces, his soul can now be stirred, reveal itself, and shine. So the main thing in the service of teshuvah is, on the contrary, to do teshuvah with joy. That is why he says: This is the service of his entire day, with great joy. The Alter Rebbe writes along these lines in Igeres Hateshuvah, chapter 11. There, too, the Alter Rebbe discusses lower teshuvah and higher teshuvah. In general—

04:17 lower teshuvah is service through bitterness, while higher teshuvah is service through joy. There, too, the Alter Rebbe uses this expression: “And this is the service of his entire day, with great joy”—higher teshuvah is specifically teshuvah with joy. “The joy of the soul as it leaves the loathsome body.” What is the joy in teshuvah? It is the soul’s joy at being able to return and draw close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. “And return to its father’s home as in its youth.” It can once again unite with Hakadosh Boruch Hu as it did in its youth. That expression means: as the soul was before it descended into the world, when it was together with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. As the Alter Rebbe also says in Igeres Hateshuvah, the essence of teshuvah is returning the soul to its original source, as it was before its descent. Chapter 8. This is the central idea of teshuvah, of higher teshuvah: drawing close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu “as in its youth,” as the soul was originally beneath the Throne of Glory, together with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. When does that happen? During Torah study and service of Hashem. Every time I sit down to learn Torah, pray, and serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu, the soul returns to unite with Hakadosh Boruch Hu, as it was before it descended into the world. So this is the essence of teshuvah, and this teshuvah is done with joy. And not just ordinary joy, or the general joy of serving Hashem. Here there is a double joy. For there is no greater joy than leaving exile and captivity. There is the joy of being able to draw close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. That is the greatest joy: standing before the King. But here the joy is even greater because it comes from the opposite state. In his contemplation, a person has gone through a process in which he considered how low his state is—in chapters 28, 29, 31, 29, 31—and reached a feeling of bitterness and did everything we discussed earlier. So—

06:15 the feeling is: Where am I emerging from? Precisely from the worst place, from exile and captivity. There is no greater joy than leaving exile and captivity. The greatest joy comes when one leaves exile and captivity. Both terms are used, “exile” and “captivity,” because they are two levels. There is a state of exile, and there is a state of captivity. Broadly speaking, they are the same, but in detail, we know there is a difference. Exile means that a person is somewhere that is not his home. As is well known, and as the Rebbe cites from Sefer HaChinuch, there is no pain like the pain of exile. A person naturally likes to be in a familiar place: the home where he was born, his family, his city, his own place. When people go into exile, [unclear], there is the pain of exile. You are somewhere that is not your place. That in itself is exile. Especially since, in exile, because you are somewhere that is not your place, there are things you cannot do, and you have to listen to all kinds of instructions about what to do. But in practice, a person in exile can still move about. Captivity, by contrast, is worse. Captivity means that even there, you cannot move: you are bound in chains, confined somewhere you cannot move, cannot— So captivity is much worse. That is why, in some sefarim, exile is associated more with permitted things, while captivity is associated with forbidden things. Or, sometimes it says that exile can also be within the realm of holiness: the constraints of holiness, or performing mitzvos by rote. That is called exile. Captivity, by contrast, is when one has already descended into this world. The maamarim on “Tziyon B’mishpat Tipadeh V’shaveha Bitztakah” discuss the distinction: which levels are in exile and which are in captivity. The maamarim discuss this at length.

08:09 But in any case, the Alter Rebbe says, there is no greater joy than coming out of exile and captivity—like a prince who was held captive, grinding in prison and filthy with refuse, and then went free to the home of his father, the king. That is the analogy for the work of teshuvah. Here the Alter Rebbe emphasizes three details. There are three points here. The first is that he is a prince. There are several details here in the work of joy, and we’ll get to them. Each detail brings us to a feeling of great joy. The more you grasp each detail, the greater the joy. The first foundation is what I’m talking about: this is a prince. “Prince” points to the stature of the soul. Where does the soul come from? It is a prince. Certainly, it is much harder for a prince to be in captivity than for an ordinary person. So the first thing is: where do you come from? You are a prince, and that shows the stature of the soul. Consequently, falling into captivity is a much greater fall. There is a difference between an ordinary person in captivity and a prince in captivity. The prince’s bitterness over being held captive is therefore much greater than that of an ordinary person in captivity. The depth of compassion. As we discussed in the previous class, the compassion is especially deep for a prince. So the compassion for him in his state of captivity is much greater. And when he is able to get up, leave captivity and return to his father the king, that is going from one extreme to the other: from the greatest pain of a prince held captive to the greatest joy of leaving captivity. And where does he return? Here too, he doesn’t just return to an ordinary home; he returns to his father the king. So every detail of this explanation adds to the joy, making it a great joy and a deliverance. The expressions the Alter Rebbe uses here—“held captive and grinding”

10:19 “in prison and filthy with refuse”—are also expressions that are all part of the analogy. Yes, these expressions echo verses. There’s something like this in Parshas—I think Parshas Bo, yes. “Grinding in prison,” an expression like that. “The maidservant who is behind the millstones,” as it says in the verse. Yes, the verse says that in connection with the plague of the firstborn. There are various expressions there, “behind the millstones.” In other words, this emphasizes imprisonment in its harshest form. In prison, one of the things they would do was put people to work. Part of imprisonment was backbreaking labor. Backbreaking labor. There are many degrees of it. One of the hardest forms was grinding in prison. Grinding was hard work; it exhausted the body. In the past, how did they grind? They needed very heavy stones that had to be turned, and that did the grinding. It was very, very hard labor. And there are further details. The commentaries say they arranged it so that you couldn’t even see the results. In other words, the person just kept turning the stones without seeing anything. When a person sees that something happens as he turns them, that makes a difference. It’s like the well-known story the Rebbe told about a man who had a job, and then said he didn’t want to do that work. They wanted to give him easier work. Yes, the well-known story the Rebbe told about the laborer, the farmer who worked very hard in the field. His employer took pity on him so he wouldn’t have to work so hard in the summer and winter and so on. So he told him to do the same motion, but not in the field. He should do it inside the house—stand there with the tool and move it like this all

12:15 day inside. If there’s air conditioning there, he has everything. He doesn’t have to be out in the heat and cold. After one day he said, “I want to go back to the field.” The Rebbe told this story many times. [unclear] “I don’t see the result of the work; it’s not the same.” That is the hardest kind of backbreaking labor. That was grinding in prison. In other words, there was the grinding itself, together with not seeing the product of it each time. So what is he trying to emphasize? He wants to emphasize this for us as well. We’re talking about a prince held captive in this physical world. The soul descends into a body, and in this physical world it is held captive, imprisoned by the body and the animal soul. It is occupied with all kinds of worldly matters without seeing the purpose. That is “grinding in prison”—backbreaking labor: for the soul to be in this physical world and do what the yetzer hara wants, rather than what the soul wants. And that is, in practice, degradation. “Filthy with refuse” is another matter. That refers to one’s thoughts, speech and actions—to the things one does. That is what “filthy with refuse” means. All these details show the depth of the degradation. Yet he goes free to the home of his father the king. So the joy is as great as can be, because there is no greater joy than this. Interestingly, the Alter Rebbe’s wording here is that at first he says “abundant joy,” and afterward he says “great joy.” “The goal of all his days” is “abundant joy”; afterward he says, “There is no greater joy.” The Rebbe explains in one of his sichos that “great joy” and “abundant joy” parallel “How manifold are Your works” and “How great are Your works.” That is precisely the maamar we’re studying this year. There is the idea of “how manifold” and the idea of “how great.” Chassidus explains that these are two different ideas. “Manifold” refers to quantity, to the multitude of created beings, while “great”

14:13 refers to quality, to the greatness of created beings. That is why the main explanation of “how manifold” relates to the beings on earth, where the emphasis is on their multitude. And the main explanation of “how great” relates to the host of the heavens, where the emphasis is on greatness and quality. The Rebbe points out something similar here. The Rebbe wants to say that the joy has both aspects: “all his days in abundant joy.” There is the quantity of joy, “abundant joy.” And beyond that, “there is no greater joy”—the quality of the joy. So the dimension of quantity comes from the very fact that the soul rejoices in leaving the loathsome body at the time of Torah study and divine service. The joy is abundant in its quantity and frequency: throughout all one’s days, there is an abundance of Torah and mitzvos, and one can constantly be in a state of joy. That relates more to the quantity of joy. The explanation is that at every moment, at every time, every day, whenever you study Torah and fulfill mitzvos, you have the opportunity to draw close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. So the emphasis there is more on abundance—“abundant joy.” Then, when the Alter Rebbe considers the journey from one extreme to the other—a prince held captive who leaves captivity and returns to his father the king—this is not only joy in quantity. It is the quality of the joy. That is “great joy.” So this is the joy in one’s avodah that must follow all the soul-searching and bitterness. The Alter Rebbe continues: “And although the body remains in its loathsome and repulsive state.” The Alter Rebbe raises what seems to be a very serious problem, a major question a person asks himself: How can you ask me to feel great joy because I am leaving imprisonment and drawing close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu? That whole account isn’t really true. After all, the body remains imprisoned; the body remains in its loathsome and repulsive state. In other words, there is no

16:28 As we learned, this is the parable of the king’s son. The king’s son was imprisoned, and now he is no longer in prison. So that settles it: he has gone home and is standing before the king. There is great joy because he has come home. But here, the G-dly soul is freed from exile while the soul and body remain, essentially, in the same place. After all, we are talking about a beinoni. A beinoni has not refined himself; he has not finished overcoming his yetzer. The body remains in the same state and condition. So it turns out that there has been no real release from prison. How, then, can you expect me to be joyful when I know that I am still, essentially, sullied? I am still coarse. The body and soul have essentially remained where they were. Otherwise, you are lying to yourself. This is what the Alter Rebbe asks: “Although the body remains in its loathsome and repulsive state,” still in its place, “and, as stated in the Zohar, is called mishcha de-chivya.” It is interesting that the Alter Rebbe says, “as stated in the Zohar.” Do we need the Zohar to tell us that? We know it even without the Zohar. But this is what the Zohar says about the body: “It is called mishcha de-chivya.” What does the Zohar mean? It is speaking about the human body, and it calls a person’s body mishcha de-chivya. What does mishcha de-chivya mean? The Zohar explains that all kelipah comes from the primordial serpent. The primordial serpent is the source of kelipah. So the Zohar says that a person’s body, a Jew’s body, is also kelipah from its external side—the body and its soul. But it calls it mishcha de-chivya, the skin of the serpent. It is not the serpent itself; it is the serpent’s skin. In halachah, we know—

18:42 Was it in the Rambam recently? Yes, or perhaps not yet. In any case, we are learning it now. There is this matter of skin. I think it was in the Rambam in the last few days: the skin of a serpent... Some skin conveys impurity like its flesh, and some skin does not convey impurity like its flesh. Yes. Regarding a serpent’s skin, I think it says that it does not convey impurity like its flesh. Its skin does not have the same status of impurity as the serpent’s flesh. There is a distinction in halachah. So, in spiritual terms, the serpent itself represents the three impure kelipos, while the serpent’s skin is kelipas nogah. Those animals listed in the Mishnah whose skin is like their flesh—their skin, too, belongs to the three impure kelipos. But the serpent’s skin, they say, is kelipas nogah. That is what the Zohar means when it calls the human body mishcha de-chivya: the serpent’s skin. It is not the serpent itself, but at any rate, as we said, it is kelipas nogah. In practice, though, it is kelipah, part of the serpent, and so it remains in its loathsome and repulsive state. How, then, can you be joyful? Because the essence and substance of the soul are not entirely good, wholly within holiness. With a beinoni, its essence and substance have not changed. “Nevertheless, his soul should be more precious to him, so that he rejoices in its joy more than in the lowly body, and does not mix and confuse the soul’s joy with the body’s sadness.” So the Alter Rebbe gives an answer here. A wonderful answer—one of the revolutions of the Alter Rebbe in Tanya, you might say. The Alter Rebbe gives a wonderful answer that is fundamental to serving Hashem. He says: You are right. This is one of the things that shows the treasure of Chabad: we do not fool ourselves. The Alter Rebbe does not say, “It’s fine.” No, it is true. In practice, the body and the animal soul have still not been refined. Mishcha de-chivya remains in the realm of kelipos. It has not yet been refined, and we are speaking here about a beinoni. But nevertheless—

20:44 What is the joy? If so, what is one joyful about? What matters to me right now? Where is my focus? What is most important to me? What do I value? In other words, you now have two realities. You have reason to be joyful, because your G-dly soul has the ability to draw close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. And you also have reason to be sad that your body has still not been transformed; it remains as it was. In practice, the body is also serving Hashem right now. It is not that when the soul serves Hashem, the body is committing sins at the same time. Certainly, when a Jew does a mitzvah, the whole body does the mitzvah. As the Alter Rebbe will say later, in chapter 35, even if it does so against its will... Certainly the body and animal soul take part. Without a body, you cannot perform mitzvos. So what is the problem? The body has not been refined; it follows the soul only against its will. It still remains... So the Alter Rebbe says: True. The question is, what matters most to me? What is precious to me? If what is precious to me is the opportunity to connect with Hakadosh Boruch Hu, then the fact that, at the same time, there are still things I have not resolved—things I have not yet finished cleaning up, as they say—is not the issue right now. That is not what matters now. What matters is what is most precious right now: the joy that I can draw close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. What is this like? It is a simple parable, but I heard it from Rabbi Yair[?] [unclear]. I heard it from Rabbi Yair[?], so I am giving credit to the one who said it. It is about a man at his son’s wedding. Imagine a father marrying off his child. It is the greatest joy there can be, the joy of his son’s wedding. He dances, he rejoices, he is happy. Everyone who comes over, he draws them close,

22:45 hugs them and dances with them. The greatest joy. Now, at that very time, he knows that the wedding has left him with bills to pay. It is not free. He has to pay the caterer, the photographer, this expense and that expense. Everything costs money, and money does not grow on trees. Afterward, he will have to pay, perhaps go into debt, take out loans, use credit—whatever it takes. So he has reason to worry as well. I will not say to be sad, but at least to worry, because there is... But a normal, sensible person does not do that. “Right now I am happy. Ah, tomorrow I will have to pay the bills.” Bottom line, what is the calculation for me? What matters most to me right now? Right now it is the joy of my only son’s wedding, and that is where my focus is. Ah, there are things I have not yet resolved. I do not even know exactly how I will deal with them. That is not what matters now. A person has to consider what is most precious to him and focus on that. Then all the other concerns have no significance beside that joy. In the Rebbe’s sichos, there is an example the Rebbe sometimes gives that makes this point very clear. The Rebbe gives a different parable in the sichos: someone is told he has won a million dollars in the lottery. At the same time, he notices that he has lost twenty-five cents—a quarter. Or what do you call it, a nickel? I still need to use some small American coin. Two things happened at once: you won a million dollars here, and you lost a few pesos there. So are you going to start saying, “Oh, how could I have lost those pesos? What will I do?” It is not even on your mind; it has no significance. You have a million dollars! Is the loss of five pesos even something to speak of? It has no significance at all.

25:03 Along the same lines, the Rebbe says: When you contemplate it, what do you have? You now have an opportunity to connect with the King of kings, Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Your soul can leave the body and cleave to Him. So how can the bitterness, and the fact that the body is still immersed in... have any significance? It has no significance at all.