Tanya Chapter 32 - Part 1

00:00 We’re beginning to study chapter 32 of Tanya. As we discussed, we’ve already given a general introduction: here in chapter 32, the Alter Rebbe teaches us the depth of Ahavas Yisroel—Ahavas Yisroel as understood through Chassidus. What is its inner meaning, its depth? And this isn’t only a question in Chassidus; it’s a question in the revealed teachings of Torah too. In fact, without Chassidus, the mitzvah of “Love your fellow as yourself” is very difficult to understand even on the level of halacha. On the face of it, this is a mitzvah of the heart. “Love”—love is an emotion of the heart. And here we come to the famous question the Baal Shem Tov asks about “You shall love Hashem your G-d.” The same question can be asked about “Love your fellow as yourself”: How can love be commanded? You can command someone to do things, but how can you command a person to love? You can’t command an emotion. Either you have a feeling or you don’t. You can say, “You must do these things,” but love has to come on its own. It’s a famous question, and it applies just as much to “Love your fellow as yourself.” It’s a question in the revealed teachings of Torah, a question in halacha; the works of revealed Torah ask it too. Look at the halacha, at the Shulchan Aruch, at the Rambam. And indeed, we see that it isn’t simple. How does the Rambam explain the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel? In Hilchos Dei’os, the Rambam says that it is a mitzvah to love every Jew as oneself, and therefore one should speak in his praise, and so on. Why “therefore”? Because according to halacha, the way we

02:05 fulfill Ahavas Yisroel is through actions. You speak in his praise, do good things for him, speak kindly to him, and treat him well. So Ahavas Yisroel is expressed in actions. We see this in a number of halachic works. One of the major works that discusses it this way is Sefer HaChinuch, one of the better-known works of the Rishonim on the 613 mitzvos, their underlying principles and their reasons. As is known, Sefer HaChinuch was written by a student of the Rashba. We don’t know his name. Some say he was Rabbi Aharon Halevi; others say he was Rabbi Aharon Halevi’s brother. Some say he was a different Levi. We know he was a Levi because he says so at the beginning of the book, but we don’t know who he was. We do know that he was a student of the Rashba and that he wrote the book for his son. His son didn’t want to learn, so he made him a book about the 613 mitzvos and their reasons, to help him enjoy learning. That’s how he drew him into learning, and it became Sefer HaChinuch, a foundational work in halacha today. Sefer HaChinuch presents the principle that the heart follows one’s actions. That is its fundamental principle: the heart follows one’s actions. You tell a person, “You need to love.” “But I don’t love him.” So we tell him there’s a rule: when you perform loving actions, those actions produce the feeling. Sometimes it goes from the heart to action: you feel something, and because you feel it, you act. But it also works the other way around. When I act, my actions bring about the feeling. Often a person doesn’t feel connected to his friend, doesn’t feel affection for him, doesn’t really love him. But if you actually speak to him,

04:11 give him attention, and act lovingly toward him, that will spark something. It will awaken the feeling in your heart. That’s what it means that the heart follows one’s actions. It’s a principle in Sefer HaChinuch both in our relationship with Hashem and in our relationships with other people. According to this approach, “Love your fellow as yourself” means that action will lead you to feeling. Chassidus agrees that this is true. It is, of course, a genuine path according to Torah. But we know that Chassidus offers another approach as well. The Baal Shem Tov revealed the power of contemplation: when a person contemplates an idea, the mind and the power of contemplation can influence the heart. Broadly speaking, this is the approach of Chabad Chassidus, founded by the Alter Rebbe. There is the question about “You shall love Hashem your G-d”: How can love be commanded? Chassidus says that if you contemplate, your contemplation will lead to love. So here too, the Alter Rebbe applies this idea to “Love your fellow as yourself.” This commandment can be fulfilled through contemplation. If you understand the essence of the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel, if you understand the essence of a Jew, you will be able to come to love a Jew. That is one fundamental point underlying chapter 32 of Tanya. Now, when we speak about “Love your fellow as yourself,” there are two other major problems, two major questions that the commentators ask. The first is: How can it be “as yourself”? What does “as yourself” mean? The Torah doesn’t merely say that you need to love. It says the love must be on the same level, in the same way, as you love yourself. The commentators, including the Ramban and Ibn Ezra, ask: That’s impossible. A person cannot

06:19 love someone else the way he loves himself. Why? Simply because a person loves himself first. I love myself in an entirely different way. I can be fond of someone else. I can draw him close. I can love him as a friend. But what does “as yourself” mean? As yourself? How could that be? Especially when we look more deeply at it, as Chassidus explains, the love a person has for someone else and the love he has for himself are entirely different kinds of love. They are different in essence. The love I have for someone else is usually, by nature, connected to particular things: because he’s a good person, because I enjoy being with him, because he’s intelligent. There’s something that connects us, and that’s why I love him. In other words, the love is tied to some quality, some reason why he’s my friend and why I love him. I need to find reasons to draw close to him, to be his friend, to love him. So it will always depend on something additional. It isn’t an essential love. It’s a love that comes from a connection between my intellect and his, or between my character and his. We have a connection, so we love each other. Or it’s a connection between my talents and his talents, my knowledge and his knowledge, my life and his, what I have and what he has, what I lack. All sorts of things that are additional to our essence. By contrast, when I love myself, I don’t love myself because of what I have. A person doesn’t love himself because he’s intelligent. He loves himself even if he isn’t intelligent. A

08:17 person doesn’t love himself for particular reasons. He loves himself because “this is me.” It has nothing to do with what I have or don’t have. That’s beside the point. My qualities aren’t what awaken love for myself. A person’s love for himself is called an essential love because it comes from his very essence, because it’s me. So how can love for another person be “as yourself”? All the commentators ask this question. And then there’s another question: the Torah doesn’t place conditions on this. It says, “Love your fellow”—meaning every Jew. In the Rambam’s words, to love every Jew as oneself. That means the love must extend to every Jew, whether that Jew is righteous or wicked, a good person or not a good person, intelligent or foolish, wealthy or poor. It doesn’t depend on any circumstances or conduct: love every Jew. So here too the commentators ask: How can you love every kind of person with the same love? Usually, the more qualities someone has, the greater the love; the fewer qualities, the less love. So there are three questions about this whole subject. Question one: How can love be commanded at all? Question two: How can that love be “as yourself”? How can it be an essential love? And question three: How can there be love for each and every member of the Jewish people, for every Jew, in the same way? This is what the Alter Rebbe comes to explain in the first part of chapter 32. And now the Alter Rebbe explains that understanding this—what I’m about to explain—so that a person can fulfill it, is one thing.

10:13 To understand it, to really understand it. Second, to put it into practice, so that it becomes real. So the Alter Rebbe says that if you put into practice what we learned in the previous chapter, it will be easier for you to fulfill Ahavas Yisroel. That is what the Alter Rebbe says here in the text. Let’s read it in the words of Tanya, chapter 32. The Alter Rebbe says: “And through putting the above into practice, so that his body is lowly and loathsome in his eyes, while his joy is the joy of the soul alone.” That is what we learned in chapter 31. If you remember, we discussed there that for a person to experience true joy, there have to be two sides. First, he has to recognize the lowliness of the body and materiality—how far the animal soul, on the bodily level, is from G-dliness. Then he contemplates that, nevertheless, I have a spark, I have a soul, and I can bring my soul out of exile through Torah and prayer. There is the whole explanation in chapter 31, and consequently there is tremendous joy: the joy of a king’s son leaving captivity and prison. An exodus from Egypt. You see it in the Alter Rebbe’s wording: his soul should be precious to him, so that he rejoices in its joy more than in the joy of the lowly body. Precious. A person’s main joy comes from the soul, even though he still has a body that is lowly and loathsome. In other words, what the Alter Rebbe has asked of us in the last few chapters is to learn how to make the light of the soul prevail over the body’s materiality. That is the beinoni, because the beinoni has not yet refined his body. He still has an animal soul. It still has not been refined. Rather, what does he do? He holds the soul precious. He defines for himself what is primary and what is secondary. Because matters of the body are

12:20 secondary. Matters of the soul are primary, and therefore the joy of the soul is more precious to him than the needs of the body. That is why he has true joy. Every day he is joyful. That is what we learned in chapter 31. And so the Alter Rebbe says that if a person truly serves Hakadosh Boruch Hu in this way, “this is a straight and easy path for him to fulfill the mitzvah of ‘Love your fellow as yourself,’ with regard to every soul of Israel, from great to small.” Here the Alter Rebbe answers all three questions we raised. This recognition of the soul’s greatness and the body’s lowliness, this recognition of how precious the soul is, is a straight and easy path by which a person can develop love in the first place: that he can love every Jew, that the love can be “as yourself”—a love of one’s own self, not love for something separate, but the very kind of love with which you love yourself. You will have that kind of love for the other person, and for every Jew, from great to small. That is what the Alter Rebbe is coming to teach us now, and now he will give the explanation. We will soon see it in the text, but the essential point is that once the soul is what matters most to you, then on the level of the soul we are all one. If the soul is what matters most to you, then all our souls are part of one whole; we are all one. That is why there can be love as for oneself. Just as I love myself, I love the other person with that same love, because my true self is not my kinship or my ego. My true self is the Jew in me, the fact that I am a Jew. That is my real self, and the other person is also a Jew. I am a Jew and he is a Jew, so we are one. Consequently, he too is part of my self, and there is no distinction between great and small. All those calculations fall away. That is the essential point

14:34 that the Alter Rebbe is going to explain in the rest of the chapter. There is a well-known story that chassidim tell. A young man came to Reb Hendel, who was a mashpia in Lubavitch—one of the earliest mashpi’im there. His name was actually Reb Chanoch Hendel. Hendel was not his surname; his surname was Kugel. Reb Chanoch Hendel Kugel. His given names were Chanoch Hendel, and the chassidim called him Reb Hendel. He was among the great chassidim of the Tzemach Tzedek, the Rebbe Maharash, and the Rebbe Rashab, and he was one of the earliest mashpi’im in the teachings of Chassidus. The Frierdiker Rebbe describes him in a very special way in his sichos. Reb Hendel was considered one of the greatest chassidim in Lubavitch. The Frierdiker Rebbe always speaks about him in a very, very special way. Relatively speaking, he was not such a great intellectual; he was someone who worked on himself, but his avodah was genuine. The Frierdiker Rebbe tells many stories about him. So a young man asked Reb Hendel: How can I develop Ahavas Yisroel? How can I bring myself to love? I don’t have Ahavas Yisroel. What do I do to acquire it? Reb Hendel told him: It’s very simple. Jews love one another; a non-Jew is separate from another person. So when someone does not love, it is because of the non-Jew within him. When the Jew in you comes forward, you love; you don’t need to do anything else. You need to cast out the non-Jew and bring the Jew within you closer. Once you cast out your inner non-Jew and reveal the Jew within you, you will have Ahavas Yisroel. What was he telling him? In other words, his answer was that you don’t need to create it. Ahavas Yisroel is not something you have to manufacture. Ahavas Yisroel is natural, it is healthy, it is part of who we are. It is our very essence. It is what I am, because it is “a part of G-d above.” So why do we lack Ahavas Yisroel? Because there is

16:53 “the non-Jew within you,” as the familiar expression goes—the non-Jew within each and every person. As is well known, the Rebbe cites from the maamarim in the name of the Mitteler Rebbe: the non-Jew—the material part, the non-Jew within you—is the ego. That is what separates us, and because of that inner non-Jew, you don’t feel it. Once you pay attention to this and awaken the Jew within you, Ahavas Yisroel follows naturally. The Rebbe spoke about this once on Purim, at a wonderful farbrengen. He based it on the Frierdiker Rebbe’s explanation of what is written about Mordechai: “There was a Jewish man in Shushan the capital, whose name was Mordechai, son of Yair, son of Shimi, son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Binyamin.” It begins with “a Jewish man” and ends with “a man of the tribe of Binyamin.” A Jewish man—he was a Jew. What? What was Mordechai’s special quality? Not that he was a genius, not that he was a tzaddik, not that he was... He was “a Jewish man”: his Jewishness was fully expressed. A Jewish man. As the expression suggests, he was master of the Jew within him. The Jew in him was revealed. How was the fact that he was “a Jewish man” expressed? He was “a man of the tribe of Binyamin.” What does that mean? Ahavas Yisroel. The right side: he looked at every Jew with a right eye, the right hand that draws others close. That is how the Frierdiker Rebbe explains it in one of the maamarim. “A man of the tribe of Binyamin”—he looks at the other person with a right eye. The verse is telling us: How can you come to Ahavas Yisroel, love someone else, draw someone else close, look at the other person with your right eye rather than your left? How can you look at each and every person favorably and be “a man of the tribe of Binyamin”? By being “a Jewish man.” That is the Alter Rebbe’s point here. Once the Jew within you is fully expressed, you naturally have true Ahavas Yisroel. So the Rebbe once spoke at a farbrengen about this as well, about the true Ahavas Yisroel we learn from Mordechai, and he brought

19:07 this saying from one of the Rebbeim—I don’t remember now which of the Rebbeim said it. The phrase “everything that had happened to him” appears twice in the Megillah, right? Once when Haman told his wife, and once when Mordechai told Esther. When Mordechai told Esther about the decree, it says that Mordechai told her “everything that had happened to him.” Later, when Haman arrived there, miserable and with his head covered, it also says, “He told them everything that had happened to him.” So the phrase appears twice. There is a saying—I don’t remember which of the Rebbeim said it—that Mordechai’s “everything that had happened to him” nullified Haman’s “everything that had happened to him.” In other words, the decree was nullified and Haman fell because of Mordechai’s “everything that had happened to him.” What does that mean? What is the explanation? The Rebbe explains it beautifully. What is the meaning of “everything that had happened to him”? Mordechai himself was not subject to the decree. From what is explained in the Gemara and Midrash, even if they had killed everyone, Mordechai could have gotten out of it. The decree was against the entire people, but Mordechai was a high official, and he could have found a way to escape the whole thing. Yet Mordechai felt the decree as something that had happened to him. He did not view it as a decree against someone else. Mordechai felt that it had happened to him, that it was his own concern. That was Mordechai’s Ahavas Yisroel. And because he felt it personally, that broke Haman’s “everything that had happened to him,” when Haman came and recounted “everything that had happened to him.” So Mordechai had first made things right by expressing Ahavas Yisroel—by caring about the other person. The Rebbe then told the story about a sigh, about a certain Jew... It is the well-known story of when the Rebbe Rashab was a child and was playing with his brother, the Raza. The Rebbe Rashab asked

21:27 A way to make amends for some transgression. He had eaten—what was it called? Peanuts? Walnuts? Yes, almonds. He had eaten something that the Rav forbade eating in the Siddur. He was a small child and didn’t know. Later he found out, and a week later he asked how to make amends. So the Raza told him that he should daven from a siddur; that would be his way of making amends. The Rebbe Rashab said to him, “You’re not a Rebbe, and that’s no way to make amends.” Why? What had he done wrong? The Rebbe Rashab told him, “Because you didn’t let out a krechtz.” Before telling him how to make amends, you should have sighed, shown that you cared. You hear that a Jew committed a transgression—how can you remain so detached? The Rebbe told this story to explain the phrase “what had happened to him.” When you hear that something bad has happened to a Jew, materially or spiritually, it has to affect you. When it does, that nullifies Haman’s entire decree. That is also why mishloach manos and gifts to the poor are among the main mitzvos of Purim. Why are they part of Purim? Because the whole story of Purim is bound up with this point: “a Jewish man, a Benjaminite.” The whole point of Purim is to awaken this feeling. Mordechai revealed the depth of Ahavas Yisroel: that what happens to another Jew should matter to you. And that is why mishloach manos and gifts to the poor are part of Purim—the theme of Ahavas Yisroel and Jewish unity. There are many explanations of this in the Rebbe’s teachings, in the Rebbe’s sefarim. But of course, everything we’re discussing here now, in this little talk, also applies to our own times. We’re here in Argentina, and elsewhere in the world there are, rachmana litzlan, Jews whose lives are in danger. There is, rachmana litzlan—

23:35 —a war going on, and many other things, yet there are bochurim here walking around as though nothing has happened. Laughing, feeling secure—it’s nonsense. As if nothing had happened. We need at least some sense of “what had happened to him.” True, you’re in Argentina, not in Ukraine or Russia. You’re in Argentina, far from that whole region, but it has happened to him. They’re our brothers—Jews, chassidim, shluchim. There is suffering and pain in the world. So there has to be at least some sharing in it, some feeling that it affects me, that I care. And this sense of “what had happened to him” is really the foundation for making things right, with Hashem’s help. But may it all be transformed, and very soon may we see “On that night, the king’s sleep was disturbed”—the sleep of the King of the universe. Then Haman will be hanged on the gallows, and “Mordechai the Jew was great among the Jews.” Mordechai, the King Moshiach, immediately, right now.