Tanya Chapter 32 - Part 6

00:00 We’re returning to Likkutei Amarim, chapter 32, on page 41b, at the line beginning “Do not fear.” There, at the period. Yes? What is the Alter Rebbe discussing here? In the first half of chapter 32, the Alter Rebbe explained the depth of Ahavas Yisroel according to Chassidus. He explained why Ahavas Yisroel is a mitzvah that you can fulfill completely only if you have the central point of Tanya—the point the Alter Rebbe explained in the preceding chapters. On its face, Ahavas Yisroel is a mitzvah that is hard to understand how to fulfill. The Torah demands love, and not just any love, but genuine love, in the sense of “as yourself”—meaning the way a person loves himself. And for whom? For every Jew, great or small. That seems contrary to reality. First, the Ramban: on the verse “Love your fellow as yourself” in Parshas Kedoshim, the Ramban says that this cannot be taken literally. You can’t understand this verse according to its plain meaning. In reality, such a thing seems impossible. That is the question the Ramban and several other early commentators ask. So they offer various interpretations. What does “love your fellow as yourself” mean? How does it fit with—how can one fulfill this mitzvah? Simply speaking, according to halachah, when you look in the Rambam and the Shulchan Aruch, it says that the intent concerns action: to speak well of him and treat him well. In other words, it is a matter of conduct. There is a well-known sicha of the Rebbe in Likkutei Sichos, volume 17, on Parshas Kedoshim, explaining how, according to the plain meaning of the verse as well, Rashi’s approach is that Ahavas Yisroel concerns action. All the mitzvos in Parshas Kedoshim explain Ahavas Yisroel. How do we put

02:07 it into practice? It is a great principle of the Torah. That is why Rashi quotes Rabbi Akiva’s statement that it is “a great principle of the Torah”—to explain that this is the point. You fulfill Ahavas Yisroel by not stealing, by not taking revenge or bearing a grudge, and by not placing a stumbling block before the blind. All the verses there describe how to fulfill Ahavas Yisroel. And according to the plain meaning, “as yourself” does not actually mean “as yourself” in the sense explained in Tanya. It means “like yourself,” along the lines of “For you are like Pharaoh.” What did Yehudah mean when he said to Yosef, “For you are like Pharaoh”? Like him? Not exactly the same—similar. So too here: “as yourself” means approximately. But the Alter Rebbe explains that according to the inner dimension of the matter, that is not so. According to the inner dimension, it means the words in their full depth: “Love your fellow as yourself.” There must be “love” in its fullest sense, “your fellow” in its fullest sense, and “as yourself” in its fullest sense. How can that be done? By making the soul primary and the body secondary. That was the explanation in the first half of the chapter. When, for a person, the soul is what matters most—and the soul is what we all have in common: souls come from one source, and all souls are one. Indeed, their source is in the one Hashem. So because of the unity of souls, love for every Jew is like love for oneself, regardless of who he is or what he is like. That was the point of the first half of the chapter, and on that basis he explained Hillel’s statement, “This is the entire Torah,” with the Alter Rebbe’s two explanations. We won’t go back over them now. In the second half of chapter 32, the Alter Rebbe turns to the details. Given what we have learned here—that there must be genuine Ahavas Yisroel, truly “as yourself,” for every Jew, no matter how he behaves, and that this love must be intrinsic because he is a Jew—how, then, do we find that halachah says otherwise? Halachah says that sometimes one must hate a person.

04:05 It rules that it is a mitzvah to hate him. That was the question the Alter Rebbe raised. How can you be required to hate him if you must have this intrinsic love? The Alter Rebbe began to explain that the mitzvah to hate him, which is stated concerning one’s fellow, applies under particular conditions and for a particular reason. He must be your fellow in Torah and mitzvos. Those are the conditions: for it to be possible to hate him, he must be your fellow in Torah and mitzvos, someone close to you, and you must already have fulfilled “You shall surely rebuke.” If, after all that, the person remains in the same state, it means he is doing it deliberately. It means that he is aware of the evil in what he is doing and doesn’t care. He knows, he is on your level, you have already spoken with him and tried, and nevertheless he continues. So there is the matter of hating evil: “You who love Hashem, hate evil.” One must hate evil; one must hate this person who acts in a way that shows he has, in practice, accepted the evil. But those are very, very specific conditions. If those conditions are not all present—if he is not your fellow in Torah and mitzvos, is not close to you, and so on—even if you rebuked him, he is not on your level. He does not have the understanding to grasp how precious Torah and mitzvos are. So you cannot—you have to find grounds to judge him favorably. You have to love him. The mitzvah to hate him does not apply. That was the point

05:55 for which he brought what it says in Pirkei Avos: “Be of the disciples of Aharon, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving people and drawing them close to the Torah.” Hillel—the same Hillel who made the earlier statement that “this is the entire Torah”—said, “loving people.” By “people,” he does not necessarily mean a Jew who is your fellow in Torah and mitzvos. He means a person who has no apparent virtue. As the Rebbe points out, and as the Alter Rebbe now comes to explain: people whose only apparent distinction is that they are created beings, with no other virtue. Nevertheless, Hillel says one must love them. Let’s look inside, where we are holding. At the line beginning “loving,” and so on. The point: he said that even those who are distant from Hashem’s Torah and His service, and are therefore called merely “created beings”—what is Hillel saying? He is speaking about someone entirely distant from Torah and mitzvos, someone who, in practice, commits transgressions. Nevertheless, Hillel says we must love him. So this is the proof: as the Alter Rebbe says, the mitzvah to hate someone is not speaking about just any Jew who commits transgressions. It refers to a very specific kind of person. But about someone who is not your fellow in Torah and mitzvos and is not close to you, Hillel said that although he is distant from Hashem’s Torah and His service, and is therefore called merely a “created being,” you must love him. What does “merely a created being” mean? It means that his only virtue is that he was created. He has no other virtue. His only virtue is that Hakadosh Boruch Hu created him. He has no virtue in his intellect,

07:42 no virtue in his character traits—he has nothing else. But what does he have? Hakadosh Boruch Hu created him. There is the well-known sicha in which the Rebbe brings the story of Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon. He was traveling and saw a person—the well-known story—and said to him, “How ugly that man is!” Meaning, how did he look? He did not look good; he looked ugly. And that person answered him, “Go to the Craftsman who made me.” There is the well-known question: How could Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon—the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the great Tanna, the Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon of the Zohar—say to a person that he was ugly? How could he belittle and embarrass him by saying, “You look ugly”? The Rebbe explains what happened: he saw that this was such a coarse, lowly person that the only way to awaken his connection with Hakadosh Boruch Hu was through an approach of severity, through gevurah. The Rebbe says that not everyone can do this. Only Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon could. An ordinary person is forbidden to do it. But someone on the level of Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon knew that the moment he broke through the person’s outer shell, his inner point would awaken. And that is exactly what happened. What did the man answer him? “Go to the Craftsman who made me.” He immediately revealed the Creator. Through breaking his outer shell, Rabbi Elazar awakened his connection with Hakadosh Boruch Hu and revealed the fruit within him, revealed his soul. He said, “The Craftsman who made me.” That was the only virtue he had: the Craftsman who made him, the fact that he was created. And with that, he had already lifted him out of the mire. And that is about

09:21 The Alter Rebbe is saying here too that when Hillel said, “Love the created beings,” the only thing we know about this person is that he is a created being. You have to take him as he is, connect with him, and love him. You have to draw him close with thick cords of love—thick cords of love. That means strong, substantial cords. In other words, not just saying hello to him, but showing him abundant love. This is the whole foundation of the outreach campaigns, as the Rebbe taught us: how to bring a Jew close, how to love a Jew. It comes from Tanya; this is the foundation. Thick cords of love, and so on. After all that, perhaps you will be able to bring him close to Torah and the service of Hashem. But what is the Alter Rebbe saying? This is how he explains Hillel’s words: “Love the created beings and bring them close to Torah.” What does “bring them close to Torah” mean? Hillel is saying that you do it through love. Think about a person whom you are supposed to hate. Why do you hate him? In the case where they say it is a mitzvah to hate him, what does that mean? Just hate him for no reason? Rather, the idea is that when you show him disapproval, he will understand. It will get through to him. He will realize that he has truly crossed a line and cannot go on this way. So if he is your peer in Torah and mitzvos, and you have tried every positive approach without success, then they say it is a mitzvah to hate him for this purpose: through that, you may succeed in stirring him to do teshuvah. But with someone to whom that does not apply, it is the opposite. By loving him—and not just loving him, but drawing him close with thick cords of love—then, after all that, perhaps, perhaps, you may succeed in bringing him close to Torah and the service of Hashem. And bring him. And bring him. That is what Hillel meant by “bring them close”

11:15 “to Torah and the service of Hashem,” the Alter Rebbe says. “And if not, he has not lost the reward for the mitzvah of loving one’s fellow.” He has fulfilled the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel even if he did not manage to bring that person close to Torah and mitzvos. You went out on a mitzvah campaign, approached a Jew, connected with him, spoke with him, showed him love, and did everything you could. You asked him to put on tefillin, but he did not want to, and you did not succeed. Do not think it was a waste of time. Through that very connection with this Jew, through drawing close to him, you are fulfilling the mitzvah of loving your fellow. But here there is also a question the Rebbe asks: Why does Torah and mitzvos matter here? Why is it relevant? The wording of Tanya implies that the purpose of drawing him close should be to bring him close to Torah. If that does not happen, all right—it is almost presented as an after-the-fact outcome. If you did not bring him close to Torah and mitzvos, that is also good; you fulfilled Ahavas Yisroel. It sounds as though, ideally, the goal should be to bring him close to Torah and mitzvos, and only after the fact, if you did not, you have still fulfilled Ahavas Yisroel. Why must Ahavas Yisroel have the goal of bringing him close to Torah and mitzvos? Why not speak of Ahavas Yisroel as an ideal in its own right, without that? Why must Ahavas Yisroel be for the purpose of bringing someone close to Torah and mitzvos? Especially since it is well known that the Baal Shem Tov revealed the importance of doing a Jew a favor materially, even without a spiritual element. This whole teaching of the Baal Shem Tov is well known; it was one of his innovations. At the age of fourteen, the Baal Shem Tov joined the hidden tzaddikim. When he joined their circle, he introduced among them the practice of helping Jews materially. So how is it that here

13:10 the Alter Rebbe rules and says that it is worthwhile to love him so that, through this, you will bring him close to Torah and mitzvos? On the simplest level, the Alter Rebbe just wants to explain Pirkei Avos. It says there, “Love the created beings and bring them close to Torah.” What is the connection? The meaning is: love the Jew and bring him close to Torah. Through loving him, perhaps, after all that, you will succeed in bringing him close to Torah and mitzvos. But that itself is the question. Those are the words of Pirkei Avos, but what is the reasoning behind them? Especially in light of what the Alter Rebbe explained earlier, in the first part of the chapter: Ahavas Yisroel should come from the fact that he is a Jew, from his very essence as a Jew. That is why you should love him. If so, why does bringing him close to Torah have to enter into it? The Rebbe explains this in a wonderful sicha in volume 17. There the Rebbe explains that, for a Jew down here to connect with his soul, he needs Torah and mitzvos. As we know from what is written in Chassidus—and the Alter Rebbe explains this in Tanya too—“The Jewish people, the Torah, and Hakadosh Boruch Hu are all one.” Yes, chapter 8. For a Jew to connect with Hakadosh Boruch Hu, he needs Torah and mitzvos. The soul above has its root in Hashem’s essence, prior to that, correct? That is the soul as it exists above: its root in Hashem’s essence is higher than Torah and mitzvos. “Two things preceded the world”; the Jewish people preceded the Torah. But that is when we are speaking of the soul in its essence. Once the soul descends below, it comes down into a body. For the body to connect with Hakadosh Boruch Hu—for the soul to connect with Hakadosh Boruch Hu together with the body—that connection must come specifically through Torah and mitzvos. That is how a Jew connects. Therefore, the goal must be to bring him close to Torah and mitzvos.

15:10 Because I love him, because I love the Jew within him, I do not want that Jewishness to remain hidden within him; I want it to be revealed down here. That is why the goal must be to bring him close to Torah and mitzvos. Then the Alter Rebbe says that if this does not happen, he has still not lost out. The Rebbe adds there, in his explanation of the sicha, that the Alter Rebbe’s words “he has not lost out” sound like an after-the-fact outcome. But once the Alter Rebbe has ruled that he has not lost out, it is not merely that he has lost nothing: he has gained by fulfilling an instruction of the Alter Rebbe. That is how the Rebbe puts it at the end there. And that concludes the sources up to this point. That is one point. “And even those close to him whom he rebuked, but who did not turn away from their sins—whom it is a mitzvah to hate—it is also a mitzvah to love them.” Now the Alter Rebbe adds another point, an even greater innovation. Until now, the Alter Rebbe made a distinction: with someone close to you, there can be a mitzvah to hate him, because there must be hatred of evil—but the hatred of evil that the Gemara speaks of applies only under certain conditions, with all the specific requirements. Otherwise, there must specifically be love; you are obligated to love the sinner, and it is precisely through love that you must try to bring him close. That was the Alter Rebbe’s distinction. Here the Alter Rebbe adds an even greater, more remarkable insight: even this Jew, about whom it says that it is a mitzvah to hate him—even while you are commanded to hate him, you are also obligated to love him. “It is also a mitzvah to love them.” In other words, the Alter Rebbe is explaining something even more novel: there is no contradiction between what we learned at the beginning of the chapter and what the Gemara says in Bava Metzia, that it is a mitzvah to hate the sinner. The two go together. At the same time, you can fulfill both things: there is a mitzvah

17:21 to hate this person and, at the same time, to love him. Both are true. Hatred is directed at the evil within him, and love at the innate good within him—the spark of G-dliness inside him, from his G-dly soul. This is an enormous insight. If you think about it, the Alter Rebbe is saying something profound and remarkable here. An ordinary person cannot understand how you can love and hate at the same time, but in light of what we have learned in Tanya, it makes perfect sense. Not only is it not a contradiction; it rests on everything we learned in the previous chapters. Think back to those chapters. The Alter Rebbe spoke—and we will come back to this—about a person who has an intrusive thought during davening. Do you remember? Chapter 28. What did the Alter Rebbe say? If a person has an intrusive thought during davening, he should not be upset by it. Not as people tend to think: you had an intrusive thought, so you are finished. Your davening is worth nothing. [unclear] It may happen that while you are davening, an intrusive thought suddenly arises. Does that mean you have been deceiving yourself? The truth is that there are two souls. One soul wants to daven, while the other soul overpowers him and does not want to. There is a battle. So why wouldn’t you have an intrusive thought? That is the whole foundation of chapter 28 of Tanya. Then, in chapter 31, which we learned here, just before chapter 32, the Alter Rebbe speaks about bitterness and joy. There too, the Alter Rebbe says they are not a contradiction. It is true that the body and the animal soul are in a state of coarseness and materiality, with all that we learned in chapters 29 and 31. But there is also strength in the G-dly soul. That

19:13 It says that once you grasp the foundation of Tanya—that every person is made up of two souls, that the evil comes from the animal soul and the good from the G-dly soul, and that there is a struggle between them—the same applies to love and hatred. So when I hate, what do I hate? The evil within him. When the Torah says there is a mitzvah to hate your enemy, it does not mean the person. You do not hate the person; you hate the evil within him, the part that comes from the body, from the animal soul. But he also has a G-dly soul, and you love that G-dly soul. So, as we said regarding a person himself, there is no contradiction between experiencing that melancholy and everything we learned in chapters 29 and 31, and at the same time, ... rejoicing in the soul’s joy and therefore being joyful. The same applies in relation to another person. At the very moment that you hate the evil within him, you love the good within him, the goodness within him. This is a fundamental principle in serving Hashem. There are all sorts of situations where you sometimes need to take an approach of severity, but that does not contradict the genuine love you have for him, because you love the good within him, the G-dliness within him. In any case, today we are speaking at the time associated with the Rebbe Maharash, [unclear]. We are now on 2 Iyar. With Hashem’s help, tomorrow there will be a big farbrengen, with all the excitement—lechatchila ariber, the whole idea. But there is another story connected with Ahavas Yisroel and the Rebbe Maharash. The Frierdiker Rebbe relates in one of his sichos that the Rebbe Maharash once told his son, the Rebbe Rashab: “Today two chassidim came to me for yechidus. One brought me satisfaction, and the other caused me distress.” What happened? So the Rebbe

21:20 Maharash told him that one chossid, Reb Eliya Blo[?], came in, and the Rebbe Maharash asked him how things were going. He said, “Boruch Hashem, everything is fine. I came to ask on behalf of my friend, Yosef. The poor man is a shlimazel. Nothing he does works out. He buys something, and the business does not go well. In short, things keep going badly for him. I’m asking the Rebbe to pray for him, to ask that he succeed in earning a living.” The Rebbe Maharash was deeply moved by this: a Jew comes into yechidus, and all he asks for is that another Jew should have a livelihood. The Rebbe Maharash told him he wanted to enter into a partnership with him. Anyway, the account goes on at length. We will not get into all the details of the story now, though it is very interesting. The Rebbe Maharash made a partnership with him, gave him a coin, and said, “Let this be a partnership.” “Who am I? What am I?” In short, the Rebbe Maharash got a great deal of satisfaction from him. After that, another chossid came in. The first one, actually—he was a relatively simple man. The other chossid who came in was a Torah scholar, a rabbi. His name is given there too. He entered yechidus, and the Rebbe Maharash asked him, “How are things? How is everything?” Everything was fine. “So what is happening in your shtetl?” He told him about a group of young married men who were studying, and so on. And then the Rebbe Maharash asked him, “What are the middos of these young men like? How do they treat one another?” The rabbi said, “Well, like the sons-in-law of wealthy men.” That was the expression. As if they had a bit of coarseness, a bit of [unclear]. So the Rebbe Maharash told him that when he returned home, he should ask each of those young men to bring the Rebbe Maharash half the dowry he had received for his wedding, for charity. He said, “They won’t bring it. It won’t work. They won’t

23:26 give it.” The Rebbe Maharash told him, “Tell them that if they do not give half, they will lose the other half as well.” He was alarmed. He said, “All right.” Before he left, the Rebbe Maharash told him, “I hope that next time you will be able to bring better news.” So the Rebbe Maharash told him that the first chossid had brought him satisfaction: a person who, from the outset, enters yechidus thinking about another Jew. He cares about another Jew. The second chossid had caused him distress. Look at these learned, knowledgeable men, yet their middos are not right. In other words, we see here how deeply Ahavas Yisroel mattered to our Rebbeim.