Tanya Chapter 32 - Part 1

00:00 We’re beginning to learn chapter 32 of Tanya. As we’ve already discussed, we gave a general introduction: here in chapter 32, the Alter Rebbe teaches us the depth of Ahavas Yisroel, what Ahavas Yisroel means according to Chassidus. What is its inner meaning? What is its depth? And this isn’t only a question in Chassidus; it’s also a question in the revealed teachings of Torah. Because without Chassidus, we can’t really understand the mitzvah of “Love your fellow as yourself” even on the level of the revealed teachings. In other words, it’s a mitzvah that’s very, very hard to understand from the standpoint of halachah: how do you fulfill it? After all, in its plain meaning, “Love your fellow as yourself” is a mitzvah of the heart. To 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’t command an emotion of the heart. You can command someone to do things. How can you command a person to love? You can’t command a feeling. A feeling is something you either have or you don’t. You can’t say, “You must love.” You can tell someone, “You must do certain things,” but love is something that has to come on its own. It’s a famous question, and the same question applies to “Love your fellow as yourself.” This is a question in the revealed teachings of Torah, a question in halachah. All the works on the revealed teachings ask it in the plain sense too. When you look at the halachah, at the Shulchan Aruch and the Rambam, you see that it really isn’t simple. How does the Rambam explain the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel? Look in the Rambam’s Hilchos Deos. The Rambam says: “It is a mitzvah to love every Jew as oneself,” and therefore one should speak his praises, and so on—various things. What does “therefore” mean? Because according to halachah,

02:04 the way we fulfill Ahavas Yisroel is through actions. Speak his praises, do good things for him, speak kindly to him, show him consideration. So Ahavas Yisroel expresses itself in actions. And indeed, we see this in a number of places in works of halachah. One of the major works that discusses it this way is Sefer Hachinuch. One of the better-known works of the Rishonim to set out the 613 mitzvos with their underlying principles and reasons was Sefer Hachinuch. As is known, Sefer Hachinuch was written by a student, one of the students of the Rashba. We don’t know his name. Some say he was Rabbi Aharon Halevi; some say he was Rabbi Aharon Halevi’s brother; others say he was another Levi. We know he was a Levi because that’s what it says at the beginning of the book, but we don’t know who he was. We do know he was a student of the Rashba, and that he wrote the book for his son. He had a son who didn’t want to learn, so he made him a book with the 613 mitzvos and their reasons, to give him joy in learning. That’s how he drew him into learning. And that became Sefer Hachinuch, a foundational work in halachah today. Sefer Hachinuch presents the principle that hearts are drawn after actions. That’s its central principle: hearts are drawn after actions. You tell a person, “You need to love.” “But I don’t love.” So you tell him there’s a principle: if you perform actions, those actions create 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, the actions bring about the feeling. Many times a person has no connection, no affection, no love for his friend—not really. But if you actually

04:10 talk to him, show him consideration, perform acts of love, that will kindle, that will awaken the feeling in your heart. This is what it means that hearts are drawn after actions. It’s a principle in Sefer Hachinuch both in matters between a person and Hashem and in matters between one person and another. And according to this approach, that’s the meaning of “Love your fellow as yourself”: through your actions, you’ll come to feel love. That is true as well. Chassidus doesn’t, G-d forbid, reject it; it too is a genuine path, a genuine path according to Torah. But we know that Chassidus has another approach. The Baal Shem Tov revealed the idea of contemplation: when a person contemplates a subject, the power of the mind and the power of contemplation influence the heart. Broadly speaking, this is the approach of Chabad Chassidus. It’s one of the foundations of the Chabad approach. There’s that question about “You shall love Hashem your G-d”: How can love be commanded? Chassidus says that if you contemplate, contemplation will lead to love. So here too, the Alter Rebbe takes this approach to “Love your fellow as yourself.” The mitzvah is grounded in contemplation. If you understand the essence of the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel, if you understand the essence of a Jew, then you’ll be able to come to love a Jew. That’s one fundamental point, the basis of chapter 32 of Tanya. Now, when we speak about “Love your fellow as yourself,” there are two more main problems, two main questions that all the commentators ask. The first question: How can it be “as yourself”? What does “as yourself” mean? The Torah doesn’t simply say that you have to love. It says your love has to be on the same level, in the same way, as you love yourself. All the commentators ask—the Ramban, the Ibn Ezra—this is impossible. There’s no such thing. A person can’t love

06:20 another person the way he loves himself. Why not? Quite simply, because a person is closest to himself. So I love myself in a completely different way. I can be fond of someone else. I can draw someone else close. I can love someone else with the love of friends. But what does “as yourself” mean? “As yourself” can’t be. Especially when we consider the matter more deeply, as Chassidus explains: the love a person has for someone else and the love you have for yourself are entirely different kinds of love. It’s a different kind, an entirely different essence. The love I have for someone else, generally speaking, naturally, is a love tied to certain 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 connected to some quality, some reason why he’s my friend, why I love him. I need to find reasons to draw close to him, to be his friend, to love him. So there have to be reasons, which means it will always depend on something additional. It isn’t essential love; it depends on something additional. It’s a love that comes because my intellect and the other person’s intellect connect, and so we love each other; or because my emotional qualities connect with his. My talents and his talents, what I know and what he knows, the relationship between us, what I have and what he has, what I lack—all sorts of things like that, things additional to the 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 has intelligence. A person loves himself even when he lacks intelligence. A person doesn’t love

08:17 himself for particular reasons. A person loves himself because this is me. It has nothing to do with what I have or don’t have. That’s beside the point. It doesn’t matter to me. That isn’t what arouses love in me—not the qualities I possess. A person’s love for himself is called essential love, because it comes from the essence, because it’s me. So how can love for another person be “as yourself”? That’s a question all the commentators ask. Then there’s another question: the Torah doesn’t set any conditions here. The Torah says, “Love your fellow,” meaning every Jew. And in the Rambam’s words: “Love every Jew as oneself.” That means love for a Jew has to extend to every Jew. It makes no difference whether this Jew is righteous or wicked, a good person or not a good person, intelligent or foolish, whether he has money or doesn’t have money. It has nothing to do with any circumstances or behavior. Love every Jew. So here too, all the commentators ask: How can you love every kind of person with the same love? Generally, if a person has more good qualities, the love is greater; if he has fewer, the love will be less. So there are really three questions about the whole subject. Question number one: How is it possible to command love at all? Question number two: How can love be “as yourself”? Where do you find a love that is essential like that? And the third question: How can you love each and every person among the Jewish people, every Jew, in the same way? This is what the Alter Rebbe comes to explain here in the first part of chapter 32. And the way the Alter Rebbe helps us understand it—which I’m about to explain—is meant to enable a person to fulfill it. One thing is to understand,

10:14 To understand it, and 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. Let’s read it in the words of Tanya, chapter 32. The Alter Rebbe says: “Now, through fulfilling the above-mentioned matters—so that his body is lowly and repulsive in his eyes, while his joy is solely the joy of the soul.” This is what we learned in chapter 31. If you remember, we discussed there that for a person to experience genuine joy, there have to be two sides to it. First, he has to awaken a sense of the lowliness of the body and materiality: how distant he is from G-dliness on the part of his body and animal soul. Then he reflects that, nevertheless, I have a spark, I have a soul, and I have the ability to take my soul out of exile through Torah and prayer. That is the whole explanation there in chapter 31. And so there is tremendous joy here—the joy of a king’s son leaving captivity and prison, the Exodus from Egypt. You’ll see that the Alter Rebbe’s wording was, “And my soul will be precious to me, to rejoice in its joy more than in the lowly body.” Precious. A person’s main joy comes from his soul, even though he still has a body that is lowly and repulsive to him. In other words, what the Alter Rebbe has asked of us in the last few chapters is to learn how to give the light of the soul greater strength than the body’s materiality. That is the beinoni, because the beinoni has not yet refined his body. He still has an animal soul; it has not yet been refined. So what does he do? He treasures the soul. He defines for himself what is primary and what is secondary. Because matters of the body are

12:20 secondary matters. Matters of the soul are primary. That is why the soul’s joy is more precious to him than the body’s distress, and why he lives in genuine joy all his days. That is what we learned in chapter 31. And so, the Alter Rebbe says, if a person truly serves Hakadosh Boruch Hu in this way, “this is a straight and easy path to fulfilling the mitzvah ‘Love your fellow as yourself’ toward every Jewish soul, from the greatest to the smallest.” Here the Alter Rebbe answers all three questions we raised. This awareness of the soul’s virtue and the body’s lowliness, this recognition that the soul is primary, is a straight and easy path for a person to develop love in the first place; to be able to love every Jew; and for that love to be “as yourself”—a love of one’s own self, not love for something separate, but love just as you love yourself. The kind of love you have for yourself is the love you will have for another person. And it will extend to every Jew, from the greatest to the smallest. That is what the Alter Rebbe is going to teach us now, and he will now give the explanation. We’ll soon see it in the text, but the central point is that once the soul is primary for you—and on the level of the soul, we are all essentially one—then we are all part of one whole, one essence. That is why there can be a love like the love of oneself. Just as I love myself, I love the other person with that same love, because my true self is not my coarseness or my ego. My true self is the Jew that I am. That is my real self. And the other person is also a Jew. So I am a Jew and he is a Jew; we are one. That makes it a love like the love of oneself, and it also makes no difference whether someone is great or small. All those calculations fall away. That is the central point the Alter Rebbe is going to explain.

14:36 Now, later in the chapter. There is a well-known story chassidim tell about a young man who came to Reb Hendel. He was a mashpia in Lubavitch, one of the first mashpi’im there. His name was 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 one of the great chassidim of the Tzemach Tzedek, the Rebbe Maharash, and the Rebbe Rashab, and one of the first mashpi’im in Tomchei Temimim. The Frierdiker Rebbe describes him in a very special way in his sichos. Reb Hendel was considered one of the greatest chassidim in Lubavitch, and 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, and did so genuinely. The Frierdiker Rebbe tells many stories about him. So a young man asked Reb Hendel: How do I develop Ahavas Yisroel? How do I get myself to love? I don’t have Ahavas Yisroel. How do I come to have it? Reb Hendel told him: It’s very simple. Jews love one another. A non-Jew is separate from another person. So when someone doesn’t love, it is because of the non-Jewish element within him. When you are a Jew, you love; you don’t need to do anything more. You need to cast out the non-Jewish element and bring forward the Jew within you. Once you cast out that element 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 have to create it. Ahavas Yisroel is not something you have to manufacture. It is natural, it is healthy, it is part of our essence. It is our very core. It is who I am, because it is “a part of G-d above.” So why do we lack Ahavas Yisroel? Because there is the “non-Jew

16:54 within you,” as the familiar expression goes—the non-Jewish element within each of us. As the Rebbe cites from the maamarim in the name of the Alter Rebbe: there is a material side, the “non-Jew within you,” which is the ego. That is what creates separation, and from that side there is no Ahavas Yisroel. So you don’t feel it. Once you recognize this and awaken the Jew within you, Ahavas Yisroel follows naturally. The Rebbe once spoke about this on Purim. There is a wonderful passage based on a maamar of the Frierdiker Rebbe, about the verse: “There was a Jewish man in Shushan the capital, and his 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 was Mordechai’s distinction? 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 in force: a Jewish man. Like when we say “the man of the house”—he was master of the Jew within him. His Jewishness was revealed. How did his being “a Jewish man” show itself? In his being “a man of the right.” What does that mean? Ahavas Yisroel. The right side: he looked at every Jew with his right eye. That is how the Frierdiker Rebbe explains it in one of the maamarim—he looked at the other person with his right eye. The verse is saying: How can you come to Ahavas Yisroel, love and draw close another person, and look at them with your right eye rather than your left? How can you look at each person with a favorable eye, as a “man of the right”? By being “a Jewish man.” That is the Alter Rebbe’s point here. Once your Jewishness is fully in force, you naturally have genuine Ahavas Yisroel. So the Rebbe once spoke at a farbrengen about this as well: the genuine Ahavas Yisroel we learn from Mordechai. He brought this in a passage in the name of one of the rabbis—I don’t remember who.

19:10 Now, which of the Rebbeim said the teaching about the words “all that had happened to him,” which appear 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 “all that had happened to him.” Later, when Haman came home miserable and with his head covered, it also says, “And he told them all that had happened to him.” So the phrase appears twice. There is a teaching—I don’t remember which of the Rebbeim said it—that Mordechai’s “all that had happened to him” nullified Haman’s “all that had happened to him.” In other words, the decree was nullified and Haman fell because of Mordechai’s “all that had happened to him.” What does that mean? What is the explanation? The Rebbe explains it in a sicha—a wonderful teaching. What does “all that had happened to him” mean? Mordechai himself was not subject to the decree. According to what is explained in the Gemara and Midrash, even if they had killed everyone, Mordechai could have escaped. The decree was against the entire people, but Mordechai was an official, and he could have found a way out of the whole matter. Yet Mordechai felt the decree as something that had happened to him. He did not see it as a decree against someone else. Mordechai felt that it had happened to him, that it was his own matter. That was Mordechai’s Ahavas Yisroel. And because he felt it as his own, it broke Haman’s “all that had happened to him,” when Haman came and told them all that had happened to him. The remedy had already come through Mordechai: he had acted with Ahavas Yisroel, caring about the other person. So the Rebbe told a story about a krechtz, a heartfelt sigh, involving a Jew. There is the well-known story of the Rebbe Rashab as a child, playing with his brother, Reb Zalman Aharon. And the Rebbe Rashab asked for a way to make amends for some transgression. A transgression.

21:31 He ate, um, he ate—what do you call it? Peanuts? Nuts? Ah, yes, almonds. He ate something that the Alter Rebbe forbade eating in his siddur. He was a little boy and didn’t know. Later he found out, and a week later he asked for a tikkun. So the Raza told him he needed to daven from the siddur; that would be his tikkun. But the Rebbe Rashab told him, “You’re not a rabbi, and your tikkun is no tikkun.” Why? What had he done wrong? The Rebbe Rashab told him, “Because you didn’t let out a sigh before coming to give me a tikkun. There should have been a sigh, a krechtz, to show that you cared. You hear that a Jew committed a transgression—how can you remain so unmoved?” So the Rebbe told this story and explained 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 affects you, that nullifies the entire decree of Haman. And that is also why we see that among the main observances of Purim are mishloach manos and gifts to the poor. Why are they part of the mitzvos 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. Mordechai revealed the depth of Ahavas Yisroel: what happens to one Jew must matter to another Jew. That is why part of the tikkun of Purim is mishloach manos, gifts to the poor, Ahavas Yisroel and the mutual responsibility of Jews for one another, and so on. There are many explanations of this in the Rebbe’s teachings, in the Rebbe’s maamarim. But of course, everything we’re discussing now, [unclear], also applies to our own time. We are here in Argentina, while elsewhere in the world, rachmana litzlan, there are Jews whose lives are in danger. There is, rachmana litzlan, a war, and so much else is happening, yet there are young men going around as though

23:40 nothing had happened. Laughing, joking, fooling around—as though nothing had happened. We need at least some sense of “what had happened to him.” True, you’re in Argentina, not Ukraine or Russia. You’re in Argentina, far from that whole region, but it happened to him. They are our brothers—Jews, chassidim, even shluchim. There is suffering, there is pain in the world. So there has to be at least some measure of sharing in it, of feeling it, of saying, “This matters to me. I care.” And this sense that it happened to him is the foundation for the entire tikkun that will come, with Hashem’s help. But “it was turned around”: very soon, “on that night the king’s sleep was disturbed”—the sleep of the King of the world. Then Haman will be hanged on the gallows, and Mordechai the Jew will be great among all his brethren. Mordechai, King Moshiach, immediately, right now.