Chapter 1 - Sixth Lesson

00:01 So we began here with the second part of chapter 1 of Tanya, where the Alter Rebbe begins to explain the two souls. First, the Alter Rebbe explains the one soul, the first soul. We discussed in the previous class that the Alter Rebbe brings up three points here. First, he tells us the role of the soul that comes from kelipah and the sitra achra. He says, “It is clothed in a person’s blood, giving life to the body.” The animal soul, the natural soul, the vital soul, is clothed in a person’s blood to give life to the body. The very matter of giving life to the body is already the beginning of the animal soul. What does that mean? The Alter Rebbe is teaching us a very important principle here: the essence of the animal soul is not evil. The essence of the animal soul is “I”—I exist. A sense of self. It is clothed in a person’s blood to give life to the body. This soul is clothed in the blood and gives a person life, and that is where a person begins to feel, “I am here. I exist.” There is a well-known expression in Chassidus, particularly in the maamarim of the Frierdiker Rebbe, that every “I” is kelipah and sitra achra. The “I” is the root of evil, the root of all ailments, and the whole point of Chassidus is to turn the “I” into “nothing.” That is essentially what the Alter Rebbe is saying here in other words. What is the Alter Rebbe teaching us? This is the whole foundation here—really, the foundation of all of Tanya. I just want to explain it in a little more detail. This point is very, very important; it is fundamental to understanding all of Tanya. What is the Alter Rebbe revealing to us by saying that the animal soul is clothed in a person’s blood to give life to the body? The very matter of life. As we discussed in another class, we mentioned that the Alter Rebbe originally wanted to print Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah before Likkutei Amarim. He wrote it before

02:36 that. We explained that Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah is really the foundation of all of Tanya. That is why the Alter Rebbe initially wanted to put it first, though in practice he later changed the order. Why is that? Because when we study Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah, we discover the Alter Rebbe’s insight, which is the teaching of the Baal Shem Tov, the teaching of Chassidus: the entire reality of the world is G-dliness. In other words, in Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah the Alter Rebbe reveals to us what the true reality is. It is not merely that there is G-dliness up in the seventh heaven, that there is some G-dliness that is one and not two. Rather, G-dliness is all of reality. That is the entire foundation of Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah. “Forever, Hashem, Your word stands firm in the heavens”: the world’s coming into being, the world’s very existence, is the Divine power, the word of Hashem. There is no other reality, nothing apart from it; everything is Divine power. The Alter Rebbe explains this at length. So when you speak of holiness, holiness means the oneness of Hashem. When we say there is holiness and there is kelipah, holiness means a place where we sense the truth, where we sense that the true reality is G-dliness and that created existence is nullified to G-dliness. That is the definition of holiness. As the Alter Rebbe says later in the coming chapters of Likkutei Amarim, including chapter 6, anything that is nullified is holy. Sitra achra, the “other side,” which is not the side of holiness, is something that is not nullified. It is something in which I feel that I exist, that I am an independent entity, rather than existing in connection with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. That is the foundation of kelipah and sitra achra. To use the familiar phrasing: What is taken as self-evident? Is it G-dliness, or is it the independent self, created existence? That is essentially the difference between the G-dly soul and the animal soul. This is the first thing the Alter Rebbe says here. The animal soul, the vital soul, is clothed

04:51 in a person’s blood to give life to the body. As we discussed in the previous class, it is a living soul. What does “living” mean? For the animal soul, being alive means that I am an entity. I exist. I am here. Just the fact that I am here. There is no evil here yet, no wrongdoing, nothing of the sort. At this point, it is only the feeling of one’s own existence. But with that feeling, a person takes existence, the sense of self, as self-evident: I am alive and I exist. From there, everything else begins. If I am here, then I want things; I need things. I feel like having things, I want things, and from there all the rest begins to unfold—the negative character traits the Alter Rebbe will go on to discuss. But at the root, at the foundation, the point is the feeling of “I,” the feeling of one’s own existence. That is what the Alter Rebbe means when he says it is clothed in a person’s blood to give life to the body. We know that in Chassidus, when we use the word “clothed,” it does not simply mean clothing, something external. If a person wears a garment, I am clothed in the garment, but the garment and I are two separate things. I can put it on, take it off, put it on again—“You change them like a garment.” What is the wording there? They do not become one thing. But there is another kind of being clothed that Chassidus discusses: being clothed in G-dliness, being clothed in spirituality. There, it means that what is clothed and what clothes it become truly one, as we say about the soul in the body. The soul is clothed in the body, but not like a garment. Rather, it becomes its whole character: the soul’s entire being becomes bodily life, material life, physical life. In other words, if you ask it what “life” means, life means bodily life. That is its definition, and that is what “animal soul” means. It is clothed in a person’s blood to give life to the body. It is clothed in the person’s blood, and consequently life comes to be defined for it as existence, a sense of self: “I.” Then the Alter Rebbe goes on and says—so this is why, as we said, the Alter Rebbe

06:58 wanted to place Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah first. Because when a Jew truly wants to reach the essential truth, to serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu—which is what all of Tanya is about—how do we give the G-dly soul the upper hand over the animal soul? For a Jew’s service of Hashem to be a service of truth, as the Alter Rebbe will say in the coming chapters, one cannot truly cleave to Him except through the performance of many mitzvos. To attain true bittul, we need the awareness, the genuine awareness, that G-dliness is the true reality. The G-dly soul has that awareness, as we will learn in the next chapter. So let’s continue in the text. First, the Alter Rebbe said that the vital soul is what is clothed in a person’s blood to give life to the body. The Alter Rebbe continues: “And from it come all the negative character traits, from the four evil elements within it.” Once the independent self, the “I,” is at the center—there is an “I”—negative character traits also emerge from that “I,” from that sense of self. Those negative traits are divided among four elements. As is well known, the Rambam writes, and it says here in the Zohar and in several places, that the whole world is composed of four elements. There is the well-known teaching of the Ramban on Parshas Bereishis: he says that the four elements are alluded to in the first and second verses, in “And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The four elements are the four vessels, the four qualities from which all creation is composed: fire, air, water, and earth. And this applies not only to physical things. We know that the Rambam explains at length in Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah how everything is composed of the four elements. In our world, nothing lacks all four elements. Even water has four elements. The water we see is not only water; the water we see already contains a mixture of the four elements. The same goes for fire, and the same goes for air. Because in our world everything is already

09:07 It has to be composed of four elements, and not just physical things. The spiritual is also composed of four elements. Just as there are four physical elements, there are four spiritual elements, and that is what the Alter Rebbe is now going to explain in relation to the animal soul. Later, when we get to the G-dly soul, the Alter Rebbe will speak about four elements there too. He does not present it all together, but Tanya also discusses four elements in the G-dly soul. Here, though, the Alter Rebbe is speaking about the animal soul. He says that all the bad character traits come from the animal soul’s four evil elements. He gives examples: anger and arrogance come from the element of fire, which rises upward. So two traits associated with fire are anger and arrogance. Why do anger and arrogance come from fire? There are several ways to explain it. The Alter Rebbe’s wording is “which rises upward.” What is the connection? What distinctive tendency does fire have? It rises. Fire always rises upward. That is unique to fire—not to wind, water, or earth. Only fire has this tendency to rise upward. And which bad traits rise upward? Anger and arrogance. Arrogance certainly does: a person feels that he is higher, greater, more special, more important. He measures himself against someone else and feels superior. That is arrogance, and it rises upward. The same can also be said of anger. Why does a person get angry? Because he feels hurt. Quite simply,

11:04 why am I angry? Someone said something unpleasant to me; he hurt me. Why was I hurt? Because I am an important person. How dare you say that to me? How dare you treat me that way? So anger, too, is rooted in rising upward: he considers himself important, elevated, above others. That is why he gets angry when his honor is slighted. This is one way to explain it, if we say that “rises upward” refers to both anger and arrogance. But the maamarim of our Rebbeim sometimes make a distinction: “rises upward” refers only to arrogance. Anger is connected to fire because of its heat. Fire has two properties: it rises, and it burns hot. That heat is the idea of arrogance—sorry, anger. When a person gets angry, he gets hot. That is how they say it in Spanish, right? What do they call an angry person in Spanish? He gets caliente—hot. In other words, anger and heat go together. Rashi also says this in Chumash, in Parshas Vayeira, [unclear]. Rashi says that when a person gets angry, his nose grows hot, and so on. In any case, the Rebbe Rashab makes this point: anger is associated with fire’s heat, while “rises upward” refers only to arrogance. Those are two ways of understanding the passage. “The desire for pleasures comes from the element of water, for water causes all kinds of pleasures to grow.” The bad trait associated with water is the desire for pleasure: a person seeks enjoyment. Enjoyment of what? That is desire

13:07 for pleasure. How is it connected to water? We know that water is, in essence, associated with pleasure. Quite literally, water causes all kinds of pleasurable things to grow. The Alter Rebbe means that the growth of everything that gives pleasure down here depends on water. Without water, things cannot grow. So all physical pleasures are connected in some way to the element of water. There is a deeper meaning as well. Chassidus and the books of Kabbalah explain that the pleasure in anything is connected to water. The moisture in something is what gives it its pleasurable quality. There is a great deal to say about this, and I do not want to go into it now. But one simple illustration is that when a person craves something, his mouth literally waters. So we see that pleasure is connected to water. That is why Chassidus and Kabbalah speak of mayin nukvin and mayin duchrin. They come up constantly in Chassidus. Water represents pleasure—the pleasure of the recipient and the pleasure of the giver. In any case, that is the analogy. So he says that water is associated with the desire for pleasures, while “frivolity, mockery, self-display, and idle talk” come from the element of wind. What is wind? Air. It has no substance. And so, among the bad traits, wind represents things without substance. That is why the Alter Rebbe lists these four: frivolity, mockery, self-display, and idle talk. They are all associated with wind; they have no substance. Frivolity is a kind of joy, but joy without a reason. Joy without a reason is called

15:21 frivolity. Joy that is all air. A person just acts wildly, with no content or purpose. The same is true of mockery. It has no real point; it is empty. And self-display is a kind of arrogance. The difference is that arrogance has a reason: a wealthy person takes pride in his wealth, a wise person in his wisdom, a strong person in his strength. He takes pride in what he has. But someone who takes pride in what he does not have, like it says about Haman [?], is proud of his very self without any reason. That is self-display, and that is why it is associated with wind. The same goes for idle talk. All of these belong to the element of wind. “Laziness and sadness” come from the element of earth. What connects laziness and sadness to earth? Quite simply, earth tends downward. It is heavy. Another thing is that earth has no life in it. Of all the elements, earth has the least life; it is inanimate. It is characterized by a lack of vitality and by heaviness. The same is true of laziness and sadness. A lazy person lacks vitality; he feels weighed down. He lies in bed: “How long will you lie there, lazy one?” Sadness is similar. When a person is sad, he has no vitality. Depression, sadness in the soul—a state of sadness. A sad person is like someone without life. He feels dead, despairing. Sadness and despair are states in which a person has lost his vitality. He has no life, no geshmak, no enthusiasm. He is sad, depressed. His soul has no movement of life, and that also brings

17:28 him down. As the well-known saying goes, sadness puts a person in bed, with no desire to do anything. So both laziness and sadness are connected to the element of earth. Chassidim sometimes say that since earth is the root of all four elements—everything comes from the earth—laziness and sadness are likewise the source of all the bad character traits. We can see it in practice: all the bad traits begin with laziness and sadness. As the Alter Rebbe will explain later in Tanya, why is sadness so harmful? Because the moment a person becomes sad, the yetzer hara gains control over him. He loses control of himself and falls in all the other areas too. So what do we see from all this? The Alter Rebbe has given several examples, but if we consider each of these bad traits, we will see that they all result from one thing: a sense of self. As we said earlier, the beginning, root, and foundation of it all is the feeling of “I,” the feeling of being a separate self. Everything develops from that feeling. As we said, a sense of self can exist without anything forbidden. Even when you eat permissible foods, that “I” can be present. But when that “I” descends and becomes involved in negative things, all these traits emerge. If you think about it, you can see that every bad trait the Alter Rebbe mentions here has one thing at its core: a sense of self. Because of that, a person becomes arrogant; because of that, he is driven by desire; because of that, he shows off and engages in idle talk. At their core, all the bad traits come from a person’s sense of “I,” of being a separate self, of being self-centered. The same applies to laziness and sadness. Why does a person become sad? As the Alter Rebbe says

19:19 Sadness comes from pride and a sense of self: he thinks he should already be on a certain level, and when he falls from that level, he becomes sad, and so on. So we understand that all these things flow from that point of self-centeredness. That is regarding negative character traits. The Alter Rebbe continues: “And the good character traits that are in the nature of all Jews from birth, such as compassion and acts of kindness, also come from it.” Not only negative traits. Now look: he is making a third point, something even more interesting. The animal soul is not entirely bad. There can also be good things, good conduct and good character traits, and those good traits come from the animal soul. How can good things come from the animal soul? The Alter Rebbe explains that we see three distinguishing traits in every Jew. The Gemara says: “There are three distinguishing traits of this nation.” Every Jew has three traits: they are compassionate, modest and kind. These traits are connected to the nature of the animal soul, not only to the G-dly soul. Of course, they also come from the G-dly soul. We need to explain that, because otherwise there is a contradiction in Tanya. There is a well-known question: here the Alter Rebbe says these traits come from the animal soul, while in Igeres Hakodesh, section 12, he says the three traits come from the G-dly soul. But it is not a contradiction, because a Jew has these three traits both from the G-dly soul and from the animal soul. By nature, from both souls, a Jew is compassionate, kind and modest. These three traits are connected with the three Patriarchs. Avraham Avinu performed acts of kindness; Yitzchak was modest, and in the plain sense, Yitzchak was modest, so he did not leave—he remained in the Land of

21:23 Israel. The trait of modesty is connected with the trait of awe. In any case, Yaakov Avinu was compassionate. In the weekly parsha, “He kissed him, and they wept”—the trait of compassion. So a Jew has these three traits from the Patriarchs. Ah, but the Patriarchs instilled them not only in a Jew’s G-dly soul, but also in the animal soul. Even from the side of his animal soul, a Jew loves to do kindness. He is compassionate and modest. Although the Alter Rebbe does not mention modesty here. Of course he means that too, but in practice he does not mention it. The Rebbe asks: either mention just one trait or mention all three. Why leave out modesty? The Rebbe gives a very interesting answer. He says the Alter Rebbe does not mention modesty because it is not really an ordinary, natural trait in a Jew. On the contrary, a Jew is naturally bold. Everyone knows that. It is famous throughout the world. Jews are not naturally shy. Jews are naturally bold-faced. “The boldest of the nations”—the Gemara says that too. Rather, the modesty we have, for the most part, came to us through the Giving of the Torah. It began with Yitzchak, but modesty was revealed primarily at the Giving of the Torah. In that context, the verse says: “The people saw, trembled, and stood at a distance.” So modesty is not quite as natural, and that is why the Alter Rebbe does not mention it. He mentions more natural traits: compassion and acts of kindness. In any case, what is the Alter Rebbe telling us here? That a Jew’s animal soul is different from a non-Jew’s animal soul. A Jew’s animal soul also contains good. What is the explanation? He says: “For in a Jew, this soul of kelipah comes from kelipas nogah,

23:18 which also contains good, and it derives from the mystery of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” A Jew’s animal soul comes from kelipas nogah. In the coming chapters, we will learn in detail what kelipas nogah is. Nogah is a mixture of light and darkness. Nogah is a kind of light, but not full daylight; it is associated with night. So kelipas nogah contains a mixture of good and evil. A Jew’s kelipah, his animal soul, is nogah, which contains both good and evil, and therefore good character traits as well. What does the Alter Rebbe want to tell us by this? He wants to tell us that sometimes even the good we do can contain self-centeredness. Not the self-centeredness of a non-Jew, which the Alter Rebbe will discuss shortly. Not the kind of self-centeredness where I do something in order to gain pride or a sense of importance. No. He means a subtler kind. A Jew’s self-centeredness can be: I do kindness because I like doing kindness. I feel compassion because it is natural to feel compassion when you see someone suffering, poor thing. That is not connected with G-dliness. That is what self-centeredness means here. It is not connected with Hakadosh Boruch Hu; it is connected with my nature, and therefore it too belongs to the animal soul. It is still part of my sense of self. A Jew’s sense of self is not only bad; it can also be good. But it is not connected with G-dliness. In other words, the Alter Rebbe is laying the foundations of Tanya and the teachings of Chassidus. As we said earlier, before Chassidus, before Tanya, we think in terms of a good inclination and an evil inclination: either good or bad. If it is good, it is good; if it is bad, it is bad. So doing kindness is good. But based on what we have just learned, not necessarily.

25:13 Something can be good and yet not be connected with the G-dly soul; it can still come from the animal soul. So the distinction is not between good and evil. The distinction is between holiness and kelipah. What kind of life are we living? A soul—what kind of life are we living? A life of holiness or a life of kelipah? A life of G-dliness or a life centered on myself, on “me”? That is the foundation of the entire work of serving Hashem, and the rest of Tanya is built on it.