Chapter 7 - Part Four

00:01 We’re holding here in Tanya, in the middle of chapter 7. There’s a very important point that the Alter Rebbe explains in this part of Tanya. On page 12, around the fifth line: “This is not so with forbidden foods.” The Alter Rebbe has been speaking about permitted things. This is the chapter about kelipas nogah. The Alter Rebbe explained what happens with kelipas nogah. All the permitted things that belong to kelipas nogah are in a state that depends on the person. A person can elevate them to the side of holiness, as though they were an offering, when he eats for the sake of Heaven. The same applies to other permitted things. But a person can also bring them down into the three impure kelipos when he eats for the sake of his appetite. And it’s not only the food that descends. The Alter Rebbe added that the person himself also descends, because he has now become a vehicle for this: he receives from the food and becomes a vehicle for his appetite. So his body, too, descends into the three impure kelipos. Here the Alter Rebbe gave us the good news: since we’re talking about permitted things, there is still hope for them. Even after he has brought them down into the three impure kelipos, because the thing itself is permitted, if the person later repents and returns to the service of Hashem, he can still release its spark and elevate it. The Alter Rebbe said that this is also the meaning of the word mutar, “permitted”: it also has the sense of “releasing those who are bound.” It is the opposite of being tied up. Mutar means that it is not bound and held captive by the forces of kelipah, and it can be released. It’s like the verse, “You opened my sackcloth and girded me with joy.” When the sack is closed, you can’t get out. But when the sack is open, even if you’re inside it, as long as the sack

02:10 is open, you can get out. Likewise, the spark in permitted things is, for now, inside a sack. It is clothed in the sackcloth of kelipah because the person ate the food for the sake of his appetite. But if he later does teshuvah and returns to the service of Hashem, he can still release the spark and elevate it to holiness. That’s what we discussed regarding permitted things. The Alter Rebbe now continues: “This is not so with forbidden foods and forbidden relations.” What happens with forbidden things? If a person ate non-kosher food, G-d forbid—food that was treif, forbidden food—or, likewise, engaged in forbidden relations, these belong entirely to the three impure kelipos. The three impure kelipos cannot be elevated. The Alter Rebbe says: “They are bound and tied in the hands of the external forces forever.” Here again we have the word assur, “forbidden.” Assur means bound, attached, held captive. It is held within the three impure kelipos, tied up—not mutar, free. It cannot be elevated. “And they do not ascend from there until their day comes and death is swallowed up forever, as it is written, ‘And I will remove the spirit of impurity from the earth.’” At present it is impossible to elevate them. In the future, Moshiach will come, and then “I will remove the spirit of impurity from the earth.” In other words, when Moshiach comes and the process of refinement is complete, the spirit of impurity will be removed from the earth. Those kelipos will no longer have any hold, and they will become nothing. As we explained, the three impure kelipos have no life-force of their own. Their life-force lasts only as long as kelipas nogah exists. Kelipas nogah, as we discussed in the previous class, is like the Jordan River, which “takes from one and gives to the other.”

04:25 In other words, there is something in the middle that transfers life-force from holiness to kelipah. As long as kelipas nogah exists, there is an intermediary that takes things from holiness and brings them down into kelipah, and through this the three impure kelipos also receive life-force. But in the future the process of refinement will be complete. Kelipas nogah will be entirely refined; that mixed state will no longer exist. Refinement means that good and evil will no longer be mixed together. Once there is no longer a mixture of good and evil, the three impure kelipos certainly cannot continue to exist. So when their existence is nullified, nothing remains of them. But at present there is no way to rectify this. That is what the Alter Rebbe wants to tell us: just how serious this is. How careful a person must be when eating, making sure that the food is permitted. Because if it is forbidden, then, as the Alter Rebbe will say later in the chapter, even if you have all the good intentions in the world, it cannot be elevated. It remains in the three impure kelipos. Only in the future, when evil is nullified, will it cease to exist. Now we need to remember—and I want to explain an important point in understanding this chapter—that here the Alter Rebbe is not speaking so much about the person. He is primarily speaking about the things themselves. There are two matters that we, my friends, can mix up when learning Tanya. When a person eats forbidden food or commits a transgression, there is the person’s transgression. For that, he needs to do teshuvah. The Alter Rebbe wrote Igeres Hateshuvah about this. In Igeres Hateshuvah, the Alter Rebbe explains lower-level teshuvah and higher-level teshuvah: what is lower-level teshuvah, what is higher-level teshuvah, and the whole progression he sets out there. But that is not what he is discussing here.

06:26 Here the Alter Rebbe is speaking about things in the world. After all, this chapter follows the previous one, where the Alter Rebbe explains the nature of kelipas nogah and the three impure kelipos. He is speaking more about the object than about the person. When someone eats for the sake of his appetite, he causes the food to descend into the kelipos. To elevate it, as the Alter Rebbe said earlier, if it is something permitted, then when the person does ordinary teshuvah and returns to the service of Hashem, it can be released, because it is permitted. But a forbidden thing cannot, in the natural course of things, be elevated. Only in the future will that object cease to exist. As for the person, he needs to do teshuvah. Certainly, a person can do teshuvah even now. That concerns the person. The question now concerns the object: is there a way, at present, to elevate the things a person has done—sins connected with the three impure kelipos? On this point, the Alter Rebbe now introduces a remarkable idea: there is one way, one mode of serving Hashem, through which something can be accomplished even with the three impure kelipos, even now. This is how the Alter Rebbe continues: “Or until he does such great teshuvah that his deliberate sins become actual merits for him.” When a person does teshuvah—but not just any teshuvah. Here a special kind of teshuvah is needed, teshuvah so great that “his deliberate sins become actual merits for him.” So, as we said, we are now talking about the object. Because when we speak about a transgression, about

08:24 Teshuvah—there are two aspects to teshuvah. There are many aspects, of course, but broadly speaking, there are two. One is the baal teshuvah, the person doing teshuvah. What is teshuvah? What does it accomplish in a person? He overcomes all the challenges and does teshuvah, and through that a baal teshuvah reaches a higher level than a tzaddik, and so on. There are all sorts of points about the baal teshuvah. But then there is the sin itself. When a person commits a sin, there is now the reality of the sin, something that has fallen into the three impure kelipos, and that cannot be elevated. It is bound and held in the hands of the external forces. Here the Alter Rebbe says, based on the Gemara, of course, that not only can the baal teshuvah return, but the things with which he committed the sin can also be elevated. For that, though, a very, very particular kind of teshuvah is needed. That is the teshuvah the Alter Rebbe is about to explain: “Or until he does such great teshuvah that his deliberate sins actually become merits for him.” There is a special kind of teshuvah that can transform the object involved in a deliberate sin and turn it into something of merit. “This is teshuvah out of love, from the depths of the heart, with great love and longing, and a soul yearning to cleave to Him, blessed be He, its soul thirsting for Hashem like a parched and weary land.” That is the teshuvah we are talking about here. What kind of teshuvah can make even deliberate sins become merits? As we said, the object itself is transformed; the deliberate sins themselves become merits. But deliberate sins are deliberate sins. They are held in the hands of the external forces. How can the object itself change? There is one kind of teshuvah that can cause deliberate sins to become merits. Which kind? Teshuvah out of love. And what does teshuvah out of love mean? The Alter Rebbe says it is not just ordinary love, but great love, from the depths of the heart—“with great love and longing, and a soul yearning to cleave.” It is a particular kind of love. Now, what does the Gemara say? The Gemara at the end of Yoma says that when a person does

10:40 teshuvah out of fear, his deliberate sins become like unintentional sins. When he does teshuvah out of love, his deliberate sins become merits. That is what the Gemara says. So the straightforward meaning in the Gemara, as Rashi explains it, is that when a person does teshuvah out of fear, “fear” means fear of punishment. That is how it appears from Rashi, from the Gemara, and from the commentaries. When a person does teshuvah out of fear, it is fear of punishment. And because that fear means the teshuvah is not genuine—it is an external kind of teshuvah; he is not really doing teshuvah, he is just afraid—the way Hakadosh Boruch Hu forgives him is by treating his sins like unintentional sins. They are not erased completely. Right? They are counted as unintentional. Even though he did teshuvah, he did it out of fear. But that is enough teshuvah for Hakadosh Boruch Hu to forgive him in a certain way. Imagine a friend of yours punched you, slapped you in the face, right? You are angry with him. But if he asks you to forgive him, even if his apology is not entirely wholehearted, you forgive him. What does it mean that you forgive him? You no longer count it as deliberate; you count it as unintentional. All right, so that is a certain kind of forgiveness. But when the teshuvah is out of love, when a person awakens love for Hakadosh Boruch Hu and therefore does teshuvah, then Hakadosh Boruch Hu forgives him completely—his sins become merits. In the Gemara, the meaning is not the novel idea the Rebbe brings out. In the Gemara, the idea is that when you love someone, you love him so much that the wrongdoing no longer matters at all. It is as though nothing happened. The meaning of “they become merits for him” concerns the person and the relationship with him. Hakadosh Boruch Hu loves the person. When you love someone, you

12:42 forgive him completely. Chassidus comes along with a novel idea: it means that the sin itself turns into a merit. The bad reality, the evil, turns into good. How can that be? And what does it have to do with love? Why, if I do teshuvah out of love, does Hakadosh Boruch Hu not only forgive the person, but the sin itself becomes a merit? How can a sin become a merit? How does a prosecutor become a defender? How does evil turn into good? That is the opposite of its nature. So the Alter Rebbe says something remarkable here. This is not ordinary love; it is great love. What kind of love? What defines this great love? It is love that arises specifically because of the sin. The person’s state of sin is what brought him to great love. So let us read it inside, and we will understand what the Alter Rebbe is saying. The Alter Rebbe says: “For”—here is the explanation. The Alter Rebbe explains why teshuvah out of love turns deliberate sins into merits. He says: “For until now his soul was in a parched land and the shadow of death, which is the sitra achra.” How is teshuvah out of love born in a person? It is born specifically from the opposite state. This is a particular kind of love. It is not the love of tzaddikim; it is love that comes from that state of wrongdoing. Precisely because the person had been in a place of drought and the shadow of death, in a state of darkness—the sitra achra—“and utterly distant from the light of Hashem’s countenance.” He was as far from G-dliness as could be. “Therefore his soul thirsted with greater intensity than the souls of tzaddikim thirst.” Precisely because of the distance, precisely because of the darkness, an especially powerful thirst was awakened in him, a greater love for G-dliness. It comes from that thirst. Consequently, the deliberate sins themselves turn into merits. “Therefore his soul thirsted with greater intensity than the souls of tzaddikim thirst.” This is

15:04 a different definition, a different kind of love. What gives rise to the love of tzaddikim? The goodness of G-dliness. A tzaddik does not see evil; he sees only good, so he sees the goodness of G-dliness. He sees how wonderful, good, and upright Hakadosh Boruch Hu is, and all of this awakens in him a desire to cleave to Him, a longing, a sense of awe, a wish to draw close to G-dliness. That is what a tzaddik experiences. But what is awakened in a baal teshuvah does not come from closeness or from seeing greatness. It is the opposite: he senses the danger. He feels that he is in the depths of death. And that makes him want to run to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. It is a different kind of connection. There is love born of closeness, and there is love born of distance. The love born of distance is a kind of love that only a baal teshuvah can feel. If you have never been on the other side, you will never feel that kind of love. That is the underlying point here. So it follows that the sin itself, that very state he had been in before, an unwanted state, is what brought him to such a great thirst for G-dliness. And that is what it means for the deliberate sins themselves to become merits. Because, as the Rebbe says in Likkutei Sichos, the deliberate sins become, so to speak, a means of enabling the mitzvah. Yes, it is hard to say, but that is the point. It is like the principle that the means of enabling a mitzvah are part of the mitzvah. There are things involved in preparing for a mitzvah that become part of the mitzvah. Even though they are only preparation, because I need those things in order to fulfill the mitzvah, the things that enable it also become part of the mitzvah. Similarly, here the sin is, so to speak, a means of enabling the mitzvah. In itself, it is a sin,

17:04 This is the very opposite of G-d’s will. But because the sin itself caused a person to feel how evil and bitter it is to forsake Hashem—to feel thirst and distance—it awakened in him a great love for G-dliness. Without it, he would never have reached that kind of great love. That is why the deliberate sins themselves become merits. As our Sages said, “In the place where baalei teshuvah stand…” The Alter Rebbe says that this is the deeper meaning of the Sages’ teaching: “In the place where baalei teshuvah stand, even the completely righteous cannot stand.” A tzaddik never has that kind of thirst. He never has that kind of love for Hakadosh Boruch Hu. It is a different quality of love, a different category of love—one a tzaddik can never reach. Only a baal teshuvah can reach it. So baalei teshuvah stand at a level of thirst for G-dliness that simply does not apply to a tzaddik. And the Alter Rebbe emphasizes: teshuvah motivated by this great love. When the Gemara says that through teshuvah motivated by love, deliberate sins become merits, it means the love that comes from thirst. It is about this that we say the deliberate sins become merits. And here comes the word “since.” This is the crucial “since”: “Since through this he came to this great love.” That is the whole point. Because it brought him to love—because the distance itself brought the person to thirst—the sin itself becomes a kind of trampoline, right? A springboard. It is what enabled the person to make that leap, so it too becomes part of the merit. This is the great transformation possible specifically through teshuvah motivated by love: the deliberate sins themselves become actual merits. The Rebbe has

19:07 many sichos on this subject. One place where the Rebbe explains it at length is in several sichos in Likkutei Sichos—there is one on Parshas Acharei in volume 17, and one on Parshas Metzora in volume 27. There are several very substantial, foundational sichos from the Rebbe on this whole question of deliberate sins becoming merits. The Rebbe explains the depth and precision of the Alter Rebbe’s words. So there are two aspects here, as we said. The idea that deliberate sins become merits has two aspects: one concerns the person, and one concerns the object. Here the Alter Rebbe mainly wants to emphasize the object. The object is something forbidden. A forbidden object cannot be elevated. “Forbidden”—asur—means bound to the external forces, and therefore a tzaddik has no way to elevate forbidden things. A tzaddik can elevate only permitted things. This kind of innovation is truly the creation of something from nothing, a transformation from one extreme to the other: taking something that, by its very nature, cannot be elevated, and yet the baal teshuvah has the power to bring about something new. It is a wonder, something from nothing. He turns deliberate sins into merits. And the Alter Rebbe explains the reasoning here: it is because those deliberate sins brought him to this state. This is connected, by way of example, to what the Alter Rebbe says—and this brings us to the whole subject of Geulah. There is the well-known teaching cited in the name of the Alter Rebbe and in several maamarim: “My soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You.” And then, “So I have beheld You in the sanctuary.” It is the same idea: specifically during exile, the Jewish people say to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, “A psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah.” The soul is in exile, in the wilderness of Judah—the darkness of exile—and there it says, “My soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You.” The thirst comes precisely because one is in the wilderness, because of the hunger and thirst, because of

21:11 the darkness. That is where one says, “My soul thirsts for You”; that is where the thirst is. And of this we say, “So, in the sanctuary”—if only it could be so in the sanctuary. The Rebbe spoke about this when he taught the niggun “Tzamah Lecha Nafshi.” The Rebbe said that the niggun has two movements when we sing “Kein Bakodesh.” The first time, it is sung with an upward movement: “So I have beheld You in the sanctuary.” The melody rises. The second time, it is sung with a downward movement. “So I have beheld You in the sanctuary.” When the Rebbe taught the niggun, he explained that these express two things. There is the thirst, and we say, “If only.” The first time is an upward movement: If only we could have that kind of thirst even when we are in moments of holiness—not only during exile, in times of darkness or sin, but also in times of holiness. That is the wish expressed by “so.” And then we conclude “so” with a movement of return, as though to say: yes, may “I have beheld You in the sanctuary” truly come about in the future, and may we have that quality too. But that is a novel idea. It is explained in the Rebbe’s maamarim and in a sicha of the Rebbe’s that even in the time to come, exile will be mentioned. Many sichos say that in the time to come people will mention exile, speak about exile, mention the Exodus from Egypt—all sorts of things. But seemingly, in the time to come there will already be ultimate perfection. Why will there be a need to speak about them? One explanation is the special quality of thirst. There is the quality of “My soul thirsts for You,” the quality of that yearning, and it will be present in the time to come as well. In any case, it will be mentioned, by way of remembrance. People will speak about it because it will also have an effect on the revelations of the time to come. In any case, to return to our subject, this is what the Alter Rebbe says here: there are two ways forbidden things can be elevated. One is when Moshiach comes. At the present

23:19 time, they cannot be elevated. Even if a person does teshuvah, the forbidden thing is not elevated. The person can be elevated; Hashem will forgive him. But the thing itself remains rooted in kelipah until the time to come. If, however, the person does teshuvah out of great love in this particular way, then the thing itself can be elevated, because of this movement of “since through this he came to this great love.” The Alter Rebbe concludes here: “But teshuvah that is not motivated by this love”—a person may do teshuvah, not only out of fear but even out of love, yet not this love. There are levels of love, but if it does not come from this love born of thirst, born of distance—if it is simply love, rather than this love of thirst—then “although it is proper teshuvah and Hashem will forgive him,” as we said, with respect to the person, Hakadosh Boruch Hu will forgive him. He will receive no punishment. The person is entirely in the clear; he did teshuvah out of love. But with respect to the forbidden thing itself, “nevertheless, they do not become merits for him and do not rise completely out of kelipah until the end of days, when death will be swallowed up forever.” At the end of days, when Moshiach comes, “death will be swallowed up forever.” The reality of evil will then be completely removed from the world, and consequently it will no longer exist. But that is a different category, a different matter. It is not relevant here. A person needs to think about the present: “Today, to do them,” as it says in the parsha. “Today, to do them.” A person needs to see to it that things are as they should be today. Therefore, we must be careful not to fall into forbidden things, G-d forbid. And if, G-d forbid, there has been some involvement with forbidden things, then the Alter Rebbe gives us the remedy here: the avodah of teshuvah motivated by love. That is what it says in Tanya.

25:16 The Rebbe offers a novel insight on this passage in Tanya. It appears in Melukat, volume 4, in an extensive maamar printed within a sicha—one of the wonderful maamarim on teshuvah. There the Rebbe says something remarkable: in truth, every kind of teshuvah has the capacity to turn sins into merits. The Rebbe explains that this movement is actually present in every kind of teshuvah, even teshuvah motivated by fear, because fundamentally, a Jew does teshuvah because he feels distant. There are many levels to this, but every act of teshuvah contains some feeling of distance. There the Rebbe speaks in defense of the Jewish people. It is written in a very interesting way, and although Tanya says otherwise, the Rebbe gives an explanation there. [unclear] There are several points there that are worth seeing inside. It is an extensive maamar from 5748. Now, here we should always tell the story about the Berdichever. He once said to a Jew who had come to do teshuvah—the Jew told him that he had already committed every sin in the world—and the Berdichever said to him, “I envy you. I have to work hard to gather merits, but you can do teshuvah in a single hour, in a single moment, and your sins will become merits for you. You will have an abundance of merits.” You know, the story about the Berdichever is a good one.