Chapter 9 - Part Five

00:00 We’re in the middle of chapter 9, a very, very fundamental chapter in which the Alter Rebbe explains the battle between the two souls. As we said, in chapter 9 the Alter Rebbe begins to explain what each soul wants in this battle. He gives the example of a king: a king doesn’t want just part of a territory. A king wants everything. He wants to conquer it so completely that the whole territory is entirely his. In the same way, the two souls are each like a king: each wants to be the complete and absolute master of the body and all the faculties of the soul. Here the Alter Rebbe begins to explain how this works in detail with the faculties of the soul. He’s speaking about the G-dly soul. So we began explaining how the G-dly soul wants to be in complete control of the person’s entire being. The Alter Rebbe goes into detail: he began with the three intellectual faculties, Chochmah, Binah, and Daas, and then spoke about the emotions, love and awe. Within the emotions themselves, he speaks about the right chamber and the left chamber of the heart. At first, the G-dly soul spreads through the right chamber, and there are three levels within that. It can fill it, fill it completely, or overflow it. These are different degrees to which the love penetrates the heart, until it overflows—until the love extends even into the left chamber. And this is where we are, in the middle of the Alter Rebbe’s explanation that the G-dly soul wants love of Hashem to be not only the G-dly soul’s love of Hashem. It wants the animal soul to love Hashem too, for the animal soul itself to become a lover of Hashem. “With all your heart”—with both your inclinations, so that even the evil inclination is transformed into love. The Alter Rebbe explains that this itself has two stages. At first it is through iskafya, and afterward through ishapcha. These are the Alter Rebbe’s words here: “To subdue

02:21 the sitra achra through iskafya.” We explained in the previous class that here he doesn’t mean iskafya in its usual sense, because we’re speaking here about love of Hashem. Contemplation and love involve an inner love. So this isn’t what we usually mean by iskafya—forcing myself against my will. Rather, the explanation here is that the person hasn’t yet completely transformed his animal soul. Through contemplation, he influences it and persuades it that G-dliness is good, but it still feels like something additional. So, in a subtler sense, this too is called iskafya. But what is the ultimate goal? For the iskafya to lead to ishapcha as well. That’s where we are. I’ll read the text, and then we’ll explain. The Alter Rebbe says: “That he should rise and come to, and reach, a level of great love and affection greater than the level of intense love like flames of fire.” How does a person move from subduing the sitra achra in his animal soul to transforming it—so that the animal soul changes completely and comes to love Hashem fully? The transition from iskafya to ishapcha comes when a person moves from love like flames of fire to love like water. Here the Alter Rebbe teaches us a very deep idea in Chassidus. Among the levels of love of Hashem, there is love like flames of fire and love like water; here, love like water is a higher level than love like flames of fire. Chassidus discusses this in several ways. It’s a broad subject in Chassidus: which is higher, love like water or love like flames of fire? Here the Alter Rebbe is speaking about a level of love like water that is higher than love like flames of fire. When love is like flames of fire, it brings about only iskafya; it is specifically love like water that brings about ishapcha. Love like water here is “love of delights.” Now let’s read the text and explain it. The Alter Rebbe says

04:31 again: “That he should rise and come to, and reach, a level of great love and affection greater than the level of intense love like flames of fire”—to reach a love higher than love like flames of fire—“and this is what Scripture calls ‘love of delights.’” A love above love like flames of fire. This love like water is called love of delights. “To delight in Hashem.” A person not only has a fiery love for Hakadosh Boruch Hu; he takes delight in G-dliness. “To delight in Hashem, something akin to the World to Come. And the delight is in the faculty of Chochmah, in the intellect that delights in comprehending Hashem and knowing Him according to the capacity of one’s intellect and wisdom.” What is the Alter Rebbe telling us? There is love like flames of fire, and there is love of delights. What is the difference between them? We can understand it from fire and water themselves. One of the differences between love like fire and love like water is that, generally speaking, fire is hot and water is cold. More specifically, fire has a great deal of excitement and noise. Look at fire: it crackles, turns into a blaze, and creates a whole commotion. That is the nature of fire: it sends out fiery sparks. Water, by contrast, is not only cool by nature; it is also the opposite of noisy. Water is naturally calm. It makes noise only when something gets in its way. “The sound of mighty waters, the breakers of the sea”—that’s when there are breakers, when things obstruct the water and it becomes noisy. But by nature, water flows very, very calmly. That’s its nature. What does this mean in a person’s inner life? It means there is a kind of love in which a person is distant from G-dliness, and he contemplates the greatness of Hakadosh Boruch

06:54 Hu. This arouses in him wonder, excitement, thirst, warmth, a stirring of the blood, and so on. This is called love like flames of fire. In other words, sensing how wondrously great Hakadosh Boruch Hu is awakens in a person a longing, a desire, a thirst to reach that place. As it says of King David: “A psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah: My soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You.” It was because he was in the wilderness of Judah. The wilderness—the distance, the concealment—is what awakened his thirst, his flames of fire, his warmth. That is love like flames of fire. Love like water is the opposite. It is when a person reaches a kind of closeness to G-dliness in which he and G-dliness become one. There is no longer thirst, noise, or excitement. His whole being becomes self-nullified; his whole being becomes united with G-dliness. It is one thing; he is there. Broadly speaking, in two words, Chassidus calls this the difference between excitement and cleaving. Excitement is when you are at a distance and are deeply stirred. The Hebrew word for excitement is related to the word for action. That’s why you run, you move outward, you... The commotion comes from being far away and becoming stirred to action: you want to leave that distant place and unite with what you are trying to reach. Cleaving, by contrast, is the opposite. You are there; you’ve become attached, you’ve become part of it. The person is already within the experience. That is the difference between love like flames of fire and love of delights. So what is the Alter Rebbe saying? When a person contemplates G-dliness, the first thing that develops is love like flames of fire. Love like flames of fire is more closely related to the nature of the emotions. Emotions are warm by nature. As the Alter Rebbe said in chapter 3 of Tanya, the difference between the mind and the heart is that the heart is naturally warm and the mind is naturally cool, even physically. The heart is constantly in motion, and the blood comes from the heart,

09:04 The boiling of the blood. The mind, by nature, is always composed. Its nature is composure and coolness, while the heart’s nature is emotion and warmth. So when a person contemplates G-dliness and a love of Hashem awakens within him, the first response is love in its natural form, as an emotion. It is love like flames of fire: thirst, emotion, and fervor. What does that accomplish in the animal soul? It brings about iskafya—self-restraint. When the animal soul encounters the fiery love of G-dliness, its own fire—its warmth, the boiling of its blood, its natural emotional fervor, the emotions of an animal—is redirected. It moves from the emotions of the animal soul to being stirred by G-dliness. But this is still like winning a battle, as we say, because its essential nature remains animalistic. What does it feel instead? The greatness of G-dliness, which gives it a thirst for G-dliness. But there are still two things here: there is the self, and it has a thirst for G-dliness. By contrast, when we reach love with delight, what did we say its advantage is? The person becomes completely one with it. So with the animal soul too, when the soul’s love for Hakadosh Boruch Hu is a love with delight, that love becomes the person’s entire reality. That is the difference between iskafya and ishapcha—transformation. What did we say about iskafya? It means something like winning a battle, which is why it is called iskafya. At its core, the animal soul has not changed. With ishapcha, by contrast, this becomes its entire reality. That is why the Alter Rebbe says that love like flames of fire is not enough to transform the animal soul; it has to be love with delight. When it is love with delight, it becomes the person’s entire reality, and then the animal soul too, in its entirety, becomes one with G-dliness.

11:08 And when its entire reality becomes one with G-dliness, it naturally comes to despise evil. As the Alter Rebbe will go on to explain in the next chapter, this is the distinction of the tzaddik. Since the tzaddik reaches the ultimate perfection of love with delight, his delight in G-dliness causes him to be completely repulsed by all matters of this world—evil things, material things. So that is what the Alter Rebbe is saying here: one must rise from love like flames of fire to love with delight. That is why the Alter Rebbe emphasizes that this level is delight in the mind, in chochmah and intellect. What is the Alter Rebbe telling us? As we said earlier, there are two kinds, the two levels we discussed: love like flames of fire and love like water. Both are forms of love, of emotion. But the difference is that love like flames of fire belongs primarily to the realm of emotions, because emotions are naturally warm. Love like water, by contrast, is connected to the mind, because that is the mind’s essential nature. So even the emotions are a different kind of emotion: emotions on the level of intellect. The yeshivah students here have studied more of this; the Rebbe Rashab discusses it in his maamarim. Concealed love and fear, inward love and fear—the emotions take shape according to the intellect, so they function in an intellectual way. It is a different kind of emotion: intellect within the emotions. These are emotions in which the G-dly matter becomes so completely united with him that his heart, too, unites entirely with G-dliness. Then there is ishapcha in its fullest sense. The Alter Rebbe continues: This level of love with delight, the aspect of water, is the water within the G-dly soul. We said water represents delight. It is “the aspect of water and the seed of light sown in the holiness of the G-dly soul, which transforms for the good the aspect of water in the animal soul, from which the desires for worldly pleasures originally arose.” In other words, what is the Alter Rebbe saying here? This level we are discussing—the transformation

13:16 of the animal soul, in which it is completely transformed into love of Hashem—is what we mean when we say that the water of the G-dly soul transforms the water of the animal soul. As he said, we learned in chapter 1 of Tanya that, among the four elements of the animal soul, the element of water is connected with pleasure. The Alter Rebbe says... Guys! The Alter Rebbe says that water gives rise to all kinds of pleasure. The defining quality of water in the animal soul is pleasure. Take the attribute of love in the animal soul: when a person attains love like water—what is love like water? It is love with delight, as we explained—he transforms the water of the animal soul into the water of the G-dly soul. What was animalistic pleasure now becomes delight in G-dliness. The Rebbe Rashab adds another point in his explanations here. It is interesting. Tanya speaks mainly about water representing pleasure, right? There is the water of the animal soul, and it must be transformed into delight in G-dliness, the delight of water on the side of holiness. The Rebbe Rashab points out another detail. In chapter 1, the Alter Rebbe says that water “gives rise” to pleasure. It is not just that water is pleasure; water causes things to grow. It gives rise to all kinds of pleasure. The Rebbe Rashab asks: Why specifically say “gives rise”? Because here too, we are talking about growth. This is not just another kind of pleasure; as we have seen, there is growth here. We said that love is first in the mind, then it descends into the heart, into the right chamber. The right chamber is filled to overflowing with love. Then it reaches the left chamber. The left chamber itself is first refined and then transformed. In other words, there is growth here. It does not stay in one place. A person is constantly in a process of growth. His love for Hakadosh Boruch Hu grows from the mind to

15:34 the heart, to the right chamber, to the left chamber, where it is refined and transformed. All of this is a process of growth. So that is essentially what the Alter Rebbe is telling us here about this love of the G-dly soul. What does the G-dly soul want? As we said, it wants to permeate the person completely, so that the person’s entire being is transformed into love of Hashem. Now, the wording the Alter Rebbe uses here is interesting. There is an interesting detail in his phrasing: he says, “the water and the seed of light sown.” What do these words, “seed of light sown,” mean? It is an unusual expression. In Chassidus—and, incidentally, there is also a maamar on Toldos about this on the website—the Rebbe Rashab gives a very interesting explanation. Chassidus explains that water has three aspects, called “light, water, firmament.” I do not know if you have learned this. The maamarim describe a sequence: light, water, firmament. These are three stages of water. Water does not begin as water. At first it is like light. That is, the water is like... what do you call it? Vapor, steam vapor. It begins in a very, very subtle state. In that subtle state, it is called eid in the language of Tanach. The word appears in Tanach; in Iyov, rain at its source is called eid. So water begins as something subtle and spiritual. Then it takes on a more physical form and becomes water, and then it becomes a firmament—ice. These are three stages of water. The Rebbe Rashab explains their meaning in our spiritual work in several maamarim, and the subject also appears in the Rebbe’s teachings in a number of places. That is to say... What kind of love is this? Light means subtlety. Just as water, I mean, has a subtle state, so too love has many levels.

17:37 When the love for Hakadosh Boruch Hu is utterly refined. Take fire, for example: there are many kinds of fire. Generally, we say fire represents fervor. But we know there is fire that burns meat, fire that burns wood, and fire that burns oil. When you light a flame with oil, the flame is extremely fine; it does not even make noise. Similarly, water has many levels, and light is water at its most refined. So the Rebbe wants to hint here that this is not just love experienced as delight, but the loftiest form of that love, the finest of the fine. That is what transforms the fiery love of the animal soul into love for G-dliness. A new book has just come out, Tanya: Me’oros Uve’urim from our Rebbeim, the Nesi’im. Really, we should hold a farbrengen about it—about this revelation of new Torah that has now come to light. It is a complete collection of what our Rebbeim taught about Tanya. Two volumes have just been published; it is something very, very special. And there is something remarkable there. We had always understood the plain meaning here to be that the Rebbe wants to hint at light: water is not enough to transform the animal soul; you specifically need light. But in this new book there is a handwritten note from the Rebbe rejecting that reading. The Rebbe says that the Alter Rebbe is not trying to discuss light here, because the Alter Rebbe explicitly says that it is the water that brings about the transformation. So, according to the Rebbe’s explanation, we still need to understand why the Alter Rebbe uses the words “seed, light is sown.” The Rebbe does not explain that; he only says that in Tanya... Well, these are various fine points. But the main thing we are learning here in Tanya is how we need to serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu and come to love Hashem. At first,

19:34 it is like flames of fire, and afterward it is love experienced as delight, love like water, which is the ultimate perfection. I should emphasize that love like flames of fire also has an advantage. We need both, and this is connected to the time of year as well. As is explained in the maamarim on Parshas Toldos, including the Rebbe’s maamarim on Parshas Toldos: “Yitzchak, son of Avraham; Avraham fathered Yitzchak.” These are the two levels of love: one is love like water, and one is love like fire. That is why it says, “Yitzchak, son of Avraham; Avraham fathered Yitzchak.” We need both kinds of love, because each completes the other, and so on.