Chapter 9 - Part Six (and Final)

00:00 We’re at the end of chapter 9. With Hashem’s help, I hope we’ll finish the chapter today. As we discussed, this is the chapter in which the Alter Rebbe explains the struggle between the two souls. Each one wants to have complete control over a person’s entire being. The struggle is not just about those moments when the good inclination wants a person to do a mitzvah and the animal soul wants him to commit a sin. It is a struggle over the person’s whole essence, over every part of him. Each one wants to be king—and, as we explained, being king means having absolute control over everything. The Alter Rebbe is in the middle of explaining what the G-dly soul wants. First, he spoke in general terms: the G-dly soul wants complete control, like a king, with the entire body and the entire person accepting its rule and becoming wholly united with it. Then he went into detail. He spoke about the intellect and the emotions, about fear and love, and about several levels within love itself: “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might”; the right chamber and the left chamber of the heart; and how it begins with love like flames of fire and reaches love of delights. When it becomes love of delights, a person becomes wholly, through and through, united with G-dliness in the fullest possible way. So we’re now at the top of page 14b. When a person succeeds in bringing his love for Hakadosh Boruch Hu beyond love like flames of fire—because flames of fire produce a thirst for Hakadosh Boruch Hu, more of a movement of yearning—but when the love is also a love of delights, it brings about a transformation. It’s not only yearning, but also fulfillment. The whole

02:11 essence of the person is transformed: the water of the animal soul—pleasure, which is associated with water, the element of water—is transformed into G-dly pleasure. The Alter Rebbe continues here on page 14b, third line from the bottom: “As stated in Eitz Chaim, Shaar 50, chapter 3, in the name of the Zohar, the evil is transformed into complete good, just like the good inclination itself.” The Alter Rebbe is quoting Eitz Chaim in the name of the Zohar. This Eitz Chaim is the same Eitz Chaim the Alter Rebbe cited at the beginning of Tanya. It’s good to know that; it helps us understand what the Alter Rebbe means here, because we don’t usually study Eitz Chaim and so wouldn’t otherwise know what he means. We should remember, then, that this is essentially what the Alter Rebbe cited in chapter 1. He began by saying that every person, both a tzaddik and a rasha, has two souls. That means even a tzaddik has an animal soul. The Alter Rebbe stated this in chapter 1 but didn’t explain it. Here comes the explanation. The Alter Rebbe cited a fundamental teaching from the Arizal: every person, every Jew, has two souls, a G-dly soul and an animal soul. Now, it’s easier to understand that a rasha also has a G-dly soul. That means he can always do teshuvah, and that deep down he wants to do teshuvah and all those good things. But what does it mean that even a tzaddik has an animal soul? After all, he is a tzaddik. The Alter Rebbe says a tzaddik is a person whose good inclination rules over him, whose entire being is ruled by the good inclination. Nevertheless, the Alter Rebbe writes in the name of Eitz Chaim—it’s

04:09 the same passage. I think he uses the same wording in chapter 1. There it says Shaar 50, chapter 2, and here it’s Shaar 50, chapter 3. In other words, it’s the same discussion, the same subject. So what is it saying? That’s what the Alter Rebbe is coming to explain here. Eitz Chaim teaches that every person is born with two souls, even a tzaddik. “And souls I have made”—the verse says this about every Jew, every soul, using “souls” in the plural. That means even a tzaddik has a soul that comes from the side of kelipah and the sitra achra. But through avodah, when the tzaddik serves Hakadosh Boruch Hu with great love, until he reaches love of delights, he comes to transform the animal soul. And this is the wording of Eitz Chaim: “The evil is transformed into complete good, just like the good inclination itself, by removing from it the soiled garments—the pleasures of this world in which it is clothed.” What does the Alter Rebbe mean here? This needs some explanation. The Alter Rebbe is brief here, but elsewhere, in Likkutei Torah, he explains it at greater length. Everyone, this is in Likkutei Torah on Parshas Chukas; it’s very well known. There the Alter Rebbe discusses—and we’ll get to the red heifer, we’ll get to it. The mitzvah is to take the red heifer and burn it completely, leaving only ashes. Those ashes are then used with spring water to purify someone who has become impure through contact with the dead. The Alter Rebbe explains that all this is an analogy for a person’s avodah. The red heifer represents the animal soul, and the animal soul has two parts. There is its essence: the animal soul’s basic power of desire. The animal soul, in its essence—as we said earlier—is like water, which gives rise to all

06:10 kinds of desires. The animal soul is also given to pride and appetite. Its nature is to have pride and desire; desire is part of what it is. In the language of Chassidus, this is called the power to desire. Now, what does it actually do? In itself, though, it is not evil. The animal soul has the power to desire; it is drawn to things and is given to pride, but it is not evil. Evil is something produced by its garments, when the animal soul is used to think improper and evil thoughts, and so on. When it becomes involved in the desires of this world, these become garments for it. In the language of Chassidus, they are called soiled garments, dirty garments. Those soiled garments are what must be burned away, consumed. This is what it means to take the red heifer and burn it with love like flames of fire. So the fire—oops, not the fire. Love like flames of fire burns away the animal soul’s soiled garments, but reaches the underlying power to desire. That power of desire is not evil, and it is transformed into good. That is what he is saying here. This is the tzaddik’s work, a person’s avodah: with his G-dly soul, he takes the animal soul and works on it through love like flames of fire, burning away the soiled garments. He removes the garments, the expressions of undesirable desires, and what remains is the power to desire itself, the power to desire itself. He turns it away from desires for worldly things, and it becomes a higher desire. Through this, the animal soul’s entire essence becomes, as he says, “just like the good inclination itself.” That is also the meaning of what we learned in chapter 1. A tzaddik, too, has an animal soul. But the tzaddik’s animal soul becomes united with his G-dly soul

08:14 through his avodah, through the love like flames of fire and the love of delights that he has attained. In this way, he has made the entire essence of the animal soul into one with the G-dly soul, completely united with it. It is also explained that there are two levels in this. As is known, there is the level of King David, of whom it is said, “My heart is hollow within me,” and there is the level of Avraham Avinu, of whom it is said, “You found his heart faithful before You.” He too transformed the animal soul, turning it into good. The Alter Rebbe continues: “And likewise…” So, so, so—that’s that. What has the Alter Rebbe discussed here already? We spoke about actions. We spoke about the emotions and the heart, and within that, about the right chamber and the left chamber, love and fear. The Alter Rebbe goes on to say: “And likewise, all the emotions of the heart that are branches of fear and love shall be for Hashem alone.” Now the Alter Rebbe continues further. There are other emotions. We’ve spoken only about love and fear, but we know there are seven emotions, or six emotions, including netzach, hod, yesod, and tiferes. As the Alter Rebbe said in chapter 3, all the other emotions are branches. So the Alter Rebbe says that here too, the G-dly soul wants every aspect of all the emotions—even the branches of love and fear, not only love and fear themselves—to be for Hashem alone. That means the attribute of netzach, a branch of love, and the attribute of hod, a branch of fear, and so on. All the branches, all the emotions, should be entirely for Hashem alone. In other words, they should be devoted exclusively to serving Hashem. His attribute of netzach should be used only for G-dliness: to overcome evil, to overcome the kelipos, to overcome the sitra achra. The attribute of hod, which is about acknowledgment

10:18 And the bittul, so that it will be only in matters of holiness. “And the entire power of speech in the mouth.” Until now, he has been speaking about a faculty. Now the Alter Rebbe will speak about the garments. He will explain that the same applies to the garments as well: “And the entire power of speech in the mouth and thought in the brain should be filled with the garments of thought and speech of the divine soul alone.” The same applies to the soul’s garments. The divine soul wants the entire faculty—this is the precise point: the whole of it, with no part of the power of speech left over. What should the power of speech be entirely about? Divine speech. The entire power of speech in the mouth—the fact that a person has the power of speech in his mouth—the divine soul wants all of it to be devoted solely to serving Hashem. Likewise, the entire power of thought in the brain should be filled with the garments of thought and speech of the divine soul alone. No space should remain, either in the power of speech in the mouth or in the power of thought in the brain, that is not thoroughly permeated with matters of holiness and the service of Hashem. And the Alter Rebbe spells it out: “Which are thought of Hashem and His Torah.” His thoughts should be entirely occupied with thoughts of Hashem, thinking about Hakadosh Boruch Hu, “and His Torah.” Some say “His Torah” means thinking about Torah. Others say it means speaking words of Torah: “So that his conversation all day long is such that his mouth never ceases from study.” All his speech, all his conversation, should be what is described as “his mouth never ceases from study.” In other words, throughout the day, at every opportunity, he does not stop speaking words of Torah, because his mouth is devoted solely to serving Hashem. We spoke earlier about something the Alter Rebbe brought at the beginning of Tanya, in chapter 1 as well. Here the Alter Rebbe is returning to what he began in chapter

12:26 1, when he spoke about Rabbah. Rabbah was an example of a person wholly permeated with the service of Hashem. That is why the question is asked of Rabbah: You call yourself a beinoni? Rabbah was surely a tzaddik! We said of Rabbah that his mouth never ceased from study, to the point that even the Angel of Death could not gain power over him. In other words, the soul’s control over his body was absolutely complete. That is why the entire power of speech in his mouth was devoted to serving Hashem: his mouth never ceased from study. I once heard Reb Yoel—Rabbi Yoel Kahn—tell a story about a chossid named Chaim Moshe Alperovitz. Reb Yoel would speak about him often. Chaim Moshe Alperovitz. Apparently Reb Yoel knew him from Eretz Yisroel as well. There is a large Alperovitz family in Chabad; they are all his descendants. Chaim Moshe was one of the students of Lubavitch, and some say that the Frierdiker Rebbe testified that he was a beinoni as described in Tanya. Here is one of the stories Reb Yoel told: Chaim Moshe arrived in Eretz Yisroel and needed to earn a living. The chassidim were looking for work, and this was during the period when Eretz Yisroel was being built up, about ninety or a hundred years ago. At that time, particularly if a person needed a livelihood, he could help with construction. They were building roads, railways, and buildings. So a number of chassidim worked in construction, and Chaim Moshe began working there too, carrying stones and other things. Other chassidim were there as well; Reb Yoel mentioned his uncle as an example. At first they worked in—now, the— But the boss, the supervisor—what do you call the person in charge of the whole operation? Over time, he began to see that they were righteous, dignified, and intelligent people. In short, he had a certain respect for them, and at some point he decided to give them easier work. Instead of having to carry stones and work hard in summer and winter, they could work in the office. He gave them jobs inside the office, where they could sit comfortably and answer the phones. Relatively speaking, it was very easy work.

14:42 Reb Yoel said that his uncle gladly accepted it, and at first Chaim Moshe did too. After a few days, Chaim Moshe said he wanted to go back. He asked the boss to let him return to working with the stones. The boss looked at him as though he were crazy. Everyone would love a job like that, sitting in the office by the telephone, and he was asking to go back to carrying stones. He asked him, “Have you gone crazy? Why do you want to do that?” He answered, “It’s very simple. When I was outside carrying stones, I could recite Tanya by heart, Mishnayos by heart. I had time to say words of Torah. Now that I have to sit in the office and answer phones, I don’t have time to say words of Torah. No, it isn’t worth it to me.” It was that obvious to him. Here was a Jew for whom this was his life: his mouth never ceased from study. Whenever he had a free moment, he spoke words of Torah. He was constantly reciting passages of Tanya and Mishnayos. So on the one hand, the work was grueling; but for him it was an opportunity to speak words of Torah. That is essentially what the Alter Rebbe is saying here: the divine soul wants the entire power of speech and the entire power of thought to be devoted to Hashem alone. “And the power of action in the hands and the other 248 limbs should be devoted to performing mitzvos alone.” The same applies when we come to the power of action: the entire power of action, in the hands as well,

16:32 and likewise in all 248 limbs. That means each and every limb. What does he see in that limb? What mitzvah can be performed with it? He wants the limb’s entire purpose to be fulfilling that mitzvah. So up to this point, the Alter Rebbe has explained the matter in detail, going through every part of a person: desire and pleasure, inclination and will. Then he spoke about the intellectual faculties and the emotions. After that he spoke about the divine soul in the brain, and then about the offshoots of the emotions and about thought, speech, and action. There is an interesting observation from Reb Levik here: the Alter Rebbe begins with speech and thought, and afterward says thought and speech. Why does the Alter Rebbe first say speech and then thought? After all, the Alter Rebbe is proceeding from above downward, so he should say thought first and then speech. Yet he says speech first, then thought, and afterward returns to thought and speech. This is Reb Levik’s observation. There is an explanation according to Kabbalah, but the basic point in simple terms is this: In the order of the garments, thought is above speech. But we know that at their source, speech is higher than thought. As is known, speech is rooted more deeply in the essence of the soul than thought, as explained at length in [unclear], and so on. Therefore speech has an advantage over thought. That is why the Alter Rebbe begins, “the entire power of speech in the mouth.” In other words, because the divine soul knows the special quality of speech, that speech has a deeper root in the soul, it wants speech first, and then thought. In the usual order, it is thought and speech. That is why he says it in that order afterward. This is simply an interesting observation of Reb Levik’s about the wording of Tanya. Regarding what the Alter Rebbe says here, that the entire power of action in the hands

18:34 They would be expressed only in the performance of the mitzvah. There are other places where the Rebbe returned to this point. Once, the Rebbe told a story about the Frierdiker Rebbe. The Frierdiker Rebbe was released from prison on Gimmel Tammuz 5687 and was then in exile in Kostroma, as is well known. A few days after his release, while he was still there in exile, before 12 Tammuz, the Frierdiker Rebbe suddenly said one day: “I’ve been out of prison for several days already, and I still haven’t written a letter about mikvaos and chadarim.” The Frierdiker Rebbe had been imprisoned because of his work on behalf of chadarim and mikvaos. He had only been out of prison for a day or two and was still under their control. He was in exile; he was not yet free. But what did the Frierdiker Rebbe say? “Several days have passed, and I still haven’t written a letter about mikvaos and chadarim.” Then he said, “What do I need a hand for?” He used a very harsh expression about the hand—so harsh that the Rebbe did not even want to repeat it. What do I need a hand for if it isn’t doing its job? The Rebbe explained this at one of the farbrengens connected with 12 Tammuz: a tzaddik feels that the entire purpose of his hand is, “I was created only to serve my Creator.” That is essentially what the Alter Rebbe says in other words: his whole being—every aspect, every limb, everything about him—is permeated with G-dliness. There is nothing else. And so, for the Frierdiker Rebbe, it was as if to say: If I’m not writing about mikvaos, what do I need it for?

20:29 The Rebbe spoke about this even though the Frierdiker Rebbe used his hands to put on tefillin and so on. But since this was his shlichus, he felt that if he wasn’t doing it, what did he need a hand for? As though the entire purpose of the hand was to serve Hashem. That is regarding the G-dly soul. Here, in the final lines, the Alter Rebbe says: “But the animal soul.” What happens on the other side? The Alter Rebbe says: “The animal soul, which derives from kelipah, desires the very opposite.” What does the animal soul, which comes from kelipah, want? The very opposite. It’s interesting: when the Alter Rebbe discussed the G-dly soul, he spent a page and a half describing everything it wants. When he discusses the animal soul, he says just two words: “the very opposite.” That powerfully emphasizes how the animal soul, on its own, doesn’t really know what it wants. What does it want? The very opposite. Reb Elchanan Baruch Avraham[?] had a powerful way of expressing this point. It’s not that the animal soul wants something of its own. The G-dly soul wants things, each one in particular. It wants the mind, it wants the heart, it wants the intellect and the emotions, it wants thought and speech; and in every one of them it sees a purpose, a way to serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu. The animal soul doesn’t want anything in particular. It wants just one thing: the very opposite. Like the famous niggun the Rebbe taught and would sing, “Ech Ti Durnyi Marko,” right? It just wants to cause confusion. In other words, it has no goals. Its goal is to confuse things. Yes, “Durnyi Marko, s’parko”—as if its whole purpose is to muddle your head. Its desire is

22:15 the very opposite. Of course, in the plain meaning of the Tanya, “the very opposite” means that in each of the things we discussed here, the animal soul wants the opposite. It wants to be the sole ruler over the mind, over the heart, and so on—the right chamber and the left chamber, the whole matter. In the terms explained in Tanya, that means the animal soul isn’t interested only in getting a person to actually commit a transgression. It wants the person’s whole being, the entire person, to be completely on the side of kelipah and sitra achra. But how does the Alter Rebbe describe what it wants? “The very opposite.” The Alter Rebbe then adds a crucial phrase: “for the person’s benefit.” The animal soul wants to take control of the body not because it truly wants that, or because it truly believes in kelipah and sitra achra. Rather, the real, inner reason is “for the person’s benefit, so that he may overcome it and defeat it, as in the parable of the harlot in the holy Zohar.” In other words, what the animal soul wants is only its external desire. On the inside—and the Rebbe points out the precise wording here—when speaking of the G-dly soul, the Alter Rebbe said “its delight and desire”: it both delights in this and wants it. When speaking of the animal soul, the Alter Rebbe says only “its desire.” He does not say “its delight and desire,” because inwardly, the animal soul also wants holiness. It wants the person to overcome it. That is why the Alter Rebbe brings the parable of the harlot from the holy Zohar. As is well known, the Zohar tells of a king and his son. The king wants to test the inner, essential strength of his son, so he brings a harlot to try to persuade the prince to sin. But the inner intention is precisely the opposite: that the prince should overcome the temptation and refuse to listen. Only then will she receive her true reward.

24:15 And so on. Similarly, the animal soul is an emissary whom Hakadosh Boruch Hu sends to test a Jew, because Hakadosh Boruch Hu knows that the neshamah has the strength to overcome it. The animal soul itself also knows this truth, and that is what it really wants, for its own good. This makes our work easier. On the one hand, we know there is a battle here, an immense battle between the two souls. But when a Jew knows that the battle is not between equal sides—that the animal soul, too, truly wants the G-dly soul to prevail—it makes the whole battle and all the work easier. We can truly defeat the animal soul and transform it to holiness. This is also connected with the time we are in now, a time of Geulah. Throughout this period, these days, this month of Geulah, we need to study the sichos and maamarim that discuss “He redeemed my soul in peace.” Chassidus places great emphasis on this point: although there is a battle between the two souls, there is also “He redeemed my soul in peace.” We see it in this very line of Tanya. When a person, a chossid, reflects on the Alter Rebbe’s words here—that the animal soul, too, wants the person to overcome and defeat it for his own benefit—it is like what is written regarding “He redeemed my soul in peace”: even Absalom’s men prayed for Dovid’s victory. Deep down, they too wanted Dovid to win. So too in our avodah: deep down, the animal soul also wants to be transformed. This is the meaning of “even his enemies will make peace with him”—that this should be revealed, fully and truly, with the coming of Moshiach Tzidkeinu.