In the previous section we studied the definition of the beinoni given in chapter 12, in the Alter Rebbe's own words: the beinoni is one who "has never committed a sin in his life and never will, and the name rasha has not been applied to him even for a single hour or a single moment in all his days." Now we need to understand what this language actually means.
The Rebbe's explanation of "has never sinned and never will":
In one of his letters the Rebbe explains the intent of this sentence: the Alter Rebbe is not discussing what happened to the beinoni in the past, nor what will happen to him in the future, even though the wording is in the past and future tense. It does not literally mean that he never sinned and never will sin. Rather, the words describe the beinoni's condition in the present: right now he stands in a state in which the very concept of sin is utterly foreign to him. If he did sin in the past, he has severed himself from it so completely that he has no connection to it whatsoever; and right now his rejection of sin is so absolute that he will never transgress. This is a description of a present state of the soul.
This expression is not the Alter Rebbe's innovation. The Rambam, in the Laws of Teshuvah, defines teshuvah as the state in which "He who knows all hidden things testifies concerning him that he will never return to this sin" - the word "never" already appears in the Rambam. And what does it mean? Has a person's power of choice been taken away from him?
The past: "has never committed a sin in his life":
The matter resembles a halachah in the laws of kiddushin, where a person is judged by his status at this very moment: when it is established that he is a tzaddik, the meaning is that right now he has uprooted himself entirely from his former state - and not necessarily a tzaddik in the true, precise sense, but a tzaddik in the general sense, as people call him by that name based on the majority of his deeds. So too here: at this point, in this state, he is a beinoni. If his teshuvah is completely genuine, he sees no way that he could sin, and he has the power to turn from one extreme to the other in a single moment - for this moment, and every moment is this moment.
The Mishnah in Pirkei Avos says: "עבירה גוררת עבירה" - "one sin drags another sin after it." If a person sinned and did not do genuine teshuvah for it - even if he felt a general regret, as long as he did not uproot it from his heart entirely and some residue of it remains - he is liable to come to another sin. It is not inevitable, but he will face challenges that are far from easy. The Gemara says that the sin "wraps itself around" a person, and the Mishnah adds that it drags him - like someone hitched to a trailer, so that when the trailer moves it pulls him along behind it.
Who, then, is a person who has done genuine teshuvah? A person who has cut himself off. If he has severed himself completely from the earlier sin and no residue of it remains, there is nothing to drag him into a further sin, and therefore at this moment he is in the state of one who has never committed a sin.
Who is called "a person who has sinned in his life"? One in whose soul you can see that the sin still clings to him, and that he is easily dragged after it, because he never detached himself from that earlier sin. But the beinoni, even if yesterday he committed the gravest sins, has at this moment cut himself off from them with an absolute break, and therefore right now he is in the state of one who has never sinned in his life. The sin cannot be attributed to him, because he has risen to a state in which yesterday's sin no longer exists as far as he is concerned.
The future: "and never will":
This does not mean that we know with absolute certainty that tomorrow he will overcome his yetzer. It is possible that tomorrow he will face a test and a temptation, and who knows whether he will withstand it; indeed we pray every day, "Do not bring us to a test." Rather, right now he is in a state where, from the vantage point of this moment, he says: it cannot be, and it will not be. Like a person in a moment of uplift, immersed in the spiritual atmosphere of that moment and detached from everything else - he has not sinned and he will not sin. This is what the Tanya means: the beinoni, in his present state, is utterly removed from the concept of sin.
And if you ask, why did the Alter Rebbe not write explicitly "in the present"? Precisely this language conveys the sheer force of the actual state the person is in, and his intent is clear from the way he continues through the following chapters: "has never sinned and never will" is a definition of the present condition.
It is worth noting that there is also a state in which a person rises to a higher level, and then - relative to his new state - he feels that what was entirely rectified relative to yesterday now demands a higher level of rectification. Like the well known story of Rabbi Saadia Gaon and hachnasas orchim: had his host known who the guest before him was, his hospitality would have been of a far loftier order, and therefore rectification was called for. This is not in the sense of sin and coarse failure, but that in every state a person must say that this is not what it could have been. We will not expand on this here; it belongs to chapters 28 and 29, where the matter is discussed.
The Alter Rebbe goes further and sharpens just how inconceivable sin is for the beinoni: not only does he not transgress in the coarse sense, but the name rasha is not applied to him, and not even a trace of a willful thought of sin stirs in him, "even for a single hour or a single moment in all his days." This expansive language comes to stress how completely detached the person is in his present state.
Here a question arises: a person who did sincere teshuvah and severed himself absolutely from his former state, and afterward came to a very difficult test and did not withstand it - he has fallen again. Can we still say that beforehand he was a beinoni?
The answer is that at that moment he truly was a beinoni: at that moment it was utterly inconceivable to him that he would ever sin, and in that G-dly atmosphere in which he was immersed, had you placed him before any test whatsoever, he would have said, "Impossible." But that is no guarantee that he will withstand the next test, because this is a constant battle. A person does not reach the level of beinoni, receive a badge, and go to sleep while the business runs itself.
And the nature of this state is spelled out by the Alter Rebbe himself: two lines earlier he wrote explicitly that in the beinoni there is no thought, speech or deed of sin. The question of how a person arrives at this will be explained further on.
"But the essence and being of the nefesh haElokis":
Let us return to what we said: the beinoni is one who on the external level - thought, speech and deed - does not stumble; but on the inner level, in intellect and emotion, his yetzer hara beats with full force, only that it does not manage to raise its head. And this is the language that follows: "אך מהות ועצמות נפש האלוקית, שהן עשר בחינותיה, לא להן לבדן המלוכה והממשלה בעיר קטנה" - "But the essence and being of the nefesh haElokis, which are its ten faculties, do not hold kingship and dominion in the 'small city' by themselves alone."
The ten faculties are the ten powers we learned about in chapter 3: chochmah, binah, daas, chesed, gevurah, tiferes, netzach, hod, yesod and malchus. These ten powers are the essence of the nefesh haElokis, and the Alter Rebbe says that they do not hold kingship and dominion by themselves alone: the nefesh haElokis does have a certain kingship and a certain dominion in him, but it is not alone on the battlefield. There is a nefesh habahamis there as well, and a wrestling match between them - sometimes one has the upper hand and sometimes the other.
And where does that wrestling take place? In the heart, not on the outside. In the heart of the beinoni the nefesh haElokis is not the absolute ruler; there is also a yetzer hara there with which he must contend.
A note from Likkutei Torah:
In Likkutei Torah on parashas Vayikra the Alter Rebbe quotes this very line from chapter 12 of Tanya and remarks: although it is written here that the essence and being of the nefesh haElokis are its ten faculties, "אך באמת חסר שם" - "but in truth something is missing there," meaning that something is lacking in that formulation. The reason: in truth, the essence of the nefesh haElokis is not the ten faculties. The essence is something abstract that cannot be defined at all. When we define the soul in terms of chesed, gevurah and tiferes, that is not a precise definition, for the soul is something spiritual and abstract that has no definition. The definition in terms of the ten faculties was stated only in relation to thought, speech and deed - relative to which it is correct to say that the ten faculties are something essential, though not entirely. In any case, this is only a note and we will not expand on it.
In summary: in this section we learned that the Alter Rebbe's words "has never committed a sin in his life and never will" are not a description of past and future in the literal sense, but a definition of the beinoni's present condition, in which at this moment the concept of sin is entirely foreign to him. We saw that the Rambam already used the expression "that he will never return to this sin"; we explained that a genuine severance from a sin removes the pull of "one sin drags another sin," whereas a residue that remains drags a person into a further sin; and we noted that this definition carries no guarantee for the future, since the battle is constant. Finally we opened the line "But the essence and being of the nefesh haElokis, which are its ten faculties, do not hold kingship and dominion in the 'small city' by themselves alone," and mentioned the Alter Rebbe's remark in Likkutei Torah that the essence of the soul itself is abstract, beyond any definition.
In the next section we will continue with the Alter Rebbe's words in chapter 12, and examine how the nefesh haElokis and the nefesh habahamis contend with one another in the "small city," and what this means practically in the avodah of the beinoni.