In the previous section we studied the Alter Rebbe's words: that the nefesh ha'elokis (the divine soul) exerts itself and prevails over the nefesh habahamis (the animal soul). Before moving on, let us finish clarifying the point: how does this prevailing actually take place?
Chesed and gevurah are both sides of the heart, and therefore, in a battle waged inside the heart itself, it is extremely difficult to overcome the animal. For this reason the divine soul must rise to the source of the gevuros, which is binah (understanding): a person begins to contemplate the greatness of G-d, hashgacha peratis (divine providence in every detail), the way G-d conducts the world, the analogies and explanations found in chassidus and in the Tanya. When the mind contemplates, it hands the heart the tools it needs, and then the divine soul succeeds in overpowering the animal that is raging in the heart. This is what the words mean: the divine soul ascends to the source of the gevuros, which is binah, and from there it draws the strength to prevail over the animal soul.
The beinoni (intermediate person) being described here stands at the highest rung of beinoni: even in his heart he has managed to reach a spark of love for the Creator. As long as he holds that love, he feels no attraction whatsoever to the desires of the world. But this does not mean the desires have died; they have only fallen asleep. It is entirely possible that a few minutes later they will erupt in full force, even making up for everything they missed in the meantime. It is only that during davening they were asleep.
[In the tzaddik we are speaking of a permanent state in which there is no arousal at all: "ולבי חלל בקרבי" ("and my heart is void within me"). Even in a tzaddik vera lo the heart is void, as we learned at length in an entire chapter.]
The beinoni, however, is not a tzaddik, and therefore the Alter Rebbe chooses the words "אבל בבינוני הוא דרך משל כאדם שישן" ("but in the beinoni it is, by way of analogy, like a person who is asleep"). A sleeping man does not speak, is not stirred by anything, sees nothing; you can do whatever you like right next to him. But "שיכול להיות חוזר וניעור משנתו" ("who can awaken from his sleep"): one loud noise is enough to wake him. So too with the animal: it can be put to sleep, but a person should never imagine that it has died. It is only sleeping.
And so: "כך הרע שבבינוני הוא כישן בחלל השמאלי בשעת קריאת שמע ותפילה שלבו בוער באהבת ה'" ("thus the evil in the beinoni is like one asleep in the left chamber during Shema and davening, when his heart burns with love of G-d"). When a person recites Shema with attention to what he is saying, when he davens and contemplates as he davens, he puts the animal to sleep, and right now it is asleep. "ואחר כך יכול להיות חוזר וניעור" ("and afterwards it can awaken again"): once davening is over, it wakes up.
We see examples of this in our own day as well. When chassidim sit at a farbrengen and it is conducted as it should be, the animal falls asleep, and a person feels that nothing interests him except G-dliness, kedusha and chassidus, as if the whole world simply does not exist. And when it is over, he suddenly discovers that everything has woken up again. During davening or during the farbrengen he was living in a different atmosphere, and in that atmosphere his animal fell asleep.
[And if a person finds himself in this state, then at that very moment he is not a rasha but a beinoni.]
At this point the Alter Rebbe comes to answer one of the most powerful questions he raised in the very first chapter of Tanya. On the opening page he brought the account of Rabbah, who sat with his students in the beis midrash and explained the levels to them: what a tzaddik is, what a beinoni is, what a rasha is, and then said to them, "kegon ana beinoni" ("someone like me is a beinoni").
This "Rabbah" is Rabbah bar Nachmani, about whom the Gemara in Bava Metzia relates the story we brought at length when we learned chapter 1: when his time came to leave this world, the Angel of Death had no way to take his soul, since as long as a person is engaged in Torah the Angel of Death has no power over him. He therefore had to resort to all sorts of ruses to distract Rabbah from his learning for a split second, and only then could he take his soul. And it was a man like this who said about himself, "I am a beinoni."
Hence the Alter Rebbe's question in chapter 1: how could Rabbah possibly say such a thing about himself?
To answer that Rabbah said it only out of humility, because he did not want to tell his students that he was a tzaddik, is not a correct answer. Not because Rabbah was not humble (he was genuinely humble), but because humility is not falsehood. Humility does not mean that deep down a person knows he is a tzaddik and simply does not reveal the truth to others. Someone who behaves that way is one thing with his mouth and another in his heart, a liar and not a humble man. What a person says with his mouth is what he thinks and what he lives with when he is alone with himself, and when Rabbah told his students "I am a beinoni," he was sincerely convinced that he was a beinoni.
And here lies the difficulty. According to what we learned in chapter 12 and at the beginning of chapter 13, the beinoni on the first level has desires raging in his heart, and they even rise and stir in his mind so that he needs all sorts of strategies to deal with them. If that were the picture, Rabbah could never have deluded himself that he was a beinoni, for he knew himself and knew that he had no such desires and that his heart loved G-d. But once we have elevated the beinoni to this level, where at a certain time (the time of davening) his animal lies asleep, everything falls into place. If his davening lasts all day long, and he lives on that level all day long, then Rabbah, in his humility, could be certain that he was not a tzaddik and could say to himself: I am a beinoni, and the fact that I feel no trace of my animal must simply mean that it is asleep. This was Rabbah's mistake.
In the Alter Rebbe's words: "ולכן היה רבה מחזיק עצמו כבינוני" ("and this is why Rabbah considered himself a beinoni"). And immediately the Alter Rebbe raises up his level: "אף דלא פסיק פומיה מגירסא" ("even though his mouth never ceased from Torah study"), not for a single moment, and he was "ובתורת ה' חפצו יומם ולילה" ("and in the Torah of G-d was his delight day and night"). And not merely so, but with the most intense feeling possible: "בחפיצה וחשיקה ותשוקה ונפש שוקקה לה' באהבה רבה כבשעת קריאת שמע ותפילה" ("with delight, desire, longing and a yearning soul for G-d, with a great love, as at the time of Shema and davening"). The highest emotional level that love of G-d can reach was Rabbah's constant state, just as it is at the time of davening. [We will not enter here into the precise wording of these four expressions and how they correspond to the four letters of the name Havayah, so as not to stray from our subject.]
"ונדמה בעיניו כבינוני המתפלל כל היום" ("and he seemed in his own eyes like a beinoni who davens all day long"), for the Gemara says, "וכמאמר רז"ל הלוואי יתפלל אדם כל היום כולו" ("as our Sages said: would that a person would daven the entire day"). The intention is not that he should be saying "Shema Yisrael" or "Baruch She'amar" all day, but that he should remain all day at the level of davening. Rabbah said of himself that he had reached this level, of one who davens all day, yet in his own assessment his animal was still there, and that is why he mistakenly thought he was a beinoni and placed himself on that side.
It is told that something similar happened with the Alter Rebbe himself. He once said to one of the chassidim, "kegon ana beinoni," "someone like me is a beinoni." The chassid was shaken and said, "Rebbe, what are you talking about?" The Alter Rebbe answered him: "In 'beinoni' there are five hundred levels." The Alter Rebbe was a complete tzaddik; it is simply as we explained with Rabbah, that true tzaddikim lower themselves out of humility. The real problem is the opposite one: that beinonim will raise themselves higher than they really are, and it is precisely this that the Alter Rebbe comes here to prevent, that a person should not think of himself as more than he is.
To round out the subject, Likkutei Torah contains a fascinating passage in which the Alter Rebbe relates directly to this chapter of Tanya. It is a beautiful illustration of the fact that the narratives of the Torah, which look like lovely stories one could tell children before bedtime, are not to be taken merely at face value. The entire book of Bereishis is narrative from beginning to end, as is the first part of Shemos, yet all of it is Toras emes, the Torah of G-d, and every single word contains within it the most wondrous secrets. Here the Alter Rebbe takes one of the most gripping stories in Bereishis and explains a single sentence from it in connection with this chapter of Tanya.
First the background. Everyone knows the story of Yosef and his brothers, which was mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. One of the stages through which Yosef sought to squeeze teshuvah out of his brothers was when he hid his silver goblet in Binyamin's sack. Binyamin sets out on his way with no idea that in his sack there is a silver goblet that is not his but Yosef's, and from there the whole sequence of events unfolds. Out of the entire story the Alter Rebbe takes only this one sentence: what is the inner meaning of Yosef hiding his silver goblet with Binyamin? Folded into that one sentence are chapters 12 and 13 of Tanya.
This is how the Alter Rebbe explains it in Likkutei Torah (and whoever wishes may look inside at the text before you):
Yosef is called tzaddik elyon, the "upper tzaddik," and the source of the souls of tzaddikim throughout the generations is from him.
Binyamin is called tzaddik tachton, the "lower tzaddik," and the source of the souls of beinonim is from him.
And what is kesef, silver? As we have already learned in Tanya, kesef comes from the word for love and longing, kisufin, as in the verse "נכסוף נכספת" ("you longed intensely"). Binyamin has no silver goblet of his own, for the beinoni, by his very makeup, does not possess love of G-d: the beinoni is the one who battles, and he is not on the level of the tzaddik who has a constant love of G-d. But Yosef the tzaddik takes his own silver goblet, the love of G-d that by its very nature belongs to tzaddikim, and hides it in Binyamin's sack.
To summarize: In this section we completed the explanation of how the divine soul prevails over the animal soul: by ascending to the source of the gevuros, which is binah, through contemplating the greatness of G-d, so that the mind supplies the heart with its tools. We saw that the evil in the beinoni, during Shema and davening, is "like one asleep," dormant but not dead, and able to awaken afterwards. With this, the question from chapter 1 is resolved: how could Rabbah hold himself to be a beinoni? Out of genuine humility, which is never falsehood, he assumed that he was "a beinoni who davens all day long," and that his animal was merely asleep. We also brought the story of the Alter Rebbe, who said "kegon ana beinoni" and "in 'beinoni' there are five hundred levels," and we began the Alter Rebbe's explanation in Likkutei Torah of the silver goblet that Yosef, the tzaddik elyon, hid in the sack of Binyamin, the tzaddik tachton: the silver is the love that the beinoni does not possess on his own.
In the next section we will continue with the parable of the silver goblet and what it means for the avodah of the beinoni.