In the previous section we looked closely at the Alter Rebbe's language in chapter 15 and at the demand "to contemplate the greatness of God." That line takes two seconds to read, but a deep inner exertion is folded into it. In this section we will look at the two levels of this avodah, and at the principle that the effort itself is the service.
"To contemplate the greatness of God": avodah tamah, complete service
Contemplating God's greatness is the deepest kind of inner exertion. Sometimes the effort gives birth to real love, and sometimes it produces no more than a faint stirring, a flicker of feeling, because a person is simply not used to contemplating at all. He is used to letting things pass through his mind at the speed of thought. To contemplate means to stay with one and the same matter, going deeper into it, for a long stretch of time.
One who has managed to reach genuine contemplation, and whose contemplation led him to love, and whose love led him to exertion in his service, is the one called an "oved Elokim," one who serves God. This is the "avodah tamah," the complete, finished service of the beinoni, the beinoni at his best. It is the ideal state, and it is hard to attain.
And one who has arrived at revealed love has undergone something genuinely new. Picture a boy putting on tefillin for the first time in his life, every part of him gripped by the excitement of it. A person who contemplates God's greatness can be that new even twenty years later, and put on tefillin not the way he put them on yesterday and the day before and twenty years ago, but with freshness each and every day. One who reaches that has "avodah tamah," a genuine rebirth.
The second level: awakening the hidden love
For one who has not managed to reach that lofty level, the Alter Rebbe adds a lower rung, one that at the very least every person is obligated to do: "או לעורר את האהבה המסותרת שבלבו, למשול על ידה על הטבע שבחלל השמאלי" ("or to arouse the hidden love in his heart, and by means of it to rule over the nature that resides in the left chamber of the heart"). There is no contemplation here, since contemplation is difficult, and sometimes a person does not even know what to contemplate. It is enough that he stop for a moment, notice that everything he does has become routine, and say to himself: I will not do this out of habit, but because the Holy One commanded it and wants it.
There is no revealed love here, but there is an awakening of the point of Yiddishkeit that lives inside him, and out of it he is pushed to do a little more for God's sake than he usually does. This is not an elaborate avodah of contemplation and arousal, only a brief pause, along the lines of "ushavtem ure'isem" that we mentioned: to stop, and to say that he does not want to slide into routine but to think about what he is actually doing.
Here is an illustration. A person davens Shemoneh Esreh three times a day, says the berachos, and suddenly notices that he has already finished the tefillah and cannot remember what he said or where he began. Next time he will stop and pay attention to every single word coming out of his mouth. That is not easy, because now he has to think about each and every word. But the very need to think about each word, that is the avodah.
Serving God does not have to look the way people usually imagine it, as though an oved Elokim is someone who has turned over worlds and shaken up everyone around him until it is common knowledge that there is an oved Elokim here. It may well be something that no one else knows about at all.
The Alter Rebbe's explanation of the Mishnah "Eizehu mekoman"
Every day, before the morning prayers, we say the chapter "Eizehu mekoman shel zevachim" from Maseches Zevachim, which states: "He ascended the ramp and turned to the surrounding ledge and came to the southeast corner, then the northeast, then the northwest." The "kevesh" is the ramp by which the kohanim went up to the mizbeach, and the "sovev" is one of the places on the mizbeach, so called because it encircles and surrounds the entire altar; the Mishnah is describing the order in which the blood was sprinkled on the mizbeach. The Alter Rebbe explained this Mishnah as a description of avodas Hashem:
"He ascended the ramp": let a person lift himself even slightly above the state he was in before. And specifically a ramp, not stairs: with stairs you can measure whether he went up one step or two, while a ramp is a slope, and even half a step forward is already an ascent. A rise so small that no one notices it is enough.
"And turned to the sovev": let him pay attention and see what happens inside him when he rises even a hairsbreadth.
"And came to the southern corner": south is the warm side of the world. The moment a person lifts himself a little, he immediately begins to warm up.
"Eastern": after the warmth comes light. Light dawns and shines for him.
"Northern": north is the yetzer hara, as the verse says, "From the north the evil shall break forth." Even the cold, northern side of a person begins to shine.
"Western": the north becomes "arev," pleasant. The yetzer hara no longer interferes; on the contrary, it becomes sweet and good.
So everything being asked of a person is "he ascended the ramp": to rise a little, to be a notch higher than he was, the "hundred and one" that stands just above yesterday's routine. And once he has risen that hairsbreadth, everything is already in his hands: warmth and light, and even the yetzer hara turns "westward," pleasant and agreeable, to the point that he can put it to work like a donkey, as in the halachah of "donkey drivers who are hired," hiring it out to carry loads of kedushah on its back.
With this the Alter Rebbe closes the chapter: this too is called avodah, to do battle with one's nature and one's yetzer by arousing the hidden love in his heart. In other words: either a person has succeeded in contemplating and arriving at love as a powerful emotion, and that is the "avodah tamah" of one who has reached a level; or at the very least he has succeeded in putting a brake on himself and saying that he does not want to live on autopilot, but to stop, to change something, to add something. And that too is already something.
"מה שאין כן כשאין לו מלחמה כלל" ("but when he has no battle at all"). A person who serves without any struggle whatsoever, who does everything that comes to him easily and comfortably, without feeling any exertion or labor, then "אין אהבה זו מצד עצמה נקראת עבודתו כלל" ("this love, in and of itself, is not called his service at all"). True, even one who makes no effort possesses the hidden love, since it exists in every Jew, but he has no credit in it and no authorship over it; it was given to him as a gift. For it to be called by his name, he has to fan it into flame and do something with it.
The conclusion of the chapter, then, is that a Jew should treasure the difficulty, and even go looking for it. Not difficulty in the sense of suffering, but the effort: where are the points that are hard for me?
A chassid once came to the Tzemach Tzedek and asked: "Give my grandson a berachah that he should have a good memory." What he meant was that the boy would be raised in a chassidishe environment, and through the power of the berachah he would remember everything he saw and heard, like "a plastered cistern that loses not a drop"; and then, since he would absorb it all, he would grow up to be a chassid by himself. That was no small request.
The Tzemach Tzedek was the third Rebbe in the line, and by then some fifty years had passed since the Alter Rebbe began his leadership, followed by the Mitteler Rebbe. The Tzemach Tzedek answered him: for fifty years now my grandfather (the Alter Rebbe), my father-in-law (the Mitteler Rebbe) and I have been working on chassidim so that nothing should come by itself, but only through investment and effort, and you come asking for a berachah that things should come by themselves! There is no such thing as "by itself." You have to work, you have to exert yourself, you have to invest.
And every investment, even the smallest, carries a value and a force many times over, greater even than that of the person who does something a hundred times with ease. For "a hundred times" is measured in each person according to his own life: for one man a hundred times is literally a hundred, while for his friend even a single time is already in the category of "a hundred and one."
Every person knows in himself where his own hard point lies, and that is exactly where he should press. That is precisely where the medicine for his soul is to be found, and that is precisely what carries a person from the state of "lo avado," one who has not served Him, to that wondrous state called "avado," one who serves Him, an oved Elokim.
In summary: in this section we learned that contemplating God's greatness is a deep inner exertion, and when it gives birth to love and to effort, that is the "avodah tamah" of the beinoni, a genuine renewal. At the very least a person is obligated to arouse the hidden love in his heart and to step out of routine, and that too is avodah. We saw the Alter Rebbe's explanation of the Mishnah "he ascended the ramp," that even the slightest rise is enough to bring warmth and light and even to turn the yetzer hara into something "arev" that serves the person; and by contrast, one who has no battle at all, his love is not called his service at all. And from the story of the Tzemach Tzedek we learned that nothing comes "by itself," and that every investment, even the smallest, is the most precious thing of all.
In the next section we will move on to chapter 16 and continue clarifying the avodah of the beinoni.