We are in the middle of chapter 16, on page 22a (page 43). Last time we stopped at the fifth line from the top, which begins with the words "והיא לזאת." Let us begin with a short review of what we have covered so far, and from there continue onward.
In chapter 16 the Alter Rebbe sets out to teach a great general principle in the avodas Hashem of the beinonim, the intermediate people. That is how the chapter explicitly opens. As the chapter goes on, he adds a second principle, and it is mainly this second great principle that we will be dealing with in this lesson.
We have learned many times in Tanya about a person who contemplates the greatness of Hashem with real understanding and comprehension. The Alter Rebbe consistently describes it this way: from the contemplation the matter descends into the heart, emotion is aroused, and the emotion then drives action. This is the proper structure of the ten faculties of the soul:
The contemplation in the mind: ChaBaD (chochmah, binah, daas).
The descent into the heart: the middos, the emotional attributes, known in chassidus by the initials Z"A (zeir anpin).
The side that carries it out: thought, speech and action.
The Alter Rebbe opens by describing the situation that is typical of beinonim. True, such a person understands the greatness of Hashem with his mind, and he contemplates matters that by all rights should arouse emotion in him, but what can he do if the emotion simply does not come? He never arrives at genuine feeling in the heart. Instead we get that unusual wording we dwelt on at length in the previous lesson: a hidden love "in his mind," while the heart "understands." Seemingly the reverse of the usual arrangement, where love sits in the heart and understanding in the mind.
And this is not merely an objective grasp of a fact. A person can sometimes learn something, understand it, and say: very interesting, very beautiful, and yet it says nothing to him personally. Here the understanding does not remain on the level of understanding alone; something is born from it. It is just that it is not an emotion of the heart but an intellectual emotion. In the language of Tanya: it is "יאה ונכון," fitting and proper, to be attached to the Holy One, blessed be He, since He is the ultimate truth, and it is only right that all the souls and spirits in the world should be included in and attached to Elokus.
This kind of understanding already carries with it a leaning in a direction, and that is what is meant by the heart, as it were, "understanding." That is the connection point. And as is well known, the middos do not begin in the heart; they are already contained within the understanding of the mind. Here the middos have been aroused as they exist within the "insights of his mind and the hidden recesses of his heart," and this brings him to the conclusion that if he wishes to be attached to Elokus, he must keep Torah and mitzvos. But to actual feeling he never arrived.
Every single act of a mitzvah that a Jew performs in this world has a great purpose: that it should not remain a merely physical act. We are in the world of physical action, where a person moves an object from one place to another and the object moves here below, in gashmius. That is what happens when an ordinary person, or an animal, moves something. But when a Jew performs a mitzvah, he too moves an object: he takes the four species, the lulav and the esrog, and waves them right and left; he takes tefillin and puts them on. And even though a physical object is being moved here, the purpose is not that it should move only down here. The point is that the movement should take place in all the worlds, because a Jew affects the whole of creation.
How far up this movement reaches depends on what sort of feeling a person invests in it, and the coming chapters of Tanya will discuss this at length. In general terms, this is the concept that Torah and mitzvos need to ascend upward: that they should not be done as something merely technical, but as something with vitality, and when there is vitality in a deed, it lifts and rises upward. And what puts vitality into it? The feeling.
What is striking is that although feeling is something inner and of the soul, while the deed is physical, the feeling is nevertheless recognizable in the deed itself. In speech it is obvious: when a person speaks out of feeling, you can hear that this is not dry talk. And even in action: when a person does something he loves to do, an onlooker can see that he does it with his whole being, in the sense of "all my bones shall declare." The reason is that the feeling clothes itself in the deed. It does not merely push from the side; it enters into the deed, acts upon it and changes it. That is why it matters so much that a deed be done with feeling.
And here the Alter Rebbe turns to that beinoni who has a problem. On the one hand he keeps the entire Torah and all the mitzvos, and he understands that this is right and proper. And it is not that he merely has an intention; he has an understanding that carries a leaning within it. But he does not feel anything. If you were to attach monitors to his heart, you would see no acceleration in his pulse; the heartbeat is normal and everything is steady. There is none of the emotion of a person who suddenly sees his father, his mother or his brother after years apart. So the Alter Rebbe comes to reassure this beinoni and to explain at length, as we began last lesson, that even a feeling of this sort, one that seemingly remains an intellectual feeling, has the power to accomplish the elevation that the performance of mitzvos requires.
Let us return to the Alter Rebbe's own words: "ואי לזאת יאתה להן ונכון להן לחבקו בכל לב ונפש ומאד" ("And therefore it is fitting and proper for them to embrace Him with all their heart and soul and might"). The Jew contemplates the greatness of Hashem and understands that it is fitting and proper to be attached to Him. "להן," for them, meaning for all the souls and spirits, for every Jew in the world, that they should embrace the Holy One, blessed be He, with all their heart, all their soul and all their might. And how does one embrace Him? As he mentioned in the preceding line, and as is written also at the beginning of Tanya: one embraces the King by way of the mitzvos.
"דהיינו קיום התרי"ג מצות במעשה ובדבור ובמחשבה, שהיא השגת וידיעת התורה כנזכר לעיל" ("that is, the fulfillment of the 613 mitzvos in action, in speech and in thought, which is the comprehension and knowledge of Torah, as mentioned above"). Action and speech are self-explanatory, but how does one embrace the King in thought? To this the Alter Rebbe adds that it is "the comprehension and knowledge of Torah": when a Jew fills his mind and his thought with the knowledge of Torah, that is embracing the King in thought; and when he brings the words out of his mouth, "they are life to those who bring them forth" with the mouth specifically, that is embracing the King with his mouth; and when he performs mitzvos in deed, that is embracing the King in action.
"הנה כשמעמיק בעניין זה" ("now, when he contemplates this matter deeply"). The person goes deeply into the contemplation that leads him to this conclusion, except that it remains "בתעלומות תבונות לבו ומוחו" ("in the hidden recesses of the understanding of his heart and mind"): it was never revealed in him as open feeling but stayed within the inwardness of the heart. "ופיו ולבו שוין" ("and his mouth and heart are equal"): the inner part of his heart says that this is what must be done, the outer part of the heart was not stirred, and the mouth, which is on the outside, aligns itself with the inner decision: "שמקיים כן בפיו כפי אשר נגמר בתבונת לבו ומוחו, דהיינו להיות בתורת ה' חפצו ויהגה בה יומם ולילה בפיו, וכן הידים ושאר אברים מקיימים המצוות כפי מה שנגמר בתבונת לבו ומוחו" ("that he carries this out with his mouth in accordance with what was concluded in the understanding of his heart and mind, namely that his delight be in the Torah of Hashem and that he meditate in it day and night with his mouth; and likewise his hands and other limbs fulfill the mitzvos in accordance with what was concluded in the understanding of his heart and mind").
And here comes the conclusion toward which the Alter Rebbe has been leading the entire chapter: "הרי תבונה זו מתלבשת במעשה ודיבור ומחשבת התורה ומצוותיה, להיות להן בחינת מוחין וחיות וגדפין לפרחא לעילא" ("this understanding clothes itself in the action, speech and thought of Torah and its mitzvos, to be for them the aspect of mochin and vitality and wings with which to fly upward"). (Later we will understand why this is called "tevunah" rather than "binah" or simply "understanding.") The tevunah clothes itself in the deed, and since it clothes itself in it, it enters inside it, acts upon it and influences it: it becomes for the deed "mochin and vitality," the energy that enlivens a Jew's performance of mitzvos, and "gadfin" (Aramaic for wings) "lefarcha le'eila," growing wings for his mitzvos so that they lift up and rise on high.
"כאלו עסק בהם בדחילו ורחימו ממש אשר בהתגלות לבו" ("as though he had engaged in them with actual fear and love revealed in his heart"), as though there had been genuine, felt emotion here. And this is the Alter Rebbe's novel teaching in this chapter: even though the person himself feels no emotion, and all he has is the recognition in his mind that this is what is right, that recognition nevertheless clothes itself in the mitzvos he performs, puts vitality into them and elevates them "lefarcha le'eila," so that the deed does not remain a dry deed.
To summarize: in this section we learned that the normal order in avodas Hashem is contemplation in the mind, a descent into the feeling of the heart, and from there into thought, speech and action, and that it is the feeling which puts vitality into the performance of mitzvos and elevates them throughout all the worlds. With the beinoni, the contemplation does not give birth to revealed feeling in the heart but to an inner recognition that it is "fitting and proper" to be attached to the Holy One, blessed be He, a recognition that remains in the hidden recesses of the understanding of his heart and mind. And here is the Alter Rebbe's chiddush: when "his mouth and heart are equal" and he keeps Torah and mitzvos in accordance with what was concluded in the understanding of his heart and mind, that very understanding clothes itself in the action, the speech and the thought, and becomes for them "mochin and vitality and wings with which to fly upward," as though he had engaged in them with actual fear and love.
In the next section we will see how it is possible for a feeling that is not felt openly in the heart to accomplish this elevation, for which a special divine power is required.