Continuing on: we have been discussing the Jew with a melancholy temperament, whose learning and davening nevertheless flow from the hidden love in his heart. Why must this love be present in him? Because the Alter Rebbe writes further on that a person naturally loves himself more than he loves the Ribbono shel Olam, and without the ahavah mesuteres (the love for Hashem hidden in every Jew's heart) he would never have come to Torah and tefillah at all.
Let us make this concrete. Take that melancholy fellow who is diligent in his learning: why should his diligence express itself specifically in Torah, in sitting over a Gemara all day? By temperament (seriousness, inwardness, and the whole extended family of such traits) he could just as easily have been poring over volumes of deep wisdom at a university, and with that very same persistence become a certified professor. So who is it that steers a person of such a nature to channel his powers precisely into Torah, rather than sitting and pondering the wisdoms of the world? It is the hidden love for Hashem in his heart, which directs his nature toward the G-dly side, toward the good side.
And yet none of this is placed to his credit, because the hidden love is not something he produced. It came to him as part of the "package deal" when his soul descended into this world.
In the Alter Rebbe's words: "אלא די לו באהבה המסותרת אשר בלב כללות ישראל שנקראו אוהבי שמו" - the hidden love present in the heart of every Jew, those who are called "lovers of His Name," is enough for him; "ולכן אינו נקרא עובד כלל" - "therefore he is not called a servant at all," since everything he does flows from his nature, and the love in his heart was given to him as a gift: "כי אהבה זו המסותרת אינה פעולתו ועבודתו כלל, אלא היא ירושתנו מאבותינו לכלל ישראל וכמ"ש לקמן" - "for this hidden love is in no way his own doing or his own service; rather it is our inheritance from our fathers, belonging to all of Israel, as will be explained further on" - an inheritance we received from our fathers, as the Alter Rebbe writes later in chapter 18, where he explains where this love comes from and how it is drawn down.
So it turns out that he gets credit for neither side: not for his actual deeds, which come from his nature, and not for the hidden feeling in his heart, which is "in no way his own doing or his own service." (Loves that come from genuine avodah and hisbonenus are a different matter entirely, and we will deal with them later on.)
A clarification is in order: the example was given with a melancholy person, but that makes no difference. Precisely parallel examples could be given for the opposite temperament. The principle is that anything a person does because of his nature is not grounds for calling him an oved Hashem.
More than that. A person may be born with a nature that is not at all inclined to learn much, and he invests enormous effort of soul - with tremendous difficulty, like the splitting of the Yam Suf - until he trains himself to learn one hour a day. All through that period of toil and labor he is an oved Elokim, because he genuinely labored. But after a year or two, once it has become a fixed habit and he sits and learns like clockwork every day from seven to eight, at that very moment he has forfeited the title "oved." True, this was not his original nature, but by now he has acquired it.
In the Alter Rebbe's words: "וכן אף מי שאינו מתמיד בלמודו בטבעו, רק שהרגיל עצמו ללמוד בהתמדה גדולה ונעשה ההרגל לו טבע שני" - "and likewise one who is not diligent in his learning by nature, but trained himself to learn with great diligence, so that the habit became second nature to him." "Second nature" means an acquired nature, one that through sheer habit has become the routine of his life. "די לו באהבה המסותרת זו" - "this hidden love is enough for him." Once a person has reached second nature, he is no longer investing anything; he does his thing out of habit, and the continuation along the track he trained himself in comes from the hidden love, which pushes him and tells him: keep going, this is fine, keep going. There is no renewal here, no fresh emotion generated each day through hisbonenus, only a love that has been in him since birth.
And here comes the turning point of the chapter: "אלא אם כן רוצה ללמוד יותר מרגילותו" - "unless he wishes to learn more than he is accustomed to." This "more" does not have to be much; even one extra minute is enough. But the moment a change is made, the change itself demands effort: that one additional minute demands more effort than the sixty minutes that ran on habit.
The chapter opens with the words of the pasuk, "ושבתם וראיתם בין צדיק לרשע" ("you shall return and see the difference between the righteous and the wicked"), and some have written that the heading of the entire chapter is contained in those first two words. Once a person settles into habit, everything is racing along and seemingly everything is in order - and to this the Torah says: "ושבתם וראיתם," return and look again. A person has to go back and examine what is happening with him, and not slip into routine, because routine is what brings a person down. He must take a fresh look, refresh the whole system, return to the starting point, draw strength from the source and set out again; and when things settle back into routine, once more "ושבתם וראיתם," and so on around again.
In the previous lesson we brought the Gemara's question - "an oved Elokim is the same as a tzaddik, and one who did not serve Him is the same as a rasha" - along with its answer. Now we will see that the Gemara's answer is in fact the very idea of this chapter: "ובזה יובן מה שכתוב בגמרא דעובד אלקים היינו מי ששונה פרקו מאה פעמים ואחד, ולא עבדו היינו מי ששונה פרקו מאה פעמים לבד" - "with this we can understand what the Gemara says, that 'one who serves G-d' refers to one who reviews his chapter one hundred and one times, while 'one who did not serve Him' refers to one who reviews his chapter only one hundred times."
Why did the Gemara choose the number one hundred in particular? On the level of pshat the Alter Rebbe explains: "והיינו משום שבימיהם היה הרגילות לשנות כל פרק מאה פעמים" - "because in their days the custom was to review every chapter one hundred times." Since they were accustomed to going over each chapter a hundred times, one who learns it a hundred times is merely doing what he is used to, and even though we are speaking of a hundred times, he is called "one who did not serve Him." But one who adds a single time beyond his habit, one hundred and one, has made the change, the flip from "did not serve Him" to "oved Elokim."
On the inner level the number one hundred is not incidental at all; it symbolizes the entire idea. We have already learned many times that the complete soul comprises ten faculties, and this is because in the upper worlds every world has ten sefiros. Each one of these ten faculties, and likewise each of the ten sefiros, is itself composed of ten - as we see in sefiras ha'omer, where we say chesed of chesed, gevurah of chesed, and so on. (In sefiras ha'omer we count only the seven middos, but when speaking of the full set of ten, each one of them is composed of ten.) So when one enters into the details of the soul, its completeness is one hundred.
Accordingly, a person who has worked through the hundred has reached completeness - but the completeness of his nature, the completeness of the faculties he was given. At one hundred and one, however, he connects to that which is above nature. In Pasach Eliyahu it says that the Ribbono shel Olam revealed from Himself ten sefiros, while of Himself it says "אנת הוא חד ולא בחושבן" - "You are One, but not in the count": You are not one of the ten, You are above them. How does a person connect to "אנת הוא חד ולא בחושבן," to the Ein Sof that is above the structure of ten? Through one hundred and one, through the one that is beyond the hundred. The hundred is the completeness of the ten, the completeness of one's character and nature, and there is no avodah in it at all; the connection to "אנת הוא חד ולא בחושבן" is made precisely and exactly through the hundred and first.
On this the Alter Rebbe brings the parable of the Gemara. A preface is needed. When people want to explain something, they look for a matter that seems more or less similar and present it as a parable, and generally one or two points are drawn from it to serve the idea, while all the other details and rich colors are there for the beauty of the story and are not necessarily connected to the content. In Torah, both Torah shebichsav and Torah shebe'al peh, this is not the case. When the Gemara brings a parable, not only is the parable exact, it comes from the nimshal itself. It is the very same matter, only dressed in the form of a parable, and consequently every single detail in it belongs to the nimshal and is astonishingly precise.
In the words of the Gemara: "כדאיתא התם בגמרא משל משוק של חמרים" - "as it is stated there in the Gemara, the parable of the donkey-drivers' market." The chamarim are the donkey owners who stand in the marketplace and hire themselves out to transport merchandise from place to place, something like today's truck drivers, where one who hires them hires the driver and his donkey together. "שנשכאים לעשר פרסי בזוזא, ולאחד עשר פרסי בתרי זוזי" - "who hire themselves out for ten parsah for one zuz, and for eleven parsah for two zuz." For ten parsah you pay a single zuz (a zuz being a coin), while for eleven parsah you pay two zuz, double, and not one and a tenth. The addition in distance is only a single parsah, yet the payment is twice as much. Why? "מפני שהוא יותר מרגילותם" - "because it is more than they are accustomed to."
It is like taking a "special" car service: there is a set price to take you from point to point, but when you ask the driver to continue a few more streets, he does not add a proportional supplement; he charges at least double.
That is the mashal. In the next portion we will examine its precise details and its explanation in the nimshal, in a person's own avodah.