In the previous section we learned the great rule that the Alter Rebbe told the Jew who came in to him for yechidus. Here was a beinoni whose spiritual situation seemed to be in fine shape: he is an oved Elokim, he pushes himself and reaches the "hundred and one," and he has a live, revealed feeling of love of G-d. All of this is good and excellent. And still the Alter Rebbe told him: know a great rule, the ultimate point of it all is not the feeling, but mastery over the nature of the chalal hasmali, the left chamber of the heart, the seat of the nefesh habahamis.
Feeling does carry something very important: when a person does something out of strong feeling, the feeling fills out his connection to what he is doing. And since we are physical human beings, the easiest way to make this tangible is to begin with an example from the physical world.
The Gemara brings in the name of Rav Avdimi of Haifa: "Before a person eats and drinks, he has two hearts; once he has eaten and drunk, he has only one heart." A hungry man, even when you are talking to him, is not one hundred percent there. His heart is in the plate he is dreaming about, and he is not fully present with the person in front of him. Once he has eaten and drunk he settles down, and then he has one heart and can be entirely present.
Let us carry the same physical example a step further. A person pictures a full meal for himself: a first course, a second course, a third course, dessert and a drink. He knows how to appreciate that each course has its own particular qualities, and he is absorbed in it over his head. Now someone comes and tells him: we prepared your meal, only we put the whole thing through a blender, the bread, the meat, the salads, the tehina and the dessert. Nothing is missing; every mineral and every ingredient is right there, only it is all there together. He may well eat it, but only because he has no choice, because his heart does not find in it what it was looking for. What a person is really after is the matamim, the taste and the order of the thing.
The nimshal in avodas Hashem: a Jew comes to do a mitzvah, to put on tefillin or to wrap himself in tzitzis, and beforehand he contemplated the greatness of the Creator and he understands what he is doing. He knows that tefillin are mochin, the dimension of intellect (mochin d'abba and mochin d'imma), why they are placed on the arm and on the head, why the strap is black, why there are specifically seven windings, and what the four parshiyos inside them are. He is living the thing, and he comes to putting on tefillin with all that chayus. It is an oneg for him and he is in it with his whole self, because he is not doing it dryly. Someone else, who does not know what any of it means, does in fact fulfill all of it, but for him it is all blended together, exactly like that meal that went through the blender.
From here we see that the world of feeling is not to be dismissed. It is very important; one should invest in it and develop it, and whoever succeeds in developing his feeling, his deed is on a far higher level, as the chapter will go on to explain. As we will see with G-d's help further on, and in clearer language, feeling is like "wings" for the mitzvos a person does, and the wings lift the mitzvos upward. So a person must infuse feeling into what he does, and at the same time not get confused and not lose track of what is ikar and what is tafel, what is primary and what is secondary. The wings are important, but the body is more important than they are.
[A question was raised: surely a Jew is meant to contemplate the greatness of G-d in his mind without limit, and that is the greatest thing of all, seemingly even higher than the deed; and from there he comes back to "talmud Torah keneged kulam," Torah study outweighs them all, and the Torah brings him once again to hisbonenus, and so on in a circle. The answer: the entire purpose of hisbonenus is to bring chayus into the actual doing of the mitzvos. The chayus itself is therefore enormously important, but it is not the destination.]
And when a person finally comes to do that "hundred and one," he has to know that this is the point. Everything that happened until now is like a person starting his car, pressing the gas pedal and getting the whole system running. But the purpose is not to rev the engine while standing in place; the purpose is to arrive at the destination. The destination is mastery over one's nature, the "hundred and one," the exertion itself. Obviously one cannot arrive without starting the engine, without driving, without the whole system running, and that is very important and without it one does not get there at all. But the goal is not to turn on the motor and stay parked.
[A question was raised: surely the mitzvah itself is the goal. Indeed, and the goal is to do the mitzvah in a way of mastery: not to learn Torah only where it is easy and comfortable, but to add one more minute of learning specifically where it is not comfortable. That is mastery.
Another question was asked: why is the main thing located in the heart and not in the mind? This subject will be discussed with G-d's help in chapter 29, where an entire long chapter is devoted to it, and we will return to it there.]
"ויתר על כן צריך לידע כלל גדול בעבודה לבינונים" - "Moreover, one must know a great general rule in the service of beinonim." Here the Alter Rebbe turns to a different kind of person. Someone will come and say: I contemplated, and contemplated again, and the engine never started. I feel nothing, no emotion, no love. Maybe I did not contemplate enough? So he contemplates again, and it still does not work. Which raises two questions. First, why is it not happening? And second, if without feeling there is no chayus in the thing, is this person lost? Can he never arrive at the place he is supposed to arrive at?
To this the Alter Rebbe says that there is another great rule one must know: "שגם אם אין יד שכלו ורוח בינתו משגת להוליד אהבת ה' בהתגלות לבו" - "that even if his intellect and the spirit of his understanding do not reach far enough to give birth to a love of G-d revealed in his heart" - he is not lost. It is worth noticing the wording, "his intellect and the spirit of his understanding do not reach." The very ability to grasp is already a high level. Anyone who tries to contemplate one subject for two minutes will discover that genuine concentration on a single subject is no simple work at all, so the comprehension itself is already an accomplishment. And nevertheless, even having gotten that far, he does not manage to give birth to any feeling from it.
The Alter Rebbe continues: "שיהיה לבו בוער כרשפי אש וחפץ בחפיצה וחשיקה ותשוקה מורגשת בלב לדבקה בו" - "that his heart should burn like flames of fire, desiring with longing, yearning and craving felt in the heart to cleave to Him." None of this does he have. He knows himself and he knows that there is no longing in him, no yearning, no craving. He heard the ideas and he understands that they are true, but he is not moved, he is not aroused, he stays cold and indifferent. So what does he have after all? "רק אהבה מסותרת במוחו ותעלומות לבו" - "only a hidden love in his mind and in the recesses of his heart."
The state of this Jew is what we might call a "cold feeling." To understand it, let us first identify the opposite case, where a person has intellect alone with no feeling whatsoever, a situation that is not good at all. It can be illustrated by a story the Rebbe told at one of the farbrengens.
A woman brought a chicken to the shochet, and after the shechitah, when the shochet opened the bird and examined the internal organs, he had a doubt whether it was treif or kosher. He told her: take it to the rav, he will examine it, he knows the halachah, and he will tell you kosher or treif. She went to the rav with the chicken and said, "Honored Rabbi, the shochet sent me. What should I do?" The rav examined it, saw exactly what the problem was, opened the Shulchan Aruch and told her: according to the Sifsei Kohen, the Shach, one of the commentaries on Shulchan Aruch, this chicken is treif. She was already about to run and throw it in the garbage when the rav stopped her: wait a moment, according to the Bach, who works through this question at length, it would seem that the chicken is in fact kosher. And so it went, back and forth, according to this commentary this, according to that commentary the opposite. Finally the woman stood up and said: "Honored Rabbi, I am asking a simple question. Can I put this in the pot or not?"
What happened here? Two worlds. The rav is not occupied in the slightest with whether the chicken goes into the pot; his own lunch is ready and the question is not on his mind at all. He is entirely inside the world of intellect, inside the halachic clarification: kosher or treif, this commentary said one thing, that one said the reverse, and there is a line of reasoning in each direction. The woman is in a completely different world: tachlis, does it go in the pot or does it not go in the pot. When there is, G-d forbid, such a disconnect between the mind and the heart, and all the more so when a person lives with that disconnect inside himself, that is a bad situation.
But sometimes there is some kind of connection between the mind and the heart. It is not a connection that came all the way down and soaked into the heart; the person has no felt yearning and craving, and yet something has happened. Sometimes a person studies a concept that does not touch him personally at all, a completely objective piece of learning, since intellect by its nature is supposed to be objective. He understands the topic, he hears a side in this direction and a side in that direction, and he remains, as it were, outside the picture. And then suddenly a certain leaning arises in his mind, not in his heart: it seems to him that this side is more correct, that this approach is the right one, and he feels a pull toward it.
What exactly is that leaning? It is not an excitement of the heart, and it is not pure intellect either, because pure intellect is supposed to be neutral. So where did a leaning toward one particular side suddenly come from? It is a sign that here the heart understands. The heart does not yet feel, but it is already involved in the sugya, it is inside it and understands it, and it is already pushing the person in a certain direction. This is the state a person can arrive at in ahavas Hashem.
To summarize: in this section we learned that feeling is not to be dismissed, since it fills out a person's connection to what he does, as in the example of the hungry man who has two hearts, and the example of the meal put through a blender that lost its taste and its order, and likewise with someone who performs a mitzvah without understanding what it means. Feeling is like wings that lift the mitzvah upward, but it is not the main thing, because the destination is mastery over one's nature, the "hundred and one." We also learned the further great rule in the avodah of beinonim: even someone whose intellect and spirit of understanding cannot give birth to a love revealed in the heart, who has no longing, yearning or craving that he can feel, is not lost, because he has "a hidden love in his mind and in the recesses of his heart," a heart that understands even though it does not yet feel.
In the next section we will continue with the Alter Rebbe's words and with the explanation of how the beinoni works with this love that lies in the mind and in the hidden recesses of the heart.