With G-d's help we have arrived at chapter 17. Already on the title page of the Tanya the Alter Rebbe wrote that the sefer is built on the verse "כי קרוב אליך הדבר מאוד בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו" ("For the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it"), and that is the purpose of the entire sefer: "לבאר היטב איך הוא קרוב מאוד" - to explain clearly how it really is very close, how keeping Torah and mitzvos is genuinely within reach of every single Jew. And at the close of the title page he added that the explanation would be given "בדרך ארוכה וקצרה בעזרת השם יתברך" - "by a long way and a short way, with the help of G-d."
As we learned at length, one of the explanations of the phrase "a long way and a short way" is that the Tanya contains two distinct approaches by which the Alter Rebbe shows a Jew that the matter is very close to him: one long path, and a second, short one. According to this explanation, chapter 17 is the last chapter that belongs to the long path. From chapter 18 onward the Alter Rebbe shifts to a different approach altogether, the short way.
The theme running through all of these chapters, through chapter 16 and including chapter 17 which we are now beginning, is that in order for a person to arrive at the actual keeping of Torah and mitzvos he has to reach a state in which he has hisbonenus, contemplation, and he has feeling, both together. When a person has contemplated and the contemplation has produced an emotion, that carries him into a full, living performance of Torah and mitzvos. That is the long way. What the short way is, and what makes it unique, we will learn, G-d willing, when we begin chapter 18.
In chapter 16 the Alter Rebbe introduced a major chiddush. On the one hand, it is of the greatest importance that a Jew have feeling, because emotion lifts up the deed of the mitzvah. We spoke about how the emotions are like wings that carry a Jew's whole avodah upward and breathe life into it. On the other hand, there are times when a person simply does not succeed in arousing any feeling: he contemplates, and the furthest he gets is an intellectual agreement that it is right and fitting to act in such a way, but he is not moved. The reason is that his soul, from the outset, is not capable of more than agreement and an inclination of the mind, and not of actual emotion.
Is something then missing in the vitality of his mitzvos when he never reaches a live, felt emotion? [That is, his heart does not beat faster out of love of G-d; only his mind grasps the matter and concludes that this is the right and proper thing to do.] On this the Alter Rebbe taught in chapter 16 that nothing at all is missing, and he tied it to the words of our Sages, "מחשבה טובה הקדוש ברוך הוא מצרפה למעשה" - "a good thought the Holy One, blessed be He, joins to the deed." A Jew who has only a "good thought," meaning that the conclusion that this is good and right and fitting lives in his head, in his thought, but does not descend and seep down into his heart, is told that the Holy One, blessed be He, joins even that intellectual feeling to the deed and elevates it. That is the summary of chapter 16.
And as a direct continuation of this, the Alter Rebbe opens chapter 17: "ובזה יובן מה שכתוב כי קרוב אליך הדבר מאד בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו" - "With this we can understand the verse, 'For the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.'"
The verse appears in Sefer Devarim, in parshas Nitzavim. Moshe Rabbeinu is standing with the final generation, the generation about to enter the Land and the generation from which he is about to part, and he says: "כי תשוב אל ה' אלוקיך בכל לבבך ובכל נפשך" ("when you return to Hashem your G-d with all your heart and all your soul"), and then: "For this mitzvah which I command you today is not beyond you, nor is it far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, who will go up to heaven for us and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it; nor is it across the sea, that you should say, who will cross the sea for us and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it." And then comes our verse: "כי קרוב אליך הדבר מאוד בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו."
What does Moshe Rabbeinu mean by "הדבר," "the matter"? In the commentaries we find two explanations:
It refers to what was said at the beginning of the passage, "כי תשוב אל ה' אלוקיך" - that is, the avodah of teshuvah is what is very close to a person.
It refers to Torah as a whole - "for this mitzvah" is understood as the entire fulfillment of Torah and mitzvos.
In this chapter the Alter Rebbe relates to both explanations. In the first part of the chapter he explains that "the matter" refers to Torah and mitzvos as a whole, and at the end of the chapter he will explain that the same applies to the avodah of teshuvah.
According to the first explanation, with which he begins: the Torah is telling us that the whole of Torah and mitzvos is very close to every single person, and it lists three things - "בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו":
"בפיך," in your mouth: speech.
"ובלבבך," and in your heart: according to one explanation, thought; according to another, which is the plain meaning of "heart": emotion.
"לעשותו," to do it: action.
And when you add it up, something here does not add up. Regarding "in your mouth," saying with one's mouth what is required, and regarding "to do it," carrying out what is required, one can reasonably demand this of a person: even if it is inconvenient for him and even if he does not understand it, once he decides, he can say it and he can do it. So too if we explain "and in your heart" to mean thought, we can still say that it is in his power to place something in his mind and to decide what he will think about. But according to the plain meaning, that "and in your heart" refers to an actual emotion in the heart, love and fear of G-d, how can the Torah say that this is "very close to you"?
The Alter Rebbe builds up the difficulty in three stages:
The first difficulty: it goes against what we plainly experience.
"דלכאורה הוא בלבבך נגד החוש שלנו" - "for seemingly, 'in your heart' is against what we sense." Everyone knows, plainly and tangibly, that love of the Creator is not something you install in your heart by some technical procedure. As the wise man says in Chovos HaLevavos, in a famous formulation: just as it is impossible for fire and water to dwell together in one vessel, so love of G-d and love of this world cannot dwell together in the heart of a believer. A person is naturally drawn to the love of this world, and bringing in love of G-d has a price: uprooting the love of this world. So the matter runs against our very experience. Not only is it not close, it is very distant and very difficult "to turn one's heart from the desires of this world to a true love of G-d." How, then, does the Torah say "the matter is close to you," and add the word "very"?
Here the Alter Rebbe adds in parentheses: "והתורה היא נצחית" - "and the Torah is eternal." He is heading off a possible objection: how do we know that when Moshe Rabbeinu said "the matter is very close to you" he was speaking to us as well? Perhaps he was speaking to that generation alone, the generation of the wilderness on the verge of entering the Land, a generation of knowledge that lived with Moshe Rabbeinu for forty years. True, regarding mitzvos it is simple and obvious that they are eternal, and nobody would suggest that the mitzvah of tefillin was given to that generation only. But here we seem to be dealing with a narrative: Moshe Rabbeinu is describing a situation to them, not issuing a command - "it is not in heaven," "it is not across the sea," "for the matter is very close to you" - and in a narrative there would have been room to say that he is addressing them specifically. To this the Alter Rebbe answers that if this narrative was written into the Torah, then the Torah is eternal. Moshe Rabbeinu said a great many things to the people of his generation, and not everything he said was recorded in the Torah; rather, "a prophecy that was needed for later generations was written down," while whatever was relevant only to that moment and that generation was not. It follows, then, that Moshe Rabbeinu is speaking to us too when he says "the matter is very close to you."
The second difficulty: even in that generation it was hard.
"שאין קרוב מאד הדבר להפך לבו מתאוות עוה"ז לאהבת ה' באמת" - "that it is by no means very close to turn one's heart from the desires of this world to a true love of G-d." A word of introduction: among the emotions there is love and there is fear, and love is far harder to generate than fear. Although love is the more accessible and the more pleasant of the two, it is precisely regarding love that the rule applies that love of G-d and love of this world do not dwell together in one heart. With fear there is no such rule: a person can be G-d fearing and at the same time be afraid of a bear or a lion, with no contradiction. There is a further difference as well: fear does not require closeness, as we find at Mattan Torah, "the people saw and they trembled and they stood far off" - a person can stand at a distance and still be in awe. Love, however, comes out of closeness; the one who loves is the one who is near and connected. For this reason it is harder to arouse love than fear.
"וכמ"ש בגמרא אטו יראה מילתא זוטרתי היא וכל שכן אהבה" - "as the Gemara says, is fear a small thing? And all the more so love." Regarding fear, the easier of the two, the Gemara in Berachos says: "Rabbi Chanina said: everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven, as it says, 'And now, Israel, what does Hashem your G-d ask of you but to fear.'" The language of the verse implies that in sum, all the Holy One, blessed be He, asks of a person is fear of Heaven, and the Gemara immediately asks: "Is fear a small matter?" Is yiras Shamayim such an easy thing? Fear is itself among the hardest things to attain. And if that is so of fear, then of love, "all the more so."
The third difficulty: it seems to be altogether impossible.
Here the Alter Rebbe brings the language of the Midrash in Bereishis Rabbah: "וגם אמרו רז"ל דצדיקים דווקא לבם ברשותם" - "and our Sages also said that it is specifically tzaddikim whose hearts are in their control." Only by tzaddikim is the heart placed in their own hands: the tzaddik decides that he wishes to love G-d now, and he loves; he wants fear, and he has fear. But tzaddikim are few, as our Sages put it, "the Holy One, blessed be He, saw that the tzaddikim are few." And whoever does not stand at the level of a tzaddik does not have his heart in his control, and does not get to decide what will be in his heart. If so, what does the Torah mean when it says, "For the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it"?
["And in your heart," in its plain sense, means actual emotion: a love and a yearning that are felt in the heart, to the point that you could measure the heartbeat and see that the person is moved. And granted, there are certain moments in which a person feels an unusual closeness and longing, but that is not enough. Every expression of love we might name, including deveikus, attachment, is a level one has to climb to through a certain standing and an inner preparation, and after all of that he may perhaps arrive at some point of it, and that is not "very close." Nor is it enough to say that "close" does not mean "easy." Someone who stands a few meters below the summit of the mountain, where precisely that last stretch is the hardest of all, is not described as "very close." "Very close" means accessible. And that is exactly the question: if the thing is difficult and demands labor and takes on the character of a mission, where is "the matter is very close to you"?]
In summary: in this section we saw that chapter 17 is the final chapter of the long way, whose theme is bringing a person to the keeping of Torah and mitzvos through contemplation and emotion together. We reviewed the chiddush of chapter 16, that even one who reaches no further than intellectual agreement lacks nothing in the vitality of his mitzvos, since "a good thought the Holy One, blessed be He, joins to the deed." We looked at the opening of chapter 17 with the verse "For the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it," at the two explanations of the word "the matter," teshuvah or the whole of Torah and mitzvos, and at the three points of difficulty in "and in your heart": that it runs against our experience, that it was hard even in that generation (and all the more so by a kal vachomer from fear), and the words of the Midrash that only tzaddikim have their hearts in their control.
In the next section we will take up the Alter Rebbe's explanation of the verse, and how the matter truly is "very close to you" for every single Jew.