Every Jew is responsible for his own portion of the world, and ultimately he has the power to affect the whole of creation. As the Rambam writes, the entire world is like a balance scale, and with a single deed a Jew can tip the scale to the side of merit and bring the Geulah immediately. On what does it hinge, that one act of one Jew should turn all of creation into something that brings salvation and deliverance to the whole world? On one small detail: because the act was done properly, with all its details, it changed the entire creation, the whole picture.
It emerges, then, that all the vitality and all the flow of the lower worlds depend on the performance of mitzvos. And if so, it follows that the performance of mitzvos is the inner, ultimate Divine will, while the created beings and all the worlds are no more than an external will. This is how the Alter Rebbe sums it up: "ונמצא שמעשה המצות וקיומן הוא לבוש הפנימי לפנימית רצון העליון" - the doing of the mitzvos and their fulfillment is the inner garment for the innermost dimension of the Supernal Will.
What, then, expresses the inner Divine will in the world? A Jew performing a mitzvah. A Jew putting on tefillin, the vitality he has in keeping Shabbos, the vitality in each and every mitzvah he does - the act of the mitzvah that you see right in front of your eyes is, at that moment, the expression of the true and ultimate Divine will. "שממעשה זה נמשך אור וחיות רצון העליון להתלבש בעולמות" - from this act there is drawn down the light and vitality of the Supernal Will to be clothed in the worlds. From the particular mitzvah that this Jew does, the light and vitality of the Supernal Will are drawn down to be clothed in the worlds, and all the Divine vitality that continues to exist in the world is in the merit of the mitzvos of this Jew and that Jew.
[Regarding the question that was raised here about the interval: the Torah preceded the creation of the world, and from creation until Mattan Torah there was a gap of twenty-six generations. Before the world was created there was no performance of mitzvos at all, since there was no world and no creation; but why, from the time the world was created until the actual performance of mitzvos began, the matter waited twenty-six generations, that is a subject in its own right. The Holy One, Blessed be He, even wanted to wait many more generations, and He "shortened the road" and waited only twenty-six. In any case, this is a process by which the world advanced toward its goal: the world was being prepared for this from the very first moment, and this was the purpose all along, as is already written in the very first word of the Torah, "Bereishis," which Rashi explains to mean: for the sake of Israel and for the sake of the Torah. The whole world was created for this, and this is the true will.]
Here comes the explanation of why the mitzvos are called limbs, as against what we will see further on about the Torah, which is "entirely one with the Holy One, Blessed be He." In the Alter Rebbe's words: "ולכן נקראים אברי דמלכא דרך משל" - and therefore they are called, by way of analogy, the limbs of the King. This is brought in Tikunei Zohar: the mitzvos are, as it were, the limbs of the King, of the Holy One, Blessed be He. And why specifically limbs? On this the Alter Rebbe continues with an analogy drawn from the limbs of a person's body.
Consider an analogy. When Reuven commands Shimon and says to him, "I am instructing you to go and do such and such," and Shimon carries it out, it would seem that Reuven's will has entered Shimon's hands, and that Shimon's hands are a vessel for Reuven's will. But that is not accurate. True, Reuven's will finds expression in Shimon's act, but this is an external and very distant influence, influence alone and not hislabshus, not an actual clothing of the will within. If Reuven wants something very badly and Shimon never heard his request, Reuven's will will not be clothed in Shimon's limbs; only when there is a command does the command have an effect, and even then it reaches him through several circles of mediation.
What, then, is an inner hislabshus? It is like the way things work within a person himself. When a person wants to move his hand, he does not have to issue a command to the hand, and it moves at once. The will simply enters the limb. (A situation in which a person has to "command" his hand to move, to work hard at it and practice over and over, as in physiotherapy sessions, is a state of illness; but when the body is healthy, the person wills and the hand obeys on its own.) This is the difference between will as it is clothed in another person, who needs to be commanded, and will as it is clothed in the person himself: an inner hislabshus.
And there is a further point here. How do we know that the will itself is present in each and every limb? A person wants to move his foot and the will is in the foot, he wants to move his hand and the will is in the hand - who says so? Perhaps the will resides in the brain, and the brain issues an order that travels to the limb. On this the Alter Rebbe brings a second proof: if the will had one central station from which an instruction goes out to a particular limb, there would have to be a time lag from the moment the person wills until the thing is carried out. And further: the will is never "occupied." It is not the case that when a person's head is busy with one thing, wanting to learn or to look at a certain place, he would have to wait and redirect his will in order to move his foot. The will runs directly to each and every limb without passing through any intermediate station, and therefore there is no lag of even a single point in time from the moment the will arises until the moment of execution.
From these two proofs the Alter Rebbe demonstrates:
From the fact that no command is needed: that the will is actually clothed within the limb itself, unlike a person's relationship to someone else.
From the fact that there is no time lag: that the will is not located in one single point in the body, in the brain or the like, but literally in each and every limb.
The language of the Tanya: "ולכן נקראים איברין דמלכא, דרך משל כמו שאברי גוף האדם הם לבוש לנפשו" - and therefore they are called the limbs of the King, by way of analogy, just as the limbs of a person's body are a garment for his soul. From the analogy we understand how exalted the mitzvos are, for the standing of the limbs is tremendous: the limb is a garment for the soul, and the soul is clothed directly in each and every limb. "ובטלים לגמרי אליה מכל וכל" - and they are utterly nullified to it in every way. The limbs are in complete bittul to the soul.
Only when a limb is ill, God forbid, does it stop being in bittul to the soul and begin to feel itself. When does a person feel pain, or feel at all that he has a limb? Normally a person does not feel his hand or his foot, and when he begins to feel their existence, that is already a problem. And why does he not feel them? Because they are absolutely nullified to the soul and stand ready at all times: whatever the soul wants is immediately carried out by that limb. The limbs have no self-interest of their own, nothing detached from the soul's desires.
"כי מיד שעולה ברצונו של אדם לפשוט ידו או רגלו הן נשמעות לרצונו תכף ומיד" - for the moment it arises in a person's will to stretch out his hand or his foot, they obey his will immediately. And what does "immediately" mean? Here the Alter Rebbe brings the first detail: "בלי שום צווי ואמירה להן" - without any command or instruction to them. There is no need to issue an order to the limb; it understands on its own and is attentive on its own. Whereas one who needs to be told every single time, "now do this and now do that," a servant who has to run to his master each time and ask, "Nu, what do you want now?" and does not grasp his master's will by himself - that is not a servant.
A man held job interviews and hired workers, and after a short while he fired one of them. The worker said to him: "Explain to me why you are firing me. Is there one thing you told me to do that I did not do? I did everything precisely, I did not miss a single point." He said to him: "You want to know why? Come and I will show you."
He asked him to go down to the warehouse and tell him how many crates of wine were there. The worker ran down, and two or three minutes later he came back and said: "Fifty crates." He asked him to go down again and report how many crates of grape juice there were; he ran and brought back the answer. A third time he asked about beer, a fourth time about something else, and each time he ran down again. He said to him: "Excellent, everything I asked you did. Now wait here." He called the second worker and said: "Please go down to the warehouse and tell me how many crates of wine there are." The worker came back four or five minutes later and said: "Wine you have fifty, grape juice there is such and such, beer there is such and such." Nobody had asked him for that, but he immediately understood what the master wanted: to know what was going on down in the warehouse.
Someone who is a "small head," and does what he is told - that is perfectly fine, but this is a person who needs a command every single time, who only carries out what he is explicitly ordered to do, and that shows that his bittul to the master is on a limited level. The second servant, by contrast, who understands one thing from another on his own and needs no command, reveals a far deeper level of bittul toward his master. And so it is with the limbs of the body, which are nullified to the soul "without any command or instruction to them."
To sum up: in this section we learned that every Jew is responsible for his portion of the world, and that with a single deed he can tip the scales of all creation and bring salvation and deliverance. The vitality of all the lower worlds depends on the performance of mitzvos, and therefore the mitzvos are the innermost dimension of the Supernal Will and its inner garment, while the created beings and the worlds are an external will. We examined the reason the mitzvos are called "the limbs of the King": just as the limbs of the body are in absolute bittul to the soul, and its will is clothed in them without any command and without any lag of time, and from these two signs it is proven that the will is literally clothed in each and every limb. And in the analogy of the two servants we saw that the ability to understand on one's own, without being commanded, is the sign of an inner and deep bittul.
In the next section we will continue with the explanation of the nimshal, and we will examine the difference between the mitzvos, which are called "the limbs of the King," and the Torah, of which it is said that it is "entirely one with the Holy One, Blessed be He."