We have reached chapter 27 of the Tanya, found on folio 33b (page 66). In the previous lesson we finished chapter 26, and before we move on let us briefly review the flow of these chapters.
Where these chapters fit in the sefer:
Up to chapter 26 the Alter Rebbe has been explaining at length the verse "For this thing is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it" - how close it is to every Jew to keep Torah and mitzvos, and how close to him are the love and fear of Hashem. From chapter 26 onward a new group of chapters opens, dealing with side issues, external ones: the various disturbances that can come upon a person who wants to serve Hashem, and how he is to deal with them.
The gist of chapter 26:
The first disturbance he opened with is the absence of joy: a person sunk in low spirits, or in the language of the Tanya, in laziness and heaviness that stem from sadness. In the first half of the chapter the Alter Rebbe establishes that sadness is a negative thing, and he explains this with the analogy of two wrestlers: whichever of the two is in low spirits is almost certain to lose the match, while the winner is the one whose spirit is lifted. So too in the spiritual struggle within a person's soul between the yetzer tov and the yetzer hara: when a person is in a state of joy, the yetzer hara cannot bring him down, and when he is in sadness, the yetzer hara has the upper hand. Therefore one of the first things the yetzer hara tries to accomplish is to plant sadness in a person, and it makes no difference to him at all what the person will be sad about - he will dig up reasons from under the ground, as long as the person is sad.
In the second half of the chapter the Alter Rebbe began to confront the various causes that bring a person to sadness, and to remove them one by one:
Sadness over physical matters: a lack in parnasah, in health, and the like. When a person contemplates that everything coming from Above is good, and that even what appears to him as bad is nothing other than a concealed good - and on the contrary, the Divine closeness is even greater when these hidden matters are revealed to him - he has nothing to be sad about.
Sadness over a spiritual matter: a person who knows his own spiritual state, who knows that he failed in this sin and that one, with the list of his transgressions before his eyes, and he is sad over the fall. Here you cannot tell him that the thing is not bad, because he is sad about something that genuinely is bad. Even so, this sadness too is planted in him by the yetzer hara, who has no preference as to what the sadness will be about, as long as there is sadness.
How to deal with this sadness depends on the hour at which it arrives:
In the middle of one's business: if the sadness over his sins falls upon him in the middle of the day, in the thick of his affairs, it is certainly from the yetzer hara - for what business do spiritual reflections have during business hours? He must push it away.
During the service of Hashem: if it falls upon him in the middle of davening or learning, he still should not sink into it, since this bad feeling is one of the ways the yetzer hara seeks to bring him down. Rather he should say to himself: true enough, but not now. Let him set a time in his calendar - say, next Thursday at ten at night - and then hold a meeting with his own soul, think honestly about where he failed and how to repair it. In other words, the person should control the situation, rather than the situation controlling him.
The kind of sadness treated in chapter 27:
In this chapter the Alter Rebbe adds another type of sadness that can fall upon a person, and he places in his hand the tool to dispel it. This is not a person sad over having failed - that was chapter 26 - but a person sad from the struggle itself: he simply has no strength left for the alien thoughts and the improper reflections that keep dropping into his head without pause. True, he pushes them away, but how much can a person take? He wants quiet, he wants calm, and wherever he finds himself - in the middle of davening, in the middle of learning, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, even in the middle of his sleep - thoughts pop up that are not right, not pure, and not good.
It is worth emphasizing: we are not speaking of someone who fails in these thoughts, for we have already learned in Tanya that one who willingly entertains an evil thought is a sinner and is called a rasha. Here we are speaking of the beinoni, who the moment a thought falls upon him removes it, and succeeds in removing it - for otherwise he would not be a beinoni - and nevertheless he feels bad about himself: how can it be that after so many years of learning and effort he still stands with those very same thoughts he had ten, twenty and thirty years ago? That is what makes him sad.
The Alter Rebbe devotes two chapters to this matter, corresponding to two different situations:
Chapter 27 (the longer one) deals with thoughts that fall upon a person not at the time of serving Hashem, in the middle of his day and in the middle of his affairs.
Chapter 28 deals with thoughts that fall upon him in the middle of davening and learning.
Let us turn to the words of the chapter:
"ואם העצבות אינה מדאגת עוונות" ("And if the sadness does not come from worry over sins") - worry over one's sins is a real and proper concern, and the Alter Rebbe did not dismiss it in chapter 26; he only directed that a set time be designated for it. But here we are speaking of someone whose sadness does not come from worry over sins, "אלא מהרהורים רעים ותאוות רעות שנופלות במחשבתו" ("but from evil reflections and evil desires that fall into his mind") - he is not sad over having failed, but over the very constancy of the struggle. He would like to be free, to be in a state where he has no alien thoughts and no evil reflections, where he serves Hashem in calm and in joy and invests all his energies in Torah and tefillah; and in practice he pours his energy into pushing thoughts away, and it wears him out emotionally. The exhaustion produces low spirits, the low spirits produce sadness, and so the wheel keeps turning.
The Alter Rebbe's answer is the complete opposite: precisely because evil reflections fall upon you, you should rejoice.
"והנה אם נופלות לו שלא בשעת העבודה, אלא בעת עסקו בעסקיו ודרך ארץ וכהאי גוונא" ("Now, if they fall upon him not at the time of his service, but while he is engaged in his business and worldly occupation and the like") - "service" here means the service of Hashem. We are not speaking of someone to whom an alien thought comes in the middle of davening or in the middle of learning Torah, but of someone in the thick of worldly matters, in his store or at his place of work, and there the reflections fall upon him and he pushes them away until he has no strength left for it.
"אדרבה, יש לו לשמוח בחלקו, שאף שנופלות לו במחשבתו הוא מסיח דעתו מהן" ("On the contrary, he should rejoice in his portion, that although they fall into his mind, he turns his attention away from them") - he should rejoice in the portion the Holy One has given him, for He has handed him an opportunity to fulfill a mitzvas lo saaseh: "לקיים מה שנאמר 'ולא תתורו אחרי לבבכם ואחרי עיניכם אשר אתם זונים אחריהם'" ("to fulfill what is written, 'and you shall not stray after your heart and after your eyes, after which you go astray'"). This is a negative commandment of the Torah, that a person not turn after evil reflections, and we say it in Krias Shema twice every day - an obligation from the Torah itself.
A tzaddik has no opportunity whatsoever to fulfill this mitzvah. As we learned, the tzaddik loathes evil - whether he loathes it completely or not completely - and one who loathes a thing feels no desire for it at all, just as a person does not crave to eat something repulsive but flees from it, and just as a person does not wrestle with a temptation to desecrate Shabbos. Therefore, "ואין הכתוב מדבר בצדיקים לקרותם זונים ח"ו, אלא בבינונים כיוצא בו, שנופלים לו הרהורי ניאוף במחשבתו בין בהיתר כו', וכשמסיח דעתו מקיים לאו זה" ("and Scripture is not speaking of tzaddikim, to call them 'going astray' God forbid, but of beinonim like himself, upon whom there fall thoughts of immorality, whether of the permitted kind, etc., and when he turns his attention away he fulfills this prohibition") - every single time the beinoni turns his mind away from the thought, he is actively fulfilling the prohibition of "velo sasuru."
And even though this is a negative commandment and not a positive one, the Alter Rebbe brings the words of the Gemara: "ואמרו רז"ל ישב ולא עבר עבירה נותנים לו שכר כאילו עשה מצווה" ("and our Sages said: one who sat and did not commit a sin is given reward as though he had performed a mitzvah"). The Gemara in Kiddushin cites the language of the Mishnah, "whoever performs one mitzvah, it is made good for him," from which it would seem that it is specifically an active deed that earns this; and it raises a question from the Beraisa, "one who sat and did not commit a sin is given reward as one who performed a mitzvah." The Gemara explains that this does not refer to someone who merely sits and does not desecrate Shabbos, but to someone to whom a matter of sin came to hand and who escaped it. Rashi explains that he subdued his yetzer and did not transgress, and he adds: "אין מצווה יתירה מזו" - there is no mitzvah greater than this. It turns out that every time a person stands before the temptation and pushes it away, the mitzvah in his hand is among the greatest of mitzvos.
So the Alter Rebbe says: what are you complaining about, and what are you sad about? The Holy One hands you a mitzvah, and another mitzvah, and another mitzvah, and from this you become sad? This is nothing but foolishness. Not only is there no room for sadness, there is reason to rejoice.
It is told of one of the tzaddikim of Poland who had no children. In his old age, before his passing, his many chassidim asked him to whom they should go. He answered them: I will not give you a name, but I will give you a way to test. Go to all sorts of tzaddikim and ask each one of them: what does one do when he has alien thoughts? Any tzaddik who gives you advice on how to be rid of alien thoughts - leave him and go to another. They went to one tzaddik and to a second, and each one gave them advice of his own, until they came to a tzaddik who said to them: "You have alien thoughts? Very good. Let there be alien thoughts, and you will push them away." They immediately understood that this was the tzaddik they were looking for. And this is precisely the teaching of the Alter Rebbe here in Tanya.
In summary: in this section we surveyed where the chapters dealing with disturbances to the service of Hashem fit in, and we reviewed chapter 26 - the rejection of sadness by force of the analogy of the two wrestlers, and the removal of its causes: sadness over physical matters, and sadness from worry over sins, for which a set time should be designated. Chapter 27 deals with sadness of a different kind: the sadness of the beinoni over the very constancy of his struggle with evil reflections and alien thoughts. The Alter Rebbe's answer is that "on the contrary, he should rejoice in his portion" - with every turning of the mind away from the thought he fulfills the prohibition of "velo sasuru," a mitzvah that a tzaddik has no opportunity at all to fulfill, and of which our Sages said, "one who sat and did not commit a sin is given reward as though he had performed a mitzvah," and as Rashi explained, "there is no mitzvah greater than this."
In the next section we will take up chapter 28, where the Alter Rebbe explains how one is to deal with those same alien thoughts when they fall upon him specifically during davening and learning.