In the previous section we learned about the obligation to serve G-d with joy. Now we turn to the Alter Rebbe's advice for a person who is not, at this moment, engaged in avodas Hashem at all but is busy with his business affairs, and right in the middle of his work sadness and worry over "milei dishmaya," matters of heaven, descend upon him.
"ואם נופל לו עצב ודאגה ממילי דשמיא בשעת עסקיו - בידוע שהוא תחבולת היצר" - "And if sadness and worry over spiritual matters fall upon him in the midst of his business, it is known that this is a ploy of the yetzer." When, in the middle of his work, thoughts about spiritual matters suddenly descend on a person, he is told: know that it is the yetzer hara who is planting these thoughts in you.
And why? What business does a spiritual thought have showing up precisely in the thick of one's work? After all, it is a rule that a G-dly matter never arrives on its own; it comes through avodah and effort. A man is standing in his store and he has merchandise to sell, and suddenly a spiritual cheshbon hanefesh, a soul-accounting, is flowing through him effortlessly? It is known that this is a ploy of the yetzer.
And why does the yetzer hara do this? So that the person should burn up his energies and his strength on it right now, "כדי להפילו אחר כך בתאוות" - "in order to make him fall afterward into physical desires." When the right moment comes, he will topple him, G-d forbid, into taavos.
The Alter Rebbe then adds a proof: "שאם לא כן, מאין באה לו עצבות אמיתית מחמת אהבת ה' או יראתו בשעת עסקיו" - "for if not, from where would genuine sadness, born of love of G-d or fear of Him, come to him in the midst of his business?" During davening, when a person tries to think about the Almighty, he finds himself thinking about his business, and it is enormously difficult for him to concentrate on "ve'ahavta es Hashem Elokecha" while a thousand other things are running through his mind. So how is it that specifically in the middle of his business dealings a love of G-d descended on him so easily? It must be that this is not coming from the yetzer tov.
The Bas Kol That Goes Forth from Mount Chorev:
Here an interesting point should be added. Pirkei Avos teaches that every single day a bas kol, a heavenly voice, goes forth from Mount Chorev and proclaims: "Woe to the creatures for the shame of the Torah." Every day announcements go out from Above, declaring woe to those who do not keep Torah and mitzvos. And who hears this bas kol? Not the tzaddikim. To tzaddikim one does not say "woe to them," and they have no need whatsoever for such an announcement. The ones who need it are precisely those who are not tzaddikim.
If so, why do we not hear it? The answer is that the bas kol reaches a person from Above and suddenly awakens in him a thought that he ought to be better. Sometimes a person has not heard a shiur or a lecture, nobody has inspired him, and suddenly he feels an urge that he simply must go put on tefillin, must daven, must do something. That is the bas kol that penetrated his mind; his neshamah sensed it and transmitted the frequency to him to do what needs doing.
But this raises a difficulty: it turns out that thoughts do fall upon a person without any preparation, by the power of the bas kol. How, then, is he to tell whether the thought that came to him in the middle of his business is from the bas kol or from the yetzer hara?
The test is simple: what is the conclusion that emerges from the thought that came to him?
A thought directed toward the present and the future - "I have to run and daven," "I need to go right now and do a mitzvah" - comes from the bas kol, since the yetzer hara would never say such things to a person.
A thought directed toward the past - "how bad I have been," and the person begins sinking into brooding over just how wicked he was - that is the ploy of the yetzer hara. The bas kol does not tell a person to sink into the past; it tells him to look forward, to run forward and do what is incumbent upon him.
Therefore a person is told: if in the middle of your business a thought falls upon you about a past that was not as it should have been, and that thought is pulling you down, this is a tactic of the yetzer hara.
But so far we have only understood where the thought is coming from. What is the person supposed to say to himself now? After all, he does in fact know that he has done things that were not good. Are we going to tell him that it was fine that he transgressed? How does one deal with this thought?
The Conclusion of the Chapter - Setting a Time for Soul-Accounting:
"והנה בין שנפלה לו העצבות בשעת עבודה בתלמוד תורה או בתפילה" - "Now, whether the sadness fell upon him during his avodah, while learning Torah or during davening" - that is, whether the thought about his sins came to him in the middle of davening or in the middle of learning, and it begins to gnaw at him: how could he have done something so foolish, how could he have committed such a sin, "ובין שנפלה לו שלא בשעת עבודה" - "or whether it fell upon him not during avodah," such as in the middle of his business, in which case it comes from the yetzer hara as explained - "זאת ישים אל לבו כי אין הזמן גרמא כעת לעצבות אמיתית", "let him take this to heart: that now is not the time for genuine sadness." He should tell himself: it is true that I did things that were not good, but now is not the moment to think about it. "ואפילו לדאגת עוונות חמורים חס ושלום" - "and even for worry over severe sins, G-d forbid" - even if we are speaking of a very serious transgression, this is not the hour for it.
"רק לזה צריך קביעות עתים ושעת הכושר בישוב הדעת" - "for this one needs fixed times and an opportune hour, in a settled frame of mind." The person is to be the one in control of the situation and to set for himself the time for his cheshbon hanefesh; the yetzer hara does not get to dictate when that hour will be. And that hour needs to be a fitting one, approached with yishuv hadaas, a settled mind, and before it "להתבונן בגדולת ה' אשר חטא לו" - "to contemplate the greatness of G-d against whom he sinned." A vague thought that he is not as he should be is not enough; he has to engage in hisbonenus, contemplation, of the Creator's greatness, and out of that he will grasp how far he truly falls short. That requires time, and sitting down in one place to study the greatness of the Creator, "כדי שעל ידי זה יהיה לבו נשבר באמת" - "so that through this his heart will be truly broken." When he genuinely understands the greatness of G-d, he will have real heartbreak over having sinned against the Creator.
It is like any sensible merchant, who does not draw up a balance sheet every five minutes and does not shut his store down every moment to run the numbers. He pushes it off to "fixed times" and to "an opportune hour": once a year or once in six months he stops and checks where things stand, rather than running to the accountant every other day to see how he is doing.
"כמבואר עת זו במקום אחר" - "as this time is explained elsewhere." In other places this hour is spelled out: at krias shema she'al hamitah, the Shema said before sleep, or at other times. "ושם נתבאר גם כן כי מיד אחר שנשבר לבו בעתים קבועים ההם" - "and there it is likewise explained that immediately after his heart has been broken at those fixed times" - even once he has set a time, sat with himself and decided to make a soul-accounting, it is only for that designated span, those ten minutes or quarter hour in which he thinks about it, and once that thought has passed - "אז יסיר העצב מלבו לגמרי ויאמין אמונה שלמה כי ה' העביר חטאתו ורב לסלוח" - "then he should remove the sadness from his heart entirely, and believe with complete faith that G-d has removed his sin and is abundantly forgiving." He should clear out the sadness completely and believe that the Almighty is abundant in forgiveness and has already forgiven him, and he should not think about that sin again: erased, finished. "וזו היא השמחה האמיתית בה' הבאה אחר העצב כנ"ל" - "and this is the true joy in G-d that comes after the sadness, as explained above."
So it emerges that when an unscheduled spiritual sadness descends on a person, he should say to himself: aside, this is the yetzer hara, this is not the hour, and I will set the time for my own cheshbon hanefesh at some other point.
The Avodah of Our Generation:
Here two important points are worth adding. The first: someone may come and say, "Still, I would like to shed a few tears over my situation." Now, the Rebbe writes in many places that in our generation this kind of soul-accounting should be the rarest of rare, and one should hardly occupy himself with it at all, because this is not the hour for it. Even though the sefarim write that it is needed, it should be left to fixed times, and practically speaking we are not capable of it at all. Our task is to go forward: to do good from here onward, and to leave the past to the Almighty, who will repair it. In earlier generations there were Jews who were capable of descending into the past and who knew how to fix it; ours is not a generation of experts. When a person's machine breaks he goes to the expert, and someone who is not an expert and tries to fix it himself will only do more damage. So do not try to repair the past; leave it be.
And how do we know what the path of the generation is? I once heard a chassidishe saying: for every mitzvah, if you want to know how to fulfill it, there is a tractate in the Talmud from which you learn it; and mitzvos that do not have a whole tractate at least have a few pages in the Gemara, a sugya laying out exactly how they are performed. But the chovos halevavos, the duties of the heart, have no tractate in the Gemara; there is no orderly tractate in which these matters are explained. And they say that the tractate of the duties of the heart is the tzaddik of the generation: in every generation the tzaddik hador is the walking tractate of chovos halevavos, and he is the one who knows which tikkunim to give that generation and what is demanded of it, and these things change from generation to generation. And in our generation the Rebbe writes explicitly that our avodah is through simchah alone, while the avodah of teshuvah through bitterness and sadness is not for us; it is not our direction and not our path. Even though such things exist in Torah, this is not our way.
A Proof from the Meeting of Yosef and Binyamin:
One of the fascinating proofs the Rebbe brings for this is from the meeting of the two brothers. The Torah tells of Yosef and Binyamin meeting in Egypt after a long separation, and both of them wept greatly. But the Torah is precise: Yosef wept on Binyamin's neck, and Binyamin wept on Yosef's neck. Rashi there explains why they wept: because they were great prophets. Yosef saw that the first and second Beis Hamikdash, destined to be built in Binyamin's portion, would be destroyed, and therefore he wept on Binyamin's neck; and Binyamin saw that the Mishkan destined to be built in Shiloh would be destroyed, and therefore he wept on Yosef's neck.
And the question is asked: if Yosef and Binyamin were prophets of such stature and saw the future, surely Yosef also saw the destruction of the Mishkan in his own portion, and Binyamin also saw the destruction of the Mikdash in his own portion. Why, then, did each one weep specifically over his brother's churban and not over his own? The answer is that over your own Beis Hamikdash that was destroyed you need not weep; you simply need to build. When you see another Jew whose Beis Hamikdash has been destroyed, and you have made every effort in your power and you cannot build it for him, then you weep. But over your own Beis Hamikdash: build! What is there to cry about?
And in general, there is great danger in weeping, two dangers in fact:
The first danger: after the weeping the person feels lighter. He cried, he calmed down, and it seems to him that everything is fine.
The second danger: once a person starts weeping over spiritual matters, the yetzer hara comes along and whispers to him quietly, so nobody else should hear: "What a tzaddik you are! You care so much about spirituality that you even shed tears" - and he will even count up for him how many tears he shed, and give him a pat on the back: "What a spiritual person you are, so devoted to spiritual matters." He will pull the wool over his eyes, and the person will end up in an even worse state than before.
In summary: we learned that sadness and worry over matters of heaven that descend on a person in the midst of his business are nothing but a ploy of the yetzer hara, whose aim is to topple him afterward into taavos, and that the test for identifying the thought is its direction: toward the future and toward action (from the bas kol), or toward sinking into the past (from the yetzer). Therefore the present hour is not the time for genuine sadness, and for cheshbon hanefesh one must set fixed times and an opportune hour, with a settled mind and through hisbonenus in the greatness of G-d. And even then, immediately afterward he is to remove the sadness from his heart entirely and believe that G-d has removed his sin and is abundantly forgiving, and this is the true joy that follows the sadness. We added that in our generation the Rebbe writes that this is not our path at all, as is proven from the weeping of Yosef and Binyamin: over your own Mikdash you do not weep, you build. Ours is a generation of joy and uplift. We will go forward and look forward, and the Almighty, who is abundant in forgiveness, will erase everything, and with G-d's help we will reach the goal: the true and complete Geulah, with joy and gladness of heart.