In the previous section we learned that every time a stray thought (machshavah zarah) falls into a person's mind, he is being handed an opportunity to accomplish something that no one else in the world can accomplish at that moment. From here the Alter Rebbe moves on to sum up the entire matter.
"ואל יפול לב אדם עליו" - "Let a person's heart not fall within him":
"ואל יפול לב אדם עליו" ("let a person's heart not fall within him") - there is no reason for him to be depressed over the fact that these thoughts keep arising. "ולא יירא לבבו מאוד" ("and let his heart not fear greatly") - and here one has to be precise: the Alter Rebbe does not write "let his heart not fear at all," but "greatly." A certain measure of caring is in fact required, because if it would not bother him at all, he could G-d forbid begin to enjoy these thoughts. But he should not fear "greatly," and he should not be pained over it beyond measure.
"גם אם יהיה כן כל ימיו במלחמה זו" ("even if he will be in this war all the days of his life") - a line that some would read as a verdict of despair, and the Alter Rebbe turns it into a challenge. No one is promised that after ten years of avodah he will be granted freedom from these thoughts. All his days, a hundred and twenty years, he will stand in this war - "כי אולי לכך נברא" ("for perhaps this is what he was created for"), perhaps this is precisely why his soul was brought down into the world, "וזאת עבודתו" ("and this is his avodah") - l'achpia l'sitra achra, to subdue the sitra achra, constantly.
There is no point in looking around for some other avodah. A different avodah belongs to a different gilgul; in this world and in this lifetime, this is his avodah: an ongoing struggle with his thoughts. And when a person knows that this is what is being asked of him, he is also given the strength and the power to stand up to it. On the one hand, "whoever is greater than his fellow, his yetzer is greater than his," and on the other hand, the struggle itself grants him strength, and even a measure of rest from time to time, because this is what he was created for.
Every person has his own job:
Each person was created for a different purpose, and a person's completeness is reached specifically through his own job. This is true not only of the difference between beinonim and tzaddikim, but even among the tzaddikim themselves. A soldier who decides in the middle of the war to transfer from fighting in the field to being a reporter filing stories from an air conditioned room has betrayed the purpose, and he will be punished for it. Jobs cannot be traded.
In this connection it is told that before his passing the Baal Shem Tov said to his students that had he wished, he could have ascended heavenward in a storm like Eliyahu HaNavi, but he wanted to fulfill the completeness of the verse "and to dust you shall return."
The Rebbe brought this story at one of his farbrengens, and related that he had been asked: seemingly it turns out that Eliyahu HaNavi lost out, since he lacks the completeness of "and to dust you shall return," for he ascended heavenward in a storm. The Rebbe answered that this is no question at all, because every person has a different job. Eliyahu HaNavi came down to this world and his completeness lay in ascending heavenward in a storm; had he fulfilled "and to dust you shall return" he would not have reached his completeness. The Baal Shem Tov, by contrast, came down to this world precisely so that "and to dust you shall return" should be fulfilled in him. There is no room to ask whether one person lost out on another person's work. Each has his own job, and jobs are not to be traded.
"Wandering souls":
Trading jobs is what gives rise to the concept of "wandering souls" (neshamos hato'os). A wandering soul is a soul that has exchanged its job for someone else's. On this too the Rebbe told a story:
There was a desperately poor Jew, a simple wagon driver, who would come to shul early every Friday evening and gather up all the guests. To every guest who arrived he would say, "Maybe you have nowhere to eat? Come and eat by me" - even though his own table was the barest of tables. Meanwhile the wealthy man, whose table was broad and laden, barely managed to bring home a guest, since all of them had already been taken. After davening the poor man would walk home with a whole caravan behind him, and the rich man with one or two, if that.
One Friday evening the rich man left his house for shul and heard desperate cries along the way: a Jew had arrived in town, his wagon had sunk into the mud, and no matter what he tried he could not get it out. The rich man had no idea how to handle a horse and wagon, that was not his job, but a Jew needed help, so he went over to lend a hand. He tried to free the horse's leg from one side and got lashed by the horse's tail; he tried from the other side and the wagon sank in deeper. In the end somebody came along and helped him, and the rich man emerged bruised, bleeding and filthy from head to toe. That is how he arrived at shul, and after davening he barely made it home with a single guest. The poor man, the wagon driver who actually knows how to do this kind of work, arrived polished and whole, and went home with a caravan of guests.
On the face of it both of them did good deeds: one tried to pull a wagon out of the mud, the other brought guests into his home. But these are "wandering souls": each of them traded his job for the other's. The wagon driver was the one who should have pulled the wagon out of the mud, and the rich man should have been taking in guests and providing for them generously. Trading jobs is no way to run a life.
Many remember the Rebbe's farbrengens, where on special occasions he would call for a particular campaign on behalf of one mitzvah or another, and would ask the crowd to fill out envelopes with their pledges, how much each one intended to give. We, as yeshivah bochurim, wondered what we could possibly put in an envelope, and it was explained to us: from the yeshivah bochurim the Rebbe asks that they write how many blatt Gemara they intend to learn and how many maamarim of Chassidus; from the wealthy he asks for money. In practice, though, it came out the other way around: when the Rebbe speaks about adding in Torah study, everyone sits still; when he speaks about money, the bochurim are asking how much they are prepared to give. Jobs are not to be traded.
And so it is with our subject in Tanya. A person who does not understand his own place becomes depressed and asks why he is not a tzaddik, and that is sheer foolishness. A person has to rejoice in his situation, to know that he has a job, and to carry out his job with joy.
"בראת רשעים" - an answer to the question from chapter 1:
Here the Alter Rebbe answers a question raised on the very first page of Tanya, in chapter 1: Iyov said to the Holy One, blessed be He, "Master of the world, You created tzaddikim, You created resha'im." How could Iyov say such a thing? Being a tzaddik or a rasha is a matter of free choice; the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what a person will become, but He does not determine it.
The Alter Rebbe gave two answers to this question. In chapter 14 he answered the first half of Iyov's words, "You created tzaddikim," explaining there that a person's being a tzaddik is a matter of choice from Above and is not given over to the person's own choice. And here he comes to answer the second half of Iyov's words.
In the Alter Rebbe's own language: "ועל זה אמר איוב בראת רשעים" ("and about this Iyov said, You created resha'im") - "ולא שיהיו רשעים ממש ח\"ו" ("not that they should be actual resha'im, G-d forbid"), the Holy One, blessed be He, does not create a person to be a rasha, "אלא שיגיע אליהם כמעשה הרשעים במחשבתם והרהורם לבד" ("but that what befalls them is like the deeds of the resha'im, in their thought and musings alone").
In other words, the Holy One, blessed be He, created people in whose minds evil musings will arise exactly as they arise in the minds of resha'im, and with their free choice it is up to them to be beinonim and to push those thoughts away. True, He also created those who will be tzaddikim, in whose minds no stray thoughts arise at all, but the overwhelming majority of people fall under "You created resha'im": in their minds there is no difference at all between them and a rasha. Evil musings fall into the rasha's mind and evil musings fall into theirs; it is only that he is a beinoni and not a rasha, because he pushes them away. "ויהיו נלחמים תמיד להסיח דעתם, כדי לאכפיא לסטרא אחרא, ולא יוכלו לבטלה מכל וכל" ("and they are to be constantly at war, to divert their minds, in order to subdue the sitra achra, yet they will not be able to nullify it entirely").
A beinoni should not imagine that after a good number of years of avodah the "hard drive" of evil thoughts will be wiped clean and they will stop arising. Erasing the "hard drive" of stray thoughts is reserved for tzaddikim alone. For everyone else there is no such "software" and no capacity to erase it; on the contrary, the thoughts will always come up.
And although there are beinonim for whom it does stop after ten or twenty years, that is not true of every beinoni, for there are a great many levels within the category of beinoni. The Alter Rebbe said of himself that he was a beinoni, and Rava too said of himself that he was a beinoni, and we have already spoken about the fact that there are those whose distance from the level of tzaddik is so fine that they oscillate back and forth on the border between tzaddik and beinoni.
Even so, at the beginning of Tanya the Alter Rebbe writes explicitly "על כן טעה רבא" ("therefore Rava erred") - Rava erred in his self assessment. He said of himself that he was a beinoni, and in truth he was a tzaddik, and he said it out of humility. The Alter Rebbe too thought of himself that he stood at the highest level of beinoni and not at the level of tzaddik, and out of sheer humility that is how he spoke of himself. We have already discussed this at length, and there is no need to repeat it.
Two kinds of nachas ruach Above:
The Alter Rebbe continues: "שני מיני נחת רוח לפניו יתברך למעלה" ("there are two kinds of nachas ruach before Him, may He be blessed, Above") - two kinds of pleasure, as it were, that the Holy One, blessed be He, derives from His creations. The first: "מביטול הסטרא אחרא לגמרי, ואתהפכא ממרירו למתקא ומחשוכא לנהורא, על ידי הצדיקים" ("from the complete bittul of the sitra achra, and its transformation from bitter to sweet and from darkness to light, through the tzaddikim") - the tzaddikim turn darkness into light and bitter into sweet. With them there is no struggle with evil, only a constant ascent in holiness and in good, in "sweetness." But while a sweet food is a good food, there is a food that is better still, a food that gives even greater nachas ruach.
In summary: in this section we learned that "let a person's heart not fall within him and let his heart not fear greatly" - even though the war against stray thoughts may well last all his days, "for perhaps this is what he was created for, and this is his avodah, to subdue the sitra achra constantly." We saw that every person has his own job and that jobs are not to be traded, as emerges from the story of the Baal Shem Tov and Eliyahu HaNavi and from the "wandering souls" story of the rich man and the wagon driver, and from here that a person must rejoice in his job and carry it out with joy. We also saw the Alter Rebbe's answer to Iyov's words "You created resha'im": not actual resha'im, but that the musings of resha'im reach them in thought alone, and they are constantly at war to divert their minds, without being able to nullify those thoughts entirely. Finally we began the subject of the two kinds of nachas ruach Above, and the first of them, the one that comes through the tzaddikim.
In the next section we will take up the second kind of nachas ruach before Him, may He be blessed: that "food" which gives even greater nachas ruach.