In the previous section we looked closely at what the beinoni essentially is. Now we return to the passage we skipped, the parenthetical remark in which the Alter Rebbe speaks about tzaddikim. It is precisely once a person knows what he himself is that he can properly appreciate the whole matter of bittush, the crushing of the self.
The parenthetical remark: with tzaddikim it is exactly the reverse
Who is a tzaddik, and what is he at his core? Godliness and holiness. His body and the body's pleasures are the furthest thing from him. True, he too eats and drinks, sleeps and washes, he has a home, and from the outside he looks like any other person. But how does he relate to those physical things? About himself he does not say "the soul You have placed within me." He sees the body that the Almighty placed within him as something pitiful.
In the Alter Rebbe's words: "כי אם בצדיקים שבהם הוא להיפך, שנשמה הטהורה שהיא נפש האלוקית היא האדם, וגופם נקרא 'בשר אדם'" ("except in tzaddikim, in whom it is the reverse: the pure soul, which is the nefesh ha'Elokis, is the man, while their body is called 'the flesh of a man'"). For the tzaddik, "the man" is the nefesh ha'Elokis, while the body with all its sensations and pleasures is no more than "the flesh of a man": his flesh, but not him. He himself is Godly.
The saying of Hillel the Elder
As an illustration the Alter Rebbe cites what Hillel the Elder told his students, and it is worth seeing the Midrash in full. In Vayikra Rabbah the verse in Mishlei, "a kind man does good to his own soul," is expounded on Hillel the Elder, and two accounts are brought there:
When he would take leave of his students, he would walk along with them. His students asked him: "Rebbe, where are you going?" He said: "To do a mitzvah." They asked: "And what mitzvah is that?" He said: "To wash in the bathhouse." They asked: "Is that a mitzvah?" He said: "Yes," and he gave them an illustration: just as the statues and furnishings in a king's palace are cleaned, so too his body is like a furnishing that requires cleaning.
"Another explanation": when he would take leave of his students, he would walk along with them. His students asked him: "Rebbe, where are you going?" He said: "לגמול חסד עם הדין אכסניא בגו ביתא" ("to do a kindness with this guest in my house"), meaning the guest staying with him, whom he must feed. They asked: "כל יום אית לך אכסניא?" ("do you have a guest every single day?"). He said: "והדא נפשא עלובתא לאו אכסניא היא בגו גופא? יומא דין היא הכא, למחר לית היא הכא" ("and is this poor soul not a guest within the body? Today it is here, tomorrow it is not here").
Notice what Hillel was talking about: his body or his soul? His words were "והדא נפשא עלובתא" ("this poor soul"), and the Alter Rebbe seems to shift the wording slightly. In the Tanya he writes: "כמאמר הלל הזקן לתלמידיו כשהיה הולך לאכול היה אומר שהוא הולך לגמול חסד עם העלובה והענייה" ("as Hillel the Elder said to his students, that when he went to eat he would say he was going to do a kindness with the lowly and poor one").
There are two points here. First, the Alter Rebbe adds the word "והענייה" ("and poor"), which is not in the original. The reason: in the Gemara in Gittin, "עלובה" means brazen, so the Alter Rebbe clarifies that here the intent is not brazen but poor and pitiful.
Second, Hillel said "נפשא עלובתא," the poor soul, while the Alter Rebbe explains that he meant his body. The explanation is simple: the body on its own is nothing but a piece of flesh, so who is it that eats? The life force within the body, that energy which animates the whole system and derives pleasure from it. That is what Hillel meant by "נפשא עלובתא": the vitality in his body, the one that eats, drinks and washes.
And why would Hillel say such a thing about himself? Because it was "like a stranger" to him. He was saying, as it were: yes, I eat every day and drink every day, but this is only a favor I am doing for something that trails along after me; it is not the main thing. That is why he called it an act of kindness: he is feeding his animal, for if he does not feed it, the animal will see to it that the soul cannot learn and cannot daven. There is no choice, the engine needs fuel. And when a person fills his car with gas, it is not because he wants to give the car a present; it is because he wants to get somewhere, and for that the car needs fuel.
In the Alter Rebbe's words: "כי הוא עצמו אינו רק נפש האלוקית לבדה, כי היא לבדה מחיה גופו ובשרו, שהרע שהיה בנפש החיונית המלובשת בדמו ובשרו נתהפך לטוב ונכלל בקדושת נפש האלוקית ממש בצדיקים" ("for he himself is nothing other than the nefesh ha'Elokis alone, since it alone animates his body and flesh, because in tzaddikim the evil that had been in the vitalizing soul clothed in their blood and flesh has been transformed into good and is literally absorbed into the holiness of the nefesh ha'Elokis"). In Hillel the Elder, his entire essence had become nefesh ha'Elokis; all of him had turned into good and holiness.
All of this applies to tzaddikim, who are a different world entirely, which is why it is said as a parenthetical remark. The beinoni is not like that. His "I," as we learned, is the nefesh habahamis, and therefore it is up to him to crush it, because if it is not crushed it blocks up the entire system. How does one crush it, and what is one supposed to do? Let us turn to the next page.
"Far from Hashem with the utmost distance"
This is the conclusion a person must draw for himself once he has understood that he himself is the animal: "ואם כן הוא רחוק מה' בתכלית הריחוק" ("and if so, he is far from Hashem with the utmost distance"). Let the beinoni look in the mirror and say to himself: true, I am careful with the light mitzvos as with the severe ones, and everyone says of me "you are a tzaddik," but the truth is that I am as far away as can be, because in the inner core of what I am there is still no bittul.
And how can he tell whether he is in fact far? "שהרי כח המתאווה שבנפשו הבהמית יכול גם כן להתאוות לדברים האסורים שהם נגד רצונו יתברך" ("for the faculty of desire in his nefesh habahamis is also capable of desiring forbidden things, which are against His blessed will"). Fantasies of forbidden things still rise in his mind from time to time, even though, God forbid, he has no intention of actually doing them.
For example: a God fearing person is sitting on Shabbos, and suddenly a thought passes through his mind: how nice it would be to have a hot cup of tea right now. He has no hot water in the house, he prepared nothing before Shabbos, and there is no way for him to make any. The second thought, "let me go and heat some up," never even occurs to him, since today is Shabbos, and he never reaches that stage at all. And yet the wish itself, "if only I had a hot cup of tea now," does arise in him, and that is a desire.
"אף שאינו מתאווה לעשותם בפועל ממש ח\"ו, רק שאינם מאוסים אצלו באמת כבצדיקים" ("even though he does not desire actually to do them, God forbid; it is only that they are not truly repulsive to him as they are to tzaddikim"), as was explained earlier. Were he a tzaddik, not only would it not occur to him to do the thing, he would not even think about it, and it would have no relevance to him whatsoever.
So let the beinoni say to himself: how is it that I am thinking about this? And who is raising these thoughts in me? They are not being thrown at me from outside; they come from within. And if so, what is my inside? An animal. It turns out that on the inside I am an animal, and I am utterly far.
What is gained by this line of thought?
A great deal is gained, and that is the bittush: that a person should not imagine to himself that he has already reached this or that peak, but should instead recognize where he stands, as in "who is wise? One who recognizes his place." Once he recognizes his place, he will see that more work is demanded of him, and this will open his heart. Then contemplation of the greatness of Hashem will ignite his heart, and he will say: I want to be close, I am still lacking, and he will actually do something in order to come closer. But if he does not feel his lowly state at all, nothing takes hold in him.
And in this, in the very fact that forbidden things can arise in his thoughts even though he does not do them, "הוא גרוע ומשוקץ ומתועב יותר מבעלי חיים הטמאים ושקצים ורמשים, כנ\"ל" ("he is worse and more detestable and abominable than the impure animals and the creeping things, as above"), as we learned at length in earlier chapters. None of the animals, creeping or crawling creatures in the world ever conceives of doing something against the Creator's will, nor are they even capable of it; whereas man, who was given free choice, is capable of doing the greatest foolishness in the world. So he says to himself: I am worse than the animal. It cannot, and I can.
On this the Alter Rebbe brings the verse "ואנוכי תולעת ולא איש" ("and I am a worm and not a man"). Many ask: what is the proof from this verse? The point being made is that man is worse than the animals, not merely that he is like them. The explanation is that when a worm is a worm, there is nothing wrong with that, since that is what it is supposed to be. But "and I am a worm and not a man": when a person is supposed to be a "man" and he conducts himself like a worm, rooting around after physical and animal things, then he is worse than the worm. This is perhaps one of the allusions the Alter Rebbe is drawing from the verse here.
The Alter Rebbe closes with a parenthesis, in order to head off a thought liable to creep into a person's heart. On the one hand he is saying about himself that he is worse and more detestable than animals, and suddenly the objection arises in him: am I really that bad? After all, from time to time I am aroused during davening, as we learned in chapter 13, that the beinoni is aroused at the time of prayer.
To this he writes: "וגם כשמתגברת בו נפשו האלוקית לעורר האהבה לה' בשעת התפילה, אינה באמת לאמיתו לגמרי, מאחר שחולפת ועוברת אחר התפילה, כנ\"ל סוף פרק י\"ג" ("and even when his nefesh ha'Elokis prevails in him to arouse love for Hashem during prayer, it is not completely true in the fullest sense, since it passes and vanishes after davening, as above at the end of chapter 13"). In chapter 13 the Alter Rebbe used this very statement on the positive side: since he is able to arouse that love every single day, it counts as truth. Here he takes the identical statement to the other side: after all, it is not a permanent state, and since it has to be set in motion anew each time, that is a sign that it is not him himself. Were it really him, it would flow naturally and of its own accord.
In summary: in this section we completed the parenthetical remark about the tzaddik, for whom the nefesh ha'Elokis is "the man" and the body is no more than "the flesh of a man," as in Hillel the Elder's saying that he was going to do a kindness with "the lowly and poor one," the vitality within his body, which is nothing but a guest that is here today and gone tomorrow. The beinoni, by contrast, is "far from Hashem with the utmost distance," since the faculty of desire in his nefesh habahamis is capable of desiring forbidden things even though he has no desire to actually do them, and in this he is worse and more abominable than the impure animals, which have no free choice. With this an important stage in a person's self assessment has been completed: even one who has never stumbled into sin, and even in the hypothetical case of someone born a beinoni who has no memory of any past misdeeds, still has the tools to recognize his smallness, by looking inward and seeing that inside he is an animal, and that the forbidden thoughts that arise in him come from a well developed and well nurtured animal. The purpose of bittush is not sadness or depression, God forbid, but rather that when he afterwards contemplates the greatness of Hashem he will be genuinely aroused, because he recognizes his place, and a problematic ego and an imaginary self image are no longer sealing off his senses.
Further on in the chapter we will see, with God's help, additional approaches, sharper and even more forceful, that bring a person to crush the self.