In the previous section we looked at the Alter Rebbe's advice to the beinoni who suffers from timtum halev, a dullness and numbness of the heart: the avodah of bittush, of crushing and breaking the self. To get to the root of the matter, let us first lay out a general principle that runs through the whole Tanya. From it we will understand both why bittush works and how one actually goes about doing it.
The Tanya comes, first and foremost, to speak about a person's inner avodah, the work of the soul. Not the technical side of serving G-d, but the inner, soul side of it. That is also why the Alter Rebbe does not generally use the terms 'yetzer tov' and 'yetzer hara' (although he does mention them), but rather 'nefesh Elokis' and 'nefesh habahamis', the G-dly soul and the animal soul. A nefesh is something inward, and here we are speaking about what a person is on the inside.
“והיא המתלבשת בדם האדם להחיות הגוף” - “and it is clothed in a person's blood to give life to the body”:
Already in chapter 1, on the second page of the Tanya, when the Alter Rebbe comes to define the two souls within a person, he begins with the animal soul and tells us where it is found and how one can identify it: “והיא המתלבשת בדם האדם להחיות הגוף”, “and it is clothed in a person's blood to give life to the body.” At first glance this needs explaining. Is the very fact that a person is alive an animal matter? A tzaddik is also alive, and of King David it says “ולבי חלל בקרבי”, that he had no yetzer hara at all. Was his body not alive?
Rather, as has already been explained, the intent is to the basic inner sense a person carries with him through his daily life: what is primary for him and what is secondary. Whose existence is to him obvious, simple and self-evident, and who is present in his life as a guest, as second-class, as an appendix.
Two opposite ways of looking at life:
What is primary is his own existence: A person feels that the world is the main thing, the body is the main thing, and so too the money, nature and his natural surroundings. “This is where I was born, this is where I am comfortable, I came into the world in order to get around and enjoy.” And this does not necessarily mean a coarse, animalistic person. He may well be a Torah observant Jew, careful with a light mitzvah as with a severe one, fulfilling everything required of him, and still feel that the reality of the world and of nature is what is primary for him. He says: I live here, I am comfortable here, and my body and my physical life are to be cultivated. It is just that I know this has to be done according to the rules of the Torah, and I do nothing that the Torah forbids. But inside, he feels as though the Torah came for his sake, to give him his own completeness.
What is primary is the Almighty: A person feels that the One who is truly here is the Almighty, and that Torah and mitzvos are the main thing, indeed everything, as the Mishnah puts it: “אני לא נבראתי אלא לשמש קוני”, “I was created only to serve my Maker.” Was he then not created? Of course he was, but his entire creation is nothing other than to serve his Maker. Since the Torah says “וקשרתם לאות על ידך”, he needs a hand with which to fulfill the mitzvah of tefillin. Since one must give tzedakah to a poor person, he needs money. Since there is a mitzvah of mezuzah, he needs a house on which to affix it. The house is not the main thing, with him graciously “doing a favor” and putting up a mezuzah on it. It is the reverse: there is a mitzvah of mezuzah, and I have merited to fulfill it by having a house.
The difference between these two ways of looking at life is from one extreme to the other, as far apart as heaven and earth. And the feeling that one's own existence and one's own ego are what is primary, even in a person who keeps everything written in the Torah, comes from the nefesh habahamis. This is what the Alter Rebbe wrote in chapter 1, that its function is “to give life to the body”: to grant physicality a reality of its own. The tzaddik, by contrast, sees things in exactly the opposite way: everything that exists is G-dliness. Not that the body does not exist, but that it exists as a servant of G-dliness, and not the reverse.
This is also the point of what the Alter Rebbe is saying here in chapter 29. If a person feels a blockage and a numbness of the heart, the root of it is that his own self takes up too much room in him, and leaves no space for a G-dly feeling to seep inside. That is precisely why bittush is needed.
The kindness of Avraham and the kindness of Yishmael:
One might ask: so what? Someone for whom money is the main thing can still give a great deal of it to tzedakah. But the difference touches the very essence of the act, as we find in the difference between the kindness of Avraham Avinu and the kindness of Yishmael. Both are the middah of chessed, except that Avraham's chessed is a chessed of kedushah and Yishmael's chessed is a chessed of kelipah.
Avraham Avinu: Everything I have belongs to the poor and belongs to the Almighty, and if something is left over, I will take some for myself too. This is “ואנוכי עפר ואפר”, “I am but dust and ashes”: I am nothing.
One for whom he himself is primary (the way of Eisav): He too is willing to give to the poor, but first let me have everything I need and lack nothing, and whatever is left over, that I am willing to give to the poor as well.
Both of them had a great deal of money. The only question is what is primary and what is secondary. That is why, when guests did not come to Avraham Avinu, he had no rest; he did not eat and he was not at peace, because for him the giving is the main thing. Whereas the one whose priorities are reversed tells himself: right now there are no guests, I tried and it did not work out, and he moves on with his day. This is a question of one extreme versus the other.
This is the direction in which the Tanya is pointing a person: he must know that the main thing is G-dliness, the main thing is the Almighty. And to the beinoni whom the Alter Rebbe is addressing here he says: your timtum halev comes from the fact that your “main thing” is too big, and it needs to be cut down to size.
Here a fundamental question arises:
We have said that the person himself is the nefesh habahamis, yet in many places it is explained that the essence of a Jew is G-dliness. This emerges from the well known ruling of the Rambam in Hilchos Geirushin: if a man is compelled by beis din to give a get and he screams “I do not want to”, the get is invalid, since he must say “רוצה אני”, “I want to”, and give the get of his own free will. The halachah is therefore that he is beaten until he says “I want to.” The Rambam asks: what good is it that he says “I want to” under coercion? And he explains that the true, inner will of every Jew is to fulfill the mitzvah; that is his truth. The one screaming “I do not want to” is nothing other than the external nefesh habahamis, and once it has been given a few blows it weakens and everything falls back into place. So we see that what is primary in a person, even in a wicked person, is the nefesh Elokis. How, then, can the Tanya say here that the person himself is the nefesh habahamis?
There is no contradiction here. From the standpoint of the inner truth, every Jew is pure and unblemished; it is only that this inner truth is not always revealed in him. From the standpoint of the revealed part of him, his nefesh habahamis is “the person himself.”
And so the Alter Rebbe continues: “ועל נפש האלוקית שבו נאמר: נשמה שנתת בי”, “and of the G-dly soul within him it is said: the soul You placed within me”, with the emphasis on “בי”, “within me.” True, the neshamah is pure, but every morning a Jew declares that it was placed “within me”, inside the body, “מכלל שהאדם עצמו איננו הנשמה”, “which implies that the person himself is not the neshamah.” For the beinoni, the pure neshamah is something of a guest, “כי אם בצדיקים שבהם הוא להיפך”, “except in tzaddikim, in whom it is the reverse.”
We will now skip over an entire passage and move to the last three lines on the page, where the Alter Rebbe states regarding the beinoni:
“אבל בבינוני, מאחר שמהותה ועצמותה של נפש החיונית הבהמית שמסטרא אחרא המלובשת בדמו ובשרו לא נהפך לטוב - הרי היא היא האדם עצמו”, “but in the beinoni, since the essence and being of the animal life-soul that stems from the sitra achra, which is clothed in his blood and flesh, has not been transformed to good, it is in fact the person himself.” The nefesh habahamis is clothed in his blood, as we learned in chapter 1, and since it has not yet been transformed to good, it is his very essence.
From here: when a person engages in bittush, whom is he crushing? The nefesh habahamis. And in one sharp turn, almost without our noticing, two things are packed into this sentence:
Why bittush works: because a person is not crushing his holy essence, but rather the animal within him.
How one does bittush: the very thought that he himself is the nefesh habahamis, that is itself the bittush. A person was convinced that he is a beinoni and who knows what else, and the moment he looks into an honest mirror and sees who he really is, there is no greater bittush than that.
It is worth adding: at a farbrengen there are others who help a person with the avodah of bittush, but ordinarily, in daily life, it falls to a person to do it for himself.
In summary: In this section we learned that the Tanya deals with the inner avodah of the soul, which is why it speaks in terms of 'nefesh Elokis' and 'nefesh habahamis'. We saw that “to give life to the body” in chapter 1 means to grant physicality a reality of its own, the feeling that one's own existence is what is primary, even in someone who keeps Torah and mitzvos with the utmost precision. Set against it is the outlook of “I was created only to serve my Maker”, in which body and money serve the mitzvah, like the chessed of Avraham Avinu as opposed to the chessed of Yishmael. We also saw that there is no contradiction between the inner essence of every Jew being G-dliness (as in the Rambam's ruling that “he is compelled until he says 'I want to'”) and the Tanya's statement that from the standpoint of the revealed part “it is in fact the person himself”. And from this we derived both the reason bittush works and the way to go about it.
In the next section we will return to the passage we skipped over, and look at the path of the tzaddikim, in whom it is the reverse.