In light of all this, a Jew might well ask: the Tanya tells us that a person must divert his attention entirely from the machshavah zarah (the alien, distracting thought). Yet the Alter Rebbe is a disciple of a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, and the whole approach of elevating alien thoughts is spelled out in the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov and of the Maggid of Mezritch. Why, then, does the Alter Rebbe reject that approach?
And it is not only that he rejects it; notice how sharply he rejects it: "אל יהא שוטה לעסוק בהעלאת המידות של מחשבה זרה" ("let him not be a fool, occupying himself with elevating the middos of an alien thought"). Let a person not be a fool and busy himself with this. And about what is this said? About something the Baal Shem Tov says one should do. With language this sharp the Alter Rebbe pushes the approach away, and immediately he explains why.
"כי לא נאמרו דברים ההם אלא לצדיקים" ("for those things were said only of tzaddikim"):
To whom was it said that one should act this way, elevating that middah to holiness? Only to tzaddikim. Not to the beinoni, the intermediate man who is the subject of the Tanya, but to a true tzaddik, the one of whom it was already said at the beginning of the Tanya, "and my heart is a void within me," who has no yetzer hara at all. But if he is a true tzaddik, how does an alien thought fall into his mind in the first place? To this the Alter Rebbe continues: "שאין נופלים להם מחשבות זרות שלהם, כי אם משל אחרים" ("for the alien thoughts that fall to them are not their own, but those of others").
A true tzaddik is in the category of "for man is a tree of the field." Just as a tree has a root and branches that come out of it, and all the branches belong to that one root, so the tzaddik is the root, "the tzaddik is the foundation of the world," and attached to him are many branches, leaves and fruits. Everyone connected to him is his responsibility, and he cares for him.
How does this work in practice? When one of those connected to the tzaddik is caught in alien thoughts because he is sunk in his desires, the tzaddik has the merit, the ability and the responsibility to help him. So from Heaven they cause a thought to fall into the tzaddik's mind whose source is in that other person, not in himself. With the tzaddik it never descends, Heaven forbid, into any stirring of the heart, any attraction or enticement toward something forbidden; that is simply not relevant to him. The thought falls to him in thought alone, and he knows how to identify where it came from, how to elevate it to good, and in that way to help that Jew overcome.
It is about the tzaddik, where the thought is not his own but somebody else's, that it was said: when such a thought falls, one should raise it up, sanctify it, elevate it. But for a person who is himself down below, this has no application whatsoever.
The Previous Rebbe explains that thought is the mirror of the heart: whatever is going on in the heart finds expression in thought. An ordinary person, even a beinoni, has a yetzer hara and a nefesh habahamis (the animal soul), and the nefesh habahamis has its coarse desires, which show up in his thoughts. The beinoni's thoughts are not drawn from somebody else, as with the tzaddik; they come from himself.
So how is he supposed to elevate them, when the thought comes from below and he himself is bound up below? It is like a man who imagines he can lift himself above his own head. Even if he climbs onto the table, his head rises along with him, and he will never get above it. If the thought comes from him, he cannot take it out of himself and raise it upward. Only a tzaddik, who is up above, can draw the thought up and elevate it.
How does the tzaddik feel another person?
The tzaddik belongs to the other person, feels him, and knows what is going on with him, because he is a neshamah kelalis, an all-inclusive soul bound up with every Jew of his generation. He helps them because he feels them and feels their pain, exactly as happens within a person's own body: when the foot is pricked, the brain notices at once. How does the brain, which is up above, know what is happening down below? Because it belongs to the same body. So too with the Jewish people, which is one great body, and the tzaddikim are the heads of Israel; the head feels what is happening even at the tip of the foot.
The parable of the exhibition:
Picture an art exhibition to which various artists have come to study and to assess the artistry of each painting. One of the paintings was so vivid and lifelike, a painting of a terrifying dog, that everyone who came near it recoiled and fled and could not evaluate its artistic worth at all. Why? Because he is affected by the picture itself. Who can assess the artistry of such a painting? Precisely the one who is not affected and not stirred by the picture itself, who is able to analyze the matter coolly.
This is the difference between the beinoni and the tzaddik. When a thought falls to the beinoni, the feeling of his heart acts upon it, because he belongs to that matter, he is drawn to it and desires it, and therefore he cannot elevate it; either he recoils from the thing or he loves it. The tzaddik, by contrast, is not affected by the external side of the matter at all, and when a thought falls to him, its source is in somebody else.
Avraham Avinu in Egypt:
Here is another illustration. When Avraham Avinu went down to Egypt, he said to Sarah, "Behold now, I know that you are a woman of beautiful appearance." In the sefer Me'or Einayim by Rabbi Nachum of Chernobyl the question is raised: how is such a thing possible for a tzaddik as great as Avraham Avinu, whose whole being was immersed in G-dly, holy matters, and for whom the desires of this world and coarse physical things held no interest at all? For many years he lived with Sarah and never took note of this detail. What happened now?
The answer is spelled out in the verse itself: "ויהי כאשר הקריב לבוא מצרימה" ("and it was, as he drew near to enter Egypt"). The moment Avraham reached Egypt, he arrived at a place that is "the nakedness of the land," a low, animalistic place, so much so that Pharaoh himself later told Avraham to leave. Avraham Avinu's task was to refine the lowest sparks of Egypt, and how did he refine them? The Almighty placed in his mind a thought that came from the environment and not from him. As long as he was with himself, over all those years, such a thought never once arose in his mind; only when he entered such an environment did the thought fall to him, and as one entrusted with a G-dly mission he knew how to handle it and how to elevate it.
All of this is said about tzaddikim alone. People like us can only read that such a thing exists; it has no application to us at all.
And now to the words of the Tanya: "אבל מי שנופל לו משלו, מבחינת הרע שבלבו שבחלל השמאלי - איך יעלהו למעלה והוא עצמו מקושר למטה?" ("but one to whom it falls from his own self, from the evil in his heart in the left ventricle, how can he raise it upward when he himself is bound below?"). The thought is not alien to him at all; it is his own, drawing from his very makeup and from the evil in his heart. How could it even occur to him to make use of this thought and say to the yetzer hara: so you are arousing me with some foreign love? Fine, let us rise together with it to a proper love. That does not work, because the thought did not come from someone else; it came from him.
The practical advice:
How, then, should a person relate to an alien thought that falls to him? He should divert his attention from it completely, move on to other things, and not return to it even for a single moment of deliberate, willing thought. That is the correct way to handle the matter.
And it is worth remembering the flow of these chapters. This chapter comes to answer the person who is pained by the very fact that alien thoughts fall to him. In the previous chapter it was explained that if alien thoughts come to him in the middle of his business affairs, he need not become dejected, since he should actually rejoice that he is fulfilling the mitzvah of "and you shall not stray after your hearts." Here the question under discussion is: what about when the alien thoughts fall in the middle of prayer? We will shortly see why he need not be dejected over that either, but even before that the Alter Rebbe gives a piece of good advice: if an alien thought falls during prayer, let him divert his attention from it and not dwell on it at all.
And from here we come to the main subject of these chapters: a person to whom alien thoughts fall every single day, in every prayer, again and again. He does divert his attention, true, but the very fact that it keeps repeating itself disturbs him, and because of it he is sad. How do we give such a person the tools not to fall in spirit from the sheer constancy of the struggle with alien thoughts? That is what the rest of the chapter addresses.
"אף על פי כן" ("nevertheless"): even though he finds himself in a situation where alien thoughts fall to him during prayer, fresh every morning, and he does what is asked of him and diverts his attention, and nevertheless the situation pains him, the Alter Rebbe tells him "אל יפול לבו בקרבו" ("let his heart not fall within him"), let him not sink into low spirits over the fact that such thoughts visit him constantly, "להיות מזה עצב נבזה" ("becoming from this despondent and depressed").
An introduction: the different situations of thoughts during prayer:
There are several different situations of thoughts that fall during prayer, and the Alter Rebbe is dealing here with one particular situation. First, though, we must introduce an earlier situation, one he is not speaking about here: a person to whom alien thoughts come during prayer because he never stopped those thoughts in the first place. Before davening he is talking nonsense and idle matters, and he arrives at shul still busy with his affairs and still talking, and in the middle of all that he puts on tefillin and says the words. For such a person it is no great wonder that alien thoughts fall to him in the middle of prayer, since he has not yet begun to pray at all. These are not alien thoughts within prayer; they are the alien thoughts of before prayer, and even though he is in fact pronouncing the words of the prayer with his mouth, this is not called praying.
It is not this situation that the Alter Rebbe is addressing here; he addresses it elsewhere, and it is plainly stated in the Shulchan Aruch. There is a halachah about what a person is obligated to do before prayer, and it is printed in the Alter Rebbe's Siddur just before Shemoneh Esreh, in small letters that one sometimes hardly notices. It reads: "המתפלל צריך שיכוון בלבו פירוש המילות שמוציא בשפתיו" ("one who prays must concentrate in his heart on the meaning of the words he utters with his lips"); a person must think about the meaning of the words he is saying, as it says, "תכין לבם תקשיב אזנך" ("You will direct their heart, You will cause Your ear to listen"); "וצריך שיראה עצמו כאילו שכינה שרויה כנגדו" ("and he must see himself as if the Shechinah rests opposite him"). One who stands in prayer must see himself as standing literally before the Almighty.
To summarize: In this section we learned why the Alter Rebbe so sharply rejects any occupation with elevating alien thoughts: those teachings were said for tzaddikim alone, to whom thoughts fall not from themselves but from others, since the tzaddik is the root and a neshamah kelalis bound up with all the people of his generation, like the brain that feels the pain of the foot. The parable of the exhibition showed that only one who is unaffected by the picture can assess it, and so too only the tzaddik, who is not drawn to the matter, can elevate it, as we find with Avraham Avinu on his descent to Egypt. The beinoni, by contrast, whose thought comes from himself, cannot lift himself above his own head, and therefore the only advice is to divert his attention. We also learned that nevertheless his heart should not fall within him and he should not become despondent and depressed over this, and we introduced the situation in which there was no preparation for prayer at all, together with the halachah that one who prays must concentrate on the meaning of the words and see himself as if the Shechinah rests opposite him.
In the next section we will take up the continuation of the words of this halachah: the preparations a person is required to make before prayer, and the explanation of why one should not fall in spirit from the very struggle with alien thoughts during prayer.