In the previous section we learned that the very fact that his soul is a soul capable of sinning is itself grounds for a broken heart, and also that he should call to mind the sins of his youth. Now we continue with the next piece of advice: a full accounting of everything he has thought, said and done up to today.
He will not find actual sins, since we are speaking of a person who has none. But he must examine himself and ask whether all his thoughts and words, from the first to the last, came from the side of kedushah (holiness) or, G-d forbid, from the side of tumah (impurity).
And "tumah" here does not mean specifically forbidden thoughts. "Tumah" means anything that is not kedushah, as the Alter Rebbe writes here, building on what we learned in chapter 6: "כל המחשבות והדיבורים והמעשים אשר לא לה' המה ולרצונו ולעבודתו, שזהו פירוש לשון סטרא אחרא" ("all the thoughts, words and deeds that are not directed to G-d, to His will and to His service, which is the meaning of the term sitra achra"). In chapter 6 we learned at length that the kelipah has no title, name or description of its own; the only definition one can give to the forces of evil is "the other side" - you have to know what kedushah is, and whatever is not kedushah is sitra achra. It follows that it is enough that a thing was not done for the sake of Heaven for it to fall under kelipah, and even though it is only kelipas nogah, it is still kelipah.
And although we are speaking of things that are already past, the very memory that he once had such thoughts, words or deeds is itself what brings him to sadness and a broken heart in the present.
And it is well known, "כי כל עת שהאדם מחשב מחשבות קדושות נעשה מרכבה בעת זו להיכלות הקדושה שמהן מושפעות מחשבות הללו" ("that whenever a person thinks holy thoughts, he becomes at that moment a chariot for the heichalos of holiness, from which such thoughts flow"). What is a holy thought? A thought that a person can honestly tell himself, without fooling himself, that he would have been thinking even if at that moment he were standing in shul on Yom Kippur, at Neilah, beside the Aron Kodesh: a thought that fits the place and the time. When his thought is holy, it is the heichalos of kedushah that are activating his mind at that moment, and he becomes a chariot for them. And the reverse is equally true: if his thoughts are not holy, he becomes at that moment an impure chariot for the heichalos of tumah, from which all evil thoughts flow, and the same applies to speech and action.
The result is that a person scrutinizes what passes through him far more closely: not sins alone, but thoughts, words and deeds as well, and it is enough that they were simply not holy.
"להיות ממארי דחושבנא" - "to be among the masters of reckoning":
The Alter Rebbe was precise in his wording. He did not simply write that one should make an accounting; he prefaced the entire accounting with the words "לקיים מאמר הזוהר הקדוש להיות ממארי דחושבנא" ("to fulfill the teaching of the holy Zohar, to be among the masters of reckoning"). A most important addition is being made here: there is one way of doing an accounting and there is another. The bottom line will come out the same either way, but the feeling is nothing alike. It is the difference between the accountant and the owner of the business.
The accountant: he knows exactly what is going on in the business, how much profit and how much loss, what was bought and what was sold, and he tracks every development. Everything with him is precise. He has one job: that the numbers add up and that he know where every item went. Even when he comes at the end of the month and informs the owner that the business is losing money and that he is bankrupt, he lays out the reasons and pinpoints exactly where the decline began. And once he has handed in the report, he goes home, goes to bed and sleeps soundly, because he did his job faithfully and he has an explanation for every detail.
The owner: he does not sleep that night. Knowing the reasons does not calm him in the slightest. What good is a reason to him? He is bankrupt.
This is the Alter Rebbe's demand. A person may come and make an accounting and say: true, I am in the minus, but I have a reason. The environment was not good, I was not raised properly, that day I was not in the right frame of mind. It is entirely possible that every one of those reasons is a hundred percent valid. But if the reasons calm him down, that is a sign that he is not the owner, a sign that he does not grasp at all what is at stake here. The accounting has to be done like an owner, not like an accountant: a "mari dechushbena," a master of the reckoning, someone to whom it actually matters whether he is in the minus or the plus.
Like the story of the child who came late to class. The teacher asked him, "Why are you late?" and the child gave an excuse. Said the teacher: "I ask you a question, and you answer me with an excuse?" What did the excuse accomplish? At the end of the day he was still late.
And there is a clever reading of the verse in Tehillim, "If you see a thief, ve'teiretz imo": a thief always has a teirutz, an excuse, for why he did it, and even if his excuse is a good one, he is still a thief, and the excuse does not help him.
"We did everything" - and we did not succeed:
There is a striking story on this theme. In the days of the Rebbe Rashab, the fifth Rebbe in the Chabad line, a conference was held in Russia dealing with a matter of great consequence for all of Klal Yisrael. The rabbonim discussed various ways of influencing the government to annul the harsh decree, they sent emissaries, they made every sort of effort, and in the end they did not succeed. They did everything that could possibly be done, the absolute maximum, and nothing worked. Present at the conference were the Rebbe Rashab and many of the gedolei Yisrael, among them the Gaon Rabbi Chaim of Brisk. Rabbi Chaim walked into the Rebbe Rashab's room and found him sitting and weeping like a small child over the outcome. Said Rabbi Chaim: "Lubavitcher Rebbe, we did everything that could be done, we did everything." The Rebbe Rashab answered him: "But we did not succeed."
That is the difference. While you are still working, you can say, "I did everything." But when you come to the accounting, there is no such thing as "I did everything." The only question is the result on the ground.
And when a person makes such an accounting and finds himself in the minus, he is genuinely broken. And what does that brokenness accomplish? His soul becomes more refined and his heart opens up more, because of the bitush, the crushing, like the parable of the block of wood: once it has been pounded and split, the fire catches in its fine slivers.
So far the Alter Rebbe has listed several levels of this accounting:
The very fact that his soul is a soul capable of sinning. That alone is already one minus.
That he recall the sins of his youth.
That he make an accounting of all his deeds, words and thoughts.
And if even these do not help, the Alter Rebbe adds: "עוד ישים אל לבו" ("further, let him take to heart"). If a person cannot manage to make an accounting from what passes through him while he is awake, let him draw on what passes through him while he is asleep: "רוב חלומותיו הבל ורעות רוח" ("most of his dreams are vanity and a vexation of spirit").
The emptiness of dreams:
A person wakes up and remembers, more or less, some of what he dreamt (and the Gemara says that if several days pass and a person does not dream at all, that is not a good sign). And what does he dream about? Nonsense and empty things.
Generally a person dreams about whatever concerns him and troubles him; someone deeply preoccupied with something will dream about it at night as well. On the positive side, it is told of gedolei Yisrael that they kept a pad and pen beside their beds so that the moment they woke they could write down the chiddushei Torah that had been revealed to them in a dream. There are sefarim of she'eilos u'teshuvos from which halachos are ruled, whose source lies in the dreams of tzaddikim in which words of Torah and novel Torah insights were revealed to them. But every person knows himself and knows that he is not in that category, and that most of his dreams are simply nonsense.
Sometimes a person comes and says: I dreamt one night that something would happen, and a week later it actually happened. Such a thing can indeed occur, and then the person begins to imagine that he has something of prophecy in him. The holy Zohar discusses this at length: a person should not get drawn into such fantasies. It comes from the sitra achra, which is out to confuse him, and which will sometimes even show him things about the future, some of them accurate and some of them not. It is nothing but emptiness and foolishness.
A point of precision is in order: the Alter Rebbe writes "רוב חלומותיו" ("most of his dreams") and not "all of his dreams," since we are speaking of the beinoni, and there are dreams that do carry a sign and a meaning:
"Taanis chalom": there is such a concept as a fast for a dream, for someone who dreamt a dream that worries him and disturbs his peace of mind, a sort of calming remedy that the Almighty gave him.
Dreaming of a tzaddik: fortunate is his lot. It is written in the sefarim that tzaddikim do not appear in a person's dream unless they have decided to come to him, and that is a sign of assistance and a great merit for one who is granted it.
To summarize: in this section we learned about the cheshbon hanefesh that the beinoni makes over all his thoughts, words and deeds, not over sins alone, but over everything that is "not directed to G-d, to His will and to His service," since when a person thinks a holy thought he becomes a chariot for the heichalos of kedushah, and in the opposite case an impure chariot for the heichalos of tumah. We examined the precise wording "mari dechushbena," the master of the reckoning and not the accountant, the one whom excuses do not calm, like the owner who cannot sleep at night, and as the Rebbe Rashab put it: "But we did not succeed." And finally we learned the further piece of advice: "עוד ישים אל לבו רוב חלומותיו הבל ורעות רוח" ("further, let him take to heart that most of his dreams are vanity and a vexation of spirit").
In the next section we will continue with the Alter Rebbe's words in chapter 29.