In the previous section we spoke about the bas kol, the heavenly voice that rouses a person to return to his Creator, and about the question of why it is specific people who happen to find themselves within its 'reception zone.' Now let us come back to the subject and clarify: what actually takes place inside a person when the bas kol awakens him and he decides to draw close?
Does the bas kol change him from within? Does a person who had coarse character traits suddenly, in one moment, become a person of refined traits? No. The bas kol is nothing more than an external push. For a real change to take place, the work is left to the person himself: he has to labor hard, to change himself from the inside slowly, and only over time will his situation be different. An awakening from the outside has no power to produce an inner change. There is no external 'boom' that transforms a person from within.
Yetzias Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt: three stages:
When the Jewish people were in Egypt they were sunk in the forty nine gates of impurity. You cannot take them out of such a state all at once and announce, 'From now on you are out, and that is that.' There is no hocus pocus, and there is no drastic leap from the lowest state to the highest in a single moment.
Stage one: fleeing. First a person has to make a decision out of an inner kabbolas ol, an acceptance of the yoke of Heaven: yes, I was sunk in everything I was sunk in, but I am leaving it and I no longer want it. He has not yet changed; the cravings have not disappeared and they still confuse his mind. But the first, basic decision is: I am running away.
Stage two: gradual work. After the escape a person begins to work on himself bit by bit. That is exactly what the Jewish people did for forty nine days: sefiras ha'omer, daily work on the middos, one trait after another.
Stage three: Mattan Torah. At the end of those forty nine days the Jewish people stood at the foot of Har Sinai, ready to receive the Torah, after they had labored on themselves and all their middos had been refined: forty nine days corresponding to the forty nine gates of impurity, and through them they entered the forty nine gates of holiness.
This inner, psychological reality played itself out on the practical level too: the Jewish people come to Pharaoh and tell him that they are going only a three days' journey. That is precisely what a person says to his own 'Pharaoh,' to his yetzer hara: I am not leaving you completely, right now I am running away, give me a break. To the yetzer tov a person says, 'I am going with you forever.' But to the yetzer hara you do not announce that you are turning a hundred and eighty degrees in one moment; you say, 'For now I am fleeing, with all my strength.'
Hence the approach: rejoice in every single mitzvah you do; and if you stumbled and leaned after the animal side of yourself, flee from it right now, leave it and do not sink into it.
In the words of the Alter Rebbe in the text: "אלא מפני שהרע שבנפשות ישראל עדיין היה בתוקפו בחלל השמאלי, כי לא פסקה זוהמתן עד מתן תורה" ("but because the evil in the souls of Israel was still in its full strength in the left chamber of the heart, for their contamination did not cease until the Giving of the Torah"). The inner evil found within every Jew was still in full force, and until Mattan Torah the zuhama, the contamination, remained in them, growing less from day to day.
"Mashcheini acharecha narutza":
The first chapter of Shir Hashirim says: "משכני אחריך נרוצה הביאני המלך חדריו" ("Draw me, after You we will run; the King has brought me into His chambers"). Chassidus notes an inconsistency in the wording of the verse: "משכני", "draw me," is singular, and accordingly it should have continued "after You I will run." Instead the verse says "נרוצה", "we will run," in the plural, and then immediately returns to the singular, "הביאני", "He brought me." Chassidus explains that the three expressions in the verse are the three stages of the Exodus from Egypt:
"משכני", "draw me." The Holy One drew the person, but only his nefesh ha'elokis, his divine soul; the nefesh habahamis, the animal soul, remained in its animality and did not change.
"אחריך נרוצה", "after You we will run." Now both of them together: the animal soul too begins to change and to run.
"הביאני המלך חדריו", "the King has brought me into His chambers." This is Mattan Torah: we entered inside and received the Torah.
"רק מגמתם ופניתם לצאת נפשם האלוקית מגלות הסטרא אחרא היא טומאת מצרים ולדבקה בו יתברך" ("their whole aim and intent was that their divine soul should go out of the exile of the sitra achra, which is the impurity of Egypt, and cleave to Him"). This is the inner aim a Jew must have: in the first stage you flee the situation, and afterwards you leave it behind slowly.
Here the Alter Rebbe brings three verses:
"ה' עוזי ומעוזי ומנוסי ביום צרה" ("Hashem, my strength, my stronghold and my refuge on the day of distress"). Three expressions: He is my strength, He is my stronghold, and He is the place to which I can flee. I flee to Him and escape my situation.
"מגיני וקרן ישעי משגבי ומנוסי" ("my shield, the horn of my salvation, my fortress and my refuge"). Here only two expressions: He is my fortress and my support, and He is the place I flee to.
"והוא מנוס לי" ("and He is a refuge for me"). Only one expression.
On this last phrase the Rebbe places a question mark, since it requires investigation where such a verse is to be found: nowhere in all of Tanach does this exact sequence of words appear, and the Alter Rebbe has combined several expressions here and presented them as the wording of a verse.
In his notes on Tanya, written in the language of Kabbalah and the inner dimension, Reb Levi Yitzchak, the Rebbe's father, explains why the first verse has three expressions, the second two and the third one: they correspond to the levels of evil within a person. The most severe is the evil of action, and from it a person flees with three expressions; after it comes the evil of speech, and after that the evil of thought. It is worth noting that Pharaoh's three officers, the chief butcher, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker (sar hatabachim, sar hamashkim, sar ha'ofim), form the acronym tamei, impure. A person is asked to flee from this 'tamei,' from these officers, and that flight is done by way of escape.
In the future to come: not in flight:
In the future to come, when Hashem will remove the spirit of impurity from the earth, when Moshiach comes and we go out of exile, it will be altogether different, and we will not flee the way we left Egypt. The verse says explicitly: "ובמנוסה לא תלכון כי הולך לפניכם ה'" ("you shall not go out in flight, for Hashem goes before you"). In Egypt it says "וילך מאחריהם", "and He went behind them," whereas in the future redemption "He goes before you." In Egypt we were sunk in evil and flight was a necessity; but after all the work of exile, when the Jewish people have labored on themselves and have become entirely pure and clean, there is no longer any need to flee from evil. The evil vanishes, there is nothing left to flee from, all is good and all are meritorious.
This is the inner message of the chapter: the evil in a person need not stand in the way of his joy. The Jewish people rejoiced at their exodus from Egypt even though the evil was still inside them; they did not escape it and leave it behind except over the course of forty nine days of work.
The close of the chapter: a descent for the sake of an ascent:
At the end of the chapter the Alter Rebbe adds one more point to contemplate, so that the teshuvah should have even greater force: "להיות בחינת תשובה זו ביתר שאת ויתר עוז מעומקא דליבא" ("so that this teshuvah should be with even greater intensity and greater strength, from the depths of the heart"), and so that the soul's joy should be increased as well.
Until now we have been speaking of one approach: you have a body that gets in the way and you have a soul that connects to G-dliness, so rejoice in the soul and pay the body no mind. At the close of the chapter the Alter Rebbe says that the truth runs deeper: pay attention precisely to the body, because whenever you connect your soul to G-dliness you are not connecting it alone, you are bringing the body along with it. Your joy is therefore all the greater, since you are causing the body too to be connected, and it emerges that the descent of the soul into the body was worth it: a descent for the sake of an ascent, in which a person accomplishes something new that did not exist before.
In the words of the chapter: "כאשר ישיב אל לבו דעת ותבונה לנחמו מעצבונו ויגונו, לאמר כנ\"ל" ("when he takes to heart knowledge and understanding to comfort himself from his sadness and grief, saying as above"). Everything explained in chapters twenty nine through thirty one is true, "אך אני לא עשיתי את עצמי" ("but I did not make myself"): we did not create the body, we did not fashion for ourselves such an obstructive animal, and we did not put ourselves into this situation. The Holy One placed us in it. "ולמה עשה ה' כזאת, להוריד חלק מאורו יתברך הממלא וסובב כל עלמין וכולא קמיה כלא חשיב, והלבישו במשכא דחויא וטיפה סרוחה" ("and why did Hashem do such a thing, to bring down a part of His light, which fills all worlds and encompasses all worlds, and before whom all is considered as nothing, and clothe it in the skin of the serpent and a putrid drop?"). Such a lofty soul, from such an exalted place, the Holy One clothed in this lowly state. As it were, He took a risk in doing so, and for what purpose?
[Here a question arises: with Adam Harishon this was not the situation, and only after the sin of the Tree of Knowledge did evil enter. But the Gemara expounds the verse "נורא עלילה על בני אדם" ("awesome in His doings toward mankind") to mean that even the sin of the Tree of Knowledge is part of the divine plan built into creation. The Holy One created such a world because He desired a dirah betachtonim, a dwelling place in the lower realms, and He wanted a low, bottom, coarse world. The entire situation in which we find ourselves is a planned situation. Not that the sin was planned, G-d forbid, but the potential to sin and the lowliness of the state are a given in which the Creator of the world has placed us.]
[From this we can also understand why a baby cries when it comes out into the air of the world at the very moment everyone else is rejoicing: it has just arrived from such a lofty place, and it has no understanding at all of where it has been sent or why it has come down into such a lowly state. "Why has Hashem done this?"]
And the answer: "אך אם ירידה זו היא צורך עלייה" ("but if this descent is for the sake of an ascent"). The whole descent is only so that there should be an ascent. An ascent for whom? To elevate the body. For if the purpose had been to elevate the soul alone, there were other ways to do that; but the soul was sent specifically into a body. Certainly the soul is elevated by this as well, yet the goal is to elevate the body and physicality: "להעלות לה' כל נפש החיונית הבהמית שמקליפת נוגה וכל לבושיה, הן בחינת מחשבה דיבור ומעשה שלה, על ידי התלבשותן במעשה דיבור ומחשבת התורה" ("to raise up to Hashem the entire vital animal soul that stems from kelipas nogah, together with all its garments, meaning its thought, speech and action, by having them clothed in the action, speech and thought of Torah"). 'Body' here means the vital soul and all the physical, material faculties in a person, all of which are harnessed for the sake of holiness: when a person learns, davens and performs mitzvos with thought, speech and action, he draws the body along with him into holiness. That is the goal.
From here on, let a person not complain and say: why did You bring me down into the darkness? He was brought down precisely so that the profits should be great. A big risk brings a big return; a cautious, calculated risk brings small returns. The Holy One took a great risk because He is relying on us to bring Him great returns, and every single one of us was sent here for exactly that purpose: to bring the Holy One genuine nachas ruach.
[True, at the beginning of Tanya we are told about the 'tzaddik v'tov lo,' in whom the evil has been driven out entirely and who has transformed even his body into holiness. But that is not a level within everyone's reach, and it is not the goal demanded of every person. The goal is to refine over the course of a hundred and twenty years, to fight and to bring in one more point of light and another point of light, endlessly. And in the end everyone will succeed, for "לא ידח ממנו נידח", "no one who is banished will remain banished from Him."]
"כמו שיתבאר לקמן עניין העלאה זו באריכות, איך שהיא תכלית בריאת העולם" ("as this matter of elevation will be explained later at length, that it is the purpose of the creation of the world"). In chapter thirty six the Alter Rebbe will explain that this is the purpose of creation.
And from this comes the conclusion with which the Alter Rebbe seals the chapter: "אם כן זאת אעשה וזאת תהיה כל מגמתי כל ימי חלדי, לכל בהן חיי רוחי ונפשי" ("if so, this I will do and this shall be my whole aim all the days of my fleeting life, to include in them the life of my spirit and my soul"), to invest in them, in Torah and mitzvos, his entire life and his entire soul. "כמו שכתוב אליך ה' נפשי אשא, דהיינו לקשר מחשבתי ודיבורי במחשבתו ודיבורו יתברך, והן הן גופי הלכות הערוכות לפנינו" ("as it is written, 'To You, Hashem, I lift up my soul,' meaning to bind my thought and my speech to His thought and His speech, and these are the very halachos set out before us"). When a person learns halachos and immerses himself in them, he is binding his speech and his thought to the Holy One, "וכן מעשה במעשה המצוות" ("and likewise action, through the performance of the mitzvos").
"שלכן נקראת התורה משיבת נפש" ("and this is why the Torah is called 'that which restores the soul'"). "תורת ה' תמימה משיבת נפש", "the Torah of Hashem is perfect, restoring the soul": the Torah returns the soul to its source and to its lofty root. And it is not only the divine soul that it returns to its source, it also lifts up the animal soul. Of this it is said: "פקודי ה' ישרים משמחי לב" ("the precepts of Hashem are upright, gladdening the heart").
To summarize: in this section we learned that the bas kol is no more than an external push, while the inner change comes about through gradual work: first fleeing the situation, then daily work on the middos (the forty nine days of the Omer), and finally Mattan Torah and the entry into the forty nine gates of holiness. These three stages are hinted at in the verse "משכני אחריך נרוצה הביאני המלך חדריו." We looked at the three expressions of flight in the verses and Reb Levi Yitzchak's explanation that they correspond to the evil of action, of speech and of thought; at the future redemption, which will not be in flight, because the evil will already have been nullified; and at the close of the chapter, that the descent into the body is a descent for the sake of an ascent, to elevate the body and the vital soul through the thought, speech and action of Torah and mitzvos, and thereby to add force to one's teshuvah and joy to one's soul.
And here is the summary of the whole theme from the beginning of chapter twenty eight onward: a person who suffers from timtum halev, a dullness of heart, and cannot manage to be aroused, has a long road of avodah ahead of him, a serious 'scrubbing' through contemplating his lowly state. For a short while such contemplation will indeed bring his mood down, "how did I come to such a low place?", but immediately afterward he will grasp the purpose and the goal of it all: to use every possible moment to do a good deed, to learn the Torah of Hashem, to daven, to lift himself up and to connect to the divine truth all his days through teshuvah. This recognition should bring a person to great joy in every single moment. As the well known saying has it: joy may not be a mitzvah, but where joy is able to take a person, no mitzvah can take him. A person who lives with joy and uplift will without a doubt reach the very highest goals, until we all merit to rejoice in the joy of the redemption, immediately and literally now, with Hashem's help.
In the next section we will continue, with Hashem's help, to chapter thirty two.