We have arrived at chapter 32 of Tanya. It is not one of the longer chapters in terms of quantity, but it is certainly one of the greatest in quality: from beginning to end, the entire chapter deals with ahavas Yisrael, the love of a fellow Jew, and its explanation. The chapter appears on folio 41 (page 81).
Chapter 32 in the editions of Tanya:
It is well known that the Alter Rebbe wrote Tanya in a first edition, and afterward a second edition appeared, also from his own pen, with slight changes. One of the most striking differences between the editions is that in the first edition, chapter 32 does not appear at all: chapter 31 is followed immediately by chapter 33. And in truth, that is the natural flow of the subjects discussed in chapters 29, 30 and 31; nothing is missing in understanding the topic even without chapter 32 in between.
In the second edition, where the Alter Rebbe himself arranged the chapters, supplied the details and the titles, and determined what each chapter would be, he inserted chapter 32 on that very page and into that very sequence of ideas. As we will see in our study, the chapter fits beautifully into the flow of the discussion, and at the same time it stands as a subject in its own right. Why did he do this? Because the Alter Rebbe wanted to stress that here lies the heart of all of Tanya, and so he placed it specifically as chapter 32, whose letters spell "lev," heart: the heart of the sefer, and also the heart of a person.
The heart of Tanya and the heart of a person:
As is known, every single mitzvah is performed with a particular limb, and each mitzvah has an inner connection to the limb through which it is carried out. There are a number of mitzvos called "chovos halevavos," duties of the heart, mitzvos fulfilled through the heart: ahavas Yisrael, the love of G-d, and others. And the mitzvah of ahavas Yisrael, about which the famous statement was said (which we will mention in this chapter) that it is the entire Torah in its entirety, is literally and practically bound up with a person's physical heart. Put simply: the health of a person's physical heart depends on his proper fulfillment of the mitzvah of "v'ahavta l're'acha kamocha," love your fellow as yourself.
The heart of pnimiyus haTorah:
Torah divides into the revealed part and the inner part, pnimiyus haTorah, and this chapter is the heart of the inner part of Torah. Its subject is ahavas Yisrael, that there be no division and no strife, and this subject is connected in a special way to pnimiyus haTorah. For consider one of the striking differences between the two:
In nigleh, the revealed Torah: study comes accompanied by questions and contradictions. The light is not seen right away; there are those who raise objections and those who refute them, and before one arrives at the clarification of the matter there are, if one may put it this way, "obstacles and hindrances" of Torah along the way to reaching the conclusion.
In pnimiyus haTorah: this is not the manner of study. There are no questions and contradictions in that way; rather, the light shines directly.
The whole of pnimiyus haTorah deals with love and unity within Torah, and ahavas Yisrael is love and unity among Jews. It emerges, then, that the heart of Torah, and all the more so the heart of pnimiyus haTorah, is bound up with the mitzvah of the heart: "v'ahavta l're'acha kamocha." This is the "heart" chapter of Tanya, and we now begin to learn it.
There are many details here and a number of distinct points, so we will study the chapter in sections: first to grasp the plain meaning of the words, and afterward we will try to appreciate the many precise nuances in the author's golden language, in which he defined so beautifully and so clearly what ahavas Yisrael actually means.
A summary of the previous chapters:
The chapter opens with the words "V'hinei al yedei kiyum hadevarim hanal," "And behold, through fulfilling the above." The word "v'hinei," behold, implies that the matter lies before a person in such a way that he can point at it and say, "here it is." In other words: by learning, understanding and internalizing what was said earlier, we will be able to reach the heart of Tanya. We must therefore remind ourselves, at least in brief, what "the above" refers to, what was explained in the preceding chapters:
Chapters 29-30: these two chapters deal with one and the same subject. The opening was the parable of the Zohar about a log of wood that the flame cannot penetrate, where there is no other way but to crush it into small pieces, and then the fire takes hold. The Zohar explains that this is a parable for the body: a person's body does not allow him to be aroused, to connect, to catch fire in davening, and there is no way to awaken his heart and his soul except through bitush haguf, crushing the body, crushing the animal part that stands in the way.
What is this crushing? On this, chapters 29 and 30 presented various lines of contemplation through which a person arrives at the conclusion that his body is despicable and loathsome. And "body" does not mean flesh alone, for flesh in itself is nothing; it means the body together with the nefesh hachiyunis, the vital soul, that animates it and gives it the vitality to eat, to drink, to think, to see and to hear. When a person contemplates this body, which the Holy One created and gave him, as it is in and of itself, he reaches the conclusion that it is despicable and loathsome: a body capable of transgressing the will of G-d, that does not allow him to rise to what is demanded of him and constantly drags him toward trivialities. We will not repeat here all the length at which we studied these chapters.
Chapter 31: this conclusion, that one's body should be despicable and loathsome in his eyes, is not a pleasant conclusion, since the feeling that accompanies it brings a person to sadness, to bitterness, to depression and to collapse. So what, then, is gained by it after all? On this the Alter Rebbe explained in chapter 31 that there is sometimes benefit in such a low mood for a short time, but one must not sink into it.
And why must one not sink into it? Not because the conclusion is untrue: the body really is despicable and loathsome, and we do not retract that conclusion. Rather, a person must know that he also has a neshamah, literally a part of G-d above, and the neshamah is the essential thing in him and the very purpose for which he is here, not the depression. The neshamah is connected to the Holy One at every moment, and when he performs mitzvos and learns Torah, for every single second in which he succeeded in joining his body to the Divine will through the power of the G-dly soul shining within him, he should rejoice with the joy of a person released from prison: like someone who was shut in a place where he saw no daylight, and when he comes outside he delights in every breath of air and every ray of light that he did not have before. So too the neshamah should awaken joy at every single moment in which a person manages to fulfill one more mitzvah, to learn one more minute of Torah, to connect to G-dliness, rather than sinking into disgust with the body below.
To summarize: in this section we considered what is unique about chapter 32, which does not appear in the first edition of Tanya and which the Alter Rebbe inserted in the second edition as the "heart" of the sefer. We saw that the mitzvah of ahavas Yisrael is the mitzvah of the heart, connected even to a person's physical heart, and that it is the heart of pnimiyus haTorah, which in its entirety deals with love and unity. We also reviewed the previous chapters in brief: bitush haguf and the contemplation of the body as despicable and loathsome (chapters 29-30), and, in contrast, the joy in the neshamah, which is literally a part of G-d above (chapter 31).
In the next section we will turn to the words of the chapter itself, "And behold, through fulfilling the above," and examine the Alter Rebbe's great novel insight regarding ahavas Yisrael.