In the previous section we learned that bitterness comes from the side of gevuros (severities), while joy comes from the side of chassadim (kindnesses). The heart contains both: it has a place for chesed and a place for gevurah, and the question at any given moment is simply which of the two a person is drawing on.
A summary of the stages of this hisbonenus (contemplation):
At the very first stage, right after a person contemplates what was said in the previous chapters (29 and 30), for the first few seconds he really does fall and become sad. There is nothing terrible about that; this is what we referred to with the words of Chazal, "mineih uveih abba lizil beih nargah" (the axe handle for cutting the tree is taken from the tree itself) and "pagah bo kayotzei bo" (he was met by one of his own kind). But immediately afterward he does not remain in depression and despair, G-d forbid; he moves on to bitterness.
As is well known, the entire teaching of Chassidus is built on the fact that a person has a neshamah, that it is alive within him, and therefore he is never a lost case. There is no lost case. As the famous saying goes: just as you believe it is possible to ruin, believe it is possible to repair. These are the points that will keep him from falling into depression and despair, and they are what will ultimately bring him to joy, as we will see later in the chapter.
It is like a businessman who hears from his accountant that the past fiscal year closed at a loss. If he is a businessman in his soul, this will not make him close the business. He will say: I lost money, it is bitter and painful to me, and from now on I will look for a better way to get out of this and not to lose again next year. That is a bitterness that leads to rebuilding, and that is the bitterness of chapter 30, which comes from gevurah of kedushah (holiness).
In the Alter Rebbe's words: "והנה לעתים צריך לעורר בחינת גבורות הקדושות, כדי להמתיק הדינים שהם בחינת נפש הבהמית ויצר הרע כששולט חס ושלום על האדם" ("At times one must arouse the aspect of the holy gevuros, in order to sweeten the dinim, which are the aspect of the nefesh habahamis and the yetzer hara when it rules over the person, G-d forbid"). Every so often there is no choice, and one must arouse this gevurah, this bitterness. A person whose yetzer hara has taken over and sealed off his feelings is in a state of din (judgment, severity), and there is no greater din than that. So one has to look for a way to sweeten the din.
How do you sweeten a din? Let us begin with a simple analogy: bitter water, how do you sweeten it? There are two ways:
Sweetening by covering over: you add sugar, syrup or good water, much like a person who has to take a bitter medicine and mixes something else into it so he will not taste it. But has the bitterness really been sweetened? No. The bitterness is still there; it has simply been covered over with other things until it loses its taste and its significance.
Sweetening at the root: a harder way, but a truer one, to turn the bitter itself into sweet.
There is an example of this in the Torah. The Jewish people arrived at a place called Marah, named for the bitter waters that were there, and the verse says, "And G-d showed him a tree, and he cast it into the waters, and the waters became sweet." Chazal differ as to what kind of tree it was, and according to one opinion it was a harduf, a bitter tree in its own right. He put a bitter tree into bitter water and the water became sweet. This was not magic, it was a divine power, and that is what it means to sweeten a din at its root.
Let us make this concrete. Every Jew has a nefesh habahamis (animal soul) that gets in the way of his davening and his learning. The Men of the Great Assembly arranged the prayers for us in stages, so that in the course of davening a person would be persuaded and arrive at a conclusion, a conclusion that even the animal within him would arrive at, until at Shema he cries out "And you shall love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart" - with both your inclinations.
In the blessings of Shema we speak of the ofanim and the chayos hakodesh, of the angels and serafim who cry out "Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh" and "Boruch kevod Hashem mimekomo." At first glance, what does the nefesh habahamis have to do with this, and how is it persuaded by what the angels are doing? The explanation in Chassidus is that the angels are called behemos and chayos, animals and beasts. That is what the prophet Yechezkel saw in the vision of the Merkavah, "the face of an ox" and "the face of a lion" - the ox is a behemah and the lion is a chayah, and both are angels called by the names of animals and beasts. And it is explained in Chassidus that from those very angels, through a long chain of hishtalshelus and descent, a person's nefesh habahamis comes into being. So when we turn to the nefesh habahamis and tell it: look how your own root and original source cries out "Boruch kevod Hashem mimekomo" - that is an appeal to the root.
The same thing happened with Yaakov Avinu. Before he met Eisav, he first met Eisav's heavenly minister, and after he overcame him and was named Yisrael, "for you have striven with the divine and with men and have prevailed," he no longer had any problem meeting Eisav himself. Once the root has submitted, the one below can be subdued as well.
It is the same here. The "din" the Jew is caught in is the yetzer hara's dominance over him. If he wants to sweeten that din and turn it to good, he has to deal with its root. And what is the root? Everything that exists in the world originates in kedushah, and only through a long chain of hishtalshelus does it become evil and kelipah. The din too has a root in kedushah, and by working properly with the din of kedushah one sweetens the din of kelipah. That is why specifically a contemplation that brings a person to bitterness, since bitterness is gevurah of kedushah, is what sweetens the dinim, "כי אין הדינים נמתקים אלא בשורשם" ("for the dinim are only sweetened at their root").
By contrast, a person who says "I feel sad" and immediately breaks into joy and dancing may well enter an ecstasy of joy and be aroused for the moment, but the problem has not been solved, only covered over. Slowly the joy will wear off and the problem will return; the bitter waters are still bitter. The path of hisbonenus, on the other hand, changes the person from the inside, and that is a real change and a treatment of the situation at its root.
On this the Alter Rebbe brings the statement of Chazal, "ולכן אמרו רז"ל לעולם ירגיז אדם יצר הטוב" ("therefore our Sages said: a person should always provoke his good inclination"). The intent is not to anger the yetzer tov, but to rouse it in anger against the yetzer hara. And to which aspect does anger belong? To gevurah. In other words: whenever it is needed, a person should draw out the gevurah within his yetzer tov against the yetzer hara, and in that way be rid of it. That is the meaning of "והיינו בכל עת שרואה בנפשו שצריך לכך" ("namely, at every time when he sees in his soul that this is needed") - every time the wagon is not moving, when the numbness is holding him back and he cannot get aroused, he should awaken a bitterness in himself that will set him in front of an honest mirror of his own condition, and that will open his heart.
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In the last six lines of this passage the Alter Rebbe adds something interesting. Usually, when a person comes to ask what he should do, the answer is: joy, "serve G-d with joy," always with joy. And here the Alter Rebbe teaches us that there is one opportunity in which one should take advantage of the opening and make use of bitterness, and apart from it this is not the way. What is that opportunity? "אך שעת הכושר שהיא שעה מיוחדת וראויה לכך לרוב בני אדם, היא בשעה שהוא עצב בלאו הכי ממילי דעלמא, או כך בלי שום סיבה" ("but the opportune time, the hour that is especially suited to this for most people, is when he is in any case sad from worldly matters, or even for no reason at all"). If his spirits are down anyway, whether for a known reason or for no reason whatsoever, "אזי היא שעת הכושר להפך העצב להיות ממרי דחושבנא הנ"ל ולקיים מארז"ל לעולם ירגיז וכו' כנ"ל" ("then it is the opportune time to transform that sadness into being one of those who take an accounting, as above, and to fulfill the saying of our Sages, 'a person should always provoke,' etc.") - to make a spiritual accounting with himself.
And why specifically then? The mashpia Reb Gronem, one of the great mashpi'im of Lubavitch, explains in his commentary on Tanya three reasons for this:
A technical reason: it is an opportunity. Normally a person should be joyful, and we would never send him down the road of sadness; but once he has landed in such a situation anyway, he should use it properly.
The external conditions assist the internal ones: Chazal said that in the time of the Beis Hamikdash "there is no joy except with meat" - the meat of the shelamim offering that was eaten on the festival, and once the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed, "there is no joy except with wine." At first glance, joy is something inner and spiritual, so what place does an external act have in it? The answer is that when the external conditions are such that even the animal is happy with them, it is easier to penetrate inward to true joy; when the animal is happy, it is easier to lull it to sleep and say everything that needs to be said. And the same works in the other direction: a person for whom everything is flowing and who is in good spirits will never arrive at genuine bitterness. But when the surrounding conditions are such that the animal is already low, that is the opportunity to learn chapter 31, so that the lowness will be spiritual and genuine, coming from the side of kedushah.
"A judgment below exempts from a judgment above": why does a person suddenly become sad for no reason at all, at a time when everything is going well for him? It is explained that at that very moment he is being judged in the heavenly court, and the soul senses it even though it cannot explain it to itself; it feels that this is an hour of judgment, and so his spirits fall. And what is the solution? There is a principle, cited in Shulchan Aruch regarding the Ten Days of Teshuvah, that the beis din should sit and judge and set right whatever needs setting right at that time, because when there is a judgment below there is no judgment above. So too here: if his sadness has a known cause, the verdict above has already been issued and he lost; and if it is for no reason, then he is in the middle of the proceedings and who knows what the verdict will be. Therefore let him hurry and judge himself below, let him learn chapter 31 and arrive on his own at the conclusion of bitterness, and when they see in the heavenly court that he has already been judged below, they will exempt him from the judgment above.
Let us clarify further: there is no infringement here on free choice. The very feeling of bitterness below comes from the fact that at that moment a judgment is taking place above, and the Holy One established in His Torah that the two should not coexist: when there is a judgment below, there is no judgment above. Therefore, once a person feels that bitterness, let him hurry and judge himself and draw up a new accounting, and in that way nullify the judgment above.
Let us look closely at the wording in the text, and we will see that all three explanations are contained in it:
"The opportune time, the hour that is especially suited to this for most people, is when he is in any case sad" - this is the first explanation: once you are sad anyway, there is no need to go looking for new opportunities.
"From worldly matters, or even for no reason at all, then it is the opportune time" - this is the second explanation: once the animal is sitting in a dejected environment, it is easier to reach the right conclusions. And therefore it is "the opportune time to transform that sadness into being one of those who take an accounting, and to fulfill the saying of our Sages: a person should always provoke his yetzer tov against his yetzer hara."
"And through this he will be freed of the sadness that comes from worldly matters" - this is the third explanation: since the source of his sadness is a judgment above, by holding a judgment below he is freed from the judgment, and the sadness automatically departs and everything goes well for him.
It emerges that for all these reasons it is worth a person's while to take the reins into his own hands at the moment he sees that something is going on. But if there is nothing, if everything is good and flowing and he is happy, let him continue in his joy and not go looking for opportunities to step out of the blue into the world of bitterness. The general rule is to remain in the world of joy, "serve G-d with joy," always. Only if he has landed in a situation that brought him down, whether for a reason he knows or a reason he does not, should he seize the opportunity and give a bittush, a pounding, to the animal within him, and that bittush will cause the divine fire to catch and bring him to joy.
In summary: in this section we learned that after the initial fall a person moves on to constructive bitterness, which is gevurah of kedushah, and not to depression and despair. We looked at the two ways of sweetening a din: sweetening by covering over, which merely conceals the bitterness, and sweetening at the root, like the waters of Marah that were sweetened with a bitter tree. We saw that the root of din is in kedushah, and therefore "the dinim are only sweetened at their root," and that this is the meaning of "a person should always provoke his yetzer tov against his yetzer hara" - activating the gevurah within the yetzer tov. Finally we learned about the "opportune time," the hour when a person is sad in any case, and the three reasons to make use of it: seizing the opportunity, the help of the external conditions, and the rule that a judgment below exempts from a judgment above.
In the next section we will continue with the chapter and see how one moves from here, in a sharp transition, to a great and powerful joy, and why there is no contradiction at all between that joy and the bitterness that preceded it. And the joy can begin already now.