In the previous section we learned the teaching of the Arizal that all Jewish souls are like limbs of one single body. The Rebbe points out that this is not a teaching of the Arizal alone. One might have argued that this is how things stand in the inner dimension of Torah, in the sodos of Torah, but where do we find it in the revealed part of Torah, in nigleh? To that the Rebbe notes that the very same idea is stated explicitly in nigleh as well.
The source of the idea in the revealed part of Torah:
In the Talmud Yerushalmi, tractate Nedarim, there are three lines that explain the prohibitions of "לא תִּקום ולא תִּטור" ("Do not take revenge and do not bear a grudge"): if someone did something bad to you, you may not pay him back in kind. The Yerushalmi explains the logic behind it: picture a right hand that accidentally picked up a knife and cut the left hand. Would it ever enter your mind that the left hand should now take a knife and cut the right hand back, claiming, "You wounded me, now I'll show you"? Obviously not. Just the opposite: the right hand itself will rush to bandage the wound. That is precisely the reason for "do not take revenge": against whom is there to take revenge here? This is the right hand and that is the left hand, of one and the same body.
It turns out, then, that the teaching of the Arizal is already written in the Talmud: all the souls are limbs of one body, and therefore, precisely because they are all limbs of one body, the Torah demands of us "ואהבת לרעך כמוך" ("Love your fellow as yourself").
[It is worth noting that the analogy does not match the lesson perfectly: the right hand did not intend to hurt the left hand, whereas revenge and grudge-bearing deal with someone who wounded his fellow deliberately and maliciously. But in truth, even if the right hand strikes the left hand on purpose - say, a person wanted to test a sharpened knife, ran a deliberate, calculated experiment and cut his own hand in the process - would it ever enter anyone's mind that the left hand should pay the right hand back? The idea simply has no place. And on a deeper level, as we have already learned in Tanya: the damage that befell the victim was decreed upon him from Above, the Almighty decreed that it should be so, and the one who caused the damage is nothing more than a messenger who, in essence, intended nothing. What sense, then, is there in being angry at him?]
What, then, is the new teaching of chapter 32?
Everything said until now was already known before chapter 32: from the writings of the Arizal, from the Gemara, and even earlier, from the wording of the verse itself, "כמוך" ("as yourself"). That one must love his fellow as himself - this we have known our whole lives. The question that remains is how to do it, how one actually arrives at it in practice. And that is what chapter 32 comes to teach us: the way.
What is the straight and easy path:
Says the Alter Rebbe: whoever wishes to reach this has a path before him that is straight and easy. How? Let him study chapters 29 and 30 well, and after them chapter 31.
Let us first ask: what exactly is the difficulty here? The difficulty is that everything said above is true from the side of the soul, where we are all joined as one. But between us, from the side of the body, we see that each person looks different, and every person is wary of the next one: he will take my livelihood, my honor, my place, he will do this and that to me. Each person builds his own world and sees in his fellow someone who is getting in his way. All of this comes from looking only through the eyes of the body.
Therefore the Alter Rebbe says: do not forget the conclusion of chapter 31. That chapter dealt with the balance between body and soul, what is primary and what is secondary. From the side of the body, the body is lowly and repulsive, and were a person to look only from the side of the body, he would spend his entire life in sadness and bitterness. But together with that, within the body dwells a soul bound up with G-dliness, and a person must know the G-dly potential hidden within him. That knowledge is what should lead him to joy. And once a person has managed to direct his thinking so that the soul is primary and the body secondary, he will automatically look at his fellow not with the eyes of the body but with the eyes of the soul. For from the side of the body, you are you and he is he, so what connection is there between you at all?
In the Alter Rebbe's own words: if a person will fulfill "הדברים הנזכרים לעיל" ("the matters mentioned above"), that is, what we learned in chapter 31, "להיות גופו נבזה ונמאס בעיניו, ורק שמחתו תהיה שמחת הנפש לבדה" ("that his body be despised and loathsome in his eyes, and that his only joy be the joy of the soul alone"), then "הרי זו דרך ישרה וקלה לבוא לידי קיום מצוות ואהבת לרעך כמוך לכל נפש מישראל, למגדול ועד קטן" ("this is a straight and easy path to come to fulfill the mitzvah of 'Love your fellow as yourself' toward every soul of Israel, from the greatest to the smallest").
A Jew who is sad and bitter cannot love his fellow, because he does not even love himself: he looks at himself only from the side on which he is lowly and loathsome and repulsive, and he is depressed by his situation. But a Jew who is joyful - what is he joyful about, when his situation is so low? He is joyful because he has a soul bound up with G-dliness, and he refuses to look at the low side of himself, which is the secondary part, but only at what is primary in him.
"לכל נפש מישראל" ("toward every soul of Israel"): not only toward his son and his brother, for that no one needs chapter 32, since that is simply human nature. Rather toward every soul of Israel, from the greatest to the smallest, even where human nature cries out and asks: how can there possibly be love like the love one has for himself toward a person like that? That question is asked from the side of the body.
It is told of one of the bochurim in the Tomchei Temimim yeshivah in Lubavitch, founded by the Rebbe Rashab, who came to one of the mashpi'im of the yeshivah and asked: how is it even possible to love another person, how does such a thing apply? The mashpia answered him: "Throw out the goy in you, and then the Jew in you won't ask that question." In other words, the question arises from the side of the 'goy' within a person, from the side of his body. And how does one 'throw out the goy'? That takes a great deal of work, learning how to look at everything properly.
And this is that same "straight and easy path," once a person has immersed himself in chapter 31. Everyone imagines that a straight and easy path means pressing a button, but no such button exists. What does exist is the right direction: training oneself to think correctly, to place the emphasis on what is primary and not on what is secondary. To the degree that we place the emphasis on the secondary part of ourselves, on the body, we will not be able to tolerate another person, since he interferes with our body, and my body and his body do not go together. But if we place the emphasis on the soul, on what is primary in us, then, as the Alter Rebbe is about to say in wondrous expressions, all of us are really one essence, and there is no difficulty whatsoever in loving another person exactly as yourself.
"כי מאחר שגופו נמאס ומתועב אצלו" ("for since his body is loathsome and repulsive to him"): this is the conclusion we reviewed in chapter 31, which flows out of chapters 29 and 30. A person has a body that is repulsive and loathsome, yet this does not drag him into bitterness and sadness all his days, because his joy comes from somewhere else, from the nefesh and the neshamah within him. "והנפש והרוח מי יודע גדולתן ומעלתן בשורשן ומקורן באלוקים חיים" ("and as for the nefesh and ruach, who knows their greatness and excellence in their root and source in the living G-d"): from the side of the soul, who knows who is higher and who is lower? Perhaps the very one who looks low in your eyes is in truth the higher one, and you, who consider yourself high, are the lower one. "בשגם כולן מתאימות" - they correspond to one another, "ואב אחד לכולנה" - they all have one father.
Read straight through, these three expressions seem to contradict each other:
"מי יודע גדולתן ומעלתן" ("who knows their greatness and excellence"): this implies that there is a higher and a lower, only that we do not know who is who.
"כולן מתאימות" ("they all correspond"): if they all correspond to one another, then there is no greater and smaller, and they are all equal to each other.
"ואב אחד לכולנה" ("they all have one father"): there is only the father, and there are no individual souls here at all.
Three stages in the root of the souls:
In these three expressions the Alter Rebbe folds together all the levels in the root of the soul, and he climbs with us step by step. First he says: do not look from the side of the body, for from its side you are you and he is he, utter strangers, genuinely separate from one another, and from the side of the body it is simply impossible to love another person. Let us look from the side of the soul, and climb one rung after another:
A level where there really is a greater and a smaller, only that "מי יודע" ("who knows") which is the greater and which is the smaller.
A higher level, where "כולן מתאימות" ("they all correspond"), all of them matching and equal.
A still higher level, where "אב אחד לכולנה" ("they all have one father"): there are no individual souls at all, only the father.
The physical analogy we learned in chapter 2:
In the physical world this is literally how it works. Already in chapter 2, thirty chapters earlier, the Alter Rebbe dealt with the root of the souls, and he gave an analogy there from the way a son is born from a father: how the multitude of limbs in a human body comes into being, even though they all come from that very same root, from the father's brain. In the end a son emerges from the father's brain, yet the father's brain is simply the father's brain: there is no son there, no individual parts, nothing at all. And in the end out comes a complete son with 248 limbs and 365 sinews. How does this process come about? The Alter Rebbe said that it passes through several stations:
The father's brain: the source, in which there is no son and no individual parts whatsoever.
The drop that comes from the father's brain: the next stage.
The nine months of pregnancy in the mother's womb: these are what create the distinctions between the parts - head, heart, foot, nails and hair.
In summary: in this section we learned that the Arizal's teaching, that all souls are limbs of one body, has a source even in the revealed part of Torah: in the Talmud Yerushalmi, tractate Nedarim, on "do not take revenge and do not bear a grudge," in the analogy of the right hand and the left hand. The novelty of chapter 32 is not the obligation of "Love your fellow as yourself" itself, which was already known from the writings of the Arizal, from the Gemara and from the wording of the verse, but rather the question of how one actually arrives at it: a "straight and easy path" built on the conclusion of chapters 29 to 31, that one's body is loathsome and repulsive in his eyes and that his joy is the joy of the soul alone. When the soul is primary, one's view of his fellow shifts from the eyes of the body to the eyes of the soul. We also examined the three expressions "who knows their greatness and excellence," "they all correspond" and "they all have one father," which express three ascending stages in the root of the souls, as well as the analogy from the process of birth that we learned in chapter 2.
In the next section we will expand on the definitions of the concepts we have read, review the material, and examine the wondrous expressions with which the Alter Rebbe goes on to explain the oneness of the souls in their root in the living G-d.