In the earlier parts of chapter 32 we learned that hatred of a fellow Jew simply has no place, and that even in the rare case where one is obligated to hate the evil in him, one must still love the good in him. Now the Alter Rebbe strengthens this even further: that very same Jew whose evil we were told to hate, we are also obligated to awaken mercy upon him.
"וגם לעורר רחמים בלבו עליה, כי היא בבחינת גלות בתוך הרע מסטרא אחרא הגובר עליה ברשעים ח"ו" - "and also to arouse mercy in his heart for it, for it is in a state of exile within the evil of the sitra achra that overpowers it in the wicked, G-d forbid." One must arouse compassion for that Jew, because his nefesh ha'elokis (his divine soul) and the yetzer tov within him are held in exile inside the evil deeds he does, since the yetzer hara has overpowered them.
And what does arousing this compassion accomplish? "והרחמנות מבטל השנאה ומעורר האהבה" - "and compassion nullifies the hatred and awakens love." Even the hatred that was permitted to him in this one unique case must be weakened and nullified.
Why? Because the person standing in front of him is made up of a yetzer tov and a yetzer hara, and he was told to hate the evil in him and love the good in him. The Alter Rebbe knows human nature, and he knows that if a person arouses hatred even toward the evil alone, the hatred will gradually spill over into a negative attitude toward the person himself. The moment that Jew comes asking him for help, the hatred will surface and "ve'ahavta" will be forgotten. Therefore the hatred must be compressed to the absolute minimum, focused only on that one corner of evil in him, while toward the person himself love remains intact - and if he asks for help, one is obligated to help him.
Where does compassion get the power to nullify hatred and awaken love?
This is understood from what chassidus explains on the verse in Isaiah (29): "לכן כה אמר ה' אל בית יעקב אשר פדה את אברהם, לא עתה יבוש יעקב ולא עתה פניו יחוורו" - "Therefore, so says G-d to the house of Yaakov, who redeemed Avraham: Yaakov shall not now be ashamed, nor shall his face now pale." The verse is puzzling. "The house of Yaakov" is the Jewish people, but what is "who redeemed Avraham" - who redeemed Avraham? On the level of pshat the words should be read as a parenthetical phrase referring to the Holy One: so says G-d (who redeemed Avraham and took him out of all his troubles) to the house of Yaakov such and such. But it is still difficult why the verse did not simply state things in clear order from the start.
And in fact the Gemara in tractate Sanhedrin brings a reading in which the verse is taken literally: that Yaakov Avinu actually redeemed Avraham Avinu. The Gemara asks: "And where do we find that Yaakov redeemed Avraham?" Rabbi Yehuda answers: "He redeemed him from the pain of raising children." Rashi explains that when the Holy One told Avraham "and I will multiply your seed," the multitude of children was supposed to come about through Avraham, and with it the pain of raising them. Avraham had only two sons, and even with them things were not simple, whereas Yaakov took upon himself the twelve tribes and the pain of raising them - and over the years not everything there went smoothly either. It emerges that Yaakov spared Avraham the pain of raising children, and this is "Yaakov, who redeemed Avraham." So even in the revealed part of Torah there is a concept of Avraham being redeemed by Yaakov.
The explanation in the inner dimension of Torah:
It is known that the three Avos embody three middos:
Avraham - the middah of chesed (kindness).
Yitzchak - the middah of gevurah (severity).
Yaakov - the middah of tiferes, which is the middah of rachamim (mercy).
And why is tiferes mercy? Because tiferes is the line that blends chesed with gevurah. But why is that blend called mercy?
Chesed: giving without any accounting. Everyone is wonderful, pour it all out on him with no limits, and when someone comes to report that he is not behaving properly, chesed does not even recognize the claim.
Gevurah: the exact opposite. Always contract, always judge, always limit: "he does not deserve it," hold back from him, and always find every one of his faults.
Tiferes and rachamim: they make peace between the two. The middah of mercy does not shut its eyes to gevurah's claims and does not say "what are you talking about?" On the contrary, it concedes that everything gevurah says is true - and nevertheless, have mercy on him, so give to him. Mercy is therefore a blend of chesed and gevurah, and Yaakov is called the middah of mercy.
With this we can return to the words of the Tanya. The mitzvah of love comes from the middah of chesed, and the mitzvah of hatred from the middah of gevurah: love the good in him and hate the evil in him. But if the situation is left like that, the evil will gradually surface and the hatred will expand, until he hates not only the evil in the person but the personality and the person himself, for a human being does not know how to draw precise boundaries between the evil in someone and the person himself. Inevitably the level of hatred rises and the level of love drops.
So what does one do to make the level of love rise above the level of hatred? One arouses compassion. The middah of mercy acknowledges gevurah's claim: true, there is evil in him, and true, the evil in him must be hated. But the compassion is for the good in him, and through this that good is strengthened. Automatically the hatred shrinks to the relative minimum possible, and the love is aroused on an incomparably greater scale. This is "compassion nullifies the hatred and awakens the love."
It turns out that the divine spark gains twice over: it is loved, and it is also pitied. Two middos are working in its favor, and they are what weaken and shrink the hatred toward the evil. This is "Yaakov, who redeemed Avraham": the middah of mercy is what redeems and reinforces the middah of chesed and love. And the hatred is always directed only at the evil and at the framework of the yetzer hara, never at the essence of the Jew himself, for "we all have one Father" - his essence may not, G-d forbid, be hated.
The parenthetical passage at the end of the chapter:
At the close of the chapter the Alter Rebbe inserts a passage in parentheses. The very fact that it appears in parentheses tells us that it is not an essential part of the chapter and is not its message. The idea of the chapter has already been completed: arouse love for every Jew, love without limit, and even in that one unique case where hatred was called for, we compressed it to the smallest possible measure.
Still, we have a question about David HaMelech, who said about a certain type of person: "תכלית שנאה שנאתים" - "with utter hatred I hate them." "Utter hatred" is not a small dose of hatred directed only at the evil in a person; it is absolute hatred: no accounting, no compassion, no love. How is that possible? If that person is "your fellow in Torah and mitzvos," then the hatred applies only to the evil part and the love toward him must be increased; and if he is not "your fellow," then there is love alone. About whom, then, could such a statement possibly be said?
To this the Alter Rebbe answers: "ולא אמר דוד המלך ע"ה תכלית שנאה שנאתים וגו' אלא על המינים והאפיקורסים, שאין להם חלק באלוקי ישראל, כדאיתא בגמרא ריש פרק ט"ז דשבת" - "David HaMelech, peace be upon him, said 'with utter hatred I hate them' only regarding the minim and apikorsim, who have no share in the G-d of Israel, as stated in the Gemara at the beginning of the sixteenth chapter of Shabbos." From that Gemara it is clear that minim and apikorsim on this level have cut themselves off, on the revealed level at least, from any revealed connection to the G-d of Israel, and therefore the side of them that would obligate love is not there, and love for them cannot be aroused in a revealed way.
It is worth stressing that the word "apikores" here does not mean what it means in everyday slang, but a precise and clearly defined halachic category. The Rambam lists five categories called minim and three called apikorsim: those who deny the existence of the Creator, those who deny the prophecy of Moshe Rabbeinu, those who say that the Holy One does not know the deeds of human beings, and the like. We are speaking, then, about a very specific definition.
A few points to emphasize:
Why did the Alter Rebbe specifically mention David HaMelech by name? He could have quoted the verse without noting who said it, as he does with most verses. Rather, he is hinting to us that even when facing a genuine apikores by the strictest definition, an ordinary person has no grip whatsoever on this expression. David HaMelech was a king, who had both the authority and the standing to judge, to investigate and to examine the matter, and he was on a unique level that allowed him to gauge when such a thing may be said. Someone who is not on that level has no ability at all to issue such a stamp.
No person knows what is in another's heart: "man sees with the eyes, but G-d sees into the heart." It is entirely possible that everything that sounded like heresy was said in order to find favor in someone's eyes, or for political reasons, or simply because that is how it came out. One may not take a person's external statements and brand him with them. A beis din does indeed rule and impose punishment based on what the eyes see, on the testimony of witnesses and on the case that occurred, but to determine one's inner attitude toward a human being on that basis - there is no such concept at all.
David HaMelech himself said in Tehillim, "יתמו חטאים מן הארץ ורשעים עוד אינם" - "let sins cease from the earth and the wicked be no more." It says "sins," not "sinners": it is the sins that should cease, while the sinners are to be drawn close, greeted with a pleasant face and shown the beauty and the delight of Torah - and then they too will connect to it.
And in our generation this concept simply does not apply at all: all people have the status of "tinokos shenishbu," children taken captive, and what we are dealing with is lack of knowledge. Furthermore, halachah has the concept of a "mumar," and there are two types: a mumar le'hach'is, who acts specifically in order to go against the Torah - and such a person is extremely rare to find; and a mumar le'tei'avon, which is what most people who act against the Torah are: because it is convenient for him, because it is hard for him right now, because he simply does not feel like it, or because it is hard for him to leave his social circle. All sorts of considerations of convenience drag him into doing, or not doing, what the Torah says.
It is therefore certain beyond any doubt that about such a person one does not say "with utter hatred I hate them." We are speaking of a rare and highly exceptional case, which is precisely why the Tanya places it in parentheses, and it has no relevance to us whatsoever.
The other person is your mirror:
Let us return to the main theme of the chapter, the one that does apply to us: ahavas Yisrael, which must be without any limit and without any condition, and even in the exceptional cases, only in that exceptional dose and in that exceptional form. And if, G-d forbid, a person does see evil in another and does not take to heart everything explained here about how he is meant to relate to him, he should recall the Baal Shem Tov's teaching that the other person is your mirror: what you see in someone else, you see because you recognize the thing from within yourself, and had it not existed in you, you would not have been able to see it in him.
There is a lovely hint to this in the laws of nega'im (the plagues of tzaraas): someone who has a nega is "brought to the kohen," and a kohen who develops a nega must go to another kohen, since "a person sees all nega'im except his own." The inner explanation comes from moving the comma: "all the nega'im that a person sees outside himself - come from his own nega'im." In other words, it is from the nega'im within him that he sees the nega'im outside; had the problem not been in him, he would not have seen it out there.
One might ask: what about tzaddikim who rebuke others, who are genuinely tzaddikim with no evil in them at all - how do they see evil in another, and if they do see it, does that imply that there is evil in them too? The answer is that the tzaddik is not seeing the evil; he is seeing what he is obligated to do, the fulfillment of the mitzvah "הוכח תוכיח את עמיתך," "you shall surely rebuke your fellow." That is the tzaddik who comes before his community to rebuke it, and there is nothing in him but rebuke. But a person who sees evil in his fellow and turns it into a headline and an issue, and keeps cooking it over - he has to stop, take a look, and understand that it is coming from himself. Toward another person there must be nothing but love and affection, boundless affection, and that is the conclusion of chapter 32.
In summary: in this section we learned that even in a case where one is commanded to hate the evil in another, one must arouse mercy upon him, since his divine soul is in exile within that evil, and "compassion nullifies the hatred and awakens the love" - so that the hatred does not spill over from the evil onto the person himself. We saw the power of the middah of mercy from the verse "Yaakov, who redeemed Avraham": in the revealed level, that he redeemed him from the pain of raising children, and in the inner level, that Yaakov is tiferes and rachamim, blending chesed and gevurah and redeeming the middah of chesed and love. We also examined the parenthetical passage at the end of the chapter about "with utter hatred I hate them," which was said only about minim and apikorsim, their precise halachic definition, and the fact that in our generation everyone has the status of tinokos shenishbu, so that this concept has no application at all. We concluded with the Baal Shem Tov's teaching that the other person is your mirror. Chapter 32 is a foundational chapter, which is why we studied it more slowly than usual, since it demands a great deal of depth and understanding.
In the next section we will begin, with G-d's help, chapter 33 of Likkutei Amarim.