We now begin chapter 33. To follow the flow of the Tanya, let us first take a short look back at the preceding chapters, from chapter 29 through the end of chapter 32.
A review of chapters 29 through 32:
Chapters 29-30: The Alter Rebbe opened by explaining how a Jew solves the problem the Tanya calls timtum halev, a "dulled heart." The definition: a Jew wants his avodas Hashem to come with feeling, with life, with inner vitality, and he simply cannot get there, because something in him is blocked. Building on the Zohar's advice that the remedy is bitush, crushing, the Alter Rebbe devoted all of chapter 29 and all of chapter 30 to a long description of how a person works on himself to crush the animal side within him: the nefesh habahamis, whose sense of "I" and of being a yesh, a self-standing something, creates the very dullness and barrier that keeps the divine light from settling in him with feeling and vitality.
Chapter 31: After all that detail about bitush, the Alter Rebbe raised a problem: this crushing, in the whole long menu he laid out, is liable to bring a person to bitterness and depression, which is utterly unacceptable in avodas Hashem. He answered that a measure of broken-heartedness is not a disaster, and sometimes there is no alternative; it is like an antibiotic, and specifically minei uvei, the cure drawn from the ailment itself. Then, in the second half of the chapter, he makes a sharp turn: even though a person recognizes how low his animal side is, that need not interfere with his being joyful. He has joy from the fact that he also possesses a nefesh elokis, and that every single time he performs a mitzvah, learns Torah and does Hashem's will, he is connecting to Elokus. That is the joy of the soul.
Chapter 32: As a kind of parenthesis he added that if a person truly knows how to rejoice in his divine soul, that itself will help him love another Jew as well. What gets in the way of loving another person is that a man frames everything as "me" and "him"; the other either bothers him or does not bother him, but why should he actually connect with him? From the standpoint of the souls, however, we are all one, all brothers, all a single essence. Training oneself to increase the joy of the soul and to give less weight to the lowliness of the body is precisely what opens the heart toward another Jew and brings a person to love him.
In chapter 33 the Alter Rebbe offers an additional avenue: what will bring a Jew to be joyful. Every person is looking for the recipe for joy, because joy is a necessity, and it is one of the great foundations of avodas Hashem: "Serve Hashem with joy" is something basic and utterly real. Here the Alter Rebbe adds a further point: what can bring a Jew to genuine, truthful joy.
Introduction: Where does joy come from?
Joy from external causes: This is the kind we are most familiar with. Weddings, a bris, all sorts of situations a person finds himself in that make him happy.
The joy of a mitzvah: A mitzvah setting that generates joy. For example, when the Beis Hamikdash stood, the Sages said "there is no joy except with meat" and "there is no joy except with wine." They did not mean meat bought at the butcher, but eating the meat of the korban a person brought for the festival, where he felt uplifted and joyful.
In this chapter we will learn how a person arrives at joy from within himself. Joy that comes from the person himself is a far more inward and essential joy.
The Rambam uses a striking expression in Hilchos Lulav. There, regarding Sukkos, which is called zman simchaseinu, the festival of joy, he writes that the joy a Jew is meant to feel is "a great avodah." It is not simple and it is not easy. This is the difference between the mitzvos of action and the duties of the heart. With mitzvos of action, technical instructions suffice: "just tell me what to do," how to put on tefillin, where to affix a mezuzah, and it gets done. But a mitzvah that is a duty of the heart, where the heart itself has to be a partner, is not a technical matter at all, and for it to be real it demands great avodah.
And where exactly does the work take place? Shlomo Hamelech tells us: "Know the G-d of your father and serve Him with a whole heart." If you want to serve Him with your whole heart, with full vitality and inwardness, then "know the G-d of your father": it begins with hisbonenus, contemplation, in the mind. When a person contemplates properly the matters we will learn in this chapter, they filter down and settle in his heart in a way that brings him to genuine joy, because he will see that a Jew most certainly has what to rejoice over.
Let us turn to the words of the Tanya:
"עוד זאת תהיה שמחת הנפש האמיתית" ("There is yet another source of true joy of the soul"), another thing that will bring a Jew to joy of the soul, and to joy that is true. "ובפרט כשרואה בנפשו בעתים מזומנים שצריך לזככה ולהאירה בשמחת לבב" ("and especially when he sees, at set times, that his soul needs to be refined and illuminated with gladness of heart"). A person ought to be joyful always and should not need an occasion for it, since "serve Hashem with joy" applies constantly. But from time to time a person feels that he needs to be roused, and for all sorts of reasons joy is missing, and with it his vitality is missing, and then he needs to refine and illuminate his soul with gladness of heart.
Where there is joy there is life, and then everything opens up and all the obstructions and blockages fall away. As we mentioned in one of the earlier lessons, the Zohar says that the same face a person shows upward is the face shown to him from Above: when he shows a joyful face from below, from Above too everything is given to him with joy. A person's own conduct sets the course of events. It is therefore up to a person to work on himself to be joyful, but not in the manner of a photographer saying "smile, stretch your mouth." Real joy is not something you can act out; it has to be in the inwardness of the heart.
"אזי יעמיק מחשבתו ויצייר בשכלו ובינתו עניין ייחודו יתברך האמיתי" ("then let him deepen his thought and picture in his intellect and understanding the matter of His true Oneness"). And what is the basis for this? "כי עוז וחדוה במקומו" ("for might and gladness are in His place"). True joy cannot come from something physical, because a physical thing is limited, and even if a person rejoices in it, his joy lasts only until the thing is over. True joy comes only from connecting to truth, and there is only one truth: the existence of the Creator is the one reality, and connecting to that true reality is what brings true joy.
The wording here is worth noticing:
"יעמיק מחשבתו" ("let him deepen his thought"): this alone is a great avodah, to think and to deepen one's thinking.
"ויצייר בשכלו ובינתו" ("and picture it in his intellect and understanding"): this is a step beyond. Sometimes a person thinks about something and understands it; and then there is more than that, that the matter is painted before him like a picture in front of his eyes, tangible, vivid and clear, until he sees it and lives it. That is the level the Alter Rebbe wants a Jew to reach.
"The matter of His true Oneness":
Contemplating and believing in His true Oneness is one of the six constant mitzvos, which are not bound to particular times but apply at every moment, day in and day out, on Shabbos and on weekdays, for men and for women. And what is His true Oneness? In one sentence: not merely to believe that there is one Creator and not two, but more than that, that the only reality is the reality of the Creator, and ein od milvado, there is nothing besides Him. And the entire world you see, it is not that there is no world; there is a vast world. Rather, this entire world stands in genuine bittul to the divine reality, and far from contradicting it, it actually expresses it.
This idea runs very deep. An entire section of Tanya is devoted to it, Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, which we will reach in time; and we also learned this subject at great length in chapters 20 and 21, roughly ten chapters back, as the Alter Rebbe himself will note further on. Here he presents it in condensed form, and we will review and study it as much as our subject requires, because his purpose here is to lead from the understanding of this idea to joy. We will yet see how faith in His unity and Oneness connects to joy.
First let us briefly clarify what is meant by saying that the world is in bittul to the reality of the Creator. For this the Alter Rebbe will bring several analogies that explain the matter. Which world are we speaking about? Our world and all the worlds: every world a person can picture, from the lowest to the highest, the physical and the spiritual alike.
Three expressions for the connection between the Creator and the world:
Memaleh kol almin, filling all worlds.
Sovev kol almin, encompassing all worlds.
Kula kamei kelo chashiv, everything before Him is as nothing.
These three expressions appear many times in Tanya, and the Alter Rebbe already mentioned them back in chapter 3. Let us review them briefly.
Memaleh kol almin: almin in Aramaic means olamos, worlds, and within the worlds there is an endless multitude of creations, each with different qualities: inanimate, vegetative, animal and human, and within each of these tens of thousands of species, fire, air, water and earth and every sort of variety. An enormous multiplicity, which the verse folds into a single phrase: "How manifold are Your works, Hashem!" Now a Jew comes and learns that every single detail of creation that he sees, and every quality he is familiar with, is an expression of a divine energy that produces that very quality. Although what we see is a multiplicity of qualities different from one another, with each created thing having its own individual character, the Creator contracts Himself in the act of creating in such a way that in every quality of every particular creature there is an expression of the infinite divine energy. This process is called memaleh kol almin, and "filling" is said by way of comparison and analogy, as if He fills.
And here is the novelty: we are not saying that the world as a general whole was created by the Creator, but that each and every detail reveals Him. The tiny movement of an ant's leg, and the course of the sun, which is something colossal, are both a constant divine creation, with every detail included. That is memaleh kol almin.
As the Midrash and the Gemara say on the verse in Tehillim "Bless Hashem, O my soul": just as the soul fills the body, so the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the world.
Here is the explanation. A person does not say "I am alive in a general sort of way." He is alive in every single detail, in every limb and every cell, and he wants each of them to function fully and well. Each limb has its own distinct qualities, and the soul is present, pulsing and enlivening each and every detail. A person who comes to the doctor and describes his problem is not satisfied with the answer that in general he is alive; he wants everything, down to the smallest details, to express the soul. So too the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the world: it is not that in a general way the world has a Creator, but that every single detail of creation is an expression of the divine power.
This is what the Alter Rebbe compresses into one sentence, that a person must picture it in his mind and contemplate it: how the Holy One, blessed be He, fills all the worlds, upper and lower, both the spiritual worlds and the physical ones, and even within the physical world itself there is a loftier part and a lower part. That is the first of the three.
In summary: In this section we reviewed the flow of chapters 29-32: bitush as the remedy for timtum halev, the caution against bitterness and depression, the joy of the divine soul, and the ahavas Yisrael that is born from it. In chapter 33 the Alter Rebbe adds a further path to joy: not joy from external causes, nor joy from a mitzvah setting, but inner joy that comes from the hisbonenus itself, which is "a great avodah" in the Rambam's words, and which begins with "know the G-d of your father." A person must deepen his thought and picture in his intellect and understanding the matter of His true Oneness: that the only reality is the reality of the Creator, and that the whole world stands in bittul to it and expresses it. We laid out the three expressions, memaleh kol almin, sovev kol almin and kula kamei kelo chashiv, and explained the first of them: that every single detail of creation, like the soul filling the body, is an expression of the divine power.
In the next section we will continue with the explanation of sovev kol almin and kula kamei kelo chashiv, and we will see how contemplating His Oneness brings a Jew to the true joy of the soul.