The gist of the Alter Rebbe's words at the opening of the chapter: the ultimate perfection of the days of Moshiach and the resurrection of the dead, which was the subject of the previous chapter, is that in this physical world there will be a revelation of the Creator, «ולא יכנף עוד מוריך» (your Teacher will no longer hide Himself), with no garment and no covering at all, a revelation of the light of the Ein Sof, blessed be He, in this physical world itself.
And here the Alter Rebbe says something that is of enormous consequence for us: on what does this ultimate perfection depend? «תלוי במעשינו ועבודתנו כל זמן משך הגלות» (it depends on our deeds and our service throughout the duration of the exile).
In other words: while we are in exile and performing mitzvos in actual deed, we are not merely bringing about the fact that Moshiach will come and that things will be good. We are literally producing the very revelation that will shine in the days of Moshiach. Our actions, here and now, create the state in which the world becomes a dwelling place for Him, blessed be He.
«כי הגורם שכר המצוה היא המצוה בעצמה» (for what brings about the reward of a mitzvah is the mitzvah itself):
At first glance, what connection is there between our deeds and our service during the exile and the state of things in the time to come? To this the Alter Rebbe gives a foundational answer: «כי הגורם שכר המצוה היא המצוה בעצמה», what brings about the reward of a mitzvah is the mitzvah itself. To grasp what this means, we have to distinguish between reward and punishment as the world understands them, and reward and punishment as the Torah understands them.
In dealings between one person and another, reward and punishment are not a direct outcome of the deed, and there is no intrinsic connection between the act and the compensation. Act A is performed, and the compensation is B:
Reward: A man works in a factory hour after hour, and at the end of the month he receives a sum of money. Did he produce money over the course of that month? He produced one thing and received something else. The payment is not an outcome of the work.
Punishment: A man committed a certain act, and it was determined that his punishment would be such and such. Here too the punishment is not an outcome of the act itself; it is something imposed on it from the outside.
Contrast this with a man who puts his finger into a burning flame and is burned. The burn is a direct outcome of the act. This is what reward and punishment mean according to Torah: not one deed and some other compensation, but a compensation that emerges from within the deed itself.
Now to our subject: we perform deeds and mitzvos today, and the reward is the coming of Moshiach and the resurrection of the dead. What does that reward have to do with what we are doing? The answer is that the reward is the deed itself. With our actions here and now we are producing the revelation of the Creator in the world; it is only that we do not see it.
To what can this be compared? To a man who drops coins into a box in order to save, so that one day he will take out what he put away. Every single coin he puts into the box is itself what he will eventually receive, and when the time comes and the box is opened, he takes out exactly what he himself put in. That is the definition of a reward that is an outcome of the deed. So it is with a Jew's avodah: through deeds done according to the will of the Creator he is producing the days of Moshiach today, only that it is all hidden away in a box, and the days of Moshiach mean precisely this, that what we produced becomes revealed.
This is why the Alter Rebbe says that the ultimate perfection of the days of Moshiach depends on our deeds and our service. He does not mean dependence in the sense of a promise alone, that if you do this you will receive that. He means that with every single action a Jew performs today he sanctifies and refines the world and actually produces the state of affairs that will be revealed in the future. And this is «כי הגורם שכר המצוה היא המצוה בעצמה».
The structure of the chapter:
Once the foundation has been laid, that with our deeds today we produce the result, the chapter divides into two parts:
Part one, the things a person comes into direct contact with: The Alter Rebbe will explain that everything a person comes into direct contact with while performing a mitzvah becomes sanctified through that very contact, even though nothing is visible to the eye. A general example: the hide of an animal that was made into parchment, on which the parshiyos were written, and which was made into tefillin. Holiness has entered into this object, even though to all appearances nothing about it has changed. Within this theme there are two details: the object itself with which the mitzvah was performed, and the person, the strength and energy he invested in the act; in his body and in his energy too, holiness is created at the moment of the deed. All of this is being produced today, and when Moshiach comes we will see everything we produced.
Part two, the wider circles: If holiness were created only in the things we came into direct contact with, that would not be enough. For in the days of Moshiach there will be a revelation of G-dliness throughout the entire world quite literally, and how many things have actually come into direct contact with the performance of mitzvos? Therefore, in the second part of the chapter the Alter Rebbe will deal with the wider circles, the things we did not come into direct contact with, and he will explain how holiness penetrates them as well. And the same question applies to the person himself: what about the life force, the limbs and the parts of him that are not in direct contact with the act, and how do they too become part of the picture?
That is the structure of the chapter: a detailed explanation of how the things in direct contact become holy, and how the wider circles become holy as well.
A precise reading of the words «כל זמן משך הגלות»:
Before we enter into the body of the chapter, there is something to be precise about in the sentence we read: «תלוי במעשינו ועבודתנו כל זמן משך הגלות», it depends on our deeds and our service throughout the duration of the exile. Let us begin from the end of the sentence. When did the Jewish people begin to fulfill mitzvos in actual deed? After the giving of the Torah. And since then many eras have passed: the years in the desert, the settling of Eretz Yisrael, the era of the first Beis Hamikdash, the seventy years of destruction, the second Beis Hamikdash, and after it the exile whose end we await at every moment. It turns out that the span of time in which the Jewish people serve their Creator includes not only the time of exile, but also eras that were not a time of exile at all.
If so, why does the Alter Rebbe specify «כל זמן משך הגלות», the whole duration of the exile? He could simply have said «our deeds and our service» without defining a time frame, since that would include the deeds performed in the time of the Beis Hamikdash as well. And in truth, none of the deeds performed in the time of the Beis Hamikdash reached their completion until the coming of Moshiach either; we are speaking of one continuous sequence of actions that the Jewish people have been performing for more than three thousand years, ever since the Torah was given. That whole period is not all exile. One could say that roughly two thirds of it is exile, but a third of it is apparently not a time of exile at all. And if so the question arises: what about that portion which has nothing to do with the time of exile, and how will it too bring about the revelation of the days of Moshiach and the resurrection of the dead? (Obviously we are speaking here of the positive side, of our good deeds and our good service across those three thousand years.)
There are several deep points in the explanation of this, and the Rebbe addresses them in many places. A lengthy and profound explanation of why this is bound up specifically with the time of exile is found in Likkutei Sichos vol. 17, p. 95 and onward. In other places the Rebbe brings a further, shorter explanation, and we will take one point from it: there is a virtue in the time of exile that is far greater than the virtue of the time of the Beis Hamikdash.
In the time of the Beis Hamikdash: there was a revelation of G-dliness. Jews walked into the Beis Hamikdash and saw the light with their own eyes, as the Mishnah in Pirkei Avos teaches that ten miracles took place in the Beis Hamikdash. And since a person saw G-dliness openly, his avodah did not flow so much from bittul, from self-nullification before the Holy One blessed be He, as from the feeling and the vitality that were born out of the revelation he was seeing.
In the time of exile: one sees no miracles and no wonders, everything is dark and the tests are hard, and nevertheless the Jew serves his Creator. He does not see and he does not feel; on the contrary, he sees the opposite and feels the opposite, and still he does.
It emerges that when a Jew brings about a revelation of G-dliness through his deeds specifically in the time of exile, his action is far more powerful. That is why the Alter Rebbe stresses precisely this in Tanya: true, the avodah has continued ever since the giving of the Torah, but «כל זמן משך הגלות», the duration of the exile, is the time in which the deed accomplishes all this with far greater force.
In summary: in this section we learned that the ultimate perfection of the days of Moshiach and the resurrection of the dead, the revelation of the light of the Ein Sof, blessed be He, in this physical world with no garment and no covering, depends on our deeds and our service throughout the duration of the exile, because «הגורם שכר המצוה היא המצוה בעצמה». Unlike reward and punishment between one person and another, which are not outcomes of the deed, in Torah the compensation emerges from within the deed itself, as in the analogy of the coins a person puts into a box and takes out, after time, exactly what he put in. We outlined the structure of the chapter, the things a person comes into direct contact with and the wider circles, and we looked closely at the words «כל זמן משך הגלות», which hint at the superiority of avodah in a time of concealment and darkness, where there is no seeing and no feeling, and whose effect is therefore all the stronger.
In the next section we will enter the body of the chapter and learn in detail how the things a person comes into direct contact with while performing a mitzvah become sanctified, and how holiness penetrates even into the wider circles.