We are in chapter 37 of Tanya. We finished the first part of the chapter on page 47 (page 93), and now we turn to the second section, which begins with the words «זאת ועוד אחרת» (page 47a, at the bottom). Before we start, let us review what we have learned so far, so that the flow of the idea stays clear.
The purpose of creation: dirah betachtonim
In chapter 36 we learned a foundational principle: what is the purpose of the creation of this world? «נתאווה הקב"ה להיות לו דירה בתחתונים», the Holy One desired a dwelling in the lower realms. In one sentence: Hashem wants that right here, in the lowest world, the physical and material world, He should have a dirah, a dwelling, a place where He is present openly, the way a person lives in his own home freely and without concealment.
And who is supposed to accomplish this? Man. That is why Hashem brought the souls down into this physical world, placed them inside a physical body, and clothed the mitzvos in commands that are bound up with physical objects. Everything a person deals with from the moment he is born and throughout his life revolves around physical matters, and the purpose of his avodah is to sanctify the whole of creation.
When does the result take effect?
The effect happens immediately; it is only that we do not see the result. Here is an illustration: a person dropping coins into a savings box. With every single coin the box grows. The large sum is not created at the moment he opens the box; it was produced along the way, with each act of putting a coin in. The same is true of our spiritual avodah: every act we do here refines and sanctifies creation, except that for now it is locked away inside a box. In the time to come, in the days of Moshiach and at the resurrection of the dead, the Creator will remove the covering, and then everything we have accomplished will be revealed. It emerges that «מעשינו ועבודתנו», our deeds and our service, throughout the entire length of the exile, are what produce the result: turning the physical world into a dwelling for Him.
The question of the chapter: how does the entire world become refined?
Chapter 37 comes to explain how this actually happens in practice. After all, at most a person deals in his lifetime with a handful of small objects. So how does the entire vast world become refined, a world containing staggering quantities of inanimate matter, plant life, animal life and human beings, all of which is supposed to become a dwelling for Him? How does one person's action affect the entire system? This cannot be something random, since it is the result of an action.
The immediate circle
The Alter Rebbe explains this in stages. The first stage, which is what we learned up to the words «זאת ועוד אחרת», is the circle closest to the person, and it divides into two: the object he acts upon, and the energy he invests in order to carry out the act. Take a simple example, a Jew putting on tefillin:
The physical object: he took the hide of a physical animal, physical parchment, bound it in the proper way and placed it on his arm, and in doing so he sanctified and refined that particular piece of physical parchment with which he fulfilled the mitzvah of tefillin.
The strength invested: the person invested strength and energy to put them on, to wrap and wind them around his arm. That energy too was refined and sanctified, since it was put to use for the Creator.
This is the immediate circle in which refinement takes place as a result of doing the mitzvah and drawing holiness into the world. But we cannot stop there, because it looks extremely limited, and we have not yet reached the full expanse of the world, all of which needs to be refined. At this point we move on to the next section, where we will learn how the refinement spreads outward to the more distant circles.
Why is a physical world needed at all?
Here it is worth pausing on a question: why did Hashem have to create a physical world? He could have made do with a spiritual world and set up angels and souls to carry out spiritual acts. We dealt with this at length in earlier classes, and we will repeat one point.
There is a whole new way of looking at this in Tanya. In the past people thought, and even today someone who does not study these matters through the lens of Tanya is liable to think this way, that in the entire process of hishtalshelus, the chain of descent of the worlds, the spiritual worlds are the main thing, the important and lofty thing, and the further down one goes (and the very word «down» already says it) the more of a deficiency there seems to be, and when you arrive at the physical world, that is the ultimate deficiency. Hence the question: why descend so far down? Up above everything is more alive, more wondrous, more exalted. But Tanya and the teachings of chassidus turn the entire picture on its head: the purpose of everything is here, and all the upper worlds, the angels and the souls, all of them exist for the sake of here. The purpose is here, not there.
An illustration to help grasp this: a person who is joyful. Where is the joy located? On the inner level, in the soul. Joy is something inward. But when his joy is great, it does not stay inside his heart; it works its way outward: he dances with his feet and claps with his hands, and you see physical movements. Now look at those movements and ask: what is primary and what is secondary? At first glance the primary thing is the inner joy, since a person does not need to learn how to make bodily motions that will make him look happy; the bodily motions are nothing more than an external expression of the joy.
Now translate this on the macro level: the joy is the upper spiritual worlds, and the dancing feet and clapping hands are the physicality of the world. According to that first way of looking at it, the spiritual is the essential thing and the physical is merely a result, an expression. But here chassidus comes and says: no. That physical movement is the main thing, it is the purpose and it is the goal. Hashem wants a dirah in this lowest world, and the entire order of hishtalshelus was created in order to serve this lowest world.
So here we have the refinement of the immediate circle, meaning the particular object with which a person fulfills the Divine will, and the energy he invests of himself in that particular act. And beyond that, there are further, wider circles that become refined as a result of that same act.
Take, for example, that very energy a person invested while performing the mitzvah. What is that strength, and where does it come from?
Strength and vitality come from the blood: a healthy, good flow of blood to all the limbs is what gives a person energy, and weakness of the blood means a problem in the blood flow. The blood is what gives the nefesh hachiyunis, the vital soul, its strength.
The blood comes from food: when a person eats healthy food in the proper way, his blood is strengthened, and with it his energy is strengthened.
It emerges that when a person channeled his energy into something positive and good, we should not look narrowly at just that particular energy that was channeled toward the good and thereby refined. Rather we must ask: what about everything that produced that energy? Without those things that enabled that energy to function, it would not have functioned at all. And therefore everyone who had a hand in that one point gets drawn upward along with that act.
And who are all those who had a hand in it? Here the circles begin to widen enormously. If we look at a far and wide circle, we can think about every single food item, and how many factories in China are at work so that at the end of the process there should be actions through which, ultimately, matters of Torah and mitzvos are carried out, and all of these become refined in that same process.
To summarize: in this section we reviewed the purpose of creation, dirah betachtonim, and the point that a person's avodah in physical matters accomplishes the refinement immediately, even though the revelation of it all will come in the days of Moshiach and at the resurrection of the dead. We examined the immediate circle in which the refinement takes place: the physical object with which the mitzvah is fulfilled, and the strength invested in it. We also examined the fresh perspective of Tanya, that the purpose of all the upper worlds is precisely here, in this lowest world. From there we opened the section beginning «זאת ועוד אחרת», in which the Alter Rebbe explains how the refinement spreads outward: the energy comes from the blood, and the blood from the food, and therefore everyone who had a hand in that act, out to the most distant circles, is drawn along with it and refined with it.
In the next section we will continue with the Alter Rebbe's explanation of how the refinement expands to the wider circles of the world.