In the previous section we looked at the kavanah that is generated by contemplating the greatness of the Creator. Now the Alter Rebbe turns to a further level of kavanah: that of a person whose understanding is limited, who simply does not have the capacity to contemplate and give birth to revealed love and fear in his heart.
"ומי שדעתו קצרה לידע ולהתבונן בגדולת אין סוף ברוך הוא להוליד האהבה מבינתו בהתגלות לבו, וכן היראה במוחו ופחד ה' בלבו" - “And one whose understanding is limited, who cannot know and contemplate the greatness of the blessed Ein Sof so as to give birth to love out of his understanding, revealed in his heart, and likewise fear in his mind and dread of G-d in his heart.”
A person of limited understanding lacks the ability to grasp the greatness of the Creator with his intellect, and therefore no revealed love will be born in his soul. The emotion of love comes only after prior contemplation, and contemplation requires depth in matters of G-dliness and the capacity for it. Since he has no deep understanding, he cannot arouse the feeling in his heart. The same is true of fear: yiras shomayim and dread of G-d in the heart are exceedingly hard for him to arouse. He is drawn to the affairs of the world, but when it comes to G-dly matters he has no such capacity.
"רק שזוכר ומעורר את האהבה הטבעית המסותרת בלבו" - “He only remembers and arouses the natural love hidden in his heart.” This is the one thing he is able to do: since by his very nature, like every Jew, an inner love for the Creator is planted within him (he was born with it and cannot detach himself from it), he remembers it and awakens it.
"ומוציאה מההעלם והסתר הלב אל הגילוי במוח על כל פנים" - “And he brings it out of its concealment and hiddenness in the heart into revelation in the mind, at the very least.” He does not reach revelation in the heart; he does not succeed in arousing the emotion there. But at the very least he brings the love into revelation in his mind.
What is this revelation in the mind?
"שיהיה רצונו שבמוחו ותעלומות לבו מסכים ומתרצה בריצוי גמור באמת לאמיתו למסור נפשו בפועל ממש על יחוד ה'" - “That the will in his mind and the hidden recesses of his heart agree and consent, with complete and absolutely genuine consent, to actually give up his life for the unity of G-d.” He reaches a state in which his mind understands that this is how things must be. To say that he feels real love and thirst for the tefillin he is about to put on? No, he has not reached that level. So why does he go and put on tefillin? Because he understands that tefillin must be put on. There is indeed feeling here, but it is a natural feeling that is not revealed in the heart. It is worth noting the wording: not in the revealed heart, but “בתעלומות לבו,” in the hidden recesses of his heart, and this consent is “בריצוי גמור באמת לאמיתו,” with complete and absolutely genuine consent, to the point of literally giving up his life for the unity of G-d.
This is well illustrated by a bar mitzvah day. It may well be that on that first day, when he comes to put on tefillin, he feels a genuine inner excitement. But after a day, after two days, after a year or two, that feeling is no longer there, because he never managed to arouse an emotion in the heart. And nevertheless he goes on putting on tefillin every single day. Where does the drive come from? From the natural Jewish feeling in his mind, from his understanding that this is how it must be. It is a very powerful drive, but a natural one.
"כדי לדבקה בו נפשו האלקית ולבושיה ולכללן ביחודו ואחדותו, שהוא רצונו העליון המלובש בתלמוד תורה ובקיום המצות כנ"ל" - “In order to attach to Him his G-dly soul and its garments, and to include them in His unity and oneness, which is His supernal will clothed in Torah study and in the fulfillment of the mitzvos, as mentioned above.” He knows that the way his G-dly soul and its garments become attached to the Creator is through the mitzvos, and so he fulfills them: he seeks to join and bind the garments of his G-dly soul with the unity and oneness of the Creator. And connecting to the Divine will happens through doing the mitzvos, which are themselves the will of the Creator, the supernal will clothed in Torah study and in the fulfillment of the mitzvos.
This is an expression of inner love, and fear is included in it as well: when a person has an inner will to keep mitzvos in order to be connected to the Creator, yiras shomayim is bound up in that too, for he does not want to be cut off from the Creator. It is an inner will to be connected together with a dread of being severed, both of which live in the Jewish instinct: to accept His kingship and not, G-d forbid, to rebel against Him.
"ובכוונה זו הוא סור מרע ועושה טוב ולומד ומתפלל ומברך בפירוש המלות לבדו, בלא דחילו ורחימו בהתגלות לבו ומוחו" - “And with this kavanah he turns away from evil and does good, and studies and prays and recites blessings with the plain meaning of the words alone, without love and fear revealed in his heart and mind.” With this kavanah, which is not a kavanah he created anew but one already present in him that he merely awakened, he turns from evil and does good. He prays and blesses and directs his mind to the plain meaning of the words alone, and not to the inner depth within them, without revealed love and fear. What he has is the inner love that is already there within him.
Which level does this kavanah correspond to?
It does not correspond to the level of medaber, the speaker, because there the kavanah comes from intellect and contemplation. This kavanah comes from nature, and therefore it stands at the level of chai, the living creature, in the Alter Rebbe's words: "הרי כוונה זו על דרך משל, כמו נשמת החי שאינו בעל שכל ובחירה" - “This kavanah is, by way of analogy, like the soul of an animal, which possesses neither intellect nor choice.”
Even though we say of a certain creature that it is “the cleverest of the animals,” and animals do display considerable cleverness, this is not true intelligence. It is all a sophisticated level of understanding how to obtain its needs, around itself and within the world. That is why we say of a person's nefesh habahamis, his animal soul, that it is a developed animal: there is an animal with no intelligence at all, like a donkey, and there is a more intelligent creature, like a fox, and the animal soul of a human being is more intelligent still. But as long as all its thinking revolves around itself alone, the added understanding does not remove it from that same family. A being of true intellect is one who can step out of himself and contemplate a matter objectively, and that does not exist in an animal. And since it has no intellect, it consequently has no freedom of choice either: it cannot choose as it wishes, but remains within the framework of itself, at the level the Creator gave it.
"וכל מדותיו, שהן יראתו מדברים המזיקים אותו ואהבתו לדברים הנאהבים אצלו" - “And all its emotions, namely its fear of things that harm it and its love for things that it finds dear.” All the animal's emotions are natural: it fears things that harm it and is drawn to the things it loves.
[This can even be seen in halachah. The laws of the four types of guardians, each of whom bears a different level of responsibility for an animal entrusted to him (if it was lost, stolen, or died), are discussed in all their details in tractate Bava Kama. And there is a ruling in Shulchan Aruch: a borrower, whose level of responsibility is the highest of all, who took an animal from his fellow and was walking with it in the street, and a large fire was burning at the side, and the animal went and leaped into the fire and was burned, is exempt. Why? Because the guardian can say to the owner: a normal animal is afraid of things that harm it, and I had no reason to anticipate that the animal entrusted to me was not normal. We see from here that fear of harmful things is the animal's very nature.]
And so too with its love: it loves to eat whatever its nature draws it to, and it does not sit and contemplate the value of the food. If you give an animal food it does not like, it will sniff at it and not touch it, and there is no way of persuading it with advertising to eat it. It is drawn to what it loves and flees from what harms it, and nothing will help.
"הן רק טבעיים אצלו ולא מבינתו ודעתו" - “They are merely natural to it, and do not come from its understanding and knowledge.” It does not come from contemplation, but from instinct.
And the nimshal: "וכך הם על דרך משל היראה והאהבה הטבעיות המסותרות בלב כל ישראל, כי הן ירושה לנו מאבותינו וכמו טבע בנפשותינו כנ"ל" - “And so too, by way of analogy, are the natural fear and love hidden in the heart of every Jew, for they are an inheritance to us from our fathers and are like a nature in our souls, as mentioned above.” The same is true of the natural feelings of love and fear that a Jew has, that he does not want to be severed from the Creator and wants to be connected to Him. If a person arouses this feeling and out of it keeps Torah and mitzvos, that is very good indeed. But if we come to rank it according to the four categories of creation, we would class it as chai. The reason: nothing was done to earn this natural love. A person was simply born a son of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov and inherited this from his fathers, and it exists within him as a nature in his soul.
[From here we see that training has no power to change nature. Consider the parable of a goose egg left without its mother, which a hen brooded over together with her own eggs. The gosling grew up among the chicks, ate their food and walked with them, and while they were small no difference between them was noticeable. One day they came to water, and immediately the goose jumped into the water and began to swim. Who taught it that? Its whole life it had been among chickens! Rather, nature does not change: even if it grew up among chickens for a hundred and twenty years, a goose remains a goose. All that is needed is an opportunity in which its nature can come out. Without water, the difference would never have been seen at all.]
In summary: in this section we learned the level of the person whose understanding is limited, who does not give birth to love and fear out of his own comprehension, but rather awakens the natural love hidden in his heart and draws it out of concealment into revelation in his mind, so that the will in his mind and the hidden recesses of his heart agree and consent with absolutely genuine consent to give up his life for the unity of G-d, and out of this he turns from evil and does good, studies and prays with the plain meaning of the words alone. This kavanah was compared to the soul of a living creature, whose emotions are all natural and do not stem from its understanding and knowledge. With this, the chapter's conclusion is explained: kavanah is defined as the soul and the performance as the body. In the body there are two categories, domem and tzomeach, inanimate and vegetative, corresponding to speech and action; and in kavanah there are two categories, kavanah generated by understanding, which is at the level of medaber, and kavanah generated by natural feeling, which is at the level of chai. What all of them share is that it is all the will of the Creator, and from the standpoint of the revelation of the supernal will there is no difference between them whatsoever. The difference is not one of concealment and revelation but of tzimtzum and expansion: in kavanah there is a greater revelation and recognition in the soul of the person of the reality of the Creator, and without kavanah the recognition is extremely contracted, yet the revelation of the Divine will is present in all of them.
In the next section we will see how greatly the Alter Rebbe elevates this level of the hidden natural love, and its great quality in the service of G-d.