Until now we have been dealing with levels that we describe as an observer looking in from the outside. From here on the Alter Rebbe turns to us, speaking in plain language to people of our own standing, and examines what is actually happening with a G-d-fearing Jew who keeps Torah and mitzvos, and where the feeling in his service is to be found.
Here is a Jew serving Hashem: he learns, he davens, he keeps mitzvos, all exactly as it is written in Shulchan Aruch, «אבל עבודה בלי התעוררות דחילו ורחימו», but it is service without any arousal of dechilu urechimu, without any arousal of feeling, neither love of Hashem nor fear of Hashem, and «אפילו», not even «במוחו בבחינת גילוי», not even revealed in his mind.
What does «feeling in the mind» mean? Isn't the place of feeling in the heart? When a person arouses the natural love and it does not come to revelation in the heart, it can still come to revelation in the awareness of the mind, as was explained in the opening chapters of Tanya: the mind tells him that it is fitting and right to love. True, his heart is not pounding with emotion and his pulse does not rise when he picks up his tefillin, but his mind determines that this is how a Jew ought to feel. Even this level has its own virtue.
And here we are speaking of someone who did not even manage that. He did not succeed, «דהיינו לעורר האהבה הטבעית המסותרת בלב, להוציאה מההעלם והסתר הלב אל הגילוי, אפילו במוחו ותעלומות לבו על כל פנים», that is, to arouse the natural love hidden in the heart, to bring it out of the concealment and hiddenness of the heart into revelation, at least in his mind and in the inner recesses of his heart. He did not manage to arouse even the natural feeling that exists in every single Jew.
We are talking about mitzvos a person performs naturally, out of habit. For years he has davened Shacharis, Minchah and Maariv at their proper times, and all of it as a matter of routine, without ever stopping for a moment to think where the vitality in it is, where the feeling in it is.
And what became of the love? After all, every Jew, by the very fact that he is a Jew, has a natural love. Only that «רק שהיא נשארה מסותרת בלב כתולדתה כמו שהיתה קודם העבודה», it remained hidden in the heart just as it was from birth, exactly as it was before he began serving. It is there in every single person, there is no Jew who does not have it, but he never touched it and never tried to uncover the gift buried inside him.
Why does this service not rise upward? There is a rule: in order for Torah and mitzvos to ascend to higher worlds, there must be vitality in them. And as we mentioned in one of the earlier lessons, there is a difference between where the neshamah dwells and the place to which Torah and mitzvos ascend. Torah and mitzvos ascend to the ten sefiros of each and every world, whereas the neshamah itself does not belong to that level of Torah and mitzvos themselves.
And when the service is entirely without feeling, «הרי עבודה זו נשארת למטה בעולם הפירוד הנקרא חיצוניות העולמות», this service remains below, in the world of separation, which is called the externality of the worlds. The Torah and mitzvos that a Jew performs with no feeling at all, not even in his mind, do not become united with the G-dliness within the worlds; they remain in the externality of the worlds.
The Rebbe is precise about the plural, «the worlds»: the intention is not specifically that it stays in the physical world of Asiyah, because there is no kelipah here at all. The thing is not seized by kelipah; it was simply done in a neutral, offhand way. So it may well belong to the world of Yetzirah or to the world of Beriah, only that it does not become united with the holiness and with the ten sefiros of that world.
In his words: «ואין בה כח לעלות וליכלל ביחודו יתברך שהן עשר ספירות הקדושות», it has no power to ascend and be absorbed into His blessed unity, which is the ten holy sefiros. It does not ascend and it does not unite, because Torah and mitzvos without vitality do not move from their place. It is like a bird whose wings have been removed: it lives and it walks, but it does not lift off. Love of Hashem and fear of Hashem are the wings, and when a person does not put feeling into his Torah and mitzvos, this is a bird without wings that cannot rise upward.
«וכמו שכתוב בתיקונים», as it is written explicitly in Tikunei Zohar: «דבלא דחילו ורחימו לא פרחא לעילא», that without fear and love it does not fly upward, «ולא יכלא לסלקא ולמיקם קדם ה'», and it has no power to ascend and stand before Hashem, that is, to unite with G-dliness in a revealed way.
It is told that the Alter Rebbe would take part in prearranged debates with communities that opposed Chassidus. The crowd would assemble, he would go up on the platform, answer questions and explain. At one of them he was asked: what is the source for the claim that someone who performs a mitzvah or learns Torah without feeling, his deed does not rise upward but remains below? He answered that this is what is written in the Tikunim, but they asked for a source specifically from the revealed Torah, and not from the works of Zohar and Kabbalah.
He told them that this is an explicit Gemara. The Gemara raises a contradiction between two verses in Tehillim: in chapter 108 it says «כי גדול מעל שמים חסדך», for Your kindness is great above the heavens, and elsewhere it says «עד שמים», until the heavens. And the Gemara resolves it: «כאן בעוסק בתורה לשמה, כאן בעוסק בתורה שלא לשמה», here it speaks of one who studies Torah lishmah, and here of one who studies not lishmah. One who studies lishmah, who has feeling in his learning, is «above the heavens», his learning ascends upward; and one who studies not lishmah is «until the heavens», and it stays below. So one does not even need to reach Tikunei Zohar, since the matter is stated explicitly in the Gemara and derived from the verses.
From here we see that there is an obligation that there be feeling and vitality in one's learning, in one's davening and in one's performance of mitzvos, and if there is no feeling in them, they simply do not rise upward.
The Alter Rebbe says: «והיינו אפילו אינו עוסק שלא לשמה ממש לשום איזו פניה חס ושלום», and this is so even if he is not actually studying not lishmah, for some ulterior motive, G-d forbid. We need not go so far as to say that this Jew is learning not lishmah, meaning out of self-interest. There are several possible states in Torah study:
Lishmah: he learns for the sake of the Holy One blessed be He, out of love of Hashem and fear of Hashem and genuine feeling. This is the highest state.
Literally not lishmah: he learns for an ulterior motive, so that he should have money, so that he should have honor, and the like. This is the lowest state.
An in-between state: neither lishmah nor not lishmah. He just learns. His father put him into yeshivah and he did not object, so he sits and learns. He never stopped for a moment to think, not about the Holy One blessed be He and not about money and career either. He can learn like this for six years and like this for twenty years, and never once stop to think what is actually going on here.
This kind of learning also does not rise upward. And this is what the Alter Rebbe continues: «אלא כמו שכתוב ותהי יראתם אותי מצות אנשים מלומדה», but rather it is as the verse says, their fear of Me is a commandment of men learned by rote. The prophet is complaining about Jews who do have yiras Shamayim. They keep the Torah, they learn and they perform mitzvos, and their whole daily order runs along the lines of an observant Jew's life, and nonetheless it is «a commandment of men learned by rote»: they do the mitzvos because that is how they were taught and that is what they were accustomed to, and there is no genuine feeling of love of Hashem or fear of Hashem in it.
In his words: «פירוש מחמת הרגל שהורגל מקטנותו שהרגילו ולימדו אביו ורבו לירא את ה' ולעבדו», meaning, because of the habit he was accustomed to from childhood, that his father and his teacher trained him and taught him to fear Hashem and to serve Him. As a small child he had no feeling, and he was not even capable of grasping what was going on here; he simply grew up in a home of yiras Shamayim and was trained from childhood to go to shul every day and daven. When he reached the age of thirteen they got him used to putting on tefillin, and so he continues onward. In this way a person can live many years and pass through many stages of life without there being any dimension of feeling in it. The father did indeed fulfill the verse «ולמדתם אותם את בניכם», and you shall teach them to your children, and accustomed his sons to the habits of Torah and mitzvos, but there is no real vitality in it.
«ואינו עוסק לשמה ממש», and he is not truly studying lishmah, because in order to learn lishmah one has to do something: stop and think about the Holy One blessed be He, contemplate the content of what he is learning, and think about how this mitzvah connects him to Him, and to do so afresh each time. He has to feel something in it, and he has to do something to bring that about. And if he stopped to think about it one day and the next day did not think, he forgets all over again, because this is something required in each and every mitzvah.
And as is brought in one of the places in Tanya, that one who learns Torah must stop every hour and remind himself what is happening here, that he is learning the Torah of Hashem, which is holy and which is G-dliness. For if not, he sinks into the fascinating ideas of the learning, delights in the concept and in the intellectual brilliance of it, and forgets who it is that is leading him through this whole enterprise.
In summary: in this section we learned that serving Hashem without an arousal of dechilu urechimu, and even without any revelation of feeling in the mind and without arousing the natural love hidden in the heart, remains below in the world of separation called the externality of the worlds, and has no power to ascend and be absorbed into His blessed unity, which is the ten holy sefiros. It is a bird without wings, and in the language of Tikunei Zohar, «דבלא דחילו ורחימו לא פרחא לעילא». We saw the source for this in the revealed Torah, from the Gemara's precise distinction between «above the heavens» and «until the heavens», and we learned that even someone who is not studying literally not lishmah, but out of «a commandment of men learned by rote» and habit from childhood, is still not considered to be studying lishmah, because lishmah demands stopping, contemplating, and feeling, in each and every mitzvah.