In the previous section we looked at Torah study done with an ulterior motive, and at study done «just so», by rote, in the manner of «mitzvas anashim melumadah». Now we turn to the promise «ki lo yidach mimenu nidach», and to the ways such learning can be repaired.
The Alter Rebbe cites the words of the verse "כי לא ידח ממנו נדח" (that none who is cast away shall remain cast away): no Jew will be left banished, God forbid, thrown away from the Holy One, blessed be He. In the end he will return, even if that requires another gilgul. On the face of it, though, someone who learned Torah with an ulterior motive is hardly «cast away», he is a talmid chacham! So why does the Alter Rebbe apply to him «ki lo yidach mimenu nidach»? The answer is that he is speaking here in general terms, covering every case:
Learning shelo lishmah, for one's own honor: this is not «cast away» at all. In the end he did learn Torah, and this is precisely the situation about which it is said, «a person should always occupy himself with Torah».
Learning in order to provoke: a person who wants to learn and know Torah so that he can extract all sorts of things from his knowledge and use them against the Torah, to approach other Jews and pull them away from Torah with the claim, «I also know what it says in there». Such a person is indeed in the category of «cast away».
And even one who was, God forbid, in the state of «cast away», still: «none who is cast away shall remain cast away». Every Jew will in the end come back, uncover the Divine truth within him, and arrive at the proper way of learning Torah.
Let us return to the person we discussed in the previous section. His learning was not driven by an ulterior motive; it was simply static learning, «mitzvas anashim melumadah». He was not thinking about the Holy One, blessed be He, but he was not thinking about himself either. He learns because that is what he is used to and he does not know anything else. Now, all at once, he has grasped that Torah study is supposed to be alive, with feeling, and he asks: what becomes of the three or five years in which I learned statically? How do I lift all that Torah upward?
Certainly, if he does teshuvah the matter is repaired, and there is no question that teshuvah is fitting for him, since he did not learn as he should have. But he is not obligated to arrive specifically at teshuvah; there is another route open to him. In the Alter Rebbe's words: "אך כשעושה סתם לא לשמה ולא שלא לשמה אין הדבר תלוי בתשובה, אלא מיד שחוזר ולומד דבר זה לשמה" (but when he does it «just so», neither lishmah nor shelo lishmah, the matter does not depend on teshuvah; rather, the moment he goes back and learns that same thing lishmah...).
In other words: when the learning was not done out of a negative feeling but «just so», neither lishmah nor shelo lishmah, the repair does not depend on teshuvah. It is enough that he go back and learn that same masechta and that same mishnah properly and lishmah, and immediately all the earlier times he learned it attach themselves to this learning: "הרי גם מה שלמד בסתם מתחבר ומצטרף ללימוד זה ופרחא עליה" (what he learned «just so» joins and attaches itself to this learning and flies up with it). Everything is lifted and rises upward. Even what he learned without any thought at all joins this learning and ascends along with it.
The reason: teshuvah is required when something has become attached to evil, to the kelipah, and the whole point of teshuvah is to uproot that kelipah. Here, by contrast, there is no kelipah to uproot, "מאחר שלא נתלבש בו עדיין שום קליפה דנוגה" (since no kelipas nogah has yet clothed itself in it). It is therefore enough that he learn that same thing once more, properly.
"ולכן לעולם יעסוק אדם כו'" (and therefore «a person should always occupy himself» etc.), that he should always keep learning. For if a day comes on which he learns that same subject while thinking about the Holy One, blessed be He, even for a single moment, all the previous times are instantly transformed and lifted up, even though he does not remember a thing about them.
"וכן העניין בתפילה שלא בכוונה" (and the same applies to prayer said without kavanah). The very same idea holds for davening said without intention, "כמו שכתוב בזהר" (as is written in the Zohar). The Zohar brings something wonderful: there is such a thing as a «gathered prayer», assembled from all the prayers of the entire year. A person davens Shacharis hundreds of times a year, and most of those times there is no kavanah in it at all. But one day he thought about the Holy One, blessed be He, while saying «Hodu», and immediately afterward the yetzer hara clothed itself over him and he no longer knew where he was standing. On another day his kavanah in «Hodu» was weak, but he had kavanah in words further on. And on a third day he had kavanah somewhere else entirely. And these need not have happened on consecutive days; they may have been weeks or months apart.
Once a year the Holy One, blessed be He, reviews the entire year and gathers from all those prayers one complete prayer, a «gathered prayer» assembled out of the whole year's davening. And that one prayer carries up with it all the prayers of the entire year.
So this same phenomenon exists both in Torah and in tefillah. If the prayer was said absentmindedly, with no thought, and one single time he had proper kavanah even in one word, everything rises. And so too in Torah: if he learned without thought, and one time he went back and learned that same subject properly, everything rises and is lifted upward.
The Rebbe's explanation of «mitoch shelo lishmah ba lishmah»:
To round out the subject, let us add an interesting and deep explanation that the Rebbe gives on the words of the Gemara, «a person should always occupy himself with Torah even shelo lishmah, for out of shelo lishmah he comes to lishmah».
A Jew has a yetzer tov and a yetzer hara, a nefesh ha'elokis and a nefesh habahamis. Take a person sitting and learning Torah with an ulterior motive, for his own honor: why is he really learning? It is not the ulterior motive that is making him learn. It is his nefesh ha'elokis, which wants to learn and to connect to the Holy One, blessed be He; that is the reason he is learning. And what does the nefesh habahamis do?
At first, when it sees that the nefesh ha'elokis has suddenly woken up to learn a blatt Gemara, it tries to stop him and scramble his thoughts: «Don't learn, look over here, look over there».
When it sees that this is not working and he wants to learn his blatt Gemara, it injects an ulterior motive into him: «It is worth your while to learn, after all you will gain honor from it».
But the truth is that the ulterior motive is nothing more than an outer wrapping; it is not the truth of the matter. And this is the precision in the Gemara's language, «mitoch shelo lishmah», literally «out of the inside of the shelo lishmah». Take the shelo lishmah and dig into it: when you see a person learning with an ulterior motive, look at what is inside, and inside there is lishmah, a nefesh ha'elokis that wants to learn because the Holy One, blessed be He, said so. The motive is only an outer covering. Inevitably, then, a day will come when the lishmah will be not only on the inside but out in the open, breaking through to the outside as well.
On a deeper level: the poskim disagree whether the rule «a person should always occupy himself with Torah even shelo lishmah, for out of shelo lishmah he comes to lishmah» applies also to one who learns in order to provoke, or whether it was said only about learning for one's own honor and the like. To a person learning for his own honor, in order to be a talmid chacham, we simply say: learn! There is nothing bad here, and even though it is for your own honor, «out of shelo lishmah he will come to lishmah». But what about a person who announces up front that he wants to learn only in order to know how to provoke and do the opposite? Do we say the same to him? On this the poskim are divided.
The Rebbe explains the root of this dispute as well. Until now we explained that «mitoch shelo lishmah» means that the inside, the true desire, is Elokus, while the ulterior motive comes from the yetzer hara and the nefesh habahamis. But one can go a step deeper and say that even the ulterior motive itself comes from the yetzer tov and the nefesh ha'elokis, for the motive too has an outer wrapping and an inside.
How so? A person learns because he wants honor, he wants to be respected. Yet in truth the honor does not interest him in the least. Then what is going on? The nefesh ha'elokis is telling him: if you learn Torah you will be given honor, and then everyone will see that Torah study brings honor, and that will awaken in all of them a desire to learn. And likewise, if through your learning you receive money and become wealthy, everyone will say: it pays to learn, look how those who learn become rich. It turns out that the nefesh ha'elokis wants the ulterior motive too; the difference is that the nefesh habahamis is looking at the momentary gain, while the nefesh ha'elokis is looking at the inner splendor of Torah. This is «mitoch shelo lishmah»: even inside the ulterior motive itself there is an «inside».
From here we can understand the dispute among the poskim regarding a person learning in order to provoke, whose learning is nothing but provocation from beginning to end: can we say even here that the nefesh ha'elokis has an interest in the matter, or has it gone too far, so that «out of shelo lishmah he comes to lishmah» cannot be said about it?
In summary: in this section we learned that a Jew learning Torah or doing a mitzvah must always be searching within it for the Divine feeling. Static learning, with no Divine feeling in it, does not rise upward, and all the more so learning done out of the opposite feeling, which is drawn down to the kelipos. But it is never a lost case, and it is always possible to lift these things upward. If the learning was driven by an ulterior motive, teshuvah is required. And if it was done «just so», teshuvah will certainly help, but there is no obligation to arrive specifically at teshuvah; the very act of learning that same subject once more, properly, already elevates it and makes all the difference. We also looked at the promise «ki lo yidach mimenu nidach», at the «gathered prayer» of the Zohar, and at the Rebbe's explanation that the inside of the shelo lishmah is lishmah.
In the next section we will continue with the Alter Rebbe's words in the remainder of the chapter.