The Alter Rebbe continues with the two lines printed in large letters, in which the whole matter of Moshe Rabbeinu is explained. Moshe Rabbeinu gives to anyone who wants to receive; he gives to everyone. But what about those who are not connected to him?
For someone who is not directly connected, serving Hashem is harder. There is no question about that.
And still, already in chapter 2 of Tanya it was explained that there is no Jew who is not connected at all. Sometimes the connection is hidden, and it is in a person's hands to open the pipes. Here the Alter Rebbe is speaking about someone who wants to nurse from Moshe Rabbeinu openly, and such a person nurses and receives in full measure.
The soul of Moshe Rabbeinu is «המושרשת בדעת העליון שביו"ד ספירות דאצילות», «rooted in the supernal Daas of the ten sefiros of Atzilus». Atzilus is the highest of the worlds, and it contains ten sefiros; the root of Moshe's soul is in the sefirah of Daas among them. These sefiros are «המיוחדות במאצילן ברוך הוא», «united with their Emanator, blessed be He», united with the Creator in the most wondrous and most exalted way, «שהוא ודעתו אחד והוא המדע כו'», «for He and His knowledge are one, and He is the knowledge itself».
We will not dwell on this at length, so as not to stray from the main point of the chapter, but let us touch on it briefly. It is a concept already mentioned at the beginning of Tanya. With human beings everything is made of parts; you can take apart and put together. When a person knows that there is a table here, we have three things that have come together: the person, the table, and the faculty of intellect and knowing that joins them. Three matters that can be separated and can be joined.
But the Creator is one. He is not, Heaven forbid, composed of parts and details; He is entirely one in all that pertains to Him. When the Creator knows something, it is not that there is the Creator, and then His knowledge, and then the thing known. Rather He is the Knower, He is the knowledge, and He is the known, in the language of the Rambam.
It emerges that if the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu is rooted in the sefirah of Daas of the world of Atzilus, a world that is entirely revealed G-dliness with no division in it, then Moshe Rabbeinu is rooted in the Creator Himself.
And from here to our subject: since by Moshe Rabbeinu G-dliness is revealed, his soul being from another place entirely, it is through him that all of Israel can connect to G-dliness, and there is no way to do it without him. So the Holy One established it: created beings are limited, and the limited cannot connect to the limitless. By Moshe Rabbeinu there is a complete union of the limited and the limitless, and he gives this connection to each and every one.
And we are speaking here of Moshe Rabbeinu who was in a physical body, the one who gave the Torah and came down from Mount Sinai, the Moshe Rabbeinu we all know and learn about in Chumash. It is he who continues to this very day to draw down to every single Jew that knowing and recognition, daas of G-dliness.
The Alter Rebbe adds «ועוד זאת», «and furthermore». The connection to Moshe Rabbeinu is not exhausted by knowing that Moshe Rabbeinu lived three thousand years ago and that his influence continues until today because his powers are eternal. More than that: it is the Holy One's will that each and every one of us be able to connect to Moshe Rabbeinu in a more direct and more revealed way, because seeing, feeling and closeness, when they are revealed, to the point that you can actually see and touch and know who it is, accomplish far more.
Therefore the influence of Moshe Rabbeinu comes down in a stronger form: «בכל דור ודור יורדין ניצוצין מנשמת משה רבנו ע"ה ומתלבשין בגוף ונפש של חכמי הדור עיני העדה», «in every generation sparks descend from the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu, peace be upon him, and clothe themselves in the body and soul of the sages of the generation, the eyes of the congregation». This is not merely a radiance that passes to every Jew from then and forever; it is an actual spark.
And what is the difference between a radiance and a spark? A great bonfire gives light, and you can benefit from its light, but you cannot use the radiance to make a second bonfire. A spark, however, is part of the fire itself, a piece of the flame, and it has the power to kindle another bonfire, because it is the thing itself.
There is an interesting precision here. The Alter Rebbe writes that the sparks clothe themselves «in the body and soul», and not «in the soul and body», which would be the expected order. Why? So that we should not say that the essence of Moshe Rabbeinu is only the soul, and the body is nothing more than the technical part. Know that the investment of the spark in the body is with the same intensity, even apart from anything to do with his soul. That is why he puts the body before the soul, to stress that this exists both from the side of the body and from the side of the soul.
From here came the practice of chassidim, when they would come to the Rebbe, simply to look. Even someone who heard nothing and understood nothing, the very looking worked on him, because in the physical body of the sages of the generation, the eyes of the congregation, there is a spark of Moshe Rabbeinu, and in their soul certainly so.
And what do these sages of the generation, the eyes of the congregation, do? «ללמד דעת את העם ולידע את גדולת ה' ולעבדו בלב ונפש», «to teach daas to the people, to know the greatness of Hashem and to serve Him with heart and soul». The people of that generation learn daas from them.
There are two ways in which tzaddikim act upon their generation:
There are tzaddikim whose way of working on those bound to them is the very fact that they come and look at them. Throughout the generations it is told of many of the great ones of Israel that the chassid's very coming and gazing at the Rebbe aroused in him yiras Shomayim and gave him provisions for the road for a long time afterward.
And there are tzaddikim whose action is in giving something to the one bound to them, including by teaching him Torah. Only that when they teach Torah, what is being transmitted is not merely a beautiful idea, but the G-dliness within it, which they have clothed in the content being taught. A person who learns that very same kind of idea, but not from him and not through him, will not receive those same things.
To what can this be compared? First an introduction. It is known that there were chassidim, not Rebbeim and not our Rebbeim, but chassidim, of very great stature, who wrote maamarim of chassidus themselves. There are printed sefarim containing very deep maamarim of chassidus and truly wondrous things written by great chassidim.
And nevertheless, chassidim did not make a practice of learning in these sefarim. Someone who wanted to look something up looked it up, but they did not sit and learn in them. They are important sefarim, and there are wondrous things in them, but when a person wanted to learn chassidus, say before davening, when he wanted to connect to the content of chassidus, he would take a maamar of chassidus of the Rebbe and learn it, even though sometimes in that very maamar the material is easier and simpler, while in that other sefer there is great depth.
And why? It is certainly not, Heaven forbid, out of a worry that the words are not accurate or not true. They are the absolute truth, and there is no doubt that every word there is true, for they drew from the holy source, from our Rebbeim.
A true artist, who understands the craft of painting, painted a figure. Whoever looks at the painting connects to the figure and is moved by it; the figure becomes actually alive.
Now along comes someone who is not an artist and does not understand painting, and he takes that same painting and copies it, an exact imitation, every single detail. Stand the imitation next to the original: in the imitation there is no soul. There are eyes, there is a nose, there is a mouth, everything is there, and it is not the same thing. And anyone with a little understanding of painting will tell the painting from the copy immediately.
And the difference is simple. The copyist made a circle, and he wants the circle to hint at an eye; but there is no eye here, there is a circle. With the true artist there is no circle, there is an eye. The eye comes to expression in a circle, but essentially it is an eye. And the same with the nose, and the same with the mouth. It is a completely different approach: the artist puts in the soul, the essence, and clothes it in these lines and those, and when you look at the lines you do not see lines, you see the essence. With the copyist, the viewer sees lines; he understands that here the man meant to hint at the eye and here at the nose, he grasps his intention, but he does not see the figure, he sees the lines.
And that is the difference. In a maamar of the Rebbe, G-dliness itself is clothed in the content being taught, whereas with another, even though the words are true and wondrous, the essence itself is not in them.
In summary: in this section we learned that the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu is rooted in the supernal Daas of the ten sefiros of Atzilus, which are united with their Emanator, blessed be He, «for He and His knowledge are one, and He is the knowledge». With a human being, the knower, the knowledge and the thing known are three separate things, whereas with the Creator He is the Knower, He is the knowledge and He is the known; it follows that Moshe is rooted in the Creator Himself, and therefore it is specifically through him that the limited connects to the limitless. We saw the addition of «and furthermore»: that in every generation sparks descend from the soul of Moshe and clothe themselves in the body and soul of the sages of the generation, the eyes of the congregation. A spark and not merely a radiance, for a spark has the power to kindle another bonfire. And we noted the precision of «body and soul» specifically, that the spark is present even from the side of the body, which is the source of the chassidim's practice of coming to the Rebbe simply to look. And we examined the two ways tzaddikim act: the very gazing at them, and learning Torah from them, in which G-dliness is clothed within what is taught, like the parable of the true artist, in whose painting there is an eye and a soul, as against the copyist, by whom everything is exact but there is nothing there except lines.