Picking up where we left off, let us explain the point: a maamar of chassidus written by a Rebbe, who, in the Alter Rebbe's words here, is a spark of the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu, brings Elokus (G-dliness) down into the world. It makes no difference whether he brings that G-dliness down through a parable, through a simple word, or through a verse he quotes; whatever form the words take, it is the G-dliness itself that clothes itself in the «lines» he has chosen.
To what may this be compared? A copyist sets a set of lines in front of you and asks you to read certain things into them. A person who is after information alone, concepts, something like an encyclopedia, can open any book at all and will come away with interesting ideas. But one who wants to connect to Elokus has to take specifically the original picture, the one in which the thing itself is present. This is exactly what the Alter Rebbe is saying: in every single generation, the matter is drawn from within.
Let us read the Alter Rebbe's words again:
"ועוד זאת, יתר על כן, בכל דור ודור יורדים ניצוצין מנשמת משה רבנו עליו השלום ומתלבשים בגוף ונפש של חכמי הדור עיני העדה, ללמד דעת את העם ולידע גדולת ה' ולעבדו בלב ונפש"
«And furthermore, in every single 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, to teach knowledge to the people, so that they may know the greatness of Hashem and serve Him with heart and soul.»
It is specifically the tzaddik, who is a spark of Moshe Rabbeinu, who places the Elokus inside the very things a person receives from him. As a result, the one who learns from him is connected to the Almighty in every single word he learns from him, whether it is a deep word or a simple one. The words are not the main thing; the G-dliness contained within them is.
"כי העבודה שבלב היא לפי הדעת", «for the service of the heart is according to the daas.» The more daas there is, the greater the connection, and the more the heart will be aroused and drawn after the matter. If a person is asked for yiras shomayim, which is a fear residing in the heart, the road to it runs through daas: the more daas, the more it will be felt in the heart. "וכמו שכתוב דע את אלוקי אביך ועבדהו בלב שלם ונפש חפיצה", «as it is written: Know the G-d of your father and serve Him with a whole heart and a willing soul.» The verse itself establishes, then, that whoever wishes to serve Hashem with a whole heart must first have «know the G-d of your father.»
And what is daas? It does not mean knowledge and information, which belong to chochmah and binah. Daas comes from a word that means connection. Take an example: a person does not need to be informed of his own name, because he knows it; it is not an external piece of information, it is his very self, a part of him.
The Alter Rebbe adds, as a parenthetical remark, what is said about the future: "ולעתיד הוא אומר ולא ילמדו איש את רעהו לאמר דעו את ה' כי כולם ידעו אותי וגו'", «and of the time to come it says: And no longer shall a man teach his fellow, saying, Know Hashem, for they shall all know Me.» In the time to come, Elokus will be revealed and will pour out in the open streets. But that is no reason to wait. On the contrary: precisely now, in our present situation and in the darkness in which we find ourselves, we have to arouse ourselves, and that happens by connecting to the sages of the generation, the eyes of the congregation, and recognizing that they are the ones teaching us. Through them one can reach Elokus, and without this there is no other road.
The Alter Rebbe immediately stresses: "אך עיקר הדעת אינה הידיעה לבדה, שידעו גדולת ה' מפי סופרים ומפי ספרים", «but the essence of daas is not the knowing alone, that one should know the greatness of Hashem from the mouths of scholars and from books.» Daas is not measured by how many more lines and words a person has learned and how much information he has stockpiled. Even someone who knows a great deal will not find that the knowing by itself accomplishes anything, "אלא העיקר הוא להעמיק דעתו בגדולת ה'", «rather the main thing is to immerse his daas deeply in the greatness of Hashem.» In other words, when a person contemplates these matters of pnimiyus haTorah and of the greatness of Hashem, the very matters handed to him by the sages of the generation in whom the spark of Moshe Rabbeinu is clothed, he must sink his daas deeply into them.
And what does «deeply» mean? "ולתקוע מחשבתו בה' בחוזק ואומץ הלב והמוח, עד שתהא מחשבתו מקושרת בה' בקשר אמיץ וחזק כמו שהיא מקושרת בדבר גשמי שרואה בעיני בשר ומעמיק בו מחשבתו", «and to drive his thought into Hashem with the full strength and vigor of the heart and mind, until his thought is bound to Hashem with a firm and strong bond, just as it is bound to a physical object that he sees with his fleshly eyes and in which he immerses his thought.»
Think of a nail. As long as it is held in your hand it can move in any direction, and you can set it down here or there; but once you have driven it firmly into the wood, all the way in, it is fixed. So too a person must drive his thought into the matters he is contemplating, until he is lodged in them and they become a part of him.
With a physical object that a person sees with his fleshly eyes, it is easy for his thought to be lodged there: the food he wants to eat is right in front of him, and his thought clings to it powerfully. Someone else has his thought driven into the image of a hundred thousand dollars; each person has his own version. And even when the thing is not literally before his eyes, for instance while he is on his way home to the meal, his thought is already fixed on it. In spiritual matters, though, it is extremely difficult. If it is nothing more than knowing, then one moment he is thinking about the matter, and the next moment his mind is on something else entirely and he has taken his attention completely off what came before. This is why the Alter Rebbe says that if a person wants the G-dly matter to be alive for him, he has to drive it into his mind.
"כנודע שדעת הוא לשון התקשרות", «as is known, daas is an expression of connection.» As we have stressed several times, daas is not an expression of knowing and information, it is a synonym for being bound: when a person is bound to something, that is his daas in it. And the simplest, clearest proof: "כמו והאדם ידע וגו'", «as in: And Adam knew Chava,» meaning that he joined with her. Knowing can be external: he knows, and five minutes later he has forgotten because he has moved on to something else. But an inner bond, in which a person has driven his thought in with force, is what actually does the work in him.
And how does one arrive at this?
On the face of it, it seems entirely out of reach: a physical human being is not capable of driving his thought into something G-dly. With food he can, because the food is physical and so is he. With a hundred thousand dollars he can, because that too is physical. But when we are speaking of Elokus, is it realistic that a person steeped in physical matters should drive his thought into it? (And even if someone claims that he himself is spiritual and can fix his thought on something as remote and abstract as Ein Sof, that is not spiritual, it is imaginary.)
To this the Alter Rebbe answers, just as he opened the chapter: "וכח זה ומוח זה לקשר דעתו בה' יש בכל נפש מבית ישראל ביניקתה מנשמת משה רבנו עליו השלום", «and this power and this mind, to bind one's daas to Hashem, exists in every soul of the house of Israel, by virtue of its nursing from the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu, peace be upon him.» Every Jew can reach this, because there is a Moshe Rabbeinu, the raya mehemna, and the Moshe Rabbeinu of every generation gives these powers to each and every one.
This bond does not depend on a person's wanting it: whether he wants it or not, that is what the soul is. The choice concerns only whether to reveal it and do something with it, whether to awaken the connection or to leave it for Ne'ilah on Yom Kippur. Even in those moments of overwhelming arousal, when a person suddenly feels the Elokus, that too comes from Moshe Rabbeinu; it is simply that at that moment he has removed the concealing klipos and the already existing connection has come to light. And whoever wants to reveal that connection on an ordinary Wednesday in the middle of the year, with no preparations at all, has to work at it, and then he will bring it about. The capacity is always there and the channel from Moshe Rabbeinu is open; it depends on the person himself, for if he too aims himself in that direction, he will be able to see that he is receiving powers from Moshe Rabbeinu.
And how does one connect to him? As we said above: by studying the matter and immersing oneself in it, immersing oneself in the authentic picture and not merely in the «lines», in the words of Moshe Rabbeinu into which he placed Elokus. That is how a person becomes connected to the matter.
"רק מאחר שנתלבשה הנפש בגוף", «only, since the soul has become clothed in the body.» Were the soul stripped of the body, this would be easy: it has no interference, it wants and it is bound, and all it needs is to focus, to look toward Moshe Rabbeinu, and that accomplishes the whole thing. But once the soul is clothed in a body, the body gets in the way at every turn. The moment a person tries to stir himself even slightly, the body presents him with a thousand and one other physical things to tempt him and draw him off, until he has completely forgotten the G-dly matter he sat down to learn in the first place. A person learns one line and suddenly finds himself somewhere else entirely, because the body has one job: to set up obstacles at every moment.
Therefore "צריכה ליגיעה רבה ועצומה, כפולה ומכופלת", «it requires great and mighty exertion, doubled and redoubled,» a sustained physical and emotional effort. Nothing comes about easily, since easiness is precisely where the body does its best work, in the other direction. And one who wants the soul to prevail needs exertion that is great and mighty, doubled and redoubled.
The Alter Rebbe lists several points on which the exertion must be focused. The first: "האחת היא יגיעת בשר, לבטש את הגוף ולהכניעו שלא יחשיך על אור הנפש", «the first is the exertion of the flesh, to crush the body and subdue it so that it should not darken the light of the soul.» The body, which interferes and confuses the mind, needs from time to time to receive a bittush and be humbled, and once it has been given a bit of a bittush it interferes less. This is as we learned at length regarding bittush in chapter 30.
And it is fitting that a person give his own body the bittush rather than wait for someone else to do it for him, because when it comes from someone else it hurts more, since we are not paying attention. The Alter Rebbe writes in Iggeres HaKodesh that when a person receives a bittush from another person, he should stop for a moment and realize that it is not really that person at all; rather, the Almighty has just sent him a bittush. And we, as a rule, when we take a bittush from another person, focus on the trivial side of it: «Why did you do that?» «Why did you say that?» We fail to notice that at that moment he is nothing but a messenger from the Almighty.
To summarize: In this section we learned that in every generation sparks descend from the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu and clothe themselves in the body and soul of the sages of the generation, the eyes of the congregation, and that through them a person receives the Elokus contained within the very things he learns from them, whether in a deep word or in a simple one. We saw that the service of the heart is according to the daas, and that the essence of daas is not the knowing alone but immersing one's daas in the greatness of Hashem and driving one's thought into Him with force, like a nail driven into wood, until the thought is bound to Hashem the way it is bound to a physical object seen with fleshly eyes. We saw that the power to bind one's daas to Hashem is present in every soul of the house of Israel, by virtue of its nursing from the root of the soul of Moshe Rabbeinu, and that once the soul is clothed in a body this calls for exertion that is great and mighty, doubled and redoubled, beginning with the exertion of the flesh, to crush the body and subdue it so that it should not darken the light of the soul, to the point that even a bittush that comes by way of another person is a mission from the Almighty.
In the next section we will continue with the remaining forms of exertion that the Alter Rebbe lists in this chapter.