We have reached chapter 47 of the Tanya, on folio 66b (page 132). In chapter 46 we opened a subject that does not end in chapter 47 but continues all the way through chapter 49: how every single person can awaken his love for the Creator in a way that is truly within his reach.
A reminder of the mashal in chapter 46: the Alter Rebbe developed at length a parable built on the verse «As water reflects a face back to a face, so one man's heart to another.» He showed there how, when a person displays love to his fellow, the recipient's natural response is to return that love. And the greater the distance between the giver and the receiver, when the one giving the love is a lofty and exalted king and the one receiving it is the lowest of men, filthy and lying in the refuse, the greater the response: when someone so great pours out and invests his love in the lowest of the low, the recipient's response is literally kelos hanefesh, the soul expiring in longing. And more than that: this great king left all his ministers and servants behind, came down to the very lowest place, and even draws this lowly man up into his palace, bringing him in chamber within chamber.
We are still in the chapters that describe what the Creator does in the nimshal, the thing the parable stands for: the king is the Creator, and the man is each and every Jew. These chapters explain what the Creator does for us and how He descends to us, and this continues in chapter 48 and through the first half of chapter 49. Only midway through chapter 49 does the Alter Rebbe begin to describe what our answering response to Him must be.
In chapter 46 this part of the mashal was explained: the Creator took us out of Egypt at a time when we were sunk in it, in a state of «ervas ha'aretz,» the nakedness of the land, a place of filth and impurity, and the Holy One Himself, in His own glory and not through an angel, came down there to lift us up and bring us close to Him through Torah study and the keeping of mitzvos. And as we discussed, when a Jew learns Torah and keeps mitzvos, that is the embracing and the kissing with which the King embraces every Jew: by granting him the very possibility of learning His Torah and fulfilling His mitzvos.
Chapter 47 is a short chapter that comes in the middle of this running explanation of how the Creator descends to each and every person, how far He comes down and contracts Himself in order to draw close to him, a theme that will be developed at length from chapter 48 onward. The Alter Rebbe pauses here to settle an obvious question. If the whole matter rests on yetzias Mitzrayim, the Exodus, in which the King came down to each and every person to raise him up, and out of that the Jew is called upon to return a great love to the King (as we will see in chapter 49), then the Exodus is an old story, something that happened more than three thousand years ago. Yet we are speaking about a Jew here and now, who is supposed to feel that the King is descending to him, taking him out of a low and filthy place and lifting him up to Himself. How can a story from thousands of years ago produce a feeling in the present?
To this, chapter 47 comes and ties the idea to the present: this is not a piece of history from the past, but a living story of literally every single day. Not, of course, in the form of the historical Exodus from Egypt, but in another form, while the idea itself is the very same idea. That is the subject of the chapter, and along the way it repeats points already made in chapter 46, here with far stronger emphasis.
And so the Alter Rebbe opens: «והנה בכל דור ודור וכל יום ויום חייב אדם לראות עצמו כאילו הוא יצא היום ממצרים», «Now, in every generation and on every day a person is obligated to see himself as though he himself went out of Egypt today.»
At first glance this is simply a quotation whose source is not the Tanya at all. It appears already in the Mishnah in tractate Pesachim, and it is one of the twelve verses and sayings of our Sages that every child knows by heart. But when you look at the source, you see that the Alter Rebbe added words that are not written there. The Mishnah says, «In every generation a person is obligated to see himself as though he himself went out of Egypt.» The Alter Rebbe adds «and on every day,» and he further adds, «as though he himself went out of Egypt today,» since this is precisely the subject of the chapter, to connect the matter to every single person today. So what is the source for this addition?
For that we need to join a second Mishnah to the first, at the end of the first chapter of tractate Berachos, which we also recite in the Haggadah of Pesach. The Alter Rebbe reads the two places as one unit and fuses them into a single sentence:
The Mishnah in Berachos explains the verse «so that you remember the day of your going out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life» (and it brings the opinion of Ben Zoma and the opinion of the Sages). Had the verse said only «the days of your life,» it would have taught about the days, that every single day one must remember the Exodus, while about the nights we would know nothing. The added word «all» teaches that the nights are included too. So the obligation to remember falls on every day, and we actually fulfill it in the recital of Shema, in its third paragraph, the parshah of «Vayomer.»
The Mishnah in Pesachim teaches in what manner he must remember: «as though he himself went out of Egypt.» Not to remember that his great great grandfather left Egypt three thousand years ago, but to live it and experience it as though he himself went out.
Put the two sources together and you get one complete sentence: in every generation and on every single day a person is obligated to see himself as though he himself went out of Egypt today.
In the Rebbe's explanations on the Haggadah of Pesach, the Rebbe asks at length: if every day a person must remember the Exodus and experience it as though he himself went out of Egypt today, then what is new about the Seder night, when we sit over the entire subject of the Exodus? What does it add? And he brings there five or six differences and emphases, and even more, in which the Seder night is stronger than what we have every day:
Every day, remembering is enough; on the Seder night it is done by way of telling, of sippur.
Every day a person can do it alone, by himself; on the Seder night it is done through question and answer.
And several more differences; it is worth looking them up inside, in the Rebbe's explanations on the Haggadah of Pesach.
We have established that one must experience the going out of Egypt every day. But in fact we were never in the physical Egypt, so what does this mean? The intent of the Mishnah is the going out of the divine soul from the imprisonment of the body.
As we have already learned in Tanya, every soul that finds itself within a body is in effect sitting in a prison, for the body conceals, interferes with and limits the soul's true desires. The soul wants to be bound up with G-dliness constantly, and the body, with its cravings and its confusions, keeps getting in the way: here it is tired, there it is uncomfortable, and somewhere else it is something else. The body turns out to be a kind of house arrest and prison for the soul, and the soul is held captive by the body.
In summary: in this portion we learned that chapter 47 comes to connect the mashal of the king from chapter 46 to the present: the Exodus is not a historical tale but something alive on every single day. We examined the precision of the Alter Rebbe's wording, «in every generation and on every day... as though he himself went out of Egypt today,» and the joining of the Mishnah in Pesachim (the manner of remembering, as though he himself went out) with the Mishnah in Berachos (the obligation to remember every day and night), and the Rebbe's question about what is new on the Seder night. We also learned that the daily going out of Egypt is the going out of the divine soul from the imprisonment of the body, which conceals and limits its true desires.
In the next portion we will continue to explain this matter, and the manner in which the Creator descends and contracts Himself in order to draw close to each and every person, as will be explained at length in the coming chapters.