In the previous section we worked out the distinction between chomer (matter) and tzurah (form). Now we apply it to the soul itself: what is the chomer of the nefesh habahamis, the animal soul, which is meant to be kept and turned into good, and what is the tzurah that a person has to rid himself of.
Ratzon as the chomer, taavah as the tzurah:
Out of the middos of the nefesh habahamis flow the appetite and craving for the pleasures of this world, whether in permitted things or, chas v'shalom, in forbidden ones. When a person craves and wants some physical thing, that object of his longing is nothing more than a vessel for the will and the desire in his heart. The ratzon and the longing are the chomer; the object in which they get dressed is the tzurah.
The physical object: the thing a person sets his heart on is simply a vessel that clothes his will.
The letters of thought and speech: turning over in his mind, and talking out, how to obtain the thing - these too are vessels for that same will. A person can talk for a solid hour about the ways to get what he craves. The craving is the chomer, and the words are the tzurah in which it has been dressed.
Action: and all the more so the deed itself. All of them are vessels and garments for the ratzon.
The will in its essence is, by way of analogy, like plain unformed matter, and all of these are the form it takes: to be wanting this particular thing in this particular way.
What the koach hamis'aveh really is:
The will in its essence, even when it is clothed in an evil craving and is thoroughly bad, is not in its own essence sin and evil. For its essence is nothing other than the koach hamis'aveh, the sheer faculty of desiring: it wants all the time, it never stops wanting, and it jumps from one thing to the next. Sometimes it does not even know what it wants, it simply wants. Like a small child who understands nothing - and so too the animal inside a grown man, wanting without pause and without any reckoning.
The evil lies only in the tziyur, the shape it has been given: in whatever bent and drew the desiring power to crave what is wrong, gave it a thoroughly evil form and dressed it in filthy garments, until it is pulled toward neglecting a positive mitzvah or transgressing a prohibition. Sometimes the form is so powerful that the matter underneath is no longer visible at all, and a person is convinced that his nefesh habahamis is evil through and through, never noticing the potential for good that is hidden inside it.
Yet as far as the desiring power itself goes, it has the ability to turn the heart from one extreme to the other, to crave and love and want to cleave to Hashem, as the verse says, "נפשי אויתיך" ("my soul has desired You"), like a man who loves and craves the very life of his soul.
The root of the koach hamis'aveh in kedusha:
In truth, the desiring power of the nefesh habahamis, taken in itself, has its root and foundation in the highest kedusha: in the aspect of pnei shor, the face of the ox in the merkavah, the supernal root of the loftiest angels of the merkavah. It was only through the descent of the levels and their fall in shevias hakeilim, the breaking of the vessels, that it came about that this desiring power can crave a matter of transgression as well. And therefore, when a person returns to Hashem, he is able to turn his heart from one extreme to the other, so that the very same desiring power that had been clothed in an evil craving now goes back to loving Hashem as it was at its root in the aspect of pnei shor. His will for G-dliness then becomes an animal-like will - but a positive animal, one that carries a person with force and clarity into learning Torah and toward the right destination.
Not so the evil deed that came out of it. That is utterly evil in itself, it cannot be absorbed into kedusha, and there is no remedy for it other than nullifying it and removing it from the world. The filthy garments, the tziyur, must be erased; the animal itself is to be kept. This entire discussion is said in the Tanya in two lines only: "הבגדים הצואים... שהם תענוגי עולם הזה שהוא מלובש בהם" ("the filthy garments... which are the pleasures of this world in which it is clothed") - clothed in them, no more than that, while in its own essence it is nothing but the faculty of desiring.
The goals of the nefesh haElokis:
Up to this point the Alter Rebbe has been describing at length what love is: how the nefesh haElokis works on itself, and how it succeeds in working on its neighbor who lives together with it always - in the first stage through is'kafya (subduing), and in the second stage through is'hapcha (transformation). Earlier he brought the example of fear and awe, and here the side of love, and so he concludes: "ושאר כל המידות שבלב שהן ענפי יראה ואהבה" ("and all the other middos of the heart, which are branches of fear and love").
We should not forget that what is being described here is still the desires of the nefesh haElokis and its strategy: to conquer the mind, to conquer the heart, to conquer fear and love, and to conquer all the middos - netzach, hod and bittul, so that a person is nullified to G-dliness alone and stands victorious against everything that opposes him, and all of him belongs to Hashem alone.
Having described the takeover of the inner layer, the mind and the heart, the Alter Rebbe now moves on to the garments: thought, speech and action.
Thought and speech: "וכל כוח הדיבור שבפה והמחשבה שבמוח יהיו ממולאים מלבושי המחשבה והדיבור של נפש האלוקית לבדה" ("and the entire power of speech in the mouth and of thought in the brain should be filled with the garments of thought and speech of the divine soul alone") - that his thought should be occupied with nothing but Hashem and His Torah, and that His Torah should be his conversation all day long, his mouth never ceasing from learning.
Action: "וכוח המעשי שבידיו ושאר אבריו יהיה במעשה המצוות לבד" ("and the power of action in his hands and the rest of his limbs should be engaged in the performance of mitzvos alone").
As we already learned back in chapter 4, the garments of thought and speech belong to Torah, and the garment of action to mitzvos, which is the third garment of the nefesh haElokis. If the nefesh haElokis reaches this goal in full, it has conquered the whole city, in every layer and at every stage.
And it is not only that the animal is lifted up; it actually helps. "ורב תבואות בכוח שור" ("and abundant harvest comes through the strength of the ox") - with the strength of the ox a man plows the entire field, whereas on his own he could not drag the plow even two meters. So too in a person's avodah: when he harnesses the animal to the positive side, the work is done with appetite, with will, with power and at a run, and everything looks completely different. This avodah happens in order and by stages, step after step - from the mind to the heart to the garments - through constant training, until all the faculties are playing together and in one direction.
The will of the nefesh habahamis:
After such a lengthy description of what the nefesh haElokis wants, and since he opened with the words "ולאום מלאום יאמץ" ("and one nation will overpower the other"), we would have expected a full page describing how the nefesh habahamis seeks to take over the business. But the Alter Rebbe makes do with a few words: "אך נפש הבהמית שמהקליפה היא רצונה להיפך ממש" ("but the animal soul, which is from the kelipah, wants the very opposite") - the identical detailed program, only with the dish turned upside down, entirely on the other side.
And here a precise point is worth noticing. Regarding the nefesh haElokis the Alter Rebbe wrote "חפצה ורצונה" ("its desire and its will"), while regarding the nefesh habahamis he wrote only "רצונה" ("its will"), and not "חפצה". The reason: inwardly, the nefesh habahamis, the yetzer hara, has no desire whatsoever that a person should fail.
The parable of the harlot in the Zohar:
The holy Zohar in parshas Terumah relates that Rabbi Yitzchak met Rabbi Elazar and asked him several questions about the phrase "בכל לבבך ובכל נפשך ובכל מאודך" ("with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might") - what each one adds to the other - and Rabbi Elazar explained to him at length what love of Hashem is. Then Rabbi Yitzchak asked him by way of a parable: have you ever seen a servant who is constantly running to do the opposite of his master's will and interfering with his master's words at every turn? The question beneath the parable: the Holy One created everything and is the master of everything, so how can there be such a thing in the world as a yetzer hara telling a Jew to act against Hashem's will, when Hashem Himself created it?
Rabbi Elazar answered him with a parable. A king had a son, and there was great love between them. The king asked his son, lovingly, that he always walk the straight path and never stumble into forbidden things, and the son agreed. The king added that only if he remained faithful would he be able to stay in the inner chambers of the palace. Behind the palace lived an immodest woman. The king wanted to test his son's love for him, so he called her and asked her to try to make him fail. The woman went and met the son and tried to entice him to sin, and he pushed her away, refused even to look at her, and ran back to the palace to his father the king. The king rejoiced enormously, gave his son many gifts and brought him into chamber within chamber. And to that woman too he gave many gifts, for it was she who brought the son's faithfulness to light.
So it turns out that the woman is acting as the king's agent, and there is no question of a servant acting against his master's will, since this itself is the master's will, for the son's benefit. The same is true of the nefesh habahamis: its whole existence is for a person's benefit, so that he should overcome it and defeat it. The goal is the victory, and the boundless elevation that follows it. This is what the Alter Rebbe is pointing to when he writes "כמשל הזונה שבזוהר הקדוש" ("like the parable of the harlot in the holy Zohar"), sending us to that very passage.
From here it is clear why the Alter Rebbe did not write of the nefesh habahamis "its will and its desire" but only "its will." Its outward will is to make a person fail, and even while it keeps giving him a pleasant feeling in its company, inwardly it wants him to push it away, so that it can return to the king and report, "I did not succeed." In the nefesh haElokis there is will together with inner desire; in the nefesh habahamis there is only an external will, a will with no desire behind it.
This war is not being fought somewhere in the Far East but right in one's own heart. It exists in every single person, in every single moment of the twenty four hours of the day, a constant battle over who will rule each and every part.
Introduction to the question of the beinoni:
Everything said until now is the introduction to answering the central questions the Alter Rebbe raised at the beginning of the Tanya: what is a beinoni, an intermediate person? For if he has stumbled in a sin, even the lightest of the light, he is a rasha; and if he has not stumbled at all, why should he not be called a tzaddik? After all, in a tzaddik there is no war at all between the nefesh haElokis and the nefesh habahamis. This cannot be answered in a single word, and three chapters are devoted to it: chapter 10 will explain what a tzaddik is, chapter 11 what a rasha is, and from chapter 12 onward, what a beinoni is.
In brief: since the soul has two layers, as we have seen in this lesson too - the inner layer (mind and heart) and the outer layer (thought, speech and action) - the division works out like this:
The beinoni: in the outer layer, in thought, speech and action, only the yetzer tov rules, and he does not stumble in anything at all - for if he stumbles, he is a rasha. But in the inner layer, in the heart, the yetzer hara rules in full force: he has cravings all the time, not stopping even for a moment, only that they never manage to get out.
The rasha: not only does he have cravings inside, but from time to time he lets them come out into the open, in thought, in speech or in deed.
The tzaddik: not only in the outer layer, but even in the inner layer he has no cravings at all.
And within each of these levels there are many gradations. Of the beinoni it is said that there are five hundred levels; in the tzaddik two levels will be presented in a general way, and likewise in the rasha, even though in practice there are tens of thousands of levels in each, as will be mentioned further on, im yirtzeh Hashem.
To sum up: in this section we learned that the will and longing in the heart are the chomer of the nefesh habahamis, while the object, the thought, the speech and the deed in which that will gets clothed are the tzurah. The koach hamis'aveh in itself is not evil, and its root is in pnei shor of the merkavah, which is why it can be turned from one extreme to the other into love of Hashem; whereas the filthy garments, the deed and the evil form, have no remedy other than nullification and removal from the world. We saw the goal of the nefesh haElokis - to conquer the mind, the heart and the three garments - and the will of the nefesh habahamis, which is "the very opposite," an external will only, like the parable of the harlot in the Zohar, whose entire purpose is that a person should overcome it and defeat it. Finally we set out the general division between tzaddik, rasha and beinoni according to the two layers of the soul.
In the next section we will take up the reasoning behind this division: why the levels are divided precisely in this way, and how the Alter Rebbe explains in the coming chapters what the tzaddik, the rasha and the beinoni essentially are.