Before we turn to the third level, let us sharpen the order of what we have seen, because the ranking itself is interesting:
The first level: the evil is present in the heart, and it even manages to rise up into the mind.
The second level: the evil is not in the mind, because the mind is occupied with Torah study and the evil does not rise up, but it is present in the heart. And since awareness begins in the mind, when the mind is fully occupied a person is not necessarily aware of what is going on in his heart: there may well be desires there, and he has no awareness of them because he is keeping his mind busy.
The third level: a very high level within the beinoni, in which even in the heart the evil is not present at this moment. The beinoni has managed to put the nefesh habahamis to sleep in the heart as well.
This state exists at those times when a person succeeds in arousing within himself a love of Hashem, for example during davening. For it is impossible for two opposing loves to occupy a person's heart at one and the same moment; if he has genuinely aroused a true love for holiness, then at that very moment the love for worldly matters simply is not there. And when he manages to remain in that love for an hour or two, or even for the whole day, he is liable to think that the evil does not exist in him at all.
[A comment was raised during the lesson: there is someone whose grandfather was called a "beinoni" by the Rebbe, and from this it emerges that the level of beinoni is close at hand and attainable, to the point that one can point to a flesh and blood person and say of him that he is a beinoni. And indeed, in chapter 14 it will appear that the measure of the beinoni is the measure of every person, for every person must be in it at certain moments.]
As we said, the third level in the beinoni is the level at which a person succeeds in driving the nefesh habahamis out of his heart as well, and he is then very close to the level of a tzaddik. Precisely because of this closeness, someone who has reached this level is liable to think that he is a tzaddik, and the Alter Rebbe quickly "brings him down" from that. The opposite is possible too: a person who is a genuine tzaddik will say about himself that he is nothing more than a beinoni, and that the absence of desires in him is only because he is a beinoni of the third level. It can go in both directions.
"כי אם בשעה שאהבת ה' הוא בהתגלות ליבו" - "only at the time when the love of Hashem is revealed in his heart." There are times when the love of Hashem is openly felt in a person's heart. At those moments there is no nefesh habahamis even in the heart, and he is a beinoni on a high level. But this does not mean that the nefesh habahamis has died and will never rise again: he overcame it in a way that put it to sleep with an anesthetic, and it dozed off for a while. When the anesthetic wears off, it will get up again.
[These definitions are specific to each and every moment, and they are personal: for some, the state is momentary, lasting a certain stretch of time (a beinoni right now), and it is quite possible that an hour later, or even a second later, his situation will have changed.]
"בעתים מזומנים כמו בשעת התפילה וכיוצא בה" - "at specific times, such as during davening and the like." When is a person in a state where the love of Hashem is revealed in his heart? At certain times, such as during davening. As we learned in chapter 12, the time of davening is an es ratzon, a favorable time, when the gates are opened from Above and the Holy One helps a person to become aroused. At such a time he may experience a certain stirring of feeling, and at that moment the nefesh habahamis is not present even in the heart.
[There is a story about a chassid whose love of Hashem was visible on him during davening. His friend said to him, "I see that you have arrived, you have love of Hashem." He answered, "A slight tickle" - for chassidim never made anything of themselves. And even in an arousal of that sort, a mere "slight tickle," at that moment the nefesh habahamis is not present in the heart.]
"ואף גם זאת הפעם אינה רק שליטה וממשלה לבד" - "and even this time it is no more than dominion and rule alone." This is not a killing of the nefesh habahamis, but only control over it at this particular point in time, not its complete nullification. "כדכתיב 'ולאום מלאום יאמץ'" - "as it is written, 'and one nation shall overpower the other.'" This verse was said about the two twins in the womb of Rivkah our mother, Yaakov and Eisav, as we mentioned in the previous lesson as well. Why is this verse brought here? Because Chazal said, "כשזה קם - זה נופל וכשזה קם כו'", "when this one rises, the other falls, and when this one rises, etc.": when the yetzer tov, the nefesh ha'elokis, rises up, the other one falls. But the very wording teaches that all that has happened here is a fall, and a situation can arise in which the other one will rise again. Accordingly, even when the nefesh habahamis is down, it is not dead, it has merely fallen.
"שנפש האלקית מתאמצת ומתגברת על נפש הבהמית במקור הגבורות שהיא בינה" - "that the nefesh ha'elokis exerts itself and prevails over the nefesh habahamis in the source of the gevuros, which is binah." The nefesh ha'elokis overpowers the nefesh habahamis with tremendous strength, and it does so by going to the source of the gevuros, "להתבונן בגדולת ה' אין סוף ברוך הוא", "to contemplate the greatness of Hashem, the Infinite One, blessed be He," and out of that contemplation "ולהוליד אהבה עזה לה' כרשפי אש בחלל הימני שבלבו", "and to give birth to an intense love of Hashem like fiery flames in the right chamber of his heart" - for the intellect gives birth to emotion. When a person contemplates hashgachah peratis, the hand of Hashem directing every detail, the service in the Beis HaMikdash, and what avodas Hashem and davening really are, there is born in him a stirring, an attraction, a longing. "ואז אתכפיא סטרא אחרא שבחלל השמאלי" - "and then the sitra achra in the left chamber is subdued." The nefesh habahamis in the left chamber cannot even lift its head, since the heart is entirely taken up with a full attraction to holiness.
"אבל לא נתבטל לגמרי בבינוני, אלא בצדיק שנאמר בו 'ולבי חלל בקרבי'" - "but it is not completely nullified in the beinoni, only in the tzaddik, of whom it is said, 'and my heart is void within me.'" In the beinoni the evil is not dead; it exists and it is not nullified. In the tzaddik, by contrast (and we learned an entire chapter about him, chapter 10, with its two levels of tzaddik, which the Alter Rebbe mentions here briefly), the heart is "chalal," that is, empty. And not only does he have no love for worldly matters, but "והוא מואס ברע ושונאו בתכלית השנאה והמיאוס או שלא בתכלית השנאה כנ"ל", "he despises the evil and hates it with absolute hatred and loathing, or with a hatred that is not absolute, as above": the complete tzaddik has no connection whatsoever to an animal emotion, and if he is not a complete tzaddik, his hatred and loathing are not absolute. But with the beinoni this is not the case.
Let us return to the line we read and explain what it means that the nefesh ha'elokis prevails over the nefesh habahamis "in the source of the gevuros, which is binah." This is not the place to go on at length, but let us set out the foundation of the matter.
As is known, the soul has ten powers: three intellectual powers and seven emotional attributes. And there are several ways to map out the structure of these powers:
In one straight line, one beneath the other: the upper ones are the intellectual powers, chochmah, binah and daas, and the lower ones are the middos, chesed, gevurah, tiferes, netzach and onward.
In three lines: the right line, the left line and the middle line. Both approaches are correct, and which one you use depends on the subject at hand.
The division into three lines:
The right line - chochmah, chesed, netzach.
The left line - binah, gevurah, hod.
The middle line: kesser, which is above the line, malchus, which is below the line, and in the middle, daas, tiferes and yesod.
One could discuss at length why each power belongs to its particular line and what that means, but let us focus on what is relevant here: chesed is right and gevurah is left. The right draws close, and chesed is giving; the left pushes away, and gevurah is left. This is why Avraham Avinu is the symbol of chesed, Yitzchak is bound up with the left, and Yaakov is the middle line, "give truth to Yaakov," the attribute of tiferes.
Now let us notice what stands above chesed and above gevurah, in their root and source: above chesed is chochmah, and above gevurah is binah. Chassidus brings this, and it is stated explicitly in Mishlei: "I am binah, mine is gevurah" - binah is bound up with gevurah. And what is the difference between chochmah and binah, which we dwelt on at length in chapter 3?
Chochmah is the flash of insight in a person's mind: a new idea that drops into the mind as a single point. It has no length and breadth yet, and the person does not yet know exactly what it is about. And just as the point came in, so it can flee and vanish within a second ("I had a good idea and it ran away from me"), and every person has experienced this in one form or another.
Binah is the development of that point: broadening it and setting its boundaries, from where to where, what is included and what is not, why and how much; understanding the thing, knowing exactly how it answers the question, where it begins and where it ends, what in it is grasped and what is not.
From here the connection: the flash of the point of chochmah is of the character of chesed, since it gives a person an illumination he did not have at all, a gift from above. Binah, on the other hand, gives the point boundary and measure, and that work belongs to the line of gevurah: chesed is giving, and gevurah is holding back. And holding back does not necessarily mean withholding entirely, but rather setting a boundary and a measure. It follows that the source of gevurah is binah, and that is why binah is called "the source of the gevuros."
To summarize: in this section we set out the three levels within the beinoni, and above all the third level, in which a person has managed to put the nefesh habahamis to sleep even in his heart, at the time when the love of Hashem is revealed in his heart "at specific times, such as during davening." We learned that this is nothing more than "dominion and rule alone," and not a nullification of the evil, as hinted in the verse "and one nation shall overpower the other" and in the words of Chazal "when this one rises, the other falls"; complete nullification exists only in the tzaddik, of whom it is said, "and my heart is void within me." We also explained the phrase "in the source of the gevuros, which is binah": the structure of the three lines, the difference between the flash of chochmah (chesed, giving) and the broadening of binah (gevurah, boundary and measure), and why binah is called the source of the gevuros.
In the next section we will continue in chapter 13, where Yaakov, the middle line, will appear, and we will add further explanation.