Having established the respective roles of the mind and the heart, let us now look at where the heart stands with the beinoni, the intermediate person. The beinoni does not rule over his heart, which is why he still has cravings; but neither is he in his heart's possession, automatically carrying out whatever the heart dictates. Hence the Tanya's expression "באמרו לליבו" ("by saying to his heart"): he has the power and the ability to persuade his heart, to offer it one explanation or another that will change the situation he finds himself in.
In every transgression a person is drawn to, there are two enticements at work, and both must be present, for without both he would never actually go through with it:
The revealed enticement: the craving for the particular thing itself. He is drawn to this food, or to this matter.
The hidden enticement: beneath the surface a second enticement is needed to hold the first one up. "Don't worry, nothing has happened. Even if you do this you are not cutting yourself off from the Almighty, it doesn't turn you into a gentile, you remain a Jew and a respectable member of society, everything is fine." This enticement is a form of self-confusion, and that is precisely why it is called a ruach shtus, a spirit of folly: a person muddles his own mind.
Without this self-confusion he would never stumble at all. For as the Tanya will go on to explain, the moment a person violates G-d's will he is disconnected from the Almighty, and there is no difference between a small sin and a large one. Picture someone hooked up to life-support machines, and a decision is made to unplug him: the sin is the disconnection itself. If a person truly knew and felt that the instant he transgresses G-d's will he is severing his bond with the Almighty, the thought would never even enter his mind, and the yetzer hara would never manage to talk him into it. So the yetzer hara first confuses his mind and tells him that nothing has happened, that all the connections are still running as though nothing occurred; and only once it has succeeded in that does it come along with the specific enticement: since nothing is at stake anyway, go ahead and do it.
It follows that the beinoni cannot stop the process at the level of the revealed enticement itself. He cannot tell himself that the food is not tasty while the yetzer hara is insisting that it is. But he can take on the hidden enticement, which is what is holding the whole thing up: he can tell himself that there is no truth in the yetzer hara's claim that "nothing has happened," but rather that if he commits the transgression he will be severed from the Almighty. Once he reveals this to himself, he shatters the entire foundation on which the yetzer hara operates, and it thereby becomes far easier for him not to fall into the craving. This is the idea the Alter Rebbe is explaining here.
It is worth adding: there are places where a different kind of contemplation is brought, that a person should say to himself, "What, are you a fool? Whatever you are told, you do?" It is like the fellow who is asked why he did something foolish and answers, "He told me to," and is answered: if he had told you to jump off the roof, would you have jumped too? So here as well: must you do everything your heart tells you to do? That is indeed a thought with the power to stop a person, but the Alter Rebbe does not take that route. He takes a loftier and deeper one: not "don't stumble because it is beneath a clever person like you to stumble," but rather, don't stumble so as not to be cut off from the Almighty, and know that if you sin, whatever the size of the sin, you have been cut off.
A person standing before an enticement must immediately reveal to his heart that the yetzer hara is not right in the nonsense it is telling him, "באמרו לליבו: אינני רוצה להיות רשע אפילו שעה אחת" ("by saying to his heart: I do not want to be a wicked person even for a single hour"). Why does he not want it? Seemingly he could say: I will be wicked for just one hour, and afterwards I will do teshuvah.
The answer is that no person is willing to be killed even if he is promised that tomorrow he will be brought back to life, as in the well-known story of Rabbah and Rabbi Zeira. And no person is willing to have the rope cut on the assurance, "Don't worry, disconnect for a day and tomorrow we will reconnect," for who says the reconnection will succeed. In practice the beinoni need not even enter into such negotiations at all; he simply has control over himself, control in thought and in deed. Fortunate is one who stands in such a state, but it is no easy thing, it is real work.
"כי אינני רוצה להיות מובדל ונפרד ח"ו מהשם אחד בשום אופן" ("for I do not want to be separated and cut off, G-d forbid, from the One G-d in any way"): if he becomes wicked, he has disconnected himself from the Almighty, and that is what he does not want. And here there is no room for the argument "disconnect just for a moment," for no person is willing to be disconnected from his own life even for a moment. And how do we know that sin disconnects? "כדכתיב: עונותיכם מבדילים וגו'" ("as it is written: your sins separate, etc."). Every sin becomes a screen that conceals and separates, and that is a disconnection. As for the fact that afterwards one can reconnect, that is G-d's kindness, that He reconnects us; but it does not mean that no break was created at the time of the sin. At the moment of the sin it was a total disconnection.
"רק אני רוצה לדבקה בו, נפשי רוחי ונשמתי, בהתלבשן בשלשה לבושיו יתברך שהם מחשבה דיבור ומעשה, בה' ותורתו ומצוותיו" ("rather I wish to cleave to Him, with my nefesh, ruach and neshamah, through their being clothed in His three garments, which are thought, speech and action, in G-d, in His Torah and in His mitzvos"). How does a person attach his nefesh, ruach and neshamah to the Almighty? By clothing them in the three divine garments: thought, speech and action. The three sets of three in this sentence each run in a different direction, and they correspond to one another precisely:
"Nafshi" (my nefesh): a term for the lowest level of a person's soul, bound up with his faculties of action, and therefore "action," and correspondingly "His mitzvos."
"Ruchi" (my ruach): a higher level in his soul, bound up primarily with his emotions and also with speech, as in the Targum's rendering "leruach memalela" ("a speaking spirit"), and therefore "speech," and correspondingly "His Torah."
"Venishmasi" (and my neshamah): the intellectual, contemplative dimension of a person, and therefore "thought," and correspondingly "in G-d," in Divinity itself.
The order in the first set of three runs from the lighter to the heavier: nefesh and action first, since it is easier to contend with the yetzer hara so as not to stumble in deed than it is not to stumble in thought, even though action is the end product of thought and speech. In the set "in G-d, His Torah and His mitzvos," by contrast, the order runs from above downward. Running in both directions, the order covers every possible situation.
[It is worth emphasizing: it is not the way of the beinoni to stumble at all, neither in deed nor in thought, for the beinoni does not stumble in anything, and he is certainly obligated to hold himself back in all three. And this is the difference between the wicked person and the beinoni: with the wicked person the thing is really present and poised, right on the verge, except that he does not actually carry it out, for a wicked person need not commit the transgression in practice, it is enough that the matter exists within him as a live possibility; whereas with the beinoni it does not stand there even as a possibility, it is simply out of the question for him.]
And from where does the beinoni draw this strength? "מאהבה מסותרת שבלב כללות ישראל שנקראו אוהבי שמך" ("from the hidden love in the heart of the Jewish people as a whole, who are called 'those who love Your Name'"). This hidden love exists in every Jew, and it is called "hidden" from both directions: hidden from without, because the yetzer hara conceals it; and hidden from within, because in its own right it is so deep that it does not come into revelation, lying at a great depth.
And where do we see that all Jews love the Almighty? King David says in Tehillim "those who love Your Name," and with that the entire Jewish people are called His lovers. In one person it is revealed and in another it is concealed, but every Jew is included in the Jewish people as a whole, and they all love the Almighty. And so the beinoni says to his heart: I love G-d, and I do not want to be cut off from Him in any way whatsoever.
As we said at the outset, what causes a person to stumble is not only the craving for the particular thing, but chiefly that piece of folly telling him that nothing has happened. Now consider: even a person who has stumbled into sins his whole life, right and left, has a "red light," a boundary line he will not cross. When he is faced with the test of kiddush Hashem, when he is told to convert out of his faith or die as a Jew, in most cases he will know exactly what to do, even though he never kept anything his whole life. Why does he stop there? Because at that point the yetzer hara cannot tell him that same piece of folly, that nothing has happened and life can go on as usual; and since it cannot say that to him, he consequently does not fall [and this mesirus nefesh atones for all his sins, and once he has reached that state he is holy].
In summary: in this section we learned about where the heart stands with the beinoni, who neither rules over his heart nor is subject to its rule, and from this comes his power "by saying to his heart." We introduced the two enticements present in every transgression, the revealed craving and the hidden folly of "nothing has happened," and we saw that the beinoni contends specifically with the hidden enticement, by revealing to himself that every sin cuts him off from the Almighty, as it is written, "your sins separate." We examined the three corresponding sets of three: nefesh-action-mitzvos, ruach-speech-Torah, neshamah-thought-Divinity. And we saw the source of the beinoni's strength in the hidden love in the heart of the Jewish people as a whole, and in the reinforcement found at the point of kiddush Hashem.
The full explanation of this hidden love we will leave for chapter 18 and onward.