In the previous section we learned about the middos that flow from the four elements of the nefesh habahamis, the animal soul. Now the Alter Rebbe continues, turning the discussion to the natural makeup of a Jew's soul as against the souls of the nations of the world, and to the difference between chesed that is true kindness and chesed that has no truth in it.
Why bashfulness is left out:
Let us begin with a careful reading. Bashfulness, too, is a good middah. The Alter Rebbe is listing good qualities that exist in a person's very nature, and he quotes the Gemara: רחמנות וגמילות חסדים ("mercy and acts of kindness"), yet he skips over bashfulness and does not mention it. Why? If he simply wanted to be brief and cite two examples, he should have taken the first two on the list, the merciful and the bashful, and left out the third. The fact that he specifically passed over bashfulness shows that this is deliberate. What lies behind it?
The Rebbe explains this in a fascinating way. On the face of it there is a difficulty. Here we are told that a Jew is a bayshan, bashful, and the opposite of a bayshan is an az, one who is brazen. Yet the Gemara in Maseches Beitzah states that there are three brazen ones:
Among the nations: עזים שבאומות ישראל ("the boldest of the nations is Israel").
Among animals: the dog is the boldest of animals.
Among birds: the rooster is the boldest of birds.
So of all the nations, it is Israel that possesses azus, boldness. And now we have a contradiction: in one place we are told that the Jewish people have azus, and in another that they are bashful, and these are two opposite qualities.
The Rebbe explains that by their original nature, from the time the Jewish people came into being from Avraham Avinu, they possessed azus; but at a certain point that azus was taken from them. The Gemara brings a verse and a source for each of the three good qualities, and the source it brings for bashfulness is the verse: ביישנים דכתיב - בעבור תהיה יראתו על פניכם ("bashful, as it is written: in order that His fear be upon your faces"), a verse from the account of Mattan Torah in Sefer Shemos. From the giving of the Torah onward, since Torah weakens a person's strength, their earlier nature changed and they became bashful. When the Gemara says "bashful," it means from Mattan Torah and on.
The Rebbe adds a striking observation on this in a letter: why is it that in matters that are the very opposite of tznius the world feels no shame at all (people publicize them in the street, and some even receive prizes for them), while precisely in positive matters people are embarrassed? The answer is that the very nature of shame is bound up with the standards of Torah. It is the Torah that generates the sense of shame, and therefore when something runs counter to Torah and is not lived according to it, the shame simply does not take hold, because shame does not come from nature alone but from Torah.
Let us return to our point. The Alter Rebbe here is speaking of the Jew's makeup as it was originally, at its root, even before Mattan Torah. At its foundation and in its essence, the nature of a Jew is mercy and acts of kindness alone, and that is why he does not include bashfulness here: bashfulness is a second nature, a nature acquired from Mattan Torah onward. That is the first careful point.
Acts of kindness, and kelipah?
Now a question arises: why should the whole matter of chesed be linked to kelipah? Put differently: gemilus chassadim is a mitzvah of the Torah, and not just any mitzvah, but a great one, unmatched. How can we say that acts of kindness are connected to kelipah and to the sitra achra, when gemilus chassadim is holiness? The answer is simple, and it will emerge from what follows.
In a Jew's animal soul, we defined, there are good middos and bad middos. מה שאין כן, by contrast, the souls of the nations of the world, says the Alter Rebbe, הן משאר קליפות טמאות שאין בהן טוב כלל, כמו שכתוב בעץ חיים ("are from the other, unclean kelipos, in which there is no good whatsoever, as is written in Eitz Chaim") (Shaar 49, chapter 3). The soul of a non-Jew is not like the soul of a Jew; it comes from the three impure kelipos, in which there is no good at all but only evil, and so the very concept of good does not exist within it.
And should someone ask: surely there are non-Jews who show mercy and do acts of kindness? To this the Alter Rebbe answers: וכל טיבו דעבדין האומות - לגרמייהו עבדין ("and whatever good the nations do, they do for themselves"). All the good that appears in the deeds of the nations is not really good; it is something done for themselves and for their own benefit. וכדאיתא בגמרא, as the Gemara says on the verse וחסד לאומים חטאת ("and the kindness of the nations is sin"), that all the tzedakah and chesed that the nations of the world do is only in order to glorify themselves.
It emerges that the concept of chesed comes in three levels, from the highest down:
The chesed of the nefesh ha'elokis: the truest chesed of all, which we have not yet studied here in the chapter, chesed that flows from the G-dly soul and from the taryag mitzvos, which a Jew performs because the Holy One commanded it. This is genuine chesed, on the highest and most correct level.
The chesed of a Jew's nefesh habahamis: here he acts neither because the Torah says so nor because the Holy One commanded it, but because this is his nature and his feeling. The Holy One implanted in him a natural concern for another person. This is not giving for his own sake or to quiet his conscience; it is real concern for the other and a genuine desire to give to him. It is simply not driven by the mitzvah and the will of Hashem, but by nature.
The chesed of a non-Jew: the lowest level. Why does he do kindness? Because he has an interest in it, some benefit. Sometimes the benefit is crude: he will be written up in the advertisements, he will be honored and praised. Sometimes it is that his conscience will not let him rest. But dig far enough and you will find the point: it stems from his own wants.
And from here comes the answer to our question, why chesed and mercy are attributed to the animal soul. The intent is not that chesed and mercy must come specifically from it. What has been revealed here is that even the animal soul contains mercy and acts of kindness; but from the true side of a Jew, from the Jewish side of him, chesed ought to come from above.
The chesed of Avraham and the chesed of Yishmael:
This is the difference between Avraham Avinu and Yishmael: Avraham Avinu is chesed within the realm of kedushah, and Yishmael is chesed within the realm of kelipah. How do you tell them apart, when both of them are performing acts of kindness? Avraham, because his chesed comes from the side of holiness (and indeed from above the animal soul, on the very highest level), does it not for himself but for the other. Therefore he gives to the other first, and gives him the choicest and the best; and if something is left over, then he takes it for himself. His concern and his calculation are entirely about the other, not about himself at all.
Yishmael's chesed is another matter. He too is prepared to give to the other, if there is something left, if there is plenty, if there is enough, but he will not give before he has secured his own portion, so that he should not, G-d forbid, be impoverished and left with nothing. On the technical level of giving it can therefore be hard to tell the two apart, since this one gives and that one gives; but at the depth of the matter, one giving may be the giving of Yishmael and the other the giving of Avraham, one giving of the essential and one giving of the leftovers and the incidental.
It is told in one of the sources: a poor man comes to ask for help, and Avraham wants to give him, and afterward it turns out that the poor man no longer needs it and he says, "I managed, I don't need it." Avraham will be glad that the man is not in need. But Yishmael, who wants to give because he is looking for some benefit in it, will be annoyed: "What do you mean you don't need it? I already put it in the budget, I already publicized it, I want to give!" The Jew rejoices that the poor man does not need it, and Yishmael is pained by it. This is a difference from one extreme to the other, and it all depends on the source from which the chesed flows: from the animal soul, from the G-dly soul, or, in the case of a non-Jew, from absolute evil.
The chassidei umos ha'olam:
Here a further note must be added: among the nations themselves there are differences, and not all are alike. There are non-Jews who are called chassidei umos ha'olam, the righteous of the nations, of whom the Rambam writes that they have a share in the World to Come. Their souls come from kelipas nogah, and are therefore similar, in a certain sense, to the animal soul of a Jew. Accordingly, with the chassidei umos ha'olam it is possible to find chesed that is not "legarmayhu," not for themselves, and not for self-glorification, but genuine chesed, because in creating them the Creator placed within them a soul on a somewhat higher level.
For this same reason a person cannot choose to be one of the chassidei umos ha'olam. If he was born that way, with a higher soul, he will be a chassid umos ha'olam; and if not, nothing will help him. It is not given over to his choice, just as there are animals whose nature is cruel, and that is their nature and nothing can change it.
In one of the maamarim of the Tzemach Tzedek it is written that the supernal merkavah has four faces, פני אריה, פני שור, פני נשר ופני אדם ("the face of a lion, the face of an ox, the face of an eagle and the face of a man"), the four faces seen by Yechezkel the prophet, and it is further said ועל דמות הכיסא דמות כמראה אדם עליו מלמעלה ("and upon the likeness of the throne was a likeness like the appearance of a man upon it from above"), and that "likeness like the appearance of a man" upon the throne is not the same as the "face of a man" in the merkavah. The Tzemach Tzedek explains:
From the face of the ox: the souls of all the domestic animals in the world were formed.
From the face of the lion: the souls of all the wild animals.
From the face of the eagle: the souls of all the birds.
From the face of the man in the merkavah: the souls of the chassidei umos ha'olam.
Whereas with a Jew, the "man upon the throne," we are dealing with something far loftier, something else entirely.
To sum up: in this section we learned about the natural makeup of a Jew: why the Alter Rebbe passed over the quality of bashfulness, because it is a second nature acquired only from Mattan Torah, while mercy and acts of kindness lie in the very foundation of his soul. We also learned three levels in chesed: the chesed of the nefesh ha'elokis, the chesed of a Jew's nefesh habahamis, and the chesed of a non-Jew, which is done for his own benefit, along with the difference between the chesed of Avraham and the chesed of Yishmael. And we learned that among the nations themselves there is a distinction: the chassidei umos ha'olam, whose souls are from kelipas nogah and whose root is in the "face of a man" of the merkavah.
In the next section we will take up chapter 2: the nefesh ha'elokis of a Jew, its essence, and the way it becomes bound up with the body.