In the previous section we studied the nefesh ha'elokis, the divine soul, and its connection to the body, and we saw how the Alter Rebbe established that every Jew has two souls. In this section we will look more deeply at the definition of the second soul, the divine soul, and at the sources that teach us about its essence and its inner root in the Creator.
We have arrived at chapter 2 of Tanya (page 6a), which flows directly out of the end of chapter 1. At the close of chapter 1 the Alter Rebbe explained that every Jew, every single member of Israel, has two souls, and he described at length the characteristics and the workings of the soul that comes from the side of kelipah and sitra achra.
"The second soul in a Jew":
Chapter 2 opens with the definition of the second soul: "נפש השנית בישראל היא חלק אלוק-ה ממעל ממש" ("The second soul in a Jew is literally a part of G-d above"). We have already gone through all the precise wordings: why it is called "second," what the emphasis of "from above" adds, and what "literally" means. The point of it all is that the divine soul present in every single Jew is a part of G-d, coming literally from above and descending all the way into actuality, so that in every Jew there is an actual divine essence.
Now the Alter Rebbe comes to reinforce this and to bring sources and proofs that the second soul possessed by every Jew is literally a part of G-d above, in every sense of the words and without any exaggeration. For this he cites two expressions:
"ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים" ("And He blew into his nostrils a soul of life"), a verse at the beginning of the second chapter of Bereishis. After the general account of all the creations of the six days of creation, the Torah returns and describes in greater detail the creation of man, who is the purpose of the whole creation: the Holy One, blessed be He, formed him of dust from the earth, "and He blew into his nostrils a soul of life, and man became a living being." The life and the soul entered the man who had been formed from the dust of the earth by way of a blowing.
"ואתה נפחת בי" ("and You blew it into me"), the language of the Gemara in Berachos, which cites the text of "אלוקי, נשמה שנתת בי" ("My G-d, the soul You placed within me") that a person says in the morning blessings. From the Gemara it entered the siddur, and it is said every morning. Although there are different versions and small variations between the wording of the Gemara and the wording of the siddur, in one thing there is no difference: "You blew it into me," the very same expression used about Adam.
Why are both sources needed?
The verse is speaking about Adam, and one might have thought that this blowing was unique to him. The Alter Rebbe therefore brings that identical expression from the morning blessings: every morning every Jew declares and thanks the Creator of the world that his soul was "blown into me," in exactly the same manner.
"And He said" versus "And He blew":
First an introduction: the Torah speaks in the language of human beings, even though the Creator has no body and no bodily form. The expression "and He blew" is familiar from physical life, a person blowing up a balloon, and the Torah uses human language so that the ear can absorb it, as is well known that "דיברה תורה כלשון בני אדם" ("the Torah speaks in the language of men"). But even when the Torah chooses a metaphor that the minds of created beings can grasp, it chooses a metaphor that is precise in every detail.
In the first chapter of Bereishis, in the account of the entire creation, the Torah uses one expression: "And G-d said, let there be light," "And G-d said, let there be a firmament," "And G-d said, let the waters be gathered," "And G-d said, let there be luminaries," and so on with everything, and in the well known phrase, "בעשרה מאמרות נברא העולם" ("with ten utterances the world was created"), and utterances means "and He said." "And He said" is likewise a metaphor drawn from human speech and applied to the Creator, exactly as "and He blew" is a metaphor.
From the fact that the Torah changed the metaphor specifically when it came to the soul of man, we must understand that there is a change in the nimshal, in what the metaphor points to: the soul of man is not like the rest of creation. Had it been identical, there would have been no reason to change the metaphor, and here too it would have said "and He said, let there be a soul." The change comes to emphasize that with the soul we are dealing with something entirely different in its very essence.
"He who blows, blows from within himself":
To explain this change in the nimshal, the Alter Rebbe quotes the Zohar, which explains the concept of blowing as it applies to the coming into being of the soul: "מאן דנפח מתוכיה נפח" ("he who blows, blows from within himself"). In the metaphor: one who blows up a balloon is expelling air and energy from within himself, from his innermost self. A person who speaks also expels air, yet he can speak for hours without losing his strength; but when he blows, after a few seconds he cannot continue, because something is going out from his innermost self. In physical terms this outflow limits his capacity, and in the spiritual nimshal the main emphasis is on precisely this point: the thing comes from the innermost dimension.
The Holy One, blessed be He, wants to teach us that the soul is not like the firmament, like the luminaries, like light or water or anything else. Every creature in the world contains a divine life force, without which it could not exist, and that life force is great and powerful, but its level is the level of "and He said," whereas the level of the life force in the soul is "and He blew." This is what the Zohar is saying.
The meaning of "mitochei" is from within him, from his innermost self, and in the language of Tanya, based on the verse in Iyov cited at the beginning of the chapter, "חלק אלוק-ה ממעל ממש" ("literally a part of G-d above"). This is the meaning of "and He blew": one who blows forcefully draws it out of himself, from the inwardness and the innermost core of his own life force. And when the Holy One, blessed be He, blows, as it were, the soul into a person, and every single individual says "and You blew it into me," meaning his own personal soul, every day and every moment, this is a soul whose source is in the inwardness and innermost core, as it were, of the Creator.
There is a further precision here: it says "the second soul in Yisrael," specifically in the Jewish people, and not in the land of Israel. Among the nations of the world there is no such thing; they are like the animals that the Holy One, blessed be He, created: they have a life force, but it is on the level of "and He said," and it need not be from "and He blew." The "and He said" is strong enough to provide the energy of life, but it is not the soul that a Jew has. And one who converts certainly receives the "and He blew," since at the moment of conversion, according to halachah, he receives a new soul.
Another emphasis: the verse says "and He blew into his nostrils" with no interruption between them. "And He blew" refers to the Creator and "into his nostrils" refers to the created being, teaching that the inwardness of the Creator is found within the person with no interruption whatsoever.
"The souls of Israel arose in thought":
The Alter Rebbe continues: "וכמו על דרך משל, נשמות ישראל עלו במחשבה" ("and as it were, by way of metaphor, the souls of Israel arose in thought"). One may ask whether this line belongs to the sentence before it or is an introduction to the sentence that follows. From the way it is written in Tanya, a colon followed by the opening of a new topic, it appears to be an introduction to what follows, and in it he offers a metaphor that we will expand upon later.
This phrase is parallel to the expressions "and He blew into his nostrils" and "literally a part of G-d above." For what is the difference between speech and thought? Speech is external: the letters and words go out, and that is why another person hears them. Thought, by contrast, remains within, in the inner dimension. For this reason, when the Alter Rebbe comes to say that the soul of a Jew belongs to the inner dimension, to "He blew, literally from above," he expresses it as: "the souls of Israel arose in thought."
In summary: in this section we learned that the Alter Rebbe proves that the second soul in a Jew is literally a part of G-d above, and he brings as proof the verse "and He blew into his nostrils a soul of life" together with the wording of the morning blessings, "and You blew it into me." We examined the precision of the metaphor: the Torah shifts from "and He said," used throughout creation, to "and He blew," used for the soul, and by that shift it hints at a difference in essence. According to the Zohar, "he who blows, blows from within himself": the soul comes from the inwardness and innermost core of the Creator, with no interruption, and this applies to Israel alone. We also saw that the metaphor "the souls of Israel arose in thought" teaches that the soul belongs to the inner dimension, like a thought that remains within.
In the next section we will deal with the origin of the soul in the inwardness of the Creator, and go deeper into how "thought" and the blowing "from within himself" express the root of the soul of Israel in the inwardness and in the very essence of the Creator.