In the previous section we listed the examples the Alter Rebbe brings of situations in which evil prevails in some small matter. That list is partial and very short, and even the situations on it are ones we should all be so fortunate as to have no worse problems than these. The Alter Rebbe is describing a rare case here: a person who does not stumble in all three garments and in all the examples, but who slips very occasionally in just one of them, and even then only in something minor. That is enough, one of the examples given or "כיוצא בהן" ("or the like"), for him to be called a rasha at that moment.
An important clarification - this is a definition of one's spiritual state, not of reward and punishment:
Before we go on, we have to recall what was explained in chapter 1. A person who stumbles once in a long while in a light thought will be called a tzaddik by us, and not only by us: the Holy One Himself will call him a tzaddik. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when a person is examined to see in which book he will be inscribed, this man will be first on the list in the book of the tzaddikim, because there what is being weighed is his overall standing: where the majority of his deeds lie and where the minority lie. The majority of this man's deeds are excellent, and therefore he will merit good life and a good year, Gan Eden and the World to Come, reward, abundance, blessing and success in material and spiritual matters, completely.
But the Alter Rebbe is not dealing here with the question of whether a person will merit Gan Eden; that is not the subject of the chapter and not its point. The question under discussion here is what this person's spiritual definition is, where he stands on the ladder of closeness of the soul to the Creator. It is entirely possible that he deserves Gan Eden, and that relative to the majority of his deeds he is called a tzaddik, and nevertheless his inner state with respect to closeness to the Creator is the state of a rasha.
And the reason is this: the precise definition of tzaddik and rasha in this context is kabbolas ol malchus shomayim, accepting the yoke of Heaven, as opposed to throwing off that yoke. It makes no difference whether the throwing off of the yoke is large or small. The moment a person is capable of telling the King, "You gave twenty or thirty or a hundred instructions, and in one of them I go against Your will," at that moment he has left the category of one who accepts the yoke and entered the category of one who casts it off. True, the King may tell him that he is among the best of His servants, since he barely casts off the yoke, and indeed he is barely a rasha, but out of the category of one who casts off the yoke he has not moved. So do not be confused by the description of such a person: the title "rasha" refers to his inner spiritual state alone, and not to his conduct as a whole or to the reward awaiting him.
"נקרא רשע בעת ההיא" ("he is called a rasha at that moment"):
"At that moment" means at the very moment of the fall. And what happened at that moment that caused him to be called a rasha? The evil in his soul prevailed over him and clothed itself in his body, and took control of one of its parts: a thought, a word or a deed, and it "מחטיאו ומטמאו" ("causes him to sin and defiles him"). Several stages are packed into this language, it prevails, it clothes itself in his body, it causes him to sin, and we are not going into the precise wording here. In general terms: the evil clothed itself in him, made him sin and brought him down, and therefore he is called a rasha.
In the previous section we noted that even a person who does not stumble at all may be called a rasha, and we wondered how that could be. The following lines explain it. That same person whom we placed at the very highest level stumbles extremely rarely, and immediately afterward "גובר בו הטוב שבנפשו האלוקית ומתחרט" ("the good in his divine soul prevails and he regrets"): the good side in him awakens, he realizes that he has fallen, and the good demands of him that he do teshuvah. His regret is genuine, and he asks forgiveness and pardon from Hashem: Master of the world, I know that I thought improperly, spoke improperly and acted improperly, and I will not return to it again. And Hashem will forgive him.
All this provided that he does teshuvah "בתשובה הראויה על פי עצת חכמינו ז"ל בשלושה חילוקי כפרה שהיה רבי ישמעאל דורש" ("with a fitting teshuvah, according to the counsel of our Sages in the three categories of atonement that Rabbi Yishmael would expound"). What is a fitting teshuvah? The reference is to the words of the Gemara in Yoma, where Rabbi Yishmael enumerates three cases:
"He transgressed a positive commandment and repented": a person who transgressed a mitzvas asei, for example he did not put on tefillin one day, and repented, "אינו זז משם עד שמוחלין לו" ("he does not move from there before he is forgiven"). The teshuvah brings about an immediate repair, and on the spot the matter is wiped away.
"He transgressed a prohibition and repented": for example he spoke lashon hara or ate a forbidden food. Here teshuvah alone is not enough: "תשובה תולה ויום הכיפורים מכפר" ("teshuvah suspends and Yom Kippur atones"), the teshuvah leaves him in a suspended state, and when Yom Kippur arrives he will be clean.
"He transgressed sins punishable by excision or by death at the hands of the court": matters that carry the penalty of kares, such as desecrating Shabbos and the forbidden relations. Here "תשובה ויום הכיפורים תולין וייסורין ממרקין" ("teshuvah and Yom Kippur suspend, and suffering scours clean").
Reading this at face value, one might think that the teshuvah in all three levels is one and the same teshuvah, and the whole difference lies in whether something additional is required alongside it: for a positive commandment teshuvah suffices, for a prohibition teshuvah plus Yom Kippur is needed, and for sins of kares teshuvah, Yom Kippur and suffering. But from the language of the Tanya it emerges that the teshuvah itself is also different at each level: of one who transgressed a positive commandment, teshuvah on one level is demanded; of one who transgressed a prohibition, a deeper teshuvah is demanded; and of one who transgressed sins of kares and death at the hands of the court, a teshuvah deeper still. "A fitting teshuvah," then, means a teshuvah that matches the level demanded for that particular sin.
And so, after he has done teshuvah, what is he called?
Not a baal teshuvah and not a beinoni, but a rasha vetov lo, a "rasha who has good." The Alter Rebbe opens his description of the "rasha vetov lo" precisely with this: that the man stumbled in something very minor and afterward repented, and that itself is the definition. The proof: if doing teshuvah removed him from the category of "rasha vetov lo," there would have been no reason at all to mention teshuvah in this chapter, and the Alter Rebbe should have stopped at the description "it clothes itself in his body and causes him to sin and defiles him" and ended there. From the fact that he added the lines about teshuvah it is clear that even afterward the Alter Rebbe is still describing what this person goes through, and he is still called a rasha vetov lo.
And what is he lacking? He has already regretted, and he has already erased the sin.
The explanation, which will be brought out even more sharply in the following lines, is fascinating: after the regret, the thing is still not uprooted from his heart entirely. He is not in an inner state in which the possibility of falling again is utterly ruled out. A person who spoke lashon hara and regretted it with genuine regret has not made lashon hara impossible for himself the way eating pork or desecrating Shabbos is impossible for him. He says: I spoke lashon hara, I did teshuvah, but I have not yet uprooted it from my heart, it is possible that I will fall again a moment from now.
Of course this depends on the measure of the regret, and there certainly exists the possibility of reaching a total break, the very existence of the level of beinoni, which we will learn about in chapter 12, proves it. But as long as a person has not severed from his soul the very possibility of falling, he remains within the category of "rasha vetov lo," even if at the highest level such a state can be: the evil side in him is minor and minuscule, and he has even already regretted it, and yet he is capable of sinning and stands a hair's breadth away from the fall. Once he reaches a total break, he rises to the level of beinoni.
In summary: in this section we learned that a rare stumble in one of the examples the Alter Rebbe listed, even in some light matter, is enough for a person to be called a rasha at that moment, since at that moment the evil in his soul prevailed and clothed itself in his body, causing him to sin and defiling him. We clarified that this has nothing to do with the question of reward and punishment, for that purpose such a person is a complete tzaddik, first in the book of the tzaddikim, but rather with the definition of his inner state and his place on the ladder of closeness to the Creator, since even a light throwing off of the yoke takes a person out of the category of one who accepts the yoke. We also saw Rabbi Yishmael's three categories of atonement, and the fine point that the depth of teshuvah required also varies between the levels. And finally we saw that even after genuine regret a person remains within the definition of "rasha vetov lo," as long as he has not uprooted from his heart the very possibility of sinning.
In the next section we will continue with the following lines of the chapter, in which this principle will be sharpened further: why regret on its own does not remove a person from the definition of "rasha vetov lo."