Text-Based Tanya Class—Week #1

so first of all blessed uh hashem who has kept us preserved us brought us to this time this is a big deal because i think the first share that i started to give here at kabot of the five towns was this for an earlier version of this class a weekly tanya class which for the feedback when we turn it up it's not feeding back okay there's an earlier version of this tanya class yeah it's feeding back a little bit yeah one second you're gonna play around with it it's a fine line between loud enough for people to hear and hold it like this so uh that class finished tanya we went through the whole time yeah well what i'm let's explain what i mean by the whole pageant um this is the tanya tanya actually that you're looking at here is composed of five values but very often when we refer to tanya we mean the first value which is technically called uh seifer chaubenin the book of the intermediate or the average or the ordinary person and it's a 53 chapter guidebook in personal development and spiritual growth there are four other volumes as well and we studied from those as well in this class but the the main objective when we started this i think it was i think it was four years ago is to go through the 53 chapters and we did we did go through the 53 chapters but i want to explain what i mean by going through the chapters first of all tanya is a book that you never finish i don't know anyone who finished tanya one of the nicknames that siddham gave to the tanya is the teresh the written torah of hasidic teachings and there are many reasons why it has that that nickname but one reason that's given is that just like the homicide the written torah five books of moses everybody learns it relearns it relearns and relearns it from the little kid and hater to the biggest scholar so too tanya is that kind of a book that whatever level you're on from the the most uh most advanced to the most elementary it's the kind of book that you go over and over and over and over and uh i've heard also people say that tanya's a book that gets smarter every time you learn it like oh that's what it was saying that's really smart yeah so this is so we went through the tanya but i'll tell you the way that we did it we tried to cover a chapter every class and sometimes we covered multiple chapters of class there were a couple of places where it took us more than one class to cover a chapter but basically the structure was a chapter of class and we did not learn it inside we did not read the actual text and there's a reason why we took that approach we took that approach because personally i've found that many times people study tanya um and they don't see the forest for the trees meaning they've studied the tanya line by line and they can tell you what individual parts of tanya mean but they didn't get the big picture the flow there's a an exquisitely organized system in these 53 chapters and everything is exactly in its place exactly structurally where it needs to be in order to create the strongest possible uh building and if you study it you know microscopically you know with a microscope you can do that you can study time you're such a rich book that you can study you could spend a whole class on a word with multiple meanings of every single word but what happens is very often you lose the the big picture the context the overall context and since tonya after all is a practical book it's a guidebook it's a manual so it's a little bit uh i i consider it personally i feel like if a book is a manual and it's studied so up close that i don't get the basic instructions so maybe i've gained in depth but i'm not uh i'm sort of missing the the main point so what what do we do we we said we're gonna give everyone the big picture we're gonna i mean those who took this class last time four years ago okay it's years later now you remember the basic structure and flow of tanya right i mean it makes sense to you there's a beginning there's a middle there's an end there's a okay we really emphasized that and i think that in every class we would retrace our steps this is how we got to where we are right now and this is this is the flow this is the build up and uh that's very very very important what i want to try to do we'll see you know i'll feel it out every class is a is an organism as a living being of its own so we'll see what happens here what i would like to try to do is go a little bit slower uh not too slow but slow enough that maybe we can get some more of the details than last time so what i'm going to try to accomplish today is an introduction if we get into the text it'll probably just be the title page but i want to give you a general introduction to the book whether you've learned the book many many times before or you've never learned it at all or you never even heard of it same introduction the balchemtev the first leader of the movement that later became known as siddhis khasidism and the balshams have primarily had 60 students valshamptov influenced thousands tens of thousands in his lifetime perhaps hundreds of thousands all over eastern europe but i'm talking about proper disciples 60 disciples and one of those disciples was the magid of mezrich who became the the balshampton's successor and he in turn had 120 students double the number of the of the baal shem tov and again he influenced many many people but uh we're talking about proper disciples who considered themselves official students so there were 120 and of these 120 disciples of the magid we basically had the all-star team of khasidism we had basically the fathers of all the hasidic dynasties every hasidic court can trace itself to one of these students lublin everyone from that uh generation was basically i mean it's hard to fathom hard to imagine what those sheer and what those classes looked like you had the margin learning with these saintly geniuses each one of whom became the father of another strain of hasidic thought and i feel bad that i mentioned a few names and i left out names and it's like it's it's because each one of them was such a a a sadiq and and and a coin i mean it was leaving out names there's so many of them who were the uh just unique and unparalleled and each one of them had their own style and in a certain way although each one of them had their own style it was sort of understood that the alta rebbe was the odd man out he was like different than the rest of them first of all culturally he was different in fact they even had a nickname for him which they didn't like if other people called it to him but inside they called them their litvak they called them their litvak the lithuanian and that's because of where he came from he came from uh he came from lyajna and uh which is uh white russia which was lithuania as opposed to what as opposed to poland they mostly they came from poland they had a different way of talking i mean historically we know about uh how he pronounced things differently you know you say good shabbos or git chabas and so that's one difference but also it wasn't just a cultural difference it was an ideological difference as well and they were all teaching teresa shemtev in a way that they felt was was true they were all filtering the teachings of the maggit who was filtering the teachings of the balshemptav as faithfully as they as they could but each one of them had a different a different spin on things so generally speaking the the style of the other talmide of the other disciples of the maggie was characterized as chagas chagas is an acronym for the three emotional spheroids in kabbalah cassettes kindness severity and compassion those are the three main emotional faculties and the altera of course this acronym has become famous it's become synonymous with with a movement it's become synonymous with uh people looking for shabbos hospitality i always think it's ironic that this name which is actually the name of a mystical school of esoteric thought has become synonymous with uh a place to find chol and schnitzel on shabbos when you're when you're traveling but uh you know what the acronym is we call it i mean in a clumsy translation we call it wisdom understanding knowledge and uh what's the difference between the chabad approach and the chagas approach it's the it's the difference between education and inspiration so the chagas approach is excitement and using emotionalism to get closer to hashem i mean the end objective everyone agrees is to get closer to pushup but uh the question is the path how to get closer to a ship so one approach is an emotional approach inspiration feeling the other is the educational approach the chabad approach which is you'll learn something you'll think about it and you won't be inspired right away no who says you'll be inspired right away but if you'll sit with the thought long enough there's a trickle-down effect remember reaganomics so there's a trickle-down effect and chabad will lead to hagas that through emotion through intellectual discovery you will reach emotional inspiration but um the emotional inspiration is not the initial state by the way i mentioned before it's it's ironic that the chabad which is this not only a school of of esoteric wisdom but a very intellectual school of of esoteric system became synonymous with uh with shabbos hospitality so how do you explain that you want to know how to explain that i'll explain to you very clearly because if you learn tanya and you understand what it says and you really meditate on it it will affect you to the point where you will live according to those ideas and then you'll end up giving free cholent to people who are traveling through your town and need a free place for shabbos not that the hospitality is the is the point it's not the that's not the goal that's the evan of bayern that's the litmus test that if you learned it properly and you absorbed it and it affected you intellectually and then emotionally then it'll come out behaviorally and it'll manifest itself in various ways including perhaps primarily as as loving your fellow jew and even to the point of self-sacrifice loving your fellow jew but all that humanitarian stuff that i think chabad is very well known for that is like the final manifestation the most outward manifestation of a very deep school of mystical thought so when we're studying titus khabad when we're studying tanya we're studying the deep theological philosophical ideological ideas that if you absorb them they would cause you perhaps to move out in the middle of nowhere and host people like oh this week's parties you know avraham avino had the first combat house he set up a tent with soda and it was open to everybody all four four in the four directions they had openings in the tent then everybody could come and eat and then while they were enjoying the chicken soup he would put in a little vartara and then he would ask them to bench so uh just like happy-go-lucky jovial fellow he just social guy social butterfly that's why he wanted to open up his tent and hang out with people is that a promo of you know no that's the avraham avenue from the coloring book was was einstein before einstein romavino was a kid who had no education he looked at the world and scientifically his genius mind came to the conclusion that there had to be only one power in the universe okay so please avramovino was not some happy-go-lucky social guy who wanted to uh bring out a tray of coagul he was a genius who looked at reality and was able to figure out without any education he was able to figure out there must be one power in the universe it all must be oneness and he figured this out because he was his father ram means exalted father in kabbalah means was exalted exalted wisdom he was a genius he was such a genius no one could relate to him which is why he had to become [Music] with the hey which is a leader of the multitudes so in order to become the orator to be able to give over his message he needed the hay but the point is that avraham was a genius first and foremost he was a genius he was the greatest genius ever lived he had to figure it all out on his own like a guy invents engineering and nobody taught him calculus he just figured it out so my point is that avraham was a genius and then the outer manifestation of that intellectual depth was that he was nice to people but please make no mistake and think that this book is going to tell you um recipes you know 10 ways to make brisket for your shabbos guests no this book is going to tell you how to understand yourself understand your purpose understand your inner makeup on a very deep level in that sense a lot of times it's compared to modern psychology in the way that it penetrates and gets to the bottom of what makes us tick it's also going to speak about uh theology about the the nature of of god's existence although that's more of an emphasis in the second volume of tanya but certainly it's something that comes up where uh we're we're apropos in the first volume so there's there's there's some theology here the nature of of of hashem's reality and his oneness uh the the nature of the torah and the mitzvahs what are the mechanisms of torah and mitzvahs how do they operate how do they connect us to hashem um the the mechanisms by which the physical plane is uplifted and refined and ultimately transformed into a messianic world of perfection all of that kind of stuff is going to come up so it's deep stuff it's very deep stuff and if you study it and you internalize it then yeah the outer manifestation is it's going to change the way that you treat other people and it'll change the way you study torah and change the way that you dive in it'll change the way that you do business it'll change the way that you deal with a moral dilemma it affects us in all types of ways in all types of ways but primarily what i want to explain to you is this is a deep book it's a very deep book and we're going to talk about very deep concepts and a lot of times people a lot of times when you're studying tanya one of the one of the challenges is okay well how is this relevant or isn't this too technical and you might not have had that experience if you took the class from me last time because i glossed over a lot of that stuff because i didn't bother you with it but it might happen this time we'll see again i'll test the waters i'll see my style just so you know i like to push the class to the brink of annoyance to the point where you almost hate it it's like a good trainer right everyone can see that i work out a lot so you know i i i worked out once no i did once i got the gist no because i needed to be able to refer to it as a parable so i got the experience but you know a good trainer pushes you to the brink oh i hate this guy right so but then afterwards no i don't really hate him no it's good it's good i'm getting in shape so i do want to push you cognitively cognitively i do want to push you so um yeah there may be points where you'll you'll struggle with the material cognitively also emotionally i might say some things that offend you that's okay please everyone know it's okay to be offended i know in today's day and age we have a very thin skin just collectively and i'm not making fun of that i think we are more sensitive today and i think we should recognize that we should try to honor that as much as possible and try to be as sensitive to each other as possible but i just want to warn you there may be things that are offensive to you and if they are offensive let's just talk through that just say that that that's that that offends my sensibilities um you know i'm uncomfortable with that idea that's okay you could say that we'll talk through it and we'll see if we can get you comfortable with it um but primarily i'm talking about being cognitively challenged you might say this idea is too difficult to uh to wrap my head around i don't see the practicality of it what i'm asking you to do is just work with me work this is not uh this is not entertainment this is not hagas it's not inspiration it's khabad it's educational it's hard work uh and it's gonna feel like hard work okay so a little bit of background about the tanya historically speaking i told you there was well i didn't even say yet that the alter wrote this book i implied it okay so i told you that about it was the first rabbi said this and then his student and successor the the margin in turn many disciples of the 120 students i told you that the altareba was the one who followed more of the khabad approach the intellectual approach the altareba was the one who wrote this book called tanya which systemized the teachings of the balshampton what do i mean by it systemized it it took acidic teachings and organized them into a very specific approach as to how to serve hashem in other words as opposed to just being ideas that you have to figure out how to apply them the altareba put it together he organized it principally that was his job as the author was to organize these ideas to the extent that the al-taraba does not refer to himself as the author of the tanya he refers to himself as the compiler the molocket of tanya and he says his job was simply that of organizing now there's a lot of different ways of organizing you have a lot of information you could organize it like an encyclopedia you just put it as articles and when you organize by alphabetical order you go look it up each article and there's no flow from one essay to the next the altrevo organized tanya as a manual as a guidebook so it's like instructions call it even a recipe when you read a recipe or recipes in order why because it's procedural the purpose of a recipe isn't merely just to find out about these ingredients it's to know how to actually use the ingredients in a particular order in a particular way in order to produce certain results so the alta rabbit took the teachings of the balsham and of the magid and he organized them into this procedural manual it took him 20 years he was working on tanya for 20 years now why did it take him 20 years i told you before that tanya is often referred to as tereshi and i told you there's many reasons why it has that nickname one of the reasons has that nickname is that every single letter is precise that is not so in all hasidic texts we have other writings from the altar we have like those are my modern civic discourses generally on the parsha and they are not that precise in fact uh they're not edited by the altar but they uh they were transcripts from his disciples from his grandson but the tanya was written in a way to be extremely precise to the to the extent not only word for word but every letter to the point where sometimes you know in in russian kurdish you can have a word where it's spelled malay or khasi like with above or without a vow if it's optional whether to put it in or not even details like that the altar was meticulous about when writing tanya there's a story that when the altera was in this 20-year period of authoring tanya he was sitting at his desk and his brother abuhudalaib came in and he asked you know what's going on and the al-taraba says for six weeks i am toiling over the letter v i'm putting it in i'm taking it out there's a letter evolve is uh is a is the conjunction ant in the holy time so he says there's a there's this letter of i'm putting it in i'm taking it out and i'm trying to decide which meaning is more exact we have by tradition by the way what was that it was the beginning of pedigm aleph the beginning of chapter 41 where uh however it must be made a constant reminder you have to remember always what is the beginning of the service of hashem and its root and its source so initially al trevor thought maybe the but what's the difference the difference between the beginning of the service of hashem and its root and its source or that's one way or the the beginning of the service of hashem and its root source you say what's the difference between and its root and its source or and its root source it's a big difference a huge difference anyways the afternoon was toiling on that buff for six weeks and he told his brother that that's when he writes savior shall bane in him that's how it goes because he said before i add even one letter i review the entire safer in my mind so think about that he was thinking about the entire safer before the placement of every single letter that's why by the way i developed the whole tanya map approach which has various different iterations i don't know if people have seen and kind of see in this the picture over here in the back this picture is a picture it's funny this is a picture of me sitting right here at this spot and you can see in the background a little bit the tanya map i don't know if you can see in the background we'll take this you see in the background a little bit that that multicolored uh bunch of squares that's the tanya map the tanya map is a learning tool that i made i think about 20 years ago but it visually lays out the flow and the main points of the 53 chapters of tanya so i i started the tanya map approach because i felt like this if the alta rebbe reviewed the entire tanya in his mind before placing even one letter that means every single letter of tanya is connected to the overall big picture so therefore when i learned tanya i should also learn it that way that before i read a letter that i should have in mind the overall big picture but i realized i couldn't do that i couldn't manage that so then i asked myself well how much would i have to zoom out how much would i have to like sort of do google earth and get a satellite view in order to have quote-unquote the whole tanya when the altitude thought of the whole tanya it meant the whole tanya in detail but uh could i have an uh like a sketch view of tanya where i could sort of think about the contours in the most basic way the most basic flow like uh you know imagine going up into the helicopter and looking down and seeing the lay of the land so you don't see the trees anymore but oh you see there's a forest over there and you see the shape of the forest and there's the forest and there's the city and there's the there's the water right so you get the basic lay of the land so that's why i took the tanya approach and the last time we did this course it was very much the google earth satellite view where we just got the basic gist of things the basic flow but the point of it is because when the altered was writing tanya he wrote it in such a way where every single letter is placed deliberately in context in relationship with all of the rest of of the safer when the altar finally published tanya maybe i should back up and tell you that tanya existed as pamphlets of manuscripts for many years and it was not published meaning printed as a book on the printing press until 1796. what happened though is that these pamphlets these handwritten pamphlets were being in some cases deliberately forged because because there was contention at that time um between kassadism and its opponents and people were suspicious of fascism so some people wanted to color tanya as heretical and they deliberately falsified certain versions and circulated those versions that's sort of what pushed the altar to make an official printed version because some sydney came back from a fair and uh they they at a booth there i guess there was a like a spherum shop booth and they bought some pamphlets and they brought it back and it was had errors which said heretical things so the altar said no more of this we're having an official version and uh don't don't look at any of it like nobody's on the copy and don't even look at the the unofficial versions this is it this is the official version um so that came out in 1796 as a published book since that time tanya has been printed over and over and over again um as we mentioned there are five volumes there's also a history about at what point those different volumes were added to tanya and we have the work as we know it today we have the version as we know today but uh during the past 200 and how many years is it now since 1796 225 years 26. listen 225 years i think 225. in the past 225 years since the book has been published it's a book that people continue to go back to over and over and over again and to revisit and to find new levels of insight that ebert ashab the fifth khabad rabbi was a descendant of the the author of the tanya direct uh descendant of the of the altar so that ashab said that our comprehension of tanya is akin to the understanding that a goat has when he stares at the moon meaning that there's there's a degree of depth that we're never going to be able to fathom and nevertheless whatever amount that we can understand is extremely healing and transformative and it really it makes the student a different person tell you a story that took place in in modern times there was a faucet from crown heights almond gerardi he went on a business trip and he was he went he made it to jfk and they canceled the flight it was an international flight and they didn't have another flight until the next day so if you've heard of that yohoda hossett wrote instructions customs that are considered it's considered scrupulous to follow like don't polish your shoes on the day of a journey you know you heard these things like don't plug up a window or a door in a house that kind of stuff so he uh yeah so one of the things he said these are not halacha but many people try to follow it one of the things he said was if you go on a journey if you leave the house on a journey you don't come back to the house until you've gone on your journey so he went to jfk and they canceled the flight he didn't know what to do because what should he do get out get a hotel by the airport or can he come back to crown heights and sleep in his own bed and go back to jfk the next day so he called the rebbe's office and the rebels secretary abbey answered the phone and uh explained his plight abiharukov said he's going to ask the rabbit so he gets back on the phone he says that ebba says that you should study a chapter of tanya and then go home because when you study a chapter of tanya it's transformative and you will not be the same person you were before you studied it hence it will not be you going back home it'll be as if you are a new person going into this place for the first time and that's what he did he studied a chapter of tanya and then he went home so the next day when he was about to leave on his trip for the second time he gets a call he answers the phone and jabe harukov called again and says i have a message for you from the rabbit which means it was pretty serious that the rabbit not only responded when rabbi called but now that it was following up that i was taking his own initiative to follow up and call back the next day it must mean it's pretty serious so the haruko says to make sure that you know what he said yesterday he meant that seriously that it was not uh a gliche verto it wasn't a acute saying it wasn't it wasn't meant to be cute it was serious i mean it wasn't a trick it wasn't like uh you know a loophole so the study of tanya is transformative and yeah we'll never understand it properly and i've had this experience i'm telling you i don't know how many times i went through this book i don't know how many times i've talked this book and every time i realize how little i understood it properly the last time every time i say how was i teaching it last time i didn't even understand what it was saying but that's inevitable with a book like tanya we constantly understand it in a new way in a deeper way if that's not happening then there's something wrong okay so let's let's maybe try to do the title page and if you want to get a tanya to follow along so this is like a regular tanya from kos uh just regular no commentary no nothing no english it's just the actual holy text if you want english i recommend then the the bilingual tanya also from cohos and this is nothing more than the original hebrew actually the the the whole point of this tanya is that on one side is the the page actual the actual tanya page on one side like the actual surah sadaf the the image how the actual tiny looks and then on the other pages the english and it's just a straight translation and there are footnotes with uh sources a little little bit of explanation not so much yeah [Music] is a tiny map available for sale should be on the cohost website there's two versions of it there's a wall map you come to my house you see a big wall map and then there's a handheld one that you can fold up like an actual matter but it should be on the cohort's website the tanya man why is it on you called tanya it's actually not called tanya yeah we call it time you're gonna find that it's not called that we call it on it's not even called tanya okay we call it because that's the first word of the first chapter but it's not what it's called you're gonna find out what it's called um okay so like i said if you wanna get a copy cohos has they should have tanya's in print and i highly recommend just a regular tanya no commentary no nothing no bells no whistles just a straight up tanya okay so let's let's try to do the title page we have a few minutes okay safer lakute this book has a title it's called a book of compiled sayings so it's not called tanya it's called the cote amorum a book of compiled sayings like i told you the altareba was an organizer he systemized the teachings of siddhis khelikarishoi the first volume remember we said there are five volumes of tanya anikra bashem which is cold meaning this volume is called seifer shall bain the book of the intermediate or the average or the ordinary or the regular person what does that mean there will be a lengthy lengthy exposition about what this means we'll get to that okay so so far we have a name for the whole book what's the name of the whole book say if you look at them autumn which means book of compiled sayings excellent the name of this volume of the 53 chapters is called save for bane in him a book for the intermediate average person what what what's an average person i don't know yet i don't know find out suffering compiled from books and sages who are in heaven books and sages books and sages there are those who say the books mean the written books that influenced the al-tarab meaning authors who he did not learn from directly but who influenced him through their written word such as the shallow or the maharao who was the ancestor of the al-tarab so they are pre-hasidic works shallow and maharal are pre-hasidic but very much have many of the seeds of the hasidic teachings and who would be the teachers well the teachers obviously primarily would be the magid the altered the margaret who we discussed also one of the senior disciples of the magid was in some ways a rabbit to the altar of mendel paradakar who was the leader of the hasidic aliyah he brought a community of jews from eastern europe to the holy land and started a settlement there originally it's fast and later in tavaria so the altareb is saying i compiled a compilation of sayings from great books and teachers who i have known again he's saying this is not my kiddush it's not my idea i'm just the organizer i'm just the one who made a system out of it miusud al-haposak based on the verse the book is based on the verse what does that mean for it is very near to you this matter this thing what is this thing most commentaries say the toyota itself in your mouth in in your mouth in your heart that you may do it so this this book is based on a scriptural verse which says it is very near to you meaning accessible attainable to fulfill the entire torah in your mouth in your heart in your action and it's a little bit of a hint here what is the book about it's about practical application it's about something that is attainable it's about something that uh well let's link this to another word that we haven't fully figured out yet but the savior shall bain in him and the kikari of elaja basically we're speaking to an ordinary person and we're telling you something that is caught up to you something that's attainable it's near to you what is that plan of action i don't know yet but he's laying out from the title page look i compiled inspirational ideas from the generations and i systemized it in a way that you could take action and you could actually achieve something here okay levar haitiv he says to explain well how is it very close in other words the title says it is very clear it is very near to you it's a statement plus it just says it's near to you okay i believe it if it says it i know it's true but how it because last time i tried it it didn't feel very near to me so the altar says this book is going to explain a who not only is it going to explain he says lavar hatef to explain well who caught him this book is going to make it very clear how torah observance is attainable with the help of the one above what does that mean in a long way and a short way so this is a turn of phrase which actually is taken from the gemara it's a story about atana who talks about a clever child where the tana asked the child directions to the city and the child said do you want the short long way the long short way and the tana seized upon the first word and he said give me the short long way because he heard short that was the main thing in his mind and it was direct but then it was insurmountable there were obstacles he couldn't get through so he came back and said i can't get access to the city he says oh then you want the long short way she said i told you it was short but long you want what's long but short long short it's very circuitous but ultimately it leads to the city so what's the idea here remember i told you before so hagas is a short long way it's short because it works very quickly you don't have to study you don't have to stretch yourself cognitively there's no deep concepts to to learn or to meditate upon it it works you know you get inspired you get excited and uh so it's short the problem is it's like an energy drink how long does it last right it's not is that sustainable so it's long because you got to keep doing it over and over again it's artificial then there's a long short way it's long because you got to study you got to discuss you got to figure out what it's talking about then you got to meditate on it until you actually own it and it takes a long time this is not easy work tanya it's it's grueling it's intellectually grueling it's exhausting in many in many ways so it's a long way but it's short because after you've internalized it well now it's yours now it's yours now you can call upon it at any at any time which is also by the way going back to talk about if you learn tanya it'll make you give free trolling to from people on shabbos when they want to go on vacation that guy's only going on vacation he wouldn't live there how could you live there and remain a loyal jew you know how because if you don't if you do the long short way if you do the long long way means you internalize things so once you've internalized it it's yours now you can take it anywhere see if you're relying upon inspiration then you have to be near the well of inspiration you cannot go far from it because you need to constantly but if you're doing the long short way meaning the chabad style of educating yourself rewiring your thinking well then once you've been rewired then that becomes the becomes how you think it becomes who you are okay so that's the title page i said we're very from about ending on time we're a minute late but hashem we'll start with the introduction next week