Text-Based Tanya Class—Week #29

all right so last week we finished chapter seven not last week we had schwartz but two weeks ago last time we had class we finished chapter 17 right and chapters 16 and 17 basically said what tool should you use to increase your love and of hashem meditation should go think about hashem okay now chapter 18. starts off and said i'm just going to jump into the text they'll take cephas beer bar haiti remember on the title page it said that the entire save of shabbat and him is based on the pasek kikarov we're going to ask now what does it mean not only that toyota is near to you but it's very near to you you have to know something for sure endlessly even somebody whose mind is not equipped to understand the greatness of hashem even to manage to muster some tv nice remember that term we learned in 16 and 17 the tv nice nevertheless even if you can't do that which was described in which chapters even if you can't manage to muster the nice which was described in what chapters 16 16 right and 17. even if that method will not work for you aphapique nevertheless caught of a it is still very close to you accessible to you very so lee smith says commit substantive talmud to keep all the mitzvahs in the tater including constant torah study befive mamish both in your mouth and in your heart from the depths of your heart truly betray and this is the premise of chapter 18. someone who cannot manage to successfully implement 16 and 17 for whatever reason or i might even say someone who is in the midst of implementing 16 or 17 and it hasn't fully kicked in yet you haven't yet seen the results of meditation which are again i want to just make sure everyone gets this i know i'm belaboring the point but the point of meditation is what to develop love and all right it's not relaxation it's not i don't know what a mindfulness it's to give hamidah saying emotions are babies of the intellect we cogitate on subjects which bring us to an emotional connection to hashem so if you're not able to create sufficient loving of god through meditation nevertheless we have a method for you through which perfect adherence to toyota mitzvahs and not just behaviorally but also belvave in your heart emotional congruence to the behaviors is accessible very accessible you following what's happening here not really [Music] you just said even though you can't feel a very strong love and all no that's what it said in 16-17 that even though you can't feel a very strong love in awe through meditation you can still manage to generate enough of a love and an awe through meditation this is saying even more and what if you can't even do that look in the words what he said that you can't even bring out the tv nice you can't even do that and nevertheless we will still insist that observance of the entire title including constant torah study for a man obviously the obligation to constantly study toyota is gender specific it's fermented that perfect adherence to the torah is not only doable but it's very doable very very near to you even if you can't do 16 and 17. now you're following yeah okay all right let's let's get it yeah i don't know what the method is he just he taught me a method in the previous two chapters and he said well what if it's not working for me not that it doesn't work it works but what if it's not working for me maybe i'm not smart enough he said somebody whose mental capacity is not sufficient he's not able to generate love and awe even to nice love and awe through meditation so is there anything that that person can do so he says yes there is i want to tell you something when i taught tanya the last time here we went we did not learn inside we did not do the text i would give it over outside as we call it there's inside there's outside i know it's for people don't have a yeshiva background it's like what is inside and outside you look what went outside inside means text based outside means non-text based so when i gave over not from the text last time i did 18 through 25 in one class and there's a reason for that was it like 14 hours no it was a normal length class there's a reason why i did 18 through 25 in one class yeah and if you look in the tanya map it's all one color 18-25 is a multi-stepped argument and if you don't know what the point of it is there are several places where it's extremely easy to lose the plot i'm going to bang it into your heads over and over again to the point of annoyance what the point of each step in the argument is so that we don't lose the but i just want to tell you there is a way of presenting this and this is actually the way that i presented it last time where i just take 18 through 25. i just are you going to tell us i'm going to tell you the plot so many times that you're going to tell me to stop doing it have you told it yet no no [Laughter] are you annoyed yet because i am but i want to know if you're annoyed i shouldn't be the only annoyed person it should be reciprocal okay the plot is like this the altar is going to share with you a tool that you can use to get yourself emotionally congruent with your perfect behaviors now how to get perfect behavior is that i know from chapter 12 my character alive force yourself but i want to get emotionally congruent i want to get emotionally congruent with my behaviors now i know i have a tool for that 16-17 which is meditate but it's not working for me so do you have something else that could also get me emotionally congruent with my behaviors he says yeah 18-25 18-25 is a method for getting emotionally congruent with my my behaviors that will not require the kind of a a mental focus and capacity that is inherently required by the methods of 16 the method of 16 and 17. so does one replace the other no no one complements the other you don't do one instead of the other in fact i would say remember i was saying before even if this the way that the altitude phrase is somebody for whom 16 17 doesn't work i say it could be someone for whom it doesn't work or for someone for whom he's in the midst of the process it hasn't worked yet so while you're working on your 16 and 17 you have 18 through 25 as your backup but a person whose meditation works well they don't really need to go through that well that's a wonderful question if somebody who was successful right away with 16 and 17 would have any need for 18-25 i could argue both ways i'm not sure i could i could definitely make an argument both ways is that okay you're successful without the meditation successful at what maybe it was uh matona you somebody like you whatever but you're not need thinking about dennis where he comes from yeah but there are mitzvahs that everyone's exotic for everyone has a mitzvah or a few mitzvahs that you're exotic about but this would have to be something that characterizes your entire relationship with hashem so every mitzvah you naturally react to in this way would have to be what you're goal of describing to 25 to get us to 16 and 17 in terms of the love well one way you could put put it well okay maybe i i think i'm understanding what you're saying the goal of 16 and 17 is the same goal as 18-25 which is love and awe so that your emotions are congruent with your behaviors they're just two different ways of reaching that state i also think it's very important to emphasize because i don't think i emphasized it earlier when i could have but i'll take the opportunity now to point out that the altarebi is not satisfied with merely giving you a tool for behavioral perfection and then not addressing your emotional issues he could do that he could tell you who told you it was supposed to be fun this is what you've got to do you're a jew this is your job go do it i'm sorry if you hate it he doesn't say that he says we want to get you emotionally congruent with the behaviors yeah you have to do it even if you hate it but why should that be where you stop why should you stop with that you may have to start with that you have to do it even if you hate it but that shouldn't be where you stop you should come to love it or at least appreciate it wait one second i want you to understand why that's important first of all i wanted you to understand that it's important now i want you to understand why it's important why is it important two reasons one reason is because if you just keep hating it and the only tool you have is forcing yourself there are many risks involved in that either eventually you're going to give up you're going to give up you're going to just get tired of it or maybe even a worse risk you're gonna walk around as a walking kill hashem because you're gonna just continue hating it and everyone's gonna look at you and say oh that's how you feel when you live up to the standards of toyota and mitchus so it's not really very practical it's not viable it's not a long term way of life to just continue doing it without any emotional alignment to it you have to get emotionally aligned or bad things are going to happen that's one reason why it's important another reason why it's important is a little bit more lofty but i think you can handle it is well why would you hold out on hashem why would you tell hashem you have my behaviors leave me alone why do you want my emotions too imagine a husband tells his wife hey it's enough i did what you asked i have to also like it now to make a counter argument there is something precious in doing something that you don't like just because someone you care for has asked you to do it that's beautiful from time to time so we do that for hashem all the time you know there are there are always going to be things for which we have to have kabbalah are always going to be things left that we just have to force ourselves to do so we're always going to have that massive aspect of the relationship but that shouldn't characterize the entirety of the relationship there should be some things with which we are mostly emotionally aligned so that we can say to hashem no no i actually want to do this i'm enjoying this so that's what we're trying to do now we're trying to get ourselves emotionally aligned with the behaviors that we're committed to anyway we're already behaviorally committed now we're trying to get emotionally aligned with it so one mo one method of getting emotionally aligned is to meditate and produce the the out of the the love and awe to get yourself emotionally aligned that's one method but if you can't manage that or you're waiting for that to kick in i have another method which will also produce emotions that will get you emotionally aligned with the behaviors yeah logan of what i need to do the behaviors isn't that what i'm trying to do well is the love love of hashem yes the love is love of hashem and therefore i will do what my beloved wants yes correct yeah it's chapter 16 and 17 and chapters 18 to 25 are complimentary yes back that 18 to 25 take eight chapters to say it lend itself to more credence okay so you're asking that's a that's a good question how come 16 17 is two chapters and 18 through 25 is eight chapters well first of all you remember everyone was asking me 16 17. okay i got to meditate what do i meditate on i said wait we'll talk about it later that's 41-50 so 41-50 is going to tell you what to meditate on so the meditation chapters are also long maybe even longer than the and those chapters apply to both six no no that's what i'm saying 18-25 is not meditation here's let me give you a simpler answer you want to hear something ironic the alta rabbit doesn't call it this but many consider them have a tradition that 16 through 17 is called the long way in 18-25 is called the short way so a long way is two chapters the short ways eight chapters you know why because the long way is easy to describe but takes a lifetime to implement the short way is very hard to describe but it's instantly implementable if that's a word 16-17 is very easy to describe the methodology go meditate 18-25 as i told you and i'm going to say again is a multi-stepped process and it is so multi-step that is very easy to lose the plot and i'm going to continually remind you of the point of these chapters as we go through them in fact i want to check in with you now what is the point of 18 through 25 what's the goal what are we trying to do love and all okay and if you're going to be more specific love and all without without meditation because otherwise why am i trying to achieve emotional congruence okay go ahead yeah one reason so that i don't burn out yeah the second one is why would you tell hashem that all he can have from you is your behaviors i know you're not at sadhak sadiq means hashem has your behaviors your emotions all one package equally but as close as you can come to that you should try to come to that you should say to hashem i know that i can give you my behaviors even without giving you my emotions in fact not only i can do that that's how i start i start by doing things that i don't feel like doing that's what makes childhood life means at least in chapter 12 when we introduced it but i want to also give you my emotion like the husband who says to his wife what do you care if i like you what do you care if i feel for for it i did it are you enjoying yourself no but you told me to take you out for dinner so i did it how dare you judge me for not liking it i did it well you know maybe taking out the garbage i don't care if you like it but this is something i would hope i like i hope maybe something you would like so you can't tell hashem i mean you can but it's not nice to tell hashem look i've given you my behaviors i'm obeying me i'm doing everything you want what do you care if i'm emotionally congruent with those behaviors the answer is what do you mean what do i care it's a relationship and you should endeavor to give as much of yourself to hashem as you can will you ever completely give hashem your emotions no because if you could do that you'd be exotic but you want to come as close as possible what if you're a very emotional person okay what does that have to do with god no so it's christ and you die so what does that have to do with god someone who's just generally emotional so they get excited about everything they'll get excited about god they'll get excited about cake yeah i know the difference this is god this is a cake but i'm crying about both of them godly cake sorry it's the 18-25 the whole tanya is a short long way a long short way rather because it takes a long time to implement but if i don't want to over confuse you but if you know yeah don't worry about it anyways it's uh the fifth time you learned tanya i'll tell you about it okay let's not get confused let's continue yeah yeah you're going to continue meditating no one said to stop okay because i thought that 16 and 17 was in meditation 18 to 25 i think the rabbi said you could get there without them right why would you want to do that because they're not working yet that's what i said they're complementary they're not mutually exclusive you asked that right do you stop no you don't stop doing 16-17 we're doing both i don't know what's better we try everything we do everything okay let's learn this chapter here's the method for getting emotionally congruent with total observance that does not require meditation and remember this is a multi-step process we will not finish the process today we're going to learn one step or even actually i would call this half a step today okay the next eight weeks are going to be difficult and you're going to want to distract me at every turn and i'm not going to allow you to left with that you can try the eight chapters i i i'm not sure at least eight at least at least eight okay shahi and this method is ava musuteres israel the hidden innate love that's in the heart of every jew yerushalani say no that we inherited from our others so what is it it's a latent love how did you get it you inherited it from the obvious so instead of producing love through meditation you're gonna go into the attic and open up grandma's chest that has the love that you inherited you're not gonna have to make any new love you have pre-installed factory default setting love godly though yeah of course it's the love of god of course of course the love of god yeah yeah yeah rock however here's the tricky part that's going to take eight chapters we have to explain where does this love really come from and what is it how is it an inheritance and how does the love also have awe in it because you need both you need love and awe so basically you're not going to have to create a new emotion you're gonna go dust off the old emotions that are already there but we're gonna have to understand a lot about these latent innate emotions in order to be able to effectively use them for indian the concept is obvious the others the patriarchs were called the chariot meaning to say that they were completely surrendered to god like a chariot is surrendered to the rider it has no will of its own the alchemy says their merit not your merit they merited by being totally surrendered to hashem to be able to bequeath to their descendants a holy soul he calls it a nephishama and which comes from the astrospheres of kedusha from one of the four worlds either attilas or asia and there are different levels of that but the the bottom line is every descendant of the aves we're talking about every one that halacha considers a jew has inherited from the others a certain type of spiritual energy and it has in it this love falco pony mafilo the kaushiba kalam apron and even the lowest jew even a jew of the lowest spiritual standing has this holy soul even a lower iteration of that holy soul but they have this holy soul he calls it calcium but at the very least they have a soul even if it's from the lowest level in the lowest world but it's it's a holy soul and even though it's a low level it's still one of the holy spirits or contains within it the comes from the holy spheres so it contains within it even basically even in the lowest level the marcus de marcos darcia is contained the highest level the vaccilos which is united with the infinite one himself comes out fish this is an important point is the one who possesses it says in brackets sometimes the lowest of the low spiritually end up giving birth to children who are from very high levels and souls that were very lofty souls that were caught in the depths of clipper and then they ended up being born to these people the point of that brackets is just that yes there are gradations of different types of spiritual levels within the jewish people but you know what it doesn't matter yeah the levels exist we're not going to pretend they don't exist but even with all the levels there's a certain common denominator that is categorically identical in every single jew and which also is category categorically different about every single jew than the rest of the world and specifically the word that we need to learn today is khakma now is one of the ten spheroids which is also one of the ten kairesana fish we learned about it back in peregrimo is the first of the spherice and the first of the kaikais and kohma for the purpose of this paddock is the trait or the capacity within the soul every jewish soul that is connected to the infinite and if we can activate that capacity of chakma then we're good following okay is not intellectual it is pre-intellectual but it is the source of the intellect it's the source of understanding beena is real intellect beena is understanding is higher than beena is pre-understanding call it even intuition or inspiration they say thomas edison when he wanted a new idea for an in for an invention he would take a nap with ball bearings in his hand and he had a steel bedpan next to him he would sit in a rocking chair and doze off and as he would fall asleep his hand would relax the steel ball bearings would fall from his hand and they would clang in the steel bed pen he would be jarred awake and he would have a new inspiration for an invention because the place where the invention ideas are is like you can't sit there and conjute and come up with it it's got to come from higher than intellect what will that work for you no don't [Music] intellect enters the intellect eureka as they say in latin is higher than intellect but it is the source of intellect it's the source to intellect the power of what what means the x factor the unknown the unknowable that which is off the charts of cognition movement that which is incomprehensible which cannot be grasped yet in intellect that's why god is at home there because god cannot be intellectually grasped so you can use your intellect to think about hashem and you should use your intellect to think about hashem but really hashem is above intellect so correspondingly there's a place in you that's above intellect which is much more at one with hashem precognition intuition that's so that we call that khakhma external no this is all internal why would you say external um no it's it's not a market but it's a market something that's external oh yeah so trigger warning by the way i get hit on both ends i i just want you guys to know i i get emails and comments from people who are very very uncomfortable with the fact that this is a women's class i'm not joking i think it triggers something in them but yeah yeah yeah only men we don't care right um no a bunch a bunch of different men um the comments i got are like i don't know maybe they're upset that women are learning in general no but i i the the comments that i got were like i don't know i don't want to betray any confidential uh correspondences yeah okay but at any rate but okay so here here's a trigger warning does that mean you can't have without having fun you have all of these you have you have of course you have caulked me abina your beanie of hawkman but you can't you can have one without the other one no you can't have one without it right okay okay so he says here well israel wow i'm gonna explain it in a second if you give me a chance you don't okay hey mamin basham they believe in hashem because a moon of faith is above intellect so here's the deal and amma audits is not somebody who was born to be an amma audits he just wasn't educated nama audits doesn't mean he's dumb he could be smart he just didn't have a chance to learn i'm odd it's me it doesn't mean he's dumb he means he's he's ignorant so historically speaking i'm sorry to tell you the truth women were generally uneducated they didn't learn generally i mean there were exceptions throughout history but generally women didn't learn it doesn't mean a woman is dumb it means she didn't learn the point is even people who were not educated they didn't learn concepts historically they still had faith so he explains yeah you know why because faith and intellect are two different things and you can have the faith without having the intellect in fact everyone even the person with great intellect also has faith because faith is the source of intellect interesting because a lot of times people think about them as opposites but we we view it as a spectrum you understand and understand and understand and understand until you get to a point where your understanding gives out which is obviously different for everybody each person has a different mental capacity and at the point where understanding gives out that's where faith is i'm saying if you're going from below to above that's you hit the ceiling of intellect and now you're at the ground floor of faith you could also trace it above to below where you say there are ideas that i'm connected to in a way that is above cognition because those ideas are inherently too lofty to be comprehensible but my connection to them on a precognitive level trickles down so to speak and eventually i can relate to those ideas on a lower level that is understandable to me even though that's not the pure archetype of the concept it's a lower iteration of the concept so we're saying here faith is the source of intellect what we're saying now is that faith are synonymous sometimes other places are one of the intellectual faculties and it is they're both true but in this context kohma is not proper intellect like bina is it's pre-intellectual and that's equivalent to a muna faith yeah yeah and everyone has access to that even if you don't have a great intellect or even if you do have a great intellect for that matter is on everything even in the concept is used differently in different places which i just said a minute ago it says used as in this context always remember don't ever die on any conceptual hill and consider this because someone will find another mimer that disproves it everything is contextual is part of the soul soul has ten soul powers chapter three and now we're describing in greater detail one of those ten capacities which is called yeah is there any exclusion about women in chapter 17 when they talk about even someone without a brain in their head there could be a woman without a brain in her head but it's not mentioned in the time what that's that has no exclusion about women there right no it didn't mention women no it didn't say people right oh that's oh very good so when it said even right as long as you have a brain in your head you could do this right so didn't say except women right right it didn't say that very good not that i'm too lazy to understand but that which cannot be understood yeah yeah it is easier without intellect but if you're an intellectual you're not allowed to not use your intellect in your relationship with hashem what are you going to do you're going to say hashem i'm an intellectual but i'm going to use my intellect for other things and not for you not allowed to do that faith transcends intellect yes okay let's continue like king solomon says a fool believes everything and a crafty person understands a fool actually is not a insult in this context it means there's a divine level a holy level of fool where you say look you get to a point where all of us are fools because you're talking about the infinite one you just can't wrap your mind around it okay when you can't wrap your mind around it then you accept it on faith so that's why amunda is transcending intellect very good okay when it comes to the infinite one we are all fools not a put down it's just true you know there are people who use that line to tell you that god makes fools out of us all but it's clearly saying quite the opposite that god or a relationship with god elevates our appreciation of what it means to be a fool being a fool is not a put down here being a fool is just a reality you're talking about something that can't be grasped by an uh a finite mind okay great so then i will relate to it with my with my ammuna with my precognitive faculties no no no no no no no no no no that was all 16 and 17. i'm like an animal with you hashem and i'm always with you so i'm always an animal disclaimer it's not a put on tribal the fact that i know that i don't know is how i'm constantly with you if i need it if i insisted on being able to cognitively process everything i would not be able to have a relationship with hashem so the fact that i'm comfortable with the fact at certain points even though jews are people of the book and we study and we study we study and we we must study we must use our intellect to to relate to hashem as much as we can relate to hashem through the intellect you get to a point where the intellect gives out fine no problem then you relate through faith that's a side that so this is a great example of what a side conversation that i'm not going to let you get me into okay yes that's a side point let's stay focused let's stay focused remember our point here we're trying to unleash the as a way of producing emotions without having to use the methods of chapter 16 17 to which were meditation don't don't lose the plot okay we're locking therefore here's a crazy phenomenon throughout history even the wanton sinners people who were totally not religious wantonly not religious the majority of times you find that they were willing to die al-qaeda to sacrifice themselves to be martyrs it doesn't say every time it says alright majority of times this question and they would endure torture not to renounce god or the oneness of god the hashem even though they were totally ignorant and they didn't know intellectually anything about the greatness of god the gamba machiavelli and ms baden mccloud and even the little bit that they did know if they knew anything they never meditated on it clearly when they were giving up their lives for hashem it wasn't because of anything they knew or meditated on allah but rather this was without understanding without meditation iraq but rather why did they do it as if it were impossible as if they could not denounce the oneness of god the time of nine o'clock without any rational explanation in other words what is the alkali doing here he's making an argument he's saying historically we see a phenomenon of irreligious jews who gave up their lives to defend jewish theology now you're going to say well there are martyrs in every religion yeah religious martyrs in every religion what we're saying here is we have people who would publicly eat the ham sandwich but for some reason when when the pirates would come and say renounce the god of israel no i won't do it well why not when i read this i was thinking about the daniel pearl yeah yeah that that incident where he was intermarried daniel pearl he was intermarried and how did he die we're like i'm a jew my father's a jew my mother's a jew so what he's saying is if you were to tell me that religious people die for their religion yeah i know that of course they do people die for a lot of causes they believe in but what they'll ever citing is a peculiar idiosyncrasy of the jewish people that we have people who were not committed to the ideology their entire lives they couldn't be bothered to not eat the ham sandwich and now all of a sudden they can endure torture and death where does that come from and if you're going to tell me well well what about people who did convert he says allah the majority of times they they refused to convert and and you have to explain that because if it happened once in history it would be worthy of study if it happened a thousand times now it's already statistically significant but the fact that unfortunately it happened millions of times there's something here which is apparently there's something in a jew that has nothing to do with education has nothing to do with meditation because we have people who didn't they didn't receive an education and they didn't meditate and somehow they had this incredible commitment to judaism a judaism that they didn't understand so where is it coming from i ask you give me one word use a word from the chapter it's a precognitive capacity which was installed in the soul not because of anything you did but because who the patriarchs were they merited to bequeath it to you innate love of hashem you know why the jew will give up his life for the oneness of god because the oneness of god is shining and enlivening his entire soul a is precognitive therefore it does not require understanding of that which cannot be understood she's [Applause] so here's the operative word so let's summarize the chapter so far i want to create emotions to get congruent with my behaviors i have a method it's called meditation from 16 to 17. i'm not sure if it'll ever work but even if it will work it's taking a while great i have another method for you it's going to take eight chapters to to explain but here it is the first step in this method is called recognize there is something in you you didn't make it you don't have to make it it already came pre-installed the office merited to put it in you and if you can activate that you will give up your life you'll give up your life to remain loyal to our shop it's not even emotional oh you're saying that idea is a very emotionally powerful idea yes it is an emotionally powerful idea yes but remember why we're learning it it is very inspiring when you realize this about every jew but that's not the point here remember the point here the point is i have no idea how to tap into it yet he didn't tell me how to tap into it yet i don't even know if it can be tapped into but if we could tap into this thing well we know we know we have millions of cases unfortunately that prove that if you could tap into this aspect of the soul you could make any sacrifice to remain loyal to hashem well if i could tap into that kind of dedication that would be my emotional congruence with my behaviors it happened throughout history but again the point is not it's not a history lesson this is not a history lesson reason why we're learning this is because i know a phenomenon exists unfortunately there are millions of case studies i know a phenomenon exists and that phenomenon is that jews are able to remain loyal to hashem in a way that transcends intellect how do i know that it transcends into that because millions of those people didn't have an intellectual connection to yiddish kai they didn't have an intellectual connection they weren't educated and yet they were able to give up everything to remain connected to hashem so i know the phenomenon exists my question is now can we harness that if we could harness that then we could get ourselves emotionally congruent with observing torah and mitzvahs okay that's one step that's one step okay that was chapter 18. that's just one step it's not a half a step again okay call it a full step sure