Text-Based Tanya Class—Week #6

okay i think it's working i think it's working all right okay so uh good morning thank you for everybody who participated in the campaign and as mentioned before and i'm going to mention again because we're recording and it's going to go online charity with a d c h a r d y dot com forward slash r s t is the campaign page and it's still open we officially finished the campaign last night but the matches are still matching the donations coming in so charity.com forward slash rst you can still give and uh that helps us do what we do okay so last week hashem we finished chapter one and we were left with some questions first of all we introduced in chapter one the idea of sadik rush and benini and we said these personae are somehow important in understanding the whole nature of our conflict our duality our contradiction but we don't know yet how and we're not going to find out yet today either another thing that we sort of left unresolved was the discussion of the two souls from vital and we spoke about part of it we spoke about one of those souls do you remember the one soul we spoke about in the end of chapter one yeah it is the animal soul although we did not call it navish obama's we described it as a nephesh of clipper and citra we said it's in the blood and it is effectively the vitality which animates the body but it's not just a life force it also is a drive it has a will of its own and that will expresses itself in various ways some of them are as character defects and we talked about the different four elements and how they manifest themselves as different character defects and we said because it's clipas noiga it's the type of negativity which has admixtures of good it also has some positive character traits which are native to the jewish person not something that you have to work on or acquire so it's not really anything that you've accomplished but we spoke about the native traits of uh bashful and compassionate and uh doing kindness and that that's also present in this uh this basic first soul so now in chapter two we get the other half of that picture which is the second soul so he starts off petting base let's look inside pedigrees the nephesh hashem is big israel the second soul of the jew hihelika kami mao mamash is literally a portion of god above khalik from the book of eof somebody once wrote to me and they said how did the al-taraba take the liberty to use those words of the scripture out of context and um he said that's why i have a problem with with hasidic teachings because they take verses and they use them in ways that are not the the not true to the original context so this was an email so i responded to the guy said uh first of all the altarev is not giving an interpretation of that verse in eof he's not saying that's shot of the verse in iowa he's using the latin hapasuk he's using the expression the phrase that the scripture uses second of all um if you think this is uniquely hasidic i'll tell you that the villenegon also uses the expression to describe the jewish soul and that it goes back even further than either the altar or the villenegon the addition of the al-tarab if you want to say the al trebe was anything is the word mamash because the adjective mamash literally mamash means literally is is is added on the turn of phrase from from e of his helico but the altar adds the word mamash and what we have been taught about that word is that it means even in embodiment even in a state of mamash this state of being a helichelikami mal is retained so it's not just saying it's a hey look at the cop mom is really literally like i'm not joking around i mean it literally mamash it's i mean it also means that but the the meaning of mamish is also that even when this soul is embodied and it's in a state of mammogious it's in physicality it retains this quality of being a portion of god above now why is it called the nephesh hashemis if it's a portion of god above i don't know to me that sounds primary call that the first soul why call it the second soul so simple answer you give is well he's just talking about the order in which he presented it we learned about the animal soul at the end of chapter one we're learning about the godly soul in the beginning of chapter two so it means the first soul we learned about in the second soul we're learning okay but then that begs the question why did we learn it in that order so i'll i'll tell you a couple explanations one is that you know we're talking about the story of your life so everyone's born and they have enough they have that drive for self-preservation that's why the baby cries at 3am without any guilt because if i need to be taken care of i need to be taken care of but you're not morally accountable in judaism until much later when do you become morally accountable bar mitzvah bass mitzvah so boy 13 a girl 12. why are we morally accountable at that later age because that's how long it takes the nephesh hello kiss the godly soul to be integrated enough into our consciousness that we have enough access to it to actually make moral choices instead of doing whatever is comfortable for us so when we talk about first soul and second soul you know we're talking we're talking about the story of your life the first soul that you were in touch with and the second soul that you got in touch with later schleimer king solomon talks about this by the way in uh in cahallis and ecclesiastes which we bring in chapter nine later on in tanya about the parable about the melech zakin oxil the old foolish king he says that the the animal soul is called the old foolish king why is he called old old because relative to the story of your life you met him first he was there all along so he's called old but he's foolish because he's he's an animal soul and uh the godly soul is like the baby the newbie he just arrived in town so that's one explanation about about first soul and second soul yeah when he said it takes till barbason for it to be fully integrated yeah um i mean i think i've heard like uh answers that you're not saying it doesn't enter barbaric mentality well you the question is is it something that happens like instantaneously at that moment it's incremental and gradual but as far as being integrated enough to the point where somebody could actually be expected to use it would be bar well the first stage of the first stage of entering what does entering mean because we're talking about spiritual entities so it's not like a person enters a room it's not like a physical thing that is located inside of another physical thing when we say the soul is in the body what we mean is that its influence is discernible on a conscious level so um if a person has a desire you know the little kid wants to eat the cookie and it's very very hard for the child to think selflessly let me stop and make a bracha before i eat the cookie because that runs counter to self-preservation so to really be to to have enough access to the consciousness of your godly soul that we could expect you to be able to transcend your drive for self-preservation that requires the godly soul to be integrated to a certain extent it's obviously it's not binary it's not like either it is integrated or it's not integrated even in the process of integration there are pro there are stages along the way and then even after bar and bass mitzvah there are stages of further integration so the integration concepts i get but the question is more like is there a beginning point so bris mila for a boy is the beginning of the integration of the of the soul into the body marriage is considered the biggest face of integration but bar bass mitzvah for practical purposes is sufficient to hold the person accountable at that point okay so another reason why we call it the second soul that first soul and second soul actually is connected to this week's parsha it's kind of nifty thank you paula for dealing with the flashing light without calling any attention to it and i want to mention because last week we had a whole big distraction about it and you guys were so calm just now i would actually fly with you guys because i know if there'd be turbulence nobody would shriek it's always that's the terrifying thing it's never the turbulence it's the person screaming because of the turbulence but yeah what was he where are we going thailand why thailand okay why not why not thailand yes when we finish down here we're going to take a trip yeah we're going to go to the aisle for sure yeah she wants to fly somewhere i don't know go to hottich or something okay yeah why not we could do that yeah i'm gonna invite the youtube people sure we'll take a vote at the end of the class in two three years when we finished the kanye well we're taking a class taking a trip anyways so that was really great how nobody got distracted by the flashing light okay um it's always nifty how things work out bashkacha pratas this week's parsha we just started it yesterday we just started those who learn the daily homos so yes vayishlak very good so yesterday was re-sharing today jacob sends angels angelic messengers to his brother esau and he says hey brother are you ready i'm ready are you ready what was he trying to do he's trying to unite tahu and tikkun yankevavinu represents ticken the orderly process of following the rules slow incremental success and uh ace of is toyohu is chaos his frenetic energy that can't really be contained in vessels he's like the overnight success and everything that comes with that for good and for bad so we're taught that jacob and esau are the godly soul and the animal soul respectively tell you who is higher than tikkun the world of chaos precedes the world of order and i don't mean chronologically because all of this stuff is pre-chronological but i mean as far as if you can imagine a process that is not a chronological process but think about there's a a first draft of creation where the writer is getting out all of his ideas in a flurry but it's unsustainable it's too much it's too much revelation because for someone to read something you gotta you gotta you know whittle it down you gotta carve back some of that revelation you gotta make it more uh palatable you have to make it more understandable so you got to break it up you got to take some stuff out you got to well that you know we're going to remove that that's not really for uh that's too confusing so imagine a first draft of creation which is like this burst of creativity which was necessary as part of the process but it's too much creativity so it's unsustainable and that's where the sriracha calum the shattering of the vessels emanates from because there was too much creative energy and it broke the containers at any rate tahu is this this level which is which is higher than tikkun ace of emanates from toyo yankee emanates from tikkun internally each one of us has two souls one of them is from tikkun one of them is from tohu the animal soul is from toyu that's why it is so wild because it's from this this lofty level of wild energy that is so um unconstrained and uncontainable that uh it ends up not really working out as a system for creation but it's got a certain it has a certain quality that if if you can manage to harness it is really really valuable so we have this idea of a first soul the animal soul being this in its source at least being this really lofty wild unharnessed spiritual energy and what it teaches us is that i mean why is this idea important is that even when we start to learn how to rein in the animal and to [Music] not let it call the shots and not let it direct our lives because to let the animal run our lives would mean to to face destruction who'd mean to make our our our lives into absolute uh to to havoc and yet we're not trying to get rid of this animal we're just trying to reign it in and if we can manage to redirect its energy which is the ultimate goal then we will have the best of both worlds so you should understand that the godly soul is the second soul second meaning not just you get it later in life but second meaning if you look at its spiritual source it is actually lower in its source its original source then this animal soul and and in fact you know we have a hasidic concept that something that comes from a higher source when it falls down it falls lower the the the parable often is of a wall a stone wall so if the stone wall topples then the row of stones that was at the top when the stone when the wall was standing straight ends up farthest from the wall so because the animal soul starts so lofty it comes down so low same thing with asap and that's what yitzchuk recognized in a7 why he loved him wanted to bless him because he thought he could access that energy at any rate so that that's the idea of first soul and second soul but let's find out a little bit more yeah say louder please the animal soul comes from higher falls lower that's why down here it is expressed as these base instincts it's clearly in its in its manifested state it's lower it's not some altruistic spiritual drive it's this low crass drive but the reason it expresses itself in that low manner is because it actually came and descended from from higher yeah so far so good okay so now we're going to find out a little bit more about this godly soul we we said that it's a helical kami mal and the altar adds mamas even in a body kamehameha kosovo like it says and he breathed god breathed in his nostrils meaning atoms nostrils a living soul this soul is likened to breath god's breath or like we say the aton and you breathed it within me we say that in the morning blessings we say hashem this neshama that you gave me is pure alakin you gave me this pure soul you created it you formed it and you blew it into me you blew it into me so this soul is likened to breath and the shama itself the word is related to nishima which means breath so why is this an important um metaphor that we think of the soul as breath we're going to talk about that a little bit kamehameha so like the holy zoeyer says one who blows blows from his in innerness pirush what does that mean that the inner depth of his vitality mates comes out when he blows strongly i had a thing that i developed for my oldest daughter who's now 20 when she was like maybe seven or eight she had a bunch of classmates that's when we started it we means me and my wife we started this thing where we would do tania lessons for kids and so we started it when my oldest daughter was maybe seven or eight we had her classmates come over and then since then i've done it for many many kids groups um you guys some of you have taken my class before know about some of my hands-on tonya demonstrations because some of you saw i don't know did ever you know that this the first version of this class that we did here in the five towns you know is on my website it's on soulworth.org you go soulwords.org forward slash tanya and the whole class is there and you can hear some of your questions by the way i get great comments from people like that the questions in that class are brilliant people love it by the way and i want you want to know something else people say to me they're like it's so cute i hear kids playing in the background i told them yeah we paid those kids to make that noise okay so i don't know if you guys ever saw but the class for chapter 29 at the end yeah go check it out on soulwords.org forward slash tanya go check out class 29 at the end of 29 i'm blowing stuff up like real real fire making explosions did you guys ever see that you guys should really check it out so i'm making explosions with fire i made a simulated uh grain silo explosion anyways that why am i telling you this that was one of the tanya hands-on demonstrations that i created for uh for kids yeah so you check it out chapter 29 um blowing stuff up the hands-on demonstration for chapter two i'll tell you what we did we had something called an oscilloscope and what it does is it measures sound and it represents it visually as a as a line so if you're talking i mean you could set it to different levels of sensitivity but when you're talking so the line goes up and if it's silent then the line plummets flat lines so what i did is i called up two volunteers to stand up in front of the group these are kids and i had one girl stand here one girl stands there and i say we're gonna have a contest an endurance contest one of you is going to blow bubbles and i gave her a cup with like uh water and a straw i think even at one point we got it really really fancy and we had like a ping-pong ball so you could really you could see the ping-pong ball bobbing around but i said your job is just to blow bubbles okay then there's another girl okay your job is to talk into this little uh oscilloscope to the mic and it's gonna read your sound waves of your voice and your job is just to keep that oscilloscope to keep that monitor to keep the lines jumping and if you stop talking then the lines will go flat okay so basically you can picture this you have two girls standing in the front and one is trying to keep the bubbles going by blowing into a straw and the other is trying to keep the oscilloscope line jumping by talking and the the contest is who can keep it up the longest and always but they don't know they always do they they get they have bravado they're like oh i could do this i could blow bubbles forever right it doesn't matter if you have the biggest girl against the smallest girl they think they think it matters like who's going up against whom it does it doesn't matter the talker will always be able to go forever and the one blowing the bubbles will get tired some some take a minute some take two minutes but eventually you cannot continue blowing bubbles talking i do it all the time i talk for hours and hours and hours and hours on end all the time and the reason that you can talk and talk and talk and talk but blowing bubbles will tire you out in a minute or two is because physiologically where the air is coming from when you're talking when you're talking you are not drawing air from the depths i mean maybe maybe an opera singer or something like maybe pavarotti i don't know but regular talking the air is you're not drawing from the depths of the air source from your lungs in order to talk you can breathe rather shallow and still talk but when you're blowing you're expending the air from deep within and you have to refill it deep within and that's why it's tiring so here's the deal we know that hashem creates through speech as it creates present texts hashem creates through speech but yemen ella came and god said let there be light right here and there was light so in voracious in the genesis account it describes god as speaking the world into being or like we're saying davening barak shah um blessed is he who spoke in the world came into being god speaks the world into being and those who learn with me those who remember that was one of the classes that we did here at one point remember we're learning we're learning about the ics the 22 letters of the olive base describe basic building blocks of creative energy and god creates the world by arranging those building blocks in a manner that we call divine speech so every single thing in the world is a product of god's speech he speaks it into being he calls it he names it and it comes into being there is one exception to this everything in the world is a product of god's speech there's one entity which is a product of god's breath the neshama the nephesh the godly soul it is considered not godly speech but godly breath and the idea here is that just like the altar ever says in the name of the zayar that breath means it's coming from the torchios and the panimus it's coming from the inner depth in other words the neshama is an expression of god's innerness the neshama is in many ways an extension of god's own selfhood everything is a creation of god the neshama is an extension of god or god expressing himself not by making something but by being something so we're talking about a totally different type of entity a unique iden a unique entity unlike anything else and breath is one analogy that we use breath as opposed to speech is one analogy that we use to begin to appreciate what this what this entity is yeah i read somewhere that the word abracadabra comes from there yes i speak i will create yeah that's right because the original vaudeville magicians were jews and they they used to say abracadabra the stage magicians yeah it comes from aramaic yeah yeah everything comes from the jews so one analogy is is uh breath there's another analogy that helps to round out the picture of the identity of the the second soul you see where we are right after the colon marshall likewise by way of allegory metaphorically speaking the thought of the souls of the jewish people arose to god's mind israel like it says god refers to the jewish people as my son my first born the jewish people bonnie you are children to the lord your god what is this idea of rising to the mind and what is this idea of being a son or a child pirush this means kemei shahabban nim shahm just like a sun comes from the brain of the father we're going to get into a little bit of kabbalistic physiology in a moment just like the sun derives from the brain of the father let's just finish the sentence so too so to speak the shaman's call israel the soul of every jewish person comes from the thought and the wisdom of hashem the yu khakim valley bachma that he is wise but not in the noble sense of wisdom allah but rather he and his wisdom are one so there's a lot of explanation required here you have to understand both the martial and the nimsho usually usually we use a muscle because you understand the muscle already it's to help you understand the nimsho you understand the way usually a metaphor is you make a reference which is already understandable it's not the thing that you actually want to talk about but it's similar to the thing that you actually want to talk about and it's more familiar so you make a reference to something familiar and the person says yeah i understand that and you say okay well there's an aspect of that familiar concept which exists in this new unfamiliar concept just sort of bring over your understanding of the unfamiliar uh your understanding of the familiar to your to your new understanding of this unfamiliar thing and that's why a metaphor is effective you guys all follow what i'm saying okay what do you do when the metaphor isn't familiar so it's probably not yeah so it's probably not the way you learned procreation in biology class so we need to explain a little bit of this kabbalistic physiology the the concept of the ben the sun is nimshach is drawn down from the brain of the father is both a spiritual and a physical concept what it means is that ultimately the reproductive power of the father and we're not being sexist by saying father father father as opposed to mother because father and mother have distinct roles in reproduction everybody knows that that's undeniable right now we're focusing on the father's role the father's role is to provide a tiny tiny package of code of information which is unpacked and developed within the mother and ultimately becomes articulated as an entire complete human being this phenomenon of a tiny essential point a tiny speck of information being developed into a complete human being in other words building a person out of out of a cell this is an expression of the essence of the father what do i mean by the essence what i mean is for instance a child could inherit from a father a talent that the father himself never developed so the father never touched a piano so he can't play piano and yet the father inherited from his great great great great grandfather the skills to play the piano he never developed it so he doesn't have it and yet this same father's own son can inherit the piano playing skills from his father who can't play the piano why because when you inherit your genetic code from your parents you're not getting what they were able to display and manifest you're getting their essence which is everything even the potential that was never actualized so the idea of reproduction is there's a transmission of essence and what is the medium through which that essence is transmitted the what we call tipas mayako av the drop that comes from the father's brain now you're gonna say okay i get what you mean when you're talking about the drop you're talking about the seminal drop you're talking about a cell you're talking about a cell which contains genetic code i get that that sort of is consistent with my understanding of biology but why are you saying it's from the brain there is a joke here but i'm not going to go for it um so the altareba actually speaks about this in taitu not in tanya he speaks about it in titu and he says that obviously we don't mean that there's physical pieces of brain being transmitted as the reproductive cells what we mean is that the energy that is transmitted through the reproductive cell originates in the father as brain energy in other words the in the father himself his essence is his brain which is why you see that the brain controls the entire body the brain is connected to the entire body and knows what's going on in the entire body so the brain represents the essence within one organism when that organism procreates and reproduces and passes on its essence it's passing on its brain so to speak negative as well as positive traits like everything yeah yeah and doesn't the father determine the gender the chromosomes i have no idea i have no idea that's not i don't know [Music] the son it could be a daughter it could be a daughter it's not a gender specific when we say ben it doesn't have to be a son you can imagine a daughter because the same the same mechanics apply if whether it's a son or it's a daughter the point is the muscle the metaphor here which is supposed to be which is supposed to say the reason we're using a metaphor is you're supposed to say oh yeah i know that thing and then we're supposed to get into the deep concept that is harder to understand i just understand that in a in a 2021 context people don't understand the metaphor or the thing that it's attempting to explain so that's why i'm explaining the metaphor first but please do not get hung up on the metaphor this is not a biology class and that's not the purpose of this discussion purpose of the discussion is we use the idea of biological reproduction as a metaphor for the relationship between god and the godly soul that just like biological reproduction is someone taking his own essence and reproducing it so too the relationship between god and the godly souls god taking his own essence and reproducing it so one metaphor we use is breath coming from his depths it's coming from his inside the other metaphor we use is biological reproduction that just like the sun has the same dna as the father the soul the godly soul has the same dna so to speak as god it is not a is it is not merely a creation of god which all things are creations of god it is an expression a manifestation of god's own selfhood and that is unique there's no other entity of which this can be said so what we're describing here is not just a a a loftier version of the first soul okay so you have one soul that's into self-preservation and you have another soul that's into spirituality no no no that's the big misconception actually what we're describing here are two entities which are categorically different incomparably different because the godly soul is not just a drive that's driven toward loftier more spiritual things it's not just that it's its goals and its desires are different than the animal soul it's that the entity itself is essentially different yeah is this only in the jewish we describe this we said the nephesh hashemis so we're describing a uniquely jewish soul and in fact if you ever want to know what jewish identity is not how to transmit jewish identity that's a matter of halacha you're born from a jewish mother converted according to but if you want to know what is jewish identity it is the presence of this soul that's all it is it's not adherence to a religious ideology because there are people who have the presence of this soul and they don't follow judaism it is the presence of this soul fantastic question you are anticipating where we're heading the question was if hashem gives all of his children his dna so to speak and we're speaking metaphorically obviously do we all get the same they have that dna to yield somebody that's ah not attached that that painfully inside of them is that the same part that we were all fantastic questions okay so the question let me just rephrase it especially on the microphone here is you you refer to a to an expression called the pinterlaid pintoligi is a yiddish colloquially a colloquialism which basically means that every jew regardless of observance has a certain essential jewish identity that will come out when push comes to shove at any rate the question was if i could just re-phrase it if all jews have this identity which is the dna of god so to speak does that mean that ultimately regardless of the way a jew presents himself or herself in terms of jewish observance that ultimately they possess the same spiritual identity and the answer of course is yes what you're sensing we're saying is precisely what we are saying the answer is yes however at the same time we don't want to oversimplify it so there is the question well if that's so then why don't all jews present the same why don't they all look like the same exact level of observance so we have to account for that discrepancy and he's going to talk about this in this chapter which is essentially how come every jew ultimately is essentially the same and yet we see for ourselves it's undeniable that there are different levels of spirituality being expressed by different jews it's a real phenomenon and it requires explanation and he's going to address it i mean we're not going to get into it today because we have like three and a half minutes but it's a real question yeah and a micro level is the same about the father and his kids they all get the same spiritual dna you're asking about the metaphor i don't think it's so important i don't want to i don't want to perseverate on the metaphor i mean uh do they all get the same dna i don't know i'm not i'm not i'm not a biologist i don't know i understand the metaphor as well as i need to in order to be able to to appreciate the spiritual concept the idea here is that there is a basic jewish identity which is universal and part two of that statement is that basic jewish identity which is universal to all jews is the essence of god mamash which means both literally i'm not not speaking figuratively but mamish also means like i told you the beginning of class even in a state of momotious even in a physical body because you could say well in theory if you're talking in the abstract yes every jewish soul is this reproduction of the godly genetic code and i have to say kavyakov so to speak obviously you understand the the words we're using right now are purely figures of speech because we're talking about god who is indescribable but you could say oh this is an abstract concept but um it only exists in heaven it only exists in higher planes and when the altar ever adds that word mamish what he's saying is no even here in the world even in a state of embodiment if you probe deeply enough you will find there's a certain basic universal essence of all jewish people regardless of how they present themselves and that basic essential identity is so to speak the essence of god himself powerful concept so just remember when we're talking about two souls we're not talking about two comparable entities who just have a little bit different agendas we're talking about categorically different entities two entities which are completely incomparably different and yet somehow we don't know yet exactly the particulars but we see this is where we're heading we have to somehow negotiate some livable type of arrangement between these two entities in our bodies we don't know yet how that's going to happen but that's everyone can sort of sense that's where we're heading you can sense that because that's where we started in chapter one in chapter one we started with our conflict we started with our questioning about our own identity what's going on with us and the altitude presented the idea of the conflict so now we're starting to appreciate that this conflict is a lot bigger than we even thought we thought well one minute i like pleasures of this world and the next minute i like doing acts of kindness and so i'm wishy-washy no no it's much deeper than that there are two categorically different entities that are both present within the consciousness of the jew vying for control of your life so this is very deep stuff this is very i mean you could you could you could well understand how this could create serious issues but that's why we're here that's why we're coming to a spiritual master and we're presenting ourselves and we're being honest about our situation and we're asking for guidance and this is there's no quick fix there's no quick answer this is part of the process to understanding ourselves properly and then trying to uh to manage our lives more successfully okay i don't think i can get any further than this i want to be respectful everyone's time so we're going to just remember we're stopping before the note there's a haggar there's a note here and we're going to stop right before that technical note