Chapter 10: The Tzaddik: Complete and Incomplete

Chapters 1 to 9 described the two souls and their battle. Now come the people that battle produces, starting at the top: the tzaddik. The rasha follows in chapter 11, and the beinoni, the book’s real subject, in chapter 12.

This tzaddik has gone further than any beinoni. The beinoni keeps evil out of his thoughts, words and actions. This person has removed it from its home, the left chamber of the heart (chapter 9), reading the verse’s “from your midst” as “from within you”. He no longer wants evil at all.

Yet he is only an “incomplete” tzaddik. A tiny trace of evil is left, so small that the good swallows it up. He is not pretending: he honestly senses nothing, because the trace lies below anything he is aware of. But his conclusion that it is all gone is mistaken. It only “seems to him”.

So how do we know anything is left? The Alter Rebbe gives a test. If the evil had really gone, it would have become good. The next paragraphs explain why.

To explain the incomplete tzaddik, the Alter Rebbe first describes the complete one. There are two things in the animal soul: its energy, and the “garments” it is dressed in, the bad desires through which it expresses itself. The garments cannot be raised up. They must be taken off and thrown away. Then the energy can be dressed in clean garments and turned toward holiness. That is what “turned into good” means.

Notice exactly what he despises: pleasure taken only to satisfy the body. Pleasure that serves G‑d, such as enjoying Shabbos with food and drink, is holy.

And the hatred is not where he starts. It grows out of love. Because he delights in G‑d (the love of delights of chapter 9), he cannot bear what stands opposite Him. “Search me and know my heart” means: see how much I love You, and You will know how much I hate Your enemies. Toward the sitra achra, the spiritual source, he feels hatred. Toward the physical pleasures it feeds he feels disgust, as one recoils from something filthy.

The contrast now follows by simple logic. His love of G‑d is very great, but it is not yet complete; it has not reached the full love of delights. So his rejection of evil is real but not total, and where rejection is not total, a speck of attraction must remain. That speck keeps a grip on the filthy garments, and while the garments are on, the energy cannot become good. Still, it is so small that it shows itself in nothing, not even as a desire.

The Alter Rebbe explains the name in the middle of the phrase itself: in “a tzaddik who has bad”, the bad is “to him”, subdued and surrendered to the good in him.

So the two pairs of names say two different things. “Complete” and “incomplete” describe his love of G‑d. “Who has good” and “who has bad” describe what happened to his evil: transformed, or only subdued. They go together, because only the love of delights can strip off the garments and turn the evil into good. Both are true tzaddikim: both love G‑d greatly, and in neither one is any evil felt.

Incomplete tzaddikim are not all alike. First, the kind of trace. Chapter 1 traced the animal soul’s bad traits to four elements: fire (anger and pride), water (desire for pleasure), air (frivolity and empty talk) and earth (laziness and sadness). In one tzaddik the hidden trace may come from fire, in another from water.

Second, how deeply it is swallowed up. The words come from the laws of kashrus. A drop of milk falls into a pot of meat. If the meat is sixty times the drop, its taste is gone and the dish is kosher. The drop is still there; you simply cannot taste it. So too the good in one tzaddik may outweigh the evil sixty to one, in another a thousand or ten thousand to one. The Alter Rebbe twice says “for example”: the numbers are illustrations, not fixed lines.

These are true tzaddikim, the many found in every generation. Yet all of them belong to the incomplete level.

Incomplete tzaddikim are many. The complete tzaddik is rare: Rabbi Shimon saw only a few.

The name explains what makes him different. He is a person of “ascent” because he lifts something up: the evil itself. The incomplete tzaddik has driven the evil out, and what is left is a trace swallowed up in the good. The complete tzaddik has raised the animal soul’s energy itself into holiness.

The Zohar’s two pairs say the same thing. The darkness of the world, which hides G‑d, is turned into light. The bitter taste of the animal soul and the evil inclination is turned into sweetness. To enter Rabbi Shimon’s chamber it is not enough to have pushed the darkness away. It has to have become light.

The second reason is about the good they do. Most people who serve G‑d sincerely do it because the soul thirsts for Him, and Torah and mitzvos truly quench that thirst: the prophet sends those who thirst for G‑d to the “water” of Torah. That is a great level. Yet in a subtle way it is still for oneself. The reward sought is spiritual, the joy of being close to G‑d.

The people of ascent do not serve for themselves at all, not even for their G‑dly selves. They want only that the Holy One, as He is beyond the world, be united with His Shechinah, His presence within it, here in the lowest realm. That is the “kindness” the chassid does for his Maker.

The Raya Mehemna’s picture makes it sharper. A son who gives his life to free his captive parents gains nothing for himself. His love for them goes beyond his body and beyond his own soul. So too the people of ascent: their whole concern is G‑d, not themselves.

The chapter ends with a passage the Alter Rebbe himself set apart in parentheses: the two reasons are really one. In Kabbalah, “feminine” means the one who receives and “masculine” the one who gives. “Feminine waters” rise from below, from man’s effort. “Masculine waters” are G‑d’s kindness flowing down in answer.

Raising the evil to holiness is the work from below. The animal soul comes from kelipas nogah, the “glowing shell” of chapter 1 that has good mixed into it, and refining that good rises as feminine waters. That brings about a union above, and G‑d’s kindness flows down through every positive mitzvah. That is exactly the second reason: bringing G‑d into the lowest world.

So the complete tzaddik does not have two jobs. He wants only that G‑d dwell below, and the way that happens is by lifting up his own animal soul. (Of the two reasons, the first fits the name “a tzaddik who has good”, and the second fits the name “complete tzaddik”.)