Chapter 11: The Rasha: When the Animal Soul Has the Upper Hand

Chapter 10 described the tzaddik, in whom the G‑dly soul rules. Now comes the rasha, in whom the animal soul rules. Holiness and its opposite are built as mirror images, so each kind of tzaddik has a matching kind of rasha. The complete tzaddik, who has only good, faces the rasha who has only bad. The incomplete tzaddik, who still has some evil hidden under his good, faces the “rasha who has good”: the good is really there, but the evil is on top.

Like tzaddik, rasha here is not a word for a monster. It describes what is happening inside. The G‑dly soul, with its home in the brain and the right side of the heart, bends before the animal soul on the left. And this can happen in endless degrees: how much of the good gives way (quantity), and which part of it, for example its love, gives way to the animal soul’s love for what is forbidden (quality).

The Alter Rebbe starts at the top of the scale: someone just below the beinoni. He almost always does what is right. The evil wins only rarely, only over one part of him, and only in small things. For that moment the mouth, the hand or the mind becomes the animal soul’s “chariot”, as obedient to it as a chariot is to its driver.

Notice how low the bar is. Not lashon hara or mockery itself, only their “dust”. Not a sin, only a thought about one. In one respect thought is worse than the deed: among the soul’s three garments, thought sits deepest, the closest to who a person is, so what clothes itself there stains the soul most deeply. Even a free moment, when he could learn and lets his mind drift instead, counts.

This is exactly the line between him and the beinoni. The beinoni feels the same pull but never lets it decide what he thinks, says or does. This person sometimes loses, and at that moment he is called a rasha.

Right after the slip, the G‑dly soul rises again. He feels real remorse, does proper teshuvah, and G‑d forgives him. The three kinds of atonement are: for a positive mitzvah left undone, teshuvah atones at once; for a prohibition, teshuvah together with Yom Kippur; for sins that carry the penalty of kares or of death by the court, teshuvah and Yom Kippur, and then suffering completes the atonement.

Yet the Alter Rebbe still calls him a rasha. Forgiveness wipes away the sin, and on the scale of reward and punishment he is a tzaddik, since nearly all his deeds are good. But that is the “borrowed name” of chapter 1. In the true sense, rasha describes the soul, and his animal soul can still overpower him. The same pattern can come back in a week or a year, so his state remains that of a “rasha who has good”, not a beinoni.

Now the other end of the same rank. This person sins in thought, speech and action, in serious things and often. What keeps him a “rasha who has good” is that, between one fall and the next, he feels bad and thinks about changing. The regret is real but weak. It does not turn into the teshuvah of someone who confesses and stops, so tomorrow he may do it again, and regret again.

The Alter Rebbe tells us where that regret comes from: the good in his soul. An animal does what it wants and feels nothing afterwards. The sting that comes after doing wrong, even when no one will ever find out, and even after he has explained it all away, is the G‑dly soul showing that it is still alive inside him. So “full of regret” can be read in two ways. It sounds like a criticism, but it is also good news: the soul has not gone quiet.

At the bottom is the one who never regrets anything. He is the mirror image of the complete tzaddik, with one big difference. In the complete tzaddik the evil was transformed into good. Here the good is not transformed into evil, because a G‑dly soul cannot become evil. It can only be pushed out of his inner life.

That is the meaning of makif. The soul is still there, but it is not taken in. It is like sitting through a class given in ancient Greek: the words fill the room, yet nothing of them reaches you. He has no awareness of the good, and it has no say in his life, but it has not been destroyed. It is paralysed, not dead, so even such a person can bring it back to life through great effort and return. The gates of teshuvah are not closed to anyone.

Since even the “rasha who has bad” still has a G‑dly soul hovering over him, the Shechinah, the Divine Presence, rests on any ten Jews, even if all ten are on that level. At such a gathering the Shechinah rests only as a makif: it surrounds them and does not enter the awareness of those gathered. So the good that surrounds each of them is enough to receive it.

A story makes the same point. A man once asked the Tzemach Tzedek why the word Yehudim (“Jews”), usually spelled in the Megillah with one yud, is spelled with two in connection with Haman’s decree. He answered that yud, which equals ten, stands for the ten powers of a soul. Some Jews live by the ten powers of the G‑dly soul alone; in others the ten powers of the animal soul rule as well. Haman’s decree was against all of them, even the Jews of “two yuds”. And why two yuds even after the decree was cancelled? Because when they saw G‑d’s salvation, those Jews returned and became equal to their brothers.