Chapter 14: Everyone Can Be a Beinoni

The beinoni of chapters 12 and 13 is not a rare rank: it belongs to everyone, at every moment, whatever happened yesterday. The reason is what the beinoni does not need. He does not need to loathe evil. Loathing is a feeling, feelings belong to the heart, and the heart is not fully in our hands and is not the same from hour to hour. At prayer it may recoil from evil, and a few hours later it may not. What the beinoni needs is deed, speech and thought, and in these every person is given the choice, the ability and the freedom to act against what the heart wants.

How, in the very moment the craving burns? He “says to his heart”. He does not pretend not to want it. He reminds himself what the act would do: a sin separates a person from G‑d, and he does not want that, not even for a moment. His main reason is the bond, not his own image of himself. And the bond is real, because every Jew carries a hidden love for G‑d. The proof is that even the most careless Jew (the “lightest of the light”) is capable of giving up his life rather than deny G‑d, and the beinoni tells himself he is surely no less than that Jew. He sins only because a spirit of folly tells him this sin leaves him as Jewish as ever, and because he has forgotten the love inside him. The beinoni refuses to fool himself.

A picture that helps: a person is master of himself no less than of his own home. Whoever knocks, the door opens only if he opens it. The craving can knock as long as it likes; the mind, the mouth and the hands stay shut.

The heart is another matter. To truly find evil disgusting, whether with the complete tzaddik’s utter hatred or the incomplete tzaddik’s lesser one (chapter 10), a person needs an overwhelming love: “love of delights” (ahavah b’taanugim), a delight in G‑d that is a taste of the World to Come, which the Sages describe as souls basking in the radiance of the Shechinah. Next to what he delights in, evil simply repels him.

This cannot be produced by effort alone. It is like a reward, and a reward is received, not taken. That is why the verse calls it “a service of gift”: serving G‑d with such love is called “priesthood”, though it is not limited to kohanim, and it is G‑d’s gift. So the tzaddik’s level rests on hating evil, which rests on a love that is given. The beinoni’s level rests only on choices, and choices belong to everyone.

This answers half of the question left open in chapter 1. The Gemara teaches that before birth it is not decreed whether a person will be a tzaddik or a rasha, yet Iyov, as quoted in another passage of the Gemara, says “You created tzaddikim”. Both are true. Whether a person behaves righteously or wickedly is his own free choice. But the true tzaddik, whose heart has been changed, needs a soul created with that capacity, and not every soul has it. Even such a soul still has to work for it. It is a capacity, not a destiny.

The Tikkunei Zohar confirms that souls differ in kind, and “tzaddikim” is one of the kinds. What “You created reshaim” means is explained in chapter 27.

Now the oath itself makes sense. If “Be a tzaddik” were in everyone’s power, “Do not be a rasha” would add nothing. But true delight in G‑d and true loathing of evil are not fully in a person’s choice. So a second oath is added that is fully in his choice: at the very least, do not be a rasha, not for one moment of your life.

That covers both sides: never doing what is forbidden, and doing what is required, above all Torah study, which equals all the other mitzvos. It is also the hardest to keep, since it never ends: every free moment can be filled with it. Even this is within the beinoni’s reach.

Yet the first oath is not cancelled. Even one who may never be a tzaddik must set aside times to work on his heart. The tzaddik loathes evil without trying; the beinoni has to think his way there. The Sages’ counsel against lust, said of a woman in her time of niddah, is a deliberately stark picture of what the craving fixes on once you look past the surface. Once chewed, the finest dish looks no better than garbage, and every pleasure of this world ends in rot and refuse. The wise person sees the end at the start. The aim is not contempt for people or for food, but to stop being dazzled.

On the other side he should reflect on G‑d’s greatness until he finds some joy in it. He knows it will not be the tzaddik’s full truth; it may feel like imagination. One way to understand this: “imagination” here is not self‑deception. The feeling is real, only it depends on effort and reflection instead of being part of who he is. Either way he does his part, and what comes of it is up to G‑d.

Two things come of the effort. First, habit becomes second nature: what he trains himself to loathe becomes, a little, truly loathsome. Second, effort below brings a response from above. Perhaps, after all this, he will be granted a ruach from the soul of some tzaddik, joined to him in what Kabbalah calls ibur (“impregnation”), so that he can serve G‑d with real joy. Unlike gilgul, where a soul is bound to the body it enters, here the tzaddik’s soul is an added strength.

His own soul is not turned into a tzaddik’s; it is lifted by another’s, so “You created tzaddikim” still stands. The plural in “Rejoice, tzaddikim” also hints at this: the beinoni, a tzaddik of a lower kind, rejoices together with the tzaddik whose joy he received. And so even the first half of the oath can be fulfilled.