Chapter 15: One Who Serves and One Who Does Not

Having described the tzaddik and the beinoni, the Alter Rebbe uses the distinction to read a verse. The verse seems to say the same thing twice: surely the tzaddik is the one who serves G‑d, and the rasha the one who does not. The Gemara answers that “one who does not serve Him” is no rasha. Both he and “one who serves” are righteous, and the difference is that one reviews his learning a hundred times and the other a hundred and one. That still leaves “tzaddik” and “one who serves G‑d” looking like the same person.

The answer is in the grammar. Oved, “serves”, describes an activity still going on. The beinoni fights every day to keep the animal soul out of his thought, speech and action, and the Alter Rebbe says plainly that this is hard work. Eved, “servant”, is a title describing what a person has become, like “sage” or “king”. That is the tzaddik: his war is over, the evil is gone, and the seat of evil in his heart is empty.

So the verse’s four terms describe three kinds of people: the tzaddik, the rasha, and the beinoni, who comes in two levels. Neither kind of beinoni ever sins, and in that sense the Gemara can call both of them righteous.

Even the beinoni “who does not serve” is no rasha. He has never committed even a minor sin, he keeps every mitzvah he can, and he learns Torah whenever he is free. That last point alone is a high bar: chapter 1 showed that anyone who could learn Torah and does not is called a rasha. In what he does, he is flawless. What he lacks is not in his deeds but in how they come about.

Why then is he “not serving”? Because there is no fight. The beinoni of chapters 12 and 13 wins by the light of G‑d shining in the G‑dly soul in the mind, which rules the heart. This man never needs it, because his animal soul does not object. The examples are all about temperament: a heavy, settled nature that is happy to sit and learn all day, a cool nature untroubled by desire, a person who simply does not feel much pleasure in worldly things. His animal soul has not become holy. It is just quiet.

So he does not need to meditate on G‑d’s greatness to produce fear of G‑d, which keeps a person from sin, or love of G‑d, which moves him to mitzvos and Torah. The hidden love every Jew has is enough for him, together with his easy temperament.

And that love is not his achievement. It is an inheritance from the Avos to every Jew, a gift that chapters 18 and 19 will explain. Living on a gift you were given is not yet service. That is why he is “not called one who serves at all”.

Now a much wider group. A person who is not studious by nature trains himself to learn diligently, until the habit becomes second nature. Getting there took real effort. But once the habit is set, the hidden love is enough for him too, and he is among those who “do not serve”, unless he wants to learn more than his habit.

A mashal: lifting a heavy rock onto a roof takes great effort. Once it is up there, keeping it there takes none. Effort is needed again only to raise it higher. A good habit is the rock on the roof. It is valuable, but it is no longer service. Service is whatever lifts it higher.

This explains the Gemara’s strange measure. Before the Oral Torah was written down, every lesson was reviewed a hundred times. That was simply what a student did. So the first hundred reviews were habit, and the hundred-and-first was the first that went against habit.

The donkey drivers show it. Their usual route was ten parsah for one zuz. For eleven they charged two: the one extra parsah cost as much as the first ten, because it went beyond what they were used to. So too the extra review equals all hundred and even surpasses them, because it is the only one that took a fight.

Why is it a fight? Because habit becomes nature, and nature is lodged in the heart’s left side, the seat of the animal soul, which stems from kelipah. To change it a person must contemplate G‑d’s greatness until a real love of G‑d is aroused, a love stronger than his habit. For a beinoni, that is what complete service means. By the same logic, once a hundred and one becomes the habit, the service is the hundred-and-second.

There is a second way. Instead of building a new love through contemplation, a person can wake up the hidden love he already has and use it to hold his nature in check. It does not change his nature; it only rules it. Only the first way is called “complete service”, but this one still counts as service, because it is a fight. How to wake that love is the subject of chapters 18 and on.

The last line sets the rule. Without a fight, even this love is not counted as his service. The love is real, and he does use it: even a born scholar still prefers his comforts to learning without a break, and the hidden love is what keeps him at it. But a gift that is never put to the test is not yet service. To be called “one who serves G‑d”, a person has to meet resistance and push past it.