Chapter 17: Very Near: The Heart That Leads to Action

The whole Tanya is built on this verse; its title page says so. Moshe tells every Jew that the Torah is not in heaven and not across the sea, but very near: in your mouth, in your heart, and to do. Doing is within reach, and so is speaking. The hard words are “in your heart.” A person can be told to act. Can he be told to feel?

Nor can the verse be set aside as true only for Moshe’s great generation. The Torah is eternal, so it must hold true in every generation, ours included. Yet the Gemara says that even fear of Heaven is no small thing, and love is harder still. (One way to understand why: fear can be a response to something greater than me, while love means changing what I want.) And the Sages say that only tzaddikim control their hearts. So how can love be “very near” to all of us?

The answer is in the last word of the verse. “In your heart, to do it” is one phrase: the heart that is near to us is the heart that brings us to act. That is why the verse does not list mouth, heart and action in any natural order; “to do it” follows “in your heart” to explain it. This love does not have to burn. It can be a quiet, hidden desire, a settled conviction deep inside that this is right and that I want to live by it. That is enough to bring a person to the mitzvos.

Why is it near? Because even when the heart is not in our power, the mind is. Think of people who go to work every day and spend hours thinking about whatever the job demands, even things that do not interest them at all. They can, because over his mind a person is master. Now let a person use that freedom to think deeply about the greatness of G‑d. By itself this gives birth, at least in his mind, to a love of G‑d and a wish to cleave to Him through Torah and mitzvos. It is not an idea admired from a distance, but a conviction that obligates him.

Is this “love in the mind” second best? No. This, the Alter Rebbe says, is the whole of man. “Today, to do them” teaches that this world is the world of action. The feelings belong to “tomorrow”: the full, open love of G‑d is itself part of the reward. It is not the task of this world.

So a person who does not feel a fire in his heart has not failed. The love asked of him now is the love that gets him to act, and that love is near.

This is how the quiet love works. By nature the mind rules over the left chamber of the heart, the home of the animal soul’s desires, and over the mouth and the hands. So a person whose heart is not yet his can still steer what he thinks, says and does by what his mind knows. This also shows where the beinoni stands: the tzaddik controls his heart directly, the beinoni rules it through his mind, and the rasha is ruled by it.

The exception is one who is truly a rasha. Not the beinoni, who is only “like” a rasha in his own eyes, and not someone who stumbled once, but a person whose life is given over to sin. He may know exactly what he is doing and still be unable to stop. The mind speaks, but it has lost its power. That is not how a person was made; it is the result, a punishment, of the greatness of his sins. Moshe was not speaking of him. He is called “dead” even while alive, because his sins have cut him off from the Source of life.

Does that leave him without hope? No. What the true rasha cannot do is begin serving G‑d in this way, with a mind that moves the heart. His sins have built a wall between him and his Father in Heaven, and nothing he thinks gets through. This does not mean he cannot do a mitzvah; it means he cannot begin to serve with love and fear. For that he must first do teshuvah for the past.

The wall is broken by a broken heart: real pain and bitterness over what he has done. The Zohar reads the verse this way: the offering brought to G‑d’s Name Elokim is a “broken spirit”: the spirit of impurity of the sitra achra, “the other side,” is broken, and what breaks it is a broken heart. This is not despair or self-hatred. The bitterness is aimed at the evil that has grown around the soul, and later chapters will show that such a heart is no contradiction to joy. So this person, too, has a choice. His heart is not in his power, but teshuvah is.

Teshuvah can be read tashuv hei, “return the hei,” as Iggeres HaTeshuvah, the third part of the Tanya, explains at length. G‑d’s four-letter Name has two letters hei. Higher teshuvah returns the first hei to the yud before it. Lower teshuvah, the kind spoken of here, returns the last hei to the vav before it. That lower hei is the Shechinah, the spark of G‑dliness that gives life to the soul.

The Sages taught that when Israel went into exile in Edom, the Shechinah went with them. The Alter Rebbe reads it inwardly: Edom stands for evil, and when a person acts like Edom, he drags the divine spark within him down into exile. His G‑dly soul is still there, but it is in exile: the animal soul rules his body, his “small city,” and the soul cannot express itself or move him.

When his heart breaks, the walls fall. The Shechinah rises from its fall and stands upright, and the divine spark can affect his soul and body again. Teshuvah is not becoming someone new; it is a return to who he truly is. Now he can begin to serve G‑d with love and fear, with his mind ruling his heart once more.