Chapter 2: The G‑dly Soul: “Truly a Part of G‑d Above”

Now the second soul, the G‑dly soul (nefesh Elokis). “A part of G‑d above” is a phrase from Iyov, and the Alter Rebbe adds one word: mamash, “truly”. Scripture sometimes speaks in exaggeration, like “cities fortified up to the heavens”. This phrase is not like that. It is meant literally, and the chapter shows through three images what it means.

The first image is breath. The verse is about Adam, whose soul included all the souls after him, and each of us says of his own soul every morning, “You blew it into me.” The rest of creation came from G‑d’s “speech”, and speech is outward: what it produces stands apart from the speaker. Talking is easy, but blowing hard soon tires a person, because it draws on his inner strength. So the soul is not a creation standing apart from G‑d. It comes from His very inwardness.

A second image: thought, the most private part of a person, where speech is the side we turn to others. Every other creature, even the angels, is rooted in G‑d’s speech. The souls of Israel “arose in His thought”.

A third image: a child. Being cared for does not make someone your child; a child carries his parent’s own nature. In the physiology the Alter Rebbe uses, a child is drawn from his father’s brain, the seat of the father’s very self. So every Jewish soul is drawn from G‑d’s thought and wisdom.

Why is coming from His wisdom the same as coming from Him? Because G‑d is not wise through a wisdom separate from Himself. He and His wisdom are one. Here the sentence breaks off for a note, then finishes the Rambam’s words.

The Rambam teaches that G‑d “is the Knowledge, and He is the Knower,” and the Known. A person, the knower, uses his mind to know something outside himself: three separate things. In G‑d they are one; His wisdom is Himself. So a soul that comes from His wisdom comes from G‑d Himself.

Why the note? Many Jewish thinkers rejected the Rambam’s words: to call G‑d “Knowledge” defines Him, and G‑d is beyond every definition. That matters here, because if wisdom were something apart from G‑d, a soul drawn from it would not be G‑dly at all.

The note answers that the masters of Kabbalah, even the Arizal, agreed, but gave the Rambam’s words a precise place. In His essence, the Ein Sof, G‑d is infinitely above wisdom; before Him wisdom is like “making” a physical thing. Only when His light, after many contractions, is clothed in the chochmah, binah and daas (wisdom, understanding, knowledge) of Atzilus, the highest world, which remains united with its Source, are He and His wisdom one. That is where the souls are rooted.

Now the obvious question: if every soul comes from the same wisdom, why are souls so different? The Alter Rebbe does not play the differences down. They are “without end”. Compared with the souls of the Avos and Moshe Rabbeinu, the souls of our generations, the “heels of Moshiach”, the last stretch of exile, are truly like heels compared with the head. In every generation, too, some souls are the people’s “head”, and within each soul there are levels: nefesh, ruach and neshamah.

Where the differences come from, the next paragraphs explain: how strongly each soul is affected by its descent. They show not as cleverness but as sensitivity, how strongly the soul feels G‑d, the way the heel is the least sensitive part of the body. Yet all souls, highest to lowest, share one root: G‑d’s supernal wisdom.

To show how one source produces such different souls, the Alter Rebbe works out the mashal. The whole body, brain to toenails, comes from one drop from the father’s brain. The differences come from development: nine months in which the drop descends level by level until even nails can form.

Yet even the nail stays bound to its source. It lives at every moment from the child’s brain, which still carries the father’s essence, so through it even the toenail is joined to the father. The Gemara and the Kabbalah are brought to show this link between the nails and the mind.

Now the mashal is applied. The drop is G‑d’s wisdom: no soul has any other root. The nine months are the descent through the four worlds, Atzilus, Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah. These are not places but levels of closeness to G‑d, linked like a chain. The more a soul is affected by the descent, the less its source shows.

The bond is kept the same way. As the nails live from the child’s brain, simpler souls draw their life from the tzaddikim and sages, the “heads” of their generation, whose link to the Source was not dimmed. Through them everyone stays joined to it.

One way to understand this: the tzaddik does not give a person his G‑dly soul, which is his from birth. He gives it life, the ability to feel that bond. He connects a person to himself.

This explains a puzzling teaching. How can a person “cleave to Him”? The Sages answer: by cleaving to Torah scholars, which counts as cleaving to the Shechinah, the Divine Presence. Now we see why. Attached to the generation’s “head”, a person’s soul is joined to its root in G‑d’s wisdom, and His wisdom is Himself.

So the tzaddik is not a wall between a person and G‑d. A mashal: a shopkeeper stands between customer and wholesaler and keeps them apart; a matchmaker stands between two people to bring them together. The tzaddik is the second kind. The bond was always there; he reveals it.

Even one who rebels against the Torah scholars still lives from them, since every soul stays bound to its root. But he receives “from the back”, like something handed over the shoulder to someone one does not want to face: the life reaches him only from the outside (chapter 22 explains this further).

A last question. If a soul’s level is set from above, why does the Zohar say the main thing is for a man to sanctify himself at the time of union? That seems to make the parents decisive.

The answer: the Zohar means the soul’s garment (levush), which comes from the parents. The soul does all its mitzvos through it and receives blessing from Heaven through it, so parents who sanctify themselves give their child a holy garment, which even a great soul needs. But the soul itself, its rank, comes only from above. A soul of boundless greatness may be born to a lowly father.

One way to understand this: a garment both covers and reveals. When prayer comes easily, that may reflect a refined garment rather than a higher soul; when it is a struggle, a coarse garment, not a low soul. And through avodah a garment can be refined.