Chapter 29: Timtum HaLev: When the Heart Turns to Stone

But there is one more thing for which the souls of beinonim need advice. At times, and even often, they have timtum halev, a dullness of the heart: it becomes like stone, and he cannot open his heart in any way to the “service of the heart”, which is prayer [Taanis 2a].

Also, at times he cannot fight the yetzer and sanctify himself in what is permitted to him, because of a heaviness in his heart.

The remedy here is the one the holy Zohar gives. The head of the heavenly academy said: “When a log will not catch the flame, you break it into pieces … when a body will not let the soul’s light catch hold, you crush it …” [Zohar III:168a].

“The soul’s light” here means the radiance of the soul and of the mind, which is too weak in him to master the body’s coarseness.

He does grasp G‑d’s greatness and reflect on it, yet that understanding does not take a firm enough hold in his mind to overpower the heart, so dense and gross is the heart. What causes this is the grossness of the kelipah: it lifts itself up over the holy light of the G‑dly soul, covering it and dimming its glow.

So the body has to be crushed and brought low, down to the dust. In practice this means fixing times to humble himself, becoming “lowly and contemptible in his own sight,” in the words of the verse, with “a heart that is shattered and a spirit that is broken.” That “spirit” is the sitra achra, and in the beinoni it is his very self. The vital soul animating his body still reigns in his heart with all the strength it had from birth, so it is he himself.

About the G‑dly soul within him we say, “The soul You have given me is pure.” The words “You have given me” show that the pure soul is not the person himself. Tzaddikim are the opposite case: for them the pure, G‑dly soul is who they are, and their body is merely what is called “human flesh.”

So Hillel the Elder, on his way to a meal, would tell his students that he was off to do a favour for “the poor, humble guest,” by which he meant his own body. He looked on the body as a stranger, which is why feeding it counted as doing it a kindness. His real self was the G‑dly soul alone, for that alone was the life of his body. In tzaddikim, whatever evil the vital soul held (the soul that wears the body’s blood and flesh) has already been changed to good and merged into the holiness of the G‑dly soul itself.

In the beinoni, though, the vital soul that comes from the sitra achra and wears his blood and flesh is still unchanged in its substance and essence; it has not become good. That is why it is his very self.

That being so, he stands about as far from G‑d as a person can. His animal soul is still capable of craving what is forbidden, things contrary to G‑d’s will. He has no intention of acting on those cravings, G‑d forbid, but he does not genuinely loathe them the way tzaddikim do, as chapter 12 explained. On that count he is lower, more repellent and more detestable than impure beasts, bugs and crawling creatures, as was said in chapter 24, and as the verse puts it, “I am a worm, no man at all.”

(Even when his G‑dly soul gathers strength in him to awaken love of G‑d during prayer, this is not complete truth, since it passes and is gone after prayer, as explained above at the end of chapter 13.)

How much more so when he recalls how he soiled his soul through the sin of his youth, and the damage he did in the realms above. There, time does not exist, so it is as though that damage and defilement were done this very day, G‑d forbid.

And even though he has already done proper teshuvah, the essence of teshuvah is in the heart, and the heart has many levels and stages. Everything depends on what kind of person he is, and on the time and the place, as is known to those who know.

So right now, when he notices that “the soul’s light will not catch hold in him,” one of two things must be true. Either his teshuvah has not been accepted today and his sins still stand between [him and G‑d], or he is being pushed on toward a higher teshuvah that comes from a deeper place in the heart. This is why David said, “My sin is before me constantly.”

Even someone who never committed the grave sins of youth ought to take the Zohar’s advice and become one of the “keepers of the reckoning” [Zohar III:178a]. He should review, before his own soul, every thought, word and act from the day he was born until now. Did each one come from holiness, or from impurity, Heaven protect us? Impurity here covers any thought, word or act not directed to G‑d, His will and His service; that is exactly what sitra achra means, as chapter 6 explained.

We know that at any moment a person is thinking holy thoughts, he is in that moment a “chariot” for the heichalos (chambers) of holiness that those thoughts come from. The converse also holds: at that moment he becomes a chariot of impurity for the impure heichalos, the source of every bad thought. The same applies to what he says and what he does.

Let him also reflect that most of his dreams are “futility and a grasping at wind,” since his soul does not climb on high, as the verse asks, “Who shall go up G‑d’s mountain? The one whose hands are clean …” Rather, “forces of the evil side come and cling to him, and inform him in his dream about the matters of this world … and at times they make sport of him, show him lies, and trouble him in his dream …” So says the Zohar on Vayikra (25a–b); look there for the full treatment.

Now the more he keeps turning these matters over in his mind, and reads about them in books, until his heart breaks inside him and he becomes “lowly and contemptible in his own sight,” as the verse says, wholly contemptible, so that he truly finds his own life repugnant, the more he humiliates and shames the sitra achra. He casts it down to the dust and topples it from its grandeur, its grossness and its arrogance, the very things by which it lifts itself over the holy light of the G‑dly soul to dim it.

He should also roar at it, in a fierce and angry voice, to bring it low, just as our Sages taught [Berachos 5a]: “A person should forever rouse his good impulse to battle his evil impulse, for the verse says, ‘Tremble with anger, and sin not.’” In other words, he is to storm at his animal soul, his evil impulse, with a fierce and angry voice inside his mind, telling it: “You are wicked and vile, repulsive, loathsome and foul,” and so on, using every name our Sages gave it, and every one of them deserved. “How much longer will you screen from me the light of Ein Sof, blessed be He? That light fills every world. It was, it is and it will be precisely the same, right here where I am standing too, exactly as it was when Ein Sof’s light existed alone before anything was created, without the least change, as the verse says, ‘I am G‑d; I have not changed,’ for He transcends time. And you, repulsive one, deny a truth the eyes can see: that everything before Him is genuinely as nothing, as plainly as physical sight shows it.”

By doing this he comes to the aid of his G‑dly soul, so that its eyes open to the truth that the light of Ein Sof is one, seen as clearly as with bodily eyes and not merely heard and understood. As explained elsewhere, this is the foundation of all divine service.

For the truth is that the sitra achra has no real substance whatever. This is why it is likened to darkness: darkness has no substance either, and it is chased away by light without any effort. So it is with the sitra achra. It does hold a great deal of life force, enough to animate all the impure creatures, the souls of the gentile nations, and the animal soul of a Jew too, as said before. Yet none of that life force belongs to it, G‑d forbid; it all derives from holiness, as said before. So it dissolves entirely in the presence of holiness, as darkness does in the presence of physical light. Only where the holiness of a person’s G‑dly soul is concerned did the Holy One, blessed be He, allow and empower it to rise up in opposition, so that the person would be moved to master it and humble it through his own lowliness and meekness of spirit, becoming “lowly and contemptible in his own sight.”

And “an arousal from below brings an arousal from above,” fulfilling the verse, “From there I shall cast you down, declares G‑d.” Its dominion and its might are stripped away, and the power and licence it had been granted to rise against the holy light of the G‑dly soul are withdrawn. Then it dissolves and vanishes by itself, as darkness does before physical light.

The Torah says this outright in the story of the spies. First they declared, “He is too strong for us” (“read not ‘for us’ but ‘for Him’”), since they lacked faith in G‑d’s might. Later they changed course and announced, “We will go up …” What brought back their faith in G‑d’s might? In between, Moshe Rabbeinu performed no sign or miracle to prove it. All he did was tell them that G‑d was angry and had sworn they would not enter the Land. Why should that have changed anything for them, if they had no faith, G‑d forbid, that G‑d could vanquish the thirty-one kings, which was the very reason they had refused to enter?

The answer has to be that Jews in themselves are “believers, the children of believers.” What happened was that the sitra achra dressed in their bodies lifted itself over the holy light of their G‑dly soul, out of grossness and arrogance, with sheer impudence and no logic or reason behind it. So the moment G‑d grew angry with them and thundered in a fierce and angry voice, “How long must I put up with this wicked assembly …,” “your carcasses shall drop in this desert …,” “I, G‑d, have spoken; this is surely what I will do to this whole wicked assembly …,” and they heard those severe words, their hearts were humbled and shattered inside them, as the verse records, “The people grieved bitterly.” At that, the sitra achra tumbled from its dominion, its arrogance and its grossness by itself, and the Jews in themselves are believers.

From this every person who has doubts about faith come into his mind can learn that they are only the words of the spirit of the sitra achra, which raises itself above his soul. But the Jewish people themselves are “believers …”

What is more, the sitra achra does not itself doubt the faith at all. It was simply granted leave to muddle a person with lies and trickery so that he can earn a larger reward. It is like the parable in the holy Zohar of the harlot who, with the king’s permission, uses lies and trickery to try to lead the prince astray.