Chapter 3: Mind Before Heart: The Ten Powers of the G‑dly Soul

Chapter 2 described the G‑dly soul itself. Now we learn how it works. Each of its levels expresses itself through ten powers. Elsewhere the Alter Rebbe makes clear that the soul is not literally made of ten parts. The soul itself cannot be defined or divided; the ten are the openings through which it shows itself. Every thought, feeling and act a person has comes from one of them, or from some mix of them.

These ten mirror the ten sefiros, the ways in which G‑d reveals Himself and relates to the world. The soul did not merely get its powers from the sefiros; it “chained down” from them, link by link, so its powers are a far smaller version of the same thing. Above they are called sefiros; in the soul they are called kochos, powers.

Three are the “mothers”, the powers of the mind. The other seven are the emotions. They are called the “seven days of building” because on each day of Creation G‑d acted mainly through one of them: chesed on the first day, gevurah on the second, and so on. The other four are netzach, hod, yesod and malchus. They are called “doubles” because each emotion shows itself in two ways.

Notice how the emotions are listed. Not “love” and “fear” in general, but love of G‑d, awe of G‑d, glorifying G‑d. The G‑dly soul’s powers are turned toward G‑d by their nature. Love is the inner side of chesed; dread and awe belong to gevurah; glorifying G‑d belongs to tiferes. The three powers of the mind give the word ChaBaD its name.

Why do emotions need a “mother” at all? Because a feeling cannot come from nowhere. Before you can love something or shrink from it, your mind has to know what it is and judge it good or harmful. The mind gives the verdict; the heart responds. The healthy order is that the mind leads and the heart follows, and not that a person decides what is true by how he feels.

Chochmah is the first flash of an idea. Everything is already inside it, but packed tight, like a point that has no visible length or width. At that moment all you can ask is “what is it?”, and so, in a play on words from the Zohar, it is “the potential of what is”. Everyone knows the feeling: you struggle with a problem, and suddenly you have it. But if someone asks you to explain, you can’t, not yet.

Binah is the slow work that follows. It draws the details out of the flash, one thing from another, until the whole idea stands clear in its length and breadth. Length means bringing it down, through examples, so that someone simpler can grasp it. Breadth means all its details and where else it applies. Chochmah happens in a moment; binah takes time.

Chochmah is the “father” and binah the “mother”. A father gives a tiny seed in which the whole child is hidden; the mother develops it, over months, into a body with every limb. So too chochmah gives the point and binah unfolds it.

What should a person think about? G‑d’s greatness, in three ways. He “fills all worlds”: His life-force is inside every creature, in the measure each one can hold, as a soul fills a body. He “surrounds all worlds”: His light is far too great for the worlds to take in, so it touches them from beyond. And “before Him everything is as nothing”. Each of these is explained at length later in the Tanya.

The first fruit is awe of His majesty, the humble awe one feels before someone very wise or holy. It forms first in the mind, then descends into the heart as dread. This also explains a small change in the order. When the emotions were simply listed, dread came first, because the feeling in the heart is the truer emotion. When they are being born from the mind, awe comes first.

After awe comes love. Each word in the list, flames, passion, desire, longing, yearning, is a different degree of love. Its peak is kelos hanefesh: a love so strong that the soul would leave the body to be one with its source, if it were not held back. The word kelos carries both meanings, being consumed and being completed.

King David’s words describe it, but it is not only for King David. In some measure it is meant to be within our reach too.

In chapter 1 the four elements were the roots of the animal soul’s traits, and fire gave pride and anger. The G‑dly soul has the same elements in a holy form, and in it fire gives thirst. Love by itself is warm; the restless intensity, the reaching upward, comes from fire.

The heart is the seat of warmth and feeling; the brain is cool and measured. Water flows down from high places, so it is a fitting image for chochmah, the highest of these powers. This matters for kelos hanefesh. The heart’s fire could carry the soul away, but the calm mind understands that G‑d wants the soul to stay in the body and keep His Torah and mitzvos here. That understanding cools the fire.

The other five emotions grow from love and awe, so they too are born of the mind, and the chapter can speak of these two alone.

Now the third “mother”, which gets the most attention. Daas is not more knowledge. It is a different relationship to what you know. Binah understands an idea; daas connects to it, holds onto it and takes it personally, until it is simply the way you see things. Daas is still a power of the mind, but it is the bridge over which an idea crosses into the heart.

Without it, even a brilliant understanding of G‑d’s greatness produces only “empty imaginings”: a person may feel something for a moment, or imagine that he does, but it has no substance and does not last.

A Chassidic mashal: an innkeeper who could not read got an official-looking letter, and asked the melamed who taught his children to read it to him. As the melamed read, the innkeeper turned white and fainted. His father had died. Who understood the letter better? The melamed knew every word, but for him it was information. For the innkeeper, it was his father.

Two things mark this kind of thinking. It must be steady, as the Alter Rebbe says, “firmly and steadily”, not a single flash. And it must be personal: binah can study an idea from the outside; daas means putting yourself into it and asking what this means for you.

Two words: endurance (kiyum), so that the feeling does not evaporate, and life (chayus), so that it is truly felt. Without daas, even real understanding leaves only an imagined feeling. With daas the feeling lasts, because the person himself has been changed by what he knows.

Daas “includes” love and awe. One way to understand this: daas stands at the border of feeling. When the mind binds itself to an idea and finds it good and desirable, love is born; when it finds something awesome or harmful, awe is born. Pure intellect is neutral; in daas the pull toward and the drawing back already begin. Chapter 4 shows how these feelings go out into thought, speech and action.