m008 006 Kislev 24/26
Questions for today:
In truth, the questions answered by today’s Tanya are all and any question life throws at us.
Imagine any life question, any self-doubt, and picture it written on a resume.
We do this to ourselves all the time. We put every fault we have on an imaginary resume, and in our minds eye the world is scrutinizing it, constantly.
We certainly imagine that the Creator is looking at our life/resume critically.
Today’s Tanya (essentially a verse from iyov, Job 31:2, on steroids) adds a plot twist: we are one with G-d. This doesn’t change the resume at all – but it changes everything.
When we read our own resume, we certainly see our faults – but we don’t, and can’t, fire ourselves.
Similarly, G-d certainly sees all of our good and bad. However, nothing that we can ever do can distance us from our Essence, the Creator.
https://www.chabadmed.com/dailystudy/tanya.asp?tdate=12/22/2019
Today's Tanya gives a brilliant insight into something a lot of us heard when we were little kids.
Yesterday we learned that when a person wants to be a better a better person, but at the same time we find ourselves making all these selfish choices, it's not because we're confused, we have two souls.
One of our souls is the life force of a healthy body, so it has temptations, it gets angry, laughs at other things, etc.
The other soul we learn about today.
When we were kids we learn how G-d created the world by speaking, and then G-d breathed into Adam a breath of life.
This wasn't just semantics. When we speak we also breathe, but we're distributing a tiny drop of our breath so we can speak and speak and speak and not get tired because we’re not really giving of ourselves.
When we exhale strongly we get tired, because we're giving of our very self.
The soul that G-d breathed into humans, the soul that we live with, that we feel every day - it's not distributed or a gift from G-d, it's a part of G-d's very self.
Today's video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhzMwpo6ETk&list=PLFZQPK6u-zSBls9Hwx3P5vKI_BRnjBvHe&index=6
Additional thoughts:
In chapter one we learned about the physical, animal, soul. Not only do we learn about the G-dly soul second, we describe it as the “second soul”.
Obviously, the G-dly soul is within everyone, at birth. However, unlike the animal soul that is revealed in full from the moment they are born, the G-dly soul is revealed in stages.
An infant cries to be fed with the same intensity a child cries for toys, a teen yearns for acceptance, an adult a promotions, etc. etc.
The G-dly Soul is revealed and felt at a completely different level, at birth, when it’s name is given, at Bar/Bas Mitzvah, etc. therefore it’s called the ‘second soul’.
We mentioned the difference between creation and life, in that creation was ‘spoken’, and life was ‘breathed’.
This is not only a difference in delivery. The G-dly words involved in creation were commands, and physical existence is a fulfillment of those Divine commands.
Our life is not a ‘fulfillment’ of G-d’s breath. G-d’s breath itself is our life.
We are all connected:
By emphasizing that all souls stem from the Creator’s “chochmo”, internal intellectual self, we see another lesson.
The Tanya describes the process of the formation, and distinctive definition, of all souls (in a way eerily similar to how DNA is involved in our fomation). It begins seminally, universal to everyone, and the distinctive traits are formed not because of a difference in source, but as a result of the formation process.
With this we learn that although we all are different, but like in the human body, the toe nails are sourced and maintained by the exact DNA as the brain.
Similarly, we all are sourced, and enlivened, by the same divine Essence.
[this following lesson is intended anecdotally only. I did not study the science involved.
However, to a lay person, many of what is described seems to line up with today’s Tanya. While I would not encourage anyone to draw conclusions from it, on the surface, it seems fascinating]
Today's Tanya speaks of one of the farthest statements from science; that the ‘clothing’ of the soul (we will later learn how these are tools the soul uses to interact with the world) are dependent on "the sanctity of the parents in the act of conception".
Try to explain to a scientist that a sensitive frame of mind can impact a physical, biological transfer of DNA…
…until we find it, scientifically. In this article it describes how with ivf sometimes harvesting the material in a non participatory way, they can actually measure differences in what the father imparts to the child with, or without, intimacy.
...and a lot of it fits with what we would normally describe as the ‘clothing’ of the Soul.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dads-pass-more-genetics-their-sperm-180969760/