m 006, 004 Kislev 24
Questions for today:
Always believe in yourself Be honest with yourself You can do anything you set your mind to The key to life is setting realistic expectations The most important part of a relationship is looking in the mirror and understanding your faults See yourself through the eyes of those who believe in you.
Wait, those can’t all be true?
Before we excuse all of those as being semantics, let’s respect the fact that any time a person is asked to share their life’s experience to a graduating class, they find one or more of those instructions to be the key that these enthusiastic students should use to succeed in life.
In fact, those axioms in some form or another seem to be the core of what psychologists grapple with constantly. Scrolling through the thousands of pages of Talmud, Zohar and all forms of rabbinic guidance through history, we find much of the same.
So what is the correct approach?
This is exactly what the Tanya will explain. However, as promised on day one, it will be a long journey.
Study today’s Tanya in full: https://www.chabadmed.com/dailystudy/tanya.asp?tdate=11/28/2021
Today’s Tanya builds a skeleton into which all of the instructions of the Tanya are later going to build.
The Tanya throws out a bunch of different Talmud and Mishnaic sources as well as from the Zohar.
One Talmud source which says that we should always see ourself like a wicked person. Then a Mishna that says, you are never supposed to see yourself as a wicked person. Then a Talmud that divides people into four/five different categories and that division is based on the Zohar which takes those categories and says they are not talking about quality of life, but rather distinctive characteristics…
Sounds interesting? it's fascinating!
You put all of the different elements together realizing that they are part of one Torah with one set of instructions, and when you walk away from is today’s Tanya lesson:
When we say a person is ‘righteous’, when we perceive a person as ‘wicked’, it has all different meanings. Sometimes it's based on a judgment of just what their characteristic is right now. Most importantly, it's possible to divide a person into what “they do” and “what they can be”.
So let's go through the Tanya slowly, and see how to build all of that.
Today’s video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IgqtvU70u0&list=PLFZQPK6u-zSBls9Hwx3P5vKI_BRnjBvHe&index=5