m010 008 Kislev 26/Kislev 28
In Today’s Message:
- Link to Video
- Questions for today
- Link to full Tanya
- Today’s Tanya Thought
- Additional thoughts
o “Chochmo” and “Bina”, a well and a river
o Our parallel to G-dliness is organic: we are expressions of the Divine.
Today’s video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k7aalQJeOw&list=PLFZQPK6u-zSBls9Hwx3P5vKI_BRnjBvHe&index=8
Questions for today:
How often do I “clear my thoughts”, and open my mind to a completely new idea?
Regarding which topics will my thoughts stimulate and ‘give birth to’ emotions? Are those the topics that I am most attached to? Am I proud of which things I am, or am not, attached to?
Study today’s Tanya in full:
https://www.chabadmed.com/dailystudy/tanya.asp?tdate=12/2/2021
Today’s Tanya Thought:
Yesterday we learned that in order to interact with the world, the soul has ten components; three intellectual and six-plus-one emotional.
How does this work?
The first component is the ability for the soul, through humility, to have a seminal inclination of something it had no knowledge of before.
After this, it has the intellectual capacity to, like a baby in the womb, extrapolate every detail from that insight.
This then gives birth.
When a person uses that intellectual capacity to think - For example, to think of the vastness of the universe and how the creator makes every single detail of the world, it creates a humble awe of the Creator: we’ll call that ‘fear’. Then, a burning desire to connect to the Creator: We’ll call that ‘love’
But the birth doesn't happen automatically. If the person was thinking all of that in a detached way, it is not going to have an emotional result. However, if a person uses the third intellectual capacity “knowledge” - in the biblical sense, the ability to think in a ‘connected’, compelling, way - it will give birth to the love and to the fear and to the entire emotional spectrum that follows.
Additional thoughts:
“Chochmo” and “Bina”, a well and a river.
Today’s Tanya is foundational in that it touches on a distinction that runs through all of creation. This distinction finds its self expressed in any description of creativity, as well as any clarification of feminine/masculine, seminal/gestational entities.
The explanation of the distinction between “chochmo” and “Bina”, “wisdom” and “knowledge”, would, and does, fill bookshelves.
One parable that is used in Chassidus is the distinction between a well, and a river.
The well is where the water comes from, but it has no length or width, it just is.
The river doesn’t have anything of its own, but it gives the water it’s full reach and impact.
Our parallel to G-dliness is organic: we are expressions of the Divine.
In today’s Tanya we are using examples of intellect to understand the soul. To take it farther we are studying the workings of the soul, to understand the creator.
Even farther, we often use the same Divine principles here, to understand how the world, and people, work.
This principle is based on a verse (job 19:26) ומבשרי אחזה אלו-ה and from my flesh I see G-dliness.
But it’s important when we study this to realize that the parallel between what we see here and what we learn above, is not simply imitation.
In fact, what we are seeing is a revelation of what is above us. The reason why this works, is because the world that we live in and we understand is not only created from, but it is an expression of, the deeper spiritual realm.