049 Tanya Shvat 8 ~ m55 Shvat 16
Questions for today:
How can my acts of unity be real and heroic, when to G-d, all of existence is truly one?
We've been learning that our creation of and by one Creator, through speech, all happening in the creator's own head, all means that we're all really one.
This leads to a deep religious quandary: If we are truly one, then how does one person, give a separate person, charity? is it all pretend?
On the flip side, if G-d creates a divided reality where good and bad, right and wrong, could exist - doesn't that mean that we are actually divided?
They say that a magician should never teach their secrets. This is because an illusion, no matter how impressive or how skillful, as soon as you know the secret, the excitement doesn't just get diminished - it completely disappears.
This is the crux of Creation: The Creator, with a specific Divine capacity, can conceal Himself to create a framework for reality. However, this ‘illusion’ of a divided reality, to the Creator - like a magician that knows the secret - is not just not impressive, but entirely non-existent.
Tanya book 1, ch21 pt 3
If we are truly one, how can good and bad, or charity exist? If we are separated for life's values, doesn't that divide us?
Like an optical illusion that, once seen, can't be appreciated, the concealment of creation, is real - but only to us, from whom its secret is hidden
Study today’s Tanya in full: https://www.chabadmed.com/dailystudy/tanya.asp?tdate=1/18/2022
See today’s video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRZnQauLzuE&list=PLFZQPK6u-zSBls9Hwx3P5vKIBRnjBvHe&index=49
Additional Thoughts:
There is an important confession/disclosure that I need to make. When teaching Chassidus, the inner part of the Torah, there are certain rules.
One of them is the importance of accuracy with examples and parables.
A Central tool of Chassidus is the use of examples and parables from this physical world, to understand the Creator.
With this in mind, the examples in Chassidus have the same criteria as any other Torah teaching with lessons learned from tiny details.
Case in point, in many of the lessons over these few days we are deriving all types of lessons from the various details regarding speech.
Since speech is the example that the Torah uses, therefore every aspect of speech could be analyzed and used to understand the creator.
In researching towards this project, I asked about using other examples that I found illustrative when teaching these lessons. I was told that it’s OK to use personal examples, as long as it’s clear that these are my examples being used as a tool to explain some thing, and not a part of the Chassidic lesson.
Today’s lesson is a prime example. Neither the Tanya nor the Torah source that it is explaining, use the example of a magician.
The example that is used is of a teacher explaining something to a student, which is entirely beyond the students understanding.
Rabbi Faitel Levin in his phenomenal work, heaven on earth, spells it out as a teacher teaching a preschooler math, using blocks.
[If we were to think of the ‘math lesson’ rather than the blocks as our subject] we can see the above lesson play out clearly.
The teacher lays out two blocks, and two blocks, and now there are four blocks out. We now have two separate views simultaneously; The teacher sees math. The fact that there are block shapes depicting the numbers doesn’t ‘hide’ the lesson from the teacher. The teacher sees a formula, 2+2=4.
The student however, didn’t absorb the math yet. It is ‘hidden’ from the child. All the child sees is blocks. There are groups of blocks, and they make up a sum, but the child doesn’t ‘see’ that now.
This is the example given by Chassidus for today’s lesson: G-d is creating a ‘lesson’ for us, a Divine world. We see the ‘blocks’. To G-d that ‘knows’ the lesson, the ‘blocks’, the divisions and distinctions of the world, don’t ‘fool’ the Creator, there is no divide.
Therefore, when we perform a mitzvah, it is real. In our perspective there really is a division. At the same time to the Creator, this division does not fragment reality.