LM 25.2 — Achavi Lan Mana, Part 2 of 5 · תורה כ״ה

בעזרת השם יתברך, we are starting the second שיעור in Torah כ״ה. Very exciting, it seems that there's an unbelievable amount of enthusiasm and life around תורת רבינו, with different עיון שיעורים, בקיאות שיעורים, עמוד יומי, and our own our own group trying to strike I guess a balance of of bringing in different concepts and what we need to know to to flesh out and get through the Torah, I guess striking a little bit of a middle ground. But as we begin, I'm going to mention one idea I saw in the Shiftei Chen, the volume on Pesach or in the פרשיות on on Pesach, it starts on page מ״ב.

I want to just mention mention it quickly, and then we will summarize the summarize where we're at from from last week a little bit, and then start to go vayter. The the Shiftei Chen brings, says: מקרא מלא דיבר הכתוב, ומבשרי אחזה אלוקה, that the if we look in the construction of a person, we will able to understand the model of creation, the model of of how HaKadosh Baruch Hu relates to the world. שבקומת האדם נרמזים מעשר ספירות הקדושות, that in the structure of a person we see a hint, we see a parallel to the עשר ספירות, which is how I guess we could just briefly say that this is the point of connection how we relate to godliness in the world, our relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu through the ספירות, through the מדות.

בראש אדם נרמזו המוחין, דהיינו חב״ד. In the head of a person, it relates to the מוחין, the three ספירות which would be חכמה, בינה, and דעת. And we focused a lot on חכמה, בינה, and דעת last week. חכמה being the spark of an idea, the inception, the the נקודה of wisdom, where it comes from, not being self-generated, it could come from information being given through מסורה, it can come from the נבואה, wherever. בינה is what you do with this חכמה, right? אימא בינה, the the initial זרע comes from the from אבא, what does אימא do?

אימא takes that זרע and fleshes it out, it expands it into a person. A person can compare, contrast, מדמה מילתא למילתא, מבין דבר מתוך דבר. The כח of a person is to now take this and to flesh it out, to expand on it. דעת is that that כח that integrates it. It makes that what a person knows, it's going to translate it into the מדות, because בגוף האדם נרמז המדות, the the next seven ספירות, which we're familiar with from Sefirat HaOmer: חג״ת, נהי״ם, חסד, גבורה, תפארת, נצח, הוד, יסוד, ומלכות. וביניהם במקום העורף והגרון נמצא מוח הדעת.

Daas is this this koach in the middle. The example that we've given last week, and we can talk about it in many different ways, is the way that a person feels about something is necessarily tied to the way that they to to the knowledge and their relationship intellectually with it. If a person sees, Rachmana litzlan, a kid fall, they say: "Oy vey!" They realize that it's their kid, they relate to it emotionally in an entirely different way. If they're at an event, the example we gave last time, I it was using weddings and funerals as two different life events.

A person who is sad at a wedding and happy at a funeral, we would say that they're emotionally unstable. The way that what a person understands about a particular event, if they are if they are stable and they are well-founded, well-grounded, rooted in their daas, then that should flow through to the emotions. And therefore, that koach that connects the seichel to the middos, that is called daas, and in the structure of a person that would be by the neck, take what's in the seichel, what's in the head, what translates it into the into by the heart, by the main part of a person.

The main part could be the daas, but the the body of a person. שתפקידו להעביר הארת המוחין על המדות, this tafkid of the daas is to flow through, to allow, and it will it will ultimately become one motion. It doesn't it doesn't become split up. It's not that a person needs information and say, "How should I feel about this?" With a well-adjusted, lined-up person, this should be this should be muchrach, it should be automatic. Part of our avodah is to understand the correct way of thinking about things with אורייתא וקודשא בריך הוא חד, with Torah as the objective framework of the world, the true expression of reality, creating a working to create a דירה בתחתונים so that the the Shechinah should not be in galut, that we relate the entire bri'ah through the true perspective and we line it up with HaKadosh Baruch Hu, so then we will be calibrated to רצון השם.

But but even in our personal structure, the daas, represented by the neck, is what's going to flow through from the head to the מדות, כדי שהגוף ומדותיו יתנהגו על פי הוראת המוח, so that the guf and the heart should be should be well-calibrated, what what a person understands, they hear news that could affect their heart rate, should be in line with their daas. ושם במקום הדעת הוא שורש מחצבת נשמות ישראל, and this place of the daas is where the neshamos of Yisrael come from, okay, he brings in האר״י ז״ל, וגם נשמת משה רבינו היתה מבחינת הדעת, אך מחלק הטוב שלא נפגם, ולכן הוצרך להיות הגאולה רק על ידו.

I'm not going to go through the whole piece, but I just want to read another few words. והכח הזכרון של אדם, what is the כח זכרון? What is the power of memory? Memory is not necessarily opposite forgetting. There are things that we remember all the time that we haven't thought about in years, or you go to let yourself into a door and you remember the combination. You type it in. You haven't thought about it in years. Was it forgotten in between? If it was forgotten in between, then there would be no way to remember it now.

Where did that memory come from? It's something that was dormant that was now triggered. And this happens all the time. Things that we forgot, we can remember. It's a power of recall. What zikaron really is, is it's a power of recall so that we can act going forward based on certain information, and we could put it at the forefront. We ask HaKadosh Baruch Hu, perhaps, this is peshat, we say that HaKadosh Baruch Hu should remember the avos. HaKadosh Baruch Hu is not capable of forgetting, so if remembering is the opposite of forgetting, then that wouldn't apply to HaKadosh Baruch Hu either.

We ask that HaKadosh Baruch Hu should take into consideration the avos in how He relates to us. This כח זכרון is the daas. We take things that we know intellectually and then we translate them into being fully integrated, into being relevant. What's the koach of אחורי הדעת? That would be the nape of the neck, the back. Not on the צד of the face, on the צד of the פנים, on the צד of the relationship, but rather it would be in the back of the neck. שם נמצא כח השכחה שבאדם, the idea that we can take something and make it not relevant.

Something that whether we know it or not, it's something that is that will not impact the middot. ובמקום הזה עומדת קליפה טמאה הנקרא פרעה, which is אותיות העורף, that a person can know היה הוה ויהיה, מלך מלכי המלכים הקדוש ברוך הוא, יו״ד ק״ה וא״ו ק״ה, and I don't I don't have da'at, I don't know know הקדוש ברוך הוא. That doesn't translate into anything meaningful. A person can know all of this and still stand up and say לי היאור ואני עשיתיו. ותחת במקום מצר הגרון עומדת קליפה טמאה נקרא מצרים, okay, and then it and then it goes on.

So, what we see over here is this dynamic in a person, what actually controls the middot? In the immediate sense, what controls the middot is the da'at. It's information. It's something that's שכלי. It's something that we relate to in a in a informational brain-type way. But if the if a person is well-adjusted and there's a healthy da'at, that da'at is actually the bridge and it's an extension between something that's purely intellectual and that it doesn't necessarily translate into the middot, so that we can take the things that the the idea of a sechel which is removed from middot, otherwise we might have certain biases and so on, we can take what we recognize as truth and then we can translate that into ideas that will impact us emotionally.

The example that we gave before is, let's say, if this helps, if you have food, understanding the nutritional information would be a purely intellectual thing. The the the body itself is what eats the food, it gets nutrition. What does a person have a taste for? I I think that this at least helped me just it's I don't know if it's a perfect mashal, what creates what I have an appetite for? When a person has an appetite for something, then they actually are able to eat more, it expands. What translates into the actual guf whether or not it has an appetite for something?

There's some sort of an abstract like an animal drive. That drive will actually translate into the guf. So, another example we've used before is, let's say, a person sees a candy, and a person likes candy, but they know, they have information that that candy fell into a garbage dump. So, if a kid doesn't know, their their sechel is not aligned, they they don't care, maybe they'll think it even tastes better, they have no idea, they just want the candy. But a healthy individual, they have this piece of information. Now, the guf will just eat the candy and it could taste good, but because if the da'at if the if what they understand translates into the da'at, so that that information was able to impact their integrated wisdom, so that now that they they eat this piece of candy, but they have this negative information about it, not only might it not taste good, it might even cause them to physically gag, because this person's faculties are acting as a unified whole.

And this really summarizes what we discussed last week. We talked about this this כח המדמה, this I mean out of translation, this imagination. What's imagination? You take ideas and then you relate them to yourself, you create a reality. This reality that we create, is it שרירות לב? Is it something that's really coming from the middot, it's working backwards, where instead of transmitting from our intellect, from our sechel, from something that should be purely objective and be able to understand understand how we relate to ourselves, to those around us, to the world at large, primarily to הקדוש ברוך הוא, and everything as an extension of that, is the כח המדמה actually being driven by our own body, our emotions, our subjective desires, in which case it's sort of bottom up, Or is it being, is it a function, is it a שליח of the sechel, and is it top-down?

Parenthetically, because as a person moves through life, people are going to have different desires at different times in different situations and at different stages through life, and I'm just I'm just sort of reflecting on it for a second myself, because we make life decisions at any one point in time based on the factors at our disposal, if what's driving our da'at is going to be our middot bottom-up, then we're going to make a lot of wrong decisions, we're going to put ourselves in places where when we have to live with the impacts of those decisions, well, that's not really what's best for us.

But in the alternative, if we are operating based on our sechel and we're plugged in, and תלמוד תורה כנגד כולם, and we're plugged into Hamakom and הקדוש ברוך הוא, and and the Torah as the blueprint of creation, and and the world as being a דירה בתחתונים, well then everything is going to be unified following a following a pattern to bring out the greater emet, not only for ourselves, but also for others, because all of Klal Yisrael, we're all we're all one big family, we're all we're all different pieces of one larger structure, and if we are relating to ourselves as individuals, well then there's 600,000, let's say, individuals.

But if we are 600,000 extensions from one source, we all look up to אבינו שבשמים, so then Klal Yisrael is really be'etzem one unified whole. And this idea of how da'at really creates unity or and and really is an expression of unity comes up in in a lot of different ways. Interestingly, he had a beautiful line over here, I just want to look back to what we said last week, he says as a person goes through the שכל בכוח, there's the שכל in the potential, and then there's the שכל בפועל, the actualized שכל, and then it moves into the שכל נקנה, where we take this and it becomes fully full full integration, says שכל נקנה: נקרא מה שאדם יודע הרבה דברים בידיעה אחת, a person knows a lot of different things, כי קודם צריך לידע הרבה הקדמות, קודם שידע הדבר.

In order to be able to, let's say, draw a circle or a line for that matter or any picture, if you if you would go microscopically, what it really is is a lot of different dots. Each dot on its own is just stands on its own. It's a it's an independent piece of information. When you have this pattern and you connect all of those dots together, now there's a picture, and the the the dots lose their independent expression. We see this in everything, by the way. If some of the sefarim talk about the amount of independent movements there are to speech, if you think about the the different kochos of where the tongue something comes out, you have to loosen and constrict the vocal cords, and the way that the tongue is on the roof of the mouth or the teeth, or a voice comes out of the throat, if you would have to describe to somebody how to speak a word, it would almost be impossible to describe and even harder to follow, you would have no idea what the person is talking about.

And yet, the a person is able to express themself in a way that once you understand, it's like speaking, it's like riding a bike, you you would no longer Even if you need to have independent points in order to be able to theoretically ladder up to something, once you have that picture, it's שכל הנקנה, it's integrated wisdom, you just know what you're talking about, you would no longer even be able to unsee that to identify the independent pieces of information which are not which are not substantial in their own context. And therefore, this is the da'at, this is the integration of the שכל, the the the way to look at the world that we to In order to be well-adjusted, that we want to achieve.

And the שרירות הלב, when the כוח המדמה starts being bottom-up, it starts going in its own direction, then that is be'etzem the source of all aveirot, it's the source of all פירוד, it's the source of שנאת חנם, and so on. And he says that because the source of this chochmah was really it was the בית המקדש, זבחי אלקים רוח נשברה, we had the opportunity when we had korbanot to be able to sacrifice this כוח המדמה, which beforehand is I actually related to almost as like the animal drive, the animal intellect, and that's why at the end of paragraph א, it was talking about the things we lost access to, unfortunately, right, when the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed, lost access to the שמיר worm which would be able to cut through the לב אבן, was be able to cut through the the stone so that we can get back in touch with our intellect, וכשיבנה בית המקדש אז יתקיים ומים מן המקדש יצאו.

Okay, so now we will start paragraph ב. And just introducing paragraph ב, we now explain that a person has to break his כוח המדמה to make his chochmah, the information available, to be able to actualize that through his כוח of binah, and then and then and then internalize it through his כוח הדעת, but this is not a one-time process. We're going to explain that this is a moving process. We explained at length in earlier תורות the a system of מקיפין and מקיפין דמקיפין, a system of avodah in terms of concentric circles, where I have a relationship with those areas directly and immediately beyond me, and as I move in and I grow and I incorporate those levels, I now gain a relationship with those levels beyond that, and consistently I'm able to grow to to to grow and expand further.

As one grows either within a particular system, within a particular עולם, from one דרגא to another, or ultimately graduates and is able to elevate from one system to another We have this even in our world. A person is in elementary school, and then they they reach the top, and then they go into middle school, and they have to start from the beginning again. We'll speak about that soon. We we we view one level within any particular level, any particular system, and this applies whether you're looking at the system as a whole, in a general sense, or any particular aspect of it.

There is the פנימיות and then there's the חיצוניות. There is the core, and then there's the expression. So, for instance, the פנימיות of let's say speech would be מחשבה, and then the way that that that מחשבה, that thought, comes out is going to be embodied by speech. I'm going to have a will, and then that will is going to generate a particular action. If you have a a teacher and a student, a רבי and a תלמיד, the the רבי has whatever the message is that he wants to get across, he has to dress it up.

He has to have a הלבשה, maybe certain משלים in order to be able to convey the point. The strength We said before, the strength of a משל is maintaining the integrity of the point, but dressing it up in a way that is receivable by the student. So the חיצוניות of the רבי, as it were, what the רבי knows and the depth that the רבי has as a particular idea might be much deeper and much more expansive than whatever he's giving over, but he creates a חיצוניות. That חיצוניות, that outer dressing that he's giving over to the תלמיד, will now become the פנימיות of the תלמיד of what the what what the student is able to build off, and it works the other way around.

So this process works top-down as well as bottom-up, so that this system where multiple levels are related, each one building off of the the חיצוניות of the the חיצוניות of the of the עליון becomes the פנימיות of the תחתון, that that that works as far as the development in the creative process and the giving-over process, it also it also reflects itself in terms of the growth process. Now, at any particular point in time, all of these are connected. But if you would think about if you would look upwards, in other words, at the levels that are disconnected, it could be that the חיצוניות, the outer the outer הלבשה, the גוף of a higher level might actually be higher than the פנימי of a lower level.

What would be an example of this? Let's say a person who's holding at a particular level, he gives a lot of money to ישיבות. What would be the the גוף of that? What might even be the קליפה of that? Could be he's giving it for כבוד. He's giving it He wants his name on the side of the building. There might be people where in their wildest dreams, they're not even their רוחניות is not even holding by seeking honor for giving money to ישיבות. The כבוד that they're looking for is something for, you know, doing adventures.

They they may or may not give some level of צדקה, but they don't they wouldn't take honor in that. The idea that somebody takes honor in צדקה is something הלוואי that I should that that I should relate even to the to the קליפה of what the my הלוואי that my רוחניות should be where this person's גוף is. So a person slides up in levels successively and and respectively until at each point in time, they're able to raise their פנימיות, and alongside, they're able to build up their חיצוניות as well. But we're going to see this as we go through.

So the second paragraph starts: ודע שבכל עולם ועולם ובכל מדרגה ומדרגה, within every עולם, and in a klaliyisdik way, we talk about the עולמות. We talked about it in the last Torah. We've seen the we've seen אביע, right? א, ב, י, ע as being the עולמות. Really, there's עולמות above also, but אצילות, בריאה, יצירה, and עשיה. So within each עולם representing almost a different layer of expression of the iterative process of of creation and relationships with Hashem, but within each one of those those עולמות, there's also מדרגות as you climb up in עולמות, and then the bottom the bottom of the top level can now become the top of the of the next level.

So בכל עולם ועולם ובכל מדרגה ומדרגה יש שם דמיונות אלו. והם הם הקליפות הקודמין לפרי. So again, we're we're going to go into this process where somebody is going to move through and grow, and consistently have to deal with this process of encountering klipah as they're going to enter into the next level. I'm going to use a mashal that I sort of referenced a moment ago. If you think about a person, for argument's sake, starting high school, there's going to be social challenges breaking in. He's going to be at the beginning of a system. There's going to be academic challenges.

Maybe the classes now are at a higher level. Now, the the truth is is that this is not the first time he's encountered some of these challenges. He will have had them at a different altitude. Maybe when he was starting middle middle school, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, he would have entered into a system. When he was starting first grade, he might have had that. And he'll have it again when he goes into college or beit midrash, into kollel, into a profession. At each one of those points in time. So it's interesting that at each one of the systems and they're going to parallel each other.

In other words, each one of these systems is reflective of the same process. If we want to talk about the ספירות in terms of the relationships, חסד, גבורה, תפארת, נצח, הוד, יסוד, that will exist within each one of these עולמות as a person graduates and elevates and terms of avodah, he's able to we spoke at length about this in the last Torah, he's he's chasing the the horizon, he's chasing a certain height, and as he gets there, he realizes that the process begins over again. If you think about the layers of an onion, from this person's perspective, he's trying to get to the core of the onion.

This is as far as he could possibly envision in terms of his goal, and then finally he gets to the core of that onion, and he realizes that there's an entire new onion, that that what he viewed as the פנימיות of that particular system was actually the חיצוניות of an entire new system, and now he starts again, and the challenges might even be the similar to the קליפות that he had originally experienced, and now and and now he's addressing them again for the first time within that new system, which isn't necessarily to say that there aren't new challenges that he hadn't experienced before.

Could be that at a lower altitude, for his personality, for his makeup, it didn't present a challenge to them, and now, at that at that higher level, it's something that he hasn't had to deal with yet. We'll speak soon. So again, ודע שבכל עולם ועולם ובכל מדריגה ומדריגה, within every system, within every עולם, and at every stage within that system, יש שם דמיונות אלו, there are these there's this כח המדמה that we've been discussing that is going to try to seduce him into do עבירות, to instead of being reflective of top-down of the חכמת השם, of רצון השם, so that he's all lined up and there's total unity, at every step, it's going to try to present new challenges to him.

והם הם הקליפות הקודמין לפרי, at every stage there's going to be a פרי חדש, he's trying to get to the core of that onion, and there's going to be the קליפות for that level that that tried to prevent him from from getting to the פרי, and sometimes he can get incredibly blindsided. וסובבים את הקדושה, and they are surrounding the kedushah, בבחינת סביב רשעים יתהלכון. So kedushah, if we think about it as a לשון of מובדל, it's לשון of separated, it's לשון if it's close to Hakadosh Baruch Hu, of perfection in a certain sense. So for each level, we're rising, potentially going to the פרי חדש, going to the next level of kedushah, shooting for the fruit, for the core, so to speak, the the inner part of the next onion, and yet, as I now relate to a new level of kedushah, which previously was beyond me, was out of my purview, it's nothing that I even would have had a relationship with, or wouldn't have even been on my radar as an actual goal, practically speaking, but now that I have a relationship with it, it's going to come with its own challenges.

Now, again, those challenges that we're calling רשעים, those challenges that we're calling the klipah of any particular level, at the at the levels below might not have necessarily been considered rashut, every single level has its own bechirah, has its own nisyonot, has its own growth process, right? When a rav gets up and he's giving a shiur, and he has a test of kavod, for for the person that's working on coming to shul, the person that's working on becoming frum, you know, halavai that he should get up and he should be a rav, and his problem should be not taking kavod when he's helping other people grow, is he doing that for shamayim, or he's the one who's who's who's helping to leverage those talmidim to grow.

So there's but but at each particular stage, it's going to have that klipah in order to get to the kedushah, so that at any level that the individual is at, it's going to be 50-50, there's going to be those nisyonot, but as a person breaks through those ceilings, they're going to they're going to graduate. וכשאדם נעתק ממדריגה למדריגה, when a person removes himself, he he he elevates himself from one step to the next, אז צריך לו לילך דרך אלו הדמיונות. The way to break through to kedushah, no pain, no gain, right? The way to be able to break into the next stage of kedushah is to have to go through the outer trappings, the worldly, so to speak, expression of that kedushah, to access what's in the middle of that כדי להגיע אל הקדושה.

Now, just just two points on this: number one, this also explains why a person can't skip steps in growth. You see somebody acting in a certain way, and then you want to copy that. Hakadosh Baruch Hu gave us a gift of growth, a gift of bringing tikkun to ourselves, to the world around us, the world at large, to Klal Yisrael, which means wherever it is that we're starting off, we have a job to climb that ladder, to climb that ramp, and every single step we're actually accomplishing something. So if you can take the cheap way out, even assuming that it wouldn't be fake, even assuming that it would be lasting, and you can get a helicopter ride to the top of that mountain, well, you might have ended up with a better point of view, and maybe you even needed a boost to get there, maybe there are reasons why a person would would theoretically want to try to just, you know, take a boost and קונה עולמו בשעה אחת, and so on, but the practical reality is that there there are certain things that a person will not have gained by the exercises of growth.

And which brings me really to my second point is we see why great people can sometimes fall. For various reasons, they're not prepared for the challenges at the next level. One reason would be if if, let's say, they had like an immediate boost and they ended up on a high level without actually building up through that process, so there's something lacking in the integrity of where they're holding. But another reason would be, you know, my example previously, let's say a person started off, you know, first grade, goes up to fifth grade, then starts again middle school.

And now, in their mind, they're in eighth grade, they're at the they're the king of the school. But there might have been certain social issues, certain challenges that they never had a chance to work on when they were a newbie, when they were when they were the youngest kid, when they were at the youngest ages. Now they get to ninth grade, or they get to first year college, whatever it is. Now, all of a sudden, when the stakes are higher, right, when the social pressures are more, when the academic challenges are more, they never actually had the opportunity to work on on on on on on growing into themself, right?

Hakadosh Baruch Hu, just parenthetically, I can tell you something I've thought about before, Hakadosh Baruch Hu gives us a tremendous gift. That gift is that we are in order to build resilience, we're constantly able to work on adversity. Now, that adversity, on a level 1 to 10, might have been a kid being very upset when somebody stole their snack, or it might be somebody made fun of them. Well, the stakes are relatively low at that point. If, God forbid, a person has family challenges, work challenges, parnasah challenges, well, how are they going to be expected to to deal with the problems of life?

Well, because Hakadosh Baruch Hu allowed them to go through the growth process and learn to deal with the 6, 7, 8, 9s, and 10s of life, so that when the stakes get higher, they already have experience dealing with the adversity of the 8s, 9s, and 10s. If they're pampered, and they they they go up in levels without ever having to exercise those muscles, then they can have a tremendous fall. We see the Jews by the egel, after they had all the Yetziat Mitzrayim, they fell by the egel. And we always ask, they were on such a high level, how did they have a fall?

And we see, first of all, they had a very quick process, so they never really truly built up from from 0 to 100, as it were. And second of all, the fact that a person might have not had a problem, might have either successfully addressed the challenges, or maybe it was such that they didn't have those challenges at all at the lower levels, and all of a sudden, they thought, "I don't have a problem with this particular thing," but they don't have the muscles to deal with it at the at at the higher level. And therefore, a a person that was very easily able to navigate the social challenges of one situation and he tells somebody, "Oh, this is not a problem," but he ends up in a situation with a lot more friction, or something that he wasn't prepared to deal with, well, then he's going to have a fall in a challenge that he never realized that he had.

So as a person is growing, first of all, into different arenas, but in this case, he's growing from level to level, and he's going to address the klipot of each successive level, he's going to have to gear up for war at each stage. ותיכף כשעולה למדריגה, אז נתעוררו הקליפות שבמדריגה ומסבבין אותו. As he wants to break into those new challenges, with those new goals, with those new levels of kedushah, he's going to essentially have to address those klipot, which are going to get up, they're going to wake up, to present themselves at each new level.

וצריך להכניעם, and he's going to have to be מכניע them, subjugate them, control them. Once they're under control, ולשברם. A person that just tries to to to break something when it's in control of them, well, you know, it could be a facade. First, he has to gain control of it, and then he has to break it. ולטהר שם המקום מהקליפות, and he has to purify that place, that stage of life, that stage of the briyah from those klipot. Again, on one hand, we look at it from a from the point of view of the mensch, from the point of view of the person, we have our own avodah, and we're also metaken the briyah, and we're going to clear out that space from these klipot.

As we go to the next paragraph, ג, we start talking about avodah in in a way that we've spoken about before, but it really just expands the entire discussion. It expands our mind and just introduces different perspectives and a reframe on how we approach avodah. Meaning, that we're really looking at our avodah from two different dimensions. In one way, there's a pratiyusdick way of looking at avodah. We have our own universe: כל העולם נברא בשבילי. I have to develop, I have to use my bechirah. HaKadosh Baruch Hu gave me certain challenges, certain advantages and disadvantages, if you will, opportunities for growth, and I have to develop myself into being the best individual, the closest that I can to HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

I have to develop my daat to flow through, use my חלק אלוק ממעל, if you will, and convert my my נפש הבהמית to be able to to utilize and ultimately transform it towards being totally God-centric. On the other hand, there there is more of a global, more of a klaliyusdick perspective that can exist within within families, within communities, within generations, across the span of generations. We've we've had some of these discussions as we talk about the the tzaddik as relates to the individual avodah, talking about the the Jewish people as an organism and understanding and already Torah ב' we talked about the משכן, where every single person has to develop their perfect piece of the משכן, and yet there's no השראת השכינה until the משכן is put together into a into a unified whole.

And it's the job of the צדיק הדור to put that together, so that everybody fulfills their role, but also understands their piece as part of a broader machine. Keeping this in mind, we now are going to ask, if we view not just the avodah from our own personal perspective in terms of how we have to develop, but we understand that HaKadosh Baruch Hu created צמצומים and so on so that all of the aspects of the בריאה, at least in terms of a גילוי, are actually a limitation. Why would HaKadosh Baruch Hu create these limitations in the גילוי and the בריאה?

So that He can give us the opportunity to be metaken it. We can be creators, we can be godlike, מה הוא אף אתה. But now, if the job is to be metaken these different parts of the בריאה, even if we are sliding up into different slots, as it were, from our own personal avodah, but the קליפות at any given slot in that בריאה, we're trying to make as as practical, as relatable as possible some of these very abstract ideas, if the קליפות at any particular level were already worked on, cleared out by whoever was there before, so until now we've been addressing the presenting the discussion in from the point of view of the individual, but from the point of view of the כלל, then those קליפות at the higher altitude that I now get to should have been worked on.

Everybody has You know, there's a group of people that are trying to clean the house. Even if I now work on my piece, now I'm able to go to a floor above, well, that's already been worked on by somebody. Keeping this in mind, let's explore paragraph ג, where every line can really be expanded on, but we'll try to hold it together and then be able to explore the pieces. I'm going to read a few lines, and then we're going to go back. So first of all, דע שאין שני בני אדם שוים זה לזה, no two people are alike.

Why? כי כל הנשמות הם זה למעלה מזה וזה מלביש לזה. Everything is occupying a different part of the system, again, existing independently, but also interrelated, so each person has their own avodah, but on the other hand, on the spectrum of the world at large, everything is interconnected, they affect themselves and they affect the others around them. And the way that the system is is set up is, again, overlapping, so the פנימיות of at one level now has a הלבשה, there's a חיצוניות, and the פנימיות של תחתון נעשה לבוש וחיצוניות לחיצוניות עליון. The פנימיות, the inner part of something at the lower level, so since the lower level is overlapping the thing on top of it, then whatever is at the inside of the lower level is actually a לבוש on the חיצוניות of the of the עליון, which, again, we're going to have to explore this.

So if you put something into a sleeve, then there's going to be the פנימיות, the sleeve will be riding on it, but that entire thing is a sleeve on something that comes above it. So at any level, there's a פנימיות and there's a חיצון, and then that whatever's riding on that, that will be the פנימיות to whatever the חיצון is at the level below it. נמצא, so if we have this setup where every single person is occupying one slot, as it were, in the creation, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a linear slot, we could think about it in in any matrix, different pieces of a puzzle, however it helps to think about it, no two people are going to be occupying the same slot with the same avodah, while we all have our own individual avodah, the world at large has all of these pieces that need to be worked on.

נמצא, כשאחד רוצה לעלות ממדריגה למדריגה עליונה, as each person wants to rise to the next level, אז הולך ונעתק האדם העומד במדריגה עליונה, והולך ונעתק למדריגה היותר עליונה. No two people can be working on the same slot at once. Now, we had our original question, well, if that slot was already worked on, maybe nobody has to be there, but leaving that aside for a second, if any single person is going to slide up or, we'll see, down, that means that the entire system is going to actually slide up or down because no two people are going to be occupying the same slot at any given time, כי אי אפשר שיהיו שני אנשים במדריגה אחת.

Now let's let's explore some of this for a second because these these ideas are just so יסודיסטיק and they will hopefully bring bring the Torah to life and make it somewhat somewhat relatable. I'm going to start just The Likutey Halachos discusses this חושן משפט הלכות שומר שכר ב' י', but I'm going to start actually mentioning it from a mussar perspective that we discussed when we did some of our Alei Shur ve'Eidim at the beginning of the second chelek. As we as we look at avodah, the people are holding in different places, and one of the things that we say is, listen, lifum tza'ara agra, and therefore, it's true that one person can get a hundred on a test without much effort, and another person has to study very, very hard to get a 75 or an 80 on a test.

So what's more important? Well, one of the difficult parts of education or the educational process and system is that it's linear and it's systematized and there has to be a certain organization of it, but in terms of individual avodah and accountability, if each person is standing on its own, it could be that my 75 is worth more than somebody else's hundred. The problem is Is as we work on ourself, that only goes so far, it becomes very difficult to motivate somebody towards, towards what they perceive as mediocrity. And therefore, before we we we start just, you know, going down the path and defining middot and trying to work on things in a general context, a person really has to internalize that whatever it is that they're working on is not really part of a a standardized system, but rather from הקדוש ברוך הוא's perspective, there are going to be certain תיקונים, and there's going to be, like we said, a matrix the way that we've described it in the past.

Even just using let's say time and place is that no two people can occupy the same slot. So for example, me and you can be exist at the same time, but not the same time in the same place. And we can be in the same place, but not at the same time. This means that as you plot history, no two people will ever be able to occupy the same space and time slot. Now if we introduce extra variables to this, right, this not not only just the flat idea of space and time, we could be talking about culture, points of view, community, sensitivities, the types of music you grow up with, two people in the same family, different birth order.

Even within different birth order, it's not just the way that you relate to your siblings, but it could be if siblings are let's say 10, 15, 20 years apart, one person will have been growing up when they were 5 or 10 years old with let's say a 30-year-old parent, and then the other person at that same stage of life will have had a 50-year-old parent. They might be at different financial stations in life. No two people at all will have the same experience and exactly the same, you know, set of challenges and really opportunities for growth, which is I mean it's really mind-blowing and fascinating.

It means as much as we let's say have our heroes, we have those people, those ideals that we look up to, there's a fine line between saying I'm trying to grow to be like that person or what that person represents, but really apply it to myself. If I have let's say in our own context, we look at our gedolim, we look at our rabbanim, well if I am 20 years old and I'm looking upwards towards somebody who's 70 years old, that person developed when he was 20 in a in in let's say a different country, in a different set of challenges, different type of community when he was 20.

That person, had he been growing up in Brooklyn in 2025 as a 20-year-old person, might never have reached the heights that he reached. So I'm I'm being able to see how this person utilized his strengths and apply it to myself, and yet the challenges that I have, the growth that I the way that I'm able to bring tikkun to the world is nothing that anybody in the history of creation could ever have done. So this in fact means that no two people are even actually taking the same test of number one on in terms of their own individual avodah, but also in terms of their impact in the world.

And as we take a second, press pause and we start to absorb all of this, what this means is think about how much our individual avodah is impacted by our surroundings and others and impacts our surroundings and others. Think about two people who are members of the same class, different chavruta makeup, different level of class is going to affect how hard the rebbe has to prepare, how receptive they are, how engaged he is, right? If if if one person is making jokes and the entire level of the class descends not only because of the influence on others, but just because the difference in atmosphere is going to create a totally different dynamic in that classroom in terms of what the opportunities are and what can ultimately be accomplished in a כלליסדיק way and in a פרטיסדיק way.

All of this, I think, the way that I'm learning, is embedded in Rabbeinu's discussion, and I'm sure that there's much, much more here here than even we're discussing. It's embedded in the discussion of כשאחד רוצה לעלות ממדרגתו למדרגה עליונה, when one person goes up, then as he moves from his level, then those occupying the slots above him will also shift, and it could work chas veshalom in the other way as well. The notes over here discuss the the concept of הרמה, of lifting up, they discuss the concepts of כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה, but I I think one of the important points, and this was a shift from the last paragraph, is we're not necessarily only talking about this from the perspective of individual avodah where you could say let's say שכר ועונש, if I am responsible for the entire for the entire world improving or רחמנא ליצלן the other way, or on the other hand let's say I get bumped up or down by virtue of somebody else, well I have שכר ועונש, it wasn't really my fault, those are separate discussions.

But from the point of view of the system, of הקדוש ברוך הוא who put the system in place, and like a mashal that we've that we've used many times before, it's not so much that Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants us to build a building, it's more that Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants us to create, let's say, a raft, if you will, not my mashal, to tie various logs together until a bunch of individual logs leveraging each other each one in the perfect place that it can be can allow something to rest on it. Or an even better mashal, which actually comes from Rav Aharon Lopiansky, is the mashal of an arch, where an arch is an incredibly strong structure, and yet unless every piece Imagine an arch built of pieces, no two of which are exactly the same shape, so that they couldn't be interchanged, unless every single piece is exactly where it's supposed to be, how it's supposed to be, whether it's a very large piece at the base of the arch that's going to bear a lot of the weight as you build it up, question how you how you build it in general, or, let's say, the keystone or, let's say, the the stone that's going to be at the very top that's actually going to be the final piece that holds it all together, which might actually be a very small piece, but that in a certain sense that will be the piece that ultimately holds this entire structure there so that it can bear the weight of what rests on it.

And Hakadosh Baruch Hu, as it were, wants us to build up this structure, to create this arch so that we can bring the השראת השכינה into the world. But this entire structure is totally interrelated, and a lot of the sefarim talk about different ways Mashiach could come. If you have a דור that's כולו like this, or a דור that's כולו like that. However, the final structure ends up being in place where Hakadosh Baruch Hu is going to bring a גילוי in different ways is actually going to be dictated by us. So therefore, every single person, going back to our classroom example, and the the the Torah that the Rebbe is able to give over, and the the ultimate level of the class, because he'll be teaching to a certain point on the bell curve, every single part of this entire system is actually going to be affected and impacted and changed by any person, and it can elevate the entire system, or it can bring the entire system down.

So as we go back into the text, the representation of how the entire system is is is interrelated is that the פנימיות of one level is going to ride and be a sleeve on the חיצוניות of the other level. And just one other point, and then we're going to go forward in the text, is this doesn't necessarily have to be linear. I I might suggest that there are areas where I am holding at a very high level, and then there are areas where I don't scratch the surface on the חיצוניות, or even further than that from other people that might that might be the same in in a totally different area of avodah as I am.

So, you know, it it becomes extremely complex. It's a little bit myopic to be able to say that one person is just universally higher than another one. Every person occupies their own מקום, and without having to revert to the idea that one person is necessarily greater than another, במקום that one person is standing, another person is not going to have the opportunity to ever have filled that slot or done the עבודה at that level, whether it's higher or lower. So going back into the text over here, I'm going to read it through. דע שאין שני בני אדם שוים זה לזה, no two people are alike.

כי כל הנשמות הם זה למעלה מזה, because there is a progression, there's a system, there's a continuum of נשמות, and perhaps again we can introduce that that even within the נשמות, this applies at different levels, at different areas, depending on the מצוה, depending on the on whatever we're discussing. But within any particular system, any particular continuing, זה מלביש זה לזה, each one is connected. And looking at the system as a whole, each one is going to they're connected such that any particular thing is a sleeve, it's a הלבשה, it becomes an expression of whatever is פנימיות to it.

The פנימיות של תחתון, the inner part of the תחתון, is going to be נעשה לבוש וחיצוניות לחיצון, לחיצוניות עליון. Hey, why is it not just that that's the that's the פנימיות לחיצוניות? Okay, we'll leave it for now. נמצא כשאחד רוצה לעלות ממדרגתו למדרגה עליונה, as a person wants to wants to rise up in levels, so there's when we look at it when we discuss it from point of view of עבודה, a lot of times I say that I am expanding myself, as it were, to encompass more and greater you know greater types of challenges, opportunities for growth.

On the other hand, when we look at it from the system point of view, and every single person is able to address a particular תיקון aspect of that system, people are rising up through the levels. One of the reasons that we could say that an אדם is much greater than a מלאך, a מלאך resides at a particular level, which might be very high, but they don't have the opportunity to change the world or to rise through the levels. They're just occupying that space, but without without being part of that dynamic or or controlling any part of that dynamic process.

אזי הולך ונתק עמו אדם עומד במדרגה עליונה, now the entire system is going to shift up, והולך ונתק למדרגה היותר עליונה, and the person who was occupying the level above, right? The the best kid in the class, if the entire level of the class shifts up, now the the kid who's the smartest kid in the class will actually improve as well, so will the רבי. כי אי אפשר שיהיו שני אנשים במדרגה אחת, he's talking from the from a cosmic point of view that Hakadosh Baruch Hu is not creating two people to work on exactly the same tikkun, it's impossible that two people will occupy the same space as as it were, and because the entire, or thinking about it a little bit differently, since the entire creation is in a balance, if you think about it like that, you have a two-pan scale, any, or think about the world like a mobile, right, a thousand two-pan scales, a thousand things that are that are equally inter-balancing each other out so that you have a system that's perfectly balanced at any given time in order to be able to function.

Any change in balance along the system is going to make, you know, a thousand changes and counterbalances so that the system can function. And ultimately, every person and every community and every structure is operating within a certain tzurah, within a קומת אדם. We say that they're all different eivarim of אדם הראשון, contained at such that the 600,000 Yidden are really 600,000 perspectives creating a shleimut. And it's creating a shleimut in any given situation, the shleimut that we're creating is not necessarily taking the same form as the shleimut that was represented in a different generation. But it is a complete structure.

I'm just going to mention one very fast point before we move on in the text that the notes over here bring from Likutei Halachot. This is one of the reasons why we do find machlokot even among great men and among people who have the best of intentions, because if a person doesn't realize that they are that while they are at the center of the universe as pertains to them in their avodah, but they lemaaseh are occupying one slot, one point of view, a person can say, "Listen, I am relating to Torah, I am relating to objective truth.

I'm relating to Hakadosh Baruch Hu, and I see somebody taking a totally different path in life." If a person is not able to take a step back and factor their own bias, their own subjectivity out of it, and try to see the entire world through their point of view, it can be very difficult to reconcile that somebody else is taking a totally different approach and to say, "They are just as equidistant from the center of the circle as I am, just from a different point of view." And therefore, their subjectivities get in the way. There's a certain bias that almost becomes a certain gaavah, a certain pride, but in a negative way towards the avodah that they're doing, and they want to become the center of all of the expressions rather than just understanding that they are fulfilling their avodah, and another person equally has their avodah.

And it's very difficult sometimes not to impose one's perspective on others, or not view the avodah of others solely through through their own through their own subjectivities. Now going further, again, hoping that we can try to discuss these ideas, very intimidating as high as these ideas are, but try to at least read the words in in some meaningful way. ואינו נתק מהאדם העליון, so now we have this process and we're going to isolate one part of the process over here. So we're viewing it as being linear. And in this system, we will have, let's say, A and B.

B will be the penimiyut, the inside of C. C will be resting on B. But for the next, if you think about it like dominoes, now C will be the inside of the CD. D will be resting on C, and then, like we said, each thing is a sleeve on the thing that came before it. There's the penimiyut and the chitzon. Now earlier on we used the lashon, we're going to talk about it as well, that when something slides up in this process, it becomes the chitzon on the chitzon of the thing above. Why is that?

Well, it's interesting, at any point in the process, there's a penimi, and then the chitzon is an expression of that penimi. So if I have, let's say, a machshavah, then that with the chitzoniyut, the external part of that thought will be words, putting those thoughts into words. On one hand, the words are lower down in the system than machshavah. On the other hand, they are actually expressive, they're the chitzoniyut of the machshavah of something that's much higher up. So the the chitzon, the words that relate to a higher machshavah might actually be more lofty than the machshavot of somebody lower down.

Now, the person lower down starts to want to rise themself up. Which part of that what they're working on rises up? It leads with the penimi, with the higher aspect of it. So right, which makes sense. My my actions can't lead, or at least in a meaningful way, more than my thought process, more than my ratzon. So what rises up at any point in that process, whichever person we want to isolate, what rises up from the אדם עליון, אלא פנימי שלו, the person's penimiyut rises up. והחיצוניות נשאר, but the chitzoniyut remains the same. The outer trappings, it makes a reshimu, right, there are certain aspects of the beri'ah which are dynamic.

If thought my my thought process can rise above, my words can rise above, my body, for instance, might be the same. So as a person rises up, the פנימי of him rises up, but the certain aspects of his חיצוניות will actually remain in the same place. I can say me and you can daven exactly the same, by the way, and my מחשבות be much loftier than yours, and yet we're saying the same words. So the the fact that my פנימיות rises doesn't necessarily mean that the חיצוניות will move. So as a person rises up, his פנימיות rises up, וגם האדם שבמדרגה תחתונה אינו נעתק ועולה אלא פנימיות.

So we said that this is a dynamic process. As one person moves up, it brings the person below to rise up as well, and it pushes the person above him to rise up even to further heights. But from the פנימיות and the חיצון, which part aspect of a person is rising up? It's the פנימיות of the of each part of the process that's rising up, ופנימיות של תחתון נעשה חיצון לחיצוניות עליון. But so now what ends up happening is if you think about this in terms of a chain dynamic, I know it's very technical, but I keep on saying that, just trying our best, so if the פנימיות rises up, and now my פנימיות is going to rest on the חיצון of what's above me, the חיצון of what's, I'm going to be really on the חיצוניות of that חיצון, because the חיצוניות of what's above me might be on a higher level than my פנימיות.

So my פנימיות is now going to be on the חיצון of the is going to be on the חיצון above me. But so what what's above me now? There's the פנימיות that was there before, there's its חיצון, and then there's not my פנימיות which just rose up, and now it's going to be riding on the חיצון above me. But at exactly the same moment, the פנימיות of the level above me will also rise up. So it comes out that the חיצוניות of the level that used to be above is now going to become the new פנימיות to the חיצון which used to be my פנימיות.

So again we're going to read it inside: וגם האדם שמדרגה תחתונה אינו נעתק ועולה אלא פנימיות. Each all the פנימיות are rising up, ופנימיות של תחתון, the פנימיות of what used to be תחתון is going to become נעשה the חיצוניות לחיצוניות העליון as this entire dynamic process in parallel continues to shift up. And now coming to answer the question that we started paragraph ג with: ואף על פי שכבר נשברה הקליפה שבמדרגה עליון על ידי אדם עליון, even though whatever person was occupying that particular slot before he slid up was now holding at a level of פנימיות, and therefore since he was holding at the level of that of that תיקון, he had broken the קליפות at that level, אף על פי כן, כשפנימיות של עליון נעתק משם, when that פנימיות at that level that had reached the inside of that onion, had reached the inside of that core and gotten past the קליפות at that level, so that person's פנימיות had addressed the kelipot at that level, ופנימיות There's a girsa, a question of girsa over here whether this word is penimiyut or chitzoniyut, but I'm going to read it as a, ופנימיות התחתון עולה and the now the penimiyut of the tachton goes up and is going to become the chitzon at the higher level, that chitzon, only the person that was at the penimiyut of the higher level had broken past the kelipah.

This new person who was at penimiyut at the lower level is now rising up, and in the role, he's going to be in the position as a chitzoniyut at the higher level, that person at the chitzoniyut never yet never yet was able to get inside. He was never able to get into the penimiyut because he has not yet addressed those kelipot. אזי קליפה חוזר ונעור. The kelipot which were dormant, they were not destroyed, they were but they they became dormant. Right, sometimes two people are are in a room or somebody is there, and then one light can totally outshine whatever is there.

But when that light gets removed, so then the other things now become apparent again. The kelipot, and and this makes sense. In other words, at some point there's going to be the ultimately the total giluy and the the the total truth will be there, and everything will ultimately line up and only be an expression of godliness. But in the world as it is, this is the representation Every single thing in the system has the pri and it has the kelipah. Our job is to line up the kelipah so that it's part of the part of the pri.

But that's our avodah at every given level. So therefore we're sort of speaking about both aspects of this avodah. There's the structure at large which Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants that we should be metaken, and then there's our own individual avodah. And since these processes work together, if you can imagine going back to my example about the classroom, let's say you have a very rowdy classroom. You can have one rebbe that comes in and he's able to tame the children. He's able to to disarm them and teach them in a certain way. That rebbe goes, he gets a promotion, he retires, whatever it is.

When the new teacher comes in, those kids which were be'etzem rowdy kids, they had they had a lot of liveliness, they were they they now are ultimately going to revert possibly to their ways, and the way that the new teacher tames them is going to be a totally different personality, totally different methodology of teaching, and it could be that he will tame them also, but now it's going to be a different aspect, chipping death by a thousand cuts, right? He's going to chip away now at their liveliness, but whether positive or negative, but coming from a totally different angle he's going to appeal to them.

And therefore, this rowdiness, this kelipah as it were, is going to be חוזר ונעור, כאילו נכנס אל אלפני האור הפנימיות של עליון, it was only machnia, was subjugated to the higher פנימיות, אבל לפני התחתון אפילו לפני פנימיות שלו, but to the person who's at the bottom, even though this person's penimiyut now rose up, יש כח בידו לסתור כנגדו, this penimiyut that rose up is really going to be in the role of the chitzoniyut at the higher level, ובשביל זה צריך לשבר אותה ולהכניע אותה מחדש, he's going to have to address it totally from a new, but not just totally new, it's also going to be a new way of addressing it. It's a new teacher with a different personality with a different skill set that's going to be addressing the same challenge. Okay, I actually wanted to finish paragraph ג, but we said a lot and I think we're going to hold it over here be'ezrat Hashem, and we will continue next time.