Part 5 · Chapter 32

What מסירות נפש Really Means 0:03

מסירות נפש means making it the top priority. That means that you're not doing it, you know, a person, you could say, well, we have the oil anyway, so we'll use it. That's not מסירות נפש. The main thing that shows on מסירות נפש, מסירה means that you're giving yourself over. That means you're dedicating yourself that this, I'm going to do this, I'm committing to do this no matter what.

That's what מסירות נפש means. Simple words, you know, no romanticism. That means that that's your top priority. Well, that also means, in other words, if anything will come up, whether it's big or little, the thing of מסירות נפש means that I commit that I am going to put on תפילין.

Now, what does that mean? So let's say it's going to cost me money, I don't care. Let's say it's going to take time, I don't care. Let's say somebody's going to want to kill me, I don't care.

It doesn't matter what it is. Let's say you're going to, somebody's going to say, well, you're being מבטל time from תורה, yeah, I don't care. That's what it means. מסירות נפש doesn't, it doesn't have to be a good thing, you can have מסירות נפש for a bad thing.

All מסירות נפש means that you give yourself over to that thing, and in a way that you commit to do it as your top priority and everything else is secondary. And when if anything else is going to contradict this thing, whether it's big or small, you are not going to consider the other thing of any importance.

Putting God's Will Above All Contradictions 1:16

Right, a person's מסירות נפש shouldn't be for the מצוה per se, like as its own ענין, but when a person recognizes that every מצוה is connected to השם's עצם, and a person has מסירות נפש for השם, so then if השם tells you to do this, you say, okay, so it must be that I that I can do this מצוה, and it's impossible for anything to stand in my way.

And that means even like a רוחניות thing, like when the אלטר רבי was in jail, and they said, you know, you have to eat, or else you'll be killing yourself, and then you'll die, you'll lose both this world and the next world, you'll lose your עולם הבא because you commit suicide if you won't eat the non-kosher food.

So it's true that על פי תורה you could get a היתר in that situation to eat the non-kosher food, but if you believe that the whole reason the world is here is to do תורה and מצוות, and that's the טבע of the world, you're allowed to expect a miracle when you are trying to do a מצוה.

And besides that, there's opinions that say you're allowed to, you know, I mean that's not such an example because it's not for sure that he's going to die right away, it's not immediate danger, and it's not whatever, but even halachically, that's it's not such a big question. But if a person has such an attitude, like the רבי said about the פריערדיקער רבי and things, like if a person has this kind of an attitude, it's that it's not, you know you're going to win.

So, and even for like a positive מצוה, I mean you can find a מקור always for these things in הלכה, because the whole thing of הלכה is doing is trying to tell you how to be a person with this attitude. That's what הלכה is trying to do. The תורה wants you to have be a person that lives the world with a certain attitude, an attitude of אלקות בפשיטות והעולם בהתחדשות.

That's what the whole thing of the תורה.

All the particular הלכות is telling you advice and ways of how to get yourself to be like that, what it means to be like such a person. But one of the things is that nothing in גשמיות can stop you from doing a מצוה, and also another big rule is that nothing in קדושה can contradict another thing in קדושה. So if a person thinks that one מצוה or one ענין in קדושה is going to prevent him or lessen his ability to do some other thing in קדושה, then he's making a mistake in some way.

Either it's not really a thing in קדושה, or he is mistaken that it's going to mess him up from it, or whatever. So after all of that introduction, והנה, and behold, ודאי כאשר צריך להיות התהוות התפעלות המדה בלב, surely when the emotion has to be created, when you actually want to feel something in your heart, you have a התפעלות of a מדה, מהעלם התפעלות המדה בהיותה בשכל והשגת דבינה, where is it going to be coming from?

Creating the Emotional Surge of מדה 3:42

It's going to be coming from the hidden excitement of the מדה, the way that it's in your intellect and the understanding of בינה. That implicit in your understanding is a certain מדה already.

In other words, that you understood that this thing is bad for you intellectually, but you didn't necessarily feel it yet. Right, like a person learns הלכה, so implicit in that הלכה is that in such and such a situation this thing would be אסור, but they didn't necessarily think about it. Like, in other words, if a person learns הלכה and says, oh, so if somebody does this and they do that, then they'll stone them, you know what I mean, like when a person's learning הלכות שבת, let's say, this is an איסור דאורייתא, and this is an איסור דרבנן, and this is מותר, and this is פטור, and, you know what I mean?

So when a person is learning all those things, there's an implicit מדה that is not revealed right now, that this thing is bad, and that you would be scared to do it, especially in the time of בית דין, because they would, a person would get סקילה for it.

thing, like that they would be scared to do this thing because it's against what השם wants, but since they understand that this is against הלכה, automatically that מידה will come out if somebody would say, dude, would you know, would you turn the light on for me on שבת? And the guy, you know, he'd be very scared to do it, he wouldn't do it.

And if you learn something else that that that is you're not allowed to, you know, even if it's like something little like מוקצה or something, you know, a person that's דרבנן, a person learned about it, so he wouldn't do it. You say: you want to hand me that stone? He would say, no, it's מוקצה.

From צמצום to הסתלקות: Preparing the Heart 5:48

So הוצרך להיות תחילה בחינת צמצום והעלם וקיבוץ שנקרא הסתלקות. Before you can have the emotion, you have to first have a צמצום, a העלם, and a קיבוץ, that the idea has to be focused down to a ובכן, and the main the שכל has to be hidden, and it has to be also the light has to be removed, this is called a הסתלקות. In other words, the שכל has to go away.

כמו משל רקבון הגרעין, like the משל of the rotting of a seed, בשביל השתנות ממהות למהות, in order to change from one thing to another, in order to change from physical to spiritual, it has to rot. So in other words, that the original thing has to go away in order for the new thing to come out, because you because the original thing contradicts the new thing. So if a person is focused on the intellect and that's their interest, the emotion will not be able to come out.

So therefore, the intellect has to go away in order to really feel the emotion. This is one of the reasons why women get more emotional, because they're קלי דעת.

And like little and children are more emotional, while somebody that's like more mature, especially if somebody is a בר שכל, like a real intellectual person, they're very their emotions are always very subdued and cold, because they're always thinking of things intellectually.

So as long as a person is focusing on the intellectual things, aspect of it, the emotions are going to be quiet. And a person's being very emotional, then they're not being rational.

This is, by the way, only in חיצוניות because this is a חיצוניות'דיק שכל. If you have פנימיות'דיק שכל, then they can both come together. That's the rule for anything. Anytime that things there's a division between things, it's only in חיצוניות. If you go deep enough, then they connect.

So this is a כלל גדול, whenever you're learning in חסידות and it says something that two things are are different and they contradict, or whatever, one's higher, one's lower, whatever, if you go deep enough, then there's a level where they connect.

והוא בחינת מצר הגרון, this is the idea of the narrow of the throat, that from your brain to your heart you have to go through the neck.

And the neck is narrow, so it's like physically it represents that it has to be focused and channeled to get smaller. And also it's the idea that the the brain stops. Which this also, by the way, has to do with has to do with this week's פרשה, last week's פרשה, about the in the the throat there's the קנה, ושט, and ורידין, the windpipe, the esophagus, the food pipe, and the, you know, the the jugular vein, the vein.

מצר גרון: From Intellect to Heart 7:51

Those three סימנים, like in a, you know, שחיטה of a בהמה or something like that, those are correspond to the three powers, three שרים: the שר המשקים, the שר האופים, and the שר הטבחים.

So, that's just a little living with the time there. מצר גרון דבינה שנתעלם שם התפעלות השכל, that when it goes into the מצר הגרון of בינה, the excitement of the intellect goes away, ונמשך להיות בשינוי מהות בסערת הלב, and then it becomes changed and it becomes an excitement, emotional excitement in the heart. So in the mind you're excited about the intellect of it, and when it goes in the heart, you're excited in an emotional way, which is by the ובכן, not by the actual understanding.

So the in the mind there's the whole thing of like how beautiful the idea, the שכל is, and like the explanations, how great the explanations were. You know, a person goes to like a good שיעור or something like that, they're excited if they really enjoyed and they're really excited about it, they're mainly excited by how well he explained it, and that they understood an idea that they didn't understand before, which is the intellectual aspect of it.

Then, some people don't care about intellect so much, and they say, okay, but why do I care? So it was very nice, you explained all this stuff, but who cares? Tell me why I should care. That's the heart speaking. The heart wants to know how that relates to me in a personal way. The intellect doesn't care about a personal way, it just wants to know about things just to know.

But your heart wants to know how it should relate to it, which means you have to know how I fit in the picture. And that that's the ובכן.

And so the the שכל has to go away and you have to only feel ובכן, say, oh, based on what he said, like in בית דין or something, the guy wants to know whether it's his money or not, you know, he doesn't want to know based on that, you know, it's your money or it's his money. Whatever, that's what he wants to know.

Or the same thing like with this: you hear, you learn this whole thing in חסידות, your heart wants to know, "Okay, so at the end of the day, you know, is God giving me money or is the stock market giving me money?

At the end of the day, should I be afraid of it or should I like, you know, how should I react differently to the world based on this explanation?"

So this is the idea of like a ממוצע or a מסך. וכמו בבחינת קרומא וכולו, this is similar to the קרומא דאוירא. There's three פרסאות in the body that separate between the חב״ד, חג״ת, נה״י.

There's the from the כח המשכיל to the brain, which is the קרומא דאוירא, the membrane of air over the brain, that takes the liquid from the כח המשכיל and the תענוג and it brings it into the brain to be like in a way of הבל. Then there's the מצר הגרון, which goes from the שכל to the מדות and changes it from a שכל to a מדה by making only the ובכן come over.

Then there is the חצר הכבד, the diaphragm between your lungs, your heart, lungs, and the digestive organs, like the liver and the stomach, and that brings it from an emotion to a physical impulse, to get you ready to like react physically based on that emotion, to like run away or to do something. שהוא המעמיד והמפסיק מכח עליון שלמעלה מן השכל לבוא לשינוי המהות בגילוי הארת השכל וכולו.

That the קרומא דאוירא, the membrane of air, changes, it separates between the כח המשכיל which is higher than intellect, and it changes it so that it should be to come into the brain as an idea, as a שכל.

וכמו חצר הכבד שמפסיק ומעמיד בין איברי הנשימה לאיברי המזון, and like the חצר הכבד, the the partition of the liver, which is the diaphragm, which is like this muscle underneath the lungs, that separates between the organs of breathing, the cardiovascular system, and the organs of digestion, the digestive system, לשינוי המהות, so that it should change from an emotion to a physical thing. So like if a person is scared, they'll have to go to the bathroom.

Why? Because that emotion changes the way you're breathing, and that change in the rhythm of your חצר הכבד will affect, first of all, it will push on your stomach and stuff differently, and it also triggers different things that gets your digestive system to kind of shut off and empty itself so you'll be able to run away better. In, you know, as you won't waste energy digesting food, you don't want the weight of the food, and stuff like that.

And also other things, you know, it it if a person's a person's in general, a person's digestion is affected by the their how fast they're breathing.

Also other things like that. כמו שמבואר במקום אחר באריכות, like explained elsewhere at length.