Question

Hello Rabbi Michi,
I’ve heard you refer several times in your YouTube lectures to Gate 4 of the book “Nefesh HaChaim.” You cite what he wrote there about the nature of cleaving to God through Torah study: that the intention is not to “cleaving” in the sense of emotion, but rather cleaving that comes from the very essence of Torah study itself, regardless of any feeling.
In those lectures you emphasize that this passage was actually written against the Hasidic outlook, which sees cleaving in Torah study as an “emotion” that accompanies the study of God’s word, rather than being inherent in the study itself.
 
I wanted to point out that this idea and explanation regarding the greatness of Torah study — as cleaving that comes from the study itself — is already explained at length in the Tanya (chapters 4–5), which was printed almost thirty years before “Nefesh HaChaim.”nbsp;
 
I’ll add that I grew up and studied in Chabad Hasidism, and I never once heard, nor was I ever taught, that cleaving in Torah study depends on emotion rather than on the study itself. They always drilled the Tanya’s teaching on this into us. So I think that in those parts of the lectures, you’re attacking Hasidism as a “straw man,” as though that were the Hasidic view.nbsp;
 
With your permission, I’ll copy a few passages from chapter 5 of the Tanya, and I’d be glad if you would clarify whether, in your opinion, there is any difference:

“…When a person understands and grasps a certain halakhah in the Mishnah or in the Talmud properly and thoroughly, then his intellect grasps and encompasses it, and his intellect is also clothed in it at that moment. Now this halakhah is the wisdom and will of the Holy One, blessed be He, for it arose in His will that if Reuven should claim such-and-such, for example, and Shimon should claim such-and-such, the ruling between them should be such-and-such.
And even if this case never was and never will be brought to judgment concerning these claims and counterclaims, nevertheless, since this is what arose in the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He — that if one claims this and the other claims that, the ruling should be such-and-such — then when a person knows and grasps this ruling in his mind, as a halakhah set out in the Mishnah or Talmud or halakhic decisors, he thereby grasps, holds, and encompasses in his mind the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, of whom no thought can grasp Him, nor His will and wisdom, except when they are clothed in the halakhot set before us. And his intellect is also clothed in them. This is a wondrous union, unlike any other union and incomparable to anything at all found in the physical world, that they become truly one and united from every side and aspect.
And this is an infinitely great and wondrous superiority found in the commandment of knowing and comprehending the Torah over all practical commandments, and even over commandments that depend on speech, and even over the commandment of Torah study done through speech. For through all commandments of speech and action, the Holy One, blessed be He, clothes the soul and encompasses it with the light of God from head to foot; but through knowledge of the Torah, besides the fact that the intellect is clothed in God’s wisdom, God’s wisdom is also within him — namely, what the intellect grasps, holds, and encompasses of what it is able to grasp and comprehend from knowledge of the Torah, each person according to his intellect and the power of his knowledge and comprehension in the plain sense, allusion, exposition, and secret…” etc., see there.