The Precocious Psychology of Chabad
A century before Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi laid out a sophisticated map of the dynamics of the human psyche. He called his method ‘Chabad’—an acronym for the three faculties of the mind: chochmah, binah, and da’at. In 1795, he published the book that is today known as Tanya. There, he laid out, step by step, his approach to human psychology and its applications for spiritual growth.
The psychology of Tanya is extraordinarily rich and sophisticated. It’s been heavily extended and expanded since. To quote Prof. Jonathan Garb of Hebrew University, “There is more about the human psyche in Chabad literature than in all the rest of Jewish literature combined.”
If you’ve ever studied any of the modern, secular schools of psychology, much of R. Schneur Zalman’s soul-dynamics will appear familiar to you. But failing to mark the stark points of departure is like eating exotic cuisine flooded with ketchup.
Your life, according to Tanya, is less about who you are and more about what you wear.Most obvious is the central place of the soul’s yearning for union with the divine. But more interesting, less noted, and certainly less understood, are the fascinating and unique metaphors that force you to shift the way you perceive life as a human being.
For one, your life, according to Tanya, is less about who you are and more about what you wear.
You read that correctly. In Tanya, you don’t behave in a certain way; you get dressed up in it. Your conscious thoughts, your spoken words, as well as all your physical activities are not just things you do; they are your wardrobe. And it’s your wardrobe that counts.
Most ethical works discuss moral behavior. Tanya uses that word not once. Instead, the signature metaphor in Tanya to describe all human activity, popping up in some form or another on almost every page, is clothing.
This is not just lingo. It’s a fundamentally different understanding of the human psyche. But to explain that, we first need to clarify what R. Schneur Zalman means with his metaphor, where he gets it from, and its implications.
Clothes for the Psyche
Your psyche, obviously, doesn’t need clothing to stay warm in the winter. When R. Schneur Zalman is speaking of your soul’s clothing, he is speaking about clothing not as utilities, but in their cosmetic sense.
Your clothes are your interface with the world—the world knows you and you know it through what you wear. You can go places you couldn’t go otherwise because you have shoes or boots. You can pick up things you would otherwise never touch because you have gloves. Doors that would otherwise remain shut, open for you just because you wear a fancy suit.
Your clothes fit you and you fit them. If they are well-tailored and customized, they do something quite amazing: They present you by covering you. Good clothes bring out the true you by artfully concealing the outer you and directing attention to those aspects of you that are most meaningful.
This conceal-to-reveal dynamic is especially the case when speaking of clothes for your human psyche. Generally, clothes obstruct people’s vision, but your psyche first becomes visible only once it is clothed.
Language is the inner clothing of the human psyche, making it visible not only to others, but to yourself, as well. You become conscious of your thoughts and emotions only once they speak to you in language, imagery, and sounds in your mind. They remain invisible to others until they emerge as spoken words and physical movements and actions.
Why do we call this “clothing”? Why not just “expressions” or “reflections” of the soul?
Because they never really leave you. Like clothes, you go out inside them.
Your clothes become you. And you, too, become them. Much the same way that you identify with a character in a story and thereby live that story vicariously, so you identify with your clothes.
If I smash the mirror that reflects your image, you walk away unscathed. But if I grab your clothing, I grab you.Dress as an officer of the law, and you become the law. Dress as a clown and you begin to feel and act silly. Dress in a business suit, your demeanor becomes orderly and formal. Dress in track pants and a t-shirt, and you begin to chill.
If I smash the mirror that reflects your image, you walk away unscathed. But if I grab your clothing, I grab you. If I criticize your words or deeds, you feel slighted. If I examine them, I find you within them.
Yet, nevertheless, like clothing, and like your empathy for a fictional character in a story, you can slip out of your words and actions as easily as you got into them. Your habits, your words, the chatter in your mind—they are not you, just as your clothing is not you. At any moment, you can decide to create new habits, choose happier words, and think more pleasant thoughts.
Investing in Clothes
This is the immanence that R. Schneur Zalman wants to bring across with his metaphor of clothing for human behavior. Humans don’t just do things. They live inside them.
Perhaps a better word, if somewhat archaic, is “vestments.” Tanya is not about how you should or should not behave. It’s about where you should invest yourself—in what thoughts, in what words, and in what physical activities. Those activities are your clothing—not your behavior—and you need to make sure they fit you and suit you well.
Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov—whom R. Schneur Zalman referred to as his spiritual grandfather—was fond of saying, “Wherever you put your thoughts, that is where you are, all of you.”1 As human beings, we are incapable of seriously considering an idea without somehow identifying with it, sensing what it would be like to accept it, entering, and occupying the space of that idea with head, heart, hands, and feet. We can never truly enter an idea and walk out the same.
If this is true with a thought, all the more so with words and actions. When words come out of your mouth, you go out with them. You come to believe what you say, and to doubt the things you do not say. When your actions manipulate your environment, your actions and your environment manipulate you. You may feel you are the master of your tools, your achievements, and your creations, but as you mold them, they mold you and pull you in directions you would otherwise have never journeyed.
As the anonymous 13th-century author of the Sefer Hachinuch wrote, “Your attitudes follow your actions.”2 You become what you do.
Underclothes and Overclothes
This clothing of the soul has three layers. The outer layer includes all your physical actions—lifting a finger, eating your breakfast, walking, breathing, sleeping, procreating—any way a limb of your body might move.
The other two layers, as we said, have to do with language. You use language to communicate to others; that is your intermediary layer of clothing. But you also use language to communicate with yourself; that’s your innermost layer of clothing.
That inner layer is called machshavah, which is generally translated as “thought,” but it’s important to note that it doesn’t refer to the cognitive process. Rather, it’s the means by which you articulate your thoughts and feelings to yourself and become conscious of them.
Yet, as with clothing, so too the language in which your cognition is clothed allows you to extend your thinking far further, to places the mind could never go without the tool of language. (This is a fascinating topic, well discussed in Chabad literature. I plan to cover it in a later essay.)
Clothes That Fit Your Inner Soul
According to Tanya, you have two souls. You have a human soul, which itself contains many strata and conflicting elements, but is basically an animal with a large brain and the capacity for speech. And you have a divine soul, the one that G‑d breathed into Adam after he was formed. This is the soul that R. Schneur Zalman calls “a sample of G‑d from above.”
The divine soul is clothed within the human animal soul. She has no means of expression in this world except through this outer being.The divine soul is clothed within the human animal soul. She has no means of expression in this world except through this outer being. The human soul is the outer you and the divine soul is the inner you.
Clothes have to fit, otherwise they are not clothes but sacks. The outer, human soul is the one producing the clothes, so whatever comes off her production line fits her. The inner, divine soul is more particular. The only clothes that fit her are those prescribed by G‑d Himself, in His Torah.
But where does she find them? Ironically, in the same production factory of that human soul. Indeed, that’s why she invests herself within such a beast and such a world. This world is a clothing outlet for the divine soul, indeed, the exclusive importer. And this human animal you inhabit is the only manufacturer.
Love, awe, wonder, spiritual heights—all these the divine soul had above, in her heavenly womb. She descended to this place to gain something that she could not get up there: good clothes. Clothes that will allow her to discover who she truly is.
She needs to do things from within human, physical form—to speak the words of Torah wisdom with her lips, to eat matzah on Passover, sit in a sukkah on Sukkot, eat delicious foods on Shabbat, raise children in this world, find G‑d in all the ways of human life, and perform all the mitzvahs a Jew can do on this physical earth.
She has no other clothes. Nothing else will fit her. There are no other activities, words, or thoughts that could provide expression for a divine soul.
She needs to dress in G‑d’s clothing. She can only dress in that clothing because within those clothes, G‑d Himself is found. And she, after all, is nothing less than a sample of G‑d from above.
As R. Schneur Zalman puts it in chapter four of Tanya: If you are doing all you can to keep your thoughts engaged in understanding all the Torah you can grasp, your mouth articulating all that you are learning, and doing all the mitzvahs you can, your divine soul is fully decked out.
But if none of your thoughts, words, or actions line up with any of those, they provide clothing for your human-animal soul alone. Your divine soul, the inner you, goes bare, with no real presence in this world.
Where Did He Get This Idea From?
The Zohar describes the ascent of the soul in the afterlife, the various levels to which she rises, and the chambers she enters. It describes how the mitzvahs you have done in this world clothe and protect your soul as she makes this ascent.3 They serve as a sort of protective suit, allowing your soul to absorb and enjoy the rays of divine light that shine in those higher realms.
The message: Get the clothing down here while you can—you’re going to need them later, up there. It’s similar to the teaching of the Mishnah, “This world is like a foyer before the grand hall. Fix yourself up in the foyer before you enter the grand hall.”4
In Tanya, however, the message is quite different. Here, we are talking about dressing up for the sake of dressing up.
This fits in with R. Schneur Zalman’s general view of things:
Torah is to be studied not for the sake of acquiring knowledge or even for the inspiration and guidance it provides, but for the moment of total immersion within divine wisdom.
Prayer is not to be seen as a means of getting the things you ask from G‑d, but for the sake of communion with G‑d at the time of prayer.
Mitzvahs, as well, are not a means to an end or an investment in the future. At the time you are clothed within a mitzvah, you are there already. You touch G‑d Himself—not His light, not spiritual bliss, but the core-essence of what it means to be G‑d.
At the time you are clothed within a mitzvah, you are there already. You touch G‑d Himself—not His light, not spiritual bliss, but the core-essence of what it means to be G‑d.Until now, you were a creation. Even as your divine soul stood above before she descended to this world, she was a created being, loving G‑d and in wonderment of G‑d. In the act of a mitzvah, she finds her purpose, her meaning, and her true self. She transcends the realm of created being to become one with G‑d.
That’s much as the Mishnah says, “The reward of a mitzvah is the mitzvah itself.”5 And, “One moment of return to G‑d and good deeds in this world is better than all the bliss of the World to Come.”6
If you don’t feel it, that makes sense. There is no living creature, not in this world, not in any spiritual realm, that can experience such a thing and continue to exist. As G‑d told Moses, “No one can see Me and live.”7
It also explains why, according to the majority view, the ultimate reward of the soul is not in any higher, spiritual world, but in this world.8 After the Messianic Era, all the souls in those heavenly realms, even those of Abraham and Moses, will return to their physical bodies, refurbished and refitted. Within those bodies, they will experience for the first time the true pleasure of union with G‑d’s essence that they achieved over their lifetime through their Torah and mitzvahs —something only accessible in this earthly world.
Again, R. Schneur Zalman’s point of immanence: The ultimate experience is here, now.
What Will You Wear Today?
At any moment, you get to choose the clothes for your soul. This notion is crucial to the thesis of Tanya.
Tanya distinguishes between the tzadik and the beinoni. A tzadik is a rare and special individual. To become a tzadik is to have gained mastery over your mind and heart, to never feel anger or bear a grudge, to despise evil with every cell of your body, and to love G‑d with a pure, undivided heart and seek Him in all things and all your ways.
But the vast majority of us were not placed upon this earth to become tzadikim. The mission for most of us is to be a beinoni, which literally means “the guy in between.”
To be a beinoni is to be a master over your clothing—in many ways, a much more difficult task. But then, your clothing can take you higher than your mind and heart ever can.
Realizing this distinction, R. Schneur Zalman writes, saves the beinoni from the crippling hold of frustration and guilt, allowing for fruitful spiritual growth. Don’t kick yourself for desiring the wrong things, for the anger seething in your heart, or the tempestuous thoughts swirling in your head. Chill. As long as you don’t act upon those desires, speak out in anger, or deliberately choose to entertain those nasty thoughts, you’re good.
If you fail at times—and we all do—look, it goes with the territory. Pick yourself up, tell your Maker of your regret, resolve to stick with Him from now on, and get on with life.
If you fail at times—and we all do—look, it goes with the territory. Pick yourself up, tell your Maker of your regret, resolve to stick with Him from now on, and get on with life.And if you will fill your mind with the right thoughts, speak good things, and act civilly and kindly even to those who annoy you, you’re accomplishing something the greatest tzadik could not achieve. You’re transforming yourself and raising up the entire world along with you.
The Clothes Make the Soul
Clothes can change you because, like those icons on your electronic display, they provide an interface in two directions.
Because you can observe yourself due to these clothes, you are empowered to change yourself. Now that you know who you are and where you are holding, you can create new habits, do things differently, speak differently, and think different thoughts. When you choose to think uplifting thoughts, use positive words when you talk, and do good things despite your mood, you find your moods shifting and your personality moving along with them.
True, you can’t suddenly change who you are by just changing your clothes. You don’t have to. You only need to give that inner divine soul the clothes she needs to express herself. Gradually, your human, outer personality will adapt, as well. Even your way of thinking will eventually transform.
Did you make yourself? In a way. By dressing in clothes that match your inner soul, you allowed her to emerge. And when that happens, you’re a whole new person.One day, you turn around, and you’re a whole new person. Then you can say, “See this person I am now? I made that.”
Did you make yourself? In a way. By dressing in clothes that match your inner soul, you allowed her to emerge. And when that happens, you’re a whole new person.
That’s the whole point of life on Planet Earth. Not to be perfect, but to get the clothes you need to become a self-made soul. Nothing could be more divine.
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