Hayom Yom: Tackling Life's Tasks - 4 Cheshvan

To Fill In the Background

Some passages in Tanya leave the reader convinced that the activity with the greatest impact is giving tzedakah. Other passages leave the impression that performing practical mitzvos generates far greater ripples. Yet others explain what one can accomplish by the proper use of the materiality that surrounds him. Elsewhere one reads that in these latter generations, the mode of Divine service that most affects ourselves and the world at large is prayer. And, as everyone knows, “the study of Torah is equivalent to them all.”2

How, then, can all these teachings live in harmony?

The answer is, of course, that everything depends on what criterion is used at any particular time — whether we are speaking of self-denial to save lives, or refining our own physicality by exerting ourselves when doing a mitzvah, or revealing hidden Divine sparks, or striving to communicate with G‑d in love and awe three times a day. And as far as the study of Torah is concerned, the Sages teach that it is superior to the performance of the commandments — because it leads to performance of the commandments.3 As to its own intrinsic quality, the Alter Rebbe explains in Tanya4 that when a person is engrossed in a Torah topic, his finite mortal mind utterly embraces the infinite Divine wisdom (and hence G‑d Himself) that is invested within the Torah, and at the same time his finite mind is utterly absorbed within that infinite Divine wisdom. The result is “a wondrous union; in the physical realm there is no union similar or parallel to it.”

To these and many other teachings on the benefits generated by regular Torah study, the above brief statement of the Rebbe Rayatz adds yet another perspective. The G‑dly light of the Torah not only shines within the soul of the person studying it: it also radiates outward, impacting his family and his home.