A person has been trying to change, and then he falls again. The failure hurts. Something else can follow it: the thought that all the work was meaningless, that he has proved what kind of person he really is, and that there is no reason to try tomorrow.
That second movement can be more damaging than he realizes. He began with a particular failure. He ends by giving up on the possibility of serving Hashem. The next opportunity arrives, and he no longer believes that his response could matter.
This is why simcha has become central to our learning about Tikkun HaKlali. We need the strength to use our kochos properly before a failure, and we need the strength to begin again afterward. A feeling of being useless can weaken both. Simcha helps a person recognize that he still has something to do, and that Hashem still values his doing it. The rav extends this to using our creative powers productively and guarding our time. Those are applications of the avodah of bris; wasting a moment is not thereby being given the halachic classification of a prohibited physical act.
We have also been using the expression asarah minei neginah, ten forms of song. Tehillim contains requests and prayers, but Rebbe Nachman draws our attention to its song. Song has movement: lower notes and higher notes, descent and ascent. Reb Noson's discussion in Likutey Halachos, Hilchos Piryah VeRivyah 3, will bring these connections together. For now, we are learning why a person needs the joy and strength that song can awaken. This does not require us to decide that the chapters must always be sung aloud; their character as song matters even when a person recites them.
The rav recalls attending shiurim in Eretz Yisrael in which a teacher would spend two-and-a-half hours unfolding a line or two of Likutey Moharan, drawing connections across Torah. The teacher's name remains unclear in the recording. From him, the rav remembers an association involving the final letters of eitz hadaas tov vara, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil:
וַיַּצְמַח ה׳ אלוקים מִן־הָאֲדָמָה כׇּל־עֵץ נֶחְמָד לְמַרְאֶה וְטוֹב לְמַאֲכָל וְעֵץ הַֽחַיִּים בְּתוֹךְ הַגָּן וְעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָֽע׃
Hashem Elokim caused every tree that was pleasant to see and good to eat to grow from the ground, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Bereishis 2:9)
Those final letters can be rearranged to spell atzvus in a spelling without the vav. The rav joins this with Chazal's account of the serpent's desire for Chavah. Sotah 9b:1–2 describes its intention to kill Adam and marry her; Shabbos 146a:1 speaks of its introducing zuhama, spiritual impurity. These are the aggadic teachings behind his connection with desire and pegam habris. The final-letter derash then associates the fall through desire with the dejection that can follow it. A person feels worthless, falls, then uses the fall as further proof that he is worthless. Part of the work is to interrupt that circle.
Following the connections in Torah
Before opening the next teaching, the rav describes why he looks forward to Reb Noson's treatment in Likutey Halachos,Hilchos Piryah VeRivyah 3. A short passage of Likutey Moharan becomes the basis for a lengthy discussion, weaving together joy, song, converts, family lineage, kohanim, Leviim, Yisrael, marriage and kedushas habris. He is announcing that connected study; he has not yet explained all those subjects. One sentence in the recording about who may marry whom is unclear, so it cannot supply a halachic rule here.
He compares this kind of learning with entering a palace. A room opens into another room, and each discovery reveals further doors. Chayei Moharan 594 actually records Rebbe Nachman using that image when speaking to Reb Noson about his teachings: rooms, passages, upper stories, doors and windows connected in an intricate whole. The rav describes his own experience of Likutey Halachos through that image.
He also reports a saying contrasting the Shelah's book bringing a person to the entrance of Gan Eden with Reb Noson's bringing him inside. Taam Zkeinim 105, page 9, documents a received version from R Levi Yitzchak Bender, with the Shelah described as an estate rather than an entrance. The original wording from Reb Noson's own writing has not been located. The saying expresses how deeply Reb Noson's explanations can draw a learner into avodas Hashem; it does not replace learning the explanations themselves.
The rav gives a story he heard from a visitor collecting in the community. The man, who said he had become involved in Breslov some five or seven years earlier, was learning Hilchos Pesach in Likutey Halachos with a bachur on Erev Pesach. Each time they reached a stopping point, they wanted one more paragraph. Their phones kept buzzing: the man's wife and the bachur's mother needed them home. In his telling, they continued for three hours because they found it so hard to stop.
The rav connects that attraction with the Breslov expression bitul habechirah about learning Likutey Halachos. Here it conveys being absorbed in the learning, not a literal loss of free choice or permission to neglect family responsibilities. His enthusiasm prepares us to follow the argument carefully, beyond a familiar slogan about happiness. He mentions another visiting speaker who had spoken about simcha that week; the name is unclear, and no identity needs to be invented to explain the teaching.
The strength to open the toolbox
The Baal HaTanya begins chapter 26 with a physical example. Two people are wrestling. One may be stronger than the other, but if he enters the struggle with heaviness and sluggishness, the weaker person can defeat him. Strength that a person cannot bring into use will not win the contest.
The same applies to the struggle with the yetzer hara. The Tanya says that one cannot defeat it through the sluggishness and heaviness that come from atzvus and a heart closed like stone. Zerizus comes from simcha and an open heart. The rav connects that heaviness with the element of earth, as described earlier in Tanya 1: it pulls a person down until he cannot bring his strength into action.
A coach therefore has more to do than explain technique. He also has to help the athlete believe that he can enter the contest and use what he has learned. The huddle before a game gives a simple picture of people gathering their confidence and energy. The rav observes that this can also explain the inflated ego found in sports and entertainment: people are constantly being told that they can win. His application to avodah is confidence in using the kochos Hashem has given us.
We might have a whole toolbox of eitzos. We have learned mussar and Chassidus, heard practical advice, and understood what we ought to do. Yet if we have accepted the thought that we are incapable of doing anything good, the toolbox stays closed. We cannot make use of the very things that could help us.
Simcha belongs at that beginning. It helps a person say: I can respond to this nisayon. The rav describes the yetzer hara as a malach sent to test me: it has a task, and I have been given the ability to resist it. That thought helps me stop treating the opponent as invincible. I do not need to decide that every future struggle will be easy before taking the step in front of me.
R Chaim Vital describes the danger in Shaarei KedushahII 4. Atzvus can obstruct avodah and mitzvos, interrupt learning, and weaken concentration in tefillah. It becomes an entrance through which the yetzer hara gains influence. His next point is especially relevant: the discouragement can arrive dressed as piety. The rav pictures the yetzer hara looking like a great tzaddik, with a long white beard and white clothing. Likutey Moharan 1 does describe it clothing itself in mitzvos; the detailed costume is the rav's image. It tells a person that someone as lowly as he is could never approach holiness.
That voice can sound convincing precisely because it talks about avodas Hashem. It says that my learning is inadequate, that my shemiras einayim is inadequate, and that I will never become a great talmid chacham. Even a biography of a gadol can be used that way. Instead of learning something that could help me, I conclude that I will never be that person and lose the strength to do my own work.
The question is what this reckoning is producing. Does it lead to a clearer obligation and a useful next step? Or does it leave me unable to daven, learn or keep the next mitzvah?
Regret needs a proper place
The Tanya does not remove charatah from avodas Hashem. Chapter 26 explicitly gives it a suitable time, with yishuv hadaas. At that time, a person can examine his actions honestly, regret what needs regret, and turn back toward Hashem. Afterward, he is to believe in forgiveness and return to serving with joy.
What he should resist is a stream of accusation that interrupts every other part of the day. It may appear while he is learning, davening, working or trying to do something useful. The accusation claims to be helping him improve, while preventing the avodah that is available now.
One answer is: I will deal with this at the time set aside for it. I am not refusing to take responsibility. I am refusing to let this reckoning cancel the work of the present moment.
The shiur mentions difficulties in ordinary life alongside spiritual failures: money, marriage, children, and the painful experience of not finding a suitable school for a child. The Tanya discusses both kinds of distress. The present point is that heaviness can obstruct a person's ability to respond in either area. The fuller discussion of how to work with each kind of difficulty belongs to the following learning.
The rav connects this with moach shalit al halev, the mind's capacity to direct the heart. He compares the sefarim enthusiastically with contemporary therapeutic language: IFS, with its discussion of parts of the self, and what he thinks is called DBT. He speaks as though modern psychology is only beginning to articulate ideas already present in these teachings, while explicitly saying he knows little about IFS. Those are his comparisons and his evaluation, not a verified history of psychology or a claim that a Torah passage is identical to a clinical method. The point he is developing here is the capacity to direct thought without simply being carried along by an emotion.
“My beloved brother”
Likutey Moharan II:48 speaks to a person who is trying to enter avodas Hashem and feels that he is being kept outside. Days or years have passed. He has asked for help and made efforts, but his thoughts and habits still seem so physical and confused. He starts to think that Hashem does not want his avodah.
Rebbe Nachman tells him not to accept that conclusion. The passage says that all this apparent distancing is really a drawing closer. It adds that the tzaddikim themselves passed through such experiences; had they not strengthened themselves, they would have remained where they began. This is the teaching's encouragement to the person entering avodah, not an explanation imposed on every particular experience of suffering. He then addresses him with the words, “My beloved brother.”
We should pause over that way of speaking. The person is being addressed in the middle of his struggle, before he has produced the clean record he wishes he had. Rebbe Nachman calls him a beloved brother and tells him to strengthen himself and remain in his avodah.
Then he gives an answer to the long list of accusations. Suppose the yetzer hara knows my history and can point to real failures. I cannot simply answer that none of it happened. Rebbe Nachman's answer begins with im kol zeh: with all of that.
With all of that, I need to know the value of the movement I can make now. Precisely because a person is so weighed down by gashmiyus, every little movement away from it and toward Hashem is very great and precious. The teaching describes that tiny movement as running thousands upon thousands of parsaos in the higher worlds. This is its spiritual description of the act's significance, not a measurement of distance traveled by the physical body.
The past therefore does not prove that the next step is worthless. It helps us understand why that step may be so difficult, and why making it can be so precious.
Think of the examples in the shiur. I was about to let my thoughts drift through the rest of davening, and I brought them back for one more moment. I wanted to get up from learning, and I remained for another short stretch. I reached for my phone during davening, and held myself back. These are small acts. They are also actual responses to the struggle I am facing.
I can be happy about that response without pretending that all my other difficulties have disappeared. The happiness gives me strength to respond again.