At eleven o'clock, a person opens his phone for a few minutes. Later he looks up and discovers that it is one in the morning. He had a plan for his day. He cannot quite explain what happened to the last two hours.
This is one of the everyday meanings we can hear in mikreh laylah. Mikreh is an occurrence, something that happens. The expression has a particular meaning in Torah, an emission during the night. Alongside that meaning, we are exploring a wider problem: allowing the night to become a time in which things simply happen to us.
The rav presents Tikkun HaKlali as a gift especially needed by a generation struggling with the bris. He reads this struggle through the middah of Yesod and the tradition of Mashiach ben Yosef preceding Mashiach ben David. That is his spiritual framework for the generation's work, not a date or prediction supplied by this explanation.
Tikkun HaKlali brings words of counsel, prayer and song into that darkness. Likutey Moharan II:92 gives ten verses through which to understand its ten forms of song. We will be able to follow the verses more clearly if we first understand what this darkness can mean in a person's life.
When the evening loses its boundaries
Night can be productive. Some people learn or work well late at night. There is also a proper need to rest and unwind after a long day. The question is whether we are choosing what to do with the time.
A person can decide to read a book and relax for a particular amount of time. That is different from sitting down without any direction and finding himself somewhere he never intended to go. The rav speaks more strongly than a warning about a few unsuitable items: he calls the internet setting itself a place of darkness, even when an item being viewed is appropriate. He also says he has not used YouTube for many years. We are hearing his judgment about the pull of the medium, rather than a verified description of everything currently available there.
The practical danger he describes increases when a person is tired, alone and moving from one thing to another on a screen. Even when a particular item is permissible, the loss of time and attention still matters.
The bris is connected with a person's creative potential. Its misuse is therefore also used here as an image for wasting powers that could have become something good. This wider application is an avodah comparison; it does not make every unproductive hour the same halachic act as wasting seed.
Once a person recognizes that his evening has stopped being productive, going to sleep can itself be a constructive choice. He does not have to keep following the next suggestion on the screen. A boundary now leaves him with a different morning.
There is a story of a man who called his rebbe late at night. His wife was asleep, he was sitting at a computer, and he felt close to failing. He trusted the relationship enough to ask for help before the failure.
The answer was to close the computer and leave that setting. Go to the beis medrash. Sit there, look at the sefarim and the Aron Kodesh, and direct the eyes toward holy things. In that particular moment, merely trying to go to sleep in the same place would leave him in the struggle. Changing his surroundings would help him recover his footing.
The story gives a very practical meaning to leaving the place of darkness. A person can ask for help, move away from what is drawing him in, and place something different before his eyes. He does not have to wait until he has already fallen.
The crumbs still matter
The rav describes his Shabbos practice of gathering the crumbs from the table and giving his children spoonfuls of them. They enjoy it. A question can arise from that small practice: why are we careful with something that seems so insignificant?
Chazal warn against treating bread carelessly. Likutey Moharan 11:4 quotes the Zohar's comparison between crumbs of bread and “crumbs of the mind.” If food deserves respect, how much more should a person value the powers that come from his mind and his capacity to create.
That image brings the discussion into the parts of the day we tend to dismiss. “It was only an hour. It was only a little attention.” The small pieces still belong to our life. The comparison is a call to care for them, rather than a way to diagnose someone else's poverty or misfortune.
This also explains the need to distinguish rest from drifting. Rest has a place in a life with purpose. Drifting leaves a person with the feeling that he did not choose where he went or how long he stayed there. In that sense, the night has become mikreh: events carrying him along.
The Torah's expression is:
כִּֽי־יִהְיֶה בְךָ אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יִהְיֶה טָהוֹר מִקְּרֵה־לָיְלָה וְיָצָא אֶל־מִחוּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶה לֹא יָבֹא אֶל־תּוֹךְ הַֽמַּחֲנֶֽה׃
If there is among you a man who is not pure because of an occurrence at night, he shall go outside the camp; he shall not enter the camp. (Devarim 23:11)
Parparaos LeChochmah, II 92:2, brings the expression into a discussion of night and the opposing spiritual force associated with it. Night here can mean more than a time on the clock. Confusion, dejection and the inability to see where one is going can make the middle of the day feel dark too.
The related image in Shir HaShirim is of being prepared against danger:
כֻּלָּם אֲחֻזֵי חֶרֶב מְלֻמְּדֵי מִלְחָמָה אִישׁ חַרְבּוֹ עַל־יְרֵכוֹ מִפַּחַד בַּלֵּילֽוֹת׃
All of them hold a sword and are trained in war; each has his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the nights. (Shir HaShirim 3:8)
The spiritual reading connects the image of guarding with the struggle that becomes strong at night. Its practical question is how to enter that time with direction, rather than with no plan at all.
Counsel that helps something good come into being
The first expression of song is berachah, blessing. Rebbe Nachman brings this verse:
אֲבָרֵךְ אֶת־ה׳ אֲשֶׁר יְעָצָנִי אַף־לֵילוֹת יִסְּרוּנִי כִלְיוֹתָֽי׃
I bless Hashem, Who has counseled me; even at night my innermost thoughts instruct me. (Tehillim 16:7)
Blessing and night appear together. There can be counsel even in the time when a person is unsure what to do.
Parparaos LeChochmah connects this with Likutey Moharan 7:3. Receiving counsel from a tzaddik is a form of drawing close to him. The connection is expressed in walking in his advice. A person receives an understanding that helps shape what he will make of his own life.
The comparison there is to marriage. One side gives, another receives, and something can be brought into being through the relationship. A person asks for advice because he wants to create a business, buy a home or know how to approach marriage. The counsel enters his thinking and becomes part of what he builds. Its source therefore matters.
The Torah describes Chavah's response after eating from the tree:
וַיֹּאמֶר ה׳ אלוקים לָאִשָּׁה מַה־זֹּאת עָשִׂית וַתֹּאמֶר הָֽאִשָּׁה הַנָּחָשׁ הִשִּׁיאַנִי וָאֹכֵֽל׃
Hashem Elokim said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Bereishis 3:13)
The plain meaning of hishiani is that the serpent deceived her. Likutey Moharan 7:3 also reads the word alongside nisuin, marriage. Harmful advice is understood as a union that brings the wrong influence into what a person creates. The account of the serpent's impurity, and its cessation at Sinai, belongs to this spiritual reading. At Sinai, the 613 mitzvos are described as holy counsels, a relationship through which life can be built in kedushah.
The same language can describe a good relationship with a tzaddik. His advice gives a person something true with which to create. The first berachah verse can therefore be heard very personally: Hashem has given me counsel, and I can receive it even when I am in the darkness of night.
Understanding, song and memory
Ashrei and Maskil bring us back to two expressions already explained in Likutey Moharan 205:
לְדָוִד מַשְׂכִּיל אַשְׁרֵי נְֽשׂוּי־פֶּשַׁע כְּסוּי חֲטָאָֽה׃
Of David, a maskil: Fortunate is one whose transgression is lifted, whose sin is covered. (Tehillim 32:1)
Ashrei was connected with the repair of sight: seeing beyond the surface and learning to recognize the kedushah within what he sees. Here that word stands with the lifting and covering of sin. It gives us language for the possibility of repair.
For Maskil, Rebbe Nachman brings a verse from Mishlei:
בַּיִת וָהוֹן נַחֲלַת אָבוֹת וּמֵה׳ אִשָּׁה מַשְׂכָּֽלֶת׃
A house and wealth are an inheritance from fathers, but a discerning wife is from Hashem. (Mishlei 19:14)
The ordinary meaning is the gift of a discerning wife. The word maskeles also brings us back to the earlier discussion of Maskil, Targum and the mixed area of good and evil. Understanding helps a person draw what is good toward holiness, rather than allowing the mixture to draw him down.
Shir, song, appears with night very directly:
יוֹמָם ׀ יְצַוֶּה ה׳ ׀ חַסְדּוֹ וּבַלַּיְלָה שִׁירֹה עִמִּי תְּפִלָּה לְא־ל חַיָּֽי׃
By day Hashem commands His kindness, and at night His song is with me, a prayer to the Kel of my life. (Tehillim 42:9)
The night is still there, but song is there too. A person can have words and a niggun with which to turn toward Hashem in the very time of his struggle.
Niggun, melody, appears in the verse:
אֶזְכְּרָה נְגִינָתִי בַּלָּיְלָה עִם־לְבָבִי אָשִׂיחָה וַיְחַפֵּשׂ רוּחִֽי׃
I recall my melody at night; I speak with my heart, and my spirit searches. (Tehillim 77:7)
Again the verse joins melody and night. It also joins song with inner conversation and searching. The night need not be a place where the mind is simply pulled from one thing to another.
Mizmor is connected with another expression of song, zemiros:
וְֽלֹא־אָמַר אַיֵּה אלוק עֹשָׂי נֹתֵן זְמִרוֹת בַּלָּֽיְלָה׃
No one says, “Where is Hashem, my Maker, Who gives songs in the night?” (Iyov 35:10)
Parparaos LeChochmah notes the joining of zemiros with night. Across these verses, the recurring point becomes clear. Counsel, song, melody and prayer can all be present where darkness had seemed to leave a person alone.