When a person finds himself with Timtum HaLeiv (a dullness in his heart) and he finds it hard to involve himself in the service of the heart (i.e. prayer), the Alter Rebbe tells us that he needs to break his animal soul. He uses the example of the Zohar that with a beam that does not catch alight, we must break the beam up into smaller pieces so that the fire will begin to catch on it. So too we do the same to our souls. We must break the part of ourselves that prevents the light (of Hashem – our Godly souls) from penetrating through.
One who finds themselves in such a situation should realise that all this is a sign that up until now their Teshuva (repentance) has not yet been accepted by God. If it were accepted, the person would already be serving God with much energy and not have to deal with this dullness causing him to lack this energy. He must then alert himself to the importance of the repentance that he must do in order to come close to God. Alternatively it could also be that there is nothing wrong with his Teshuva – but that God wants to raise him to an even higher level, and so “holds back” so to speak, making the person put in more effort into his Teshuva, in order to reach a higher closeness to God than was previously possible.
The Alter Rebbe then gives us another way of dealing with the issue. We should become like the Masters of Accounting (as the Zohar tells us) whereby we should look at all our thoughts, speech and deeds that we have done since we were born. We do this to see which of these were not done exclusively for God, but perhaps for our own selfishness. Here too, we are not serving God completely, and it is this that needs to be atoned for, and worked upon, so that our Teshuva will be totally accepted.
When we engage these garments of our soul for the pure things of life, then we become a merkava (chariot) for all the Palaces above to infuse us with holiness. When we engage these garments of the soul for the impure things of life, then we become merkava (chariot) for the impure Palaces thus allowing ourselves to channel further impurity into everything we do. This is what we need to think about…
We should also consider our dreams and how for the almost always, they are filled with vanity and of little worth. In fact, our sleep reveals to us just how close we are becoming to God. This is a time when the soul should be ascending on high to hear the secrets of Torah and more. But for the most part, we dream dreams of an inconsequential nature. This points to where we are really at. The forces above have the ability to show us these images and even worse – just to laugh at us. They do that because we have not purified ourselves sufficiently.
Therefore all this is here to show us that there is much work we need to do in order to come close to God. We must break through this animal soul that prevents us from experiencing the fire that catches the soul so that we can experience Godliness. The dullness of our hearts is really just a sign of how much effort we must still do in order to come closer to God. Then, those feelings of dullness will disappear as feelings of delight in God will become apparent.
