First, a few words about my connection with Chabad.
Some of the story is a bit hazy. I started my journey to become religious when I was 14 or 15, around 1977. I don’t recall knowing anything about Chabad and Chabad Chassidus until I came to Israel in 1979. It was easy to notice young men in their distinctive clothing going around asking men to put on tefillin and doing all sorts of good deeds with lots of spirit. I appreciated their energy but I really had nothing to do with them which I think is because they seemed so different from what I knew.
It was only when I went to Yeshiva University that I actually began to develop a relationship with Lubavitchers. There was one married friend, Joel, who hosted me for Shabbat dinners and that gave me an opportunity to hear about Chassidus. With time, he convinced me to go with him to farbrengans at 770 during the week. I don’t recall how many times I went but I definitely recall how deep the impression they made on me. The Rebbe OBM was as amazing as people say. He was otherworldly in his bearing and in the way that he made eye contact with me when he urged me to make a l’chaim.
I’m not sure why I didn’t deepen my connection to Chabad. Perhaps I was influenced by the super-rationalist atmosphere at Yeshiva Univeristy. My ‘brisker’ roshay yeshiva looked down at the whole enterprise of Hassidus as a deviation from what they thought was the truth. But I think that the main barrier was my desire to maintain loyalty to my parents’ ideas of outward appearance. The garb and what I perceived as the cliquiness of Chabad was too much for me and them to handle.
So I remained a curious observer-outsider which I remain to this day despite the fact that it’s become almost impossible to avoid Chabad in the years since the Rebbe started his enormous outreach project. I daven at a Chabad shul pretty much because I like the ambience there. I have deep friendships with Chabadnikim, who all hover at the outer edges of being mishichist. The die hard evangelists mostly leave me alone because I think that I’ve made it clear enough that I’m interested in what they’re ‘selling’. That being said, I have tremendous gratitude and admiration to the Rebbe and to his chassidim.
Now about how I got started with Tanya.
The truth is that I don’t recall the catalyst. Perhaps it was my frequent visits to the Chabad.org website to listen to classes or to use the wealth of information they have posted there. Or it was during a visit to my home town where I would daven and study in the local Beit Chabad and one of the classes intrigued me enough to follow the daily Tanya study plan instituted by the Rayaatz, R’ Yosef Yitzhak Schneerson, the father in law of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, OBM.
To be honest, most of the early years’ study was superficial. The English explanations of Tanya were helpful and confusing at the same time. Sometimes I would listen or watch the video classes given by R Manis Friedman and I almost always felt that I was walking into the middle of movie and had no idea what I was flying. With time though, themes became clearer. I found diagrams of Kabbalistic terms that made the text of Tanya more comprehensible.
Then towards the end of Corona, a Beit Chabad opened up next to my apartment. The head shaliach there is a unique Chabadnik. For now, I’ll leave his name out of it. He’s a baal teshuva of many years who not only did significant army service, he got a couple of advanced degrees from Tel Aviv University. He wasn’t intimidated by my expectation of intellectual honesty and my distaste for neurosis and delusion dressed in religious clothing. Best of all, he agreed to study Tanya with me. So every morning for a year we worked through the text, with him explaining the concepts that were beyond me and me sharing how various schools of psychology and philosophy would relate to the ideas of Tanya.
For me, my study of Tanya has shifted how I think about many of the central ideas in psychotherapy and in human life. After so many years of questioning my own self worth and chasing my own tail seeking an unattainable state of perfection, the Baal HaTanya settles the question: I am worth it. I am literally a part of God. And so are you. And so is everyone else. He makes a compelling case for great optimism about all of us. He also reveals a world of Godliness that I would never have known about.
What Tanya does is to expand my universe and through that expansion Tanya gives me more ‘room’ and ‘depth’ to understand myself and my place in the world. An example comes to mind. My training in cognitive therapy sensitized me to how I and my clients cognitively construct the world and their place in it. So if a client displays avoidant behavior such as avoiding enjoyable activities, the likely culprit is distorted thinking that leaves then concluding that the activity is much harder in their minds than it is in reality. The remedy is through cognitive disputation through which the imagined difficulty is dismantled and the task made easier.
Tanya doesn’t replace this conceptualization or try to replace it. What Tanya however does do is to expand the why of the depression and the opportunity in it’s remedy. In the philosophy of Tanya, man or woman, with all of their struggles, is the star (so to speak) of the Divine drama of infusing Godliness into the world, especially the areas of resistance. Depression and the avoidance which it brings is the ‘space’ for the person to bring Godliness into. When the individual is able to push back the depression through perhaps going for a walk or hanging out with friends then Godliness dispels more of the darkness. In a sense, from the perspective of Tanya, our task is to tame the darkness in our souls.