B'Chol Levavcha

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 138.

Yesterday I promised you a spelling mystery, so here it is.

Hebrew has a perfectly good word for heart: lev. Two letters. The Torah uses it constantly. So the verse should read b'chol libcha - with all your heart. Instead it says b'chol l'vavcha - levav, with the letter veis doubled. The Torah added a letter it didn't need, and in Torah, an extra letter is never decoration.

The Mishnah in Berachos catches it and gives the classic answer: b'chol l'vavcha - bishnei yitzrecha - with both your inclinations. With your yetzer tov and with your yetzer hara. The doubled letter means a doubled heart: love God with the good drive in you, and with the other drive in you.

Now hold on. Love God with your evil inclination? The part of you that wants the wrong things - the appetite, the ego, the ambition, the anger? How exactly does that love God?

Here's what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean sin with good intentions. The Torah isn't licensing anything. To understand what it does mean, you need one reframe: what we call the yetzer hara is not a defect bolted onto you. It's an engine.

There's a stunning Midrash on the verse in Bereishis, "and God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good." The Midrash asks: what's "very"? Good - that's creation. Very good? And it answers: zeh yetzer hara - that is the evil inclination. And before you fall off your chair, the Midrash explains: were it not for that drive, a person would never build a house, never marry, never have children, never engage in commerce. All the constructive energy of civilization - the wanting, the striving, the hunger to make something of yourself - runs on that engine. Unsteered, it wrecks lives. Steered, it builds the world. The Midrash's word for it isn't "bad." It's very.

Mishlei says the same thing in farmer's language: rav tevuos b'choach shor - an abundant harvest comes through the strength of the ox. The verse before notes that without an ox, the stall stays clean. Sure. No ox, no mess. Also no harvest. The strong, snorting, inconvenient animal is where the yield comes from.

So b'chol l'vavcha means: bring the ox. Don't come to love God with only your tidy, "spiritual" self - the self that likes candle-lighting and nice melodies - while your ambition, your competitiveness, your appetite all wait outside in the parking lot. That's half a heart, and the verse said all.

The Alter Rebbe builds the whole architecture of Tanya on this doubled heart. He describes two soul-forces in every person, literally at war over the same small territory - and the goal for most of us is not to kill the animal soul. You can't, and you shouldn't want to. The animal soul is the horsepower. The goal is who holds the reins. A beinoni, the Tanya's realistic hero, is not a person without an ox. He's a person whose ox is pulling the right wagon.

What does this look like on an ordinary Tuesday? Your competitiveness - the part of you that hates losing - aimed at your own davening: I was better than this last month, and I'm getting it back. Your appetite for pleasure - brought into Shabbos, which is precisely why Shabbos involves meat and wine and not a juice cleanse. Judaism almost never says "don't want." It says "want this." The drives don't get suppressed; they get redeployed.

Remember Day 82 - harofei lishvurei lev, God as the healer of broken hearts? We saw there that God does His work with hearts in less-than-perfect condition. Today is the same discovery from the other side. The verse doesn't ask for a purified heart, a unified heart, a heart that has finally resolved all its contradictions. It asks for the whole heart - both drives, as is, the mess included. The doubled letter is the Torah saying: I know exactly what's in there. Bring all of it.

Because here's the last thought. Half a heart is easy to give, and it's worth almost nothing - everyone has a polite, presentable fifty percent. The verse asks for the interesting half too. The love God wants is not the love of your best self. It's the love of your entire self, with the engine running.

Tomorrow: the second rung of the ladder - b'chol nafshecha, with all your soul - and the story of the man who waited his whole life to say it and mean it: Rabbi Akiva.