The danger, Rabbi Schneur Zalman warns, is despair. A person might think: “My body is a vessel of coarseness. My thoughts wander to nonsense. My heart feels stone-cold during the Shema. God is infinite; I am finite and soiled. There is a qualitative gap I cannot bridge.”
He argues that the entire edifice of divine service—Torah study, mitzvot, meditation, even structured prayer—operates within the realm of “the revealed will of God.” This realm has rules, hierarchies, and gates. To enter, you must be ritually pure, focused, and intellectually sincere. Your prayers ascend through celestial chambers, angels, and sefirot.
The accusation is that Tanya 157 opens the door to —the belief that raw emotional experience overrides halakhic (legal) structure. Some early opponents even compared this to Christian doctrines of faith-alone salvation, or to antinomian Sabbatean heresies. tanya 157
But tears? Tears do not go through the gates.
At that exact moment of spiritual paralysis, the person should not suppress their frustration. Instead, they should direct it at themselves —but not in a guilt-ridden, self-hating way. They should feel a profound, wordless anguish: “I want to connect, but I cannot. I am trapped in this gross body. Even my ‘good’ thoughts are selfish. I have no entry.” The danger, Rabbi Schneur Zalman warns, is despair
In other words, you cannot pre-meditate tears. You cannot manufacture them. They are the spontaneous shattering of the ego when it realizes its helplessness within the structure of divine service. For a Lubavitcher Hasid, Tanya 157 is not just theory. It is performed. During the silent Amidah —the peak of Jewish prayer—Hasidim go through intense intellectual preparations (the hisbonenus ). They meditate on God’s greatness and their own nothingness.
Standard advice: Try harder. Or stop praying until you can focus. My heart feels stone-cold during the Shema
But when distractions inevitably arise, the Hasid is taught to have a “back pocket” Tanya 157. At the moment of frustration, they are to pause intellectual meditation and drop into a raw, internal cry: “Ribono shel Olam” (Master of the Universe) — not as a phrase, but as a broken sigh.