The three hundred fifty-second "cheder" in the palace of Hayom Yom.
Sunday, 16 Cheshvan 5704.
Shiurim: Chumash, Chayei Sarah, first parshah with Rashi's commentary.
Tehillim, the 16th of the month, we say from chapter 79 through chapter 82.
Tanya, on this day we begin a new letter, Iggeres 28, from the word "Lamah". The shiur concludes with the words "mateh minogah".
The present teaching is from a letter written by the Rebbe Rayatz on the second day of Chanukah 5701. A yeshivah student wrote to the Rebbe asking for advice: he has foreign and evil thoughts, and it pains him greatly, and in his words - it literally makes him ill. He asked that the Rebbe give him advice on how to deal with foreign thoughts.
The Rebbe Rayatz tells him: "Thought is the garment and servant of the intellect and the emotions". For thought is one of the three garments - thought, speech and action - and thought serves the intellect and the middos.
But there is a point that the Rebbe Rayatz makes there: there is a difference between a physical living thing and a spiritual faculty. A physical living thing, when it is active - it is active, and when it rests - it rests like an inert mass and does nothing. But a spiritual thing has no state of rest in which it does nothing; it is active all the time, and the only question is with what it is occupied.
And let us see how the Rebbe Rayatz illustrates this with thought. He says: since thought serves the intellect, therefore "at a time when it has no service to render to the intellect or to the middos" - when a person has no planned thinking, when he is not presently delving into an intellectual matter or contemplating a particular emotion, but is simply not occupied with anything - this does not mean that thought shuts down and stops working; that is not so.
"Even then it performs its function of thinking and musing" - thought is a spiritual faculty that never ceases, a person thinks all the time. But since the person is not focusing it on planned intellectual or emotional thought, what is it occupied with then? "But its activity is not only without content" - not only does it lack substance - "rather, it is also "wildly disgraceful"", the faculty of thought runs not only into meaningless thoughts, but on the contrary, also into forbidden and bad things, entirely unrestrained.
Further on, the Rebbe also gives him the advice. What is the advice? "And it is explained that the cause of foreign or evil thoughts is the emptiness in the head" the cause that brings about foreign or evil thoughts is when the head is empty; when there is nothing in the head that the person knows, the thoughts run off in all sorts of directions. "For when the intellect is occupied, then thought has something to serve, and there is no room for thoughts of folly and vanity that have no substance" but when the intellect is occupied with something, thought has something to serve, and there is no room for thoughts of folly and vanity that have no substance. Therefore the advice is that a person should fill his head with content.
In the letter, the Rebbe Rayatz turns to that student and tells him that a student who is a yerei Shamayim must be careful about whom he befriends, and not only whom he befriends but even whom he meets with. For if he meets with those who lack yiras Shamayim, he is influenced by them and drawn after them; and therefore this will guard him and protect him all the more, so that he will not have all sorts of ideas that have no connection to what a Jew ought to be thinking about.