Daily Tanya Sunday 21st Elul Igeres Hakodesh 15 Part 5: The source of the Midfos is ones intellect

21^st Elul

🧠 The Source of All Emotional Traits

• All emotional attributes originate from intellectual faculties: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.
• Wisdom is the source of the intellect that grasps God—His wisdom, greatness, and holy attributes through which He governs and sustains all higher and lower worlds.
• Understanding is the process of contemplating this awareness in depth—its length, breadth, and depth—deriving one concept from another.
• From this intellectual grasp, emotional responses are born:
  • Love and reverence,
  • Along with other traits that emerge within the divine soul as it reflects on God’s greatness, which is truly beyond comprehension.

😨 Levels of Reverence and Love

• There are different dimensions of Divine greatness that, when contemplated, evoke different emotional reactions:
  • One level brings about awe and fear—this is the lower reverence, associated with the attribute of sovereignty.
  • Another level evokes higher reverence—a sense of shame before God’s majesty.
  • Another leads to intense love.
  • And yet another gives rise to a more modest form of love.
• These reactions also apply to external traits like kindness and others.

🧩 The Role of Knowledge in Emotional Vitality

• All emotional traits must be infused with the faculty of knowledge, which represents the soul’s deep connection and attachment to the concept it has grasped.
• When the soul truly internalizes an aspect of God’s greatness, it gives rise to a corresponding emotional trait.
• If the soul loses focus—even momentarily—the emotional trait retreats from expression and becomes dormant, remaining only in potential.

🔗 Why Emotional Activation Is Called “Knowledge”

• This is why the union between intellect and emotion is referred to as “knowledge”—because it signifies connection and bonding.
• This is the lower level of knowledge, which extends into the emotional traits and enlivens them.

⚡ Higher Knowledge and Deep Insight

• There is also a higher level of knowledge, which represents a profound connection to the core of intellect that grasps the depth of a concept.
• It begins as a spark or flash of insight, which then expands downward into full understanding.
• This leads to a broadened explanation—length and breadth—which is the function of understanding, metaphorically called “the wide river,” as explained elsewhere.