Mind and Heart

The will to receive is expressed in mind and in heart. By correcting it to work in order to bestow, a person can receive the upper abundance.

Let us explain the will to receive in the heart. The heart is called “desire and yearning for pleasures.” Hence, if a person can correct his actions in a manner that he can relinquish all the pleasures in the world if he sees that it will not yield any benefit to the glory of the Creator, he is rewarded with receiving real pleasures because now their reception will not be for his own benefit.

By intimation, this is implied in the verse, “And he looked this way and that, and saw there was no person, and he struck the Egyptian.” RASHI interprets that he saw that nothing good would come out of his offspring, meaning that he saw that from this Egyptian, meaning from this act, there will be no benefit.

“He struck the Egyptian,” not letting him satisfy his will and rejecting his request. This is called “putting to death the act and the thought of that Egyptian,” who is included in his heart. Also, the pleasure of the mind is only in doing what he understands what he is doing. To the extent that he does things against his reason, when his reason demands otherwise, his suffering is measured by the measure of resistance to his mind.

When a person goes above his mind, when he is given the mind that approves of all his work, he will be able to say that he is receiving all this in order to bestow, since for his part, he can relinquish the mind.

At that time, he can be rewarded with the light of faith, for he can relinquish because his aim is not for himself. The proof of this is that he does everything even if it is against the intellect. Naturally, he is able to receive the light of faith and can be certain that his aim is to bestow.

But when he cannot work in faith, but only where the mind approves, meaning according to the will to receive, he remains inside the Tzimtzum [restriction]. For this reason, we need two works: mind and heart.