Two Souls in One Body, and the Ordinary Person in Between

The Tanya, whose core section is titled Likkutei Amarim, Collected Sayings, is Shneur Zalman of Liadi's foundational text of Chabad Hasidism, first published in 1797, and its central teaching describes every person as animated by two souls in ongoing tension, a divine soul oriented entirely toward God and an animal soul oriented toward physical and self interested concerns, with the moral and spiritual life consisting in the ongoing struggle to bring the animal soul into alignment with the divine one. Rather than holding up the tzaddik, the fully righteous person in whom this struggle has essentially ceased, as the realistic goal for most readers, Shneur Zalman develops the category of the beinoni, the intermediate person who never stops feeling the pull of the animal soul but who nonetheless never allows it to govern actual thought, speech or deed, presenting this sustained, lifelong struggle rather than any final victory as the attainable and, in his account, spiritually adequate standard for an ordinary committed person. Shneur Zalman draws heavily on Lurianic Kabbalistic concepts to ground this account, translating what earlier Kabbalists had described in cosmic terms into a psychological framework meant to guide an individual's daily conduct rather than only describe the structure of the universe.