The Tanya's fifth chapter makes a claim about Torah study that is unlike anything else in Jewish literature. When you study a halachah (Jewish religious law)—a legal ruling—your mind wraps around the law and the law wraps around your mind. And since that law is the will and wisdom of God, what is actually happening is that your mind is wrapping around God's mind, and God's mind is wrapping around yours.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman calls this "a wonderful union, like which there is none other, and which has no parallel anywhere in the material world." He means it literally. When you understand a Talmudic ruling—say, a dispute between Reuben and Simeon over property—your intellect grasps God's own decision about that case. Even if the case never happened and never will happen, it is still God's will. And by comprehending it, you and God achieve complete unity "from every side and angle."
This is why the Tanya elevates Torah study above all other commandments. Prayer reaches upward. Charity reaches outward. But Torah study creates a reciprocal embrace. The prophet Elijah declared in the Tikkunei (spiritual repair) Zohar: "No thought can apprehend You." Human consciousness cannot grasp God. But when God's wisdom is clothed in Torah law, it becomes graspable. The Infinite contracts into a legal ruling about property disputes, and suddenly a finite human mind can hold infinity.
The Tanya emphasizes: this is not a metaphor. When you study Torah, the same divine wisdom that preceded creation and designed the universe is now literally inside your brain. Your neurons are firing with God's thoughts. No other mitzvah achieves this. Action involves the body. Speech involves the mouth. But Torah study involves the mind—the highest faculty—engaging directly with God's own intellectual content.
This, the Tanya says, is why the Torah calls itself "life." It is not a textbook about God. It is the medium through which God and the human soul become one.
Let us explain further and fully elucidate the expression tefisa (apprehension) in the words of Elijah, “No thought can apprehend You.”1 Tikkunei Zohar, Introduction 17a. Now, when an intellect conceives and comprehends a concept with its intellectual faculties, this intellect grasps the concept and encompasses it. This concept is [in turn] grasped, enveloped, and enclothed within that intellect which conceived and comprehended it. The mind, for its part, is also clothed in the concept at the time it comprehends and grasps it with the intellect.2 This point is demonstrated by the fact that when the mind is preoccupied with one thing, it cannot at the same time engage in another. For example, when a person understands and comprehends, fully and clearly, any halachah in the Mishnah or Gemara, his intellect grasps and encompasses it and, at the same time, is clothed in it. Consequently, as the particular halachah is the wisdom and will of G–d, for it was His will that when, for example, Reuben pleads in one way and Simeon in another, the verdict as between them shall be thus and thus; and even should such a litigation never have occurred, nor would it ever present itself for judgment in connection with such disputes and claims, nevertheless, since it has been the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed is He, that in the event of a person pleading this way and the other [litigant] pleading that way, the verdict shall be such and such—now therefore, when a person knows and comprehends with his intellect such a verdict in accordance with the law as it is set out in the Mishnah, Gemara, or Poskim (Codes), he has thus comprehended, grasped, and encompassed with his intellect the will and wisdom of the Holy One, blessed is He, Whom no thought can grasp, nor His will and wisdom, except when they are clothed in the laws that have been set out for us. [Simultaneously] the intellect is also clothed in them [the Divine will and wisdom]. This is a wonderful union, like which there is none other and which has no parallel anywhere in the material world, whereby complete oneness and unity, from every side and angle, could be attained. Hence the special superiority, infinitely great and wonderful, that is in the commandment of knowing the Torah and comprehending it, over all the commandments involving action, and even those relating to speech, and even the commandment to study the Torah,3 As distinct from knowledge of the Torah. which is fulfilled through speech. For, through all the commandments involving speech or action, the Holy One, blessed is He, clothes the soul and envelops it from head to foot with the Divine light. However, with regard to knowledge of the Torah, apart from the fact that the intellect is clothed in Divine wisdom, this Divine wisdom is also contained in it, to the extent that his intellect comprehends, grasps, and encompasses, as much as it is able so to do, of the knowledge of the Torah, every man according to his intellect, his knowledgeable capacity, and his comprehension in Pardes.4 Set ch. 4, note 4. Since, in the case of knowledge of the Torah, the Torah is clothed in the soul and intellect of a person and is absorbed in them, it is called “bread” and “food” of the soul. For just as physical bread nourishes the body as it is absorbed internally, in his very inner self, where it is transformed into blood and flesh of his flesh, whereby he lives and exists—so, too, it is with the knowledge of the Torah and its comprehension by the soul of the person who studies it well, with a concentration of his intellect, until the Torah is absorbed by his intellect and is united with it, and they become one. This becomes nourishment for the soul and its inner life from the Giver of life, the En Sof, blessed is He, Who is clothed in His wisdom and in His Torah that are [absorbed] in it [the soul]. This is the meaning of the verse, “And Your Torah is in my innards.”5 Psalms 40:9. It is also stated in Etz Chaim, Portal 44, ch. 3, that the “garments” of the soul in Gan Eden are the commandments while the Torah is the “food” for the souls which, during life on earth, had occupied themselves in the study of the Torah for its own sake. It is [similarly] written in the Zohar.6 II:210a ff. As for the meaning of “for its own sake,”7 See below, chs. 39, 40, and 41, for a further elaboration. We have here a departure from the conventional concepts of lishemah and shelo lishemah. it is [study with the intent] to attach one’s soul to G–d through the comprehension of the Torah, each one according to his intellect, as explained in Pri Etz Chaim. [The “food” [of the soul] is in the nature of “inner light,” while the “garments” are in the nature of “encompassing light.” Therefore our Rabbis, of blessed memory, have said, “The study of the Torah is equivalent to them all.”8 Mishnah, Peah 1:1. For the commandments are but “garments” whereas the Torah is both “food” as well as “garment”9 The “food” would correspond to the knowledge absorbed and “digested”; the “garment”—to that knowledge which is not thoroughly assimilated and remains external as it were, yet retaining the quality of the Divine precept, like all other religious acts which are conceived as “garments” of the soul. for the rational soul, in which a person is clothed during learning and concentration. All the more so when a person also articulates, by word of mouth; for the breath emitted in speaking [the words of the Torah] becomes something in the nature of an “encompassing light,” as is explained in Pri Etz Chaim.]
