The second chapter of the Tanya makes a claim so audacious it takes your breath away: the soul of every Jew is "truly a part of God above."
Rabbi Schneur Zalman does not mean this metaphorically. He cites (Job 31:2) and the morning liturgy—"the soul which You breathed into me is pure"—and then invokes the Zohar's principle: "He who blows, blows from within himself." When God breathed the neshamah (נשמה), the divine soul, into the first human being (Genesis 2:7), that breath came from God's own innermost essence. Not from God's power, not from God's creativity, but from the deepest interiority of the Infinite.
The analogy is precise. A parent's child comes from the parent's brain, the Tanya says. So the soul comes from God's own wisdom. And since God's wisdom is not separate from God—"He is wise, but not through a knowable wisdom," as the Tikkun (spiritual repair)ei Zohar states—the soul is not separate from God either. It is God, experiencing existence from inside a human body.
The Tanya then grounds this in Lurianic Kabbalah. The soul descends through a process of tzimtzum (צמצום), divine contraction—countless stages of concealment within the sefirot (ספירות), the divine attributes, passing through the four worlds of Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), and Asiyah (Action). Each stage dims the soul's light further, like sunlight passing through increasingly thick glass. But the source remains unchanged. The soul in your body right now is made of the same substance as the Ein Sof (אין סוף), the Infinite—only hidden behind layers of concealment.
This idea has radical implications. If the soul is literally part of God, then every act of sin is a form of self-exile. And every act of return—teshuvah (repentance)—is not about earning God's favor. It is about remembering what you already are.