Everyone Will Have Dominion Over the Angels

"A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, it shall not go out."

The soul comes from the upper realms; the soul descended to this world to withstand tests. "The soul You gave me is pure..." The soul is higher than the angels; it was created before the angels. In the future to come, everyone will have dominion over the angels. The angels cannot ascend from level to level; rather, just as Hashem created them at the beginning of Creation, so they remain for all eternity. But a person, in order to ascend from level to level, needs to take all the lusts burning within him and transform them into flames of fire—"A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, it shall not go out"—into flames of fire for Hashem Yitbarach. For this purpose, the soul was created, and therefore it is greater than the angels. The Rebbe (Rebbe Nachman) says in Torah 158: "Several people recounted that they sometimes saw a fire burning from a distance, and they drew near to there, but there was nothing... Similarly, there are several people whose hearts sometimes burn for Hashem Yitbarach and they begin the service of Hashem Yitbarach, but after an hour it is nullified and they return to their previous state..." A person has enthusiasm, he has fire, but afterwards the enthusiasm fades. Why did the enthusiasm fly away from me? Why did the enthusiasm melt away? Why did it evaporate? I came with such innocence, enthusiasm, with such warmth, a fire and flame for Hashem—suddenly it disappeared from me, it was taken from me. I didn't sin, I didn't commit iniquity, I didn't transgress... Rebbe Nachman says: Because it was nothing! It was imagination; it isn't called enthusiasm at all! It is a good thing, a good point that there is enthusiasm, but nothing more than that. If a person wants to reach true enthusiasm, warmth of the heart in prayer, warmth of the heart in study—this is deep, deep work! Any enthusiasm a person has [without this] is just fleeting nonsense. It is good that a person gets enthusiastic; it is preferable to being a log of wood or a piece of stone. But it won't help him at all until he receives the internal enthusiasm—enthusiasm with *Da'at* (holy knowledge), enthusiasm with depth, with deep intellect. A person must know that he needs to reach deep internal enthusiasm, so that it will be "A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, it shall not go out"—a perpetual fire that will not cease. A person thinks he has enthusiasm, that's it, he will already be Moshe Rabbeinu; within a day he will see Elijah the Prophet... But if he knew that the enthusiasm would slowly fade and fly away, he would start to delve deeply. And this is what Rebbe Nachman says, that sometimes a person's heart burns for Hashem Yitbarach and he begins serving Hashem, he gets enthusiastic, happy, dances. Truly, there is reason to dance, there is reason to rejoice, there is reason to dance for 120 years ceaselessly. A person did *teshuvah* (repented), came from here, came from there, left all the idolatries... Baruch Hashem, certainly this is joy—"I rejoice over Your word like one who finds great spoil"—but how much can one dance? A day or two? If it is not a "perpetual fire," if it is not an internal fire, if he does not work on his character traits in depth, study Gemara in depth, if he does not work on "And you shall take it to heart," then nothing will help him. He is not making a hole in the heart, he is not making a place for the fire so the fire can catch hold of him, so he will have a perpetual fire. A person burns. What are you burning for? Is this a real burning? Is this a real burning from the depths of the heart? After all, this is a burning for a moment. You have boiling blood right now, stormy blood, so you burn for Hashem. Soon the blood will quiet down, the burning will end, and that's it. One burns for a month, one for a year, but after that... it ends. The Rebbe says in Torah 21 that the flame of the heart should rise on its own. How does one reach the flame of the heart? What ignites the heart? What lights up the heart? — What lights up the heart is only the intellect. What moves the heart is the movement of the intellect. A person thinks, understands the Gemara deeply, then the intellect moves and generates heat in the heart. If a person wants to have intellect so that the flame rises on its own, so he has fire in his heart, so he has a true burning—the first thing is that he must see to start studying Torah with all his strength, and to know that what Rebbe Nachman wants from us is only the intellect, because only the intellect will purify the heart. Only the intellect can bring us enthusiasm of the heart, to bring us purity to the heart! If there is no intellect, if there is no study in depth (*Iyun*), then a person gets enthusiastic for a day or two, and after that, he can fall into such downfalls—he won't know where these downfalls came from. So everything that comes to a person without Torah study, all these things, all these enthusiasms—they disappear immediately. Only when a person studies Torah and delves deeply will he truly merit true enthusiasm and merit "A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, it shall not go out."