Kabbalah for Everyone Lesson 3: Sechel & Middot - When the Mind and Heart Learn to Work Together

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In Lesson 3 of Kabbalah for Everyone, Rabbi Yisroel Bernath explores one of the most practical ideas in Kabbalah: the relationship between Sechel and Middot — the mind and the emotions.

We all know the struggle. Sometimes our mind knows the right thing, but our heart is not interested in attending the meeting. Other times, our emotions are so strong that our mind becomes the intern in the back of the room taking notes. Kabbalah teaches that healthy living is not about shutting down emotion, and it is not about letting feelings run the show. The goal is Middot Al Pi Sechel, emotions guided by wisdom. In this class, we’ll learn how intellect can give direction to emotion, how emotion can give warmth and life to intellect, and how real spiritual maturity happens when the mind and heart stop fighting and start becoming partners. Based on the chapter “Sechel and Middos: Intellect and Emotions.”

Key Takeaways
1. Sechel means the mind: Sechel is our ability to think clearly, step back, analyze, and ask: What is true? What is right? What is really happening here?
2. Middot means the heart: Middot are our emotions and character traits — love, fear, anger, compassion, desire, excitement, frustration, and kindness.
3. The mind alone can become cold: A person can understand something intellectually and still not be moved by it. Knowing the truth is important, but it has to become alive in the heart.
4. Emotions alone can become messy: Feelings are powerful, but without guidance they can go too far. Even love can become unhealthy when it has no boundaries.
5. Kabbalah wants partnership, not domination: The goal is not for the mind to crush the heart or for the heart to hijack the mind. The goal is for the mind to guide the heart, and the heart to energize the mind.
6. Real love is not always giving someone what they want: Sometimes love says yes. Sometimes love says no. The parent taking a dangerous object away from a child is not being cruel; that is love guided by wisdom.
7. Avraham’s kindness was not wild kindness: Avraham Avinu embodied chesed, but his kindness was guided by truth and purpose. That is the model of healthy emotion: warm, powerful, and directed.
8. Emotional maturity means pausing before reacting: Before we act from a feeling, we ask: Is this feeling true? Is it proportionate? Is it helping me become the person Hashem wants me to be?

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Rabbi Yisroel Bernath's New Book The Forgiveness Experiment is Available now:

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Forgiveness-Experiment-What-Would-Your/dp/1069217638

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FR2QNJL6

Audiobook: https://bit.ly/4tPFZhV

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:41

It's a beautiful day. It's a beautiful day. Today we're going to continue a conversation that we've been having for the past few weeks. This is lesson three of Kabbalah for everyone, and we're going to focus this lesson on the mind and the heart. I want to begin with what I think is a very deep and mystical question. Have you ever known exactly what the right thing was and still done the wrong thing with great confidence? Like, you know you should not have sent that text. And your mind knows it already gave you an entire TED talk of why you should not have done whatever it is that you did. And your emotions, your heart, drafted the text, added the punctuation, and hit send. Or you know that the cake at eleven thirty at night is probably not part of your highest spiritual calling. But but somehow the cake has a different theology. Today I want to focus our class on this inner civil war. It's not just a fight between good and evil. A lot of people think that. It's a fight between what I know and what I feel, between the mind and the heart. In Kabbalah we call it Sechel. The mind is called Sechel, S-E-C-H-E-L, Sechel, and the heart is called Midot, M-I-D-D-O-T. Sechel and Midot. Kabbalah does not say that we are to become a robot. The Industrial Revolution kind of created this group think, and a lot of the conversation here is about what I think is so important about independent thinking. It doesn't say that you should become a drama factory with a Jewish library. Our job in this world is to learn how the mind and the heart are meant to work together. Last week or the past two weeks, we've been talking about the Kabbalistic philosophy of how to understand ideas and the world. Now we're going to go a step further. We're going to start talking about who is this person and how is it possible that a mind and a heart can work together. So I want to just do a quick review so you know where we're holding. You don't need to hear the other classes before this to appreciate this, but obviously it is part of a sequence and it will be easier for you if you do. In lesson one and two, we spoke about these ideas called how basha and havshatta, how a deep idea gets clothed so a human being can understand it, and how we sometimes have to strip away the outer layers to find the essence. That was the question of truth and expression. Today I want to ask a new question. The question kind of begins with that we now know the truth has been explained. We now have created the analogy, we created the image, we created the story, we stripped away that image and story. The concept is clear. Like now what? Does it stay in your head as a lovely idea? We now understand. We have a clarity on it. Does it become a real inner movement? Does it reach the heart? Does it shape behavior? This is why I'm bringing the concept of Sechel and Mido here. In a certain sense, this is the next stage of the Kabbalistic learning process. An idea can be beautifully clothed, and it can still never change you. It's nice. I go somewhere, I give a nice talk. People are like, that's so nice. It's so inspirational. Yay! Sometimes I walk in somewhere and I say, okay, so uh what do you want me to talk about? And they're like, I don't know what's the topic. Whatever you're supposed to talk about. So okay, basically, if there were curtains here, we just have to pull aside the curtain and say, Here's your next rabbi. Entertain me. So they have beautiful ideas. That was a beautiful sermon, Rabbi. But did it change me? Did it affect my heart? Did it make a difference? An essence can be uncovered, and it can still never warm my heart. So the question now becomes can truth become emotionally alive? That's today. So what I'm gonna do is start piecing apart these two ideas. We're gonna have to kind of go through it step by step. Hopefully, we'll be able to get through it all. I want to define the terms simply. Sechel means intellect. I know somehow intellect often kind of is IQ. We're not talking about IQ. We're talking about the faculty that analyzes, that distinguishes, that interprets, that asks questions like what's true, what matters, what's wise, what's real. Critical, real critical thinking. Midot means the emotional qualities or the emotional character traits like love or fear or compassion or anger or joy discipline. Not only fleeting feelings, but if I can say this, the emotional posture of the soul. What's interesting is in the framework of Chabad, it is actually built on the intellectual triad of the Sefirot, Chma, Bina, and Dat. So if you just kind of think of it that way, we're talking here about the Secho and kind of piecing it apart, which we will do in a future class. The mind is supposed to matter when it comes to all that we do, but the mind is not an end in itself, it's the beginning that is meant to reach the heart. So we're gonna have three, which is really four different possibilities as we go through this. The first is what we're gonna call pure sechel. That means that I understand something in an abstract way. I can explain it, I can define it, maybe I can even impress people with it. But it hasn't become a lived feeling. And the the verse is broken into levels. At one level, there's just Elohim, God, as an idea. Another level, there's kirvat elokim, the idea of closeness to God. And then there's Litov, that it's good for me, that I I feel, I want it, it moves me. That's what we're doing. We're we're we're trying to piece this apart. So pure Sechel, pure intellect says, I understand the comp the concept of closeness to God. That's that's very nice. Mazeltov. You can explain it over coffee. But do I feel it? Do I feel the closeness? Do I want anything? Has it changed my behavior? Has it changed how I speak? Has it changed how I love, how I forgive? So if it hasn't, Kabbalah's gonna say, it may be true that you understand it, but it's still hovering. It's still abstract. It's still in the language of our last classes, it's still a kind of havshatta, this abstraction that's removed from the concrete world of feeling. So it's just a beautiful, pure concept. And I think that a lot of education in the world today kind of follows this train of process, which is the education comes from the Greek word educara, which means to convey a message. It's just conveying the message. That was a nice idea, Rabbi. Wonderful. What does it mean? I got it. I figured it out. That's nice. Will I remember it? Maybe, yeah, maybe not. It's in my mind. I have spent a lot of my life in my head. I understand this kind of pure sechel, this pure intellectual idea, and the desire for people who are intellectuals, the desire to feed me more. I just want more data, more info. Just just tell me more. Then comes a second state. The second state is called midot shebesechel. It means emotions within intellect. If I can simply explain it, it would be I can now understand the idea of love. I can appreciate the notion of awe. I can discuss closeness, intimacy, reverence, longing, but I'm in my head. I'm mostly in my head. I spend a lot of time in my head. And this is where the mind recognizes that there exists this idea of love or fear, but it doesn't yet say I love or I fear or I want to be close. It's just the idea of the feeling, not the not the heartbeat of the feeling. And that's why this can, I think, produce some kind of religious sophistication that never quite lands. Like you become a spiritually refined, absent-minded professor, or you have very elevated language, you can teach people about fire, but the room is still cold. Then there's the third possibility, also in Kabbalistic framework, not the ideal, which is called Sechel Shebidot, which is the opposite. It's the intellect within the emotion, which means the emotion is driving, the feeling already decided where we're going, and the mind is now sitting in the passenger seat trying to sound useful. Maybe when somebody says something like, trust your gut, that's what they're talking about. Like somebody says, I've heard this before. I know I'm right because I felt it so strongly. There's no way to explain it. They could be right and they also could not be right. But they're so certain that they're right because they had a feeling. Not a guide for the heart. But in this situation here, the emotion is in control. And the intelligence is just kind of supporting it. It's justifying it, it's spiritualizing it. And Kabbalah says that is also not healthy. So we have pure Sechel, pure intellect. We have midot shiba sechel, sorry, sechoshba midot, which means that it's the mind kind of is in control, it has an idea that there's such a thing as emotions, but doesn't really embody them. And then there's the opposite where the emotions are in control and kind of is taking over the where the mind should be. All these, according to Kabbalah, are considered not healthy. Because the mind is no longer truth, it becomes PR for the ego, or the emotions no longer are the truth, it becomes PR for the mind. What is the ideal? The ideal state is what we call midot alpisecho. How does this work? It's real emotion, it's warm emotion, it's human emotion, it's not it's not uh it's not faked, but it's emotion according to the intellect. A motion educated by truth, a motion disciplined by clarity, emotion that knows where the guardrails are. And this is, I think, key. Kabbalah does not want less heart, it wants a wiser heart. The goal here, and I think people can get confused, the goal is not the suppression of a feeling, it is the elevation, the sanctification of a feeling. So let's go into a word that we're gonna discuss further in this series, but the word dot. If you go into the chma, bina, and dot, chachma meaning the flash of inspiration, and binah is the unpacking, and dot is this kind of integration and bonding. It's when the idea stops being information and starts being or becoming inwardly attached to me. The way that Chasidis explains it is that dot is what carries the mind into the emotional life of the person, it's what fill it's what fills the chambers of the heart. And that's why somebody can understand something and still not live in it, or they can understand and not be attached. Because the insight is not yet an inward union. We need a bridge. And that's why one of the most famous ideas within Kaba, and especially within Chasidut, is Moach Shalit al-Halef. The mind is honing or ruling over the heart. Now, I used to misunderstand that phrase. It doesn't mean that the mind humiliates the heart, it means the mind gives the heart direction. The heart is powerful but not ownerless. It means my emotion should not be abandoned in the street without adult supervision. Let me give you an example. Let's take prayer. Prayer is really hard. I if I could think of in my spiritual experiences, especially my Jewish spiritual experiences, prayer has been the hardest. Absent-minded recitations, not feeling integrated, not feeling embodied. People will often say, especially people who pray three times a day, will say, I don't feel anything when I pray. So what I would say to that is the first mistake is to pretend. The second mistake is to quit. Kabbalah says, begin with Seychel, begin with the intellect. Think one true thought. Not twelve, one. Let's say what's one true thought. God is giving me existence right now. God is continuously creating the world at every moment. So this moment is a new creation, and I am being created into existence in this moment. God is closer to me than my next breath. God knows me. God wants me. I'm not gonna jump too quickly into emotional fireworks. But if I say that with thought, then I let it settle and I feel it, it becomes dot. And then I ask myself, what would it feel like if I actually believe this right now? That's the movement from intellect from Seiko toward midot alpiseiho. Towards emotions according to the intellect. The emotions guided by the intellect. It's not fake. It's not cold. This is this is the inward work. It's starting with a thought. You know what meditation is? It's when we think about something until it becomes an emotion. That's what prayer is. Take study. Take learning, what we're doing right now. We can learn a beautiful idea in Kabbalah, or any beautiful idea, and we can say, Wow. Wow, that is deep. Whoa, that clicked. But the point is not that my bookshelf should be impressed. It's a nice bookshelf, but it doesn't need to be impressed. The question is, how is this affecting my life? What does this teaching do to change the way that I see my partner, my child, my anxiety, my irritation? So if the learning that we do, let's say the Torah learning that we do becomes or remains purely intellectual, I'm just continuing to use these Hebrew words, remains pure secho, purely intellectual, I may become sharper without becoming softer. And if the Torah study that I do becomes only emotion, then I become inspired without anything stable to hold it. So the ideal is to learn until the truth becomes emotionally honest and behaviorally concrete. That is the fabric and the building block. Of Jewish education. That's the Jewish way to learn. Let's take relationships. Somebody hurt me. Right away, my emotions speak very fast. They always do this to me. They don't respect me. They've been doing this since I was a kid. This is terrible. And often that emotion is real. I would say often that emotion is justified. What Cabella is going to ask is can your intellect sit down with your emotions and say, wait, slow down, slow down. What actually happened? What am I feeling? What's true? What response would be loving and wise? I'm the adult in the room now. I don't have to respond the way I've been responding since we were kids. I can now respond as the adult because I'm the adult. And so we're asking to go from the response that I've been giving all my life since I was eight, and saying, wait, I'm the adult now, I can give an adult response. I don't want the same response that I've been giving. Because that hasn't worked. And because I'm still in the same place all these years later. It's happening over and over and over again. So I don't want the response that's going to feel satisfying for the next 30 seconds. If I had to put truth and love together, what response would I give? And that is midot alpisecho. That is this kind of balance between the mind and the heart. Some people call it honesty when they're just ventilating. Some people say, Oh, it's kindness. You know, I'm so kind. No, I think we're just avoiding conflict. What Kabbalah wants is no distortion. It wants truth with heart, and met with lev, truth with heart. I'll give you, I think, the strongest example that I can give you. Abraham, the first monotheist, the father of the Jewish people in the Torah. Abraham, in Kabbalistic terms, is referred to as Chesed, as loving kindness, as this magnificent and overflowing kindness that is guided by intellect. One of the examples the Torah gives is right after he circumcises himself, he's in pain. And he's going out and looking for guests. He would often look for guests, but right after this painful surgery, he's looking for guests. And when those guests ate, he didn't just say to them, Okay, have a nice day. Thanks for coming. Come again. He insisted that they thank God. I've always had a problem with this. Like, I don't make choices for people, I support the choices they make. It seems very pushy, maybe even a little manipulative. People would come, and and there weren't monotheists at the time, so that everybody had their gods that they were serving mostly mostly idolatry. And he had this inn, a tent in the middle of a desert. He set it up. It was an oasis in the middle of a desert. And people would come and they would eat and they'd say, How much do I owe you? And he'd say, Nothing. All you have to do is thank my God. We don't want to thank your God. We have our own gods. Okay, then a million dollars. It seems a little manipulative. But Kabala actually says that it's because Abraham's kindness was real. He wasn't he wasn't, didn't have ulterior motives. It wasn't indiscriminate. His intellect guided his kindness towards what was actually good for the guest. So it wasn't only what felt soft in the moment. This is the example that Kabbalah gives for Midot al Pisejo. I think this is hard to relate to in our modern culture. We often, or I often, confuse love with the refusal to frustrate. I often used to think, well, I'm a nice guy. When sometimes it was actually I don't have a backbone. Unguided emotion can become destructive. It can act like an animal. It can be driven by instinct rather than discernment. Healthy emotion needs a check and balance system. And that check is the intellect. And it doesn't mean that we're we're not trusting the God, and it doesn't mean that we're not acknowledging the emotion or the dignity of the emotion. The classic example that's given in Kabawa is the parent-child example. A two-year-old is running around with a knife. The parent takes it away. And the child's crying, crying profusely. Somebody walks in and says, Why is your kid crying? I took away a knife. Now, here's my question. Was the parent strict or kinda? The child's crying. Just give the child a knife. See how absurd it sounds. Obviously, the child is crying. The child, a two-year-old with a knife is a really, really bad idea. And so the parent is truly being kind. Because real love is not the same as emotionally untethered softness. Real love includes intelligence. Real affection includes judgment. Real real compassion needs boundaries. Two-year-olds can't be running around with knives. But but but but I love him and he's great and and and and I don't want him to cry. Yeah, well, that's not love if you're if if you're trusting a two-year-old with a with a knife. This is a hard learning. This was a really hard learning for me. If I only say yes, I've never said no, then I've never said yes. Because not every yes is loving, and not every no is harsh. Sometimes the most loving word in a relationship is no, you are two years old and you can't have a knife. And I think this matters in leadership as well. A leader who only uses their intellect, they may always be right, but unbearable. A leader who always uses their emotions may be the most beloved human, but dangerous. A leader needs warmth that answers to wisdom. This is true in our relationships, this is true in our parenting, this is true in our community work, this is true in how we talk to ourselves. Sometimes people are cruel to themselves in the name of standards. That is unhealed intellect. Some of us indulge ourselves in the name of self-love. I would call that undirected emotions. Our job, and I think one of the most difficult jobs in our lives, is to become both truthful and compassionate. I want to add one more term. What term is a Yetzer? Judaism speaks about this these conflicting inclinations inside a person. Sometimes I have an inner conflict, and I feel like I am vacillating between two sides. Like I know it's wrong. Or I feel it's right. I have very, very alive and vibrant emotions and a very alive and vibrant mind. I can spend a lot of time in my mind, and I can spend a lot of time in my heart. And and this inner conflict is not a freak accident. It's the arena of life. The emotional system can be pulled by noble desire and by self-serving desire. And the point here, and I think that's what happens, is we often, at least I often kind of vacillate between two extremes. So I'm like, okay, well, either I'm gonna be emotional and I mean I'm gonna I'm just gonna, you know, use my emotions and my passion, or I'm gonna be intellectual, cold, cold, intellectual. And and I think about it even in my teaching, like there are a lot of people who are very intellectual and they have that monotone, and everything is just very cold, and probably at this point in our talk, you would be fast asleep. There are some people that go to synagogue on a Saturday morning to fall asleep. It's a guaranteed. And there are some people who who like when I teach, I I want to bring my passion. So I'm using the intellect, but bringing in my passion, bringing in that energy. And the point is to educate the energy. It's not a the evil, theitzer, the evil inclination is not this little red guy with horns and a pitchfork. Sometimes it's just uh emotion without orientation, or uh an urgency without being important, or uh an appetite without any boundaries. The responses can be, I guess people probably see it as like, okay, well, how do I do it? How do how do I find that balance? Yeah, that is what Kabbalah wants us to do. It's not going to be an instant fix, it's not gonna be an instant change. The first thing we want to do is to notice. To notice, am I responding with my emotions? Am I responding with my intellect? Like, let's take a step back. Let's think about this. Just literally take a step back. Can we think about it? Are we aware? And it's just the slow work of bringing the mind and the heart and finding that balance. So I want to ask you a question. And if you're if you're taking notes, you can write it down. I think it'll be nice to journal. If you're if you're journaling, it'll be nice to journal. And I'll what I'll do actually here is I'll uh I'll ask you the questions, and then if you want, you can even pause the video because I can be here on the other side. So here's here's question one. Where in your life are you too much in your mind, in your head, in your intellect? Where do you understand so much and feel very little? Just take a moment to think about it. I'll be here on the other side, you can pause the video. Okay, let's ask the second question. Where in my life where in your life are you too much in me dote in emotions? Where are my feelings making policy before the facts arrive? And again you can pause this and I'll be back here on the other side. Now the next question What relationship in your life now needs more emotions guided by intellect? Mido Psycho Emotions guided by intellect. Maybe the partner with a child, with a sibling, with a cousin, with myself, maybe with God just maybe write down one relationship. That way you can use it as a bar, or use it as an example as you as as as you go through this process. If you've answered that, then this process, this conversation has already started to change your week. And what I want to do is I want to give you a practical formula that I use. I am, in case you don't know this, I am naturally a very emotional person. And sometimes my emotions get to the best of me. And so when a strong emotion comes up, I do four things. Step one, I name the emotion. I'm angry. I'm ashamed. I'm afraid right now. I'm leading with fear. I'm craving. I'm hurt. Just name the emotion. What emotion am I leading with right now? Number two. I ask myself, what story is the emotion telling? What am I saying this means? So I name it. I ask myself, what story is it telling? Number three, I bring in the intellect. I ask what is true, what is proportionate? What would I advise somebody else if they ask me the same question? So name the emotion, ask what story the emotion is telling, bring in the intellect. And number four, I choose a response that lets the emotion stay human, but refuses to let it become in control. So I name the emotion, I ask what story is the emotion telling me. I bring in my mind, what is true, my critical thinking, and then after I spend some time in critical thinking, I choose a response that lets the emotion stay human, but does not let it control. Let me try to distill this whole idea into one line. My emotions are not the enemy. My emotions are raw material. And my intellect gives them form. And my integration, my dot gives them depth. And I can use my prayer or my work to give them direction. And what happens through this process is I become more real. I become more human. I don't want to be less alive. I don't want to be less conscious. I want to be more. I want to be more intentional. I want to make my aliveness answerable to truth. Now I want to see if we can bring this idea of seiko and midot of mind and heart into four parts of our life. So first in our study, because we do that a lot. So I figure that'll be one that we can that we can work on. So the next time, even now, when I'm learning something meaningful, before I finish my learning, I'm going to ask, what should this idea make me feel? How should I be feeling? What state am I in emotionally? And then what should it make me do today? What's one action I'm going to take as a result of this study? What about relationships? Relationships are hard because the people who are closest to us, they trigger us the most. So the next time I'm emotionally triggered, usually I lead with an accusation. I want to change and shift that. Usually I just kind of go with that first emotion. I'm going to pause that first emotion for 90 seconds. I'm going to name the feeling without dramatizing it. And then I'm going to ask, is my mind guiding this feeling? Or is my feeling recruiting my mind? Now, in the fourth work, this may not apply to everyone, but this is something that I think about a lot. In my relationship with God. So before I pray, I'm going to choose one thought about God, about Hashem, and sit with it for 30 seconds. Not five thoughts, not a mush of thoughts, one thought. I'm going to let it rest in me long enough that my heart has a chance to wake up. And I'm going to see what happens. As many of you know already, my life is an experiment. These are going to be experiments. I want to see if my if my mind can begin to teach my heart how to feel. So I want to end today with uh with a blessing. May God help. May Hashem help. That our mind, that our intellect should become clear without becoming cold. That our emotions should become warm without becoming wild. That the truths that we learn travel from the conversation from the book into my heart. And from my heart into my speech, and from my speech into my action. And May Hashem give us emotional healing when we're bruised. And clarity when we're confused. And strength when I'm reactive. And softness where I've become defended. And my home. May it be filled with love. That has wisdom and wisdom that has love. And may we be able to start this process. This is just the step one of noticing my heart and mind. Noticing where my mind responds, where my heart responds. And start this slow process of integrating them and working them together. They're not enemies, they're friends. I thank you for sharing this space with me. I can't wait to hear from you how this is landing. If we need to expand this more, if I need to give you more examples, if we need to do a deeper dive. Maybe next week on this. And uh with that, until we meet again. Thank you. Have a beautiful week.