Chassidus brings a very powerful source in Torah for ‘Moach Shalit al Halev,’ from a law in RaMBaM’s Hilchos Melochim - the laws of Kings (which is also known as ‘the laws of war’) that when a soldier is recruited into an army and he is sent to the battlefront it says in Torah that he is not allowed to be afraid. How could a soldier go to the front and not be afraid? The question is; How can you tell a soldier not to be afraid when his life is on the line? The Rambam answers: Don’t think! - You can’t tell a person ‘don’t fear’ but you can tell a person ‘don’t think about the fear’. The Rambam says if you don’t think about the fear, you won’t be filled by fear; you won’t be gripped by fear; you won’t be paralyzed by fear. That is the power of the mind. When people are very frightened, they tend to think too much. So the Torah advises when in a dangerous situation - 'don’t think' - leave it alone and move on. Chassidus brings a proof from this law that a person does have the capacity to use mindfulness to control the heart. In this case use is made of the mind not to allow the heart to be awakened. And the opposite is inferred that mindfulness can be used to arouse the heart.
Mind influences the heart: There is a good parable to illustrate this: A person was sitting on a train on his way home after a long day at work reading the paper. There were some children playing on the train making a noise and being disruptive running up and down the train. As the train hurried along the track the kids were becoming more engrossed in their game being disruptive to our friend with his newspaper. This agitated the gentleman and he began to experience many negative emotions; frustration, resentment, anger, indignation, annoyance along with a host of other emotions. At one point one of the children threw a ball across the train which landed on his paper. This was too much for our friend to handle. He jumped up and reproached the person travelling with these kids who seemed to be their father. He shouted, ‘can’t you just control your kids?’ the man responded that he could not; - and he did not know what to tell them as they were on their way home from hospital where their mother had just died. At this point our friend suddenly felt shamefaced, guilty, embarrassed and mortified, after which were followed feeling apologetic, remorseful, contrite, regretful, empathetic, compassionate, kindness, pitiful and concerned, amongst a host of other emotions. Now we can see how when the intellectual understanding changed so the emotions followed suit, or in the words of Chassidus the intellect gave birth to the emotions.
