בישעיה סי׳ י״א ז׳

This heading names the verse on which the maamar is built: Isaiah 11:7, from the prophecy of the days of Mashiach, “And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw.”

The maamar opens with the verse and recalls a teaching already explained: the Hebrew for barley, se’orah, can be read as shi’ur hei, “the measure of hei.” Barley thus stands for a measured, limited flow drawn from the level of the letter hei.

The letter hei is sounded with nothing but breath, so it stands for “the breath of His mouth,” the divine speech that gives life to creation. Barley was fodder for animals, and so it represents the life-force that flows to the angels, who are called behemos and chayos, “animals” and “beasts.”

In Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot, the angels called chayos have the face of a lion and the face of an ox. Nourished by this flow, they burn like torches with love and awe and say the praises of the Kedushah: “Holy,” “Blessed,” and “He shall reign.”

This flow to the angels depends on the service of Israel below. In the time of the Beis HaMikdash that service included the Omer offering of barley, which the kohen waved before G‑d.

A handful (kometz) of the Omer was burned on the altar, on the fire that came down from heaven. In the Beis HaMikdash that fire took the form of a lion, which the Zohar calls “the lion that consumes the offerings”: an angelic power that received what Israel brought.

The parenthesis gives the Zohar passage on the lion that came down onto the altar. The Alter Rebbe then explains the matter through another teaching of the Zohar: angels are appointed over prayer, to receive it and carry it upward.

The reason angels are needed is that human voice and speech are physical. Something physical cannot by itself rise and become included in its source, the Infinite Light; it needs an intermediary.

The comparison is the soul and the body. A spiritual soul cannot be enclothed in a physical body directly, but only through a go-between, the blood, which the Torah calls the soul.

The blood too is physical, but its warmth gives off fine, spiritual vapors, and through them the powers of the soul spread into the body and unite with it. The intermediary is physical, yet refined enough to join the two.

This account of soul, blood and body comes from the Kuzari. In the same way, the Infinite Light cannot be enclothed in the physical voice and speech of prayer except through the angels, who are messengers.

An angel is a vessel: the Infinite Light drawn into it is what really acts through it, according to G‑d’s will. The angel adds nothing of its own.

Because the light in each angel was given a fixed measure and limit, the angels do not change. From the six days of Creation on, each stands at the one level it was given.

This explains why the angel told Avraham, “I will surely return to you,” speaking in the first person. Since the angel is only a vessel for G‑d’s light, he spoke on G‑d’s mission, and his words were as though the Holy One, blessed be He, were speaking.

The same holds for Hagar: the verse says she called the name of Havayah “Who spoke to her,” although it was an angel who spoke with her. The angels are nothing but drawings-down of the Infinite Light into many levels, like many different vessels, so an angel’s speech can be called G‑d’s.

A bracketed note sends the reader to fuller treatments: the discourse “His left hand is under my head” in Parshas Ki Sisa, and the end of the section “To understand what is written in Pri Etz Chaim” at the end of Iggeres HaKodesh.

The bracket ends with one more such section, “To understand words of understanding.” The text then applies the principle to mitzvos: the “advocate” that the Mishnah says a mitzvah acquires is an angel created by it, because a mitzvah done below, an arousal from below, calls forth an arousal from above.

That arousal from above is like G‑d “studying opposite” the one who studies: the Infinite Light is drawn down in the very mode of the mitzvah performed, for example in Chochmah or in Chesed. That drawing-down takes form as an angel of the same attribute, such as an angel of Chesed in the camp of Michael.

When the Infinite Light is drawn into the angels so that they can receive the prayers and raise them, the prayers are absorbed into that same divine power and light. Carried by it, prayer can rise higher than the angels themselves, from one height to a higher one.

A bracketed note refers to fuller treatments: the discourse on “How beautiful are your footsteps in sandals,” and the discourse “The Chanukah lamp is a mitzvah” in Parshas Mikeitz. Elsewhere in Likkutei Torah (Shabbos Shuvah) the sandals are read as the angels who raise the prayers.

Prayer stands in place of the offerings, so what holds for prayer holds for the offerings too. The offerings came from cattle, the face of the ox on the left side (Gevurah), and had to be included in the right, the face of the lion; hence the lion-shaped fire on the altar that consumed them.

In Moshe’s Mishkan the fire from above did not take the form of a lion, because Moshe refused to be led by an angel. There the fire came forth “from before Havayah,” from G‑d Himself and not through an angelic intermediary.

A bracketed note sends the reader to the discourses “As an eagle stirs up” and “Return, O Israel,” on “we will render [for] bulls our lips,” and to three passages in the Zohar. Those passages teach that Moshe did not want an angel and that G‑d Himself led Israel.

Of the Future, Isaiah says that G‑d’s servant will be “very high,” which the text reads as higher even than Moshe; then the souls of Israel will be raised far above the angels. The verse “At the time it shall be said to Yaakov and to Israel, What has G‑d wrought?” points to the same.

The Sages taught that the angels’ place will then be outside the place of the souls, so that the angels will have to ask the souls, “What has G‑d wrought?” This is how they read the end of the verse just quoted.

The Sages also said that in the Future the angels will say “Holy” before the righteous. Therefore the offerings and the flow of “barley” will no longer be raised through the lion, the angel, but through the righteous themselves.

Israel is called “the first of His produce,” so the produce and the barley, the flow they stand for, will be included in Israel themselves. The lion, by contrast, will then be equal to the ox, no longer above it.

This is the inner meaning of the verse: the lion will no longer consume the offering that comes from the cattle, and lion and ox alike will eat straw. Straw is the secondary flow that comes from the barley, while the barley itself will belong to Israel.