ענין שניתנה התורה על הר סיני דוקא ולא…

The maamar opens with a question: why was the Torah given on Mount Sinai in particular, when the taller mountains Tabor, Hermon and Carmel also came forward, each asking to be chosen? The answer will show what kind of person is fit to receive the Torah.

The Aramaic translations of two verses about the mountains at the Giving of the Torah tell the story: G‑d did not want to give the Torah on proud, towering mountains, but on Sinai, which is low. The parenthesis explains the two Aramaic words for “haughty” and “scornful” from the Targum of another verse, “the contempt of the proud,” which uses the same pair.

A mountain’s height stands for a person’s self-importance: raising oneself up with coarse pride (gasus). Such pride is the root of all evil, as Chassidus teaches about the “shattering of the vessels,” the primordial vessels that broke because each stood as a separate, self-asserting existence.

Receiving the Torah requires the opposite of pride: self-nullification (bittul), setting oneself aside before G‑d. The Alter Rebbe adds a brief allusion to the verse “And you shall not profane My holy Name,” etc., and refers to fuller treatments elsewhere, among them his explanation of the verse about the salt of the offerings.

The Talmud states the same idea: one who makes himself like a wilderness that everyone walks upon receives the Torah as a gift. Rashi explains the image: such a person has no haughtiness.

The prayer at the close of the Amidah follows the same order: first “may my soul be like dust to all,” and only then “open my heart to Your Torah.” This is why the Torah was given on Sinai, a low mountain, which stands for lowliness, not raising oneself up; for more on this the Alter Rebbe refers to the end of his discourse on “And you shall draw water with joy.”

This raises a difficulty: if lowliness is the point, why was the Torah given on a mountain at all? Sinai, however low, is still a mountain, and a mountain stands for elevation.

The answer: even a person who must be utterly lowly needs inner strength and some measure of elevation in his service of G‑d. Scripture praises King Yehoshafat because “his heart was lifted up in the ways of Havayah,” an elevation of the heart that serves G‑d’s ways; the Alter Rebbe refers to his discourse “Let them bring royal apparel” for more on this.

Without any sense of elevation, a person would not dare even to begin serving G‑d; he would tell himself, “Who am I, and what is my service?” Lowliness with no strength at all would keep him from the service altogether.

So the heart must be lifted up, in its longing and thirst for G‑d, but the self-nullification must remain much greater than this elevation. The Alter Rebbe also refers to his discourse “Arm [men] from among you,” where the Sages’ phrase “peace in the household above” (pamalya shel maalah) is applied to the soul, to its mind and its heart.

Isaiah’s verse “And the humble shall increase joy in Havayah” shows the same pattern. Joy strengthens and lifts up the soul, yet this joy and elevation grow out of humility and lowliness.

The Tanya (end of chapter 34) explains how both can live in one person at the same moment: he is despised in his own eyes from the side of his body and animal soul, and joyful from the side of his G‑dly soul and the spark of G‑dliness that gives it life. The two feelings do not cancel each other, because they come from two different sources within him.

At the end of the discourse on “Because you did not serve with joy,” the Alter Rebbe goes further: the deeper a person’s sense of his own inferiority, the more his joy in Torah study is doubled and redoubled. Humility does not reduce the joy; it multiplies it.

This is why the verse says that the humble, specifically, will increase joy. The name Sinai carries the same pattern: the Sages read it as the mountain from which hatred (sin’ah) descended, which here means hatred of one’s own evil traits, like the Talmud’s advice to make the good inclination rage against the evil inclination. That rage is itself a kind of elevation, a rising above the evil inclination.

Yet this rising above evil is at its core self-nullification, because it is iskafya, the subjugation of the evil inclination, and not self-assertion. For more on the meaning of a mountain, the Alter Rebbe refers to his discourse “Set me as a seal.”

The maamar closes with further references: the discourse “The voice of my beloved,” on G‑d “leaping over the mountains” and the verse “May the mountains bear peace to the people,” and the end of the discourse “Return, O Israel.”