ולהבין שרש טעם קישור וחיבור ושייכות ברית ותורה…

The maamar opens by asking why the Grace after Meals must mention “covenant” and “Torah.” In its second blessing, the blessing of the land, we thank G‑d “for Your covenant which You sealed in our flesh, and for Your Torah which You taught us,” and the Talmud (Berachos 49a) rules that whoever leaves out covenant and Torah in this blessing has not fulfilled his obligation.

Before answering, the Alter Rebbe raises a sharper question. The command “And you shall eat and be satisfied, and bless Havayah your G‑d for the good land” (Deuteronomy 8:10) ties the blessing to the land, so one could think it is a Torah obligation only while Israel live on their land; how, then, is it a Torah obligation in exile?

The answer begins with the covenant of circumcision. In Genesis 17:8 G‑d promises Avraham “all the land of Canaan as an everlasting possession,” and in the very next verse He commands him to keep His covenant, the covenant of circumcision; the Alter Rebbe reads this as teaching that the land was given in the merit of circumcision.

Two difficulties follow. What does inheriting a land have to do with circumcision? And since Jews keep Avraham’s covenant generation after generation while living in exile, with the land in the hands of others, in what sense has the promise of an “everlasting possession” been kept?

The answer is that the promise was kept on a deeper plane. Avraham was given a supernal, spiritual “land of Canaan” that no exile can take away, and so circumcision, in whose merit it was given, is practiced today, and the blessing of the land remains a Torah obligation even now.

To explain what this spiritual land is, the Alter Rebbe reads the name Kena’an (Canaan) in two ways. It is related to hachna’ah, submission and lowliness, which is self-nullification (bittul); and it also means a trader or merchant.

Two verses show that kena’an can mean “trader.” Isaiah 23:8 calls the merchants of Tyre its kin’aneha, and Hosea 12:8 says of a dishonest dealer, “Kena’an, in his hand are scales of deceit.”

Now the analogy: how a trader buys goods. In Jewish law a purchase is completed through two acts: the buyer draws or lifts the item out of the seller’s domain into his own (the formal acts of acquisition called meshichah and hagbahah), and he hands the seller money.

In the Amidah G‑d is called Koneh hakol, usually rendered “Possessor of all” but literally “who acquires all.” The Alter Rebbe takes the literal sense: G‑d “acquires” the world as a trader does, in the same two steps. The parenthesis points to the discourse on “O that you were as a brother to me” (Torah Ohr, Terumah) and to the Arizal’s Pri Etz Chaim, where “acquires” is tied to the “higher mazal,” a Kabbalistic channel through which light flows down (mazal, from nazal, “to flow”).

Why speak of G‑d “acquiring” at all? Because His essence is infinitely beyond the worlds, beyond even the light that fills them and the light that encompasses them, and nothing compares to Him (“there is no comparison to You,” Psalms 40:6). Even the first tzimtzum, the first step toward a world, is a great descent for Him, like a king lowering himself to speak “the words of a commoner,” a phrase from the Zohar.

He sees to the end of all generations in a single glance, as the Rosh Hashanah prayers say and the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 18a) teaches, and the Zohar says He created the world with one thought. The Mishnah (Avos 5:1) likewise asks why ten utterances were needed when one would have sufficed: from G‑d’s side, the world needs no long chain of steps, and the next paragraph explains what draws that chain forth.

For the ordered chain of worlds to come forth from G‑d, there are two stages. At first creation arose in His will only because “He desires kindness” (Micah 7:18), without any prompting; but its continuation depends on what the lower beings do, since an arousal from below draws an arousal from above. The verse “If he sets his heart to Him” (Job 34:14) is read here as a person turning his heart toward G‑d.

The arousal from below is the soul offering itself to G‑d: “To You, Havayah, I lift up my soul” (Psalms 25:1). It comes from reflecting on the words of the morning blessing (Berachos 60b): the soul You placed in me is pure, and You will one day take it from me.

Since the soul will return to G‑d in any case, one gives it back to Him now, before its time, longing to rise to its source and be “bound up in the bond of life with Havayah” (1 Samuel 25:29); “despising his life” describes this yearning of the soul for G‑d, which finds a life apart from Him empty. The parenthesis points to the discourse on the Thirteen Attributes (Likkutei Torah, Rosh Hashanah) and to the end of Tanya, chapter 41, which teaches that one hands the soul back to G‑d through binding one’s thought and speech to the words of Torah and prayer.

This self-offering is an ascent from below: the soul is lifted out of “the mountains of separation,” the Zohar’s name for the realms where things feel separate from G‑d, into His unity. In the analogy it is the drawing and lifting of the purchased item into the buyer’s domain. The parenthesis adds the discourse “Who is raised high to dwell” and the verse “Draw me, we will run after you” (Song of Songs 1:4), whose “draw me” is the same word as the “drawing” of acquisition.

The second step of acquisition is paying the money (kesef). As the Zohar says, “spirit brings spirit”: the soul’s arousal draws down an answering arousal from above, which is “great love” (ahavah rabbah), a love that comes from above, as in “I have loved you, says Havayah” (Malachi 1:2). This love is the “money” of the analogy.

There are two kinds of love, known by the phrases “awe and love” and “love and awe.” The first is a love beneath the intellect: it is produced by contemplation and stays within its bounds.

A love born of the intellect is limited by the intellect’s capacity. The second, great love, has no limit; it is the level of me’od, “exceedingly.” The Shema contains both: “with all your soul” is the lesser love (ahavah zuta), the love of “To You, Havayah, I lift up my soul.”

“With all your might (me’odecha)” is the boundless higher love. The two loves correspond to the Kabbalistic “feminine waters,” the arousal raised from below, and “masculine waters,” the flow that answers from above. A bracketed note begins here: this great love is called kesef, “silver,” because kesef is related to nichsof, “longing,” as in Lavan’s words to Yaakov, “You yearned greatly for your father’s house” (Genesis 31:30).

The same “silver” appears in Yosef’s silver goblet (Genesis 44:2); Yosef, “the tzaddik,” corresponds to the supernal level of Yesod. It also appears in the “four hundred shekels of silver, passing to the merchant,” that Avraham paid for the Cave of Machpelah (Genesis 23:16), which the Zohar reads as four hundred worlds of yearning.

These worlds of yearning are the supernal delight, and the Alter Rebbe reads the words “passing to the merchant” as naming their source: the essence of the Infinite Light, higher even than the encompassing lights (makifim), which are themselves beyond the worlds. For more, the text refers to the discourse “And Yaakov sent” and to the end of the discourse on “This they shall give, everyone who passes among those who are counted” (Exodus 30:13), where the same word “passes” appears.

The bracketed note ends with one more reference: the discourse “And Yaakov settled” discusses Canaan as meaning “merchant.” The main text then turns to the land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8): milk stands for the growth of the emotive attributes (middos), just as milk makes a baby’s limbs grow.

So too, the great love makes the middos grow. Even before it, the intellect (mochin) shone into the middos, but they were in a state of “smallness” (katnus), small and undeveloped; this higher love enlarges and multiplies them. Honey stands for sweetness and delight.

Delight in G‑d is “love in delights” (Song of Songs 7:7), as in “Then you shall delight in Havayah” (Isaiah 58:14). The land is also called “good and broad” (Exodus 3:8), meaning broad enough to receive the Infinite One, just as “Your commandment is exceedingly broad” (Psalms 119:96), where “exceedingly” (me’od) again means without limit.

The great love is drawn down into a person through the mitzvah of circumcision, which has two stages: milah, cutting away the foreskin, and peri’ah, uncovering the crown (atarah). The crown corresponds to the letter yud; the Zohar cited next speaks of “the letter yud of Shaddai” in connection with the covenant.

The text refers to the Zohar (Pinchas, 215b) and to Iggeres HaKodesh, epistle 4 of Tanya, which explains milah and peri’ah as removing a coarse and a subtle covering from the innermost point of the heart, so that a love beyond intellect is revealed. By contrast, the foreskin (orlah) stands for the hold of the external forces (kelipah), which draw nourishment from holiness.

This ability, to reach the great love through submission and self-sacrifice, was given to Avraham as an everlasting possession for every Jewish soul. That is the spiritual “land of Canaan”: first submission (hachna’ah) and self-nullification, and through them an “acquisition” like the trader’s, in which the soul is drawn up and answered with great love.

This answers the opening question. Since the spiritual land, given through circumcision, is an everlasting possession, circumcision is practiced today, and the blessing of the land remains a Torah obligation even in exile.

The second section returns to the main question: why covenant and Torah in the blessing of the land? It starts from a parallel in the evening prayers. The Talmud (Berachos 12a) rules that whoever did not say “True and faithful” (Emes ve’emunah) at night has not fulfilled his obligation, and that blessing first says “all this” (kol zos), a feminine form, and then “and it is established upon us” (vekayam aleinu), a masculine form; the maamar explains this shift later, in its third section.

Scripture speaks of two kinds of bread: the manna, “bread from heaven” (Exodus 16:4), and ordinary “bread from the earth” (Psalms 104:14). They correspond to two kinds of wisdom, hinted at in the plural “Wisdoms” (Proverbs 1:20): the higher Chochmah, of which Patach Eliyahu says G‑d is “wise, but not with a known wisdom,” and the lower Chochmah, which is Malchus.

The lower Chochmah is Malchus because G‑d’s “kingship rules over all” (Psalms 103:19), and “You have made them all with wisdom” (Psalms 104:24): the wisdom that made “all” the worlds is the wisdom found in Malchus. The higher Chochmah is “essential self-nullification”: before G‑d “all is as nothing,” so nothing stands as a separate existence at all. The lower Chochmah is “the nullification of the yesh”: a being that does feel itself to exist sets itself aside before G‑d.

These two levels appear in two ways of addressing G‑d, blessing (berachah) and acknowledgment (hoda’ah). Berachah means drawing down and revealing from above to below, for the word is related to havrachah, “layering” a vine: bending a branch down into the earth so that it takes root and grows (Mishnah Kilayim 7:1).

Acknowledgment belongs to the lower level, the nullification of the yesh. One acknowledges that “all before Him is as nothing,” even though this is so only “before Him,” from G‑d’s point of view, and is not revealed in the world below.

The word modim is used in the Talmud when “the Sages concede to Rabbi Meir”: they admit that the truth is on his side. So too, in the prayer “we acknowledge (modim) You,” we admit that before G‑d all is as nothing, although this is not among “the revealed things” that belong “to us and to our children” (Deuteronomy 29:28).

“True and faithful” (emes ve’emunah) is the same pair. Emes, truth, is “from near”: what one sees with the eye of the intellect, like blessing, which reveals. Emunah, faith, is “from afar”: believing a truth one does not see, like acknowledgment.

A cross-reference first: “true and faithful” is discussed further in the discourse on “And you shall know this day” (Likkutei Torah, Va’eschanan). The same distinction now explains the two breads: “bread from heaven” is the manna, whose root is in the source of the higher Chochmah.

The manna came down with the dew (Numbers 11:9) and looked like bedolach, crystal (Numbers 11:7). This recalls the Zohar’s “crystal dew” (tala dibedolcha), a Kabbalistic image for the hidden source of Chochmah within Keser; and the Zohar (2:62a) speaks of a food “that comes from the higher Chochmah,” which the Alter Rebbe reads as food for the coming into being of the higher Chochmah.

The command to gather “each day’s portion on its day” (Exodus 16:4) reflects this. The manna was drawn from above time, from the source out of which time itself comes into being, and so it came anew each day.

Because of its lofty source the manna was absorbed entirely into the body and left no waste, so the people had no need to relieve themselves. The Talmud (Yoma 75b) therefore says that the verse “And you shall have a peg” (Deuteronomy 23:14), which commands burying excrement outside the camp, applied in the desert only to food bought from merchants of other nations.

The reason: ordinary food holds sparks of holiness that must be sifted out (beirurim), and their root is in the world of Tohu (“chaos”), whose “kings” reigned and died (Genesis 36:31), which the Kabbalah reads as the shattering of Tohu’s vessels; so such food always leaves waste. The manna’s root is above Tohu, so it had nothing to discard.

The Sages taught that the manna came down in the merit of Moshe (Taanis 9a), because Moshe’s own root is in this level, the source of Chochmah, essential self-nullification. Moshe said of himself and Aharon, “And what are we?” (Exodus 16:7): he did not regard himself as anything at all.

The Torah describes the manna as something “which your fathers did not know” (Deuteronomy 8:16). The fathers, the Patriarchs, belong to the chain of descending worlds, while Moshe was above it; so G‑d told Moshe, “By My Name Havayah I did not make Myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3), a revelation given to Moshe and not to the Patriarchs.

This is why Moshe was “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). His root, the supernal Chochmah, “is hidden from the eyes of all living” (Job 28:21) and cannot be revealed within the chain of worlds; speech is revelation, and his level was beyond revelation.

For the same reason Moshe declined G‑d’s mission at the burning bush, saying, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11).

G‑d answered that when the people leave Egypt they will serve Him on this mountain (Exodus 3:12), which means the giving of the Torah. Even so, Moshe objected again, “Please, my L‑rd” (Exodus 4:10).

Moshe repeated that he was “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” because his stature was above even the Torah. The Torah “issues from Chochmah,” so its source is higher than the Torah itself, and Moshe stood at that source.

Moshe’s name recalls “I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10), the water being the “sea” of the supernal Chochmah. Compared with that sea, the whole Torah is only “a pitcher from the sea,” like Rivkah, who “filled her pitcher” at the spring (Genesis 24:16).

G‑d’s reply, “Who has placed a mouth for man?” (Exodus 4:11), is read here to mean that by the order of the chain of worlds, “man” could have no mouth. Adam (“man”) has the numerical value 45, the Name Mah (“what”), the level of essential self-nullification, which cannot be revealed.

But G‑d continued, “I (Anochi) will be with your mouth” (Exodus 4:12). The Alter Rebbe hears in this Anochi the “I” of the Ten Commandments, “I (Anochi) am Havayah your G‑d” (Exodus 20:2), revealed when “Havayah descended upon Mount Sinai” (Exodus 19:20).

Through that revelation at Sinai, the hidden level of Mah gained a mouth: G‑d’s very words were placed in man’s mouth (Isaiah 59:21), as in “these words which I (Anochi) command you” (Deuteronomy 6:6). And “the word of Havayah” is halachah (Shabbos 138b): G‑d’s word in the form of Torah law that people speak and study.

This explains the Talmud’s statement that Moshe instituted the first blessing of Grace after Meals, “Who sustains” (Hazan), when the manna came down (Berachos 48b). G‑d’s essence is infinitely higher even than “the crystal dew,” the source of Chochmah from which the manna came.

Moshe’s blessing, “Blessed,” asks that this essence be “blessed,” that is, drawn down (berachah means drawing down), first into the yud of the Name Havayah, the letter that stands for Chochmah. That is why the body of the first blessing speaks of G‑d in the third person, the “hidden” form: “Who sustains the world,” “Who gives bread.”

The hidden form matches the phrase “it is not known who”: the manna’s root is above the chain of worlds, beyond knowing. This blessing draws down the level of the manna through Israel, for “Israel arose in [G‑d’s] thought” (Bereishis Rabbah 1:4): their root is in G‑d’s thought, higher than the world.

The second blessing of Grace after Meals, the blessing of the land, corresponds to “bread from the earth”: the lower Chochmah and the nullification of the yesh, the self-effacement of created beings before G‑d, as in “the host of heaven bow down to You” (Nehemiah 9:6). That is why it opens with acknowledgment: “We acknowledge You (Nodeh lecha).”

Unlike the first blessing, with its “hidden” third person, it addresses G‑d directly, “that You gave our fathers as a heritage,” and it closes with “Blessed are You.” The closing blessing shows that the nullification of the yesh is drawn down from the higher level, essential self-nullification, the higher unity (yichuda ila’ah).

This drawing down, too, comes through Israel. It explains the Talmud’s rule that whoever leaves out covenant and Torah has not fulfilled his obligation (Berachos 49a): the lower unity, Malchus, receives its flow through Z’eir Anpin, the emotive attributes of Atzilus, which are called “covenant” and “Torah.”

The middos of Atzilus are listed in the verse “Yours, Havayah, is the greatness, and the might, and the beauty …” (1 Chronicles 29:11). They are at the level of “Yours”: they belong wholly to G‑d and are nullified before Him, and through them self-nullification is drawn down into Malchus as the nullification of the yesh.

Therefore one who leaves out covenant and Torah has not fulfilled the obligation. Without them the flow would never reach the level of “bread from the earth,” the nullification of the yesh, which is what the blessing of the land expresses.

The third section asks why the blessing doubles each phrase: “Your covenant” and “which You sealed in our flesh,” “Your Torah” and “which You taught us.” The doubling implies two levels of covenant and of Torah, and the answer starts from a teaching in tractate Avodah Zarah (27a) on the verse “Himol yimol,” “he shall surely be circumcised” (Genesis 17:13).

Rabbi Yochanan reads the doubled verb as “the circumcised shall circumcise”: only one who is circumcised may perform a circumcision. By this reading a woman may circumcise, because “a woman is considered as one who is circumcised,” although circumcision seems not to apply to her at all. The text also refers to the Magen Avraham, the classic commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, at the end of section 187 of Orach Chaim, in the laws of Grace after Meals.

The answer: Malchus, the lower unity, is called “woman,” as in “a woman who fears Havayah” (Proverbs 31:30). In “For a sun and a shield are Havayah Elokim” (Psalms 84:12), Havayah is the sun, the giver, the masculine; Elokim is the shield and sheath that covers the sun and receives its light, the feminine.

Yet “Havayah is the Elokim” (Deuteronomy 4:35) is known to mean that Elokim, though it receives from Havayah, in turn becomes a “masculine” giver, passing on below what it has received.

The Zohar (Balak 187a) says this of Malchus: when it is sent from Abba and Imma it is called an “angel,” but once it rests in its place, upon the two cherubim, it is called by the Name. The Mikdash Melech, a commentary on the Zohar, explains the passage further; and this receiving and then giving is the very nature of kingship.

A king receives and then rules and gives. So in the evening prayer, “True and faithful is all this,” with the feminine zos, describes Malchus as a receiver relative to the levels above it, and “it is established upon us,” in the masculine, describes it as a giver relative to the worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah. A bracketed reference follows to the explanation of “For You are my lamp.”

That discourse discusses the liturgical phrases “Unique One, Life of the worlds, King” and “King, Unique One.” Hence the two covenants, masculine and feminine: every flow from a giver to a receiver passes through a “covenant,” a channel of bestowal.

“Your covenant” is the covenant above, in Atzilus, through which the lower unity, the lower Chochmah, Malchus, comes to be. “Which You sealed in our flesh” is the covenant of the feminine, the channel belonging to Malchus itself as a giver.

Through this feminine covenant the self-nullification is carried further down, into Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah. In brackets the text refers to Rabbi Moshe Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim, entry “Bris,” and notes that the word “sealed” fits, recalling what is explained elsewhere about a raised seal and a sunken seal, which mirror each other.

Likewise, “Your Torah” is the Torah as it is in Atzilus, and “which You taught us” is the Torah as it reaches Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah, the Torah we study, which comes through Malchus.

All this describes the six workdays. On those days the order runs from above to below, step by step, starting from “bread from heaven.”

On weekdays the flow descends from the higher Chochmah and the higher unity to the lower Chochmah and the lower unity, “bread from the earth,” through covenant and Torah, the middos of Atzilus. Each day of the week corresponds to one attribute: the first day to Chesed, and so on.

Shabbos is different: on Shabbos the worlds ascend. The verse “He rested and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17) is compared to a person who stops working and returns to his own inner self.

On Shabbos, then, the two breads, heaven’s and earth’s, are joined. This is the double bread (lechem mishneh) of the Shabbos meal, and also the showbread of the Temple, set out anew every Shabbos (Leviticus 24:8) and called lechem hapanim (Exodus 25:30) because it is “all face,” with no “back.”

So the two Shabbos loaves are held together with their backs touching and their faces outward, so that the whole is “face,” as the Arizal teaches (Pri Etz Chaim, Gate of the Sabbath, ch. 17). The phrase “their backs inward” echoes the oxen beneath the Temple’s “sea” (1 Kings 7:25), and the bracket refers to the discourse “And I was with Him as a nursling,” on “they shall carry on the shoulder” (Numbers 7:9).

These two loaves are the inner meaning of “bread from heaven” and “bread from the earth” joined as one.

The Arizal taught that twelve loaves be set on the Shabbos table, corresponding to the twelve loaves of the showbread; yet the essential ones are the two over which HaMotzi is said, placed side by side with their faces outward. “This suffices for one who understands” signals that more lies here than is spelled out.

This is the maamar’s own summary (kitzur), which restates the argument and adds sources. Its first point: G‑d’s promise to Avraham, “And I will give to you and to your seed … as an everlasting possession” (Genesis 17:8), refers to the inheritance of the supernal land, in spirituality.

That spiritual land is truly “an everlasting possession.” Rabbeinu Bachya, on “and they shall inherit it forever” (Exodus 32:13), reads le’olam, “forever,” as “to the world (olam) that corresponds to the land,” that is, the World to Come.

A further reference: the discourse “These are the accounts” (Likkutei Torah, Pekudei) on “like a city that is joined together” (Psalms 122:3). The land is given in the merit of circumcision, as the Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 46) and the Zohar show: at the start of Noach and in Vayechi, the Zohar reads “Your people are all righteous, they shall inherit the land forever” (Isaiah 60:21) as said of those who are circumcised and guard the covenant.

The Zohar also expounds “to the utmost bound (ta’avas) of the everlasting hills” (Genesis 49:26), in Bereishis and at the start of Va’eira, reading ta’avas as “desire.” And “If not for My covenant by day and night, I would not have set the ordinances of heaven and earth” (Jeremiah 33:25) ties the covenant to the whole order of creation.

Through the covenant, light is drawn from the level of “day” into the level of “night,” and this is what the verse calls “the ordinances of heaven and earth.” The meaning of “by day” is explained further in the discourse “My L‑rd, open my lips.”

Another link between circumcision and the land: the crown (atarah) uncovered in circumcision corresponds to the letter yud, and the World to Come was created with the yud (Menachos 29b), so circumcision is tied to the World to Come, the olam of the “everlasting” possession. The summary then recalls the two meanings of Canaan, submission and trade, and G‑d as the one who “acquires all.”

The summary describes the “drawing” of this acquisition as the arousal from above that awakens the arousal from below, so that a person says, “To You, Havayah, I lift up my soul.” The Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 86:1) reads “I drew them with cords of a man … with bands of love” (Hosea 11:4) as G‑d drawing Israel, citing “Draw me, we will run after you” and “I have loved you, says Havayah.”

The Zohar (Pinchas 249b) reads “Draw out and take” (Exodus 12:21) as drawing from one place to another. After the arousal from below, great love is drawn down and revealed, as explained in the discourse “And you shall make holy garments”; this is the “payment of the money.”

This drawing down comes through circumcision, which reveals the five Chasadim (kindnesses), rooted in the great love that comes from the light that encompasses all worlds, within the Congregation of Israel. That is why the land is called “a land of desire” (Malachi 3:12), “the land of life” (Psalms 142:6) and “a good land.” The second part of the summary then begins: covenant and Torah in the blessing of the land.

The higher Chochmah is essential self-nullification; the lower Chochmah is the nullification of the yesh. They correspond to blessing and acknowledgment, and to the two breads.

“Bread from heaven” is food through which the higher Chochmah comes to be, “which your fathers did not know” (Deuteronomy 8:16). So the blessing “Who sustains” speaks in the hidden third person, “it is not known who,” the level of “I did not make Myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3).

The second blessing corresponds to “bread from the earth,” the nullification of the yesh. So the blessing of the land begins with acknowledgment, “We acknowledge You,” and ends with “Blessed.”

The flow from the higher Chochmah into the lower Chochmah, called “land,” passes through covenant and Torah. This is why, as explained above, the land was given to Avraham in the merit of circumcision, through which a supernal flow is drawn down.

Moshe, in whose merit the manna fell, was born circumcised (Sotah 12a), like the promise “And Havayah will circumcise your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:6), a circumcision done by G‑d Himself; the discourse “See, I set before you” discusses this. The third part of the summary then begins with “This (zos) is My covenant which you shall keep” (Genesis 17:10).

Zos, a feminine word, stands for Malchus, the feminine. Malchus receives from the higher unity and the higher Chochmah, but in turn becomes a masculine giver toward Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah, passing the self-nullification down to them.

This is why the evening prayer says “and faithful is all this (zos)” in the feminine and “it is established upon us” in the masculine. The Zohar (Lech Lecha 93b) reads the zos of “In this (zos) I trust” (Psalms 27:3) as the sign of the covenant, as in “This is the sign of the covenant.”

Hence the doubled wording, “Your covenant” and “which You sealed in our flesh.” For the meaning of “flesh,” the text points to the discourse on “And it shall be, from one New Moon to the next … all flesh shall come to bow down” (Isaiah 66:23) and to the discourse on “Command the children of Israel … My offering, My bread” (Numbers 28:2).

Likewise “Your Torah” and “which You taught us,” with a reference to the verse “And all your children shall be taught of Havayah” (Isaiah 54:13). The double bread of Shabbos parallels the two breads described above.

The double bread stands for the higher and the lower Shechinah (see Me’orei Or, under the letter lamed), which are the higher and the lower unity, as explained in the discourse “The Song of Songs.” On Shabbos the two are joined together.