ביאור ולא אבה

This is a biur, an explanation, of the discourse in Likkutei Torah that opens with the verse “But Havayah your G‑d did not want to listen to Bilaam; and Havayah your G‑d turned the curse into a blessing for you, because Havayah your G‑d loves you” (Deuteronomy 23:6). It goes back to that discourse’s themes, the letters of the Name Havayah in the soul and the teshuvah that turns sins into merits, and explains their roots.

The letter yud, the first letter of the Name Havayah, has a small tip at its top that points upward. This tip alludes to Keser (the Crown), the level above intellect, and in the soul it is the hidden love: the natural love for G‑d that lies concealed in the heart of every Jew.

The hidden love is found in every Jew, not only in those who understand much, because its source is so high: Malchus of the Infinite One, a level that belongs to the Infinite One’s own essence and lies beyond all comprehension. Since this love does not come from understanding, it does not depend on how much a person understands.

The tip is the smallest part of the letter, a mere hint, so it suits a level that can be hinted at but never grasped. Even this hint does not take hold of the Infinite One; it only points toward Him.

“No thought can grasp Him at all” echoes Elijah’s prayer at the opening of the Tikkunei Zohar: the Infinite One is reached not by the mind but by the heart’s desire, which rises from a person’s depths, “the inward part of a man, and a deep heart,” in the words of Psalms. The text then refers the reader to its discourse “And Yaakov dwelt” in Torah Ohr.

The yud, a single point, stands for Chochmah, the first flash of insight; Binah then develops that insight in “length and breadth,” working out its details. Chochmah as it enters Binah is called “a point in a palace”: a concentrated point that Binah receives and spreads out, as a palace holds the one who dwells in it.

“The intellect hidden from all thought” is usually said of Keser, but supernal Chochmah can be described this way too; the text refers to its discourse “Lech Lecha” for this point. The paragraph sets out to explain why the revelation of such a Chochmah needs many contractions.

Only from Beriah, the first world of separate existence, and below is Chochmah revealed as wisdom that created beings, angels and souls, can grasp.

In Atzilus and above, Chochmah is not wisdom in any sense we know; it is only the source from which wisdom comes. Elijah’s prayer in the Tikkunei Zohar says this of G‑d: “You are wise, but not with a known wisdom.”

The text refers to its discourse “Patach Eliyahu” for Elijah’s words. Bringing this Chochmah into revelation takes several contractions, and even the hidden Chochmah (chochmah stima’ah), the Chochmah of Arich Anpin, the outer level of Keser, comes about only through a contraction.

Keser has an inner level, Atik Yomin, and an outer level, Arich Anpin; the Gevurah of Atik, its power of restraint, is clothed in Arich Anpin’s hidden Chochmah, and that is the contraction meant here. To pass from there into Abba, the Chochmah of Atzilus, takes a far greater contraction: the light descends only through the “hairs” and the mazalos of Arich Anpin’s beard, and Abba is said to be nourished from the eighth mazal, the eighth of the beard’s thirteen tikkunim.

Hair grows out of the head and draws its life from the brain, but only through the skull, which covers the brain and hides it. What reaches the hair is a mere glimmer of the brain’s vitality, with no proportion to the brain itself.

Atzilus relates to what is above it as a hair relates to the brain: there is no comparison between them. Within the chain of descending worlds it is different: Chochmah gives rise to Binah, and Binah to the emotive attributes, step by step, and each stage keeps a relation to the one before it.

The skull’s concealment is the verse “He made darkness His hiding place” (Psalms 18:12): the light above Atzilus stays hidden, and only a glimmer of it emerges, like hair through the skull.

Psalm 93 says that Havayah “is clothed in majesty (gei’us)”: a garment hides its wearer, so this “clothing” is the concealment that lets the hairs emerge. The letters of gei’us add up to 410, and Pri Etz Chaim teaches that the supernal hairs of the head of Atika, which number 410, are the secret of “He is clothed in gei’us.”

Revealing Chochmah requires contraction and judgment (din), the attribute of measure. The Name Elokim, the Name of restraint, appears thirty-two times in the creation account, matching the thirty-two paths into which Chochmah divides; these paths are contractions and concealments, and their purpose is to let the light that fills and encompasses all worlds spread out and be revealed.

Without contraction there could be no expansion at all. The Talmud tells that when angels objected to the creation of man, G‑d stretched out His “little finger” among them and they were burned; and even now that the worlds exist, “all before Him are considered as nothing.”

The worlds are only “as nothing”: the prefix “as” (the letter kaf, of comparison) means that they still exist, and even this is only “before Him,” from G‑d’s own perspective, not from ours. Were His essence to spread forth without contraction, they would be literally nothing; it is the contraction that allows them to exist.

The contraction above is brought about by a matching act below: “Nullify your will before His will,” as the Mishnah in Avos teaches. There are two kinds of self-nullification, and the first belongs to the tip of the yud, above reason: the soul’s natural refusal to be separated from G‑d, which needs no understanding.

The second self-nullification belongs to Chochmah, the yud itself: setting aside one’s will knowingly, with wisdom and understanding. This means sorting good from evil (beirurim), and such sorting is the work of Chochmah, as the saying goes, “through Chochmah they are refined.”

At the level of the tip of the yud, above reason, there is no evil at all, so there is nothing to sort. Sorting applies only where good and evil are mixed, which began with the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.

When a person withdraws his own self in this way, G‑d’s light likewise withdraws and conceals itself, clothing itself so that worlds can come into being: this is “He is clothed in majesty.” It is also the level of Atik Yomin, whose name the text links to “Who removes (ha-ma’tik) mountains” (Job 9:5) and to “Who is exalted from the days of old,” words of the morning blessing Yotzer: a level removed and exalted above the worlds, whose concealment makes creation possible.

In a parenthesis the text refers to its discourse “Go forth and see”: even G‑d’s willing the worlds is a kind of nullification and withdrawal of His essence, as it were. From His own standpoint He gains nothing from them, as Elihu tells Job, “If you are righteous, what do you give Him?”

The parallel is therefore exact: a person’s nullification of will at the level of the tip of the yud draws down Keser, the supernal will, through Atik Yomin. His nullification of will in Chochmah draws down “He is clothed in majesty,” the “hairs” through which the Chochmah of Atzilus receives its light.

Closing the parenthesis, the text compares the two kinds of self-nullification to Israel’s words at Sinai, “we will do” and “we will hear,” paired with the tip of the yud and the yud. It then turns to the next letter: the hei, which spreads out in length and breadth, is Binah, which the Zohar calls “the higher teshuvah.”

Binah is the expansion that reaches the heart. The brief flash of Chochmah is a contraction, but once Binah develops it, it becomes the fervor and blazing enthusiasm of the heart.

Joy, too, is an expansion of the heart, expressed in the verse “a joyful mother of children,” and the mother here is Binah, from which the emotions are born. When a person returns to G‑d from below upward in this higher teshuvah, he brings about above a matching expansion: the revelation of the light that fills and encompasses all worlds.

This return comes through “they cried out in their distress”: the Hebrew for distress, tzar, also means “narrow.” A person realizes that all that reaches him of G‑d’s light is a narrow place, a scant glimmer, and that even Gan Eden and the World to Come belong to this category.

The Talmud describes the World to Come as the righteous delighting in the radiance (ziv) of the Shechinah, and a radiance is only a glow, not G‑d Himself; realizing this, a person says with the psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven?” and wants G‑d alone. The paragraph then completes the Name: the vav is the drawing-down of Torah, and the last hei is the actual performance of the mitzvos, into which the Torah draws that light.

The second half of the Name, vav-hei, works through a drawing-down: the vav, a long line, carries the light down to the last hei. The first half, yud-hei, needs no such channel, because the hei is simply the yud itself revealed.

That is why no vav stands between the yud and the first hei. The hei, the spreading-out of the light that fills and encompasses the worlds, comes from a single point, the contraction of the yud itself; contraction exists only for the sake of expansion, and without contraction there could be no expansion, so the two are one level.

The same holds for a person’s service from below: it is one matter seen from two sides. Contemplating how a single point unfolds into all the light that fills and encompasses the worlds is the hei, the expansion of understanding.

Contemplating the other side, how all that expansion comes from one single point, is the yud, the level of contraction.

So the yud and the hei are one: the yud itself comes to be revealed as the hei. This is the meaning of Sefer Yetzirah’s words, “Understand with wisdom, and be wise with understanding”: Chochmah and Binah are found in each other.

The vav-hei is different: the vav is like the voice that carries the emotions into speech, which is the last hei. Speech is made of letters and words, so the vav draws the emotions down into a new medium.

A person’s speech follows his emotions: when he loves, his words are loving. Yet speech is a different kind of thing from emotion, since it is made of combinations of letters.

Only the voice, the vav, carries the emotion into the letters, so that speech follows the emotions. So it is above: the last hei, called “the revealed world,” Malchus, is of a different essence from the attributes that flow into it, and the vav bridges the two; the text refers to its explanation of “And the number of the children of Israel shall be” for more.

A new section begins. Everything so far concerned the Name Havayah within the emanated levels, the Sefiros of Atzilus; but the verse’s closing words, “because Havayah your G‑d loves you,” point higher. Read as a transitive verb, ahevcha means that G‑d draws love down into you, instilling it in the soul.

Ahevcha also keeps its plain meaning, that G‑d loves you, and the two meanings depend on each other. This love comes from the ten Sefiros within the Emanator Himself, above the emanated Sefiros; a parenthesis opens here that calls them the ten Sefiros of Adam Kadmon (a Kehot note records that these words are not the Alter Rebbe’s own) and lists sources on G‑d’s love for Israel.

The first sources are in the Midrash Rabbah, on G‑d’s love for Yaakov and on “I have loved you” (Malachi 1:2): on Ki Sisa, on Vayeshev, and in Shir HaShirim Rabbah on the verses “Set me as a seal,” “Many waters” and “I adjure you.”

The list continues with the Zohar and Tanna DeBei Eliyahu, and then refers to the Torah Ohr discourse “And Israel saw” (Beshalach), which explains that there are two Names Havayah, a lower and a higher. The Idra Rabba, too, teaches that wherever the Name is written twice, one is for Z’eir Anpin and one for Atika.

The printed letters of the Idra quotation are garbled; the Idra Rabba itself reads “one for Z’eir Anpin and one for Atika,” and the translation follows it. Likewise the love in the verse comes from the higher Havayah, and it works both ways: our arousal from below brings an arousal from above, and G‑d’s arousal from above awakens one below. From that higher level comes “He turned the curse into a blessing”: willful sins become merits.

The higher teshuvah belongs to the Name Yah, the first two letters, yud and hei. Although that light is drawn down from above, the question is how a person, bound to the world below, can reach so high.

The answer is “with all your might” (bechol me’odecha): a love that breaks out of the soul’s own vessel, its natural limits. Even this boundless love is a “vessel” compared with what is above it, but what is asked of a person below is a “might” of his own, a love beyond his own measure.

This boundless “might” appears especially in baalei teshuvah, and it comes through their sins, through the very opposite of holiness: as with Jeremiah’s “in a land not sown,” it is the “not” that is sown. The letters of shemi, “My Name” (350), together with Yah (15) make 365, the number of the Torah’s prohibitions.

So the prohibitions belong to the higher letters, yud-hei, and stand above the positive commandments. Keeping a prohibition means uprooting one’s will from what opposes G‑d, and that uprooting brings a person to “with all your might” and to self-sacrifice, first of all in actual deed.

The Talmud tells of Rabbi Elazar ben Durdaya, who after a life of sin wept until his soul left him, and a heavenly voice declared him destined for the World to Come. The other form is self-sacrifice in prayer, crying out to G‑d from the distress of being far from Him; all prayer is built on this, so as to reach “And you shall love Havayah your G‑d” in the Shema.

Through “with all your might,” sins become merits, as in “Out of the depths I called You” (Psalm 130). The “depths” are “the depth of darkness,” which is compared to the skull that covers the brain.

As in the earlier analogy, the three faculties of the intellect, Chochmah, Binah and Daas, sit in the skull’s three cavities, and the skull covers and hides them. Nothing of them shows outside except through the hairs.

Through “with all your might,” the strength with which baalei teshuvah “draw Him down,” a person reaches the “depths.” There are ten of them, one for each of the ten Sefiros: the Keser, the hidden root, within each Sefirah.

Once the ten emanated Sefiros are revealed through the hairs, the kelipos can take hold of them and draw nourishment at their outer edges: through the nails (alluded to in the verse about the captive woman, “and she shall do her nails”) and behind the skin of Nukva. This hold is only on the vessels, not on the lights themselves.

Yet the light is clothed in those vessels, so where the kelipos have a hold, complete erasure of sin cannot come from there: not “I have wiped away your transgressions like a thick cloud,” and not the washing that cleanses sins away.

That washing must come from far higher, from “the depth of darkness,” the ten Sefiros within the Emanator, where nothing has yet been revealed or clothed in vessels. “Out of the depths I called You” means calling down a new revelation of Havayah from there.

This is achieved through “with all your might,” as the Zohar says: when the sitra achra is subdued, G‑d’s glory “ascends.” The text explains that “ascends” means rising to Atik Yomin, described as “Who removes mountains” and “Who is exalted from the days of old.”

Atik Yomin is a level of concealment, and from it a new revelation of Havayah is drawn, from the Havayah that is before Atzilus. That is the meaning of the request in the daily prayer, “Bring us back in complete teshuvah before You”: “before You” is the level before, and above, the Havayah of Atzilus, which complete teshuvah reaches.

During the Ten Days of Teshuvah, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the ten “depths” are drawn down. This reaches its peak on Yom Kippur in “before Havayah you shall be purified,” and specifically at Ne’ilah, the closing prayer, because it is the end of the day that atones.

The Gemara treats Ne’ilah as the prayer said close to sunset. The Mishnah rules that one who may have sinned on Yom Kippur, even at dusk, need not bring an offering for a doubtful sin, because “the whole day atones”; the Alter Rebbe infers that the atonement takes effect at the day’s end.

The day’s end is the main time of atonement because Ne’ilah is when Malchus rises into Keser, the highest ascent there is, and this level is called “before Havayah.” From there come purity and washing, and every sin is atoned; a parenthesis then begins, referring to an explanation elsewhere of a Zohar passage on Parshas Emor.

That explanation distinguishes subjugation (iskafya), holding the darkness in check, from transformation (is’hapcha), turning the darkness itself into light. Subjugation is drawn from the mochin of Imma (Binah), while on Shabbos, which draws on the mochin of Abba (Chochmah), transformation becomes possible.

The text also refers to its explanation in Parshas Mattos of the verse “And her father hears her vow.” But all such transformation reaches only the darkness of kelipas nogah, the husk that mixes good and evil, from which the animal soul comes.

Teshuvah “with all your might” goes further: even sins rooted far below nogah become merits, which is the literal sense of “He turned the curse into a blessing.” The text refers to its discourse on Yaakov’s wrestling with the angel, where the Sages say that “they raised dust up to the Throne of Glory.”

Dust, as that discourse explains, is what is left after fire, like ash that cannot grow anything by itself; it stands for the lowest level of the kelipos. That even this dust rose to the Throne of Glory shows the power of teshuvah.

This is why the Sages said, “Great is teshuvah, for it reaches up to the Throne of Glory.” The Throne of Glory is Malchus of Atzilus, which is called “blessing,” so teshuvah reaching there means the curse becoming a blessing.

The text notes that “they raised” is in the plural and refers to its discourse there for the explanation. It then explains why Yom Kippur is called “Shabbos Shabbason,” a Shabbos of complete rest: even compared with Shabbos, it stands higher.

Shabbos is “a Shabbos unto Havayah”: on the six weekdays G‑d’s light comes through the Name Elokim, which conceals, while Shabbos reveals the Name Havayah, the mochin of Abba. This is the yud of the Name, Chochmah, of which it says “wisdom gives life,” and it is what makes the transformation of darkness into light possible.

But the mochin of Abba belong to Atzilus, the Havayah of the emanated levels. So the transformation that Shabbos brings reaches only the darkness of kelipas nogah.

Turning into a blessing the curse that lies below nogah needs the higher Havayah, the Havayah within the Emanator: this is “before Havayah you shall be purified.” That is why Yom Kippur is “Shabbos Shabbason,” a Shabbos above Shabbos.

The text closes with two more references: to its explanation of the verse in Chanah’s prayer, “Havayah, His adversaries shall be shattered… and He will give strength to His king,” which it calls another case of “He turned,” and to the Torah Ohr discourse “And the king extended to Esther.”