להבין ביאור הדברים ע״פ אני ישנה ולבי ער כו׳

The maamar sets out to explain the verse from the Song of Songs in which the bride, the Jewish people, says that she sleeps while her heart stays awake; it is a further explanation (biur) of the discourse on the same verse just before it in Likkutei Torah, and it goes through the verse phrase by phrase. It begins with the soul’s descent: each soul comes down from a particular G‑dly level, as the soul of Avraham, whose attribute was love, came from the world of love.

The souls have ten powers of their own, intellect and emotions, and these are enclothed in the ten corresponding powers of the animal soul. When the G‑dly soul awakens its love and awe of G‑d, this can be the inborn love, in which the soul is like a candle’s flame before a great torch, or a love that grows out of understanding.

Since the G‑dly soul is enclothed in the animal soul, the animal soul is carried along and comes to agree to this love: first it is subdued (iskafya), and finally it is transformed (is’hapcha). This is the reason the soul came down into the body: the descent exists for the sake of the ascent that this transformation brings about.

To show why the animal soul’s transformation is an ascent, the Alter Rebbe first identifies where it comes from: the face of the lion and the face of the ox, two of the four faces of the holy Chayos, the “living creatures” that carry the Divine Chariot in Ezekiel’s vision. The animal soul, then, has a holy root.

¶3 Hold this question: paragraph 3 explains why the transformation is an ascent.

The same holy beings appear in each of the three lower worlds under different names: Serafim (“burning ones”) in Beriah, Chayos in Yetzirah and Ofanim (“wheels”) in Asiyah. All of them belong to holiness that is already refined, for they are permeated with self-nullification before G‑d; even the Ofanim, the lowest of them, express it “with a great noise,” as the morning prayers describe them.

A person’s animal soul is different: it experiences itself as a separate existence, apart from G‑d. It comes not from the angels themselves but from the “dregs” and “refuse” of the Ofanim.

These dregs have not yet been refined, and it is the G‑dly soul that must refine them. The words about the dregs appear twice in the Hebrew, apparently a doubling in the print, and the translation keeps the repetition. The dregs, in turn, have an inner and an outer dimension.

The inner dimension of these dregs is the human animal soul, which has an intellect and emotions of its own; the outer dimension is the life-force of an actual animal. The animal soul in a person is thus the most inward part of what has not yet been refined.

The faces of the lion and the ox are themselves rooted in the World of Tohu (“chaos”), the first order of intense, unharmonized lights that came before the World of Tikkun (“repair”). Kabbalah reads the kings of Edom who reigned “before any king reigned” over Israel, each of whom “reigned” and then “died,” as the Sefiros of Tohu, whose vessels shattered and fell.

This is why an animal is physically stronger than a person: its life comes from Gevurah, strength, rooted in Tohu, whose lights are mightier than those of Tikkun. So when the animal soul is raised up, its elevation is all the greater, just as the Sages say that those who return to G‑d stand in a place where even the completely righteous cannot stand.

¶2 This answers the question from paragraph 2: the animal soul is rooted in Tohu.

This refinement is not a single event. As long as we live in this world, the work continues, one refinement after another.

The reason is that G‑d’s kingship reaches everything, even the realms outside holiness. The Sages’ teaching that when Israel was exiled to Edom the Shechinah went with them is read here as the Shechinah descending into the seventy “princes,” the spiritual ministers of the seventy nations, and enclothing itself in them in order to give them life. In Likkutei Torah, Ki Seitzei, the Alter Rebbe applies the same saying within each person: the Shechinah in exile is the spark of G‑dliness in the soul, hidden within the body and the animal soul.

Since the Shechinah is always invested in these lower forces, it must always be raised back up. This raising is called “eating” above, hinted at in the title “Shepherd of Israel,” since a shepherd feeds his flock.

The analogy is food, which can sustain a person because the divine word that gives it life is higher than the divine word in the human soul. As the Sages teach, man was created last in the work of creation, so what was created before him comes from a higher source.

So too the animal soul: its root is in the World of Tohu, which came “before any king reigned,” before the order of Tikkun. When it is refined it is transformed into self-nullification to G‑dliness itself and becomes the level of G‑dliness: it loves G‑d “with all your heart and with all your soul,” with all its desire and delight, saying “Whom do I have in heaven” but You, and finding Him “desirable and pleasant and awesome,” in the words of the morning prayers.

The goal of the animal soul’s ascent is complete union, “to be absorbed into the body of the King,” a Kabbalistic phrase for becoming one with G‑d Himself, not only receiving a glimmer of His light. Through this the transformed animal soul draws life-force and the Infinite Light into the vessels of Atzilus, the highest world.

“And you shall do them” is read as “as if you had made Me”: the word otam, “them,” is written אתם, which can also be read atem, “you” (Vayikra Rabbah reads it “as if you had made yourselves”), and by drawing the Infinite Light into Atzilus our service, as it were, “makes” G‑d’s revelation there. A parenthesis recalls an earlier explanation that put it differently: because the souls “arose in [G‑d’s] thought,” their root is higher than the life-force of the vessels of the Ten Sefiros, and so they have the power to draw the Infinite Light into those Sefiros. So it is explained earlier in Likkutei Torah, Shir HaShirim, on “My dove, in the clefts of the rock”: the souls, which arose in thought, the very essence of the light of Abba, draw the Infinite Light into Z’eir Anpin, adding lights in its vessels, and this is “as if you had made Me.”

This is why the Holy One, blessed be He, is called “heart”: the Midrash, reading “but my heart is awake” as the heart of the Holy One, finds Him called the heart of Israel in “the Rock of my heart” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 5:2). The analogy follows the physiology the Alter Rebbe uses: the liver “cooks” the blood and sends its choicest part to the heart, which then closes; afterwards a power from the brain opens it.

When the heart opens, the blood flows out from it to the lungs, and from there it joins and spreads to all the limbs.

In the same way G‑d, the “heart,” receives what the arousal from below sends up: the animal soul refined until it loves G‑d “with all your heart.” This offering from below is called the raising of mayin nukvin, “feminine waters,” the Kabbalistic term for the initiative from below that calls forth a response from above, just as the liver sends the best of the refined food to the heart.

In response mayin duchrin, “masculine waters,” flow down from the higher Chochmah, which, like the brain opening the heart, opens the supernal heart so that its life-force flows down to the worlds. Just as the heart beats by closing and opening in turn, the divine life-force pulses in “running and returning” (ratzo vashov), rising up and flowing back down; the beating heart prepares the explanation of “the voice of my beloved knocks” (dofek, a word that also means a pulse).

The first words of the verse are now applied to exile: “I am asleep” describes the state in which, as the Psalm laments, “we have not seen our signs.” Both directions of the cycle just described are weakened: the raising up from below is not complete, not truly “with all your heart,” and the flow from above is not openly revealed, so that G‑dliness is not seen with physical eyes.

In the time of the Temple G‑dliness was visible: fire came down from heaven onto the altar, described as “a lion that consumes the offerings,” and there were open miracles, as at the Sea, where Israel “saw the great hand.” In exile everything looks natural, as if “the world follows its customary course.”

Yet “my heart is awake.” Exile is compared to sleep precisely because a sleeper is fully alive and only his eyes are closed; so too in exile the raising up and the drawing down still take place, but hidden.

The Sages teach that the daily prayers were instituted in place of the Temple offerings, so prayer now does the work the offerings did; the difference is that the G‑dliness the offerings drew down was openly revealed, while in prayer it comes in concealment. The Midrash on this verse says the same: “I am asleep” from the offerings, “but my heart is awake” to the Shema and prayer (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 5:2).

This leads to the next words of the verse, “the voice of my beloved knocks”: dofek, “knocks,” also means a pulse, and the pulse felt at the wrist is the outer expression of the beat within the heart, both of them driven by a flow from the brain to the heart.

The same holds above: the “running” upward of our arousal from below calls forth the “returning” flow of the arousal from above, and this flow too has an inner and an outer level. The inner level is the drawing down of the Torah, which G‑d “established in Yaakov” and “placed in Israel.”

The Written Torah comes from the intellect of Abba (Chochmah) and the Oral Torah from the intellect of Imma (Binah), and this flow reaches the very heart, its inner core. A parenthesis refers to the commentary of the Ramaz, Rabbi Moshe Zacuto, a seventeenth-century Kabbalist, on the Zohar in Va’eira, which speaks of the Congregation of Israel in exile, when the voice departs from her and even “if the word awakens,” it breaks off again.

The second flow is outer, drawn from the “back” (achorayim) of Abba, the outer side of Chochmah. It corresponds to the pulse at the wrist, which beats just as the heart beats; that pulse too derives from Chochmah.

Because the pulse comes from Chochmah, it carries the pattern of the vowel-points, such as kamatz and patach. The text cites the Likkutei Torah of the Arizal on Vayeira and Mishnas Chassidim (the Arizal’s teachings arranged as a Mishnah by Rabbi Immanuel Chai Ricchi) for how these patterns in the pulse reveal which defect lies behind an illness.

The vowel-points belong to Chochmah, and Chochmah is where the Infinite Light rests, for that light rests only in Chochmah; that is why the pulse is drawn from there. Yet it comes not from the inner face of Chochmah but from its “back.”

The letters of dofek (דפק) are those of the number 184 (קפ״ד), the sum of the “back” form of the Name Av, that is, the Name Havayah with its letters spelled out with yuds (totalling 72), written out cumulatively, one letter-name more each time (20 + 35 + 57 + 72 = 184). The parenthesis gives the place, Etz Chaim, the Gate of the 288 Sparks, chapter 2, whose eighth level is exactly this sum of 184.

This “back” level is the root of pekidah, G‑d’s “remembering” that brings about birth, as in “Havayah remembered (pakad) Sarah”: pakad (פקד) is spelled with the same letters as 184 (קפ״ד). From the inner level alone, Sarah “had no child.”

A child could be drawn down to Sarah from the back of Chochmah, but the inner dimension cannot descend through the chain of worlds to bring about a birth below. The Arizal’s Likkutei Torah on Vayeira says the same.

The inner dimension of Abba does not descend; only from its back comes “He remembered Sarah,” and likewise the promise of redemption, “I have surely remembered what is done to you,” which reached even Egypt, the lowest of places.

The second phrase of the verse is “Open for me.” The Sages read it as G‑d saying to Israel: open for Me an opening as small as the eye of a needle, and I will open for you one as wide as the entrance of the Hall (Ulam), the great porch at the front of the Temple sanctuary. In Shir HaShirim Rabbah (5:2) the promise is of openings “through which wagons and carriages can enter”; the form cited here, with the Hall, is another version of the saying.

As the Mishnah records, every gate of the Temple had doors except the entrance of the Hall. Doors, which are sometimes closed and sometimes open, stand for the arousal from above that matches the arousal from below: when we arouse ourselves, the door opens.

Our arousal can reach only as high as Chochmah, the first level of the chain of descent, since “You made them all with Chochmah.” From that level our initiative can call forth a response from above.

But Keser, the Crown, is above the whole chain of descent; the parenthesis recalls an earlier explanation, on “Go forth and gaze,” that Keser is not counted among the Ten Sefiros, which begin from Chochmah, and that even the flow from Keser to Chochmah comes by a “leap” rather than by gradual descent. How, then, could our raising of mayin nukvin call forth mayin duchrin from Keser? It cannot: what comes from there comes of its own accord.

The parenthesis refers to the discourse on “And Havayah went before them by day” in Torah Ohr, Beshalach. There the Alter Rebbe explains that the ascent of Malchus through our arousal from below reaches only as high as Chochmah, and that Keser, above the chain of descent, cannot be aroused from below at all, except as it is enclothed in the mitzvos, its “vessels and limbs.”

This is why the entrance of the Hall had no doors at all: it stands always open of itself, like the light of Keser, which does not depend on our opening.

Even so, this light of Keser is drawn down and revealed only after there is completeness below, in the levels from Chochmah downward; only then does what is above the chain of descent rest there as well.

In a person’s service this means: when someone does all that his soul can do, with his mind and his emotions, love and awe, then the Supreme Will, which nothing in the human soul can match or produce, is drawn down of itself.

So it was in the Temple: even to reach the open entrance of the Hall, one had to pass through several gates that had doors, but once one reached the entrance of the Hall itself there was nothing left to open, for it had no doors.

Shavuos offers a parallel: on Shavuos the light of Keser shines, as the fiftieth of the fifty gates of Binah. The Gemara (Nedarim 38a) teaches that fifty gates of understanding were created in the world and all but one were given to Moshe. Here that fiftieth gate, beyond what even Moshe reached through understanding, is the light of Keser that shines of itself on Shavuos.

That is why the verse says “You shall count fifty days,” although, as the next paragraph explains, only forty-nine are counted.

In the counting of the Omer only forty-nine days are counted, each day drawing down one of the forty-nine gates of Binah by the words “Today is one day,” and so on. The fiftieth day, Shavuos itself, is not counted at all.

The fiftieth gate is not counted because nothing done below reaches it; our counting cannot draw it down. It comes of its own accord, like the light of Keser described in the previous paragraph.

Even so, the fiftieth gate comes only after the forty-nine days have been counted, that is, after we have drawn down all of the arousal from above that human effort can draw down.

Once there is completeness below, within the chain of descent, then and only then does what is above both the chain of descent and our own arousal come to rest of itself.

This explains why the verse says “You shall count fifty days” when we count only forty-nine: Scripture credits us with drawing down the fiftieth day, because although our counting cannot reach it, its revelation depends on our having counted the forty-nine first.

The same is true of “Open for Me like the eye of a needle”: the whole chain of descent, everything our service can open, is no more than a needle’s eye compared to the Supreme Will, which then opens “like the entrance of the Hall.”

Returning to the verse, the “opening” that G‑d asks of us has two levels. The first, “my sister,” is the love of G‑d that every soul has by nature, like the love between a brother and sister, which comes simply from their sharing one source.

¶3 This explains “my sister” and “my beloved,” mentioned in paragraph 3.

Natural love, however, is not yet “service” (avodah), and one who has only that love is not called “one who serves G‑d.” The word avodah is related to the tanning of hides (oros avudim): service means working on oneself the way a tanner works a hide, like a servant’s labor or the carrying of a load; the Zohar speaks of the “service of love.”

Service means changing one’s nature and habits: in Sefer Shel Beinonim, the first part of the Tanya, chapter 15, the Alter Rebbe explains that only one who battles his nature and his habit is called “one who serves G‑d,” while one who is good by nature, or whose habit has become second nature, is not. This is the second level of “Open for me,” “my beloved” (ra’yasi), a word related to mir’eh, “pasture”: the animal soul is subdued and transformed until it becomes food and pasture for holiness, like food that is digested and becomes part of the one who eats it.

This transformation comes from the mind’s contemplation of G‑d’s infinite greatness, before which “all is as nothing,” and it requires real toil of the soul and of the body, as Likkutei Amarim (Tanya) explains.

The third level is “my dove,” higher than “my beloved”: a constant gazing at the glory of the King. Of this it is said, “The eyes of man are never sated”: in Proverbs this speaks of human desire, which always wants more, and here it is read as the soul’s gaze at G‑d, which is never satisfied.

Ha’adam, “the man,” is read as “the great man among the giants,” whom the Sages identify with Avraham, of whom the Torah says that he went “going on and journeying,” an unceasing “running and returning” in self-nullification. The Sages allude to the same freshness when they say “every day they should be in your eyes as new,” and ask, “Is there old age before Him?”

The Idra, a section of the Zohar, speaks of the gaze of the Forehead of the supernal countenance, from which, as the text has it, 375 (שע״ה) lights shine; elsewhere Likkutei Torah numbers these lights of the Forehead 370 (ש״ע). The text links the number with yeshu’os, “salvations,” as in “He causes salvations to sprout” from the morning prayers, and with vayisha in “And Havayah turned to Hevel” and his offering: both words are built on its letters shin and ayin, and vayisha comes from sha’ah (שעה), “to turn toward, to regard,” which suits the Forehead’s gaze.

This gaze is a revelation of the Infinite Light that is far above the chain of descent, and as its name, Ein Sof, “without end,” says, it has no end.

Because the light has no end, the gaze never becomes stale: like doves, who never tire of looking at each other, the soul is never sated. The parenthesis points to discourses on three verses about eyes and seeing; in the first, on “Red of eyes” (Torah Ohr, Vayechi), the Alter Rebbe explains this gazing at the glory of the King as love in delights, the highest love, like a pair of doves that gaze at each other constantly with delight. The others are on “You have captured My heart with one of your eyes” and on Moshe’s plea, “let me see the land.”

The fourth level, “my perfect one” (tamasi), is the highest of all.

The other three all take place within a person’s own soul and serve to rectify that soul, but “my perfect one” completes what is lacking in others too. Moshe is the model: because his soul included all of Israel, he could rectify on behalf of the whole people.

In every generation its leaders have the same task of repairing and completing the deficiencies and blemishes above. But this applies only to those who share a common soul-root.

In its plain sense the verse asks, “Is the tree of the field a man, to come before you in the siege?”, forbidding the felling of fruit trees in a siege; here it is read as a statement, “man is the tree of the field”: like a tree, the community of souls has roots and branches. Those who share a root or a branch are responsible for one another in a closer way than the general responsibility of every Jew for every other.

Such repair for another person’s blemish comes about through reincarnation (gilgul) or ibbur, in which a soul joins another person for a time, as Sefer HaGilgulim (the Book of Reincarnations, from the teachings of the Arizal) explains; the actual repair and completion is accomplished through supernal unifications (yichudim).

The greatness of “my perfect one” is that repairing a blemish requires drawing down a new light from far above, namely the Infinite Light, called “the perfection of all.” Because it completes every blemish and deficiency, this level is called tamasi, from tam, “complete.”

The next words of the verse are “for my head is filled with dew.” Dew is what brings about all four levels just described, and unlike rain it is never withheld: Eliyahu swore that there would be neither dew nor rain, yet, as the Talmud notes (Taanis 3a), when G‑d sent him to end the drought He spoke only of rain, for the dew had never been withheld.

Dew is never withheld because it comes from a level far above the chain of descent, the same source from which the manna came down to Israel. The Kabbalists call it tala di’vedolcha, “the crystalline dew,” one of the seven tikkunim, the “arrangements,” of the Gulgalta, the supernal “Skull” that encompasses the hidden brain.

The analogy is the moisture in the human brain, a spiritual “water” in which the power of intellect resides. So above, the crystalline dew is the moisture of Mocha Stima’ah, the hidden brain, the innermost wisdom concealed within Keser.

Because this dew is above the very beginning of the chain of descent, sin and iniquity cannot hold it back, since it does not depend on our arousal from below. This is the meaning of G‑d’s promise through Hoshea, “I will be like dew to Israel,” which follows “I will love them freely.”

It is an arousal from above alone, which our arousal cannot reach. Yet for its flow to enter the inner dimension of the worlds there must again be completeness below; then it comes to rest there of itself, revealed.

The verse has two halves: “my head is filled with dew,” for the dew is enclothed in Chochmah, the “head”; but “his locks, with the drops of the night” refers to the level of hairs. The verse itself reads “my locks” (kevutzosai); “his locks” (kevutzosav) is the word of a later verse in the Song (5:11), “his locks are curled.”

Hair is the image for how the worlds descend from the Infinite: a hair carries life from the head, but only as a thin trickle, not the brain itself. There are two kinds of descent.

The first is the enclothing of the partzufim, the divine “configurations,” one within another: each level is enclothed in the next, as in a person wisdom clothes itself in emotions and emotions in thought, so that the higher level is present inside the lower.

The second kind is the descent of the worlds from the Infinite Light that is above the whole chain. Here the Infinite does not enclothe itself at all, for “no thought can grasp Him”; only a radiance comes forth, while His essence is not enclothed in it.

The Kabbalists could find no better image for such a radiance than hair, which has a hold in the head and draws nourishment from it, yet is only the brain’s surplus, not the brain itself. These hairs are the thirteen tikkunim of the beard, the “arrangements” of the supernal countenance.

The thirteen tikkunim are the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, such as “Havayah, slow to anger.” Such attributes do not apply to G‑d as He is in Himself, because before Him the world takes up no place at all; they apply only to the radiance that goes forth to bring into being the source of the chain of descent.

The word for locks, kevutzos, is linked to kotz, the thin tip of a letter: these hairs are like small yuds and vavs, mere tips, a minimal radiance.

This is why the verse speaks of “drops of the night”: the dew that falls at night breaks into drops so that it can descend through the hairs, as the Infinite Light reaches the worlds only as a thin radiance.