שחורה אני ונאוה בנות ירושלים כאהלי קדר כיריעות שלמה

The maamar opens with Song of Songs 1:5, where the maiden speaks to “the daughters of Jerusalem.” The Alter Rebbe first identifies these daughters: they are the souls that have not yet come down into this world to be clothed in a body.

Before its descent, a soul is still included within G‑d, its Emanator, in a state called ayin, “nothing”: it has no existence of its own apart from Him. He reads the morning blessing “the soul You placed in me is pure; You created it” as a sequence: “pure” is the soul while it is still ayin, and “You created it” is its later coming into being as a separate “something.”

Bittul here means that the soul does not experience itself as a separate being at all; it is wholly absorbed in the Infinite Light. This is the state of every soul “there,” above, before it is born.

The prophet Eliyahu swears “as Havayah lives, before whom I have stood,” describing himself as one who stands before G‑d. The Alter Rebbe applies the phrase to every soul before its descent: each one stood before G‑d in complete bittul.

In that state the souls are called “the daughters of Jerusalem.” The parenthesis is a scholarly note: the Pardes (Pardes Rimonim, R. Moshe Cordovero’s classic work of Kabbalah), in its section defining Kabbalistic terms, quotes two Zohar readings of the phrase, and the first of them is the reading given here.

The name Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) is read as yirah shalem, “complete awe.” Awe of G‑d comes from His Kingship, and Psalms calls that Kingship “a kingship over all worlds,” boundless both upward and downward, that is, infinite.

Because the Kingship is infinite, no created being within the descending order of levels can take on the full measure of awe that it calls for. A verse from Psalms shows how awe does reach creatures: through “His mighty deeds” and “the glorious splendor of His kingdom.”

“The glorious splendor of His kingdom” is the angels’ acceptance of G‑d’s rule. The camp of the angel Michael serves with love and the camp of Gavriel (the text breaks off with “etc.”) in its own way, and their numbers are vast, “a thousand thousands” and beyond counting.

All this angelic service is the glory of G‑d’s Kingship, yet it is made known to creatures only through “His mighty deeds” (gevuros), which the Alter Rebbe reads as the many contractions (tzimtzumim) that limit the light at each step of the descent. Created beings therefore receive awe only in a limited, contracted form.

The souls before their descent are ayin, with no self of their own, so they accept G‑d’s Kingship in its full, infinite measure. That is why they are “the daughters of Jerusalem,” of complete awe, and they are also the “virgins, her companions” of the Psalm, who follow the bride.

“The maidens (alamos) love You” gives these unborn souls another name. The souls that have descended are called, as one whole, Knesses Yisrael, the “community of Israel” understood as the source of all Jewish souls, and she is called “the bride.”

G‑d is “the groom” (chasan), a word the Alter Rebbe links to the Aramaic chaus darga, “going down a step,” as a man goes down a step to take a wife. The groom’s descent to the bride is the drawing down of the Infinite Light into the souls.

The Mishnah reads “on the day of his wedding” in Song of Songs as the Giving of the Torah at Sinai: that was the wedding of G‑d and Israel. The analogy is marital union, in which (in the older physiology the text assumes) a drop drawn from the brain of the giver passes to the recipient.

The “drop” in this analogy is the Torah, which is G‑d’s own wisdom and will as they are in the Infinite itself. The classic Kabbalistic phrase “wise, but not with a knowable wisdom” stresses that G‑d’s wisdom is unlike any wisdom we could grasp.

This infinite wisdom is received and “absorbed” by Jewish souls, as a seed is absorbed and takes hold. The Torah is said to contain six hundred thousand letters, matching the six hundred thousand root souls of Israel, so that each soul has its own letter as its channel.

The Talmud teaches that an unborn child is taught the entire Torah in the womb. The Alter Rebbe explains its purpose: so that the light of the Torah’s letters, a radiance of the Infinite, takes hold in the soul from the very start.

Because the souls receive this “drop” of divine wisdom, they are called “the bride.” The text refers the reader to the Idra Zuta, the concluding section of the Zohar, for this theme.

The second section begins. The “bride,” the source of the souls that have descended into bodies, now speaks to the “daughters of Jerusalem,” the souls that remain above, still “pure” and included in G‑d.

Her claim is paradoxical: she has been darkened by her descent into a physical body, yet she is more beautiful than the souls that never descended. The rest of the maamar explains how the blackness itself is the source of her beauty.

¶14 Why is the black bride more comely? Paragraph 14 completes the answer.

Song of Songs describes the beloved’s locks as “curled, black as a raven.” The Talmud reads taltalim, “curled,” as tilei tilim, “heaps upon heaps”: from every stroke of the Torah’s letters, heaps of laws can be derived. So the “black locks” are the vast body of halachic detail.

Hair grows out of the head and divides into countless strands; so the laws of the Torah branch out from G‑d’s Supernal Wisdom into endless details. These branches of halachah are what the verse calls “black.”

Daniel sees the “Ancient of Days” with hair “like pure wool,” that is, white hair, while the Song of Songs speaks of black locks. The Alter Rebbe will explain why the “hairs” are sometimes white and sometimes black.

In Kabbalah, “hairs” stand for channels of divine flow that extend far from their source, just as hair grows far out from the head. These channels come from Chesed, G‑d’s kindness, which reaches down even to the lowest levels, and from “abundant in kindness,” one of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy.

These long, many-stranded channels are the heaps of halachos and the fine rabbinic details in every mitzvah. In Proverbs salseleha plainly means “extol her” (wisdom), but the Sages learned its sense from Rebbi’s maidservant, who asked a man turning over his hair, “How long will you be mesalsel (curling) your hair?” So to “extol” the Torah is to turn it over and over, like curling hair, into every detail.

Some “hairs” are white: the many laws of the positive commandments, such as sacrifices, terumah, tithes, tzitzis (the fringes on the corners of a garment), tefillin and Shabbos. They teach how to perform the mitzvah, for example how to offer a sacrifice so that it is “accepted before G‑d” and becomes a “pleasing fragrance,” in the language of the laws of the offerings in Leviticus.

Every positive mitzvah is a channel of G‑d’s Supernal Wisdom through Chesed, and doing it properly raises the physical objects it uses (the wool of tzitzis, the parchment of tefillin) and binds them to G‑d’s holiness. These are the “white hairs” of Daniel’s vision, from the supernal whiteness that is G‑d’s kindness.

The “black hairs” are the laws of the prohibitions. Their work is the opposite of elevation: they separate evil from good and push it away from holiness, because what is forbidden cannot be raised up and included in G‑d’s light.

The raven was proverbially cruel (the Talmud, Eruvin 22a, speaks of one who for the sake of Torah study makes himself “cruel to his children and his household, like a raven”), so “black as a raven” hints that these “black hairs” contain an element of cruelty. The Alter Rebbe explains the cruelty by looking at what is forbidden.

Nothing can exist without a divine spark that gives it life, so even a forbidden thing has one. Yet the prohibition means that this spark cannot be raised up into holiness through use; the spark is simply rejected, pushed outside.

Rejecting a thing that holds a divine spark is a kind of cruelty toward that spark. A person must show the same “cruelty” toward himself: iskafya, subduing his own desires, and adding rabbinic fences, as the Talmud says, “sanctify yourself in what is permitted to you.”

This is why the laws of prohibition are called “black as a raven.” The parenthesis lists passages of the Zohar; the first two (132a and 140a) are in the Idra Rabba of Parshas Nasso, which speaks of the black hairs and contrasts them with the white.

Now the verse “I am black” can be read: the bride, the descended soul, receives the “drop” of G‑d’s Supernal Wisdom in its “black” form, the details of halachah and the rabbinic safeguards that are the “black locks” described above.

A second sense of “I am black”: the practical mitzvos are done with physical things, and all of them are summed up in tzedakah, charity.

Tzedakah is “black” because it is bound up with physical money, and a person becomes obliged to give it only because he is busy earning a living. While he does business, he is immersed in the affairs of this world.

Yet tzedakah makes the soul “comely,” because “tzedakah exalts.” Money earned by effort holds a person’s very life, so giving it away lifts up the animal soul and all the life-force it spent earning it.

Yosef told the Egyptians to give a fifth of their harvest to Pharaoh (Paroh). The Alter Rebbe reads Paroh by its root, as in “Aharon had exposed them (pera’o),” meaning uncovering and revelation: giving a fifth of one’s earnings to tzedakah brings a revelation of the Infinite Light upon one’s soul. A fifth is the fullest measure of tzedakah because the Sages enacted at Usha (Kesubos 50a) that one who gives generously should not give away more than a fifth, lest he himself come to need others. The maamar finds this measure in Yosef’s “fifth.”

This is the meaning of the blessing said before every mitzvah. “Blessed” (baruch) is read as “drawn down”: the mitzvah draws the Infinite Light down from the highest world into this one, to be addressed as “You.”

“You” is how one speaks to someone present, face to face, so the blessing asks that G‑d be revealed. “Havayah, our G‑d” means that the transcendent G‑d becomes truly ours, His G‑dliness taken in by the soul itself.

The Talmud says: “Fortunate is he who comes here (to the World to Come) with his learning in his hand.” “In his hand” means the learning has truly been absorbed and held, since what one learns is the Supernal Wisdom.

Holding on to one’s learning is compared to conception, in which the seed takes hold. A soul in which the Torah’s light does not take hold is like a woman who does not conceive.

The parenthesis sends the reader to the discourses for Shemini Atzeres in Likkutei Torah, “Havayah is for me among my helpers” and “It is better to take refuge.” There atzeres is read as kelitah, “absorption”: Knesses Yisrael absorbs the drop of Supernal Wisdom, the Torah, when a person learns it, reviews it and holds it firmly in memory (Shemini Atzeres 7:1).

The verse of “a fifth to Pharaoh” therefore means revelation within one’s very soul, and the text notes that Etz Chaim and the Arizal’s Likkutei Torah on Parshas Vayigash also interpret this verse. Its next words, “four parts shall be yours,” literally “four hands,” describe what follows from that giving.

The four “hands” are four expressions of divine power named in the Torah: the great hand, the strong hand, the high hand and the outstretched arm. The great hand is the one that Israel “saw” at the Splitting of the Sea.

“The great hand that Havayah had wrought in Egypt” shows that G‑d’s kindness reached even into Egypt, the lowest place. The Alter Rebbe reads Egypt as a spiritual state, the lowest levels of the soul.

The great hand is the supernal Chesed that reaches so far down that thoughts of teshuvah come even to a lowly soul sunk in physicality. Such a thought is not the person’s own achievement; it “falls” into him from above.

After the great hand comes the need for help. Holiness and its opposite are balanced (“G‑d made one opposite the other”), and when one side grows strong the other weakens, like the two nations in Rivkah’s womb. The Talmud says that a person’s evil inclination would overpower him “were it not that the Holy One, blessed be He, helps him.”

That divine help, which lets a person win his inner struggle, is the “strong hand.” The “high hand” lifts the soul higher still, binding it to the love of G‑d “with all your heart.”

The arm, the upper section of the limb, is the fourth “hand”: it is “outstretched,” reaching far downward to embrace, as in “His right hand embraces me.” This embrace keeps the soul from being separate from G‑d.

All four hands are drawn down through tzedakah, as the verse continues, “as seed for the field.” In exile everything is only “sown,” as the verse says, “Light is sown for the righteous”; what is sown now will sprout and be revealed in the future.

The third section begins. The Alter Rebbe returns to the “black” side of the Torah, the rabbinic laws and fences around the prohibitions, and now shows why it is in fact superior.

The Talmud (Avodah Zarah 35a) reads “your love is better than wine” as Knesses Yisrael telling G‑d that the words of His beloved ones, the Sages, are sweeter to her than the “wine” of the Torah; here they are “the words of the Scribes.” The word arevim (“sweet”) echoes orev, the raven of the verse just cited. To explain the teaching he cites Sefer Yetzirah: the world was created with sefer, sofer and sippur, “book, scribe and telling.”

He maps these terms onto the two Torahs: the “book” is the Written Torah, and the “scribe,” who stands above the book because he writes it, is the Oral Torah. This is why the Sages’ words are called “the words of the Scribes.”

The parenthesis sends the reader to other discourses that develop the same idea. The Written Torah comes from G‑d’s Supernal Wisdom and is called “light,” as in the verse “a mitzvah is a lamp, and the Torah is light.”

An analogy from the flame of a lamp: the light that actually illuminates comes from the part of the flame near the wick. The white hue that surrounds it does not itself give light.

Yet that surrounding white hue is the source from which the illuminating light is drawn. The words of the Scribes are like it.

The rabbinic words are the hidden source from which the “light” of the Written Torah emerges. They are a makif, a “surrounding” level too high to shine openly, described by the verse “He made darkness His hiding place”: their “darkness” is higher than revealed light, and that is why they are “black.”

This is why most rabbinic fences surround the prohibitions rather than the positive commandments. The prohibitions, as he will now show, have a higher root.

The verse “This is My Name forever, and this is My remembrance” is read by the Zohar numerically: shmi (“My Name”) plus the letters Yud-Hei equals 365, the number of prohibitions, and zichri (“My remembrance”) plus Vav-Hei equals 248, the number of positive commandments. Yud-Hei, the first half of the Name Havayah, is the higher, hidden half; Vav-Hei is the lower half, “the revealed world.”

The Tikkunei Zohar calls the 248 positive commandments “the 248 limbs of the King.” Just as the soul’s life-force is openly clothed in the body’s limbs so that they do its will, the positive commandments are vessels that openly hold G‑d’s light.

The prohibitions belong to “the hidden world”: the light that comes through them does not enter the soul in a revealed, felt way.

That light is present in the soul only in concealment, as the morning blessing says of the soul, “You guard it within me.” The soul simply has no vessel that could hold this level openly.

It is received only through negation, by not doing. Jeremiah’s phrase “a land not sown” is read as a land “sown with not”: the prohibitions, whose form is “do not,” plant this light in the soul and join it to G‑d in its root, at the level of sovev, the light that surrounds all worlds.

“Darkness” here means a light too high to be revealed. No positive deed can reach it; only refraining, the “not” of the prohibitions, connects the soul to it.

Isaiah’s words “a spirit from on high will be poured upon us” describe the result: through the prohibitions, the surrounding light (sovev) comes to rest in the soul. Then even the animal soul is raised up, and he now explains how.

¶12 How is the animal soul elevated? Paragraphs 10–12 explain, through the ofanim.

In Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot, the living creatures have the faces of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man. The animal soul is rooted in the “lion” and the “ox,” and comes from the dregs (shmarim) of the ofanim (“wheels”), a class of angels lower than the seraphim (the “burning” angels of Isaiah’s vision).

Yet Ezekiel says that the ofanim “rise up,” and the morning liturgy describes them rising “with a great noise.” The seraphim, by contrast, say “Holy,” which means separate and transcendent.

The Name Tzevaos (“of Hosts”) is read as “He is a sign (os) among His host (tzava),” and os also means “letter.” All the countless angelic hosts draw their life from one single letter of G‑d’s speech; that is the level of “the whole earth is full of His glory.”

“His glory” is the Torah (“there is no glory but Torah”), described as the thirty-two paths of Chochmah. This Torah is clothed in the lowest world and fills it, but only as “glory,” an outer radiance. Sefer Yetzirah opens by saying that G‑d created His world “with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom” (traditionally the ten sefiros and the twenty-two letters). Calling the Torah by this name identifies it with the wisdom through which creation was formed.

The ofanim receive from the seraphim, yet they quake “with a great noise,” because they sense the overwhelming holiness of the Infinite Light, which, as its name says, has no end.

At Chorev Eliyahu saw that “Havayah was not in the noise” (in the plain sense, the earthquake), and after the noise came fire. The Alter Rebbe reads the “fire” as a burning thirst of the soul to dissolve into G‑d, beyond what it can contain, and says this thirst is not for “His glory,” the outer radiance.

It is a thirst for G‑d’s very self, the “I” of “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” That “I” is the Infinite One Himself, the surrounding light (sovev) that is present everywhere without being contained anywhere.

This is why the ofanim “rise up” above the seraphim: their longing reaches higher. King David’s words “My soul thirsts for You ... so in holiness I have beheld You” describe the same thing, and the Zohar says “holiness” is a word by itself, meaning the separate, transcendent G‑d, who becomes revealed through this thirst.

¶10 This answers the question from paragraph 10.

This revelation is a foretaste of the future, when “the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll” and there will be “new heavens and a new earth.” Then the physical world will no longer hide G‑d or appear to exist on its own.

The Infinite Light is already present in everything. The word ashan (“smoke”) at Sinai is read as the initials of olam, shanah, nefesh (world, year, soul): space, time and life. Of space G‑d says “there is a place with Me”: the Infinite is drawn into space itself.

The same holds for time. The liturgical phrase “G‑d is King, G‑d was King, G‑d will be King” spans present, past and future, and all of time is rooted in the Infinite.

The soul, too, holds a radiance of the Infinite Light, as the prayer says, “all the living shall thank You.” The endless ascending levels of Gan Eden, a Gan Eden above every Gan Eden, show that the soul’s dimension also reaches toward the Infinite.

In the future the world’s coarseness will be refined away, and then, as Isaiah says, “eye to eye they shall see” G‑d. This lets the Alter Rebbe give the full meaning of “I am black, yet comely.”

The bride’s “blackness” is her cleaving to G‑d by keeping the prohibitions, the “black as a raven” side of the Torah. Precisely this will bring, in the future, the open revelation of the surrounding light (sovev), the light that encompasses all worlds.

That light is beyond the bounds of the worlds and beyond what any soul can hold, so now it can be received only through negation, “a land not sown.” Because the descended soul reaches it, she is more beautiful than the souls above, who never descended and never kept a prohibition.

¶3 This answers the question from paragraph 3.