עולם לאכסדרה הוא דומה ורוח צפונית אינה מסובבת…

The maamar opens with Rabbi Eliezer’s teaching in the Talmud: the world is like an exedra, a porch enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth, for its northern side has no wall, and when the sun reaches the northwest corner it bends and rises above the firmament. The Alter Rebbe sets out to explain why the north is left open, and begins with the south, where the heat is at its strongest.

The text draws the physical consequences of that heat: in the south the people are dark-skinned and the land is largely unsettled, while in the north the people are fair and the main settlement of the seventy nations, the traditional count of the world’s peoples, is found. These visible effects are the starting point for the spiritual explanation that follows.

In Kabbalah the directions correspond to the Sefiros: the south is Chesed and the north is Gevurah, and Jeremiah’s “Out of the north the evil shall break forth” marks the north as the side of judgment. The reason is the orientation of one who faces east, the “front” (kedmah means both “eastward” and “forward”): the south is on his right, the side of Chesed, and the north on his left, the side of Gevurah.

It is a basic principle of Kabbalah that Chesed and Gevurah are inter-included: each contains something of the other. Applied to the directions, this means that the south, though it is Chesed, must have an element of Gevurah within it.

That element is the south’s intense heat, which is hard on a person. In the Gemara cited, the sage Avlet finds Shmuel lying in the sun and asks him, “Can what is bad be good?” Tosafos on Kesubos brings the Midrash in which Rebbi blesses Antoninus to be spared the cold, and Antoninus answers that one more garment takes care of that; but when Rebbi blesses him to be saved from the heat, he agrees that this is a real prayer.

Physically, the south’s heat comes from the firmament that surrounds the world, which hems in the sun’s light so that, instead of spreading everywhere, it beats down with full force on the place where it shines. Every contraction (tzimtzum) of this kind is the work of the gevuros, the powers that limit and define.

The vessels of Kabbalah, the forms that receive and contain light, likewise come from the gevuros, since a vessel is itself a limit. This concentrating Gevurah appears precisely in the south because the south in itself is Chesed, and so it takes in its opposite.

The north, conversely, is in itself Gevurah, so Chesed is included in it and shows as its cold, for coldness belongs to Chesed. Yet the north’s own Gevurah is still present in that cold, in the harsh intensity that freezes and congeals.

This is why water is found in the north: water, in Kabbalah, flows from Chochmah, the source of the chasadim, which is therefore called “the sea of Chochmah.” In a person, too, moisture comes from the brain, while warmth comes from the heart, its “flashes of fire,” and is tied to Binah, from which Gevurah stems: “I am Binah, Gevurah is mine.”

The south, by contrast, is dry, yet because its essence is chasadim it still has rivers, and Gan Eden lies on the equator. The Alter Rebbe adds that even the pairing of cold with Chesed and warmth with Gevurah is itself the result of an exchange between the attributes, a further case of their inter-inclusion.

To sum up: the mixing of Chesed into Gevurah and Gevurah into Chesed is the chief “rectification” (tikkun) that G‑d, the Emanator, set into His world. Tikkun is the Kabbalistic term for an ordered world in which the attributes are blended rather than each standing alone.

This blend is what allows the world to exist at all. A north that was pure Gevurah, with no Chesed in it, could not endure.

So Chesed was implanted in the north. The Alter Rebbe compares this to the Talmud’s teaching that when the woman’s seed comes first the child is male, and when the man’s comes first the child is female: each side brings forth its opposite, as he says is explained elsewhere.

This also explains the Talmud’s open north. The partition of the firmament, which contracts and encloses, is made of gevuros, but the north is where the chasadim of Chochmah spread out, the same chasadim that bring it its water, and so it is left open; the Alter Rebbe leaves the rest to the reader’s understanding.

Because the north is open, the sun’s light there is not concentrated but spreads this way and that, and so the north is cold. The parenthesis that follows cites the Zohar in Va’eira (2:24a), which places fire in the north and water in the south and says that the Holy One, blessed be He, made each lend the other of its own, together with the Zohar commentaries Zohar HaRakia, Eshel Avraham and Mikdash Melech on that passage, and a discourse in Iggeres HaKodesh that opens with “How great is Your goodness that You have hidden away” (tzafanta, from the same root as tzafon, “north”).

The Zohar on Bamidbar speaks of the north as included in the south, as the left hand is clasped in the right (3:118b), and of the Shechinah set between north and south, the north beneath her head and the south embracing her (3:120a); and in Vayeshev (1:186b) it reads “I have roused from the north” as an arousal from the side of the north that is answered by a holy soul sent from above. In Terumah it explains that the table stood on the north side because joy begins from there and water comes from the left (2:154b), and it applies “From the north comes gold” to Rosh HaShanah, the day of judgment (2:135a).

The text also points to its discussion elsewhere of the Name of forty-two and the Name of seventy-two in the first two passages of the Shema, which it ties to the Zohar’s words “they exchanged their places”: the first passage, of love and so of Chesed, has forty-two words, though the Name of forty-two belongs to Gevurah, and the second, of warning and so of Gevurah, has seventy-two, though the Name of seventy-two belongs to Chesed. It then cites the Zohar in Korach (3:178b) on the open north, noting that the Zohar there makes a different point from the one made here.

The parenthesis closes with three more references: the Arizal’s Likkutei Torah on Ezekiel; the Chanukah discourse “On the twenty-fifth of Kislev” in Parshas Vayeshev, which explains the words “northward, before G‑d,” said of the burnt offering (Leviticus 1:11); and the Ramaz’s commentary on the Zohar at the beginning of Parshas Tzav.