ענין ק״ש אחד ואהבת כו׳

The maamar names its subject: two key words of the Shema, “One” (Deuteronomy 6:4) and “You shall love” (6:5), and how the love follows from the oneness, together with an explanation of the whole first section of the Shema. It opens with Elijah’s prayer in the Tikkunei Zohar, which calls G‑d “One, but not in number”: not the first in a series that goes on to two and three, but One beyond all counting and comparison.

To explain what “not in number” excludes, the Alter Rebbe first describes what is “in number”: every world in the chain of descent is made of ten Sefiros, each the cause of the next. The same tenfold structure exists in the G‑dly soul and in the vital soul, and in each the first of the ten is Chochmah, wisdom.

Yet there is something higher than Chochmah: the Supreme Will. The phrase “there is will and there is will” distinguishes two kinds; the lower one stands below the intellect and is produced by it, as part of the emotions, because it wants what reason has shown to be good.

An everyday example of the lower will: a person’s mind weighs what his body needs, sees that a certain business deal will bring profit, and as a result he longs for it and wants to do it. Here the wanting is the product of the reasoning.

The higher will works the other way: it does not come from reasons at all. Sometimes a person wants something so firmly that even if everyone were to prove to him, with all their intelligence, that he should not do it, he still would not agree.

Such stubbornness shows a will that stands above intellect: arguments and knowledge do not touch it. This will, untouched by reasons, is the image the maamar will use for the level above Chochmah, and later for the innermost point of the soul.

The two kinds of will have a counterpart, as it were, in G‑d. When Moshe asked about Rabbi Akiva’s fate, “This is Torah, and this its reward?”, G‑d answered, “Be silent! Thus it arose in thought before Me” (Menachos 29b): a decision of will that gives no reason. A reason does exist, the Alter Rebbe adds, but it is so deeply hidden that even the angels cannot grasp it.

Because the reason lies beyond every created mind, the answer is simply “Be silent.” The Alter Rebbe refers to his explanation of the verse “For over all the glory, a canopy” for more on this, and then turns to what lies below the will: everything from Chochmah downward is called hishtalshelus, the chain of descent.

The chain of descent exists for the sake of revelation, and its first stage is called Atzilus. The Alter Rebbe derives the name from vayaetzel, “and He drew off,” said when G‑d drew some of Moshe’s spirit and placed it on the seventy elders (Numbers 11:25). Moshe stood so high that providing for the people’s physical needs, such as their demand for meat, weighed on him as a burden.

Moshe’s cry, “From where shall I have meat?” (Numbers 11:13), expresses that distance: from his height he could not supply something so material. G‑d’s answer was to gather seventy elders and “draw from the spirit” that was on Moshe to place it on them (Numbers 11:17). The parenthesis refers to the discourse on Aharon’s lamps, which also discusses the people’s demand for meat.

The “drawing off” meant that Moshe’s spirit came down to the level of the seventy elders, the Sanhedrin, who stood below him; only then could they “bear the burden of the people” with him. Atzilus in this sense is a lowering, a descent from one level to the next.

The same is true above: no thought can grasp the Infinite Light, so the worlds could neither receive its radiance nor come into being at all unless it first came down through the descent of Atzilus. Atzilus is the first lowering that makes everything after it possible.

The discourse in Torah Ohr that opens with “For Avraham did not know us” explains that the ten Sefiros of Atzilus are intermediaries between the Emanator, the Infinite One, and the created worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah. As an intermediary, Atzilus relates both to the Infinite above it and to the created beings below it.

The word hishtalshelus comes from shalsheles, a chain, whose rings are linked one inside the next until it grows long. The worlds come into being and are revealed in the same way: each level is a glow of the level above it, and the next is a glow of that glow.

The links run from intellect to the emotive attributes, and from them to thought, speech and action, as in a person. The Alter Rebbe at once qualifies the comparison with Isaiah 55:8, “My thoughts are not your thoughts”: G‑d’s “thought” is not thought in our sense at all.

Human thought and speech cannot create anything, whereas G‑d’s word made the heavens (Psalms 33:6), light came into being when He said “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), and “He spoke, and it came to be” (Psalms 33:9). Still, these divine levels are called “intellect,” “thought” and “speech” by way of analogy.

The analogy works like this: human speech reaches another person, while thought stays within. So the life-force that gives life to the revealed worlds and is actually manifest is called “speech,” like the voice of G‑d that the prophets heard openly, as Moshe “heard the voice” speaking to him from above the Ark cover (Numbers 7:89).

Likewise, when the worlds were created through the Ten Utterances and physical light actually appeared at “Let there be light,” the life-force behind that revelation is called “speech,” because it is perceptible outside its source. The hidden worlds are different: by the same analogy, what gives them life corresponds to thought, which is not revealed outward.

Psalms 150:2 says “Praise Him according to the abundance (rov) of His greatness,” not “according to the greatness of His greatness.” “Greatness” is another name for Chesed, the attribute of expansive kindness, so “the greatness of His greatness” would praise only how far Chesed reaches, which is itself very great.

“The abundance of His greatness” praises something more: the endless number of ways in which that expansive kindness divides and multiplies, across many kinds of worlds and countless levels.

Even in the lowest world, Asiyah, the reach of Chesed is vast: the Talmud says that from the earth to the firmament is a journey of five hundred years, and so from one firmament to the next. There is also expansion of another kind, the expansion of understanding.

Moshe, the greatest of the prophets, had an understanding without limit, and in the same way there are countless levels “from world to world” up to the highest of all levels. The Alter Rebbe refers to Reishis Chochmah, which describes G‑d’s greatness in these same terms: the distances between the worlds and the depth of comprehension.

Section 2 begins. The chain of descent operates in Atzilus and in everything below it: Chochmah gives rise to the emotive attributes, and these give rise to thought, each link coming from the one above.

With the Emanator Himself, however, nothing bears comparison. To define comparison (erech), the Alter Rebbe points to the Torah’s law of valuations (Leviticus 27), where a person’s “value” is fixed in silver according to his age: a set measure that relates one thing to another.

In numbers, erech is a ratio: two is to four as four is to eight, each half of the next. Things that stand in a ratio share a common measure.

Every level of the chain of descent stands in such a ratio to the next, because each was drawn from the one above it: emotions from intellect, thought from emotions.

Even physical and spiritual are comparable in this sense, since the spiritual is enclothed in the physical: the power of intellect works through the brain, and the power of sight through the eye.

The two are even physically linked, through “vapors,” as the science of anatomy explained: the skull has three cavities holding three brains, and damage to one physical brain, such as the brain of memory, makes a person forgetful. A Kehot note points to the Zohar for the phrase “three cavities of the skull, three brains.”

The list of comparable things reaches its lowest point: intellect can be enclothed even in a physical act, as when deep ideas are written in ink in a book. Ink on paper still carries the thought.

None of this applies to the Supreme Emanator. He is not a link in the chain of descent, nor is He enclothed in anything, as a soul is in a body.

He is called sovev kol almin, “encompassing all worlds,” meaning that “above” and “below” are the same to Him, because no world contains or limits Him. Two texts show this: “I, Havayah, have not changed” (Malachi 3:6), and the morning prayer, “You were the same before the world was created; You are the same since it was created.”

If His very being were grasped and enclothed in the worlds, creating them would have changed Him, G‑d forbid, since before creation there was no such enclothement, and after the days of the world end there will be none.

So even now He is not enclothed in the worlds. What gives them life is only His “name,” a glimmer from His attribute of Malchus (sovereignty), as the analogy of a king will show.

A king may live far away, yet his name is “called upon” the lands he rules: they are known as his, though he is not in them. So the worlds bear G‑d’s name and are His, while His essence remains beyond them.

This is what “One, but not in number” means: G‑d stands in no ratio to anything, for He is entirely outside the chain of descent. The next words describe what happens when a person takes this meaning of “One” to heart while reciting the Shema.

The result is “You shall love … with all your heart,” coming from the Yechidah, the innermost of the soul’s five levels: Nefesh, Ruach, Neshamah, Chayah and Yechidah. To explain, the Alter Rebbe notes that the soul’s powers reach outward into many levels, and the soul is moved according to how far it extends into a matter.

The soul is not moved equally by everything. When a person hears stories of wars he is stirred a little and enjoys the telling, but he does not care how the battles ended, since the outcome does not affect him.

A matter that affects him moves him much more, since it matters to him which way it turns out. Such matters have many degrees, up to one that touches the very depth of the soul, the innermost point of the heart, on which he would stake his life.

That innermost point is the Yechidah of the intellectual and vital soul. In the G‑dly soul it corresponds to the Community of Israel, the source of all Jewish souls, called “my heart”: the point of the heart, the Yechidah, which receives the aspect of “One,” the will that is above reason and knowledge.

The way to reach it is contemplation: how G‑d is One, “not in number,” and how the whole chain of descent is a vast lowering from the light of His countenance, no more than a “name.” Psalms 148:13 accordingly says “Let them praise the Name of Havayah,” the Name and not His essence.

The verse continues, “for His Name alone is exalted”; only “His glory” is upon earth and heaven, so what reaches the world is only a radiance. Countless levels and immense contractions lie between that radiance and the light of His countenance, until physical things came into being, down to the physical light of “Let there be light.”

This, the Alter Rebbe says, is the axis of the Arizal’s Etz Chaim from start to finish: it opens with the tzimtzum, the contraction of the Infinite Light, and its last page tells of the creation of heaven and earth. Everything in between is the chain of descent.

The Sages arranged the morning prayers along these lines: Pesukei deZimra and the blessing Yotzer come before the Shema so that one can dwell at length on “One.” The Talmud says that whoever prolongs the word “One” has his days prolonged, and “days” here stands for love.

Love is called “day,” as in “By day Havayah commands His kindness” (Psalms 42:9), which joins kindness, Chesed, the attribute of love, with day. Dwelling on “One” makes love for G‑d grow, and Pesukei deZimra supplies the material for it, telling how all creation is to “praise the Name of Havayah.”

Psalm 150 says “Praise Him for His mighty acts, praise Him according to the abundance of His greatness.” As explained earlier in the maamar, “the abundance of His greatness” is the division of His kindness into countless levels in every world.

That multiplication comes about through “His mighty acts” (gevuros), which the Alter Rebbe reads as the many great contractions (tzimtzumim). Seeing how much contraction stands between G‑d and the world, a person turns to love G‑d, the Infinite Light itself, and longs to be nullified and absorbed in Him.

Once he sees that this world and its physical powers are only the end product of so many concealments and contractions, his love for them becomes very small in his eyes, and his love turns to G‑d Himself.

Section 3 begins with an objection: the Tannaim and Amoraim, the Sages of the Mishnah and Talmud, did not spend long on prayer, especially not on Pesukei deZimra. The answer is that they stood on a very high level; the discourse on the copper serpent discusses this further.

Their level is captured by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s words, “With one bond I am bound [to Him]”: a brief contemplation, all at once, was enough for them to grasp the true “One,” and it stayed fixed in the heart like a peg that can never be moved.

The parenthesis gives sources for the image of a firmly driven peg: the Zohar and the Midrash on “a peg in a sure place” (Isaiah 22:23), and Isaiah 33:20, “a tent that will not be moved, whose pegs will never be pulled out.” Such a bond is called “two companions that never part,” the Zohar’s phrase for a union that is never interrupted.

The Alter Rebbe refers to two more discourses on this constancy. We, by contrast, are coarse and far from spirituality, so we must dwell at length before our mind and heart can grasp what spirituality is.

We must also grasp how far physicality has fallen, “from a high roof to a deep pit” (Chagigah 5b). The analogy is a child, to whom a halachah must be explained at length, with examples and different phrasings, because he is far from Talmudic reasoning and from knowing the worldly matters the law deals with.

That is why the Sages instituted Pesukei deZimra and the two blessings before the Shema: through them a person fulfills “You shall love Havayah your G‑d,” so that Havayah becomes truly “your G‑d,” dwelling and revealed within him. This comes through contemplating the Shema’s words, beginning with the Name Havayah, which means “He was, He is and He will be,” G‑d beyond time.

“Our G‑d” means a G‑d who is ours, because we are nullified to Him in true union, as “You are children to Havayah your G‑d” (Deuteronomy 14:1). A son, in the Talmudic idiom, is “his father’s leg,” an extension of his father.

The foot is the model of such nullification: it yields to the head even when the head decides to cause it pain for its own good. Frostbite, for example, was treated by rubbing the foot with snow.

A burned foot was treated with great heat in a bathhouse, a cure that hurts badly at the time. The foot feels only the pain and not the cure, which only the head understands, yet it does not resist, because it is nullified to the head.

In such oneness one can say “ours”: within one person every limb belongs to him, so the head can be called the foot’s and the foot the head’s. This is the sense in which G‑d is “our G‑d.”

One cannot say this of a separate person, whose body is not one’s own. When the Torah says throughout “I am Havayah your G‑d,” it means a G‑d who is truly yours, as a head belongs to its own foot.

The reason is that the Jewish soul is “Havayah’s portion” (Deuteronomy 32:9), truly part of Him, only it has come down through the descending levels “from a high roof to a deep pit.” So “You shall love Havayah” means that He should be truly your G‑d, and no one should think that this is beyond him.

The Shema itself answers that objection in its closing words, “who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Numbers 15:41). Egypt was “the nakedness of the land” (Genesis 42:9), and the people had sunk into the fifty gates of impurity, yet G‑d took them out, and within fifty days they received the Torah.

They rose so high that the verse’s continuation, “to be your G‑d,” was fulfilled in the open revelation of the Shechinah at Sinai. Therefore even now “I am Havayah your G‑d” holds true, and the purpose of the soul’s descent is to draw G‑dliness down through Torah and mitzvos.

The mitzvos are called “the 248 limbs of the King,” after the 248 positive commandments. Just as the soul’s powers are enclothed in the body’s limbs, sight in the eye, so the divine light is enclothed in the mitzvos.

When one moves the eye, the power of sight enclothed in it moves with it. So through the mitzvos, in which the Infinite Light is enclothed, a person draws that light down, for example through the tallis.

What actually draws the light down is “You shall love.” The Zohar teaches that “a spirit brings a spirit” and cites “If he sets his heart toward Him” (Job 34:14): when a person arouses love for G‑d, G‑d’s spirit is drawn down to him.

The Alter Rebbe refers to two discourses on the Mishnah’s teaching that the Shema comes before “And it shall be, if you listen,” so that one first accepts the yoke of the kingship of Heaven and afterwards the yoke of the mitzvos (Berachos 2:2). The Shema’s acceptance and love come first, and the mitzvos draw the light down after them.

In general the mitzvos express love and Chesed: they correspond to the five chasadim (five kindnesses), alluded to in the five times the word “light” and the five times the word “water” appear at the beginning of Genesis.

Water, which flows from high to low, stands for the actual performance of the mitzvos, through which G‑d’s kindness descends “like water that waters a tree,” in the Tikkunei Zohar’s words. Their inner side is the five times “light,” the love that is the inner dimension of Chesed.

The Alter Rebbe now reads the rest of the Shema’s first section. “These words … shall be” refers to the Written Torah, called Mikra, a word meaning “summoning,” as with the silver trumpets used “for summoning the congregation” (Numbers 10:2). Since the whole Torah is G‑d’s names, as the Zohar and Ramban teach, reading it calls the Infinite Light and draws it down from above.

“You shall teach them to your children” refers to the Oral Torah, which works from below upward, since its essence is understanding. Every part of it, the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Jerusalem Talmud and even the Beis Yosef, counts as Oral Torah, and through comprehending it a person rises from below to above.

Isaiah 54:12, “I will make your windows of kadkod,” is read as kad twice. The first kad, a pitcher, as in “she filled her pitcher” (Genesis 24:16), has the numerical value of twenty-four, the books of Scripture, which come from above to below; the second is their explanation in the Oral Torah, from below to above.

“You shall bind them” refers to the performance of the mitzvos, since the Talmud compares the whole Torah to tefillin (Kiddushin 35a). Tefillin draw G‑d’s unity down so that it is revealed in physical things.

The section proclaiming “One” is written in ink on parchment, placed in the tefillin and set on the arm and between the eyes, all physically.

So too every mitzvah draws down G‑d’s unity, so that His oneness rests and is revealed in the physical objects of the mitzvos, as in the tallis.