וידעת היום והשבות אל לבבך וגו׳

The maamar opens with Deuteronomy 4:39, from Moshe’s address in Parshas Va’eschanan. A few verses earlier (4:35) Moshe had already said, “You have been shown, so as to know that Havayah is the G‑d,” so the Alter Rebbe asks what the second “you shall know” adds, and why it stresses “this day.”

Before answering, he recalls the scene at Sinai as Deuteronomy 5 retells it. The people heard the Ten Commandments from G‑d Himself, and then, afraid they would die if they heard any more, asked Moshe to go near and hear the rest for them.

G‑d approved the people’s request, “They have spoken well” (Deuteronomy 5:25), and told Moshe to send them back to their tents (5:27). The text then quotes the opening of Deuteronomy 6, where Moshe begins to teach the commandments “to do in the land,” a passage that ends with “a land flowing with milk and honey” (6:3).

Right after these verses comes the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–5). The Alter Rebbe notes that this is the first commandment Israel received through Moshe, after hearing the Ten Commandments from G‑d Himself.

Here is the difficulty. The Shema is a “personal obligation” (chovas haguf), binding on a person wherever he is, in the Land of Israel and outside it, so it is puzzling that the Torah introduces it with “to do in the land,” as if it were a commandment tied to the Land.

To answer, the Alter Rebbe first distinguishes two separate mitzvos: knowledge (daas) of G‑d and faith (emunah) in Him. The proof-text for knowledge is King David’s charge to Shlomo, “Know the G‑d of your father.”

The verse is in I Chronicles 28:9. The Alter Rebbe adds that “know” there means real knowledge and comprehension, as the Shelah also explains; the Kehot note quotes the Shelah citing Chovos HaLevavos: beyond the faith fixed in your heart from your father, through tradition handed down from person to person, know Him yourself, through your own understanding.

The proof-text for faith is Exodus 14:31, said at the splitting of the sea: “And they believed in Havayah.” The Midrash he cites (Shemos Rabbah 23) reads “Look from the peak of Amanah” as a hint at emunah: Israel merited to sing at the sea only in the merit of faith; Shir HaShirim Rabbah notes that a person can see and still not believe, and credits the faith Israel already showed in Egypt.

Now the Alter Rebbe makes a striking claim. What people usually call “faith”, that G‑d gives life to all creatures and created everything from nothing, is not really faith at all.

That G‑d creates and sustains the world needs no faith, because a person can sense it almost as plainly as sight. No one sees G‑d with physical eyes, yet the truth of it is so evident that it is “as if one sees.”

The verse is Job 19:26, and the Alter Rebbe stresses its verb: Job says “I behold,” not “I believe.” A person never sees his soul, yet because he sees his body alive and functioning he knows and feels that the soul is there; that is how he “sees” G‑d.

In the same way, the created worlds form one vast body; the Talmud (Chagigah 13a) says that from the earth to the firmament alone is a journey of five hundred years. Seeing this great “body” exist and function, one perceives the G‑dliness that gives it life, as one perceives the soul in a living body.

The same holds for spiritual beings. Angels and souls are “bodies” in relation to the G‑dly life-force from the Infinite One that creates them, gives them life and sustains them; Isaiah’s call, “Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?”, shows that this knowledge comes from looking, and is felt as if one sees it.

This is why Job uses the verb “I behold,” and why the Holy Tongue calls this awareness daas, knowledge, and not emunah, faith. Daas means recognition and feeling: something sensed directly, not merely accepted.

Daas also means a deep bond of the heart with what one knows, so that the mind never turns away from it and it is never forgotten. Mere thought, by contrast, accomplishes nothing: the Talmud (Berachos 20b) teaches that thinking words is not like saying them, and the Zohar says that thought alone does nothing.

Section 2 qualifies what was said. The felt knowledge just described belongs to G‑d as He “fills all worlds,” the life-force that enters each creation according to its measure; that is why this level is called “the revealed world,” as the maamar on “And I shall be sanctified” in Parshas Emor explains.

But of G‑d as He “encompasses all worlds,” beyond entering them, Malachi 3:6 says, “I, Havayah, have not changed.” Creating and sustaining the worlds makes no difference to Him at all.

The prayer “You are the same before the world was created, You are the same since the world was created” says the same: in relation to Him, worlds do not count. Only “Your kingship” (Psalms 145:13) relates to the worlds, and the Alter Rebbe adds the word “alone”: kingship alone is what rules over them.

Even this is not G‑d’s kingship itself, only a glow and ray from it. That is why we say “Blessed be the Name of the glory of His kingship”: what reaches the worlds is not His kingship itself but only the “Name” of its “glory.”

The Sages’ saying (Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 3), “Before the world was created there was He and His Name alone,” teaches that even His Name, the attribute of kingship, was then included in Him, “alone.” So too Psalms 148:13: “His Name alone is exalted”; only “His splendor,” a ray of the Name, reaches “the earth.”

The Alter Rebbe lists maamarim in Torah Ohr and Likkutei Torah that develop this theme of “He and His Name alone.” He then begins to define what “encompassing all worlds” means.

“Encompassing” does not describe a place. It means that the worlds take up no “space” in relation to G‑d: His life-force is not like a soul in a body, which is truly enclosed in it and affected by what happens to the body and by its surroundings, such as heat and cold.

G‑d is present below just as above, yet is not bounded by place at all, so for Him above and below are the same. “Encompassing” therefore does not mean that He hovers over the worlds from outside.

He is within the worlds too, yet even there He remains “encompassing,” untouched by them. Hence the words of the Yishtabach prayer, “and holy in heaven and on earth”: because He is holy, set apart from the worlds, He is exactly the same on earth below as in heaven above.

The words echo Deuteronomy 4:39, “in the heavens above and on the earth below.” In this gloss, which the Kehot note shows is the Alter Rebbe’s own, he explains the preceding words of Yishtabach, “the great King,” as the light that fills the worlds, His kingship spreading out in greatness: “His greatness is unsearchable” (Psalms 145:3), and “a thousand thousands” serve Him (Daniel 7:10).

At this level the worlds cause no change in Him at all; He is exactly as He was before creation. How there can be worlds with no change in Him is beyond any intellect, so knowledge and feeling do not apply here.

Here is the true place of faith: believing that G‑d is beyond the bounds of the worlds, so that before Him, in the words of Psalms 139:12, “darkness is as light.” For more, the Alter Rebbe refers to his maamar in Torah Ohr on “And Israel saw... and they believed in Havayah.”

Section 3 turns from defining faith to making it grow. Psalms 37:3 says “tend faith,” using a shepherd’s verb (re’eh) for one who feeds and provides; faith must be fed until it is felt in the heart as firmly as knowledge, almost as if seen.

This is what will happen in the time to come, when “the earth shall be full of knowledge” (Isaiah 11:9). The Alter Rebbe reads “the earth” as faith: it is called “earth” because it is the lowest level, where nothing is revealed and there is only belief, and in the future that very faith will be filled with knowledge.

Sefer Yetzirah (1:7) says that the beginning of the Sefiros is “embedded in their end.” So the highest level, G‑d beyond the worlds, is revealed precisely in the lowest, faith; in the future that faith will become direct recognition and feeling.

Isaiah 40:5 promises that “all flesh together shall see” G‑d’s glory: what is now only believed will be seen. What draws down this growth of faith is Torah study and the mitzvos.

The Alter Rebbe refers to several places for this theme: the Torah Ohr maamar on the blessings, the first letter of Iggeres HaKodesh, and the maamar on Proverbs 8:30, where the Midrash reads amon as “pedagogue,” one who carries and raises a child, a sense of providing that matches “tend faith.” He also cites a maamar on “in Our image, after Our likeness.”

Of Torah and mitzvos it is said, “Let us make man in Our image” (Genesis 1:26). The 248 positive mitzvos are the 248 “limbs of the King,” the Divine “form of man” (Adam), a name the Shelah links to adameh le’elyon, “I will be like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:14); each mitzvah is a channel drawing down from the encompassing light.

The 248 mitzvos fall into three “lines,” right, left and middle, which correspond to the three pillars of the world in Avos 1:2: Torah, divine service and acts of kindness. The Torah, as the Kehot note shows from the Zohar and the Ramban, is made of G‑d’s Names, so reading it is like calling Him by name.

Acts of kindness are above all charity, which, in the words of Isaiah 57:15, “revives the spirit of the lowly.” A person’s arousal below evokes its match above, so the encompassing light descends and lowers itself “to revive the spirit of the lowly”; and divine service means the sacrifices, in which the fire below rises to merge with the fire above.

Prayer was instituted in place of the sacrifices (Berachos 26b), so its opening sections, Baruch She’amar and Pesukei deZimrah (the Verses of Praise), act like the altar fire: they kindle love that rises from below. Baruch She’amar praises “He who spoke and the world came into being”: one utterance, which was then spelled out in the remaining nine of the ten utterances of creation.

Psalm 148, part of Pesukei deZimrah, does the same: “His Name alone is exalted; only His splendor is upon earth and heaven,” yet “He has raised up a horn for His people... the children of Israel, a people near to Him.” Verses like these kindle “flames of fire,” a blaze in the heart.

Through such prayer, love from below awakens love from above, “as in water face answers to face” (Proverbs 27:19), and the encompassing light is drawn down until faith is fixed and implanted in the heart. This, says the Alter Rebbe, is why the Shema is introduced with “to do in the land... a land flowing with milk and honey.”

The Shema’s theme is Havayah, who encompasses all worlds and is “our G‑d,” the One we now reach only by faith. The next part says what is to become of this faith.

This G‑d, now believed in by faith alone, is to become “One,” revealed in the seven heavens and on earth, known and felt; the Kehot note refers to the Semak, cited in the Beis Yosef, on the letters of Echad as G‑d’s oneness in the seven heavens and the earth. The Arizal’s Pri Etz Chaim likewise explains “Havayah is One” as drawing down the supernal Daas.

The goal is the “higher unity” (yichuda ila’ah), in which created existence is wholly nullified before G‑d. It comes about as the mitzvos draw this level down into “land,” the level of faith, which then becomes “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Milk nourishes growth, so it stands for the growth of the emotive attributes: the love of G‑d hidden in the heart grows and comes into the open. Such growth comes specifically from faith in the encompassing light; contemplating G‑d only as He fills the worlds yields love and awe limited by what the soul can hold.

For milk as the growth of the attributes the Alter Rebbe refers to his explanation of “my wine with my milk” (Song of Songs 5:1), to the end of the Torah Ohr maamar on “His eyes shall be red with wine” (Genesis 49:12), regarding “bathed in milk” (Song of Songs 5:12), and to the Zohar, Part III, 136b.

Honey stands for sweetness and delight, as in “Then you will delight in Havayah” (Isaiah 58:14). This delight, too, comes from the encompassing light.

One tastes this “honey” when contemplating that G‑d is utterly unchanged by creation, “I, Havayah, have not changed,” the same before creation as after, and that only “His splendor” reaches the world.

Though G‑d is so far beyond the worlds, He has “raised up a horn for His people,” Israel, “a people near to Him,” truly close, and knowing this a person’s heart exults and delights in G‑d. This is how the Alter Rebbe reads Habakkuk 2:4, “the righteous shall live by his faith”: “live” here means delight and the reviving of the soul.

He brings support from the after-blessing Borei Nefashos, which thanks G‑d for “their needs” and also for “all that You have created to give life through them.” “Their needs” are what a person must have to stay alive; the words “to give life” refer to things beyond that.

Those things serve only for enjoyment and refreshment of the soul. In that sense the righteous “live” by faith: faith revives the soul more than any pleasure, more than “an abundance of everything” (Deuteronomy 28:47), as in “Whom have I in heaven? And with You, I desire nothing” (Psalms 73:25).

In a gloss the Alter Rebbe ties this to Psalms 37:3–4: “Do good; dwell in the land and tend faith, and delight in Havayah.” Faith grows into delight through “doing good,” charity and good deeds, as the Zohar passages he lists discuss.

Section 4 adds a qualification. The “milk and honey” of faith, growing love and delight, still belong to faith; they have not reached the promise of “the earth shall be full of knowledge,” when what is now believed will be actually known and felt.

The reason is that the world runs its natural course under the light that fills the worlds, where there is a time for everything, so Israel’s spiritual state rises and falls. The survey begins with the Talmud’s teaching (Shabbos 146a) that the serpent injected contamination into Chavah, who stands for the Community of Israel, and that at Sinai Israel’s contamination ceased.

The survey of history continues: after Sinai, the sin of the Golden Calf brought the contamination back. Under Yehoshua the people served G‑d (Joshua 24:31), in the era of the Judges they went astray, under David and Shlomo they reached the peak (the Midrash likens Shlomo’s time to the full moon), and with Yeravam’s sin came another fall.

Every generation changed with its circumstances, and even among the Sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud no period was like another. Times keep changing and turning over.

Such constant change belongs to the light that fills the worlds, which is structured like a body (partzuf): head, hands, feet and other limbs, each different and with its own function. And as with a body, at times one limb aches or weakens.

The Alter Rebbe cites the Zohar, which describes the Community of Israel as a rose that “changes from hue to hue,” at times for good and at times for ill, along with other Zohar passages. He also cites Rabbi Moshe Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim on the four worlds.

The same holds for each person. At times he slips into bad thoughts, words and deeds, and at times thoughts of teshuvah and good deeds come to him, for “there is a time for everything” (Ecclesiastes 3:1), and as G‑d told Rivkah of her two sons, “one nation shall be stronger than the other” (Genesis 25:23).

Rashi on that verse explains that the two will never be great together: “when this one rises, that one falls,” as “Tyre was filled only from the ruin of Jerusalem.” So a person who sees himself falling should not lose heart.

Falling is part of the order of changing times, and a person can always turn back and change from bad to good. All these rises and falls belong to the light that fills the worlds.

For the encompassing light to be revealed as actual knowledge and feeling, evil must first be removed altogether, as in “And you shall purge the evil from your midst” (Deuteronomy 13:6).

That will happen only in the time to come, when G‑d promises, “I will remove the spirit of impurity from the land” (Zechariah 13:2). The Alter Rebbe refers to his explanation of “For over all the glory, a canopy” (Isaiah 4:5) for more.

When the Temples were destroyed, the opposite was true: the First Temple era had false prophets, and the Second Temple, as the Talmud says (Yoma 9b), fell because of baseless hatred. Both, says the Alter Rebbe, are the counterpart, “one opposite the other” (Ecclesiastes 7:14), of the faith that is above knowledge.

Holiness has a faith that is higher than reason, and so its opposite, the side of evil, has its own “faith”: false beliefs that also go beyond reason. Jeremiah 44:17–18 records such beliefs among Israel in his day.

In the First Temple, when holiness was strong, the Shechinah was revealed and the Temple held the Ark and its cover, which the Talmud (Yoma 21b) lists among the things the Second Temple lacked. Correspondingly, when sin strengthened the side of kelipah, its opposing power also grew.

That power turned against faith in G‑d. Ezekiel saw women weeping for the idol Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14), women in Jeremiah’s day insisted that since they had stopped burning incense to “the queen of heaven” they had lacked everything (Jeremiah 44:18), and the false prophets of Jeremiah 27:14–15 belong to the same pattern.

These were false beliefs in prophets, crediting words that G‑d had never spoken. The Second Temple lacked five things that the First had (Yoma 21b), and correspondingly the side of evil had less strength then.

In that era the “evil faith” concerned worldly matters: believing talebearers and so coming to hate one’s fellow. That is “baseless hatred,” since the fellow had done no real wrong.

This shows that such hatred rests on a false faith: a person who did not believe gossip would never hate another, since it is against human nature to hate someone for nothing when one truly knows he did no wrong.

Now the opening question is answered. Knowledge and feeling of G‑d as He fills the worlds were already given in “You have been shown, so as to know” (Deuteronomy 4:35): Israel had already been shown it.

The second verse, “And you shall know,” speaks of the higher level, G‑d as He encompasses the worlds, as its continuation says, “in the heavens above.” The heavens stand for what encompasses, since they are spheres.

Just as the earth lies inside the heavens and is surrounded by them, so the lower level is surrounded by the higher. The Alter Rebbe refers to his maamar on “For this commandment” (Parshas Nitzavim), on the words “It is not in heaven.”

So too G‑d’s word, the creative speech that is the light filling the worlds, is itself surrounded by the encompassing light. Nothing exists outside Him.

It is like speech that has not yet left the soul: it is still within the soul’s power and not separate from it. Knowing G‑d at this encompassing level belongs specifically to “this day.”

The Sages read Deuteronomy 7:11, “today to do them,” as meaning today and not tomorrow, in the World to Come, which is for receiving reward. The World to Come belongs to the light that fills the worlds: an ordered chain of levels descending from cause to effect, like a body with head, hand and foot.

That world has many levels, such as the Higher and the Lower Gan Eden. There a person’s deeds, words and thoughts from this world become “soiled garments” that he cannot remove, as if tied in a sack, and only a purging such as the “hollow of the sling” (I Samuel 25:29) can undo the knot.

For more the Alter Rebbe refers to his maamar on “Command the children of Israel” (Pinchas). “This day,” in this world, is different: one can “take it to your heart” with both inclinations (Mishnah Berachos 9:5), subduing the evil inclination (iskafya) and even transforming it (is’hapcha).

Today one can refine the evil and separate it out by drawing down the encompassing light, through the Torah’s words “which I command you this day” (Deuteronomy 6:6). “I” (Anochi) here means G‑d as He truly is, and the Torah and mitzvos come from the encompassing level; through them comes “And you shall know this day.”

The verse continues, “that Havayah is HaElokim.” Havayah is the Name of revelation and Elokim the Name of concealment and contraction; and just as the light that fills the worlds has concealment, seen in the rises and falls of changing times described above, so does the encompassing level, as the next part explains.

At the encompassing level, too, there is revelation (Havayah) and concealment (Elokim). The concealment comes when the opposing side, “the one opposite the other,” grows strong, as with the false prophets and baseless hatred described above.

So “And you shall know this day” must be achieved by subduing and transforming evil. Then “the spirit of impurity” will be removed, “the earth” of faith will be “full of knowledge,” and the earth will “make amends for its iniquity” (echoing Leviticus 26:43), in that deliberate sins become merits, as the Talmud (Yoma 86b) says of teshuvah.

A closing gloss lists where the verse is cited: in the Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 32b and Gittin 57b, and in the Midrash Rabbah on Va’eschanan, on Vezos HaBerachah and at the end of chapter 6 of Vayikra Rabbah, on Leviticus 5:1, “and he is a witness, whether he has seen or known.”

That Midrash reads “whether he has seen” as “You have been shown, so as to know,” and “or known” as “And you shall know this day.” In light of the maamar, the first verse is about the light that fills the worlds, which one “sees,” as in “From my flesh I behold” and “Lift up your eyes on high and see.”

“Seen” thus means “You have been shown.” “Known” means “And you shall know this day,” the faith and knowledge of the encompassing light, which is beyond the worlds altogether.

In the Torah scroll the ayin of “Shema” and the dalet of “Echad” are written large, together spelling ed, “witness”: Israel are G‑d’s witnesses, as the Midrash there says with the verse “And you are My witnesses.” Their testimony rests on both “You have been shown” and “And you shall know.”

Alternatively, the large ayin, which also means “eye,” stands for sight, “You have been shown.” The word Shema, “hear,” also means “understand,” and so stands for “And you shall know.”

Hence “by the testimony of two witnesses a matter shall be established” (Deuteronomy 19:15): eidus, testimony, has the letters of de’os, knowledge, and the two “witnesses” are seeing and knowing. Through them “a matter” (davar) stands, the “word” (devar) of G‑d, and the large dalet of Echad alludes to this.