למען תהי׳ תורת ה׳ בפיך כי ביד חזקה…

The maamar opens with a verse from the Torah’s passage about remembering the Exodus by a sign on the hand and between the eyes, the first of the passages in tefillin. The verse gives the Exodus as the reason for having the Torah in one’s mouth, and the Alter Rebbe asks what the one has to do with the other.

Before answering, the Alter Rebbe points to a pattern in Scripture. G‑d’s words to Moshe are “Sanctify to Me every firstborn,” but what Moshe then says to the people begins differently: “Remember this day, on which you went out of Egypt.” Such pairs, G‑d’s saying to Moshe and Moshe’s saying to the people, are frequent, and the last paragraph of the maamar explains them.

A further question belongs to the same inquiry: the mitzvah to study Torah “day and night,” from G‑d’s charge to Yehoshua. Many of the Torah’s laws are not in practice in our time, and those that are do not apply to every person alike, so what does it mean to be immersed in all of it day and night?

To answer, the Alter Rebbe first distinguishes two kinds of love for G‑d. The first is like water: calm and steady, never growing or shrinking, the same today as yesterday. He brings the verse “Many waters cannot quench the love” for this love likened to water.

The second love is like fire, whose flashes leap up and fall back: it is always in motion, “running and returning” (ratzo vashov), surging toward G‑d and returning. Each love grows from a different awareness a person can have of G‑d, and the next paragraphs describe the two.

The first awareness: the verse calls the Jewish people G‑d’s children, so He loves them as a father loves his son. Knowing this, a person loves Him in return as a matter of course, just as water reflects back the face of the one who looks into it.

This love is called “water” precisely because it is steady and unchanging. It answers G‑d’s love as a father, and a father’s love for his son never changes, so the love it awakens does not change either.

The second awareness looks at what G‑d chose: He set aside the hosts of heaven and the highest heavens and desired “a dwelling place among the lower realms,” the lowest, physical world. Recognizing this is a different kind of knowledge from knowing that He loves us as a father.

That dwelling comes about through the Torah: G‑d’s infinite intellect contracted into physical limits, so that the Torah speaks of physical matters such as fields, animals and money.

Such a descent is not in the way of nature, and it comes from G‑d’s love for us; as a saying of the Sages puts it, “love upsets the proper order.” It stems from His will, and His wisdom follows His will: because He is exalted beyond all limits, He is not confined to the heights and can be clothed even in what is most limited.

Because the mitzvos are G‑d’s will, which comes before His wisdom, their reasons have not been revealed. The mind cannot grasp them until Moshiach comes.

The verse from the “Woman of Valor” says, “Her husband is known in the gates, when he sits with the elders of the earth.” The Alter Rebbe reads “her husband” as the Holy One, blessed be He: that we can grasp Him at all depends on His “sitting” with the elders of the earth.

“His sitting” means His descent, step by step, down the chain of worlds into the wisdom found on earth, which in the light of paragraph 4 is the Torah. The word zaken, “elder,” is read as “one who has acquired wisdom,” so the “elders of the earth” are the wisdom that has come down to earth.

Contemplating how the Infinite One lowered Himself out of love into the limits of the Torah should awaken a very great love in a person. This love goes so far that he no longer entertains any will of his own in his personal affairs.

A person sets his own will aside before G‑d’s, so that his only will is to serve the Creator. Once the will is set, the intellect follows it and finds reasons for what the will wants, as the next paragraph illustrates.

The Gemara tells of sages who would not accept what a man with a case before them had brought them, though it was theirs by right, and disqualified themselves from judging him. Even so, as the case was being heard, each caught himself thinking, “If he wants, he can argue this way”: his will had leaned toward the man, and his intellect followed it.

The Alter Rebbe now draws the parallel. G‑d’s desire for a dwelling among the lower realms is not in the way of nature, for it means that the Infinite One, Who has no limit, becomes limited and contracted.

In the same way, a person should will something beyond his nature: to separate from the body and from nature and cleave to G‑d. This is how “you shall meditate on it day and night” is explained: Torah study means never ceasing to look to G‑d’s will, which the Torah expresses even in laws that are not in practice.

G‑d’s “glory” is that out of love for us He clothes, limits and contracts Himself. A person should see this and do likewise, going beyond his own nature for G‑d, and so live. The closing words, “do likewise, and live,” echo the Torah’s words about the mitzvos, “which a person shall do and live by them.”

The Alter Rebbe returns to the opening verse. The Gemara (Menachos 10a) teaches that “hand” always means the right hand, and the right, he adds, is mercy; so the “strong hand” that took Israel out of Egypt was the hand of mercy. He sets beside it G‑d’s words before the plague of the firstborn, “And I will pass through the land of Egypt.”

“I will pass” (ve’avarti) is read as G‑d “passing over” His own attributes: His nature is to have mercy on His creatures and do them good, yet He carried out judgments in Egypt. He did so out of love for Israel, as a loving father holds back his natural kindness and is angry with those who are hurting his son.

The “strong hand” is the right hand, kindness, held in check so that Israel could be brought out of Egypt: G‑d acted against His own nature. That is why the Torah is to be “in your mouth”: in return, a person makes his will like G‑d’s. And since everything comes from G‑d’s simple, undivided will, which no world could hold as it is, He had to contract Himself so that the world could receive it.

This contraction explains the pattern noted in paragraph 1. Sometimes Scripture records what G‑d said to Moshe, and sometimes only what Moshe said to the people.

Moshe’s words to the people are G‑d’s word contracted to the measure the people could receive. G‑d knows exactly how far to contract Himself so that the world can bear His word.