יגלה לן טעמיה כו׳

A heading, not part of the Alter Rebbe’s own words: the maamar is about the Cave of Machpelah, the double cave Abraham bought in this week’s Torah portion as Sarah’s burial place. The name “Machpelah” means “doubled,” and the whole first discourse turns on that idea of doubling.

The opening words come from a Shabbos table song, which asks G‑d to reveal the secret of the twelve loaves set out for the Shabbos meal, describing them as “doubled and thin.” The Alter Rebbe starts from “doubled”: when the letter hei is spelled out in full, its name is written with a second hei (ה״ה). This doubling is kefila, the same word as Machpelah, and in Kabbalah the Cave of Machpelah corresponds to the final hei of the Name Ban, the form of the four-letter Name spelled out so that its letters total 52.

Before explaining the doubled hei, he lays a foundation: what eating actually accomplishes.

Food becomes fat and blood, and the Torah itself says “the blood is the soul,” meaning it carries a person’s life-force. The liver takes that blood from the food and sends it on to the heart and the brain, which together with the liver are called the three “rulers” of the body.

Food turned into blood becomes part of a person’s heart and brain, and in that way the food itself is lifted up. His heart now serves G‑d with fiery feeling, and that strength comes from the meal; without food he would be weak.

His mind, too, gains the strength to reflect on G‑d’s greatness. This is what “refinement” (birur) means: the food, a lower thing, is sorted and raised until it becomes part of a person who serves G‑d.

All that describes weekday eating. On Shabbos, “sorting” (borer) is one of the forbidden labors, so Shabbos eating cannot be a work of refinement. Instead it is a flow from above, and Isaiah calls Shabbos “a delight” in which one “delights in G‑d.”

Scripture says that man was formed “back and front.” The Midrash reads “back” as last in the order of creation, since man was made after everything else. Food as we meet it below comes from the sparks that fell in the shattering of the vessels, the primordial breaking of the first divine “vessels.”

Measured by its present state, man stands “in front,” since he refines the food. But the food’s root is the World of Tohu (chaos), the first, unstable order of lights, symbolized by the kings of Edom who reigned “before any king reigned over Israel” and then “reigned and died,” that is, broke.

The verse about the Edomite kings continues “and he died, and there reigned.” Even so, the food’s root is higher than man, and the proof is simple: man lives from food, not the other way round.

Man takes his life from food because he was created last, after the plants and animals whose root is earlier and higher. On Shabbos all the worlds rise, and the food rises too, back to its root.

So instead of being refined by man, the food pours life into his soul from above. That flow comes through the twelve loaves of the Shabbos table. This is what Proverbs means by “The righteous one eats to satisfy his soul”: there are two kinds of eating, and the first is eating that satisfies the soul.

The second kind of eating is “the belly of the wicked shall lack.” Eating “to satisfy the soul” means receiving life that comes down from above. Now the second half of the verse is explained.

“The wicked” here are not people but the external forces, the powers opposed to holiness. Eating takes back from them what they hold, as Job says of the wicked man who “swallowed wealth and will vomit it up.” Their foothold in food is the craving that comes with eating, which is the root of kelipah.

Once the food is absorbed into a person and becomes blood feeding the heart and mind that serve G‑d, it is turned to good. The life-force that the opposing realm had swallowed is taken away from it, so “the belly of the wicked” is left lacking; as Job continues, “G‑d shall drive it out of his belly.”

The summary: weekday eating is refinement, whose goal is to empty “the belly of the wicked.” Shabbos eating is the other kind: a flow from above that “satisfies the soul,” because the food is met at its root, as it was before it fell in the shattering of the vessels, where there is nothing to refine.

The prophet Malachi says “I will spread dung on your faces, the dung of your festivals,” and the Zohar notes that he does not say “the dung of your Shabbosos.” Weekday eating works from below upward, by refinement, so it leaves waste: the best of the food goes to the heart and brain and the rest goes out through the intestines. That separation is the refinement.

Shabbos eating comes from above downward, so there is no waste in it. Waste belongs to the mixture of good and evil that entered every level through Adam’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

People too are a mixture of good and evil, in different proportions: in some the good is greater.

In others the good reaches only a certain level. On Shabbos, though, the delight is “in G‑d,” above the Tree of Knowledge, where “evil shall not dwell with you” at all.

The festivals, by contrast, are called “your festivals” with “dung” because on a festival some refinement takes place: cooking and baking for the day’s meals are permitted.

Only labors like reaping, sowing and plowing stay forbidden. Since some food labors are allowed, there is refinement on a festival, and therefore waste. The Zohar gives the remedy: “to gladden the poor.”

A time of joy means making everyone happy, as the Torah commands for the festival: “you... and the Levite and the stranger.” Joy sweetens the judgments, the forces of severity, and so everyone must be brought into the joy.

Anyone who is truly happy wants everyone around him to be happy too. By bringing everyone to the same joy, he sweetens the judgment, the strict measure that separates and distinguishes.

The Zohar warns about one who does not give to the poor on the festival. For him the judgment stays unsweetened and the “dung” remains, so the punishment fits the deed: the “dung” is given to him, since he left the waste in place by not sweetening the judgment.

This applies to the festivals. On Shabbos, even one who does not give to the poor is not punished so severely, because Shabbos has no “dung”: it is only a flow from above, where no evil dwells.

The Shabbos song describes the flow as “doubled and thin.” The Alter Rebbe explains “thin” first: it is the letters yud and vav. A vav is simply a yud drawn out downward, a single thin line.

The yud, a tiny point, stands for tzimtzum, the concentration of light into a point; so the yud itself can extend into a vav, a line that carries it downward. The hei is different: it spreads out in length and breadth, as its shape shows.

The broad expansion of the hei as it is above, boundless in length and breadth, cannot be revealed below as it is. Instead it comes down as “another hei” below: the second hei that spells out the letter’s name, its “filling.”

The filling of a letter always represents what was hidden in it. So the second hei is the power of the upper hei that was concealed above, now come out of concealment into revelation below. This is the “doubled” hei of Machpelah.

So “doubled” is the hei spelled with a second hei, the filling, as the Cave of Machpelah shows. But this doubled mode belongs to the present: it describes how we now receive G‑d’s flow through the twelve loaves of the Shabbos table.

In the time to come the song’s prayer will be answered: G‑d will “reveal the reasons of the twelve loaves.” Then there will be no need for the doubled mode; the upper hei itself will be revealed below, as Zechariah says of that day, when G‑d and His Name will be One.