זה יתנו כל העובר על הפקודים מחצית השקל…

The maamar opens with Exodus 30:13: everyone counted in the census is to give half a shekel, measured by the “holy shekel” of twenty gerah, as an offering to G‑d. By the end, the Alter Rebbe will read each phrase of this verse as a stage in a Jew’s love of G‑d.

Proverbs 31:23 says of the woman of valor that “her husband is known in the gates.” The Alter Rebbe reads the husband as G‑d and the wife as each Jewish soul: every love or awe of G‑d that a soul has is His gift, given to each in a measure suited to that soul. The phrase “according to his own measure” echoes the Zohar on this verse, which reads she’arim, “gates,” as what each person “measures” (meshaer) in his heart.

The gates through which G‑d becomes “known” to the soul are four: love, awe, Torah and mitzvos, corresponding to the four letters of the Name Havayah. How much of G‑d a person comes to know depends on how far he enters through these gates.

If every love and awe a person has comes from G‑d, what is left for his own free choice? Yet something must certainly depend on a person’s choice, and the maamar sets out to show what.

The answer will come from the Shema and the verse that follows it, “And you shall love.” Together they show which love a person must reach by his own effort and which comes to him from above.

The Hebrew ve’ahavta can be read as a command, “You shall love,” or as a promise, “you will love,” a love that comes by itself. The first, commanded love is the one a person reaches through contemplation.

This contemplation is to grasp with one’s mind that G‑d is One throughout the seven heavens and the four directions of the world, that is, throughout all creation. The verse “I, Havayah, have not changed” teaches that creating the world brought no change in Him at all.

He is exactly as He was before the world was created, because all the worlds are utterly nullified before Him. The allusion to “For a sun and a shield is Havayah Elokim” refers to the known explanation that the Name Elokim shields the creatures from G‑d’s light, the way a sheath screens the sun.

So the worlds’ appearance of independent existence is “an utter falsehood”: they exist only through G‑d’s word, as the verse says the heavens were made “by the word of G‑d.” The next paragraph explains this through the analogy of thought and speech.

Job’s words “from my flesh I behold G‑d” are the basis for learning about G‑d from the human soul. In a person, a thought, while it is still only thought, is wholly one with the thinker, with no division at all.

Once the words are spoken, they become separate from the speaker. In the same way, before creation all the worlds were wholly one with G‑d.

Speech is as nothing next to thought: in a single moment the mind can think without end, while speech brings out only a few words at a time. This is the measure of speech’s nullification before thought.

All the worlds together are only a single divine “utterance,” drawn from G‑d’s Chochmah, which the maamar likens to lightning with a verse from Zechariah. This utterance is renewed every day, as the morning prayer says, “In His goodness He renews every day [the work of creation].”

Unlike human speech, G‑d’s speech never becomes separate from Him, even after the worlds are created, because nothing exists outside Him.

Tanya ch. 21 draws the conclusion: before Him all is considered as nothing. The Alter Rebbe adds that the worlds are also nullified to one another in a chain, each lower world to the one above it.

What counts as “speech” in a higher world is, for the world below it, as lofty and hidden as “thought,” and the lower world is nullified before it. So too a teacher’s spoken words are, for the student, as deep as thought.

Even the highest worlds, which stand at the level of “thought,” are nullified before G‑d and cannot grasp Him; this is the meaning of the phrase “no thought can grasp Him at all.” The bracketed note sends the reader to Likkutei Torah, Shelach, on the verse “As You have spoken, saying.”

Likewise G‑d is called “the Hidden of all hidden ones”: even worlds that are themselves called hidden and concealed are revealed compared to Him. No thought grasps Him.

Here the Alter Rebbe returns to the command “And you shall love Havayah your G‑d.” A person is to contemplate G‑d’s true oneness so deeply that Havayah, Who transcends all, becomes “your G‑d,” one’s own, with all one’s heart, soul and might.

The text explains this as a person’s thought, speech and action: none of them should remain his own, but all should be nullified in the One, Who is above thought. Human thought can grasp only physical things, and their seeming reality is “an utter falsehood.”

The words “with all your soul” mean giving over the soul entirely to G‑d. Since the text identifies a person’s soul with his thought, speech and action, all three are to be given over and nullified in the true One.

Yet a person cannot simply be without thought. So he is to bind his thought, speech and action to G‑d’s will through the Torah and mitzvos, becoming a “chariot” for it, a vehicle with no will of its own; and since the Torah comes from Chochmah, which is above thought, through it he is joined to what thought cannot grasp.

The saying about one who performs a single mitzvah shows the worth of even one mitzvah done as the law requires, for through it a person is bound to G‑d’s will. Yet the Torah deals with physical matters, such as what is forbidden and what is permitted, and the mitzvos are done with physical things, such as giving money to charity.

Hair grows from the head and draws its life from the brain, yet nothing like hair exists in the brain itself. So the Torah and mitzvos are clothed in physical things, yet their source is G‑d’s Chochmah, which is above thought.

Contemplating G‑d’s oneness as described is every person’s duty and lies within his free choice; this is what depends on him. The second reading of “And you shall love,” as a promise, is ahavah rabbah, a great love that comes as a gift from above and not through a person’s own effort.

The word “Hear” (shema) here means receiving what one cannot reach by reasoning: it is heard, as it were, from above. Ahavah rabbah is above contemplation and cannot be produced by it.

The “holy shekel” is the great love that comes from above: kesef, silver, is read as kisufin, longing, as in Lavan’s words “you longed greatly” (nichsof nichsafta), and a shekel is a weight, for this love is given to each soul by its own measure. Each receives it in the measure of his “do good and turn from evil,” his doing the mitzvos and keeping from sin, which the text says must be to the utmost. The verse’s “passing to the merchant” (over lasocher) is read through s’chor s’chor, “around, around,” as pointing to the light that encompasses all worlds (sovev kol almin), the transcendent source of this love.

Avraham paid Efron “four hundred shekels of silver,” and the maamar reads them as the four hundred “worlds of longing” in the World to Come, of which the Zohar speaks. The longing love is then tied to the half-shekel verse’s “twenty gerah.”

Each of the two loves comprises ten powers, the soul’s intellect and emotions. The first love has ten, and the great love from above has ten more; together they make the twenty gerah of the full shekel.

The words “the shekel is twenty gerah” stand for the full measure of both loves. In the census verse, “when you lift up the head of the children of Israel,” the “head” is the souls, and lifkudeihem, usually “according to their count,” is read in the sense of the verb pakad.

In Genesis 21:1, G‑d “remembered” (pakad) Sarah and gave her a son; the census verse continues that each man gives “a ransom for his soul.” Yet the great love from above does not come to every person.

Not everyone reaches the full “twenty gerah,” which includes the great love from above. But the first love, from contemplation, is required of all: it is the half-shekel, giving over one’s soul with all ten of its powers.

The Alter Rebbe reads the verse’s “everyone who passes over the pekudim” as “everyone who transgresses the 248 commandments (pekudin).” Even one who has sinned must still give his half-shekel: his ten powers, given to G‑d through the first love, which is “an offering to G‑d.”

This bracketed note sends the reader to the discourse on Vayakhel later in Torah Ohr, on the teaching that “there is will and there is will,” and to the discourse “Because you did not serve” in Likkutei Torah, Ki Savo.

Chapter 2 of that Likkutei Torah discourse links “Rejoice, righteous ones, in G‑d” to the end of this maamar on the half-shekel. From it, the note says, one can also understand that serving G‑d with joy is required of every Jew, since the Torah rebukes those who did not serve “with joy.”

The joy required of every Jew, “Serve G‑d with joy,” is the half-shekel that all must give. The joy of “Rejoice, righteous ones, in G‑d” is the second half that completes the shekel, corresponding to the great love from above.