והבדילה הפרוכת לכם

The maamar opens with the verse about the curtain (paroches) that divided the Holy from the Holy of Holies in the Mishkan. The Alter Rebbe immediately links it to a Kabbalistic idea from the Arizal’s Etz Chaim: that in the spiritual worlds too there is a “partition” (parsa), a dividing screen between one level and the next.

The Talmud records that the Second Temple had thirteen curtains, seven of them hung at the seven gates of the Courtyard. Rashi explains that these gate-curtains were not structural but “for modesty”: to screen what was inside from direct view.

¶2 Why “for modesty”? Paragraph 2 applies it to the screen between worlds.

The point of the detail: the gates were locked at night anyway, so the curtains mattered only by day, when the gates stood open for people to pass through. Even when entry was open, the inside was still veiled, and the maamar will apply this to how Divine light passes from world to world.

The Temple on earth mirrors a structure above. Its Courtyard and chambers correspond to Malchus of Atzilus, the lowest Sefirah of the highest world, the one that faces outward to the worlds below; the Zohar even speaks of a supernal Temple Mount of five hundred cubits.

The Zohar teaches that at night the gates of the Garden of Eden (the spiritual abode of souls) close, just as the Temple gates were locked. The verse about the “woman of valor” who rises at night to feed her household (read as Malchus sustaining the worlds) does not contradict this: what flows at night is only the outer dimension of G‑d’s influence, not its inner light.

The Alter Rebbe illustrates this with human sleep. In sleep the soul’s vitality withdraws from the blood (which the Torah calls ‘the soul’) into the heart and is closed up there; only a “small measure of life” remains active in the body, the outer, basic functions of life.

During sleep the functions that keep working are the vegetative ones, nourishment and digestion. These are “outer” compared with the soul’s higher powers of thought, feeling, sight and hearing, which fall silent in sleep.

The nourishing and digestive powers work mainly in sleep. When a person is awake and thinking, these lower powers are absorbed in the dominant intellect, as a candle’s flame is lost beside a torch, and so the intellect keeps them from spreading out fully.

In sleep, when the intellect’s rule withdraws, the lower powers spread freely: the stomach digests and passes nourishment to the liver. Nourishing, digesting and expelling are the soul’s “outer” and “lower” powers, the ones that operate even when the higher ones are withdrawn.

Now the analogy is applied above. At “night” in Malchus of Atzilus, the gates of Eden close: the radiance of the Shechinah that souls enjoy in the Garden of Eden is the inner light of Malchus, and that is what withdraws.

The inner light of Eden comes from the “first three,” the intellectual Sefiros within Malchus. At night that withdraws and only an outer flow continues to Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah (“she gives food to her household”), coming from the seven lower, emotive Sefiros within Malchus: the life-sustaining minimum, like digestion in sleep.

By day the Chasadim (the kindnesses) prevail, as the verse says, “the kindness of G‑d is all day long,” and so the inner flow opens. Yet even then, like the curtains hung in the open Temple gates, there is a partition through which the flow must pass.

The partition is identified with the Chashmal, the mysterious “electrum” of Ezekiel’s vision, which in Kabbalah is the outermost garment of Binah. It wraps the Sefiros of Z’eir Anpin and Nukva on their sides like the “garments of skin” G‑d made for Adam and Chavah.

The purpose of this wrapping is to keep the “external forces” (the forces of kelipah) from drawing nourishment from holiness. The part of it that lies beneath the “feet” of these Sefiros is called a “shoe,” and it forms the division between Atzilus and the lower worlds.

¶4 The “shoe” beneath their feet: paragraph 4 explains what it does.

The Alter Rebbe cites the Arizal’s Etz Chaim: this “shoe” is the very screen (masach) and partition that separates Atzilus from Beriah. He returns to Rashi’s word “modesty” to explain what the screen accomplishes.

¶1 This explains Rashi's “for modesty” from paragraph 1.

“Modesty” means that Atzilus is not openly revealed in Beriah. Its light passes only through the screen: Malchus of Atzilus “breaks through” the screen and becomes Atik, the hidden highest level, of Beriah. The same pattern repeats between every world and the one below it.

So in Beriah too, the outer garment of its own Binah wraps its Z’eir Anpin and Nukva and becomes the “shoe” below them. In a parenthetical note the Alter Rebbe weighs another opinion in Etz Chaim (that this lower screen comes from Tiferes of Beriah) and reconciles them: Tiferes also has a Chashmal, as Rabbi Moshe Zacuto (the Ramaz) writes, citing Adam Yashar, a Kabbalistic work of Rabbi Chaim Vital that was then still in manuscript.

Now he explains the Chashmal from human experience (“from my flesh I behold G‑d”). A person’s emotions cannot contain his full intellect; if they did, they would dissolve in it and never come out as feelings at all.

Still, a small light from the outside of Binah, a kind of overarching contemplation that stays above the feelings, surrounds them. Its job is protective: emotions are where the sitra achra (the side opposed to holiness) can take hold.

The Sages note that Avraham’s great kindness still produced Yishmael, a sign that even holy emotion can yield something negative, and the Kabbalistic “breaking of the vessels” took place in the emotive attributes. So the Chashmal surrounds them, allowing the external forces to draw only in the manner of hair and nails, the body’s outgrowths, and only as much as is necessary. In the Arizal’s teaching, the vessels of the seven emotive attributes of the world of Tohu shattered because they could not contain their intense light, and their fallen fragments became what gives the external forces their hold. That is why the maamar says it is the attributes, more than the intellect, that need the Chashmal’s guard.

A puzzle: the Chashmal is an outer garment of Z’eir Anpin and Nukva, lower than what it clothes, yet it comes from Binah, which is higher than they are. How can it be both?

The answer is the parable (mashal). A parable is a garment for its meaning: its words and images are coarse and physical compared with the idea they carry.

Yet it takes the greatest minds to make parables. Shlomo HaMelech’s “parables” are the model; Rabbi Meir divided his teaching into thirds, one of them parables; and when he died, the Mishnah says, “the tellers of parables ceased.”

Only a very high intellect can compress its insight into an image that matches the idea exactly.

A lesser mind is content to grasp the idea as it is.

Such a mind cannot bring the idea out through a fitting parable; if it tries, the parable will miss. The Chashmal is the same: a garment around the emotive attributes, just as a parable clothes an idea.

Because the Chashmal comes from Binah, it is rooted far above the emotions; only in its expression does it become their outer garment, lower than they, just as a parable is outward relative to its meaning.

So the Chashmal has two aspects. The first is its root, which is high above the emotive attributes.

Its root is that high because it comes from Binah. The second is its expression: the outermost dimension, like “letters,” which are the final level in every Sefirah. Its clothing of Z’eir Anpin and Nukva is like letters and words that clothe feelings.

The word Chashmal itself divides into two: chash, “silence,” and mal, “speech.” Chash, silence, reflects its first aspect, its root in Binah.

“A fence for wisdom is silence” (Avos): Chochmah is the seat of Havayah and is pure self-nullification, and silence is the expression of that nullification. Similarly Moshe, the greatest in wisdom, was “heavy of mouth.”

Mal, “speech,” is the second aspect: the Chashmal as a garment for Z’eir Anpin and Nukva, like letters clothing meaning. Through this clothing, influence can flow to the levels below.

Everything said so far concerns the Chashmal within the Sefiros themselves. But the same structure exists among the angels, who come in countless ranks (“Is there any number to His troops?”), and some of them are formed from the Chashmal, through the vessels of Atzilus.

In those lower worlds too there are angels formed from the Chashmal. Metatron, the chief angel, is called “the shoe of the Shechinah,” and since the “shoe” has been shown to be the Chashmal, this fits. This is also the setting of the Talmud’s teaching that “when the speech goes forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, they (the Chashmal-angels) are silent.”

To explain this teaching the Alter Rebbe defines its terms. “The Holy One, blessed be He” refers to Z’eir Anpin and “His Shechinah” to Malchus, as in the familiar formula of the two joined together. Shechinah means “dwelling”: the level that rests within and is clothed in the created beings, just as a king needs a people to rule; “Holy” means set apart and beyond them.

G‑d’s emotive attributes as they are in themselves, “Yours, Havayah, is the greatness” and so on, have no relation or proportion to created beings. That transcendence is what “Holy” means, and so “the Holy One, blessed be He” is Z’eir Anpin.

G‑d’s “speech going forth” is revelation, the mal (“speech”) side of the Chashmal. It happens when Z’eir Anpin and Nukva break through the screen and descend to be revealed in the world below.

At that moment the Chashmal-angels fall silent: they are absorbed in the self-nullification that comes from Chochmah, the “silence” described above in “a fence for wisdom is silence.” Overwhelmed by the revealed light, they cannot say anything.

When the speech does not go forth, when the Divine light is withdrawn, the angels speak. That is when they are “with a great noise” and cry out “Blessed be the glory of Havayah from His place”: their loud praise belongs to the state in which the light is withdrawn.

This is the Chashmal around the sides of Z’eir Anpin and Nukva, which keeps the external forces away. Beneath their “feet” is the shoe, alluded to in “How beautiful are your steps in shoes, O daughter of the noble,” which the Alter Rebbe identifies with Malchus.

The shoe has a second purpose besides protection. It keeps the full light of Atzilus, where G‑d and His Sefiros (“His vessels”) are completely one, from being revealed in Beriah in the same way.

¶2 This explains the “shoe” mentioned in paragraph 2.

Instead, Beriah is meant to exist as “something” (yesh), a being that feels itself separate. Because the screen stands between Atzilus and Beriah, the light that reaches Beriah to give it life is only a “derivative light,” an offshoot of the light and not its essence.

That is why creation is called “something from nothing.” One might object: everything comes from G‑d (“all is from You”), and everything is as nothing before Him, so why call the source “nothing”? The answer: created being comes from the light that passes through the partition, and that light counts as “nothing.”

It counts as “nothing” because it is not the essence of the light on the far side of the partition; compared with that essence, the derivative light is as nothing. So “from nothing” describes the source of creation relative to the true light, not relative to G‑d Himself.

Now the structure of screens is applied to time. On Shabbos the light of Atzilus reaches below clothed only in Beriah, so it passes through just one screen, the one between Atzilus and Beriah.

On weekdays it passes through more screens, and place matters too: in the Land of Israel G‑d’s conduct of the world comes through Yetzirah, outside it through Asiyah, a lower world. Yet all these worlds are still holy; even their sense of being “something” is surrendered to G‑d, as “the host of heaven bows to You.”

Below Asiyah, however, there is another kind of screen: kelipas nogah, the “glowing husk,” a realm that is neither holy nor impure and can be turned either way. It is compared to the foreskin (orlah) that covers the covenant.

The Arizal’s Etz Chaim calls it kelipas nogah and describes it as the foreskin covering Yesod. This screen separates not holy from holy but holy from profane (chol), the ordinary and mundane.

This explains the verse “which G‑d created to make”: creation was left for man to “make,” to complete and repair, just as the Midrash says lupines must be sweetened before they are edible. Man, created “in Our image,” contains this screen of nogah within himself. In the Midrash this saying answers the question why, if circumcision is so precious, it was not given to the first man: everything made in the six days of creation needs finishing (mustard and lupines must be sweetened, wheat must be ground), and man too needs repair. So the maamar is already pointing to circumcision as man’s own “rectification” of the covering within him.

His task is to repair it, so that the mundane becomes “profane things prepared in the purity of holiness,” like ordinary food handled with the strictness of sacred food. This happens by bringing the weekdays into the holiness of Shabbos.

Shabbos is holy because on it Atzilus shines through Beriah alone, without the screens between Beriah and Yetzirah and between Yetzirah and Asiyah. All the more so kelipas nogah does not intervene, for the light does not pass through it at all.

That is why a Jew stops weekday work on Shabbos and does not deal with physical matters: the day is “a Shabbos to Havayah your G‑d,” a state of self-nullification. It is still only the nullification of Beriah, a created “something” that yields itself, not the complete oneness of Atzilus.

On weekdays, whose existence comes through Yetzirah and Asiyah, kelipas nogah hovers over life. But a person refines (“clarifies,” birurim) the nogah during the six days through “the labor of your hands.”

He works honestly and for the sake of Heaven, and then prays and studies with the strength that work gives him. In this way the mundane is lifted into holiness. That is why at the close of Shabbos we bless “Who separates between holy and profane”: the separation itself comes from a very high place, like the Chashmal.

The word “Blessed” (baruch) is read as “drawn down”: light is drawn from that high source to shine through the partition. Without the partition there could be no new creation of something from nothing, and no rectification of the mundane.

As long as the light passes through the partitions it remains holy, down to the end of Asiyah, where nogah begins. Circumcision (milah) addresses exactly this point: the word milah is read as mal plus Yud-Hei, the mal (the “speech” side) of the Chashmal of Binah, which belongs to the Divine Name made of Yud (Chochmah) and Hei (Binah).

Chochmah and Binah are inseparable “companions,” so the Chashmal of Binah is holy. When the foreskin, kelipas nogah, is removed, only the Chashmal of Binah remains: the necessary garment that makes the existence of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah possible. The foreskin, however, must be removed.

At first the foreskin had to exist, so that kelipas nogah, and through it the impure kelipos, could receive their minimal life-force; nogah is the buffer between holiness and outright impurity. But the purpose of man’s service is to refine nogah and turn it into holiness.

When the foreskin (the screen of nogah) is removed, Avraham becomes “father of a multitude of nations”: sparks of holiness from the wider world can now be added and absorbed into G‑dliness, because nogah no longer screens them off. The verse about the covenant of circumcision says exactly this.

The word “I” (ani) in that verse carries the cantillation zakef gadol, meaning “great upright.” Ani has the same letters as ayin, “nothing,” which stands for Keser, and Malchus, which says “I,” has its root in Keser; the zakef gadol signals Malchus being raised up to that source.

Through circumcision “My covenant” itself becomes “with you”: Yesod, the Sefirah of the covenant, is revealed. Every partition in every world has the character of Yesod, from Yesod of Abba (Chochmah) downward.

At the end of Asiyah the partition becomes the actual foreskin. When it is cut away, “My covenant” is revealed, drawing down the “I” of the raised Malchus, so that G‑d is truly “with you,” dwelling and revealed below as He is above.