ותסף אסתר ותדבר לפני המלך ותפל לפני רגליו…

The maamar opens with a verse from the Megillah: Haman has fallen, but his decree against the Jews still stands, and Esther comes before the king again, falls at his feet and weeps, begging him to undo it. The phrases of this verse will be read as a lesson about prayer.

The maamar reads “the king” in this verse as G‑d, the King of the world. It therefore asks how one can speak of falling “before His feet,” when it is a basic principle of faith that G‑d has no bodily form at all.

The answer is that the verse is teaching what prayer essentially is, and that every person, not only the great, is able to pray. Esther stands for the Community of Israel (Knesses Yisrael), the collective soul of the Jewish people.

The Community of Israel has many names, each describing a different state. When her longing for G‑d is open and felt, a desire that her life-force be absorbed back into its Source, she is called Rachel, a word that also means “ewe”: like the ewe silent before her shearers, or the sheep brought to slaughter, she gives herself over completely, with a simple will that asks for no reasons.

The same holds for every individual Jew: the will of each one is to be nullified and absorbed in G‑d’s light, “to become one with the One.” The verses about G‑d’s “splendor” and “glory” filling the earth describe His radiance as it spreads out into the world.

Before this radiance the world and all it contains are as nothing, wholly given over to their source. When this longing is open and burning, it is the state called Rachel, “like sheep for the slaughter”: ready to give everything.

When the same longing is not openly felt, it is called Esther, a name that echoes the verse “I will surely hide (haster astir) My face.” The Alter Rebbe rejects the common assumption that a person who does not feel this love simply does not have it.

Every single Jew has this love; it is only hidden, in the state of Esther, and it must be drawn out of its hiding. The concealment is described with the verse “like a rose among the thorns”: the rose is there, but the thorns cover it.

The thorns are the affairs and business of this world when they are done with one’s whole heart and soul. When a person’s full heart goes into them, they hold back the inner love and keep it from showing.

So the state of Esther is the love hidden “on that day,” in the time of concealment the verse speaks of. The verse reads haster astir (הסתר אסתיר); here the text writes אסתר אסתיר, spelling the first word as the name Esther, whom the Talmud (Chullin 139b) finds alluded to in this verse. The phrase “on that day” leads into the next paragraph.

The maamar now names four states, each taken from a phrase in a verse: “on that day,” “on this day” and “on that night.” “Day” is a time of light and revelation, “night” a time of darkness and concealment.

The fourth is “on this night.” The first two are taken from “This is the day that G‑d has made” and from the verse about the splitting of the Sea, “And G‑d saved on that day.”

Two more verses complete the four: “this night” is the night of the Exodus, “a night of watching,” and “that night” is the night in the Purim story when the king could not sleep. The word “this” refers to something in direct view, right before a person.

At the Sea the Jews sang “This is my G‑d,” speaking of a G‑dliness revealed so openly that it could be pointed to. In the analogy, a king’s subjects are wholly nullified before him because they see him with their own eyes; so the level of “this” is when G‑dliness is revealed to a person as though he sees it.

In the state of “this,” a person sees the world as nothing compared with G‑d. Elsewhere creation is called “something from nothing” (yesh me’ayin), as though the world were the real “something” and G‑dliness the “nothing”; but that is the Torah speaking in human terms, describing how things look to our physical eyes, which cannot see G‑dliness.

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s blessing shows the same thing: people fear what they see. As the Talmud there continues, a person about to sin worries only that no human being should see him; because our eyes see flesh and blood and not G‑d, we fear people more than Heaven.

That is the level of “This is the day”: open revelation. “Night” is darkness, a state in which a person sees no G‑dliness at all.

Night also includes a subtler case: a person may know about G‑dliness, but when his mind is withdrawn and he cannot hold the idea in his thoughts, that too is “night.”

Even so, from within the night one can reach “this night”: a night that has the quality of “this,” with G‑dliness in direct view. The explanation begins from the verse “The whole earth is full of His glory,” which speaks of G‑d’s radiance spreading through the world.

A second verse says that G‑d Himself fills heaven and earth. Both verses are true: not only G‑d’s radiance but G‑d Himself fills all of creation.

What hides G‑d’s own presence is the body. “The whole earth is full of His glory” refers to His radiance spreading out to give life to the worlds; that is something the mind can grasp and comprehend, and by contemplating it a person can be nullified and absorbed in it, seeing that “all before Him is considered as nothing.”

Even in the state of night, a person can reach the level of “this” through the strength of faith: believing with a faith so complete, clear and pure that it is as though he actually sees.

This requires “mortar and bricks.” Just as Israel was in Egypt for two hundred and ten years, where their labor was “in mortar and in bricks,” so today a person needs the hard labor of Torah study, which the Zohar reads into the same words: “mortar” (chomer) is the kal vachomer, the a fortiori argument.

“In bricks” (levenim) is the clarification (libun, from the same root) of the halachah: working out what the law clearly is. “All labor in the field” is the Baraisa, the teachings of the Sages outside the Mishnah. The Mishnah then teaches that one who takes on the yoke of Torah is freed from the yoke of worldly affairs.

The Mishnah continues: one who throws off the yoke of Torah has the yoke of worldly affairs placed on him. Yet the Alter Rebbe adds that even a person who is busy with worldly affairs can still reach “this night,” the faith that sees G‑dliness as though with one’s eyes.

The Alter Rebbe cites a teaching: G‑d asked the higher worlds, “What is the sound of the kid?” and they answered that it was the sound of the children of Israel. But G‑d knows everything, so how can He be said to ask?

A young goat cries for its mother without any thought or understanding. So too, the Jews’ outcry in their time of trouble did not come from contemplation but from the depth of their distress: “their heart cried out to G‑d.”

The higher worlds answered that this cry, though it is without Daas (conscious knowledge and understanding), is above Daas, not below it like an animal’s cry. It comes from a place deeper than the intellect.

Yet before G‑d, who is above Daas, even such a cry is like the cry of a kid or an animal, as the verse says, “I was like beasts with You”: when I stand with You, compared with You, all my understanding is like an animal’s. This is why, from G‑d’s side, the cry is called “the sound of the kid.”

When the heart cries out to G‑d in distress, that cry itself brings a person to faith, the level of “this night,” and to the readiness of “sheep for the slaughter.”

This was the miracle of Purim, which belongs to the level of Bavel, named in the verse for G‑d’s having “confounded” (balal) the languages there: a state of mixture and confusion. Even from such a state one can come to “that day” of which Zechariah speaks, “neither day nor night,” when “at evening time there will be light.”

The maamar turns to Amalek, against whom the Torah says G‑d wages war “from generation to generation.” It first explains the other nations: read here as spiritual categories, the idolatrous nations stand for kelipah, the forces that conceal holiness, and for the evil traits (middos) a person must overcome.

The nations the Torah names, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite and the rest, are these traits. On their own they give way before holiness as darkness gives way before light, and it is relatively easy to be free of them.

What is hard is the brazenness and haughtiness that can attach to any bad trait: that is Amalek, the enemy G‑d fights in every generation. The Talmud calls brazenness “kingship without a crown,” rule without the right to rule. The ordinary traits come from the body, called “the serpent’s skin,” and so they can arise in anyone.

But brazenness and haughtiness have another source: “the scheme of Haman against the Jews.” There are chambers of kelipah called by the name Haman, and they send thoughts of arrogance and brazenness into a person; the Hebrew word for “scheme,” machshavah, means “thought.”

The remedy is the verse’s “and she fell before His feet,” where “His feet” are the angels. The verses cited speak of “standing”: the seraphim “stand” above, and the boards of the Mishkan are “standing.”

“She wept and pleaded” to avert the evil thoughts: heartfelt prayer removes the thoughts of arrogance that Haman sends. Then Haman and his sons were hanged on the gallows “fifty cubits high,” the gallows he himself had built. The verse “G‑d reigns; He has clothed Himself in grandeur” teaches that grandeur (gei’us, a word of the same root as ga’avah, pride) belongs to G‑d alone.