ביאור אין השם שלם

This heading opens a biur, a further explanation, of the maamar before it, which began with the Sages’ teaching that as long as Amalek exists “the Name is not complete and the Throne is not complete.” The biur sets out what makes the Name and the Throne complete, and what Amalek is that stands in the way.

The Sages taught that G‑d’s Name and His Throne will not be complete until Amalek is blotted out. The Alter Rebbe places them among the Sefiros: the Name Havayah is in Z’eir Anpin, the configuration of the emotive attributes, and the Throne is Malchus, which receives from it. Havayah is complete when the intellect comes down into it, first dividing into Chochmah and Binah.

The completion continues as Daas, the faculty that joins intellect to feeling, divides into Chesed and Gevurah. What divides it is the tip of the hairs of Arich Anpin: in Kabbalistic imagery the hairs are a thin, contracted channel of light from Keser, the level above intellect, and their tip reaches Z’eir Anpin from behind, at the shoulders. The back and the nape will be the theme of the whole maamar.

The division of Daas into Chesed and Gevurah is the level of the last two letters of the Name, vav and hei: the vav is the six extremities, the emotive attributes of Z’eir Anpin, and the hei is the Malchus within Z’eir Anpin itself, as the Kabbalistic intentions (kavanos) of the lulav and esrog show. The Throne is something else: the separate partzuf, or full configuration, of Malchus. The vav and hei are called mochin, intellect, although they are emotions, Chesed and Gevurah, whose figures are Avraham and Yitzchak.

This explains how emotions can be called intellect. Natural emotions belong to katnus, the state of smallness, and can be present all day without thought behind them; emotions born of contemplation belong to gadlus, the state of mature intellect, as in prayer, when the heart takes fire from what the mind has understood.

Malchus is called “heart,” as in the verse in which the Beloved says to His bride, Knesses Yisrael, “You have captured my heart”; like the heart, it is the center of life. In the individual soul its counterpart is the point of the heart, the soul’s innermost essence.

The soul’s powers as they spread outward into its garments of thought, speech and action belong to the lower worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah, which are not G‑dliness itself. They are also where good and evil are mixed, like the Tree of Knowledge; the point of the heart is distinct from them.

The heart, Malchus, is fully revealed when she receives face to face from the Supernal Israel, Z’eir Anpin, from his inner dimension and not only his outer. Then G‑d is felt as “your life,” the source of all life and delight, the land of milk and honey, the sweetness of “my honeycomb with my honey.”

But the exile of Egypt recurs every day. In the Kabbalistic account of each night, Malchus descends to the lower worlds to sustain them, as the woman of valor gives food to her household at night, and only a “point” of her remains above, beneath Yesod; in the morning she rises and is rebuilt, first as a partzuf joined back to back with Z’eir Anpin.

Only afterwards are they face to face. This is the way through the wilderness, following after Havayah: the intellect is drawn down in full, but only from behind, through the back (achorayim), before the face is revealed.

In a person, back to back is love that the mind compels: one contemplates how fitting it is to love G‑d, and the conclusion obliges the heart to love. Left to himself a person would not move; only the rule of the mind over the heart subdues the opposition.

This is still complete service: “with all your heart,” which the Sages read as “with both your inclinations,” so that the evil inclination too is harnessed, “and with all your soul.” Through it, and through the mitzvos, over which we bless G‑d “Who has sanctified us with His commandments,” the makifim are drawn down, lights that encompass a person but are not yet felt within.

One keeps the mitzvos because they are the King’s command. Yet all of it is done out of the intellect’s obligation, before delight is felt; this is the stage of back to back.

Back to back leads to face to face because the intellect drawn down comes from the tip of the hairs of Arich Anpin, the level above intellect that reaches Z’eir Anpin from behind. From there comes “may He make His face shine,” the turning of the face; once the inner dimension is revealed, the Name is complete.

The Throne becomes complete as well. The Throne is Malchus, kingship, which is built from gevuros, powers of restraint and concealment: “there is no king without a people,” yet before G‑d there is truly no one to rule over, so He willed a tzimtzum, a contraction, so that the world would appear to exist on its own, as a “something” over which He reigns.

The effort from below is to raise mayin nukvin, “feminine waters,” the arousal from below, through a contraction of one’s own, which is also gevuros: the Sages call “one who serves G‑d” the one who reviews his chapter a hundred and one times, once more than his habit. This self-constraint is the level of the Throne and of sitting: as one who sits lowers his back, so, the preceding maamar explained, G‑d’s revelation is drawn down to the level of the back when a person compels his heart.

The Torah likewise has a front and a back, an inner and an outer dimension. A mitzvah’s physical side is outer, as in tefillin, the four Torah sections written on parchment; the inner side is Chochmah and Binah, alluded to in the section “Kadesh” (“Sanctify to Me”) and the one after it.

So too the sukkah: the sechach, its covering of branches, is outer, and the inner side is the makifim, the encompassing lights. The rule is that the outer dimension is where no delight is felt and the inner is where delight is revealed, as in the Sages’ blessing “May you see your world in your lifetime”; that revelation comes because back to back goes on to become face to face.

After the Golden Calf, Moshe pleaded, “for it is a stiff-necked people, and You shall forgive,” as though stiff-neckedness were a reason to forgive. By the ordinary order of the attributes, descending level by level, so great a sin could not be forgiven; Moshe drew down from higher, from the attribute of being “slow to anger” (erech apayim), whose Aramaic counterpart is the name Arich Anpin.

They deserved that higher mercy because, as Moshe said, they are stiff-necked: their attributes have hardness, firmness and fortitude, the quality of the nape. The nape is where the tip of the hairs of Arich Anpin reaches, and through it the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy of Arich Anpin, above the ordinary order, are drawn down.

Opposite this, on the side of kelipah, stands Amalek, whose name is read as am malak, “a people that nips”: melikah is the nipping of a bird-offering’s neck from the nape, and Amalek strikes at holiness from behind. He is “the first of the nations” because, as the text explains, the spiritual root of the idolatrous nations is in the seven emotive attributes, the “seven days of building,” while Amalek’s is higher, in Daas, the Daas behind the shoulders; Pharaoh corresponds to the upper Daas, Amalek to the lower.

The intellect reaches the emotions through the neck, and in Kabbalah Mitzrayim, Egypt, is read as meitzar hagaron, “the strait of the throat,” the narrow passage between head and body. All this is the back; Pharaoh, whose letters (פרעה) are those of ha-oref, “the nape,” is the back of the nape. That is why the intellect’s passage into the throat is called a descent, a going down to Egypt.

From the throat onward, as the intellect spreads through the body, the movement is called ascent: Yosef “was brought down to Egypt,” but G‑d promised Yaakov, “I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will bring you up.” The ascent is the intellect’s spreading into the body, the good and spacious land after the narrow strait.

The Alter Rebbe cites the Arizal’s Likkutei Torah on Parshas Vayeshev, where the throat is called the land of Egypt, and his own biur on “Therefore say” in Parshas Va’eira, earlier in Torah Ohr. Going from the throat into the body is an ascent although the body is lower, because the throat is the back: rising and falling here are measured by revelation, not by physical height.

Amalek stands at this passage through the back, the hardness of the nape turned around: in the Sages’ phrase, he knows his Master and rebels anyway. Pharaoh said, “I do not know G‑d,” and the plagues would have broken him had G‑d not hardened his heart; Amalek knew all the miracles and attacked all the same.

Opposite the back of holiness, the strength to overcome oneself because the mind demands it, the other side has its reverse: a stubborn strength against the mind, even when the mind itself obliges. It is brazenness, without reason or sense.

This is Amalek’s attack on “all the stragglers behind you,” those who are at the level of the back. Since each day a person goes out of Egypt anew, G‑d’s war with Amalek “from generation to generation” must be fought every day.

In the time of exile it is “I will utterly blot out”: the war is G‑d’s, waged at the level of the back. But when a person reaches the good and spacious land, love that delights in G‑d, then “you shall blot out” Amalek yourself, for Amalek has a hold only on the back.