ביאור על הנ״ל

This maamar is a further explanation of the one before it, “Yehudah, you, your brothers shall acknowledge you,” which read Yaakov’s blessing of Yehudah through the births and names of Reuven, Shimon, Levi and Yehudah. Here the same ideas are set out in Kabbalistic terms: the Sefiros, their three lines, and the order of the morning prayers.

The twelve tribes embody two movements: rising from below upward, and drawing down from above downward. The Zohar’s terms for these are the “world of the feminine,” which receives and rises in yearning, and the “world of the masculine,” which gives and flows downward.

This parenthesis recalls the earlier maamar on Yosef’s dream of the sheaves. The souls of the tribes come from Beriah, the first world of separate existence, and their task is to rise into Atzilus; yet their root is in Atzilus itself, in the twelve “diagonal boundaries” of Z’eir Anpin, a term from Sefer Yetzirah for the twelve edges where the six directions meet. These are called “the tribes of Yah,” with a divine Name, and from there the tribes are drawn downward.

The general rule, “through an arousal from below comes an arousal from above,” is now applied to Reuven. Reuven too has two sides: a human effort that rises upward, and a divine response that comes down, and the effort below is what draws down the response from above. The next part explains how.

Reuven’s name is read as re’u ven, “see, a son,” so he stands for sight, and the Hebrew for sight, re’iyah, has the same letters as aryeh, “lion.” From below, this “sight” is the soul’s contemplation of G‑d’s greatness, “gazing upon the glory of the King,” which kindles strong love; that love is the lion’s face on the right side of the Divine Chariot in Yechezkel’s vision, the right being the side of Chesed.

The answer from above mirrors the effort below: G‑d’s own “sight” is turned toward the person, as Leah said when she named Reuven, “For G‑d has seen my affliction.” This divine seeing is a drawing near, expressed in her hope, “for now my husband will love me.”

The verse “and his right hand embraces me” completes Reuven’s picture: the right hand is love and closeness. Shimon works the same way through hearing: a person’s “listening,” as in “If you will diligently listen,” arouses G‑d’s “hearing” in return, as in Leah’s words at Shimon’s birth, “For G‑d has heard.” Sight belongs to what is near and hearing to what is far, as the prophet Habakkuk says, “I have heard the report of You; I was afraid.”

In Kabbalistic language hearing is the level of the “ears” (udnin). Habakkuk heard from a distance, the stance of shov, “returning” or stepping back in awe, like the people at Sinai who “trembled and stood from afar,” and that distance itself draws a response from above.

Leah named Shimon saying, “G‑d has heard that I am hated,” and from that hearing came a closeness from above. The parenthesis softens the word “hated”: Leah was loved, only less than Rachel, since Scripture says Yaakov loved Rachel “also, more than Leah.”

The closeness comes precisely because the person holds himself at a distance, in the spirit of “the left hand pushes away”; this humility is what “hated” means here, and it matches “his left hand is under my head,” the left being restraint. After the right (Reuven) and the left (Shimon) comes Levi, which in the prayers is the blessing Emes Veyatziv after the Shema, known for its fifteen words beginning with the letter vav (“and”).

The three brothers correspond to the three “lines” of the Sefiros: the right line (Chochmah, Chesed, Netzach), the left line (Binah, Gevurah, Hod), and the middle line (Daas, Tiferes, Yesod), which is Levi. The middle line joins and harmonizes the two sides.

Through these three comes Yehudah, whose name comes from acknowledgment (hoda’ah): “your brothers shall acknowledge you.” This is Malchus, which has nothing of its own and only receives, yet once it has received it rules over those who gave to it, and so it is called Keser Malchus, the crown of kingship.

Malchus is a “crown from below upward”: though it is the lowest level, it becomes the crown over the very levels above it, even though they pour their lights into it and redeem it. The Zohar in Parshas Balak, to which the Alter Rebbe refers, reads “who do His word” as the mighty ones who rebuild Malchus, called “word,” from a mere point to her full form; then they all stand “to hearken to the voice of His word,” and she reigns among them like a king among his hosts.

A parable: a human king receives taxes, silver and gold, from his people, and yet he remains their sovereign. Receiving from them does not make him lower than they are.

Malchus can rule because its root is in Keser, the highest level, as the principle “their end is wedged in their beginning” teaches: the last level is rooted in the first. But Keser is “the most hidden of all hidden,” so it must be drawn down until it is revealed, and this is the meaning of “you” (atah) in “Yehudah, you”: G‑d addressed as present and revealed.

That is why the brothers’ acknowledgment runs from Keser to Malchus through the three lines, which are now mapped onto the morning prayers. Reuven is the first paragraph of the Shema, linked to the Name of Forty-Two, and Shimon is the second paragraph, linked to the Name of Seventy-Two.

The parenthesis answers an objection: the Name of Forty-Two usually belongs to Gevurah and Seventy-Two to Chesed, so linking Forty-Two with the first paragraph (love) and Seventy-Two with the second (awe) seems reversed. The answer is that lights and vessels are exchanged, the light of Gevurah sitting in a vessel of Chesed and the reverse. Levi is Emes Veyatziv, the mediating blessing after the Shema, called the Chamber of Will, higher than the Chamber of Love that belongs to the blessing before the Shema.

The highest chamber, the Holy of Holies, is the Amidah, which opens with “Ado-nai, open my lips” and must follow immediately after the blessing of redemption. There the acknowledgment of “your brothers shall acknowledge you” is reached: complete self-nullification, the level of Keser.

After Yehudah’s birth Leah “stood still from bearing,” and the Sages teach that “standing” means prayer, that is, the Amidah. The word also implies stillness and silence, the mark of Keser: keser is a term of silence, as in “Wait (kater) for me a little,” and “the fence of wisdom is silence,” for Keser stands above Chochmah, wisdom, like a fence around it.

The second clause of Yehudah’s blessing, “your hand shall be on the nape of your enemies,” is now explained. Malchus rises and falls: it rises in acknowledgment, “This time I will acknowledge,” and at night it descends into the lower worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah to refine them, sorting out the good within them.

Night is when the woman of valor “gives food,” read here as Malchus sustaining and refining the lower worlds. Refinement happens only through the “back” (achorayim), an outer engagement, like the nape of the neck in the verse. The inner dimension (pnimiyus) does not refine: it is simply absorbed, like a candle’s flame before a torch.

The third clause, “your father’s sons shall bow down to you,” is a different flow: from Abba, which is Chochmah, down to Malchus, as in the phrase “Abba founded the Daughter,” the Daughter being Malchus. It differs from “your brothers shall acknowledge you,” which comes from Keser through all three lines.

“Your father’s sons” involve only two lines: Reuven, the line of Chochmah, Chesed and Netzach, reached through acts of kindness; and Levi, the line of Daas, Tiferes and Yesod, reached through the study of Torah. Torah is called “the fallen fruit of the Wisdom above,” so it carries the flow of Abba, which is Chochmah.

Leah’s words at Reuven’s birth, “For G‑d has seen my affliction,” are now explained. Refining the lower worlds and teshuvah are one process: whatever came down from a high place and must climb back is “returning,” and the soul itself came down into the body for the sake of a greater ascent.

The closeness that comes through “my affliction,” the soul’s bitterness over its distance from G‑d, has a special power. It reaches so far that even the animal soul and the body are to be transformed (is’hapcha), turning toward G‑d as darkness turns into light.

Such closeness is greater, as light that emerges from darkness has an advantage over ordinary light. The Alter Rebbe refers to what is explained elsewhere on “And Yaakov blessed Pharaoh,” quoting only the words “just as that side…”; “that side” is the sitra achra (the other side), the realm opposed to holiness. Kehot notes that a manuscript reads this more fully: that side “kills and takes out the soul,” taking the body as well as the soul, so holiness must go further than raising the soul and remove impurity altogether, and Yaakov’s blessing of Pharaoh was needed to give the strength for this.