וללבן שתי בנות וגו׳

The maamar opens on the verse introducing Lavan’s daughters, Leah and Rachel. In Chassidus they stand for two ways the Divine expresses itself: Leah is “thought,” an inward, hidden world, and Rachel is “speech,” the world that comes out into the open. Just as a person’s thought is private and his speech is heard by others, so G‑d’s “hidden world” and “revealed world” differ in how much is disclosed.

The Psalmist speaks of the “lands” of the living in the plural. The Alter Rebbe reads the two lands as Leah and Rachel, thought and speech, and says that while the Temple stood, both of them shone openly in the Land of Israel.

Of the two, Rachel (speech) was the main one in Temple times, because thought does not stay private: it clothes itself in speech, and so what was revealed through speech carried the thought within it. The phrase “mainstay of the house” (akeres habayis) is applied to Rachel as the central figure of the household.

Because Rachel is the “revealed world,” her prominence in the Land of Israel meant that G‑dliness was openly visible there. Its signs were people: sages with the holy spirit (ruach hakodesh), and prophets.

Rashi notes that Yonah fled abroad because prophecy does not rest outside the Land, and he makes the same point about Yechezkel, who prophesied in Babylon. The Temple added further open revelation: the Shechinah in the Holy of Holies, the Urim and Tumim through which the High Priest received answers, and the fire that came down from heaven onto the altar. After the destruction, the Sages teach, the Shechinah itself went into exile with the Jewish people.

The exiled Shechinah is Rachel, the level of speech, now hidden among “the seventy princes,” the heavenly powers over the nations. The Alter Rebbe reads Isaiah’s “like a ewe (rachel) before her shearers, she is mute” as Rachel, divine speech, falling silent: she no longer shines as she did.

In exile the work is “refinement” (beirurim): drawing out and elevating the sparks of holiness that fell into the world, rather than basking in open revelation. Yet something still shines in the Land of Israel: Leah, the level of thought, which is higher than speech just as a thought is more spiritual and loftier than the words that express it.

Leah is not in exile. The final form of the letter mem (ם) is closed on all sides, while the regular mem (מ) has an opening at the bottom. Rachel, speech, is the open mem, through which the “external forces” (kelipah) can draw nourishment in exile; Leah is rooted in the closed mem, where they have no entry. The Alter Rebbe sends the reader to the Zohar at the start of Terumah.

But since Leah is the hidden world, her light does not appear openly. That is why G‑dliness in the Land of Israel today is not visible the way it was in Temple times.

The hiddenness has a hidden advantage. Great tzaddikim living in the Land can now reach higher insights than tzaddikim of their own stature reached in Temple times, because what remains in the Land is the higher level of Leah.

The reason: their insight touches supernal thought as it is in itself, before it has been clothed in speech. The Arizal, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria of Safed, is the proof: in the Land of Israel he attained depths of the Kabbalah that great tzaddikim of earlier generations had not reached.

Now a question: the Torah says Leah was “hated,” meaning Yaakov loved her less than Rachel. Why would Yaakov prefer speech over the loftier level of thought, which he surely could grasp? The answer begins with the Zohar’s name for Yaakov: “the middle bar” of the Tabernacle, which ran through all the boards from one end to the other.

Yaakov’s role is to draw the Infinite Light down from the very top, from Keser, the level above intellect, through every level below. The “upper end” is the kav, the thin line of light that enters the empty space left after the tzimtzum. The extra letter vav (“and”) in “and the G‑d of Yaakov,” which the names of Avraham and Yitzchak lack, signals this drawing downward: the vav is a line drawn down.

In the blessing “the great, the mighty, and the awesome,” the three words correspond to Avraham (Chesed), Yitzchak (Gevurah), and Yaakov, “the awesome,” who joins the two. He can unite kindness and restraint because he draws down the Ayin, the “Nothing” of G‑dliness that is above both, and in a person this appears as self-nullification (bittul). His drawing down does not stop halfway: it reaches the “lower end,” Malchus, the revealed world.

This is why Yaakov loved Rachel more than Leah. His whole desire was that the Infinite Light be revealed below, in the revealed world of speech, because only there can everyone receive it.

The hidden world of thought is not accessible to all. The Torah’s description of Yaakov kissing Rachel is read like the famous dotted word “and he kissed him” (when Esav met Yaakov), where the dots point to a kiss with special inner meaning. Here the kiss signals a depth of connection Yaakov drew into Rachel.

A kiss, in the Zohar’s language, is a union of spirit with spirit, the inner closeness that comes from the core of love; in the Sefiros it corresponds to the intellect, Chochmah, Binah and Daas. Yaakov drew even this inner, intellectual level into Rachel, so that speech would carry the depth of thought. The Alter Rebbe points to his own explanations of two verses in the Song of Songs about kissing.

Yaakov worked for Rachel, “the younger daughter,” meaning speech, the lower level. Lavan’s name means “white,” and in the Arizal’s teaching he stands for the “supernal whiteness,” the source of all kindness, pure compassion with no trace of judgment. The Zohar says of the level called Atika (the Ancient One) that it has “no left side,” no restraint or severity at all.

The physical Lavan was a deceiver, yet his root is holy: the supernal whiteness fell very low and became a physical person. The law of tzaraas illustrates this: when the white lesion covers the whole body, the person is pure. The verse “Lavan rose early in the morning” hints that the morning, time of kindness, is when the supernal Chesed gains strength and flows down each day.

Lavan, the supernal whiteness, “kissed his sons and daughters”: his kindness flowed into all the configurations (partzufim) of Atzilus, the male and female ones alike. Then he “returned to his place,” withdrawing to his lofty root, while Yaakov “went on his way,” his mission being to bring that supernal whiteness far down into Rachel, the level of speech.

This explains why Rachel was barren. For speech to “give birth” means that G‑dliness would be revealed in the lower worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah, where created beings feel themselves separate from G‑d. Such beings cannot receive the supernal whiteness openly, so birth from Rachel was blocked.

The Alter Rebbe anticipates an objection: Rachel is the “revealed world,” so why can she not reveal? Because birth is not an ordinary flow of influence: it brings out something of the parent’s own hidden essence, a much higher kind of revelation, and that is extremely hard to achieve in the lower worlds. He refers to the Zohar on Pinchas, page 249, for this distinction.

Leah, thought, did give birth: six sons. Her births took place within Atzilus itself, among the Sefiros, the divine attributes, where there is no separateness to block revelation; that is where the tribes are rooted.

Because the tribes are rooted in Atzilus, the Psalmist calls them “the tribes of Yah,” a Divine Name. Leah named Yehudah from “I will acknowledge” (odeh); acknowledgment is a form of self-nullification, and such bowing-before-G‑d grows out of thought, out of contemplation, not out of speech.

Reuven’s name comes from “seeing” (re’u) and Shimon’s from “hearing” (shama). Seeing and hearing are also above speech: they take in rather than express, and they stem from thought.

The Alter Rebbe points to his explanation of Yaakov’s blessing “Yehudah, you your brothers shall praise.” Levi’s name comes from “attached” (yilaveh): “this time my husband will be attached to me.” Levi thus stands for attachment (hiskashrus), a deep bond of the mind.

Attachment too comes from thought. Anyone can see it in a person deeply absorbed in thinking: he does not notice what is going on around him, because his mind is bound up entirely in the idea.

Two stories illustrate this. The Jerusalem Talmud tells of Rabbi Chiya Rabbah, and the Babylonian Talmud tells that Rava was so absorbed in study that he did not notice his fingers were bleeding. Both show a mind so attached to its thought that the outside world disappears.

That is why Moshe descended from Levi. Moshe said he was “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue”: his attachment to G‑d and his self-nullification, expressed in his words “and what are we?”, were so deep that he could not easily turn outward to speak and give to others.

Imparting to others is the level of speech, which Moshe’s inwardness made difficult. The Alter Rebbe now asks what separates Levi’s attachment from Yehudah’s acknowledgment, since both are forms of self-nullification.

Yehudah’s self-nullification is visible and outward, like bowing at Modim, the blessing of thanks in the Amidah, where one bends the body. So the kings of the House of David, who descend from Yehudah, embody a self-nullification that shows itself outwardly: a king’s rule expresses submission to G‑d in the open.

Levi’s self-nullification is inward and essential, not visible at all. It resembles the angels, of whom it is said that “the host of heaven bows to You”: angels have no bodies to bow with, so their bowing is the nullification of their being in the act of grasping G‑d.

Moshe, the most inward of all, therefore comes from Levi; the Alter Rebbe notes that the difference between Moshe and Eliyahu follows the same pattern. After four sons, Leah “stopped bearing”: the revelation that thought can produce reached its limit.

A long parenthesis now applies this to the generation of the wilderness, who were rooted in Leah, the world of thought. Their argument, as the Alter Rebbe presents it: why must we enter the Land, the lower earth of Malchus, and keep the mitzvos with physical speech and action, when Torah and mitzvos can be fulfilled spiritually, in thought?

They were badly mistaken. Precisely physical speech and action draw down the Infinite Light far more powerfully, because, as Sefer Yetzirah says, “their end is embedded in their beginning”: the lowest point is bound to the highest. That is why Moshe Rabbeinu, though he was of Leah’s inward kind, prayed 515 times to be allowed to enter the Land.

This sheds further light on Yaakov loving Rachel specifically: she is speech and action. Leah being “hated” is the reverse of the wilderness generation’s wish to stay in the world of thought.

But this raises a question about Leah. When she said “this time my husband will be attached to me,” she clearly did not mean to exclude speech and action; so what did she want?

The answer: both levels are necessary, thought and speech-and-action, and neither suffices alone. The future feast of the Leviathan and the wild ox represents these two levels: the Leviathan, whose name also means “attached,” stands for the fish of the sea, who live entirely within their source and are nullified to it.

Leah wanted inward attachment to be the main thing, with speech and action secondary. This resembles the early pious ones whom the Talmud describes as spending nine hours a day in prayer, absorbed in self-nullification and attachment of the mind.

The Talmud asks of those pious ones, “When was their Torah study done?” and answers that because they were pious, their Torah was preserved and blessed. Either way, their main occupation was inward attachment. The Alter Rebbe adds that the discourse on “There are sixty queens … My dove is one” explains this at length.

Yaakov, however, knew that this path is possible only for a few elite souls. For the Jewish people as a whole, the main service is through speech and action, Torah study and practical mitzvos.

So Yaakov made Rachel’s tent his main home. Yet thought is still necessary, since from it come “seeing and hearing” (Reuven and Shimon), the capacity described in the Zohar as “gazing upon the glory of the King.”

The Talmud says that one who claims to have only Torah study, without deeds, lacks even Torah. Likewise one needs both: the seeing and hearing of thought, together with action, since then the end is joined to the beginning and the lowest deed draws down the highest light.