The Song of Songs states ‘I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride’. The Previous Rebbe, in his discourse Bati LeGani, quotes the Midrash which explains that these words are said by G-d, when the Divine Presence returned to dwell in this world in the Sanctuary built by Moses.
Because at the beginning of existence the essence of the Shechinah was in the Garden of Eden, together with Adam and Eve. Then came seven negative events, beginning with eating from the Tree of Knowledge and Cain killing Abel, which caused the Shechinah to depart, further and further away from the world, to the seventh Firmament.
But then came seven Tzaddikim, who successively brought the Shechinah back into the world: Abraham, who brought the Shechinah from the seventh Firmament to the sixth, then Isaac from the sixth to the fifth, and so on through the following generations of Jacob, Levi, Kehot, Amram, and finally Moses, who was the seventh, and ‘all sevenths are precious’. Hence he was able to bring the Shechinah from the first Firmament into this physical world, which is the lowest of all realms.
The main way in which he accomplished this was by constructing the Sanctuary, of which G-d said ‘build for Me a Sanctuary and I will dwell within them’ and the words ‘within them’ in the plural, instead of ‘within it’, are explained by the Sages to mean ‘within each individual’.
Indeed, explains the original discourse, based on the Midrash, this is the task of all Tzaddikim: to make G-dliness dwell in this world.
The Rebbe now cites a profound teaching by the Sages, that every sin by man is really orchestrated by G-d, for an ultimately positive purpose. This means that the seven negative events which led to the Shechinah departing seven levels away from the world were all for a positive purpose. Why? So that when the revelation of G-d was re-established, by the efforts of Abraham and his descendants, culminating in Moses, this revelation was achieved by the efforts of Man, not just something which G-d had put in place at the beginning of Creation.
Further, this new revelation came after the darkness of the hiddenness of G-d. The light which comes after darkness, even more, in which the darkness is transformed to light, has a greater intensity. This is like the process of Teshuvah, Repentance, in which the Repentant reaches a higher level than one who has never sinned.
This process is also seen in the construction of the Sanctuary, which epitomizes the way each individual serves G-d, through study of Torah and keeping Mitzvot, and thus making a dwelling for the Divine within his or her inner being.
The first part of the actual structure of the Sanctuary to be described in the Torah is the planks of acacia wood, עצי שיטים קרשים למשכן. Each plank is called keresh. The word keresh is a rearrangement of the letters of the word sheker, falsehood. The task of life is to transform the falsehood which pervades existence into something holy, a plank of the Sanctuary, in which the Divine Shechinah can dwell.
Further, the planks were made of acacia wood, called in Hebrew ‘atzei shittim’, a word which relates to ‘shtut’, folly. The discourse explains that negative folly is behaviour which descends below the line of Reason. But sacred folly rises above the line of Reason: that means acting with dedication and self-sacrifice. This is why when they Jewish people left Egypt, they are described as Tzivos Hashem, the host (army) of G-d, because a soldier acts with total dedication and self-sacrifice.
While the Jewish people were in Egypt, the morally lowest place in the world, their task was to reveal the Divine sparks concealed in their surroundings and elevate them, to bring them out of Egypt with them. This is our task in every subsequent exile. For the world, Nature, is created with the Divine Name Elokim, which has the same gematria as Hateva, Nature. Nature exists, brought into being and kept in existence by the Divine, but concealing the Divine within it.
Chapter 13 of the Previous Rebbe’s original discourse describes the way the Divine radiance is increasingly concealed in order to descend lower and lower, but through the service of the ‘Tzivos Hashem’, the Jewish people, with selflessness and dedicated acceptance, like literal soldiers, through studying Torah and keeping Mitzvot are able to elevate the Divine sparks which are concealed in the world around them.
The emphasis in Chapter 14, the chapter for this year, is that ‘You give life to everything’ even down to the very lowest levels of existence, and that awareness of this fact is available to even the simplest person. G-dliness is so apparent at even the lowest level that we can approach G-d there with the intimacy of the second person, ‘You’.
How can we understand this paradox, that at the very lowest levels, where the Divine is most concealed, G-d is also apparent in an intimate and immediate way? In Tanya Rabbi Shneur Zalman uses three expressions to explain three different levels of Divine energy: radiance, life-energy, and force. ‘Force’ is separate from its source, and is therefore completely concealed. Radiance and life-energy are connected with their source, and therefore are more revealed. Radiance is not ‘enclothed’ in the physical world, it relates to it in a transcendent way; but life-energy is intimately enclothed in the physical realm. Since the life-energy is at the same time joined to its higher source, although it is enclothed in the physical realm it is not changed by this encounter. It remains the unchanging Divine.
The Rebbe adds that in fact there is also a fourth level: the name of any object. The Baal Shem Tov taught, as quoted in Tanya, Gate of Unity and Faith, that the name of anything in the world is its spiritual life-energy, deriving through a series of transformations from the Ten Utterances in the Torah describing Creation. While this is usually explained in terms of Hebrew names, the Rebbe’s father Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Schneerson would also explain the significance of names in other languages.
Regarding names, on the one hand Adam’s wisdom is extolled for his ability to give the right name to each creature, such as shor for ox, expressing the essence of the ox. On the other hand, two very different people can both have the same name. This means that the name is at the same time an expression of the essence, and also something which might convey nothing.
That is in fact the unique nature of the name: it links with the essence, and also with the outermost aspect of any object or person. And this helps us understand that even though the Divine radiance flows down, down, to the lowest levels of utter concealment, as explained in chapter 13 of the discourse, the Jew by his or her service of G-d is able to reveal that radiance, as expressed in chapter 14.
The radiance then reveals the name, in its highest level, the point at which the name reveals the essence. Thus the highest and the lowest are joined, the essence and the everyday, as will be revealed for all with the coming of Moshiach.
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