The Sedra states ‘You have affirmed Hashem today, and Hashem affirms you’.
The word translated as ‘affirmed’, he-emarta, is based on the root amar meaning ‘to speak’. There is a Chassidic interpretation of these words, that they mean ‘you have caused Hashem to speak’. In which way? The speech of G-d is the Ten Utterances with which the world was created, which relate to the Ten Commandments through which the Torah was given to the Jewish people. When the Jewish people study Torah they set in action the process whereby ‘when a scholar studies Torah, Hashem studies with him’.
Hence when a Jew studies Torah this causes Hashem again to pronounce those words of Torah and this gives an important input to the process of Creation, for ‘Hashem looked into the Torah and created the world’. Therefore in response to the Jew learning Torah there is a renewal of the Ten Utterances of Creation. This idea relates to Rosh Hashana, both because this statement in the Sedra is refereeing to Rosh Hashana and because on Rosh Hashana G-d said ‘let us make man’. Man (and woman) are both a microcosm of the whole of Creation and is also the completion and perfection of all Creation.
Hence the Torah states ‘you have made Hashem speak today’, meaning you have caused Hashem to say ‘let us make man’ (and all the other Ten Utterances as well). For at the beginning of Creation this process of the declaration of the Ten Utterances came about simply from Hashem, from His attribute of Chesed, kindness, but afterwards it depends on the arousal from below, on the activity of the Jewish people, by studying Torah and similar.
Then comes the response, translated above as ‘Hashem affirms you’, which is the Divine flow coming as a response to the achievement of the process whereby the Jewish people, through their Torah study, renew Hashem’s input into the world through the Ten Utterances and Ten Commandments. This Divine response comes from a very exalted level, beyond the level which can be reached by our ‘service’ of the Divine. Rather it is a product of our creating together with G-d, through the interaction of our ‘making G-d speak’, a wholesome realm, in which this higher and even more exalted Divine affirmation can be expressed.
Now this ‘making G-d speak’ the Ten Utterances and the Ten Commandments relates to the aspect of G-d which can be seen as having different aspects, like the Ten Sefirot. For ten is the perfection of Number, as is seen in the Ten Sefirot and the ten kinds of Song which King David sang in Psalms. As the Pardes explains: everything has the three dimensions length, breadth and depth, and each of these has ‘beginning, middle, end’, which makes nine, and the tenth aspect is the space in which they exist. The Rambam writes that everything has nine changeable qualities and its Essence.
This leads to the idea that the Essence includes all the other qualities. Thus with the Ten Utterances, the first word Bereishit (In the beginning), includes all the other nine. Similarly the first word of the Ten Commandments, Anochi (‘I, the Essence of G-d) includes all the others. So too the first Sefirah, Wisdom, can be seen as including all the others.
This relates also to the idea that ‘G-d took counsel with the souls of the Tzaddikim’ before He created the world, noting that ‘all Your people are Tzaddikim’ – for this is on a level before all existence, and even before the Tzimtzum. This is because it is the Jewish people who can enable the Divine goal of ‘a dwelling in the lower world’ to be realised. This ‘desire’ is beyond any other level, but it is achieved specifically on the lowest level of existence.
This relates to our service of G-d in the month of Elul, when we give ourselves to G-d and He gives Himself to us, ‘I am to my Beloved and My beloved is to me’, and also to the beginning of our Sedra which speaks of taking the first fruits and bringing them to the Temple, and there on makes a ‘declaration’, which relates to the process described in which we through our words cause G-d, so to speak to respond, with the process and cycle which leads ultimately to the full revelation of the Essence of the Divine in the lower world.
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