A man or woman who expresses the vow of a Nazirite. (Bemidbar 6:2)
What does the word Nazir mean? The Rishonim say that it comes from the word nezer, “crown.” Someone who takes the vow of a Nazir is thereby “crowned.”
A crown is an ornament that a king wears on top of his head. The head is the highest point of the body, and the crown is above the head. This represents kingship. The king is separated and uplifted from the rest of the people. Everyone bows before the king to show the importance and eminence of the king, to express their lack of significance as compared to him.
The same applies to the “crown” of Torah. The Rambam writes:
A man should not marry the daughter of an ignoramus, because if he dies or is exiled, his children will be ignoramuses, since their mother does not know the crown of Torah.
1 Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Issurei Bi’ah 21:32.
Let’s understand what the Rambam is saying here when he emphasizes the “crown” of Torah. He is talking about a woman whose father is ignorant of Torah learning. The father is an am haaretz. And why is he an am haaretz? Because of all the demands and exigencies of life. A person needs to earn a livelihood and take care of other pressing matters. In many cases, such pursuits are not against Torah, they are not anti-Torah, but they do go against the “crown” of Torah. An am haaretz does not know that the Torah Hakedoshah is above and beyond everything else, that Torah is the most important and the most eminent thing there is, that nothing else has significance when compared to Torah.
How uplifted is a crown? It may not seem to be much higher than the head, but early Torah sources say that when it comes to Hashem’s "crown,” when we speak of midas hakeser, enfolded within it is Ein Sof, Infinity. The attribute of keser, “crown,” represents infinite loftiness.
Pearls of Wisdom from the Parshah
Accordingly, when we say that the Nazir has a “crown,” we are saying that he is separated and uplifted in his holiness from the rest of the people, and he has the ability to thereby raise himself up without limit.
This requires explanation. After all, he did a relatively small thing. He uplifted himself a little bit by renouncing some worldly desires; he refrains from wine. Why does this little step grant him the ability to rise infinitely high?
The following metaphor explains it. A person wants to get higher. He jumps up again and again, thousands of times. If we would put all of his jumps together, this time a foot and that time two feet, it would come out that he jumped hundreds of yards. Yet, he is still standing on the ground, right where he was in the beginning. Why? Because gravity pulls him down to the ground all the time and doesn’t let him break loose. So after all his jumping he still stands on the ground.
But if he could for one moment rise to a height when he breaks away from the earth’s gravitational force, then he would be able to keep rising further and further, infinitely.
This has actually happened in our times. Rockets and spaceships have gotten to the moon and beyond. How can a rocket have so much force that it gets to the moon? How can it travel such a distance? Because all it really needs is enough fuel to get it past the gravitational force of the earth, and once it gets up that far, it can keep on going unhindered, even into deep space, powered only by the initial momentum.
This is what the Nazir’s “crown” signifies. By renouncing worldly desires he got high enough to be beyond the natural pull of materiality. He broke away from the gravitational force of physical matters. And once he rises even just a little bit above the pull of gashmiyus, he can keep going higher and higher in kedushah without limit. The “crown” on his head represents tremendous kedushah because once he breaks loose from the hold of human smallness, there is no end to the levels of kedushah he can attain.
This is a great principle in attaining spiritual greatness. Many people try to uplift themselves, but since they feel the tug of materiality, no matter how many times they try to jump up, in the end they find themselves back on the ground where they began.
So how did the tzaddikim do it?
First, they exerted great effort in disconnecting themselves from the gravitational pull of gashmiyus. Once they broke away from it, they went up and up to very great levels.
The Rambam writes as follows:
If a person wants to attain the crown of Torah, he should be careful with all his nights not to lose even one of them to sleeping and eating and drinking and conversing and so forth. Rather, he should utilize his nights for Torah study and words of wisdom.
The Rambam writes this because by nature it is hard to learn at night. Even if a person sits himself down to learn, he is likely to doze off, because a human being is tied to materiality, and it overcomes him and paralyses him. But if a person overcomes this tendency, and gets in the habit of learning at night,
2 Ibid Hilchos Talmud Torah 3:13.
it disconnects him from the pull of materiality, and he will go up and up.
I once caught a glimpse of what attaining the crown of Torah means. A great talmid chacham whom I knew once ended up in a certain town where he had nowhere to sleep that night. He was not perturbed or pained by this. He simply went down to the nearest shul, and there he sat and learned until the morning. It wasn’t because he was in the habit of always learning all day and night. He had no plans to stay up and learn that night. He simply was not controlled by the need for a bed. If there is a bed, he goes to sleep, and if there isn’t, he sits in the beis midrash and sleeps some other time.
What happens to people like us when we don’t have a place to sleep? We wander from here to there because we feel we must find some place where we can catch a few winks.
The Ibn Ezra wrote on the passage of Nazir that “all people are enslaved to worldly desires.” We might think he is speaking of evil hedonists who obsessively pursue lowly pleasures. But that is not what the Ibn Ezra means, because he said, “All people,” and that is not what all people do.
Rather, the worldly desires he spoke of are the routine life of all people. Although we need to keep ourselves healthy by natural standards, this doesn’t mean we need to be enslaved to the demands of the body. Rather, a person should give his body what he understands that it needs without it ruling over him. If he does this, he is “crowned.”
