The Month of Cheshvan Evil Kings and their Messianic Sparks

This and the next two articles are excerpted from the October 2017 monthly English broadcast, which centered on the figure of three non-Jewish kings, Nimrod (who is first mentioned in this week’s parashah), Nebuchadnezzar, and the Roman emperor Nero. In the original class, HaRav Ginsburgh explained how the darkness dished out by the worst of our enemies will in the end become part of the light of Mashiach through the new, deeper understanding of Torah that he will reveal.

The Letter and the Sense of the Month of Cheshvan

Sefer Yetzirah or “The Book of Formation,” is the oldest Kabbalistic text. It focuses on the letters of the Hebrew letters and provides a wealth of information on them and their connection to time and space. One of the foundational analyses is that the 22 letters divide into 12, 7, and 3. Each of the 12 letters, known as simple letters, creates one month of the year starting from the month of Nissan. The order is הוזחטילנסעצק. Being that we are now in the month of Cheshvan, which is the eighth month from Nissan, the letter that creates Cheshvan is nun (נ). Each month is also associated with a particular sense. Twelve senses are more than just the usual five physical senses in our bodies; they include an expanded set of senses based on spiritual faculties as well. The 12 months also correspond to the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The tribe of the month of Cheshvan is Menasheh, and its sense is smell. The prophet Isaiah associated the sense of smell with the Mashiach, so much so that the Sages say that Mashiach can be identified by his ability to judge or guide every individual with the aid of his own inner, spiritual sense of smell alone.

If the letter is nun and the sense is smell, what is the connection between them? We will understand this through understanding the meaning of the letter nun.

“Yinon Is His Name”

Hebrew letters have names, and the name of the letter nun (נ) is explained by Rashi to mean “king” or “kingship,” most notably in the Psalm 72, which begins, “For Solomon: O’ God, give Your judgments to the king, and Your righteousness to the king’s son,” but which many of the commentators say describes the figure of Mashiach. In that psalm, we find the verse, “may his name endure forever; before the sun, may his name reign.” The Hebrew word for “reign” or “rule” is pronounced yinnon and written: יִנּוֹן. But this verse can also mean that the king, i.e., the Mashiach’s name will be Yinnon, a name derived from the letter nun.

The verse concludes, “and all nations shall bless themselves by him; they shall call him fortunate [praise him and be joyful and fortunate through him].” When God told Avraham to leave his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house, He promised him, “and you shall be a blessing… and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.” Just as the first Jew is the source of blessing for all humanity, so Mashiach will be the source of blessing for all humanity. In short, Yinnon is the king’s name connecting the letter nun (and the month of Cheshvan) with kingship.

Nissan and Cheshvan: The Exterior and Interior of Kingship

Without consulting Sefer Yetzirah, the month that Torah explicitly connects with kingship is Nissan. As the mishnah states, “There are four beginnings to the year… the first of Nissan is the New Year for kings.” Furthermore, since we have identified the letter nun with kingship, it is telling that the name of the month of Nissan (נִיסָן) begins and ends with the letter nun. As a bonus, the tribe associated with the month of Nissan is Judah, the tribe of King David and the eternal Davidic house of kings.

What is the difference between the kingship of Nissan and the kingship of Cheshvan (חֶשְׁוָן), in which the letter nun appears only once at the end of the month’s name? Nissan is the revealed, external manifestation of kingship and the king, but the king’s inner soul, the interior aspect of kingship, which is tied to the sense of smell, the spiritual dimension of Mashiach’s leadership, is in Cheshvan. The physical side of the king—his body, which comes from King David and the tribe of Judah belongs to Nissan, while his inner, spiritual side belongs to Cheshvan. Thus, we can begin to appreciate the essence of the month of Cheshvan, which encapsulates the inner spiritual faculties of kingship and of the Mashiach.

Kings of the Letter Nun: Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, and Nero

Nimrod: The First King

The month of Cheshvan relates to the inner faculties of the kingship. It is very fitting that in our public reading of the Torah, we read about the first king in the month of Cheshvan, specifically in parashat Noach.

There is a principle in Torah (and in general) that “everything follows the inception.” When one wants to know anything in the Torah—a person, a concept, a story—one must find its first appearance in the Torah, or in history, upon which all the similar concepts and events that follow are based. Kingship begins from a certain point, from a certain place. Adam, the first man, was not a king (over a nation); his son Seth was also not a king, nor was his grandson Enosh. Who was the first king? How many generations must one wait, from the creation of Adam until the first king?

The answer 13 generations—three generations after Noach, who was the tenth generation from Adam, the tenth generation of humanity. Noach had three sons. One of them was Ham, who had a son named Kush (Ethiopia), and Kush gave birth to Nimrod—the first king in history, as documented in the Torah,

And Kush begot Nimrod; the first man who was mighty in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before God…. And his kingdom began with Babylon, and with Erech, and Akkad, and Kalneh, in the land of Shinar.

If kingship begins with Nimrod, one must become acquainted with this soul. He was not a tzaddik; he was wicked. We know his wickedness through Abraham, the first Jew and our first patriarch, whom he persecuted on account of his faith in one God. After Abraham broke the idols in his father’s shop, Nimrod tried to kill him by throwing him into the fiery furnace, but Abraham was miraculously saved when God Himself saved him.

Nimrod was the king of Babylon, and he was behind the building of the Tower of Babylon. In the story of the Tower of Babylon itself, the name Nimrod does not appear, but in the account of the generations of Noach it is written of him, “and the beginning of his kingdom was Bavel”—so it is very clear that he is the one who led the story of building the city and erecting the tower. It is written that the idolatry of Babylon, which began with Nimrod and ended with Nebuchadnezzar was called Bel, like Babel, somewhat reminiscent of the Ba’al, the chief idolatry in the Land of Israel during Biblical times. Nimrod built the capital city of Babylon, and everything connected to Babylon comes from him. Even good things connected to Babylon like the Babylonian Talmud.

The way we live today as Jews is in large measure derived from the Babylonian Talmud and not, as one might suppose, according to the later Jerusalem Talmud. As a result, to this day, there is something very foundational in our lives still connected to Babylon.

Nebuchadnezzar: Nimrod’s Reincarnation

What do we know in Kabbalah about Nimrod? The first thing that is clear is that his name begins with the letter nun, the letter of this month, Cheshvan, whose meaning we said is king.

The Arizal, the greatest of the Kabbalists, teaches us that Nimrod returned in reincarnation a second time as Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylonian empire, like Nimrod, and he is the king who destroyed the First Temple. In Nebuchadnezzar (נְבוּכַדְנֶאצַּר), the letter nun appears twice. Nebuchadnezzar is understood to be composed of two words—Nebuchad-nezzar. The second part, nezzar means emperor or king. So essentially, both parts of his name begin with the letter nun.

Again, according to the Arizal, Nebuchadnezzar was a reincarnation of Nimrod. According to the Talmud—the Torah’s revealed dimension—he was a physical descendant of Nimrod. But the Talmud adds another astonishing fact: that he was also a descendant of King Solomon, who built the First Temple that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed. How could this be?

Scripture recounts that the Queen of Sheba came to witness Solomon’s wisdom and the greatness of his kingdom. When in Jerusalem, she asked him for something (which is not mentioned explicitly in Scripture. The Sages reveal that she asked to bear a child from Solomon, and that he granted her request. The child that was born from this union was Nebuchadnezzar, which might mean that Nebuchadnezzar was a descendant of this child a few generations later.

Nero Caesar

There is one more important non-Jewish king whose name begins with nun and who was connected with the destruction of the Temple, this time the Second Temple. This was Nero, the Roman emperor, who in the Talmud is known as Neron Caesar (נֵירוֹן קֵיסָר). His name begins with nun and ends with nun and contains all the letters of the name of the letter nun (נוּן), which means “king,” as above.

The most famous gematria in the non-Jewish tradition is 666. For many non-Jews this is a frightening number, associated with what they call the “Antichrist.” The true significance of this number is that it is the value of Nero’s name when written in a particular manner (נֵרוֹן קֵסַר). Clearly, the connection is vague because both words are written with defective spelling. Nero is considered the Antichrist according to the false non-Jewish tradition—so much so that they believe he will return to fight against the Mashiach.

There is a little grain of truth behind these fantastic tales. In the Babylonian Talmud, our true tradition, it is written that at the end of his life, Nero converted to Judaism, and that Rabbi Meir, the great disciple of Rabbi Akiva, was among his descendants. According to some non-Jewish Roman historians, Nero committed suicide at a young age, but according to others, he simply disappeared. There are even gentiles who think that he never died, that he is still wandering about—the “anti-” of their messiah. For us it is very simple that he is the father of a messianic figure, that Mashiach is among his descendants—this is an astonishing lineage. Of all the Sages of the Mishnah, Rabbi Meir was the only one who regarded himself as having the potential to be Mashiach. The fact that the only messianic figure in the Mishnah is Rabbi Meir and that he is a descendant of Nero, about whom there is an entire story in the Talmud of what led him to convert at the end of his days.

The Return of the Sparks of the Wicked

We have seen the rectification of Nero, who converted at the end of his days. Is there a rectification for Nebuchadnezzar? Could there also be some rectification for him? According to the Sages, Nero has a rectification—what about the two before him, Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar? The point we are trying to reach, the salient headline from this entire discussion is that even the most wicked kings in history—those who destroyed the Temples, the Jewish values and culture, and killed millions of Jews—even they have some type of rectification. Not only is there some rectification for them, but there is within them a spark of Mashiach. Within these wicked people there are messianic sparks that must be redeemed and when we succeed in redeeming them, the true Mashiach will be able to appear and redeem us all.

What we have just said fits perfectly with what we have been discussing in recent years about the Fourth Revolution in Torah learning, which is about permitting and even requiring us to teach Torah to the entire world. Torah has the special quality that it can draw out of these kings, like a magnet pulling metal filings, the lost sparks of holiness that are concealed within them. As we explain in length regarding the Fourth Revolution, we are now in the final stages of our long exile, a stage that is meant to redeem sparks of holiness from among the nations of the world. These sparks are redeemed when non-Jewish convert to Judaism. Until all the sparks lost among the nations return to Judaism and are rectified, the final redemption will not come; Mashiach cannot come.

According to the Sages, all the well-known wicked people had descendants who studied Torah—not only Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar, but also Sancheriv, Pharaoh, and the like. There is a discussion in the Talmud whose conclusion is that all the wicked kings who destroyed and killed Jews and even those who only plotted against us, like Haman, had descendants who converted and studied Torah.