Here we place the interpretation offered by the Sochatchov rebbes, the Shem MiShmuel and his father, the Avnei Nezer. In understanding, we identified Judah and Joseph as the heart and the mind. By approaching Joseph, Judah—the heart—expresses a yearning to ascend. Now, in the sefirah of might, which is directly under understanding, the Shem Mishmuel writes that Judah represents a broken heart. This broken heart is the ultimate vessel (Judah, again) as declared by the verse, “A broken and contrite heart, O’ God, You will not despise.”
Now, the Midrash connects our verse “Judah approached him” with a prophecy from Amos: “The plowman shall meet the harvester, and the treader of grapes he who sows seed.” The plowman represents Judah. The harvester represents Joseph. This is a Messianic prophecy, akin to “She conceived and gives birth together,” – the future state where investment and profit will occur simultaneously. However, the Shem Mishmuel recounts that his father explained the term plowman as referring to Judah, symbolizing one who breaks their heart by plowing their inner self. This is the work of cultivating a broken heart. Just as plowing “softens the earth,” so plowing one’s inner self turns a heart of stone into a heart of flesh—i.e., a broken heart.
Elsewhere, the Avnei Nezer, in his commentary on the laws of reaping, explains that the essence of reaping or harvesting is separating the crop from the earth. The Shem Mishmuel expands on this by drawing from the Maharal of Prague: harvesting represents the ability to sever the intellect from its attachment to corporeality. As long as the mind cannot conceive of abstract ideas in their pure form, it remains bound to materiality and lacks the quality of a truly “detached intellect,” as it was referred to by philosophers. A detached intellect can fully grasp spiritual concepts, free of the distortions of material imagination based on the illusory world.
