This holy Name expresses the earnest and dimensionless faith of Israel that they are truly the real purpose of the Torah. According to this view, the entire Torah was designed for the sake of the people of Israel. It is all instructions, addresses, and guidance specifically for them, and they themselves are connected to the Holy Blessed One with an unchanging essential connection that lies beyond reason, rationale, or logic. Thus, it is written that the Creator consulted with the souls of Israel before creating the world, and they are “the first of His produce,” whose thought preceded everything.
The place where there is nothing but the Holy Blessed One and Israel, “Israel and the King alone,” is the secret of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s rereading of the classic rabbinic statement “Israel has no mazal” (meaning that the Jewish people are not dependent on luck or foreign influences) as “ayin is the mazal of Israel.” The mazal-root of Israel is from the ayin, the nothingness of the supernal crown, the crown of the Good Name that rises above the crown of Torah, priesthood, and royalty. Therefore, the most primal memory according to Rebbe Nachman is precisely the memory of ayin (nothingness).
ISRAEL, TORAH, AND THE TEMPLE
If the memory of the Sinai revelation is a distinct memory related to the sefirah of wisdom, and the memory of the nothingness (the ayin), the root of the Jewish soul, is from the crown, it follows that we should continue and awaken a memory corresponding to the next sefirah in line, understanding (binah). What could this memory be?
Understanding in Hebrew is cognate with contemplation (התבוננות). This is the closest Hebrew word to the original meaning of meditation (not in the Eastern sense, but in the contemplative sense). It is also related to the concept of structure (בניין) and is described in the Zohar as the chamber or palace within which the seminal point of wisdom resides and where the seed of an idea sown by wisdom is expanded and developed through the intense contemplative faculties of understanding. Translating this into a memory, the sefirah of understanding is the source of our memory of the Holy Temple, where we experience coming to see and be seen by the Almighty.
Expanding this thought a bit further: there are two aspects to understanding, known as either the supernal mother and the lower mother, or as understanding (binah) and contemplation (tevunah). These two aspects correspond to memories of the two Temples, the first and the second. The same holds true for wisdom and its memory. Wisdom too has two aspects known as the supernal father (Abba Ila’ah) and Israel the Elder (Yisrael Saba). They correspond to memories of the Giving of the Torah and the Sinai revelation.
If the Ba’al Shem Tov awakened the memory of the nothingness and the Maggid the memory of Torah, it follows that the memory of the Temple is the memory that the Alter Rebbe awakened in his disciples. The three fathers of the Chasidic movement correspond to the three Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham is the first believer and corresponds to the Ba’al Shem Tov’s simple faith in the true nothingness, referring to the true source of all being. Isaac corresponds to the sefirah of might and thus to the memory of the Giving of the Torah, which the sages describe as having been given “from the mouth of might (gevurah).” Additionally, the shofar heard at Sinai was made from Isaac’s ram. Jacob is inherently connected to the memory of the Temple since it is he who identified the location as “the House of God.”
