ענין שניתנה התורה על הר סיני דוקא ולא…

The maamar opens with a question: why was the Torah given on Mount Sinai in particular, when the taller mountains Tabor, Hermon and Carmel also came forward, each asking to be chosen? The answer will show what kind of person is fit to receive the Torah.

The Aramaic translations (Targum) of two verses about the mountains at the Giving of the Torah tell the story: G‑d did not want to give the Torah on proud, towering mountains, but on Sinai, which is low. The parenthesis explains the two Aramaic words for “haughty” and “scornful” from the Targum of another verse, “the contempt of the proud,” which renders it with the same pair.

A mountain’s height stands for a person’s self-importance: raising oneself up with coarse pride (gasus). Such pride is the root of all evil, as Chassidus teaches about the “shattering of the vessels,” the primordial vessels that broke because each stood as a separate, self-asserting existence.

Receiving the Torah requires the opposite of pride: self-nullification (bittul), setting oneself aside before G‑d. In the explanation of “And you shall not omit the salt” (Likkutei Torah, Vayikra), to which the Alter Rebbe refers here, he reads “you shall not profane” (techalelu) as “you shall not make a void (chalal)”: one who stands as a separate “something” makes a void from which the Infinite Light withdraws, for G‑d does not rest on him.

The Talmud states the same idea, expounding the verse “and from the wilderness, Mattanah (a gift)”: one who makes himself like a wilderness that everyone treads upon receives the Torah as a gift. Rashi explains the image: such a person has no haughtiness.

The prayer at the close of the Amidah follows the same order: first “may my soul be like dust to all,” and only then “open my heart to Your Torah.” This is why the Torah was given on Sinai, a low mountain, which stands for lowliness, not raising oneself up; for more on this the Alter Rebbe refers to the end of his discourse on “And you shall draw water with joy.”

This raises a difficulty: if lowliness is the point, why was the Torah given on a mountain at all? Sinai, however low, is still a mountain, and a mountain stands for elevation. The Tzemach Tzedek, citing this passage in Or HaTorah (Megillas Esther, p. 55), answers in the Sages’ terms: Sinai is a mountain of self-elevation, yet a small one, like the “eighth of an eighth” of pride a Torah scholar should have.

The answer: even a person who must be utterly lowly needs inner strength and some measure of elevation in his service of G‑d, as Scripture praises King Yehoshafat: “his heart was lifted up in the ways of Havayah.” In Torah Ohr (Megillas Esther, “Let them bring royal apparel”), the Alter Rebbe calls this the holy counterpart of Haman’s pride: as the Sages say, one’s eyes should be downward, in bittul, and one’s heart upward, in the fire of longing.

Without any sense of elevation, a person would not dare even to begin serving G‑d; he would tell himself, “Who am I, and what is my service?” This sentence and the opening words of the next are taken almost word for word from that Torah Ohr discourse.

So the heart must be lifted up, in its longing and thirst for G‑d, but the self-nullification must remain much greater than this elevation. In the Torah Ohr discourse this is the Sages’ “eighth of an eighth”: one part in sixty-four is the heart’s elevation, joined to Chochmah, whose bittul is the main thing. The Alter Rebbe also refers to his discourse “Arm [men] from among you,” where the Sages’ phrase “peace in the household above” (pamalya shel maalah) is applied to the soul, to its mind and its heart.

Isaiah’s verse “And the humble shall increase joy in Havayah” shows the same pattern. Joy strengthens and lifts up the soul, yet this joy and elevation grow specifically out of humility and lowliness. In Likkutei Sichos (vol. 28, p. 257, note 32), the Kehot note says, this passage is explained as the inter-inclusion of the two movements, bittul and elevation.

The Tanya (end of chapter 34) explains how both can live in one person at the same moment: he is despised in his own eyes from the side of his body and animal soul, and joyful from the side of his G‑dly soul and the spark of G‑dliness that gives it life. The two feelings do not cancel each other, because they come from two different sources within him.

At the end of the discourse on “Because you did not serve with joy,” the Alter Rebbe goes further: the deeper a person’s sense of his own inferiority, the more his joy in Torah study is doubled and redoubled. Humility does not reduce the joy; it multiplies it.

This is why the verse says that the humble, specifically, will increase joy. The Sages read the name Sinai as sin’ah (hatred), the mountain on which hatred descended, and here it is hatred of one’s own evil traits, like the Talmud’s advice to make the good inclination rage against the evil inclination. That rage is a rising above the evil inclination, yet at its core it is self-nullification: iskafya, the subjugation of evil, and not self-assertion.

For more on what a mountain stands for in the service of G‑d, the Alter Rebbe refers to his discourse “Set me as a seal.”

The maamar closes with further references: the discourse “The voice of my beloved,” on G‑d “leaping over the mountains” and the verse “May the mountains bear peace to the people,” and the end of the discourse “Return, O Israel.”