וזה מעשה המנורה מקשה זהב עד ירכה עד פרחה

The maamar opens with the verse on how the Menorah was made: hammered out of gold, from its base up to its flowers (Numbers 8:4). First the Alter Rebbe says what the Menorah stands for: the Congregation of Israel (Knesses Yisrael), the holiness of all the souls of Israel together. In Torah Ohr, Mikeitz (Torah Ohr, Miketz 3:2), he gives the same picture: the Congregation of Israel, the source of the souls, is called the Menorah, and it is “hammered” from one piece because all Israel are one.

The proof is Zechariah’s vision of a golden menorah: the angel asks the prophet, “Do you not know what these are?” and answers, “This is the word of Havayah.” The Alter Rebbe reads the answer as a definition: the Menorah is the divine word, the word by which, as Psalms says, the heavens were made, and which keeps all the worlds alive.

This divine word is called Knesses Yisrael, the Congregation of Israel, from mechaneses, “gathers in”: it gathers into itself a higher level of G‑dliness that is also called “Israel,” the light that encompasses all worlds, beyond what any single world can hold. The proof is the verse about Yaakov’s altar as the Talmud reads it (Megillah 18a): not that Yaakov named the altar, but that the G‑d of Israel called Yaakov “El,” G‑d, so that “Israel” is the name of a level of G‑dliness.

Because the Menorah includes every soul, from the greatest tzaddik to the least worthy, the angel’s message is addressed “to Zerubbabel.” The Alter Rebbe hears the name as two words, zeru, “sown” (from zera, seed), and bavel, “mixed” (as in mevulbal): a person in whom good is mixed with evil, “the seed of man and the seed of beast,” as Jeremiah says, who makes himself like an animal by going after pleasant talk.

“This is the work of the Menorah” now becomes instructions for such a person: whoever wants to leave evil behind and make himself into a menorah must follow the order in which the Menorah was made. First it was “hammered”: Rashi explains that it began as one solid block of gold, a talent (kikar) in weight, which was beaten with a hammer and cut until its branches and other parts were drawn out of it, rather than made of separate pieces joined together.

The hammer’s blows drive the gold on top downward and push the gold underneath upward, until the whole mass is mixed and its first shape is gone. A person must do the same with his own emotive attributes: break them until they lose their former shape, as the Mishnah says, “Nullify your will before His will,” so that what was uppermost in him is brought low and all is mixed together anew.

After “hammered” the verse says “gold,” the next stage: coming to awe of G‑d, which gold stands for. Silver (kesef) stands for love, since the word is related to nichsefah, “longs”: the soul longs to cleave to its source, “the light of life.” This is the hidden love (ahavah mesuteres), the love of G‑d present in every Jewish heart even when it is not felt, which Tanya describes at length (chapters 18–19).

Gold stands for awe, as Elihu says in Job, “From the north comes gold”; the verse goes on, “upon G‑d is awesome majesty,” joining gold with awe. To reach this awe one must contemplate the greatness of the Infinite One: how He fills every world.

The other side of this contemplation is that everything before Him is considered as nothing, as the Zohar says; together they bring a person to awe and to a sense of shame before G‑d’s greatness. That is why the Men of the Great Assembly, the sages at the start of the Second Temple era, instituted the fixed prayer with its Verses of Song (Pesukei DeZimrah), the psalms of praise said before the Shema, although by Torah law only the Shema and a short prayer are required. In Likkutei Torah, Balak (Likkutei Torah, Balak 3:8–9), the Alter Rebbe explains that prayer, though rabbinic and not counted among the 613 commandments, is the inner intent of them all, like the spinal cord, which is not counted among the limbs yet carries life to every one of them.

In the time of the First Temple they did not pray in this way: their minds were clear and luminous, “bright in the skies,” so that all day long they saw and understood the wonders of the Infinite One. In Tanya, Kuntres Acharon (Tanya, Part V; Kuntres Acharon 4), the Alter Rebbe explains why, in our era, the main work of refining the world is done through prayer, even though Torah study is higher.

At the start of the Second Temple era, the Men of the Great Assembly saw that minds had grown smaller and hearts had drawn close to matter, seeing only the physical. So they instituted the prayers and their blessings, which recount G‑d’s praises again and again, so that a person would come through them to awe.

The Song of Songs describes King Shlomo’s couch, with posts of silver and a spread (refidah) of gold; the gold spread is the same awe. Refidah is the bedding spread over a couch (as Job says, “I have spread my couch”), so the Alter Rebbe compares prayer to making up a bed: as one puts each piece of bedding in its own place, one who orders G‑d’s praises gives each created thing its place, to find G‑d’s greatness in it, since everything was created for His glory.

The Tikkunei Zohar says that David had “seven kinds of gold” in his hair, and the Talmud too counts seven kinds of gold (Yoma 44b). David is the fourth leg of the divine Chariot (Merkavah), the image of what carries G‑d’s will with no will of its own, beside the three Patriarchs: he stands for Malchus, G‑d’s kingship, “Your kingship is the kingship of all worlds.” The beard stands for what is drawn forth from the intellect, as its hair grows from the head; so there are seven kinds of intellect, seven ways of understanding, in David’s level, and through them a person can reach “gold,” which is awe.

The Menorah’s seven branches are the seven “days of building,” the seven emotive attributes through which the world was built in the seven days of creation. Each of the seven is made up of ten, making seventy, which correspond to the seventy souls of Yaakov’s family who went down to Egypt; so the souls of Israel have seventy roots.

Every Jew is bound to one of these seventy roots, and since they are made of the seven, each person can reach “gold,” awe, through one of the seven paths, and so become “its spread of gold.” Then his heart can blaze openly with “flashes of fire,” and fire, in the old account of the elements, is hot and dry; but the love spoken of earlier, silver, cannot be attained without the quality of water, which is cold and moist.

Now the last words of the verse: “unto its base, unto its flowers.” The base is the lowest leg and the flowers are the highest ornaments, yet together they are one Menorah. The great tzaddikim are its “flowers” (pirchah) because their Torah and prayer “fly” (parcha, in Aramaic) upward through awe and love, which, as the Tikkunei Zohar teaches, are the wings on which they fly.

Yet even the base, the lowest in rank, is truly part of the Menorah, provided all are pure gold without dross, as another verse says the Menorah must be “one hammered piece, pure gold.” Gold mixed with dross of another metal loses its color and turns a greenish yellow.

In the same way evil changes a person, as the Talmud says, “the sign of sin is dropsy,” a swelling of the body. One must therefore “turn from evil” completely, and the way to do it is to believe each morning that all is “new every morning,” as Lamentations says: the world has been made anew today.

The blessing before the morning Shema praises G‑d “Who in His goodness renews each day, continually, the work of creation,” for the world truly comes into being from nothing each day. A person who takes in that he too was formed today, like Adam, will surely be in awe and ashamed to sin before “the eyes of His glory,” and will not desire a world that has just come from nothing.

Even the eyes see this renewal every day: first comes the darkness of night, and then, as at the first “let there be light,” the light of the sun for the day.

This is the meaning of “Every day I will bless You”: seeing each day how G‑d “rolls away light before darkness, and darkness before light,” as the evening prayer says, a person recognizes the daily renewal of creation, and so comes to bless Him.

No one should say that he cannot separate from evil and desire because he is already rooted in what is forbidden. Against this we say each morning, in the blessing Emes VeYatziv after the Shema, “In truth, from Egypt You redeemed us, Havayah our G‑d.”

Egypt is called “the nakedness of the land,” Yosef’s words when he accused his brothers of coming to spy out its exposed places; ervah, “nakedness,” is also the Torah’s word for forbidden relations. The “Egypt” of the soul is a mind stuck to its desires, with evil surrounding it so that it cannot get out or turn its thoughts away; like the land of Egypt, it is a place one cannot escape by one’s own power, but only by G‑d’s will.

Isaiah laments that “women rule over” the people; the Alter Rebbe reads the plural “women” as the many desires that can rule a person, both permitted and forbidden. Even when they rule over him, the Holy One, blessed be He, takes him out of Egypt.

A Jew does not come to this “Egypt” from his own nature: Jews are called children of the Omnipresent, as the Mishnah says, and their nature is to do the will of their Father in heaven. Rather, the evil inclination is given by G‑d Himself: the Sages read the words “that which I have made evil” as speaking of the evil inclination, which G‑d, as it were, regrets having created.

The descent into Egypt itself came about the same way, through a chain of events that G‑d set in motion with our ancestors until He brought them down there.

So Jeremiah’s words apply: “I planted you a choice vine (sorek), wholly a seed of truth.” Sorek is spelled like shuruk, the older name of the vowel of three dots slanting in a line (today called kubutz), the “crookedness” of a person who has fallen into desires, G‑d forbid; yet he is still wholly a seed of truth and can change. The same three dots set as a triangle make segol, which spells segulah: G‑d’s “treasure out of all the peoples.”

So it was in Egypt, when G‑d told Yaakov, “I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will bring you up, also up.” The emphatic “I” (Anochi) is read as G‑d’s own self: the One Who is truly “I” is the One Who goes down.

“And I will bring you up” means that G‑d Himself helps the person, as the Talmud says that without His help no one could overcome his inclination. “Also up” means that even the level of “also” (gam), the descent itself, will have an ascent. The discourse the parenthesis names (Likkutei Torah, Chukat 7:3–5) explains that Nachum Ish Gam Zu said “this too is for the good” because he saw that the root of every evil is good, raised it to that root, and drew it down again as good that could be seen.

This is why the prayer says “In truth, from Egypt You redeemed us”: the Jew is “wholly a seed of truth,” as explained above. “Havayah our G‑d” is read as the content of the redemption itself: that Havayah, G‑d as He is beyond all limits, becomes our own G‑d.

“From the house of bondage You delivered us” refers to being enslaved to desire. The redemption came about through “All their firstborn You slew”: in the world the firstborn, “the opener of every womb,” is the first, and in the soul the first is the intellect, wisdom (Chochmah), as the words reishis chochmah, “the beginning, wisdom,” are read here.

“All their firstborn” are the intellects of Egypt: the reasoning by which each person tries to establish his own will, using his mind in the service of what he wants.

“You slew” means that this self-serving intellect falls from its standing and from its will, and such a fall is called death: the Zohar teaches that whoever falls from his former level is called dead, as in “the king of Egypt died.”

“And Your firstborn,” the next words of the prayer, is Israel, whose intellect is G‑dliness, used to contemplate the greatness of the Infinite One in prayer. Two passages of the Zohar (Part II, 44a and 133a) find in prayer the four things the Shunammite woman prepared for the prophet Elisha, a bed, a table, a chair and a menorah, with the evening prayer as the bed; and the spread of this bed is the “gold” of awe.

“You redeemed” means a true redemption: a person’s being kept from evil must not be a matter of chance, because something happened to stop him, for that is still exile. The redemption must be real freedom, including freedom from the bondage of earning a living, so that nothing keeps a person from prayer; for without prayer it is impossible to “turn from evil.”

That is why daily confessions were made part of the prayers: before praying, a person contemplates his own lowliness, that he is in “Egypt,” and the greatness of the Infinite One, and he will surely regret the evil; then in the prayer he confesses in words, and he becomes one menorah of pure gold, its base and its flowers a single Menorah. The Kehot note cites a discourse of 5659 (1899) that everyone says these confessions, even a complete tzaddik like Moshe, and the Tzemach Tzedek’s Sefer HaMitzvos, which reports that the Arizal would say each of them in detail.

But the main thing is complete unity, one Jew with another, so that a person does not look at the evil of his fellow. The Kehot note brings the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching that when a person sees evil in another, it shows that something of that evil is in himself (Likkutei Sichos, vol. 10, p. 24); the next paragraph explains why.

This unity rests on knowing that above, too, there is a “hammered menorah,” in which what is above goes down and what is below rises, like the gold under the hammer. So the evil of one person sometimes goes down and enters a bad person, though it did not begin with him.

Conversely, a mitzvah done by a bad person sometimes rises up, and someone else takes it. So every person must ascribe the lack to himself: the good he has may really come from another and have risen to him, while the evil he sees in others may really be his own, which went down to them.

Then the base and the flowers are truly one: each person regards himself as the base and his fellow as a flower, and his fellow does the same.

Then Aharon the Kohen can kindle fire in all seven lamps, the seven paths of the souls described above, for the Kohen Gadol stands for Chesed: he is “abundant in kindness,” and all kindnesses are in him. He draws down from the “great love” (ahavah rabbah), a love beyond a person’s own reach that is granted from above, into the “eternal love” (ahavas olam), the love a person arouses through his own contemplation (olam also means “world”), so that the soul’s inside is, as a matter of course, “inlaid with love,” breaking out like “flashes of fire.” This is “When you raise up the lamps”: Aharon raises them up.