והדרת פני זקן זה שקנה חכמה

Following the Sages (Kiddushin 32b), the maamar reads “elder” (zaken) as a play on words: zeh shekanah chochmah, “this is one who has acquired wisdom.” The Alter Rebbe explains “acquired” through Jeremiah’s phrase “those who hold the Torah”: a true scholar holds the Torah in his memory, engraved on his heart at all times, not only while he is studying.

The Talmud defines a Torah scholar as one who can answer a question of halachah wherever he is asked, which shows that his learning is always with him. For this reason the mitzvah to rise before him applies even when he is not studying at that moment. A passage in the supplements to Likkutei Torah’s Vayikra volume explains why: a tractate known by heart stays whole in the mind even when one is not thinking of it, for it is engraved in the faculty of memory, above the letters of thought, and that passage itself refers back to this discourse.

The reason is that G‑d dwells within such a scholar constantly (“dwells forever,” in Isaiah’s words), even while he attends to ordinary affairs, because the Torah engraved in his memory is one with G‑d. Likkutei Torah, Tazria, explains this oneness: thought cannot grasp G‑d at all, but a soul that grasps the Torah thereby grasps, and is enclothed in, the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. The Zohar cited here says that one rises before a Torah scholar, as before a Torah scroll, because he stands in the holy form above.

From this the Alter Rebbe draws a lesson for anyone who longs to be bound to G‑d without a moment’s break. Since learning held in memory stays with a person even when he is not studying, the way to have G‑d dwell within him always is to “acquire” the Torah by committing it to memory.

Torah known by heart stays present even while a person attends to the body, in the “hidden world” (alma de’iskasya) of his soul, a level that is present but concealed from his active thought. There shines the yud, the first letter of the Name Havayah, which stands for Chochmah; the passage in the supplements to Likkutei Torah’s Vayikra volume likewise calls the faculty of memory “the level of the faculty of Chochmah.” As is known in Kabbalah, the first of the four passages in the tefillin, “Sanctify to Me every firstborn,” corresponds to the yud, and so it speaks of “a remembrance between your eyes.”

The Laws of Torah Study, citing the Sifrei, require every Jew to know the whole Torah: all 613 mitzvos with their fine details. The maamar gives the inner reason: the G‑dly soul has 613 powers, parallel to the 613 mitzvos, and knowing each mitzvah draws G‑d’s light onto its own power, so that no part of the soul is left without that light.

The verse “You are all beautiful, my beloved, and there is no blemish in you” stresses “all”: the soul is wholly beautiful only when every one of its powers receives G‑d’s light. For this reason the root of this light above is also made up of 613, matching the mitzvos and the powers of the soul.

This root of 613 is called “man” (adam): as a person has 248 limbs and 365 sinews, so in the language of the Kabbalah the 248 positive mitzvos are “the limbs of the King” and the 365 prohibitions His “sinews.” This is the form Ezekiel saw in his vision of the Chariot: upon the likeness of the throne, “a likeness like the appearance of a man.”

The sentence now makes a concession: the times are hard, people lack patience and breadth of mind, and the subject is deep. So a person should at the very least summon the strength (the “strength and might” that, in the psalmist’s words, G‑d gives His people) to know by heart the Five Books of Moshe, which Moshe wrote as G‑d dictated them.

These Five Books are the root from which the entire Torah, Written and Oral, grows: the Talmud tells that Rabbi Akiva would derive heaps upon heaps of laws from every crownlet on the letters. The words play on a verse, “his locks are curled” (kevutzosav taltalim, Song of Songs 5:11), which the Talmud hears as kotz, “crownlet,” and tilei tilim, “heaps upon heaps” (Eruvin 21b). In the Five Books, however, these laws lie deeply concealed, at the level of the “hidden world.”

The Oral Torah, where the laws are spelled out, is the “revealed world” (alma de’isgalya), and from it one should at least know the Order of Kodashim, the order of the Mishnah on the offerings and the Temple service. The Sages call this order “wisdom,” which fits the opening definition of an elder as one who “has acquired wisdom,” and the Arizal writes that it atones for sin. The parenthesis sends the reader to the end of the discourse “I am black, but comely” (Likkutei Torah, Shir HaShirim 7d), where the whole verse is read: the white “hoary head” is the many laws of the positive mitzvos, and the “elder” who “has acquired wisdom” is the black “curled locks,” the laws that extend into the prohibitions.