ששת ימים תאכל מצות וביום השביעי עצרת לה׳…

The maamar opens with the verse about the seventh day of Pesach (Deuteronomy 16:8), which calls that day an atzeres, a day of assembly and restraint, “to Havayah your G‑d.” Of Shemini Atzeres, by contrast, the Torah says “an atzeres for you” (Numbers 29:35), and the Alter Rebbe asks why the two days are described so differently.

A second question: for the festivals the Torah usually forbids only “work of labor,” because work needed to prepare food is permitted on Yom Tov. Here the verse says simply “you shall do no work,” which seems to include even food preparation.

The answer draws on a dispute of the Tannaim, the sages of the Mishnah, in the sixth chapter of Pesachim (68b). Rabbi Eliezer holds that a person’s Yom Tov should be either entirely “for G‑d,” given to prayer and Torah study, or entirely “for you,” given to eating and drinking.

Rabbi Yehoshua holds that the day should be divided, half for G‑d and half for eating and drinking. The Gemara explains that both derive their views from the same pair of verses, one calling the festival an atzeres “to Havayah your G‑d” and the other an atzeres “for you.”

Rabbi Eliezer reads the two verses as alternatives, Rabbi Yehoshua as a division of the day. Either way, the Alter Rebbe infers that the seventh day of Pesach, described as “to Havayah your G‑d,” is more suited to being wholly devoted to G‑d than Shemini Atzeres, described as “for you.”

This answers the second question. A person may choose to make the seventh day of Pesach entirely “for G‑d,” and then even preparing food is forbidden to him; so the verse can say “you shall do no work” without qualification.

The permission to prepare food on Yom Tov exists for the sake of eating. So the Magen Avraham, a classic commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, rules (on Orach Chaim 527) that one who fasts on Yom Tov because of a disturbing dream may not do even food preparation, following the Rema there, who forbids one fasting on Yom Tov to cook even for others. In the same way, one who makes the day entirely “for G‑d” is forbidden all work.

The Alter Rebbe turns to the theme of joy. True joy is joy in G‑d Himself, as the festival prayer says, “And Israel shall rejoice in You,” and it belongs to every day of the year; yet the festivals are called “festivals for joy,” as in the festival prayers and Kiddush, because then the joy of a mitzvah is far more intense. The closing phrase borrows Yaakov’s words to Reuven (Genesis 49:3).

Why is the joy greater on the festivals? Every mitzvah draws new light into Atzilus, the highest world, and into the vessels, the forms that receive and express that light; and the G‑dly soul has its origin in the inner dimension of those vessels. Parallel versions of this teaching give its source in the Arizal’s writings (the introduction to Pri Etz Chaim).

One would expect the soul to feel this new light directly. Yet the light drawn down by the mitzvos is not revealed within the soul as an inner light, one that is absorbed and felt from within.

The soul’s root lies in the inner dimension of the vessels of the lower worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah, where the light does enter inwardly. Within the G‑dly soul itself, however, it shines only as a makif, an encompassing light that affects it from beyond without being felt.

The reason is the animal soul, the soul that animates the body and its drives. It wraps itself around the G‑dly soul on every side and leaves no opening through which the light could enter it inwardly.

The Song of Songs describes the Beloved, G‑d, as standing “behind our wall” (Song of Songs 2:9): the light is present but screened off. On Yom Tov there is an added revelation of light, strong enough to polish even the vessels of the animal soul.

The same verse continues, “gazing through the windows”: on Yom Tov the light breaks through the wall. This is why the festivals are “festivals for joy,” for joy is itself a kind of revelation.

This is also why shalmei simchah, peace-offerings of joy, were brought on the festivals: they act on the animal soul, which hides the G‑dly spark and blocks joy in G‑d. When the sacrificial portions (eimurim, the parts burned on the altar) and the blood were placed on the altar, the soul of the animal was absorbed into the fire above and rose with it.

It rose to its spiritual source, the “face of the ox” in the Divine Chariot that Yechezkel saw, where the ox is on the left (Ezekiel 1:10). As a result the meat of the offering, eaten by those who brought it, became an intermediary that enabled them to rejoice in G‑d.

Here the Alter Rebbe recalls a known principle: man, the “speaking” creature, draws life and strength from the inanimate, vegetative and animal realms below him. This is because their source is higher than his, as the verse “Behind and before You formed me” (Psalms 139:5) hints: the kingdoms that stand below man, and were created before him, are rooted higher than he is.

Their source is the World of Tohu, the realm of intense divine light that preceded the ordered worlds; in the shattering of its vessels its sparks fell and became the inanimate, vegetative and animal. Once the sacrificial portions and the blood had risen to their source, the remaining meat became a channel through which those who ate it could rejoice in G‑d. In Torah Ohr, Chayei Sarah (the discourse “Yagel lan ta’amei”), the Alter Rebbe reads the same verse this way: food, fallen in the shattering of the vessels, comes “behind” man, who refines it, yet in its root in Tohu it is higher than he, which is why it gives him life.

In a parenthesis the Alter Rebbe explains the name shelamim. The Midrash Rabbah links it to shalom, peace: at the end of section 9 on Parshas Tzav (Vayikra Rabbah 9:9), and in section 13 on Parshas Naso, on the peace-offering of Nesanel, prince of the tribe of Yissachar.

The Midrash also links shelamim to sheleimus, wholeness, on the offering of Nachshon, prince of Yehudah, whose descendants David and Shlomo ruled over a whole kingdom. Its phrase “two [kinds of] peace,” peace above and peace below, matches the Zohar’s “whole above and whole below,” and “below” is explained, as in another discourse, as “peace in the household below.”

Peace “below” means that the powers of the G‑dly soul shine into the animal soul, so that the body and its drives no longer hinder a person’s service of G‑d; in Torah Ohr, Yisro (the discourse “In the third month”), the Alter Rebbe explains that the Torah, called “strength,” brings this peace, and that peace “above” is the G‑dly soul bound in self-nullification to the Infinite Light. In the same way, the peace-offerings of joy bring the joy in G‑d into the animal soul itself.

A parallel: shor habar, the wild ox, is read elsewhere as related to bar levav, “pure of heart” (Psalms 24:4), meaning something already refined. So too the meat of the peace-offerings of joy has already been refined, and therefore it gives strength to the animal soul. At the end of the discourse “And I shall return in peace” (Torah Ohr, Vayeitzei), the Alter Rebbe explains that peace joins two opposites, as “He makes peace in His heights” between Michael, the angel of water, and Gavriel, the angel of fire.

The Alter Rebbe lists further sources on the term shelamim: the Pardes of the Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, in its section of Kabbalistic terms (Erchei HaKinuyim), and the Kabbalistic lexicon Me’orei Or, arranged by letter. The Shelah (the Shnei Luchos HaBris of Rabbi Yeshayah Horowitz) explains shelamim as making G‑d’s Name and Throne whole, recalling Rashi’s teaching (on Exodus 17:16) that G‑d’s Name is not whole and His Throne is not whole until Amalek is erased.

The Alter Rebbe refers to his discourse on “Remember what Amalek did to you” (Deuteronomy 25:17); in Torah Ohr (Parshas Zachor) it opens with this teaching of the Name and the Throne and explains that the war with Amalek is waged in every soul in every generation. Shelamim thus means wholeness, and this completes the explanation of why peace-offerings of joy were brought on every festival.

The second section of the maamar turns to eating, starting with the Sages’ teaching that “in the World to Come there is no eating or drinking” (Berachos 17a). The Rambam (Hilchos Teshuvah 8:2) applies this to the World of Souls, where souls exist without bodies.

The Ramban, in his Sha’ar HaGemul, objects that the saying would then be obvious, since a soul without a body could not eat in any case; he therefore applies it to the era after the Resurrection of the Dead, when souls will again be in bodies and yet will not eat. This raises the question the maamar now answers: why people in bodies will not eat then.

The answer begins with the verse “Eat, friends; drink and be intoxicated, beloved ones” (Song of Songs 5:1). “Eat, friends” refers to the higher level, Chochmah and Binah, the pair of intellectual attributes that the Zohar calls “two companions (rei’im) who never part.”

“Drink and be intoxicated, beloved ones” refers to the lower level, Z’eir Anpin and Nukva, the emotive attributes of kindness, restraint and compassion; dodim, “beloved ones,” is also the word for love, the first of the emotions. The principle follows: for Chochmah and Binah to come into being there must be “eating.”

Just as Chochmah and Binah require “eating,” the emotive attributes, the “beloved ones,” require “drinking.” The Alter Rebbe goes on to explain why the attributes need a flow from above at all.

G‑d Himself is beyond comparison with anything: kindness does not apply to Him as He is, and not even wisdom. Relative to Him even Chochmah, the first of the Sefiros of intellect, counts as mere “making,” as the verse says, “All of them You made with wisdom” (Psalms 104:24); it is even called “the Adam of Asiyah,” as if the whole structure of the Sefiros, intellect included, were the lowest world in comparison with Him. So the Tikkunei Zohar says, “You are wise,” but not with a known wisdom.

The same passage continues, “He is not of any of these attributes at all,” and explains that He takes them on to show how the world is led with judgment and with mercy, according to people’s deeds. The attributes are limits and measures that G‑d adopts so that He can reward the righteous, who must be able to receive their reward, “delighting in the radiance of the Shechinah” (Berachos 17a), and so that He can punish the wicked.

Limits are also needed for justice: simple, unlimited compassion would extend even to the wicked. The attributes are thus measured channels, not G‑d’s own essence.

Because G‑d is infinite and beyond comparison, Chochmah and Binah and the emotive attributes cannot come into being on their own. They must receive a flow from above, and this flow is what the maamar calls “eating.”

In the Zohar and the Etz Chaim the intellect is nourished through the mazalos, from nozel, “flowing down”: the eighth and the thirteenth of the thirteen “features” of the beard of Arich Anpin, the divine will that stands above the intellect, through which the flow descends. “Abba,” Chochmah, “nurses from the eighth, and Imma from the thirteenth” (Etz Chaim 13:9); this receiving, likened to eating and to an infant nursing, is what brings the intellect into being.

That is “Eat, friends” above. For the emotive attributes, the “beloved ones,” the flow must descend further, and this is “drinking”: just as drink carries food down through the body, since water flows downward (the Gemara, Taanis 7a, says that water leaves a high place for a low one), so the divine flow descends until it becomes emotion.

“Be intoxicated” refers to revelation, as in Rabbi Chiya’s saying, “When wine enters, the secret comes out”: yayin, wine, and sod, secret, both have the numerical value seventy. With this, the meaning of “eating” has been explained.

Now the maamar turns to the seventh day of Pesach, when the sea split. The Sages said that at the sea even a maidservant saw what the prophet Yechezkel did not see, and the Alter Rebbe asks where the Torah hints at so great a revelation.

At the Giving of the Torah the Torah says openly that G‑d spoke “face to face” (Deuteronomy 5:4), so the greatness of that revelation is explicit. The question is where the Torah indicates that the revelation at the sea was as great.

The hint lies in two verses: G‑d asked Moshe, “Why do you cry out to Me?” (Exodus 14:15), and Moshe told the people, “Havayah will fight for you, and you shall be silent” (Exodus 14:14). Silence, as the next lines explain, is the sign of a revelation too great for words.

Speech comes from Chochmah: “With wisdom He founded the earth” (Proverbs 3:19), which the Zohar reads as Abba, Chochmah, founding “the Daughter,” Malchus, the attribute of speech. So too a small child cannot speak until he has some understanding, as the Gemara says that a child cannot say “Abba” and “Imma” until he has tasted grain.

Conversely, a wise man does not speak in the presence of someone greater in wisdom (Avos 5:7), like a person who comes before a great king and stands silent. A greater revelation silences the lesser intellect.

The reason is the Talmudic principle “while it is occupied with swallowing, it does not expel”: one who is absorbing cannot give out at the same time. So a wise man taking in a greater wisdom falls silent.

At the sea Israel received a revelation of G‑dliness above Chochmah, the source of speech, so they could only absorb it: hence “and you shall be silent.” The Shemoneh Esreh, a state of self-nullification before G‑d that resembles that revelation, is therefore said without making one’s voice heard; the Kehot note points here to the laws of prayer in the Alter Rebbe’s Shulchan Aruch (sections 101–102).

The psalm says “He turned the sea into dry land... there we will rejoice in Him” (Psalms 66:6), though one might have expected “He split the sea.” The explanation is that the sea stands for the giver and dry land for the receiver, since the sea’s moisture makes the land fruitful.

As Koheles says, all the rivers flow to the sea and return from it, for otherwise they would dry up (Ecclesiastes 1:7); and clouds draw from the ocean’s waters and water the earth, in the words Yeshayahu uses of rain that “waters the earth and makes it bring forth” (Isaiah 55:10). The sea gives, and the land receives.

When the great revelation came, the sea, the giver, became dry land, the receiver, and the waters stood “like a heap” as a wall (Exodus 15:8; 14:22). They became like stone, domem, a word that means both “inanimate” and “silent”: like one so occupied with taking in that nothing comes out.

“The waters congealed” (in Aramaic, agleidu maya, echoing “the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea,” Exodus 15:8) is the revelation which, the Sages said, a maidservant saw at the sea and Yechezkel did not see.

Yechezkel saw the Chariot with separate faces, a lion on the right and the others each on its own side (Ezekiel 1:10): a division into distinct attributes. In the discourse on “As an eagle stirs up its nest” (Likkutei Torah, Ha’azinu), the Alter Rebbe explains that Yechezkel saw the Chariot in exile, so the Divine Presence came to him through many divided levels, clothed in the faces of the lion and the ox, while at Sinai, “face to face,” it was revealed without any division. At the sea, too, the revelation was above all division, like ice, in which flowing water congeals into a single standing mass.

Yechezkel too speaks of something above the creatures: over their heads, a firmament “like the appearance of the ice” (Ezekiel 1:22). Kerach (קרח), ice, is chirik (חרק), one of the vowel signs, with its letters reversed, and the Tikkunei Zohar calls the level of chirik “the awesome ice”; the Alter Rebbe identifies the ice at the sea with this level.

At the sea “there was the cloud and the darkness, and it illuminated the night” (Exodus 14:20). Since vaya’er, “and it illuminated,” is masculine, the Alter Rebbe reads it as referring to choshech, darkness: the darkness itself gave them light.

At Creation G‑d “separated between the light and the darkness” (Genesis 1:4). That separation is a parsa, a partition, which makes possible the ordered chain of descending worlds, each distinct from the next.

On the first day light and darkness served intermingled, until G‑d separated them so that the chain of worlds could exist, as Rashi and the Jerusalem Talmud explain. At the sea a higher “darkness” shone, the one of which it says, “He made darkness His hiding place” (Psalms 18:12), which is above the whole chain of worlds.

This level is called darkness only from our side, looking up: no thought can grasp it, as the Tikkunei Zohar says. In the discourse “I am black but comely” (Likkutei Torah, Shir HaShirim) the Alter Rebbe develops this through the image of the Torah written in black fire upon white fire, and explains that the Infinite Light as it is cannot be grasped at all, which is why “He made darkness His hiding place.”

This, the Alter Rebbe suggests, is why no peace-offerings of joy were brought on the seventh day of Pesach, though he marks the point as needing further examination. The joy of that day was of a different order. The Kehot note adds that in Or HaTorah the Tzemach Tzedek explains that the peace-offerings of joy belong only to the “for you” side of a festival, and that the Rebbe discusses the point at length in a talk of Acharon shel Pesach 5724.

Its joy was too great to be taken in inwardly, the way food is absorbed by eating; it could only surround them from above, as a makif. That is why the verse says “there we will rejoice”: “there” points to something beyond, not within.

The same explains the Sages’ saying that the World to Come has no eating (Berachos 17a), with which the second section of the maamar opened.

In the World to Come, too, G‑dliness from above the chain of worlds will be revealed, and such a revelation cannot enter in the inward manner of eating, only as an encompassing light. Me’orei Or adds that eating and drinking, in Kabbalistic terms, all derive from the union of Z’eir Anpin and Nukva.

The Torah says the children of Israel “walked on dry land in the midst of the sea” (Exodus 14:29). The Gemara (Chagigah 12a) records a dispute whether the heavens or the earth were created first.

Both views are true: in the actual making the heavens came first, but in the primordial divine thought the earth came first. At the sea that supernal thought was revealed, so Israel walked on the “dry land” that precedes the heavens, the receiver that stands first in G‑d’s thought.