ולא תשבית מלח וגו׳

The maamar opens with Leviticus 2:13, which commands that salt accompany every offering. Before explaining the verse, the Alter Rebbe states a plain fact: salt gives taste to what is salted with it, such as meat, as the Gemara bears out (Berachos 5a, where salt “sweetens” meat, and Menachos 21a). Another version of this discourse is printed in the Alter Rebbe’s Sefer HaMaamarim 5564, and Likkutei Torah, Bechukosai, recalls it in brief.

Iyov’s question, “Can the bland be eaten without salt?”, bears this out, and the parenthesis is the Alter Rebbe’s own reference to the Idra Zuta (the “Lesser Assembly”), a section of the Zohar in its third part, which cites the same verse. Meat without salt is bland and has no taste. Likkutei Torah, Shir HaShirim (the second discourse on “Shechorah ani”), uses the same image: salt, itself unfit to eat, reveals the taste of the food, as the prohibitive commandments reveal a higher light.

When meat is salted, taste comes into being in it: salt “sweetens” the meat. Yet salt on its own is not something one eats for its taste. This is the puzzle the maamar sets out to solve: how can it produce taste in something else?

The answer begins with salt’s spiritual root: the gevuros, the powers of restraint and severity, within Abba, the Sefirah of Chochmah as a complete configuration. Its physical origin mirrors this, for salt forms from water through the burning heat of the sun, kindness acted upon by a force of severity; a parallel discourse (Sefer HaMaamarim 5563) likewise says that the salt of the earth comes from the sun in its intensity.

Water stands for Chesed, the outflowing kindness within Chochmah, while salt, water burned by the sun, stands for the gevuros; that is why salt is sharp. The parenthesis refers to Me’orei Or, a Kabbalistic work arranged by the letters of the alphabet, under the letter mem.

The Arizal’s Etz Chaim teaches that what are gevuros for Abba become chasadim (kindnesses) for Imma, the configuration of Binah. Whether a force counts as restraint or as kindness depends on the level it is measured against: what is a contraction relative to Chochmah is a generous flow relative to Binah below it.

Chochmah is the source of all “taste.” In Kabbalah the te’amim (literally “tastes,” also the name of the Torah’s cantillation marks) belong to the Name Av, the Name Havayah spelled out so that its letters total 72, which corresponds to Chochmah; so salt, rooted in Abba, is fit to give taste.

Both sides of the paradox come from one root. Because salt comes from the gevuros of Abba, a restraint that holds back, it has no taste of its own; but those same gevuros become the chasadim of Imma, so when salt acts on what is below it, it gives taste.

So salt brings out the taste of meat. A parenthesis explains why meat in particular, pointing to two discourses in Likkutei Torah: one on “When you raise up the lamps” (Numbers 8:2), where G‑d tells Aharon that his part, lighting the Menorah, is “greater than theirs,” the tribal princes’ offerings, and which explains that meat comes from the gevuros, which is why it is red; and the end of one on “all flesh (basar) shall come to bow down” (Isaiah 66:23).

From those discourses one learns that meat (basar, which also means “flesh”) is rooted in Binah, the “mother,” as the Sages teach that the mother contributes the red substance from which flesh is formed (Niddah 31a). That is why salt sweetens meat in particular: the gevuros of Abba, salt’s root, become the chasadim of Imma, the very level in which meat is rooted.

A second explanation ties salt to the Kabbalistic principle “through Chochmah they are refined” (bechochmah isbreru). Refinement (beirur) means separating the good from the evil mixed with it, and it is Chochmah that carries out this separating. In Likkutei Torah, Tzav, the same principle explains why man, whose essence is the Chochmah of Atzilus, can refine the food whose root is in Tohu.

An analogy from daily life: a person who picks food out of waste puts nothing of himself into the food; he is only the one through whom the sorting happens. So too Chochmah brings about refinement without itself being present in what is refined.

A closer analogy is cheesemaking. A piece of stomach lining (rennet) is put into the milk, and the food separates from the waste, the kum and the whey, which are left behind, and becomes cheese.

The rennet’s own taste is felt neither in the cheese nor in the kum, yet it causes the separation and changes the milk for the better. The words “but rather” stand in parentheses in the Hebrew; the sentence is complete without them.

Now the analogy is applied: Chochmah carries out the refinements so that the good is separated from the evil.

Before that, the good was mixed with the evil, and so it had no “taste,” no quality that could be perceived. When Chochmah separates off the dross and the waste, the good stands revealed.

Salt does exactly this: it draws the blood out of meat, separating what may not be eaten from what may, as in the salting of meat to make it kosher. Because salt is rooted in the gevuros of Abba, where “through Chochmah they are refined” applies, it gives taste to the meat while having none of its own, just as the curdling agent refines milk and gives cheese its taste.

The parenthesis points to a fuller treatment of salt in the explanation (biur) on Numbers 15:39, about tzitzis (Likkutei Torah, Sh’lach), where the Alter Rebbe explains why Aharon’s priesthood is called “an everlasting covenant of salt” (Numbers 18:19): salt is the level of “through Chochmah they are refined.”

Salt’s deepest root is botzina dekardinusa, the Zohar’s term for the hidden source of judgment that measures out all that follows, called the measuring line (kav hamiddah). The link is numerical: melach (salt) and mazla, the flow from which Abba is nourished, both equal 78; and mazla is rooted in Mocha Stima’ah, the hidden brain of Arich Anpin (the outer configuration of Keser), in which the Gevurah of Atik Yomin (its inner configuration), botzina dekardinusa itself, is enclothed.

The measuring line sets the measure of every flow of light and of every vessel: in what form, and how much of it, is drawn down.

The Alter Rebbe illustrates this with the curtains of the Mishkan, each “twenty-eight by the cubit” (Exodus 26:2): the cubit by which a curtain is measured stands for the measuring line. A measuring rod gives every object its size, yet it does not itself become part of what it measures, just as salt gives taste without being a food.

This explains the custom of placing salt on the table at a meal, to shield from suffering. Severities (dinim) are softened only at their source, and salt, the root of all the gevuros, can therefore sweeten them; this recalls the Gemara cited at the start, that salt sweetens meat as suffering scours away a person’s sins (Berachos 5a).

The image of salt now carries over to the Torah. The wisdom of Kabbalah, the Torah’s hidden part, is the Torah’s “salt.”

Like salt, Kabbalah is not “tasted” in itself: its subject is hidden and concealed, and it is not grasped with the kind of understanding and relish we have in the revealed parts of the Torah. The wording echoes Deuteronomy 29:28, “The hidden things belong to Havayah our G‑d, and the revealed things to us and to our children.”

Though the hidden wisdom has no “taste” of its own, like salt it gives taste to everything, to bread and to meat alike. The reason: the worlds are conducted according to the Torah’s inner dimension, and the whole revealed Torah was given according to the Kabbalah, so the hidden wisdom shapes all of it.

The same holds in a person who studies Torah: the “salt” gives taste to his “bread and meat.” Since “You have made them all in wisdom” (Psalms 104:24), Chochmah is at work in everything, and that is why salt, the level of Chochmah, must accompany the offerings: through Chochmah they are refined, and the offerings are the refining of the animal soul.

The verse calls salt “the covenant of your G‑d” because a covenant binds two parties, here the Creator and His creations, and that bond is made through the refining power of Chochmah.

The Alter Rebbe adds two references. In the Zohar (Vayechi, 241b) salt is called “the covenant of your G‑d” because it scours and sweetens what is bitter and makes it tasty; Emek HaMelech, a Kabbalistic work, explains a saying of the Sages in the same way, in the name of Rabbi Yehudah Chasid, in Sefer HaOrah.

The saying is from Bava Basra 74b: G‑d killed the female Leviathan and salted it for the righteous in the Time to Come. This salting is “an everlasting covenant of salt” stored away for the future, and the eating and the feast are the comprehension the righteous will then attain.