ובזה הנערה באה וגו׳

The maamar opens with Esther 2:13, which describes how each maiden, after a year of preparation, came in her turn to King Achashverosh: “And with this,” that is, so prepared, “the maiden came to the king.” The maamar reads “with this” as the pillar that, the Zohar says, stands in the middle of the Garden of Eden, by which souls rise from the lower Gan Eden to the upper Gan Eden, the two levels of the Garden of Eden in which souls delight in the G‑dliness they grasp.

“Came to the king,” then, is the soul’s ascent through that pillar. A parenthesis takes up the Zohar in Pekudei, which reads “with this” as Yesod (foundation), the Sefirah called tzaddik, “the righteous one,” and shows there is no contradiction: the pillar is itself the Yesod of the Garden, as the Mikdash Melech, Rabbi Shalom Buzaglo’s commentary on the Zohar, writes on the passage in Vayechi.

Yesod is the Sefirah that connects the giver with the receiver, just as the pillar connects the lower Gan Eden with the upper. In Torah Ohr, Tetzaveh, on “And you shall command,” the Alter Rebbe explains that “all” in “for all that is in heaven and on earth,” which the Targum renders “that holds fast to heaven and earth,” is this pillar, which joins the upper Gan Eden with the lower; and he reads “from an abundance of all” as a call for joy in the mitzvos greater even than “the abundance of all,” the delights of the World to Come.

Next comes the inner meaning of the pillar: bittul, setting aside one’s own sense of self. No one can rise to a higher level without first letting go of the level he holds, for only what is emptied of itself can become a vessel to receive more; Torah Ohr, Bereshit, compares this to a seed, which must decay in the ground before it can sprout, and calls this bittul the pillar between the two Gardens. The parenthesis points to a discussion of the Zohar’s words “the daughter of the higher Chochmah,” with the stress on Chochmah, which Chassidus identifies with bittul.

The Sages’ saying that the angel Michael “offers up the souls of the righteous” on the heavenly altar belongs here, for an offering is itself an ascent from below to above, as Torah Ohr, Bereshit, says. Tosafot on Menachos 110a records the saying from the Midrashim, and the Zohar speaks of Michael, “the great priest,” offering up souls on the altar above. The Tzemach Tzedek’s transcript of the maamar adds that this ascent raises the soul, a creation brought from nothing into being, to be included in Atzilus.

The soul cannot rise so high by its own strength, so it needs the angels’ help, specifically that of Michael, the angel of Chesed (kindness). The parenthesis points to the same Zohar passage in Vayakhel, where on Sabbaths and festivals “four faces of an eagle” take up the souls worthy to rise and bring them into the pillar; the printed text reads מסדר, “arranges,” where the Zohar itself has מְשַׁדֵּר, “sends.” It also points to the discussion of “As an eagle stirs up its nest”; Likkutei Torah’s discourse on that verse (Ha’azinu) explains the eagle’s face in Yechezkel’s chariot as compassion, which lifts the fallen soul ever higher.

The Talmud relates that Eliyahu told a sage the sign of Rabbi Chiya’s chair in the Heavenly Academy, the academy of the sages in heaven: angels go with all the other sages as they ascend and descend, but Rabbi Chiya’s chair rises and descends by itself. The maamar calls this a true novelty: a soul that rises without the angels’ help. Likkutei Torah, Re’eh, cites the Chemdas Tzvi, a commentary on the Tikkunei Zohar: Rabbi Chiya was of the level of Yaakov, so his chair rose by itself, as Tiferes (beauty), Yaakov’s attribute, rises up to Keser (the Crown); and of Yaakov it is said, “you have striven with G‑d and with men,” for he needs no angels.

Rabbi Chiya needed no help because his bittul was complete, and the same is true of Esther. Each maiden could take with her whatever she asked for, but when Esther’s turn came she “did not ask for anything except what Hegai,” the king’s chamberlain, “would say”; the maamar reads this as needing no help from the angels, receiving only from “Hegai,” whose meaning it now explains.

Hegai was the king’s chamberlain, the keeper of the women, but the maamar hears in his name hegyon, “meditation,” from the same root, as in “the meditation of my heart,” which the verse sets beside “the words of my mouth”: speech still within thought, from which the angels receive. It calls Hegai a po’el yotzei, the grammarians’ “transitive verb,” literally an action that goes out to another: Hegai moves others to speak, making the angels, “the masters of song,” speak and sing.

A second source for the name is hogah in “when he had been moved from the highway” (II Samuel 20:13), said of Amasa’s body, which was moved off the road so that the troops would go on: something moved from one place to another. So Hegai is what passes from thought into speech, as when a person thinks how he will say something, and it is the flow that comes from the chamber of the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of a world.

The phrase fits because here light moves from one world into the next: the light of Atzilus, the world still one with G‑d, is drawn into the chamber of the Holy of Holies of Beriah, the first world of separate existence, to raise Malchus up, as the Pri Etz Chaim (the Arizal’s teachings on prayer, recorded by Rabbi Chaim Vital) explains on the rule that the blessing of redemption must lead directly into the Amidah prayer. Tanya, ch. 52, explains that the Shechinah, Malchus of Atzilus, called “the word of Havayah” because like speech it reveals hidden thought, is clothed in this chamber, the Chochmah, Binah and Daas of Beriah, and that through it the souls and angels of Beriah were created. The parenthesis also refers to the Chanukah discourse “Sing and rejoice,” earlier in Torah Ohr, on “they will sing of Your righteousness” and on the Zohar’s “song in the evening and joy in the morning.”

Esther 2:14 says that each maiden came to the king in the evening and returned in the morning. Her coming (ba’ah) in the evening is “Come (bo’u) before Him with song,” the same verb, and song belongs to the evening, as the Zohar says: it is the ascent from below to above, which belongs to night, the concealment of the Infinite Light. The Chanukah discourse explains that this very concealment stirs the longing to rise, as in “my soul desires You at night.”

Day is the opposite movement: the Infinite Light drawn down from above to below, “Serve Havayah with joy”; the Chanukah discourse calls this drawing down, through Torah and mitzvos, the souls’ advantage over the angels, whose service is only the ascent of song. So the maiden’s coming (ba’ah) and returning (shavah) are the two movements Yechezkel saw in the living creatures, “running and returning” (ratzo vashov): rising toward G‑d, and returning to draw His light down.