להבין מארז״ל ע״פ כי טובים דודיך מיין

A new section opens with the Sages’ teaching on “For your love is better than wine”: “The words of the Scribes are sweet upon me, more than the wine of the Torah.” The words of the Scribes (divrei soferim) are the laws the Sages enacted, as distinct from the Torah’s own commands, which the maamar will call “the wine of the Torah.” It asks why the saying has alai, “upon me,” and not li, “to me.”

To answer, the maamar first looks at the verse “To love Havayah your G‑d … for He is your life.” The words “for He is your life” give a reason for the love.

As the Talmud says (Rosh Hashanah 3a), the word ki has four meanings: “if,” “perhaps,” “but” and “because.” Here it means “because”: the verse gives the reason to love G‑d, because He is your life.

The Emanator is the source of all life and all delight, as the verses say, “For with You is the source of life” and “Everything is from You.” All the life and pleasure in the four worlds, Atzilus, Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah, comes from Him, so He is the Life of all life.

Contemplating this, a person comes to love G‑d: as everyone loves his own life, so he will love G‑d, the Life of all life and of his own soul in particular.

Yet love born of a reason is not yet the self-sacrifice of “with all your soul and with all your might.” A reason belongs to Chochmah: of the four parts of the Torah’s text, the ta’amim (cantillation notes, a word that also means “reasons”) correspond to Chochmah, one of the emanated levels. In Likkutei Torah, Chukas, the Alter Rebbe gives the whole order: ta’amim in Chochmah, nekudos (vowels) in Binah, tagin (crowns) in Z’eir Anpin and osiyos (letters) in Malchus.

The Emanator, the Infinite One, is beyond even Chochmah. “You made them all with wisdom” counts Chochmah among the things He made: before Him, even wisdom is like physical action.

From this level beyond Chochmah comes self-sacrifice, present in every Jew at least in potential, because a ray of the Infinite One, above Chochmah and reason, is enclothed in his soul. It is giving oneself over to the One with no reason at all, out of a simple love for G‑d, who is beyond any comparison. In Likkutei Torah (Shir HaShirim 1:1), which refers back to this maamar, the Alter Rebbe ties this “giving over one’s soul be’echad,” at “One,” to the One of the Shema, G‑d being One as before the world was created.

The verse “I, Havayah, have not changed” is the proof that He is beyond comparison: before the world was created and after, nothing in Him changed and nothing affected Him.

The love that answers to this level is the wish never to be separated from His unity, but to be truly “one with the One.”

This is the meaning of “with all your soul and with all your might”: giving oneself over beyond reason and knowledge. It binds the soul to G‑d’s very Being and Essence, far above the level of ta’amim, the realm of reasons.

This love and readiness for self-sacrifice exist in every Jew in potential, but hidden. They come into the open only through “the wine of the Torah.”

As the Sages say, “Wine enters, the secret comes out.” The secret hidden in the soul is the hidden love described above.

When the wine of the Torah, the keeping of the Torah and its mitzvos, enters the soul, the hidden love is revealed in the heart of Knesses Yisrael, so that they burn with a simple love, wanting to be one with the One.

On Shabbos too the hidden love comes into the open. To explain why, the maamar turns to the verse “Six days Havayah made the heavens,” and so on, “and on the seventh day He rested.” In Torah Ohr, Vayakhel, the Alter Rebbe explains that this is the extra soul of Shabbos: a love and will for G‑d above intellect, newly revealed in every Jew on Shabbos.

The world was created through ten utterances, which are the ten Sefiros, and the Talmud counts “In the beginning” as an utterance too. Since the maamar takes reishis, “beginning,” as Chochmah, the beginning of Atzilus, even Chochmah is only an “utterance” compared with G‑d’s own Being, as “You made them all with wisdom” showed above.

During the six days of Creation the supernal Chochmah and the emotive attributes, which are the ten utterances, were lowered in order to create the world.

The analogy: a person who writes or draws lowers his mind and thought into the picture or the writing while he works; when he finishes, his mind and thought return to their own state.

So above: during the six days the ten Sefiros lowered themselves so that the world would be created through them, and on Shabbos “He rested and was refreshed”: Chochmah and the middos rose back up into G‑d’s own Being, the source of all delight. “There is none to compare” (ein aroch) is a phrase of the Shabbos morning prayers, “There is none to compare to You.”

That is why the hidden love is revealed on Shabbos: it comes from the very level, above Chochmah and reasons, to which the Sefiros return on Shabbos.

All this comes about through the wine of the Torah entering the soul, which means keeping the mitzvos, for the supernal will, which is above Chochmah, is enclothed in them.

When the supernal will is revealed through the mitzvos, it awakens in the person the hidden love, itself a love and will above Chochmah and reason. This is “Wine enters, the secret comes out.”

Now the Sages’ saying can be understood, with its stress on “upon me.” The mitzvos themselves are the wine of the Torah, while the blessings said over the mitzvos are rabbinic, from the words of the Scribes; the Kehot note counts them among the seven mitzvos the Sages instituted.

The blessings rank above the mitzvah itself. As Etz Chaim, the Arizal’s teachings, explains, the act of the mitzvah draws down an inner light (Or Pnimi) that enters the vessels, while the blessing over it draws down an encompassing light (Or Makif), too high to enter any vessel. In the place the Kehot note gives, Pri Etz Chaim (Gate of the Omer Count, end of ch. 3), the blessing, being speech and breath that leave the mouth, is an encompassing light, while the inner light entered only through an offering.

This is hinted in the Sages’ rule that a blessing is said over a mitzvah “oveir la’asiyasan,” before doing it. The Talmud proves that oveir here means “ahead of,” but the word also means “passing over,” and the maamar reads it as encompassing, as in the silver Avraham paid, “current with the merchant” (oveir lasocher). In Likkutei Torah, Masei, the Alter Rebbe asks why the Sages chose oveir and then had to prove that it means “before,” and answers that the blessing is an encompassing light over the act of the mitzvah, which raises the act up.

This is why the Sages said “sweet upon me” and not “to me”: “upon” means that what the blessing draws down is encompassing, resting above the person rather than entering within.

That is why the words of the Scribes are sweeter than the wine of the Torah, the mitzvos, which bring only inner light. “The pleasantness of Havayah” and the sweetness drawn down by the rabbinic blessing come from the encompassing level: “sweet upon me.” In Torah Ohr, Tetzaveh, the Alter Rebbe explains that when the Mishkan was brought to Moshe he said “May the pleasantness …” (Psalms 90:17), that the blessing should rest from far above, and that this is the blessing over the mitzvos.

Now the wording of the blessing, “Blessed are You, Havayah, our G‑d, King of the world, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us,” is explained phrase by phrase. Baruch, “blessed,” is a drawing down from the head and source of all blessing, the source of life, which is above the chain of worlds.

This flow is drawn to Atah, “You,” addressed as one who is present, which stands for the revealed world, so that it becomes Havayah, the whole chain of worlds in four letters: yud, contraction; hei, expansion; vav, drawing down; and the final hei, expansion.

So it says, “The blessing of Havayah, it makes rich,” and Avraham is told, “And be a blessing”: blessing is the level of Havayah (the Hebrew for “and be,” והיה, is spelled with the four letters of that Name). Then come the words “our G‑d, King of the world,” drawing the flow further down to Malchus of Atzilus, the lowest level of Atzilus.

Asher, “who,” is read as delight, like Leah’s words when she named Asher, “In my happiness (be’oshri), for daughters have called me happy.” That delight is “to sanctify us with His commandments,” which come from G‑d’s own Being, as the Talmud says that the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself puts on tefillin. In Torah Ohr, Miketz, the Alter Rebbe explains “His commandments” in this way: the 248 mitzvos are “the limbs of the King,” one with the Infinite Light as a limb is one with the life within it.

So the blessing contains ratzo vashov, running and returning: the two movements of a soul that runs toward G‑d and returns to its task below. First comes the “returning,” drawing the flow down to “King of the world”; then the “running,” “who has sanctified us with His commandments,” reaching into G‑d’s own Being in order to draw down from there.

The verse “Fortunate is the man who fears Havayah” shows the same order in a person. First comes distance: he is afraid to approach the holy, thinking, “Who am I, that I have come this far?”

Then comes “he desires His commandments greatly”: true, I am not worthy of this, and yet he greatly desires His mitzvos.

The reason there must be both running and returning: every flow from above comes through “reaching and not reaching” (mati velo mati), a light that touches and withdraws. First comes a withdrawal, the “not reaching,” and then an expansion, the “reaching.”

So the arousal from below, our own service, must also run and return. This explains “The words of the Scribes are sweet upon me”: the Sages’ words come from the sofer, the “scribe” of “Where is the scribe?”, who stands above the Written Torah, the sefer, the “book” he writes. As explained earlier (Torah Ohr, Shemos 4, the maamar “This is My Name forever” before this one), Ayeh, “Where,” is itself the scribe, the source of the Written Torah, and the words of the Scribes are rooted there.

For more on the blessings over the mitzvos the maamar sends the reader to the explanation of “And you shall make holy garments” (Torah Ohr, Tetzaveh). There the blessing over a mitzvah is compared to the blessing of groom and bride, which draws an added flow from far above both giver and receiver.