וארא אל אברהם אל יצחק ואל יעקב באל…

The maamar opens with G‑d’s words to Moshe: He appeared to the Avos as Kel Sha-dai, one of His Names, but they did not know Him by His Name Havayah. The verb va’eira is a future form (eira, “I will appear”) that the prefixed vav turns into the past, and its first reading is the plain one, as in Rashi: G‑d was once revealed to Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov.

The second reading takes eira as a true future, a form that in Hebrew also describes what always happens: the revelation the Avos had is present at every time in every Jew. In maamarim cited in the Kehot note (Va’eira 5738 and 5734), the Rebbe explains that the two readings of one word belong together: as va’eira was with the Avos, so it is always in every Jew. The Talmud’s rule that only these three are called Avos (fathers) leads into the next paragraph, which explains why their level belongs to all their children.

The level of the Avos passes to their descendants as an inheritance in every generation, each receiving it according to his own capacity. The Aramaic phrase is the Zohar’s (1:103b), on “Her husband is known in the gates”: G‑d is known to each one “according to what he measures in his heart,” which Likkutei Torah, Bamidbar (1a), explains as contemplating G‑d’s greatness as deeply as one’s understanding allows.

The first blessing of the Amidah, the standing prayer, calls on “the G‑d of our fathers, the G‑d of Avraham”: every Jew calls on the G‑d of the Avos because their level is his own inheritance.

The levels of the tribes, the sons of Yaakov such as Reuven, Shimon and Levi, are high spiritual lights, yet a particular Jew may lack them entirely; the Avos, by contrast, must be present in every Jew, since they are the root and source of all the souls of Israel. As a sichah (talk) of the Rebbe cited in the Kehot note puts it (Likkutei Sichos, vol. 6, p. 11), a person may lack the levels of all the tribes, but all three Avos must be in each Jew.

To explain how the level of the Avos is revealed in every Jew in every generation, the Alter Rebbe turns to an image: exile is like pregnancy (ibbur), a state in which a child exists but is still hidden. Later in this parsha (Torah Ohr, Va’eira, 58d), citing the Arizal’s teachings in Pri Etz Chaim, he explains the exile in Egypt the same way: love and awe are formed in the mind but held back, as in the womb, and do not come out into the heart.

Redemption is likened to birth, as in Yeshayahu’s prophecy that Zion “labored and also gave birth to her children”: the prophet marvels at a nation born in a single day.

Times of distress are described in the same language: King Chizkiyahu’s message to Yeshayahu, during the Assyrian siege, compared his crisis to children who have reached the birthstool when there is no strength to give birth. The suffering before Mashiach is likewise called “birth pangs”: in each image the redemption is a birth, what has been forming in hiding coming out into the open.

In Yechezkel’s prophecy, Israel at the time of the Exodus is pictured as a newborn on the day of its birth, whose navel had not yet been cut. To understand this image, “to understand a parable and a figure of speech” in the words of Mishlei, the Alter Rebbe first examines the state that comes before birth: pregnancy.

The Talmud records Rabbi Simlai’s description of the fetus: folded like a writing tablet, its head between its knees and its heels against its buttocks, nourished by the food its mother eats. In the Alter Rebbe’s maamar on this teaching, cited in the Kehot note, he adds that it eats what its mother eats “and not the milk,” which comes only after the food has been refined.

In the womb the mouth is closed and the navel open; at birth this reverses. The Alter Rebbe stresses that the fetus already has every organ, including head, eyes and ears.

Though the organs exist, they do not work: the folded head does not think, the eyes do not see and the ears do not hear.

The fetus is fed, but its food bypasses the mouth and goes through the navel straight to the digestive organs, serving only to build up the body. Torah Ohr, Megillas Esther (124b), cited in the Kehot note, adds that what reaches the fetus through the navel is only the most refined, inner part of what its mother eats.

The body’s growth during the nine months shows that this nourishment works. What it does not do is pass through the mouth, the route by which food would send life-force to the heart and from there to the brain, which the Alter Rebbe counts here among the organs of breathing.

The fetus has these organs fully formed, yet it has no breath of life until it comes out into the air of the world.

Then it lets out its first cry, and the Talmud (Niddah 42b) treats a baby’s cry as the sign that its head has emerged, that is, that it has been born. Until then life-force goes only to the organs of nourishment, which are fed through the navel.

In the womb the head and the organs of breathing are idle, as if lifeless. This is why the head lies folded between the knees.

Every detail of the fetus applies to Israel in exile. Yirmeyahu’s “Havayah roars from on high” is read, following the Zohar, the classic work of Kabbalah, as the Holy One, blessed be He, having ascended on high, away from the world. Likkutei Torah, Shir HaShirim (45a), cited in the Kehot note, explains why He withdraws: like a father who hides so that his son will cry out to reach him.

In Rachel’s weeping “for he is not,” the Zohar reads the singular as referring to G‑d: He is not present among her children, for He has ascended; plainly, the verse mourns her children who are gone. This means that G‑d has withdrawn the open revelation of His presence, so that to human eyes the world seems to exist on its own.

G‑d tells Yeshayahu to “make the heart of the people fat” and seal its eyes, so that, like the fetus, they “have eyes” but do not see. In exile the eyes do not see G‑d’s light: the truth that “in the heavens above and on the earth below there is nothing else.”

Mitzvos and good deeds are food for the soul, but in exile this food does not pass “by way of breathing” to the heart and mind, so it does not bring knowledge of G‑d, love, or a felt longing like flames of fire. In a maamar of Va’eira 5739 cited in the Kehot note, the Rebbe explains the breathing from Torah Ohr, Miketz (36b): neshamah, the soul, comes from neshimah, breathing, the soul’s running and returning (ratzo vashov), and in exile, as in the womb, these powers exist but do not act.

Instead the commandments are kept as G‑d says through Yeshayahu, “a commandment of men learned by rote”: physical action alone, done coldly. This, the Alter Rebbe says, is the core of exile in the spiritual sense.

The goal of the days of Mashiach is the “birth”: G‑d’s light openly revealed within each person, deep in the heart. Yeshayahu foretells that the glory of Havayah will be revealed and “all flesh shall see,” and that Zion’s watchmen will see Havayah’s return “eye to eye.”

This revelation depends on what we do during the exile: arousing the love of G‑d that is hidden in every Jewish heart until it becomes a felt, revealed longing. The Alter Rebbe’s Tanya opens chapter 37 with almost the same words: the ultimate perfection of the days of Mashiach, the revelation of the Infinite Light in this physical world, depends on our deeds and service throughout the exile.

The Shema declares that G‑d is “One” and then commands love. The Alter Rebbe asks why the word chosen is “One” (echad), since it does not seem to express G‑d’s true unity: that He alone exists and nothing exists besides Him.

“One” cannot convey this, because “one” is also used for a single item counted among others: Reuven is “one” of Yaakov’s twelve sons, as Yechezkel names the gates of the future city “the gate of Reuven, one,” and so on.

Yitzchak, by contrast, is called yechidecha, “your only one,” a word for one who stands alone and is not one of a count; so the Shema might have said yachid, “Single.”

The answer begins here: the word “One” is not meant to describe G‑d as He is in His own essence, where it does not apply at all.

In His essence G‑d is Single and Unique, alone with nothing beside Him, so “one” says too little of Him. “One” refers instead to the Sages’ teaching that He is One in the seven heavens, the earth and the four directions, read in the letters of echad, as Likkutei Torah, Tazria (23c), explains: the alef for the One, the Master (aluf) of the world, the ches (eight) for the seven heavens and the earth, and the dalet (four) for the four directions.

Heaven, earth and the four directions make up the six extremities (the six directions) of the world, a realm of division and plurality. “One” means that G‑d’s unity rests and is revealed even there, because all of them are nullified before His light within them and so become one; the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Chabad Rebbe, adds in Or HaTorah (cited in the Kehot note) that from these, of which He is Master, we recognize His power, and so the Shema says “One.”

The Levites’ prayer in the book of Nechemyah describes the heavenly hosts bowing before G‑d, a picture of creation nullified before Him. The six extremities are both physical and spiritual: in every world there is higher and lower without end, as Koheles says, “one higher than the high.”

Spiritual “above” and “below” are defined by comprehension: whatever the creatures of a world can grasp is “below” relative to a higher level that they cannot grasp at all.

The four directions also have spiritual counterparts: in the Kabbalistic picture Chesed is the right arm, the south, and Gevurah the left arm, the north. All these dimensions are united and become one through G‑d’s unity that dwells within them.

G‑d Himself, Single and Unique, is infinitely beyond all of this, beyond every dimension, physical or spiritual. So the word “One,” which describes unity within the dimensions, does not reach Him.

David’s blessing, “Yours, Havayah, are the greatness and the might,” is read to mean that these attributes, the Sefiros of Gedulah (another name for Chesed) and Gevurah, are so nullified before G‑d that in relation to Him they cannot even be called greatness and might. Plainly the verse says that they are His; the maamar reads “Yours” as “nullified to You.”

The verse continues, “for all in the heavens and on the earth,” meaning that everything is nullified before Him. As the psalm says that before Him “darkness is as light,” so above and below are equal to Him.

G‑d’s essence is present below exactly as it is above, without any difference; the Tzemach Tzedek, quoted in the Kehot note, adds that He is not even “higher” in rank, since rank applies only to created things and the ten Sefiros. Even the two ways His light relates to the worlds, filling them from within and encompassing them from beyond, do not describe Him Himself.

Both of those ways concern worlds, and G‑d is not within the category of worlds at all. The psalm says that His Name alone is exalted, and the maamar reads on: “only His splendor,” a radiance that extends from Him, is upon earth and heaven; Likkutei Torah, Emor (31c), explains that only this splendor of His Name is enclothed in earth and heaven to give them life, while His Name itself is exalted alone.

Even within that radiance “earth precedes heaven,” as in the verse just quoted, which names earth first; the point is explained elsewhere. That is why we below say, “The whole earth is full of His glory,” while the angels above ask, “Where is the place of His glory?”

In exile, the “pregnancy,” G‑d has, in the Zohar’s words, ascended on high: to His essence, where He is Single and beyond all worlds. His unity is then not revealed in the lower realms.

Zechariah’s prophecy that G‑d will be One “on that day” implies that He is not openly One now, and the Talmud asks, “Is He then not One now?” The parenthesis adds that “that day” means the time to come.

The answer is that in exile G‑d’s unity is not openly seen, and the world appears to be a self-standing thing (yesh).

Yet G‑d has not abandoned us. Because Jews are “the people near to Him,” He gives them the power to draw His unity down into the lower world, so that His Name is openly One even amid the divisions of space, above and below, physical and spiritual.

The parenthesis applies the same idea to a person: his own six “extremities” are his emotions, love, awe and the rest, and the task is to draw G‑d’s unity into them so that they are openly felt in his heart.

This is the meaning of “Hear, O Israel”: Israel, the people near to Him, is given the power to draw the Name Havayah down so that it is One and united in the lower realms.

This is the purpose of all service: G‑d desired a dwelling in the lowest realms, where subduing the sitra achra makes His glory “ascend,” which Torah Ohr, Vayakhel, explains as the revelation of His light from beyond the worlds, not its withdrawal. Hence “Egypt shall know that I am Havayah,” and hence baalei teshuvah stand where even perfect tzaddikim cannot: turning fiery bad traits back to G‑d, as Torah Ohr, Vayetzei (21c), explains, brings great delight above.

The psalm says that Israel rejoices in its “Makers.” Plainly it means “its Maker,” but the word has a plural form, which the Alter Rebbe reads as the many ways G‑d extends Himself into multiplicity and division, which are to be bound and united with Him.

From this, love of G‑d follows of itself. The word levavcha (“your heart”) is written with a doubled letter, and the Sages read it as “with both your inclinations,” the good and the evil: love becomes so fixed and open in the heart that a person rouses his good inclination to anger against the evil one.

Just as a person is angered by anything that goes against a desire touching his very self, a love of G‑d that reaches the core of the soul makes him angry, of itself, at whatever opposes it.

Service out of love is above all joy, as the psalm says, “Serve Havayah with joy,” and as the Torah rebukes those who did not serve “with joy and with gladness of heart, out of the abundance of everything.” Plainly the last words mean that they had plenty of everything; the Arizal (Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, the great Kabbalist of Tzfas) is known for reading them as “more than all abundance”: the joy of serving G‑d should be greater than the joy of every good thing. Tanya, chapter 26, refers to this same well-known interpretation.

Joy is compared to milk. The Song of Songs speaks of “honey and milk under your tongue,” and Yeshayahu likens G‑d’s comfort to a mother comforting her child.

A mother delights her child by nursing it, and the milk is both its pleasure and what makes its limbs grow until it can walk. The maamar will apply this to joy, which makes love and awe grow.

Milk is not a separate substance: as the Talmud says, it is blood transformed, and the blood itself comes from the mother’s food and drink. Likkutei Torah, Bamidbar (19a), cited in the Kehot note, explains the image: the blood, which stands for Gevuros (severities), is itself turned into milk, white Chasadim (kindnesses); this chain, food to blood to milk, is applied to divine service in what follows.

The analogy of food, blood and milk is now applied to divine service. The Torah calls the offerings G‑d’s “bread”: they are, so to speak, His food, rising as a pleasing fragrance, as the Zohar says, “Israel sustain their Father in heaven”; Torah Ohr, Miketz (33d), explains this sustenance as drawing the Infinite Light down, chiefly through the Torah, which is also called “My bread.”

Bringing an offering “from the animal” (Vayikra 1:2) was meant to offer up the person’s animal soul as well, giving it over to G‑d with sincere intention. The aim, in Zechariah’s words, was to remove the spirit of impurity, so that evil thoughts would be consumed like the offering on the altar; Torah Ohr (111c), cited in the Kehot note, explains that even the will of the body’s matter is then turned to G‑d.

Without the Temple there are no offerings, and we cannot fully remove the rule of the animal soul. So the Sages instituted prayers in place of the daily offerings.

The opening of every blessing, “Blessed are You, Havayah,” expresses this: though our own arousal from below cannot fulfill our obligations, we ask that G‑d respond with an arousal from above.

The reason, in Michah’s words, is that G‑d “desires kindness.” “Blessed” (baruch) is read in the sense of drawing down, as a vine shoot is bent down (mavrich) into the earth: G‑d’s blessing descends so that His Name is called upon us as “our G‑d,” and we become nullified to Him and drawn after Him with all our heart.

The same applies to the 248 positive commandments, each a channel that draws G‑dliness down to rest in the lower realms.

To G‑d, the Alter Rebbe says, this is, so to speak, like eating: as food keeps the soul joined to the body so the body can house it, mitzvos and good deeds make a “throne” and dwelling for G‑d below, when His unity, “Havayah is One,” is drawn down and revealed there.

Israel also benefits from this “eating”: like food that sends life to heart and brain, it gives them the vitality to love and serve G‑d fully. This is the first stage of service.

Next comes a deeper stage, “the blood is the soul”: as food becomes blood, and blood is a person’s very life, so G‑d’s light can become part of the person’s own being.

By keeping the mitzvos, turning from evil and doing good, the person becomes a throne for G‑d, until His unity is revealed at the innermost point of his heart and reaches the soul itself.

G‑d’s light and the person become, as it were, one essence. Then he is angered by the evil within him, as anyone is angered by what threatens his very self, an anger that comes from the boiling of the blood, for the blood is the soul.

This anger is the level of Yitzchak, and of David’s “the offerings of G‑d are a broken spirit,” read here as the breaking of the spirit of the sitra achra; plainly, the psalm says that the offering G‑d desires is a contrite spirit. A manuscript quoted in the Kehot note adds that the first stage, life-force reaching heart and mind to love G‑d, is the level of Avraham, and the food becoming blood, anger at what opposes, is Yitzchak.

From anger at evil a person moves on to Yaakov’s level, compassion: seeing his soul caught in “the overthrow,” he cries out to G‑d in his distress, in words like the psalm’s. Hahafechah is the Torah’s word for the overthrow of Sedom, from which Lot was rescued, and it shares its root with hipuch, “the opposite,” the evil that opposes G‑d’s will.

Someone whose way “seems right” to him, in Mishlei’s words, feels no need for such compassion; it does not apply to him. Compassion is the beginning of, and the preparation for, the joy that follows, when he takes to heart, “Indeed it is true...,” as Tanya, chapter 31, describes: after the bitterness he comforts himself, and the joy of his soul comes with added light and joy.

Here the joy is in G‑d “who has sanctified us with His commandments,” and it is all the greater because it comes out of darkness: Koheles speaks of “the advantage of light over darkness,” read here as light that comes from darkness, the image Tanya also uses (chapter 26) for the joy that follows true sorrow.

Yirmeyahu describes the returning exiles as weeping and seeking G‑d. In the future, the Alter Rebbe says, this weeping will be aroused by seeing, when “all flesh shall see” G‑d’s glory.

That sight will arouse great compassion over the past, and this compassion is the beginning of joy in the living G‑d and of the desire to be near Him, as the verse says, “and they will seek Havayah their G‑d.”

This is why “Forgive us, for we have sinned” is said in the Shemoneh Esreh, the standing prayer of eighteen blessings, and not before it: until he has accepted G‑d’s kingship in the Shema, a person does not yet feel his sin. One manuscript, quoted in the Kehot note, adds: “his way was right in his eyes, and he did not feel that he is a sinner.”

After saying “Havayah is One,” recognizing G‑d’s unity revealed below, he sees how he lacks G‑d’s light, and that, in words Koheles says of a stillborn, he “came in futility and goes in darkness.” Then compassion stirs in him for his own soul, in the words Yirmeyahu hears G‑d say of Ephraim, “My innards stir for him.”

Only then can he reach true joy; joy that is not preceded by compassion is not true joy, just as a newborn first cries and only then is given milk. A manuscript quoted in the Kehot note compares the maamar on “Oseri lagefen” in Vayechi: there is no “wine that gladdens,” joy in G‑d’s greatness, without first “the wine that intoxicates,” bitterness over one’s distance from G‑d, for there is no delight without a prior longing.

Joy and delight come mainly from contemplating G‑d’s greatness and His choosing us. That is why the Alter Rebbe cites the Talmud’s remark that the breasts are “in the place of binah (understanding)”: milk, the image of joy, is placed where contemplation is, and, as a manuscript adds, as milk makes a child grow, so joy in G‑d makes love, awe and compassion grow.

Now the opening verse is explained: G‑d appeared to the Avos as Kel Sha-dai, a Name read as related to shadayim, “breasts,” and Yaakov’s blessing to Yosef sets the two side by side: “Sha-dai, who will bless you... with blessings of the breasts and the womb.” This is the flow of “milk,” joy, that makes the emotive attributes grow: love and awe, the qualities of the Avos, love being Avraham’s attribute and awe Yitzchak’s.

After the “birth,” when “Havayah is One” is revealed in the heart, Kel Sha-dai nourishes these attributes with added light and joy, so that a person delights in G‑d with gladness of heart; Or HaTorah, cited in the Kehot note, observes that this reading of Sha-dai is also found in Rabbi Yosef Gikatilla’s Shaarei Orah.

Now the second half of the verse: “My Name Havayah I was not known to them.” The Sages say that Avraham kept the whole Torah before it was given, which the Alter Rebbe explains as performing the mitzvos out of love.

The Sages also say that Avraham instituted the morning prayer. This is drawing down G‑d’s light so that His unity rests in the lower realms, and loving G‑d with “a love of delights,” the Song of Songs’ phrase for love that is pure delight.

For all its greatness, this is still the service of a servant, who obeys his master gladly but remains a separate self who serves. Yitzchak served likewise through awe, as the Torah calls G‑d “the Fear of Yitzchak.”

Moshe had a different quality, complete self-nullification, expressed in his words “And what are we?”: a bittul that, as a sichah cited in the Kehot note puts it, is higher than that of the Avos. For this reason the Torah was given through him, in the form of speech.

The Sages say, in several places in the Zohar, that the Shechinah spoke from Moshe’s throat. Love and delight belong to the revealed level of G‑d’s light, the light that dwells within the worlds, where there is above and below.

The Torah is different: “the word of Havayah” is halachah, the law of the Torah, and the Torah is one with “the Holy One, blessed be He” Himself, who is Single and beyond the grasp of thought; Torah Ohr, later in this parsha (57c), explains this as the level entirely separate from the bounds of worlds. In conveying it there is no feeling of love or delight.

The speaker does not feel himself at all: he is nullified in his very existence, occupying no place of his own, and is simply drawn after G‑d to say what G‑d says. A sichah cited in the Kehot note adds that such bittul is not in a person’s own power, as “a prisoner cannot free himself”; it comes through G‑d’s revelation from above, the revelation of the Name Havayah.

As Yeshayahu says, “I have put My words in your mouth.” Through this the person draws down G‑d’s own unity, as it was before creation, revealing that even now the world is as nothing and there is neither above nor below.

What this draws upon the soul is not love or delight but total self-nullification. This is why the Torah came as dibbur, “speech,” a word the Alter Rebbe connects with yadber in “He leads (yadber) peoples under us,” reading it as leading and drawing down, though plainly the psalm means “He subdues peoples”; Torah Ohr, Yisro (68b), reads “Moshe would speak (yedaber)” the same way: through his bittul Moshe drew the Infinite Light down.

Speaking Torah draws G‑d down to be revealed below as He is Single (yachid), His very essence, and not only as One (echad) within the worlds.

This happens through the Torah, whose laws are introduced again and again with “And Havayah spoke to Moshe.” Such study is not a servant’s service: one who learns and states a law is like a king issuing a decree for his people.

This is why the Talmud calls the Rabbis “kings” and the Mishnah a “queen”; Torah Ohr, Shemos (49b), connects the queens with the Sages’ reading of “sixty queens” as the sixty tractates. One who states Torah law is like one who announces the king’s word: he adds nothing of his own.

A servant, by contrast, is the one who carries out the king’s decree, so even when he serves out of delight he remains a self who loves; Tanya, chapter 35, explains that even a perfect tzaddik who serves with a love of delights is not nullified in his very existence but remains one who fears G‑d and loves Him. A manuscript adds here that one who studies Torah is above this level, for it is the King’s word that is spoken in his mouth.

Because the Avos lived before the Torah was given, their service, however lofty, was of this kind, and so the verse says, “My Name Havayah I was not known (noda’ti) to them.” It does not say “I did not make known (hoda’ti),” which would mean only that the Name Havayah was not taught to them; Rashi, too, draws a lesson from this wording.

The passive “I was not known” means that G‑d Himself, His essence, was not known to them. This is the level of yachid, which was revealed through the Torah given by way of Moshe.

The command “these words which I (Anochi) command you” uses Anochi, read as “I, who I am”: G‑d’s own Self, the level of yachid; plainly Moshe is the speaker of the verse, but the maamar hears in its “I” the Giver of the Torah. The command to love, by contrast, speaks of “Havayah your G‑d”; the very first maamar of Torah Ohr (1a) reads this verse the same way.

Love is tied to the Name Havayah, but the Torah comes from above that Name, from “before Havayah,” the level of “I, who I am.” So the maamar ends where it began: the Torah reveals what even the Avos did not know.