Introduction: What Was Seen in the Vision
After the Holy One, Blessed is He, gave Shlomo's soul the signs by which to recognize Him and attain knowledge of His Godliness - "Go out in the footsteps of the flock... by the tents of the shepherds" - the soul merits visions of prophecy, and the Holy One, Blessed is He, speaks with it in a dream of the night. From here onward, Scripture describes what transpired in that vision: what was spoken in that revelation wherein Shlomo's soul clings to its Beloved, the Holy One, Blessed is He.
"To a Steed in Pharaoh's Chariots" - When the Body Harnesses the Soul
לְסֻסָתִי בְּרִכְבֵי פַרְעֹה דִּמִּיתִיךְ רַעְיָתִי׃ (א,ט) - To a steed in Pharaoh's chariots have I compared you, my beloved. (1:9)
In the mashal, we explained: when the shepherd meets the beloved as she flees to him from the royal palace, he tells her, "I see upon you the jewelry that Shlomo gave you, as though you attached yourself to him instead of me." So it is in the nimshal. When the soul goes out and clings to its Beloved, Who is the Holy One, Blessed is He, the Holy One says to it: "I see that you have received ornaments from the physical frame, from the body."
The bodily faculties are called "Pharaoh's chariots," because the chariot of the body, as it were, originates in Egypt - from the realm of licentiousness, from the imaginative and appetitive faculties. Egypt is the "nakedness of the land," symbolizing the entirety of physical, material existence. There is an allusion in its name: Mitzrayim - meitzar yam (the boundary or strait of the sea). And the sea, as the Maharal explains, is pure matter without form. There is matter that possesses form: a cup is physical matter, but it was fashioned round and given the form of a cup. Water, however, is matter without any form at all; it was not given any intrinsic shape. Therefore, the epitome of raw physicality is expressed in water, and Egypt is meitzar yam - the straits of sheer physical matter.
With this, the Holy One, Blessed is He, says to it: "I see that Pharaoh's chariots have overpowered you; the forces of the body and the forces of materiality have prevailed over you, the soul." These are the forces that reign in Shlomo's body, and Shlomo's chariot is driven by these material forces. As a consequence, Shlomo married many foreign wives, who in the nimshal represent lust, jealousy, honor, the allure of wealth, and the love of licentiousness - and Pharaoh's daughter symbolizes licentiousness.
In simple terms: the body succeeded in dragging the soul along and harnessing it to its chariots. Instead of the soul harnessing the body and leading it toward spirituality, an inverted state emerged - the body harnesses the soul to its chariots, compelling it to serve its desires, cravings, and pleasures. "To my steed in Pharaoh's chariots" - I see that you are like a steed hitched to Pharaoh's chariots, driving Pharaoh's chariots forward instead of driving the Divine Chariot.
And nevertheless, He adds and says: "To my steed" [lesusati] - despite all this, you remain My steed. You are destined to make My will govern Pharaoh's chariots, to establish My will over the body and overcome the pull of materiality.
"Your Cheeks Are Comely with Rows of Jewels" - The Ornaments of the Body
נָאווּ לְחָיַיִךְ בַּתֹּרִים צַוָּארֵךְ בַּחֲרוּזִים׃ (א,י) - Your cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, your neck with strings of beads. (1:10)
Because you were bound to Shlomo's chariot - like the maiden in the king's palace - you were adorned with all manner of ornaments used to decorate the king's horses. In the nimshal: the soul became joined to the body, and by virtue of this connection, it became bound to physical and earthly matters, seeking corporeal pleasures. About this He says to it: "I see upon you ornaments that decorate the royal horses - rows of jewels on your cheeks and strings of pearls on your neck - which you never had when you were beneath the Throne of Glory. Your union with the body has not done you well; it has tied you to materiality."
Immediate Comprehension versus Gradual Comprehension
The Malbim explains: When man exists as an abstract intellect, he perceives things in their very essence. Where there is no body, there is no time. The entire concept of time is tied to physical matter. The Ramban wrote this eight hundred years ago, and it took Einstein seven hundred years to discover it: wherever there is matter, there is time, and where there is no matter, there is no time. Therefore, in the transcendent spiritual realm, time does not exist.
Today, atomic clocks can verify this. Pilots reaching the speed of sound already observe their clocks slowing down. Theoretically, as Einstein stated, if a spaceship were to reach the speed of light, time would stand completely still - something already demonstrated with atomic clocks and tests in atomic reactors. And if it were to exceed the speed of light - an entirely fictional scenario - time would begin to run backward. Let us retain the accepted principle: at the speed of light, time has no meaning. Time is bound to matter. This is why the Ramban writes that one cannot ask what the Holy One, Blessed is He, did a thousand years before the creation of the world - before the creation of the world there was no time, and if there is no time, one cannot speak of a day, two days, or a thousand years. Notice as well that regarding the 974 generations that preceded the creation of the world, Chazal did not speak in terms of years, but of generations, because this refers to something internal, not chronological intervals.
When the soul is spiritual and detached from matter, it can grasp things in a single moment without needing gradual perception. We have already mentioned the teaching of Rav Chaim of Volozhin that the soul is boundless and possesses immense powers, capable of grasping the entire Torah in a single second. This explains why during the nine months a fetus is in its mother's womb, an angel teaches it the entire Torah - in ninety years a person cannot finish learning it, yet in nine months he can? Rather, in a spiritual reality, comprehension is instantaneous, for the limitation of time does not exist there. And when there is no constraint of time, everything is known in a single moment.
However, when subject to the constraint of time, one must learn slowly and gradually. The Malbim explains: at first, the soul constructs statements from sensory perceptions, and then from these statements it derives affirmations and negations. For example: "The apple is red," and from this one understands that the apple is not black. Thus, one joins premise to premise, and from premises builds a concept, from a concept an idea, and from an idea a theory - until reaching true comprehension. A person does not become a professor in one day, nor does one become a Gadol HaDor in one day. Everything is acquired through daily labor, perseverance, comparing one case to another (dimui milta lemilta), moving from concept to concept, until one achieves deep understanding and mastery of abstract concepts.
The same applies to Torah study. A person opens a Talmudic sugya and finds only darkness: what is happening here, what is the underlying logic, what is the definition? Yet step by step - here Rashi, then clarification in Tosafos, then the Maharsha; reviewing once, twice, three, and four times, examining the Rishonim - the picture gradually begins to clear. How thrilled we would be if the entire sugya, with all its facets, nuances, and difficulties, entered our minds all at once. We would pay a fortune for a flash drive that could plug directly into the brain.
In our times, the situation is even more acute because of the computer. People have grown accustomed to everything happening instantly and are no longer willing to invest effort. The mind has become passive - the intellect no longer thinks, because at the click of a button it receives thirty answers. When told to think, a person answers, "I don't have the energy; just tell me, don't give me riddles." In the past, people thought; today, they just want to be told. Someone once remarked: in the past, Torah scholars carried the Torah in their heads, whereas today they have it in Otzar HaChochmah - every question answered with a keystroke. Yet they run into a problem on Shabbos. Chazal said that an am ha'aretz feels the awe of Shabbos and will not lie on Shabbos; similarly here, when someone asks him a question on Shabbos, he replies, "Wait, I don't have my computer, today is Shabbos," and suddenly it becomes clear that he does not really know it. Someone once asked a halachic question, and upon hearing the answer, remarked, "Rabbi, I asked Google and it said..." He was told: "I am not acquainted with 'Rabbi Google.'" A new posek has arisen - "My people consult their wooden idol, and their staff declares to them" (Hoshea 4:12); people consult sticks, plastic, and computers.
The root of the matter is this: in our source, the soul grasps everything and knows everything in an instant. What limits us is the body, which places us within the constraints of time and creates a reality where wisdom is acquired gradually, layer upon layer, through drawing analogies from one matter to another and logical deduction, until we succeed in grasping the essence of things.
"Your Neck with Strings of Beads" - Stringing Concepts Together
The neck represents the place from which the voice emerges; if someone asks where the voice comes from, we immediately point to the neck. And what is the difference between speech and voice? Speech is external - it must pass through the phonetic organs of the mouth and lips, articulated by the teeth and lips (the labial letters, the sibilant letters). The voice, by contrast, is the simple emission of breath from the throat before it ever touches the lips - and therefore it expresses something deeper and more internal.
Herein lies an allusion to the soul's path in study and contemplation. Why are they called charuzim ("strings of beads")? Because this is the nature of intellectual acquisition: one strings one idea to another. One learns something, adds another point to it, draws an insight from here, an elaboration from there, and further analysis - gradually stringing them together until possessing complete wisdom and thorough comprehension. Thus, our reality is characterized both by "Your cheeks are comely with rows" and "Your neck with strings of beads," all stemming from our attachment to the physical body. The body creates the limitation that grasping the Divine cannot occur instantaneously, but rather through observing a concept and needing to analyze it - this is "Your cheeks are comely with rows"; and through comprehending slowly, one detail after another, until reaching perfection - this is "Your neck with strings of beads."
"Rows of Gold" versus "Points of Silver"
תּוֹרֵי זָהָב נַעֲשֶׂה לָּךְ עִם נְקֻדּוֹת הַכָּסֶף׃ (א,יא) - Circlets of gold we will make for you, with studs of silver (1:11).
The Holy One, blessed is He, continues and says to the soul: When you were in the primordial Divine abode, beneath the Throne of Glory, before being attached to Shlomo's chariots, you had only points of silver. That is, neither quantity nor quality applied to the soul's spiritual perception. For a geometric point occupies no space at all; if you ask what the size of a point is, you will be told that it has no size - it is an infinitesimal dot, a mere dimensionless entity. In Kabbalah, too, this is how the letter Yud is described: an infinitesimal point. And because it occupies no space, it is also indivisible, for something dimensionless cannot be divided - if you were to divide it, you would have two separate entities. It turns out, then, that a point denotes something non-quantitative and indivisible, entirely beyond the realm of measurement.
This is the exact opposite of the rows and the strings of beads in the previous verse. The rows represent what we perceive through sensory observation, where we observe and register image after image, joining one thing to another until speech is formed. The strings of beads represent the logical deductions that follow one after the other, where we string one idea to the next until reaching a reasoned conclusion. "Your cheeks are comely with rows" requires an environment bound by space, while "your neck with strings of beads" requires an environment bound by time - for "and after that I examined further" implies the passage of time.
Based on this, one can understand what He is arguing to her: Silver is white, and whiteness is the absence of color. White is the simple, undifferentiated color, what we might think of as clear or colorless; when listing primary colors, white is not included, as it represents the absence of distinct hue. In contrast, the reddish hue of gold portrays vivid color. Scripture comes to say: Now you perceive things in the manner of "circlets of gold" - something governed by quantity and quality, possessing color and defined form. What was originally for you "studs of silver" - an indivisible point that grasps everything in a single instant, without the passage of time and without occupying space - has now become "circlets of gold," an intense color, requiring you to delve deeply, exert yourself, and labor strenuously to comprehend. And all this because you entered the body of Shlomo, because you entered material reality, and material reality pulled you downward.
"While the King Is at His Table" - The Soul's Reply
עַד שֶׁהַמֶּלֶךְ בִּמְסִבּוֹ נִרְדִּי נָתַן רֵיחוֹ׃ (א,יב) - While the king was at his banquet, my spikenard gave off its fragrance (1:12).
The soul answers the Holy One, blessed is He: Know that I have separated from matter. Although I appear joined to Shlomo, seemingly still bound to physical existence, nonetheless, "while the king was at his banquet" - while the physical faculties are seated at their feasts and pleasures, reveling in meat and wine and delighting in material indulgences - "my spikenard gave off its fragrance." I smelled the fragrance of spikenard, the spiritual scent of the sacred incense. "My spikenard" refers to the Holy One, blessed is He, as if to say that fragrance reaches me from Him, blessed be He. I am not truly bonded to the physical body, nor do I partake of and relish its delicacies; rather, the One who gave off His fragrance is my Beloved. The spirituality flowing from Him penetrates to the innermost depths of the body, whereupon the soul rejects physicality and yearns for the spiritual.
"A Bundle of Myrrh" - Recognizing Godliness from within the Soul
צְרוֹר הַמֹּר דּוֹדִי לִי בֵּין שָׁדַי יָלִין׃ (א,יג) - A bundle of myrrh is my Beloved to me; between my breasts he shall rest (1:13).
Here she explains her words in greater depth: The pleasant fragrance and the spirituality drawn from the Holy One, blessed is He, are experienced from two distinct perspectives. The first perspective is from the Godliness within the soul itself. The soul is a divine soul, an actual part of God above; if we ask whether its origin lies in the body or in the Divine, it is beyond doubt a spiritual part of His very essence, blessed be He. Consequently, all Divine matters are innately engraved within its very nature.
There is an expression frequently found in the early sages: "The part resembles the whole." When a part is separated from the whole, the part still resembles the whole. If you break off a piece from the corner of a table and move it away, you can easily tell where it belongs - you see its composition and know that it is not a fragment from an outdoor stone slab. The same is true of a limb severed from a person: one can recognize where it belongs. And if the soul is a part of God above, then the part resembles the whole, and it resembles, as it were, the Holy One, blessed is He.
What does this mean? It means that when one wishes to know what the will of Hashem is, what the purpose of the creation of the soul and body is, and how to attain Godliness, there are two paths. The first is to look inward into the soul. The soul originates from Godliness, and therefore it inherently knows the way to attain Godliness. This is the conscience within us. From where does a person derive a conscience that tells him, "You did something immoral"? From where does the soul know what is moral and what is immoral? These intuitions are etched into the soul, for it is a part of God above, and the matters descending and cascading from God on high are engraved within it.
We once mentioned: a little child speaks with the Master of the World - "My God, I wanted You to know." A six-year-old child converses with his Creator with simple innocence. And what happens to him at age fifteen? Dense physical matter arrives, obscuring and pulling him toward desires and material pursuits. The self-evident truths - that there is a Creator to the world and that one can speak with Him - which were completely clear to him as a child not yet drawn after physical desires, are no longer completely clear to him.
This also explains what we noted previously: that there are things a person cannot do in front of strangers. The soul senses and knows there is something to be ashamed of - these are the very things Chazal characterize as those in which we resemble animals: eating and drinking like an animal, procreating like an animal. A person does not want to be photographed while eating; he does not want to be photographed while sleeping - "Wait, let me get ready," and he moves away from the plate. Where does this awareness come from? Even a non-Jew naturally feels this way. Rather, the soul is like a tablet upon which spirituality is engraved, being a part of the whole, a part of the Holy One, blessed be He; therefore, these inner feelings are inherent within it by its very nature.
This divine fragrance, the Malbim explains, is, as it were, bundled and hidden away within the soul. That is why the beloved maiden says: "A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me" - a bundle giving off a sweet aroma; "he shall lodge between my breasts" - within the chambers of my heart, for between the breasts is the place of the heart. Those spiritual feelings reside within my heart; I sense them of my own accord, and the pull toward spirituality is deep within me.
And it is not without reason that she specifically used the example of a "bundle of myrrh." Myrrh is the well-known and famous perfume, musk, known to this day and of ancient origin: it is derived from the blood of an animal - some say it is sweat found on the back of a deer-like creature - from which a very special fragrance is extracted. And here is the allegory: the bundle of myrrh is that which is derived from blood, and its place is with me in the heart, for the heart and blood express the inner faculties. Early commentators wrote that the purest blood reaches the heart, for if improper blood were to reach it, cardiac problems could arise, Heaven forbid. The choicest blood is in the heart - and so too, divine knowledge resides deep within me, in the soul. Therefore, Master of the World, even though it appears that I am within the body of Shlomo and distant from Divinity, deep inside the heart, deep inside the soul, divine knowledge is already engraved.
"A Cluster of Henna" - Recognizing God Through Creation
אֶשְׁכֹּל הַכֹּפֶר דּוֹדִי לִי בְּכַרְמֵי עֵין גֶּדִי׃ (א,יד) - A cluster of henna is my beloved to me in the vineyards of Ein Gedi.
Yet notice: this is an observation from afar. The previous perception was within the soul itself, in what is engraved upon it. But looking at the world is already something distant, like a fragrance that reaches you from afar. You do not hold it in your hand; it is not the "bundle of myrrh" placed against my heart "between my breasts," but a scent that I smell from a distance.
"A cluster of henna [eshkol hakofer]" is a cluster that gives off a delightful scent. And why is it called an eshkol? We say ish eshkolot ("a man of varied talents"), and Chazal expounded: ish shehakol bo - a man in whom everything is contained; this is the origin of the expression. And among many clusters, there is a singular cluster, the cluster of henna, whose fragrance wafts far away, unmistakable: you know that this is the henna cluster, while those are ordinary grapevine clusters. So too is the Holy One, blessed be He - I sense His fragrance even though there are many clusters, many forces in creation, influences from celestial bodies and constellations, and I am not confused: it is clear to me which is the cluster of henna.
"In the vineyards of Ein Gedi" - Ein Gedi is a wilderness, and this is a metaphor for the dwelling place of the Holy One, blessed be He, which is "in the heavens [Aravot]," beyond the inhabited dwelling of mankind. There He abides, and His fragrance He sends forth to us.
Thus, in summary of the beloved's words: I perceive Divinity both through the perception within the soul - the aspect of "he shall lodge between my breasts" - and through the outward perception, from all that I observe and contemplate in the world, for the entire world cries out Divinity. And from both of these dimensions I seek nothing but Godliness; You have no cause for concern, Master of the World, lest I be drawn after Shlomo, after bodily desires, and after the physical concerns of this world.
In summary:
In these verses, a dialogue unfolds between the Holy One, Blessed is He, and the soul. He reproaches her, saying that the body - "Pharaoh's chariots", the confinement of the sea and of physicality - has harnessed her to its chariots, and that the ornaments upon her, the "rows" and "strings of beads", are nothing other than the marks of limitation that matter has imposed upon her: slow comprehension through the senses, space, and time, in place of the "studs of silver" - the immediate, indivisible perception she enjoyed beneath the Throne of Glory. And the soul replies that even within the body she has not lost her purpose: while the bodily faculties are immersed in their feasts, she senses the fragrance of her nard from on high; she recognizes her Creator from within herself - "A bundle of myrrh... that lies between my breasts", from the Divinity engraved within the soul and conscience, and she recognizes Him from afar as well - "A cluster of henna... in the vineyards of Ein Gedi", through contemplating the whole of creation. Through both of these dimensions, she seeks Godliness alone.