In the previous lesson we finished chapter 20. The themes it deals with are not simple or easy, so before we move on, let us review in an orderly way the main points and the whole progression of thought that we followed in the chapter. From there, with G-d's help, we will go on to chapter 21.
The Alter Rebbe wants to bring every Jew to the recognition that, in the true reality of things, every single detail of creation is utterly nullified to the Creator, in a state of complete bittul. This point opens chapter 20, and it stays with us through chapters 21, 22 and 23 as well. When a person does not sense things this way, when he attaches importance and value to some detail of creation in a way that runs against the will of G-d, this is a disconnection, G-d forbid, from the reality of the Creator, for everything is Him and He is everything. That is why every detail expresses "אנכי ה' אלוקיך," "I am the L-rd your G-d," and every descent and stumble expresses the "לא יהיה לך," "you shall have no other gods," of the second commandment.
How does a person arrive at this recognition and understanding, that everything is entirely nullified to G-dliness?
For this the Alter Rebbe gives a long explanation, built on the parallel between the divine power that creates the world and the power of speech in a human being. The Torah itself compares the divine power to speech: "בדבר ה' שמים נעשו," "By the word of G-d the heavens were made," and likewise in the ten utterances with which the world was created, "ויאמר אלוקים יהי," "And G-d said, let there be." Since the divine power that forms creation has been likened to human speech, we can learn the nimshal, the divine reality, from the mashal, the parable of speech.
Let us briefly recall the introductory parable: when a person throws a stone, the stone stays in the air only because the force of the throw is pushing it, and the moment that force weakens and fades, the stone falls back to its previous state. So what does a person who sees a stone in the air actually see? With plain physical eyes he sees a flying stone, but the eyes of the intellect teach that there is no phenomenon of a flying stone here at all, only energy doing the pushing.
The same is true in the nimshal, in the divine power that produces the world, and this is a tremendous chiddush: the entire creation, the inanimate, the vegetative, the animal and the human, and everything that takes place in the world, is nothing but the result of the divine life force. We cannot attribute the existence of the world to the world itself, as if to say, "here is a world, a world that exists, a big world, a functioning world." It is not a world at all; it is divine energy pushing and producing this result at every single moment.
But this parable only takes care of the first stage: that we not attribute to the world an independent existence standing on its own strength, but recognize that it stands only by the power of the Creator.
Once we believe, agree and understand that the world is not a reality existing on its own, G-d forbid, but a divine power producing it and pushing it into being at every moment, one can still argue: the divine power that is busy with this creation thereby grants it importance, for after all, it is a fact that He occupies Himself with it, and if so, something of real value has come into being here.
And what is wrong with that? It is written, "אני ה' לא שניתי," "I, G-d, have not changed," and we say, "אתה הוא עד שלא נברא העולם, אתה הוא משנברא העולם," "You are the same before the world was created, You are the same after the world was created." No addition and no change whatsoever came about in the Creator in any detail; after the creation everything is exactly as it was before the creation. This is hard to grasp: before the creation there was no creation, and now there is a creation that the Creator occupies Himself with and produces at every moment. If so, there is a whole broad reality of a world that the Creator is producing, so how can we say that nothing has happened?
To answer this comes the long parable from the power of speech in a human being, and it has two stages: first we will understand the process a person goes through until the words come out of his mouth; and then, once the word has left the mouth, we will look back and assess what the value, worth and weight of that word really is relative to each of the stages that preceded it.
The four stages of speech:
Mind: the subject a person speaks about must first be present in his awareness. Something that does not exist in his awareness cannot be spoken about at all.
Heart: next the matter descends into the emotional side. A person does not speak about something to which he has no emotional connection at all.
Thought: a normal person first thinks about what he is about to say.
Speech: only after all of this do the words leave the mouth.
The gap between one station and the next is very great. The words that come out of the mouth are, relatively speaking, coarse words: you can hear them, record them, see them as sound waves. The further back we climb toward an earlier stage, the more abstract and refined the words become.
In the world of thought, which precedes speech, there are also letters, for a person thinks in letters, except that they are far more abstract than the letters of the mouth. That is why one person cannot identify another person's thought, hear it or record it. What speech and thought have in common is that both consist of letters; the difference is that in speech they are tangible, coarse letters, while in thought they are far more refined.
Now let us climb one stage higher, to the world of emotion, and higher still to the awareness of the mind, where there are no letters at all. Understanding is not made up of letters: there is no difference in the understanding itself between a person who speaks English, French, Hebrew or any other language. Speech and thought have letters, but intellect, comprehension and the idea itself are abstracted from letters.
The same is true of a feeling in the heart, for example the feeling of hunger: the sensation itself is identical in all human beings. Only when it descends into thought, "I am hungry," does each person already think in his own way and in his own language: how he will quiet his hunger, why he is hungry, when he last ate and how much time has passed. In the world of emotion itself there are no letters for this at all.
From this we can appreciate the magnitude of the tzimtzum, the contraction, that the letters undergo from world to world and from stage to stage, until they descend into revealed, tangible speech that can be picked up by the ear.
All of this is only an introduction to the main stage. In the world of speech and hearing, a word is something weighty: the entire relationship between one person and another is built on "this is what he said to me" and "this is what he did not say to me," and with a single word a person can build up or tear down. Even each individual letter carries great value: a small child who begins to speak and produces one syllable, "Abba," and everyone dances around him with joy, for in the world of speech each syllable certainly has great value.
But we have to take this word and weigh it against the stages from which it came: to climb upward stage by stage and see what the word weighs at each stage, and what it is worth relative to the power of speech itself.
To summarize: in this section we reviewed the main points of chapter 20. The starting point is the recognition that every detail of creation is utterly nullified to the Creator, and that every detail expresses "אנכי ה' אלוקיך" while every stumble expresses "לא יהיה לך." To make this understandable, the Torah compared the divine power to speech, "בדבר ה' שמים נעשו." The parable of the thrown stone taught us the first stage: the world has no independent existence; it is divine energy pushing it and producing it at every moment. From there we moved to the further stage: how can it be that "אני ה' לא שניתי," that no addition whatsoever came about in the Creator, even though He is occupied with creation at every moment. For this we examined the four stages of speech in a human being, mind, heart, thought and speech, and the enormous tzimtzum between one stage and the next: from the coarse letters of the mouth, to the refined letters of thought, and up to intellect and emotion, which have no letters at all.
In the next section we will continue and assess the weight of the word relative to the power of speech in the soul, and from there, with G-d's help, we will move on to chapter 21.