In the previous sections we studied the Alter Rebbe's fundamental principle: creation effects no change whatsoever in the Creator. Now the Alter Rebbe illustrates this principle with two analogies: the analogy of the letters of speech and thought, and a physical analogy, the way the light of a candle and the rays of the sun are nullified in their source.
[A word by way of introduction: ideas like these are not acquired in one hour a week. Someone who contemplates them day in and day out stands a chance that they will penetrate and do their work.]
The Alter Rebbe's words: “וגם עתה כן הוא לבדו בלי שום שינוי כלל” (“and now too He alone is, without any change at all”). And why is there no change? “מפני שכל הנבראים בטלים אצלו במציאות ממש” (“because all created beings are nullified before Him in actual fact”): in truth, every creature stands in complete bittul, utter nullification, before the Creator. On this the Alter Rebbe brings two analogies.
The first analogy: the letters of speech and thought (as explained at length in chapters 20 and 21):
We all believe that the Torah is true, and it is well known that the Torah speaks in human language so that we, created beings, should be able to understand. In Bereishis the Torah reveals to us how the world was created. Not that after learning it we grasp the act of creation itself, but there are a few words in those verses that disclose the manner of creation: through speech. “ויאמר אלוקים יהי אור” (“And G‑d said, let there be light”), “ויאמר אלוקים תדשא הארץ דשא” (“And G‑d said, let the earth sprout vegetation”), and so on; and likewise in the verse familiar to us from davening, “בדבר ה' שמים נעשו וברוח פיו כל צבאם” (“By the word of G‑d the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their hosts”).
Obviously this is not speech of the kind we produce, for He has no body and no bodily form. We are not talking about a sound such that, had a recording device been set down during the six days of creation, one would hear an echo of “let there be light” coming out of it, the way it is pictured in films and in all sorts of imagery. The speech is only a mashal, an analogy. But when the Torah specifically chooses the analogy of speech, it is clear that it wants to bring a particular idea within reach of our minds: our speech has a certain characteristic, and that characteristic is what will help us understand how this works by the Creator.
First an introductory point: in every one of the faculties of created beings, there is no advantage without a corresponding deficiency. Any quality you point to on one side necessarily carries a drawback on the other. Every bump creates a dent on its reverse side, and that is simply the nature of the world.
The advantage of speech and its drawback:
The advantage: speech brings what is hidden out into the open. Were a person, G‑d forbid, mute, it could be that wondrous things lie buried in his soul and no one would ever know of them. This is the gift the Holy One gave us, and on account of it we are called “medaber,” a speaker: the ability to bring the inner, concealed self outward.
The drawback: the moment the words have been said, they are out. A person can never put all of himself into his speech, and once the thing has left him he no longer has any control over it. Speech reveals, but from that moment on what was revealed has gone out of him and is no longer within.
With the Holy One, all advantages are advantages only, with no deficiencies attached. We, created beings, are limited, and so every quality of ours comes bound up with a lack; by the Creator the advantage is purely an advantage, and the deficiency we suffer from simply does not exist in Him. Therefore, when the Torah reveals that the Holy One spoke and created, it means only the advantage of speech, the revealing of what was hidden, without its drawback. The Creator revealed, as it were, His power and with it created creatures, but the letters did not go outside; they remained within.
And what does “remained within” mean? By the Creator one cannot speak of an “outside” at all, since everything is He and He is everything. But here too we lean on our analogy, in order to express that there is nothing here but the advantage: the thing did not leave, it stayed inside, it remained what it is. And since it remained inside, it is without letters, for the shape of letters is formed only in the going out. It emerges that He spoke, as it were, and did not speak: the advantage of speech is here, and with it the drawback is absent.
And what do we gain from this analogy? This great and wondrous world was created through speech, yet that speech never went out. Picture a situation in which you see a person who is not speaking, and nevertheless you see everything going on inside him. It would never occur to you that those things are outside of him, since they are within him. So too with the world: it came out through speech and it did not come out; it remained with the Creator and within Him, that is, it remained united with the Creator exactly as it was before it was formed. The act of creation did not sever it from the Creator.
To our senses, though, the world looks cut off from the Creator. We see a world and we do not see the Creator. And why is it called “olam”? From the word he’elem, concealment, for it conceals Him. To us it seems that an independent reality has come into being here, distant and disconnected, with no link to its Maker and no sight of Him. A person can even come to think and say “my strength and the might of my hand have made me all this wealth,” and Pharaoh said “mine is my river and I made myself.” All of this stems from the Creator having fashioned a darkness in which a person is able to err; but in truth nothing ever left Him, and everything has remained within Him.
In the Alter Rebbe's words:
“מפני שכל הנבראים בטלים אצלו במציאות ממש, כביטול אותיות הדיבור והמחשבה במקורן ושורשן, הוא מהות הנפש ועצמותה, שהן עשר בחינותיה חכמה בינה ודעת כו', שאין בהן בחינת אותיות עדיין” (“because all created beings are nullified before Him in actual fact, like the nullification of the letters of speech and thought in their source and root, which is the essence and being of the soul, namely its ten faculties, chochmah, binah, daas and so on, in which there is as yet no aspect of letters at all”). Take the letters of speech as they are in their source and root, as though they had never gone out but had stayed within: there they are not letters at all, but abstracted from any shape, since the shape of a letter is acquired only in the going out. In the soul itself, in its ten faculties that we have discussed at length previously, there are no letters whatsoever.
And should someone ask: surely thought also has letters, for a person thinks in letters? The answer is that thought is already considered a “going out,” not a going out toward another person, but a going out toward oneself. A simple illustration: it is a perfectly legitimate question to ask “in which language do you think?” or “in which language do you count?” One counts in English, another in Hebrew, another in Yiddish. But the understanding itself, does it have a language? In the process of arriving at understanding there is a difference, but the understanding itself is abstracted from letters. So thought is already outside the soul, whereas within the soul itself there are no letters.
And just as the letters are nullified in their source, so too the world: from the Creator's side it is exactly as it was before it was created, and there is no independent reality here at all. The world was created only for our eyes, and the Creator made it in such a way that through avodah, through toil and hisbonenus, we should arrive at the true recognition that the world is in a state of bittul. That is our daily work (and see the lengthy discussion in chapters 20 and 21).
The second analogy, a physical one: the light of a candle and the light of the sun:
The Alter Rebbe then adds “משל גשמי לזה” (“a physical analogy for this”), since the analogy of the letters and the soul is somewhat abstract. Let us preface an even simpler physical analogy, the one the Gemara puts in the words “shraga betihara mai ahani,” a candle at midday, what good does it do?
A person who steps outside at noon, or even one standing in a room with sunlight streaming in through every window, can hold a burning candle in his hand and ask the person facing him, “is the candle in my hand lit or not?” It is doubtful he will be able to tell. One will see neither the flame nor the candle's light, because where there is a stronger light, a lesser light has no existence. And yet the little candle most certainly exists: surround it with a partition and its light will be seen at once. Why, then, is it not visible? Because it is eclipsed and nullified before something far more powerful than itself.
And in the Alter Rebbe's words, who brings a similar case: “כביטול זיו ואור השמש במקורו, הוא גוף כדור השמש ברקיע” (“like the nullification of the radiance and light of the sun in its source, which is the body of the sun's sphere in the sky”). The sun is the source of light, and its radiance spreads out through the whole surrounding space until it reaches us, an enormous distance away. And if it shines with such strength over such a distance, how much more so must there be light inside the body of the sun itself. Only that as long as it is inside, it cannot be called “light” but “luminary”: the light takes on the meaning and the name of light only once it has moved away from the sun. Inside the sun the point is not that there is no light there; there is light there, but it has no existence or significance of its own, since it is entirely nullified in its source.
In summary: in this section we learned that the Creator “alone is, without any change at all,” because all created beings are nullified before Him in actual fact. This principle was explained through two analogies. The analogy of the letters of speech: the Torah chose the language of speech in order to teach us about the advantage of revealing the hidden, without the drawback that speech has in us, and therefore the letters never went “outside,” as it were, and the world remained united with the Creator just as it was before it was formed. And the physical analogy: the nullification of a candle's light in the light of the sun, and the nullification of the sun's radiance in its source, the body of the sun's sphere, where even though the light exists, it has no existence or significance in the presence of its source.
In the next section we will continue explaining the Alter Rebbe's words in this chapter.