In the previous section we studied the power of chochmah as the source of the intellect: how chochmah is the primary faculty from which all intellectual awareness flows. Now we will go deeper into the essential difference between chochmah and binah, two entirely different worlds within the process of learning and understanding.
The difference between chochmah and binah is not merely an abstract concept; every person can feel it on any number of occasions. Later we will see that there are various levels in this, but first let us look at the basic level, the one that is familiar and recognizable to everyone.
The process of learning:
A person sits and studies a certain subject, whether a Torah subject or, lehavdil, some other subject, and he struggles to grasp the matter. The same happens in the middle of one's work, when a person does not know how to solve a particular problem. In any field a person is involved in, he may find himself standing before the question of how to resolve the situation in front of him.
The first stage is confusion: the person does not know, he cannot find his place, he finds no solution and no way out. And then, precisely after the confusion and after the not-knowing, an idea flashes in his mind. In that very second when the flash comes, he is filled with tremendous pleasure and joy, because he feels that the problem has been solved and the matter has lit up for him.
From here one of two things can happen. Either it disappears as quickly as it came: someone spoke to him and interrupted him, and the flash was gone. This is not imagination; the pleasure he felt a moment earlier from the solution that appeared to him was entirely real. Or else he manages to sit with himself and analyze the flash slowly, bringing it down into letters and words, sometimes with a pen and paper, jotting down words that are not even in order, and out of that gradually building the entire structure. Someone who does not know this process from the seforim, and experiences it for the first time, thinks that something is wrong with him, that he is a confused person who does not know how to build his ideas. But that is exactly how the process is built, and in a moment we will understand why.
These are the names of the stages of the process:
Bittul: the person nullifies himself, and this is the confusion.
Chochmah: the flash, the idea that sparked in the mind.
Binah: bringing the flash down into actuality, into understanding and detail.
This is the difference between chochmah and binah, and they are two entirely different worlds.
Broadly speaking, one can identify two types of people:
The person of chochmah: the faculty of chochmah shines in him powerfully. He is a man of endless inventions, ideas keep dropping into his head without a pause, but he is incapable of implementing anything or bringing it down into an orderly structure. All he can do is throw out ideas.
The person of binah: an idea never drops into his head on its own, but once he hears an idea from someone else, or once an idea does arise in him, he knows how to analyze it, because his binah works faster.
Every soul is complete, and both faculties exist in every person; it is only that there is always a greater strength in one or the other.
Chochmah and binah: sight and hearing:
In certain places these two faculties are given other names: chochmah is called sight, and binah is called hearing. The difference explained above between the flash and the analysis will be well understood from the difference between seeing and hearing.
A person stands in front of an enormous, towering building, full of details and designs and details within details. The first time he stands beside it, he opens his eyes, gives it a two-second look and closes them, and he has already photographed the entire structure. But when he is asked to describe everything he saw, two seconds will not suffice: it may take him twenty-four hours to describe what he saw in two seconds, as he keeps recalling one more detail and another. How can it be that in sight everything was taken in within a second or two, while in hearing, when someone else asks to hear those same things, the process is long and drawn out in detail?
This is precisely the relationship between chochmah and binah. In sight, nothing has yet been absorbed into the intellect and the awareness, and nothing has been internalized; all that happened is that something outside of him was photographed. The Holy One, blessed be He, gave a person the ability to open his eye and photograph something that is outside himself, even though he does not understand it, does not absorb it, and cannot even reconcile the contradictions in what he saw, and nevertheless he saw. Sight is a photograph of something from the outside, and this is chochmah: it flashed in his mind, and the Holy One, blessed be He, in His abundant mercy, gave him the ability to photograph and to see the depth of the matter in one quick snapshot.
And just as the flash is liable to run away, so too with sight. Sometimes a person sees something and walks out overwhelmed, and when he is asked to describe what he saw, he answers that he has no words and no ability to explain, and he cannot get out even a single word. And why does he not know? He saw it! This is exactly the person into whom a flash fell and who did not manage to bring it down into binah. Not every person is able to bring chochmah down into binah; that ability is a talent in its own right, the talent of binah. Chochmah is the photograph and the seeing, and binah is the hearing: the analysis, the expansion and the details.
Why is it called by the name 'chochmah'?
The word chochmah is a combination of two words: koach mah, the power of "what." "Mah" expresses bittul, self-nullification, as in the words of Moshe and Aharon, "ונחנו מה כי תלינו עלינו" ("and what are we, that you complain against us"): what are we? The power of chochmah is a power of bittul, because there is as yet no grasp in it and no substance in it, and there is nothing to hold on to. He saw something, something flashed for him, but what the thing actually is is still "mah." Once it comes down below, it becomes binah.
And why specifically did it merit the title "koach," power? After all, binah is also a power, and so is daas, and there are many other faculties. The answer is that the intent is not to some particular power, but rather as in the expression "to bring out from potential (koach) into actuality (poel)": koach is the potential and poel is the deed. In this relationship, chochmah is the potential and binah is the actual, since in binah a person draws out from chochmah. There is no binah without chochmah, but there can be chochmah without binah.
The essential avodah is that a person should know how to connect chochmah to binah always, and to remember the point, because in the midst of the expansion and the spreading out he is liable to lose the point from which he came and what he was after in the first place. The matter resembles a spring and a river: the river is wide and great, the breadth of the river, but where does it come from? From the spring that flows drop by drop. The spring is the drops of chochmah, and the river is standing, gathered water whose source is the flowing spring, and that is binah. A small spring, a tiny opening from which water trickles, and from that trickle an enormous river comes into being. So it is with chochmah and binah.
Let us look at the Alter Rebbe's own words:
And the explanation of the matter: "כי הנה השכל שבנפש המשכלת" ("for behold, the intellect of the rational soul"), that potential which exists in the soul to understand things, "שהוא המשכיל כל דבר, נקרא בשם חכמה" ("which conceives any thing, is called by the name chochmah"), that is, koach mah, a power that has no grasp in it and does have bittul in it. "והוא כשמוציא כוחו אל הפועל" ("and when one brings his potential into actuality"), when a person takes the flash and brings it down into the actual, giving it flesh, expansion, parables and explanations, "שמתבונן בשכלו להבין דבר לאשורו" ("when he contemplates with his intellect in order to understand a thing truly"), meaning to understand it properly.
The word "לאשורו" ("truly," fully) includes two elements within it:
Length: that he understand the matter and also be able to bring it down to a lower level, to give it a still lower parable.
Breadth: that he be able to compare one thing to another, so that understanding one concept helps him understand a second concept and then another.
And the Alter Rebbe adds "להעמיקו" ("to fathom its depth"), to understand the depth of the matter. This is the analysis that gives substance to the flash, and this is binah: "מתוך איזה דבר חכמה המושכל בשכלו נקרא בינה" ("out of some matter of chochmah conceived in his mind, this is called binah"). This is the difference between chochmah and binah.
"Rav was silent":
An interesting example is found in the Gemara. Twenty-four times we find that Rav said something and the Sages of Israel disagreed with him, and every time the Gemara uses the same expression: they raised very strong questions before him that contradicted his words, and "שתק רב" ("Rav was silent"). He had no explanation to satisfy the questioner. And yet, in some of those cases the halachah was decided according to Rav's opinion. How can that be, if he was silent?
The answer is that the point of chochmah was shining in him in its fullness. He saw the matter; it simply did not come down into binah. Not because Rav could not bring it down, for he was a giant, but because the surroundings were not capable of understanding it. Therefore it was evident from his silence that this was not a silence of deficiency, but a silence stemming from an immense seeing of the matter, one that does not come down into explanation. Chochmah was shining at the very highest level, and this is a very lofty rung in chochmah, as was mentioned that there are levels within chochmah. That is why the halachah was decided like him: his silence was not the silence of not knowing, but the silence of a shining truth.
In summary: in this section we learned the essential difference between chochmah and binah. Chochmah is the initial flash, "koach mah," a quick photograph of the matter from the outside, in the category of sight, which contains bittul and as yet has no grasp and no substance. Binah is the power to bring the flash out from potential into actuality: to analyze it, expand it and detail it in length, in breadth and in depth, in the category of hearing. We saw that every soul contains both faculties, but that in each person one of them is stronger, and that they are bound up with one another like a spring and a river. And we learned from the example of "Rav was silent" that chochmah can shine with tremendous force even without coming down into binah.
In the next section we will deal with the three "mothers" and with the understanding of Elokus: how the three intellectual faculties serve as the mothers and the foundation for understanding matters of Elokus and for the avodah of the soul.