In the previous section we studied the difference between chochmah and binah: chochmah as the flash point, the sudden spark, and binah as the expansion of that point into developed understanding. Now we will see why these two are called father and mother, what they give birth to within the nefesh ha'elokis, and we will go deeper into the various modes of hisbonenus (contemplation) in the greatness of the Creator.
Chochmah and Binah: Father and Mother
The three intellectual faculties as a group are called the imos, the "mothers." Having explained the difference between chochmah and binah, the Alter Rebbe now adds a specific designation for each one: "והן הם אב ואם" ("and they are father and mother"). Chochmah is called the father, binah is called the mother. Why this way and not the reverse?
Because it corresponds exactly to father and mother in the plain, literal sense. The father supplies the point, the seed. The mother, as we learned in chapter 2, supplies the expansion, nine months of development in the womb, until a child is born from it. It is therefore obvious that chochmah, the flash of the lightning point, is called father, and binah is called mother.
What, then, do chochmah and binah give birth to?
[We will leave daas for the end of the chapter, since it is a world unto itself. The Alter Rebbe himself wrote it as a separate unit, in a new passage beginning with the word "והדעת". This is not to say that daas is unrelated to the world of intellect, only that we cannot properly locate its place and function before we have analyzed and clarified the nature of the first two. So for now we stay with chochmah and binah.]
"והן הם אב ואם המולידות" ("and they are the father and mother that give birth"). What is born from this father and mother? The middos, the emotional attributes: chesed, gevurah and tiferes. The example of chesed is love of Hashem; the example of gevurah is fear and dread of Him; and so with tiferes and all the rest. But a precise reader immediately notices something. Earlier, when the Alter Rebbe described the middos belonging to the world of gevurah, he listed dread first and fear second. Here the order flips: "יראתו ופחדו" ("His fear and His dread").
Why does the order reverse?
The explanation is simple. When the Alter Rebbe is describing the middah itself, the question is which of the two is more truly a middah, dread or fear? Yirah, fear, is seated in the brain; pachad, dread, is seated in the heart. So when he was mapping out the world of the middos, he put pachad first, since pachad actually resides in the world of middos, and only afterward its root, yirah. Here, however, he is describing the process of birth, how it unfolds and descends downward. In that process the yirah of the brain comes first, and from there it descends into the heart and becomes pachad.
Note also that although the order of birth in the soul is yirah first and then ahavah, here the Alter Rebbe listed love first and fear second, because that is the order of the middos themselves: chesed and then gevurah. Later on it will be stated explicitly that in the soul's order of birth yirah must precede ahavah, along with the reason why.
"כי הנה השכל שבנפש המשכלת" ("for behold, the intellect of the intellectual soul"). This refers to the nefesh ha'elokis, which has within it the potential to be maskeles, to comprehend, to develop and to give birth. When a person uses it properly, this is the intellectual soul acting as the intermediary, drawing everything down for the benefit of the nefesh ha'elokis under discussion here.
The Three Modes of Hisbonenus in the Greatness of the Creator
So far the process has been described as it is: a flash, analysis, understanding, and the birth of emotion. Now we will see how this works in practice. When a person contemplates with binah, after chochmah has illuminated him, what exactly is he contemplating? What does the nefesh ha'elokis contemplate? Here the Alter Rebbe takes us on a quick tour of the modes of contemplation available in the greatness of the Creator, contemplation that is meant to give birth to the corresponding emotions.
He begins by saying that the intellect of the intellectual soul "מעמיק מאוד בגדולת השם" ("contemplates deeply in the greatness of Hashem"). That is, it brings the matter down into comprehension, into binah. For if it remains in chochmah, chochmah is still not the person himself: it is like seeing something that exists outside of him. For the matter to actually work on him, seeing is not enough; it has to be drawn inside, and that drawing happens through deep contemplation of what the flash illuminated.
Contemplation of the greatness of the Creator divides into categories, and here the Alter Rebbe lists three very broad ones that include them all: "איך הוא ממלא כל עלמין וסובב כל עלמין וכולא קמיה כלא חשיב" ("how He fills all worlds and encompasses all worlds, and before Him everything is considered as nothing"). These three expressions are three completely different fields of contemplation, each on a different level and in a different domain, each with its own analogies, examples and explanations. One could devote long series of shiurim to each one. We will pass over them briefly, since the Alter Rebbe brings them here only as illustrations of the process.
In keeping with the principle laid out at the opening of chapter 3, that everything that exists above in the worlds exists also in the soul of man, we will explain "memalei kol almin" and "sovev kol almin" as they are in Elokus by way of their parallels in the human soul. The Gemara expounds on the verse "ברכי נפשי את השם" ("Bless Hashem, O my soul"): just as the Holy One fills the world, so the soul fills the body, the very same expression. These terms are not the exclusive property of Kabbalah, chassidus and Tanya; they appear in the Gemara as well. All that is left for us is to understand their definitions.
"Memalei Kol Almin" (Filling All Worlds)
It is easier to begin with the soul filling the body, and from there to understand how the Holy One fills the world. The physical body has 248 limbs and 365 sinews, and the soul clothes itself in every one of the limbs and enlivens the body. But does it clothe itself in all the limbs in the same way, in the same measure, with the same intensity, in the same dosage? Clearly not. There is a very sharp differentiation. Even the two hands are not equal: the Torah writes "ידך" ("your hand") spelled in a way that hints at the weaker hand, since there is a weak hand and a strong hand, a right hand and a left hand.
How much more so with the greater differences, such as between the eyes and the hands: in the eye is the power of sight, in the hand the power of writing and movement. So too the faculties of hearing, walking, touch and smell. Every limb and every sense receives what belongs to it, and the soul clothes itself in each limb according to the vessel that receives the power entering it. It emerges that "filling the body" means the soul investing itself in the limbs of the body, each limb according to its capacity and the measure of its vessel. (One could go on at length about whether the variation comes from the side of the vessel or from the side of the light; we will stay with the essential point.)
So too the Holy One fills the world. He is present in every single detail of creation, and there is no detail in which He is not present, but He is not present in all details to the same degree in a revealed way. In the inanimate one way, in the vegetative another way, and even within the inanimate itself there are distinctions: there are stones you build a wall with, worth a few pennies, and there are precious stones and pearls; water is inanimate and rock is inanimate, and so on. The inanimate world is a world of endless variations, and the same is true of the vegetative and the differences between them. It emerges that the divine vitality in each and every detail of creation is not equal in all of them.
A person can sit and contemplate these variations and their intensity until he arrives at "מה רבו מעשיך השם" ("How manifold are Your works, Hashem") and "מה גדלו מעשיך השם" ("How great are Your works, Hashem"), and this contemplation alone will give birth in him to tremendous emotion, until he says: the Creator of the world is with me right now, literally, in every single detail, enlivening me and bringing me into being. This is contemplation that leads a person to the truest emotions. This is "memalei kol almin," three words that constitute an entire field of study, contemplation and depth, enough on their own to live with for a hundred and twenty years and to fulfill "ואהבת את השם אלוקיך בכל לבבך" ("And you shall love Hashem your G-d with all your heart").
"Sovev Kol Almin" (Encompassing All Worlds)
This is a completely different field of contemplation, and here too we will use the relationship between soul and body to understand the relationship between the Creator and the world. Is the soul's expression in the body limited to that mode which varies from limb to limb, or is there also an expression that is present in all the limbs equally, with the same intensity? Clearly there is a power in the soul that is present in every limb in exactly equal measure, and it is a power we all know: the power of ratzon, will.
When a person wants to see something, the will clothes itself in sight, in the eye; when he wants to run, the will clothes itself in the legs. The very fact that the will has no specific vessel in the body that you can point to and say "here is the organ of will" (whereas sight has a vessel, the eye, and a person will never see with his ears, because the power of sight is a limited power that is not found anywhere else) teaches us that the will finds expression in every single place in the body. Nor is it that a person first wills in the heart or the brain and from there conducts the will outward. It is explained in chassidus in many places that there is no lapse of time between the will and its execution, and the will does not have to pass through some way station which, if it were weak, would prevent it from arriving.
The will is present in all the limbs literally at all times. A person can be occupied in his mind with one matter, and in the middle of it he wants to walk, and he walks; the will acts on the legs even though the mind is busy with something else entirely. For this reason the will is called "sovev," encompassing the whole body. And "sovev" does not mean that it is located outside the body. It is present in every limb, literally. It is only that since it is not present in a way tailored to each individual limb, and is not grasped by one limb more than another, it is called sovev, encompassing.
In the divine power too there is such a level, "sovev kol almin," and it is a far deeper subject. So much so that it is explained in chassidus that "memalei kol almin" can be grasped even by a non-Jew, while "sovev kol almin" can be grasped only by a Jew; this is already a higher level.
A Jew's human intellect apprehends these matters, and a non-Jew's intellect does not. Even we, as Jews, cannot really explain why he is unable to grasp it, but so it is written. The aspect of "סובב כל עלמין" is a loftier domain, and in it too a person can contemplate.
And what is "כולא קמיה כלא חשיב" ("before Him everything is considered as nothing")? This is a third subject entirely. With regard to "memalei kol almin" and "sovev kol almin" there is still some relationship to the worlds; the very fact that we are discussing them implies that they have some value. But there is a level of contemplation deeper than that: all the worlds together are not reckoned before Him at all. The Creator, in His abstract divine essence, does not engage with the world at all, neither in the mode of memalei kol almin nor in the mode of sovev kol almin. Relative to Him Himself, the world is not reckoned at all, nothing and null. This is a third kind of contemplation. Whole chapters of Tanya and whole maamarim of chassidus have been written on each of these aspects, and each is a subject unto itself.
In any case, the Alter Rebbe's point here is this: when a person contemplates one of these three, according to his measure of understanding and his capacity, and delves very deeply into these matters, he gives birth within himself to the middos, love and fear of Hashem. As we will see shortly.
To summarize: In this section we learned that chochmah is called father and binah is called mother, just like a father and mother in the literal sense: the father gives the point and the mother expands it and gives birth. We saw that they give birth to the middos, love of Hashem and fear and dread of Him, and we clarified why the order flips between the description of the middah itself (dread before fear) and the order of birth (fear before dread). We also explained two of the modes of contemplation in the greatness of the Creator: "memalei kol almin," the divine light that clothes itself in every detail according to the capacity of its vessel, like the soul investing itself in each and every limb; and "sovev kol almin," a power present everywhere in equal measure, like the will, which has no particular vessel in the body.
In the next section we will continue with chochmah and binah as the father and mother that give birth to emotion, and we will see how deep contemplation of the greatness of the Creator gives birth in the soul to the middos of love and fear.