In the previous lesson we studied the parable of a king of flesh and blood, which illustrates the relationship between a Jew and his Creator: with the eyes of the mind a Jew grasps that there is a divine life-force that animates, makes and acts within everything; but with the eyes of flesh he sees nothing at all, for the Creator has no body and no bodily form.
As an introduction, let us recall the words of the Gemara on the verse «ברכי נפשי את ה'» (Bless Hashem, O my soul): just as the soul fills the body, so does the Holy One fill the world. In other words, the world is compared to a body, and the Holy One is like the soul that animates that body.
In the parable we brought, the awe a person feels before a king of flesh and blood is really awe of the king's soul; it is only that he arrives at it by seeing the king's body. So too in the nimshal: the Holy One fills the world, and the world is, as it were, the body, a vast body that lives and acts.
When a person contemplates «מה רבו מעשיך» (how numerous are Your works) and «מה גדלו מעשיך» (how great are Your works), the staggering multitude of details in the inanimate, the vegetative, the animal and the human, and in all of them together, he must ask himself what it is that sets them all in motion. And the answer: the divine life-force at work within them. A Jew has to reach a level of seeing in which, when he comes to look at the world, «בראשית ברא אלוקים את השמים ואת הארץ» (in the beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth), he sees the divine activity taking place at every single moment, so that the very act of looking at the heavens and the earth brings him to awe. This is the source of the expression «yiras shamayim», fear of Heaven.
[When someone today says there is no Creator here, this is nothing but shallowness and a basic failure to understand the simplest systems in creation, systems that have no rational explanation of their own: the particles of the atom spinning in orbit, and the perfect harmony in every last detail. Anyone who contemplates them will realize that there is nothing natural or self-explanatory here; there must be an unlimited power that joins it all together and produces such flawless harmony. The only question is to whom that power should be attributed, whether we call it a Creator or call it by some other name. But to say that there is no such power at all is simply a refusal to think.]
Further on, the Alter Rebbe will explain that every Jew is a believer, and that there is no such thing as a Jew who does not believe: the emunah is always there within him, and all that is needed is to scrape away the covering and uncover it.
In the Alter Rebbe's golden words: «ואם כן ככה ממש יש לו לירא את השם» (and therefore, in exactly this way, he ought to fear Hashem), precisely in the manner of the parable of the flesh and blood king and one who sees the king, that is how a Jew's yiras shamayim should look. And how does he arrive at it? «על ידי ראיית עיני בשר בשמים וארץ וכל צבאם» (through the sight of his eyes of flesh, seeing the heavens and the earth and all their hosts), a person simply looks at the world, at the physicality of creation, and through this his physical seeing becomes joined to his intellectual understanding, «אשר אור אין סוף ברוך הוא מלובש בהם להחיותם» (in which the light of the blessed Ein Sof is clothed in order to give them life), the divine light is clothed in those very physical things and enlivens them at every single moment.
The Holy One deliberately fashioned the world in such a way that His activity would be tangibly on display within it: He performed acts that would be recognizable in physical things, so that when a person looks at those physical things in which the Creator's acts reside, they should awaken in him the recognition that the Creator is present, and with that, awaken yiras shamayim.
In the lines that follow, the Alter Rebbe addresses the difficulty of this avodah: a person sees a table, and he has to contemplate that there is a divine life-force bringing that table into being, and then to join that contemplation to the act of seeing itself. With a flesh and blood king it is far easier, one sees his body and understands that a king's life is present here; but with the world it demands a great deal more work.
In a note, the Alter Rebbe adds another dimension that the Holy One planted in our world, something tangible we can see that connects us to the recognition of the Creator's existence and awakens yiras shamayim in us: «וגם נראה בראיית העין» (and it is also visible to the eye), that a person sees with his eyes of flesh the hosts of heaven, «שהם בטלים לאורו יתברך בהשתחוואם כל יום כלפי מערב בשקיעתם» (that they are in a state of bittul to His blessed light, bowing each day toward the west as they set).
There is something fascinating here that we take entirely for granted day after day: the sun sets in the west, and not only that, but from the moment it rises its entire course is westward. It is already written in seforim centuries ago that the greatest of the investigators wore themselves out, they tried and labored and never managed to understand the sun's westward course, since according to all the calculations of the spheres in which the sun is set, its movement should have been eastward and not westward. It is an entire science, and all who occupied themselves with it could not understand why the motion runs contrary to logic.
The Gemara explains this on a verse we say every day in davening: «כמאמר רז"ל על פסוק וצבא השמים לך משתחוים» (as our Sages said on the verse, and the hosts of heaven bow to You). Although everyone knows perfectly well that «מלוא כל הארץ כבודו» (the whole earth is filled with His glory) and that the Holy One is present in every place and every corner, nevertheless each of the four directions corresponds to one of the holy sefiros or to one of their themes, and the west corresponds to the Creator's malchus, His kingship. Hence the expression «שהשכינה במערב» (that the Shechinah is in the west), a familiar phrase whose source is in the Gemara. And since the Shechinah is in the west, «ונמצא הילוכם כל היום כלפי מערב הוא דרך השתחוואה וביטול» (it emerges that their travel all day toward the west is an act of bowing and bittul).
To sharpen the point: in Sefer Yehoshua, when Yehoshua bin Nun was at war with his enemies and asked that night not fall so that he could continue fighting, he said «שמש בגבעון דום» (sun, in Giv'on, be still), that the sun should halt its course. The question arises: seemingly he should have said «sun, in Giv'on, stand», so what is meant by «dom»? (Nowadays, when we want a person to stand still in place we say «amod dom», and the source of the phrase is right here, except that Yehoshua did not say «amod» at all, only «dom».)
The commentators explain that the word «dom» comes from demamah, silence. The sun praises the Holy One at every moment and sings its song, as brought in Perek Shirah. And the sun is no mute lump: the Rambam writes at the beginning of his sefer that all the spheres, the sun among them, possess wisdom and intellect [and that there is an angel appointed over it], and it sings song to its Creator. That singing is its bittul before the Creator, and it is the singing itself that produces its bowing. Therefore, when Yehoshua wanted to stop the sun's motion, he said to it «dom», cease your song; and once it stops singing, it will stand still and cease advancing. There was no need to tell it to stand, «dom» alone was enough to bring its travel to a halt.
It emerges that the sun, and likewise all the hosts of heaven, express a bowing through the very act of their travel and advance.
On this the Alter Rebbe brings a parable: «והנה גם מי שלא ראה את המלך מעולם ואינו מכירו כלל אעפ"כ כשנכנס לחצר המלך ורואה שרים רבים ונכבדים משתחוים לאיש א' תפול עליו אימה ופחד» (now, even one who has never seen the king and does not recognize him at all, nevertheless, when he enters the king's courtyard and sees many distinguished ministers bowing to one man, dread and fear will fall upon him). A person walks into the courtyard of the king's palace, not the palace itself but its courtyard, and the king is there, only that he does not identify him and has no idea who he is. He sees many people standing there, who look like dignitaries and ministers, and he sees these many distinguished ministers bowing to one man. The very sight of this act, everyone standing in such bittul before that one man, makes awe of that man fall upon him then and there, an immediate awe.
In summary: in this section we studied the nimshal of the parable of the king: just as the soul fills the body, so does the Holy One fill the world, and therefore a Jew must reach a way of seeing in which, looking with eyes of flesh at the heavens and the earth and all their hosts, he sees the light of the Ein Sof clothed within them and giving them life, and from this comes yiras shamayim. We also studied the note in the margin: the bowing of the hosts of heaven toward the west as they set, which the investigators cannot account for by the reckoning of the spheres, and whose source lies in the fact that the Shechinah is in the west, corresponding to the Creator's malchus. From here too comes the explanation of «שמש בגבעון דום», that the sun's song is the bittul that produces its travel. And we closed by opening the parable of the king's courtyard, in which the mere sight of ministers bowing to one man brings about an immediate awe.
In the next section we will read the parable in the Alter Rebbe's own words inside the sefer, and we will address the point that arriving at this kind of seeing is not simple and demands real work.