In the previous section we looked at the higher level of fear of Heaven, yirah ila'ah, the yirah about which it is said: «אם אין חכמה אין יראה» (if there is no chochmah there is no yirah). This level cannot be reached unless chochmah comes first; without it a person simply cannot arrive at any recognition of the G-dliness that is above the worlds. As the chapter continues, the Alter Rebbe brings analogies and illustrations, some of which we already learned in earlier chapters and some of which we will learn in the coming section of Tanya, all of them meant to convey what that utter nothingness really means.
Why does the text say that yirah comes from «chochmah» and not from «Torah and mitzvos»? Broadly speaking, chochmah here does refer to the fulfillment of Torah and mitzvos, and certainly only a person who keeps Torah and mitzvos can arrive at yirah ila'ah, since Torah and mitzvos are the vessel that connects the Jew to the Infinite, exactly as the Alter Rebbe says further on in Tanya (on the third line of the next page). But the Alter Rebbe is precise in his wording: «if there is no chochmah», not «if there is no Torah» and not «if there are no mitzvos». So we first have to understand what chochmah is, and only then will we understand why Torah study and the fulfillment of mitzvos are the Jew's connection to chochmah.
What, then, is chochmah?
«דחכמה היא כח מה» (for chochmah is koach mah). The word chochmah is a notarikon, an acronym of two words: koach mah, the power of «what», as the Alter Rebbe already mentioned back in chapter 3. «Mah» is an expression of bittul, self-nullification, the very word Moshe Rabbeinu and Aharon used to express their nullification before G-dliness: «ונחנו מה» (and what are we). Chochmah, then, is the faculty of bittul.
Here the Alter Rebbe wants to explain how a Jew can arrive at a recognition of G-dliness that is above the worlds. Recognition of the G-dliness within the worlds is acquired through contemplation: a person contemplates creation, uses the analogies and illustrations we have learned, and from within the world itself he understands that there is a divine force bringing it into being. That recognition is readily grasped. But G-dliness as it is above creation, how can that be grasped at all? It is not something one can deduce by observing the world. What faculty did the Holy One give a person with which to take hold of G-dliness that is beyond the world? That faculty is chochmah: the power to absorb something that lies above one's grasp.
Let us illustrate with the example we mentioned in chapter 3. A person is studying some subject, in any field at all, or he is wrestling with a problem he keeps turning over, looking for a solution, and suddenly, in the middle of his learning, the matter flashes upon him. «I found it!» There is an answer. In that instant he is flooded with a feeling of happiness, joy and uplift, because he has caught hold of the thing.
But what happens in the moment right after? One of two things. Either the flash vanishes as quickly as it came (sometimes all it takes is for someone to turn to him and interrupt, and it slips away), or he holds on to that flash and begins, little by little, to work out how it fits together and makes sense: part of it will become clear to him, part of it will not, and part of it he will go on probing deeper and deeper.
We have to examine what that flash actually is. In that instant, did he understand the matter? If he did not understand it, why was he so happy and overjoyed? And if he did understand it, why did it escape him?
The explanation is not that he was being superficial, as though at the moment of the flash the person is shallow and only afterwards becomes deeper and more internal. Rather, this is the order the Holy One established. The thing a person comes to learn is outside his world, and even if it is something simple, it is outside his awareness and outside his grasp. Now his job is to take that external thing and bring it inside.
What is this like? It is like seeing. A person looks at an enormous tower; a single second of looking is enough, and afterwards he can talk for hours about what he saw in that one second. How? Because sight is like chochmah: it photographs the thing as it stands in its own place, not inside the person. True, everyone sees through his own filters, one person this way and another that way, but it is still a photograph, a contact with the thing while it is still outside him, not a grasp of it. From there on begins the work of bringing it inside, and that work takes time. Just as conveying what he saw into someone else's ear takes time, so too absorbing the flash into his own awareness takes time.
So the faculty of chochmah that the Holy One gave us is the ability to absorb things that are outside our awareness and outside our understanding. With this faculty a Jew can absorb G-dliness. G-dliness within creation is not outside him; the Holy One contracted Himself, as it were, into creation, and a person can understand it. But to absorb G-dliness as it is above creation is beyond the capacity to grasp. The person does not grasp it and does not understand it, and nevertheless he feels it, he is happy and joyful, because he has seen it and has been caught up in it. It does not come down into an orderly intellectual understanding, and yet he is connected to it, and that connection is made through the faculty of chochmah.
It is worth noting that this is also the foundation of emunah, faith, as we learned in chapter 18: G-dliness rests in the chochmah of the soul, and from this emunah too branches out. It is one and the same idea in its essentials.
And this is the meaning of «if there is no chochmah there is no yirah». Yirah ila'ah is a person's being caught up in G-dliness that is above creation; if he lacks the faculty of chochmah, the ability to absorb something that is outside his world, how could he ever reach it?
The wording in Tanya: «והחכמה מאין תמצא» (and chochmah, from where is it found?). From where does chochmah come into being? From the «ayin», the nothing: from that which is not present in my awareness at all and does not belong to my world. Out of that «nothing» chochmah comes and connects the person to the thing.
«ואיזהו חכם הרואה את הנולד» (who is wise? One who sees that which is born). Seeing, as we said, is chochmah. And what is «that which is born»? It is the world, which is created and born anew at every single moment. And the meaning is not merely that he sees that there is a world which lives and exists by the power of the Creator who brings it into being, but that he sees how that newborn thing, that created being, is included in its source and utterly nullified to the G-dliness that is above creation. And this is something every Jew can take hold of, not with an intellectual grasp, but with a recognition and awareness that this is how it is, clearly and without a shadow of doubt; he connects to it and believes in it. With what did he take hold of it? Not with binah, but with chochmah.
In the Alter Rebbe's words: «פירוש שרואה כל דבר איך נולד ונתהוה מאין ליש בדבר ה' ורוח פיו יתברך, כמו שכתוב וברוח פיו כל צבאם» (meaning that he sees every thing, how it is born and comes into being from nothing to something by the word of G-d and the breath of His mouth, as it is written: and by the breath of His mouth all their hosts). He sees how all of creation is created and receives its vitality from the Creator anew at every moment.
But we cannot stop here, because we already concluded that contemplating how creation comes into being from nothing produces yirah tata'ah, the lower, external level of fear. How, then, can the Alter Rebbe say here that this very contemplation produces yirah ila'ah? For this he adds one more line, «ואי לזאת» (and therefore): since the entire existence of creation is nothing but the divine force bringing it into being at every moment, it emerges that the world is not merely standing in its own place and being brought into being from its source, but is in truth utterly nullified, as though it literally exists within its source.
Let us read the words now and expand on them in the next section: «ואי לזאת, הרי השמים והארץ וכל צבאם בטלים במציאות ממש בדבר ה' ורוח פיו, וכלא ממש חשיבי ואין ואפס ממש כביטול אור וזיו השמש בגוף השמש עצמה» (and therefore the heavens and the earth and all their hosts are literally nullified out of existence in the word of G-d and the breath of His mouth, and are considered as literally nothing, utter naught and nothingness, like the nullification of the light and radiance of the sun within the body of the sun itself). Yirah ila'ah is the fear that brings a person to «they are considered as literally nothing».
«ואל יוציא אדם עצמו מהכלל שגם גופו ונפשו ורוחו ונשמתו בטלים במציאות בדבר ה' ודבורו ית' מיוחד במחשבתו כו' וכנ"ל [פ' כ' וכ"א] באריכות בד"מ מנפש האדם שדבור אחד מדבורו ומחשבתו כלא ממש כו' וזש"ה הן יראת ה' היא חכמה» (and let a person not exclude himself from the rule, for his body and his nefesh, ruach and neshamah too are nullified out of existence in the word of G-d, and His blessed speech is united with His thought, and so on, as was explained above at length in chapters 20 and 21 with the analogy of the human soul, that one utterance of a person's speech and thought is as literally nothing, and so on; and this is the meaning of the verse: behold, the fear of G-d, that is chochmah).
In summary: in this section we examined the precise wording of our Sages, «if there is no chochmah there is no yirah», specifically chochmah, which is koach mah, the faculty of bittul, and not Torah and mitzvos in so many words. We defined chochmah as the faculty the Holy One gave a person with which to absorb things that are outside his awareness and outside his grasp, as in the analogy of the flash of insight in learning and the analogy of sight, which is no more than a photograph of the thing as it stands in its own place, before it has been brought inside into understanding. With this faculty a Jew can be caught up in G-dliness that is above creation, which is beyond the reach of his intellect. And we saw in the wording of Tanya that «one who sees that which is born» does not see only the world coming into being from nothing to something, but sees it as utterly nullified and literally included in its source.
In the next section we will expand on this point, which should not be passed over briefly: what kind of contemplation leads a person to the conclusion that the heavens and the earth and all their hosts «are considered as literally nothing, utter naught and nothingness», and how this recognition gives birth to a fear of shame, yirah ila'ah, like the analogy of one standing before a great man of his generation, a tzaddik, a fear that is on an incomparably higher level. And it is of this that it is said: «if there is no chochmah there is no yirah».