In the previous section we examined the level of 'ahavah rabbah' (the great love) and the three things said about it. In this section we will see why the Alter Rebbe does not elaborate in explaining it, why it requires a complete preparation of yirah (fear, awe), and what exactly distinguishes the contemplation that produces yirah from the contemplation that produces love.
Ahavah rabbah does not depend on a person's own avodah, and that is why the Alter Rebbe does not dwell on it at length. No one has the power to arrive at it on his own; all he can do is prepare himself and make himself worthy of it. If the Holy One wishes to give him this gift, He gives it; and if he is not worthy of it, he will not receive it, and all he can do is read in the seforim that such a level exists.
How will a person know that he is at this level?
When a person is immersed in worldly matters and steeped in their pleasures, he never asks himself how he knows: he is inside the thing, he lives in it and it feels good to him. The question only arises when we are speaking of something G-dly, spiritual and abstract. And in truth, when a person does arrive at this, he will certainly feel that he is inside it.
Why does this love come specifically after a complete preparation of yirah?
It is impossible to reach it without yirah coming first, and to hint at this the Alter Rebbe brings an expression from the seforim of chassidus, taken from the conceptual world of the Gemara in an entirely different area and brought here only as an analogy. As is known, every concept in the revealed Torah has a meaning in the Torah's inner dimension as well, and here we have an example of this in the briefest terms:
The Gemara in tractate Kiddushin says: «כנודע על מאמר רז"ל דרכו של איש לחזר אחר אישה» (as is known from the words of our Sages, it is the way of a man to pursue a woman), and it derives this from the wording of the verse «כי יקח איש אישה» (when a man takes a woman). Why does the verse not say the reverse, «when a woman takes a man»? Because the way of the world is that the man is the one who seeks his wife. And the Gemara compares this to a lost object: who searches for whom, the lost object for its owner, or the owner for his lost object? The owner searches for what he has lost; and since the woman was taken from the man and is therefore, as it were, his lost object, he is the one who goes looking for her.
The terms 'ish' (man) and 'ishah' (woman) carry many meanings in Kabbalah. Sometimes 'ish' is the Holy One and 'ishah' is the Jewish people, just as Shir HaShirim is built entirely on the imagery of bridegroom and bride. Here one of those meanings is brought: love is called 'ish' and yirah is called 'ishah', and the proofs for this are drawn by way of hint rather than by the plain meaning:
«שהאהבה נקראת איש וזכר כמו שכתוב זכר חסדו» (that love is called man and male, as it is written, He remembered His kindness) - 'chesed' is love (as is known: chesed is love and gevurah is yirah), and 'zachar' is not only from the word for remembering but also from the word for male, the opposite of female. From here we see that love, which is the quality of chesed, corresponds to 'ish' and to the male.
«ואשה יראת ה' כנודע» (and a woman who fears G-d, as is known) - yirah corresponds to 'ishah'.
So «it is the way of a man to pursue a woman» means: it is the way of love to pursue the place where yirah is already present. When a person is «complete in yirah», in the language quoted earlier, love comes searching for him and the gift arrives. This is the hint that without yirah coming first it is impossible to arrive at ahavah rabbah; it simply cannot be that a person should have ahavah rabbah without yiras Shamayim.
And why does the Alter Rebbe stress this so strongly? Because later in the chapter he will deal with 'ahavas olam', and there it is possible for the love to come before the yirah. None of the three things said about ahavah rabbah are said about ahavas olam:
It is not a 'love within delights', but rather a love for delights.
It does not come as a gift from Above, but through a person's own toil.
There is no requirement that yirah precede it; sometimes the order is reversed, love first and yirah afterward.
And therefore it is specifically with regard to ahavah rabbah that these three points are properly said.
«ובלי קדימת היראה אי אפשר להגיע לאהבה רבה זו» (and without yirah coming first it is impossible to attain this great love). In ahavah rabbah there is revealed within a person a G-dliness that is above the world, similar to 'yirah ila'ah' (the higher awe). This is something the world cannot contain at all, for the world is forever shouting «I exist»: it is willing to accept that it has a Master, and that there is Someone on whom it depends, but it is not willing to accept that it does not exist. And here a person is told that he can arrive at the genuine sense that he does not exist, and that nothing exists but the reality of the Creator alone. Something like that cannot come from the nature of the world.
This is what the Alter Rebbe writes: «כי אהבה זו היא מבחינת אצילות» (for this love is from the level of atzilus), a kind of 'regards' sent from the world of atzilus. One of the explanations of the name 'atzilus' is from the word 'etzlo', meaning «with Him»: near the Creator, close to Him, as a part of Him and united with Him, and it is the loftiest of the worlds. In the words of the Zohar in Aramaic, «דלית תמן קיצוץ ופירוד חס ושלום» (where there is no severance or separation, G-d forbid) - in the world of atzilus there is no sense whatsoever of separation from the Creator, and it is called the world of unity.
In other words: as long as a person feels his own reality, his 'I', his ego, his concern for his own affairs in one form or another, it is impossible that there be revealed in him something that is a radiance from the level of atzilus, for the two are opposites. A revelation of ahavah rabbah requires that the yiras Shamayim be complete, that the person be utterly nullified, bittul, as far as he is capable, and then he becomes a vessel to receive the radiance. But if his vessels are not entirely clean and clear, he cannot merit this lofty revelation. That is why this love must come specifically after yirah has come first.
The Alter Rebbe does not elaborate on this matter, because it does not depend on our avodah: what depends on our avodah is to see to it that our yiras Shamayim be complete, but the revelation of ahavah rabbah itself is a gift from Above. This is the level of unique individuals and of tzaddikim, and it is not something that belongs to every single person.
Yiras Shamayim means fear of what the Creator wants, and it includes dread, awe and shame. Taken plainly: when the king says to do something, a person does it and does not say otherwise; what the king says is what he does. If the king says to keep mitzvos, he keeps mitzvos; if he says to learn Torah, he learns Torah, and so on in every single matter. (And although there is a connection between 'yirah' and 're'iyah', seeing, one must first understand yirah in its plain sense.)
But ahavas olam (on which the Alter Rebbe will elaborate more, and we too will dwell on it at length, since it is relevant to every single person) is something to contemplate and something to invest in. Before that, though, let us stop and define the point of difference between yirah and love, as we touched on at the end of the previous section: in what way does a person contemplate so that the result of his contemplation is yirah, and what is the form of contemplation whose result is love?
Let us begin from the end: what is the difference between the feeling of love and the feeling of yirah?
In chassidus the two are called 'light' and 'darkness': love is called light and yirah is called darkness. In other words, love is expansion and yirah is contraction; love is attraction and yirah is flight.
And from where does each of them stem? It depends on what a person contemplates, and the corresponding feeling comes as a result of that contemplation. A person is told «contemplate the greatness of G-d»: sometimes he is told that this will bring yirah, and sometimes he is told that this will bring love. What does it depend on? On what aspect of G-d's greatness he contemplates, and where he places the emphasis in his contemplation:
Contemplating His exaltedness: how lofty and mighty He is, and how utterly nothing a person is next to Him. This contemplation leads to yirah.
Contemplating His goodness: how good He is, and how mighty and wondrous He is in His goodness. This contemplation leads to love.
Contemplating how creation is given life: the way the Creator enlivens all of creation at every single moment. This contemplation leads to yirah.
Here the Alter Rebbe comes to explain how a person arrives at love. In order to translate all this into abstract terms, we will first bring an example from the concepts of our physical world, and look at several levels that exist within love.
One of the maamarim of chassidus brings that there are different levels in delight and in sweetness: one person takes delight in eating, another in music, another in beautiful intellectual ideas, and another in something G-dly. These are different levels, and each person according to what he relates to.
Take, for example, a physical, materially oriented person, whose conceptual world revolves around material things that are dear to him. We will not speak of matters of eating, which are coarser, nor even of music, which is more abstract, but of something entirely material: he loves cars, he loves computers. And even within this love itself there are levels:
He is told: you do have a computer at home, but in such and such a place you can get a far better computer, faster and stronger and with many more functions. Immediately a feeling of love for the thing is aroused in him, but it is a love he knows how to evaluate: he compares the thing he loves and is thinking about to what he already has, and he can say exactly in what way it is better and by how much.
He is told about something he has never even heard of within his conceptual world, better by many times over. This he does not know, yet he can still try to assess it and say: I have such and such, and this is better by so and so much.
He is spoken to about a computer in terms he does not understand at all, in a realm that does not exist in his world of comprehension, except that he knows it is a computer beyond the category of things he is able to grasp. Here he is drawn and he loves, but he cannot define his love at all; he has stepped entirely outside the boundaries of the previous kinds of love.
And with all this, even this love is still called love for a particular, defined thing that he yearns for.
In summary: in this section we learned that ahavah rabbah does not depend on a person's avodah but is a gift from Above, and all he can do is prepare himself and make himself worthy of it. We examined the hint of «it is the way of a man to pursue a woman», that love, the aspect of «He remembered His kindness», pursues the place where there is yirah, the aspect of «a woman who fears G-d», and therefore ahavah rabbah is impossible without yirah coming first, since it is a radiance from the level of atzilus in which there is no severance or separation, and it demands total bittul and a clear vessel. We also defined the difference between love and yirah, light and darkness, expansion and contraction, attraction and flight, and how each depends on the manner of contemplating G-d's greatness, and we began the analogy of the levels of love for a defined thing.
In the next section we will deal with 'ahavas olam': the modes of contemplation that bring a person to it, and the toil it requires.