We have reached chapter 48 of Tanya, on folio 67a (page 133). We are in the middle of a sequence of chapters that began with chapter 46, where the Alter Rebbe explains the greatness of the Creator's love for the Jewish people at the Exodus from Egypt.
Chapter 46 opened the explanation with a parable: a great and mighty king who steps down from his place of honor and occupies himself with the simplest of men. Such a descent, undertaken entirely in order to draw that man close, is an enormous descent on the king's part, and it is precisely this that testifies to the greatness of his love for him. The purpose of the parable is that a person should contemplate this and take it to heart, and out of that contemplation awaken a love for the king from his own side as well: «as water reflects a face back to a face, so one man's heart to another.» And in the nimshal: the greatness of the Holy One has no end and His greatness is unfathomable, and before Him stand thousands of thousands and myriads of myriads of legions of angels, and He leaves it all aside, as it were, in order to bring the Jewish people out of the filth and impurity of Egypt. This contemplation must awaken in us a love for the Creator.
In chapter 47 we learned that the Exodus from Egypt is not a historical story of the past. Every single day a person is required to contemplate and recognize that he himself is going out of Egypt right now. As we expanded on in the previous lesson, the meaning is that every single person is given the opportunity to unite and connect with the Ein Sof, the Infinite, within the Creator, through the fulfillment of Torah and mitzvos. That is his own private Exodus from Egypt, his going out of the meitzarim, out of the constriction and limitation in which he finds himself. This opportunity itself must awaken in him a great joy and a great love for the King who gave it to him.
In chapter 48, and in half of chapter 49 as well, the Alter Rebbe comes to complete the subject and to explain the magnitude of the tzimtzum, the constriction, which the Creator performed upon Himself, as it were, in order to create a world and to occupy Himself with the lowest. All of this comes to describe that same parable of the king who leaves his palace and his position of honor and descends to the simple man in order to raise him up: the descent expresses the tzimtzum that exists on the Divine side. In this chapter it will be explained why a tzimtzum is necessary, what its implications are, and what types of tzimtzumim there are. Some of the concepts explained here are familiar and some are new, and chapter 48 is aptly named: the letters of «mem ches» spell «moach», brain. In this chapter one has to hold on to one's brain, to one's concentration and contemplation of the matters explained in it.
The language of the chapter: «והנה כאשר יתבונן המשכיל בגדולת אין סוף ברוך הוא» - «Now, when the maskil contemplates the greatness of the blessed Ein Sof.» The «maskil» is one who has the capacity to understand, to contemplate and to delve deeply. But in order to contemplate, a person must first go out from servitude to freedom and leave his own prison house, as was explained in the previous chapter. As long as he is sitting inside the prison house, he has no tools with which to contemplate.
What is «ohr Ein Sof»?
The term «ohr Ein Sof» recurs countless times in chassidus, and we must be precise in the meaning of the words. It can be read in two ways:
The light of the Ein Sof - the way we say «the light of the sun,» meaning the light that comes from the sun, where the word «sun» refers to the source. So too «ohr Ein Sof» would mean a light coming from a source that is infinite.
A light that is itself without end - here the words «Ein Sof» do not refer to the source at all, but to the light itself, whose very nature is that it has no limit.
The Alter Rebbe gives us here the correct understanding of the term: «כי כשמו כן הוא - אין סוף ואין קץ ותכלית כלל» - «for as His name, so is He: there is no end, no limit and no finality whatsoever.» Who is the «Ein Sof» here? Not the source, but the light. This is not like «the light of the sun,» where the intent is a light belonging to the sun; rather, the light itself is infinite.
And why can we not read it the first way, as the light of the Infinite One? Because the title «Ein Sof» is not a fitting title for the Creator Himself, for two reasons:
Any title given is already a form of definition, and the Creator is not defined by any definition at all. Even a title as dignified and as expansive as this, to say of Him that He is «Ein Sof,» meaning unlimited, cannot be said of Him, for He is utterly removed from our grasp.
And even if we did wish to apply a title, «Ein Sof» is not the precise one. When one says of something that it is endless, that does not negate a beginning; it may well have a starting point, and from that point onward it is without limit. But the Essence of the Creator is kadmon, primordial: not only does He have no end, He also has no beginning. The title fitting for Him is «kadmon.»
It emerges, then, that the title «Ein Sof» fits precisely the light. The light does have a beginning: it has a cause and a reason, and the Creator is its beginning, just as the sun is the beginning of sunlight. And once the light has already come forth, we say of it that it is without end and unlimited. And why is it unlimited? Based on the principle that the light is of the nature of the luminary. Sunlight and its radiance illuminate and warm because their source illuminates and warms; whatever is present in the luminary becomes revealed in the light. And since the source of this light is unlimited, the light itself is likewise infinite.
This, then, is the explanation of the opening line of the chapter: the words «Ein Sof» refer to the light, and «as His name, so is He» - just as it is called endless, so it truly is, with no limit, no end and no boundary whatsoever «לאור וחיות המתפשט ממנו יתברך» - «to the light and life-force that extends from Him, blessed be He.»
In this line and in the next one there lies a further and important emphasis. Alongside the concept of «ohr,» light, there exists the concept of «shefa,» influence or flow. In the concept of light there is a luminary from which the light goes out; in the concept of shefa there is a mashpia, a giver, from whom the shefa goes out. And one should not think that shefa necessarily means something physical: there is spiritual shefa, as when a teacher conveys intellectual ideas to his students and teaches them a concept, and there is physical shefa, like a flow of water issuing from a water source. But between «ohr» and «shefa» each has something the other lacks: there is an advantage in light that is absent in shefa, and an advantage in shefa that is absent in light. Let us begin by defining shefa, starting with terms familiar to us from our own world: sunlight as against the flow that passes from teacher to student.
One of the things indispensable to shefa is that the giver must occupy himself with the recipient. It is not a case of the teacher sitting in his room and studying for himself as he always does, while students sit off to the side and listen and understand on their own. Were that the case, they would not be students and he would not be a teacher: they would not grasp his words, and he would not even know whom he is addressing, would not know how to come down to their level of understanding, and could not see whether they had absorbed what he said or not. There would be no relationship of mashpia and mekabel, giver and receiver, at all.
The very definition of shefa, then, is that the giver occupies himself with the giving: he is engaged in the matter and invested in it, he cannot busy himself with other things at that time, and he is the one who decides how to give the influence, how much to give, when to stop and when to continue. And because he occupies himself with the giving, thinking and planning and lowering it in a way that the recipient will be able to absorb, the influence comes down constricted and limited in exact accordance with the recipient's vessel of reception: not more than that and not less than that.
In summary: in this section we reviewed the flow of chapters 46 and 47 - the parable of the king who descends from his place of honor to the simple man in order to awaken a mutual love, and the opportunity given to every person every day to go out of his own constrictions and unite with the Ein Sof through Torah and mitzvos - and we began chapter 48, whose subject is the magnitude of the tzimtzum that the Creator performed, as it were, in order to create a world and occupy Himself with the lowest realm. We were precise in the term «ohr Ein Sof»: the title «Ein Sof» refers to the light and not to its source, since the Creator is not defined by any definition and the title fitting for Him is «kadmon,» whereas the light, which does have a beginning and a cause, is unlimited because the light is of the nature of the luminary. We also began the distinction between «ohr» and «shefa,» and saw that with shefa the giver must occupy himself with the recipient, and therefore the shefa comes down constricted and limited according to the recipient's vessel of reception.
In the next section we will briefly review what we have learned and continue with the explanation of the difference between light and shefa, the advantage that light has which shefa lacks, and from there we will move on to the types of tzimtzumim explained in the chapter.