LM 32.1 — Hashem Sefasai Tiftach · תורה ל״ב

Be-ezrat Hashem, we are now going to begin together learning Torah ל״ב in Likutey Moharan. We had mentioned last time that this is really beginning a new chapter in Likutey Moharan as the תורות that came before were grouped together not necessarily topically, but following certain series of מאמרי חז״ל, lastly the conversations between Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya and the סבי דבי אתונא, the Athenian scholars, and we understood the the pnimiyut of these מאמרי חז״ל. Going forward, there's not really going to be this type of a connection, although certainly if we keep our eyes open, it would probably not be surprising if we were able to find certain patterns or certain גזירה שוות as we went from one to the other, the the way that they were put together.

That said, this is Torah ל״ב, it's לשון רבינו ז״ל, which these תורות that were word-for-word from Rabbeinu generally speaking are more dense, they're more packed, beginning "ה' שפתי תפתח." The the Torah is extremely rich and it's in Kabbalistic language, some of those make it a little bit harder, and to begin, I wanted to mention a mashal that we've definitely used before, but I think it's going to be helpful to calibrate, to get our get ourselves ready in order to dive into this Torah. I wrote it down, so I'm just going to read more or less what I wrote in case it sounds like I'm reading off something.

The the the mashal that I generally find, I'm not super technical, but just in in the world of technology, in the world of programming, the idea of a flow-through until going all the way back to a certain type of a code, a certain type of a formula until you have something that's visceral, something that you can see, that you can feel, that you see on a screen, that you can work with, almost being totally ignorant of the code beneath the surface, I personally find to be a very good mashal. So imagine that you're looking at a computer screen, again le-mashal, we're we're looking at the world and we see things vividly, we touch, smell, taste, imagine you're looking at a computer screen, you might see a picture of a person, a beautiful landscape, a page of Gemara, a video, or a spreadsheet, which couldn't look more different.

But start going underneath what you're seeing. The picture is really made up of millions of tiny pixels with each pixel being told what color to be and where to appear. Underneath that, there's software and computer code giving instructions for what should happen. And underneath all of that, if you would keep going down far enough, everything eventually reduces to the same thing: zeroes and ones. And that's it. The computer doesn't have one fundamental substance for a picture and another for a song or another for a spreadsheet. At the deepest digital level, it's all looks the same.

It all just boils down to zeroes and ones. This is because at the deepest level, a computer only knows two states: off, zero, and on, which is one, and everything without exception is ultimately represented in this way. The zeroes and ones are then grouped together into patterns, and the patterns are going to re represent information, which means that we could think of it in levels. At the bottoms, there's zeroes and ones. The zeroes and ones form patterns. The patterns become instructions, right, so if each one is a piece of data, that data put together becomes instructions and information.

The instructions will then produce pixels, colors, sounds, words, and movement, and eventually, at the very end of this chain, as you move from simplicity into complexity, or as we relate to these languages, from something that's more unified into something that's more separated, into עולם הפירוד, but as you move to the end of this system, you end up with an incredibly complex world appearing on your screen. So from our perspective, there seems to be enormous diversity. A face has nothing to do with a spreadsheet and a song has nothing to do with a photograph. But if you could travel downward through the layers, right, like we've said, our avodah, our perception is really working bottom up as opposed to top down, so if we were able to drill through all the layers layers, the distinctions would become fewer and fewer until eventually all the apparent diversity would collapse back into one underlying system.

Now, for our purposes, we have to remember that even at the nth degree, even when we we reach the end of what we could understand, there's still going to be something before that. Beyond the zeroes and ones, those also come from one source, so there does reach a point beyond which we can ask or relate to at all. But for our purpose of avodah, of of bringing unity, this is this is how we look at it. And you can travel in the other direction as well. If you start with an extraordinarily simple underlying reality, just the zeroes and ones, and then you watch as layer after layer of organization unfolds from it until that simplicity manifests as an almost unlimited variety of things, this is the model that we're looking at.

And I just got into a conversation recently with somebody, not my not my mashal at all, and we were talking about the difference between learning within the the world of peshat, so to speak, and and learning at the at the level of פנימיות התורה, learning what we're We discussed this, by the way, in the last shiur as well, when we were talking about a tzadik and a lamdan going back and forth, and one of the, one of the, the ideas that I had suggested is, when you have seeming contradictions within the world of giluy, the world of halachah, oftentimes the avodah is to create distinctions.

These things are not overlapping because if I define the lanes, and I put each thing in the lane that it belongs in, so now I realize that these are parallel structures, they're addressing different areas of halachah, they might seem similar in terms of the expression of it, but they're actually traveling separately so that the the avodah of learning giluy is to make distinctions, and that is that is a legitimate avodah at that level. The avodah of פנימיות התורה is to make יחודים and to realize that actually, all of these separate הלכות, all these separate גמרות, all really come come down to an underlying reality, which as high up as you go, ultimately is י-ק-ו-ק, and like we expressed last time between tzadik and lamdan, you actually can't have one without the other, and and those who listened to Torah ל״א or were learning together Torah ל״א, we we discussed that at length.

Which means that as we go through these torot and we go through, you know, separate types of לימודים, we're going to use different languages depending at which altitude we're discussing it. So as we as we understand the construction and the formula and the structure of how the world works and how HaKadosh Baruch Hu is משפיע to us and how we receive HaKadosh Baruch Hu's shefa, whether we're dealing with pesukim, we're dealing with מאמרי חז״ל, we're dealing with kabbalistic language, it's really all just the the representative of similar ideas, but it's going to be represented differently depending where you're holding within the system.

So going going into this Torah, I am going to first reference the note from Rav Chaim Kramer, which gives some of the background of this Torah, and he says, again, it's לשון רבינו ז״ל, the main theme is mitigating, bringing a מיתוק of judgments, decrees, through joyous dancing at a wedding, and the very first line we're going to say, ה׳ שפתי תפתח והוא בחינת ריקודין של חתונה, we're going to understand how the אל״ף דל״ת נו״ן יו״ד, שפתי תפתח, that the שפתים, the lips relate to the two legs during a dance, and that the אל״ף דל״ת נו״ן יו״ד is going to represent injecting an אל״ף into the דל״ת נו״ן יו״ד, into דין.

We're getting beyond us, but we're going to explain how dancing at a wedding is representative of bringing a מיתוק in a דין, and being able to bring tikkun and rectify a negative gezeirah. He says over here that we have no record when this Torah was given, most likely sometimes in 1803, where a number of the torot are talking about the idea of dancing to mitigate decrees, most notably Likutei Moharan Torah י׳, which we learned together, he brings, that was shortly before the wedding of Rabbeinu's daughter Sarah. There is Torah מ״ט, which we have not gotten to yet, which was during the week of the wedding, also discussing mitigating decrees.

And as a background, in 1802, he says that the czar had begun to formulate a series of decrees concerning the Jews living in his country, eventually leading to the infamous Cantonist decrees, where where the young Jewish children were drafted into army for 25 years. And he mentions over here that Rabbeinu in his teachings would invariably address various events, issues, local, political, global, and so on. And against the the mashal and the backdrop of what we said, it's because it's not just like a cute thing giving a shiur or a drasha that touches on various things that are going on, but it's because when we understand our avodah that's placed before us on the stage of the world that's presented to us at the level of something political, at the level of something secular, something that's going on the world, we can understand our avodah at one level, at a practical level, here's where you have to get up, go, what you have to do, and if we understand it on a spiritual level, what is the tikkun, what is the פגם in the בריאה that resulted in something happening on the screen, happening in the world, that resulted in this decree?

And therefore, if we want to understand how to bring a מיתוק in this דין, how to bring a tikkun, how to rectify this, we don't necessarily have to understand it at the lowest level, we can understand it at a more primal level and bring the tikkun, bring the tikkun over there. Now, one more point before we begin, because it's, you know, we can either discuss some of these ideas as they unfold in the Torah or try to build them in as an introduction, and then to understand the Torah against that against that background. So we know that HaKadosh Baruch Hu created a world, and He is משפיע to the world, and there is a system where HaKadosh Baruch Hu sends the שפע through, generally speaking, we talk about this as the ספירות: חכמה, בינה, דעת, חסד, גבורה, תפארת, נצח, הוד, יסוד, and ultimately מלכות.

And the ספירות themselves we often talk about within a framing of פרצופים or faces. למשל, if I was going to ask you, on a human being, what is it that's on top of Of a neck, I could list it out, right? One eye, another eye, a nose, lips, so on, and just list those things, and it would be 100% true, and those would be different data points. If I wanted to tell you something ultimately more meaningful, I would explain that there is a face, and in explaining what the face is made up of, I would also list the individual parts, but I would list them in a way that you're understanding the relationship between them, with the relationship at the כלל actually being more expressive in terms of the dynamic, in terms of how to relate to it, than the individual parts.

So there's פרט and כלל and so on, and again, that could be an entire study in and of itself. I understand, by the way, that I am leaving out a lot of things, so if this is if we've gone through this before, then it's a meaningful introduction, otherwise just abstract out from it and understand the concepts without trying to think that with this introduction it's going to be, you know, kind of meaningfully digging into any of the individual details. The פרצופים, so, is going to be a face. A face represents a certain dynamic. Each face at every level is going to be made up of all of the pieces.

So, every פרצוף has its own complement of 10 ספירות. The 10 ספירות, again, are חג״ת נה״י, חסד and מלכות, חסד, גבורה, תפארת, נצח, הוד, יסוד, and מלכות. The פרצופים are going to be represented by אבא, which would parallel חכמה (I'll explain the parallel in a second), אמא, which is going to represent בינה, then comes זעיר אנפין, which, don't worry about why the names are the way they are for a second, זעיר אנפין is actually a complement of six ספירות, which is חג״ת נה״י: חסד, גבורה, תפארת, נצח, הוד, יסוד, and then נוקבא, or the female, is going to represent מלכות.

So, the system of the individual points of חכמה, בינה, דעת, which is sort of the transition, but don't worry about it for now, חסד, גבורה, תפארת, נצח, הוד, יסוד, and מלכות are going to be divided up in such a way that there's a flow through from what's at the top of a particular system, כתר, רצון (we didn't address that), which then the רצון will develop into an idea or a kernel of an idea. That idea will then be received by בינה, translated into the emotional ספירות, or the action, until until ultimately the completion. What the system does of the פרצופים, it is it allows a structure.

No individual piece represents the entire system, but it's the balance where each piece understands its place in the in in the overall structure in order to accomplish the broader function. Now, this entire system is essentially going to be divided into, we could say, חסדים and גבורות, or givers and recipients. In order to achieve anything, you need both. We can use any number of one of examples, but if a person was a בעל חסד, he was at his heart he was a giver, well, in order to manifest חסד, if there were no recipients alive, that, you know, the idea that he was a בעל חסד could exist in the potential, there actually could be no expression of חסד without the recipient.

If a person is a recipient, and they are, and I'm specifically using the word recipient without a taker, then they they can receive, but in order for them to receive, then there has to be a giver. So, if somebody wants to be a משפיע, they want to be a teacher, they want to be a giver, they want to teach students who are going to receive in their own way, and between the משפיע and מקבל, then something can end up coming out of that relationship that really is greater than the sum of its parts. In this in this mashal that we're giving, the משפיע stands ready, willing, and able to be משפיע.

Really, what it's contingent on is building up the כלי, building up the receptacle, the כלי קיבול, in order to be able to receive in a meaningful way that's going to match up, that's going to preserve the השפעה with integrity. If we match it back to our system, we're going to say that the עבודה, Hakadosh Baruch Hu developed the system to be משפיע, and the avodah actually exists at the level between the זעיר אנפין and the מלכות, at the מלכות is all the way at the end of the chain, that's our level, our world. זעיר אנפין and מלכות, like this world, are created perfectly imperfect, they're created with מקום for avodah.

The זעיר אנפין wants to bestow, in order to bestow it needs the מלכות as a כלי קיבול, a receptacle, to be built up. Our avodah, and this should be eye opening, I think, our avodah in the world is to literally build ourself up into a receptacle. Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants, kivayachol kivayachol, nothing but in order to be mashpia, חק הטוב להיטיב, to give to us, and every all of the avodah of the mitzvot and the Torah and so on is so that we can build ourself up in order to be the perfect receptacle to receive the perfect good in the perfect way, and that really sums up our avodah.

Our avodah is to make ourself into recipients in order that's conformed to the to to the השפעה that's trying to come. If the כלי doesn't fit the השפעה, it's not going to be able to receive it, it'll leak all over the place, it's not going to receive it. Our avodah is to become the perfect כלים to receive the perfect good, and that really that really sums up in a nutshell a lot of a lot of our avodah. Now, we've been discussing this in very abstract terms, using kabbalistic language, because, in a certain sense, that's really a truer representation of the world than the world that we see before us.

Hakadosh Baruch Hu gave us the gift of avodah so that we can operate in a world with a perception of separateness and finiteness, and actually effect נצחיות, effect שפע, expect effect spiritual realities and bring those make those connections and bring that into the world. But the the truer representation of it is actually at a higher altitude. The truer representation of what ends up on the screen, at a more primal level, actually boils down to the code, not really what's going on on the screen. That's actually further down further down the line. So, therefore, this also gives us a window into things that just seem to be funny when we talk about in Kabbalah: איש, אשה, and different זיווג, union, conception, pregnancy, birth, nursing, coming to maturity, all of these ideas, and we think that we're using a mashal, we're superimposing very physical and intimate things into spiritual realities, and it seems sometimes so hard to relate to.

Let's think about it. It's actually the opposite. There's a certain הנהגה of Hakadosh Baruch Hu that he put into the world as a way to be משפיע in order to create a כלי קיבול. That, as far as the way that those represent ourself in themselves in the world, that is בתורת איש and אשה. The way that the idea of how the כלי קיבול builds itself up and receives from the משפיע is which we're going to call a זיווג is going to be the the אשה, the woman, developing into נערות, into maturity in order to prepare herself for a זיווג from the male, in which case there's going to be זרע.

The זרע is what the man is משפיע, and the from אבא. The אמא is going to take that זרע, that seed, and it's going to flesh it out. That זרע, which is the kernel of an idea, everything is just in one drop, that will be fleshed out into something that can become a ולד, can become a new בריה, a new entity until אם הבנים, until the the אמא is able to give birth, so to speak. In the next world, it's going to come out as the ספירות, and then the avodah will take place down line as as our perception goes farther and farther away from the source.

Now, going back to our original mashal, if we start out with complete unity, everything is coming from one source until the beginning of the perception of our world, we have the zeros and ones and so on. It's data until it becomes information represented in a certain way. At what point does the real fragmentation occur? Well, it sort of occurs in stages. So let's say, for argument's sake, I want I have a רצון, I want to evoke a certain emotion. We'll call that כתר, okay, or אריך. After I want to represent it's a רצון totally undefined in any sort of an idea, I have an idea.

You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you a picture. That picture will evoke this emotion. We'll call that אבא, we'll call that חכמה, it's a kernel of an idea. But at that stage, there's really no avodah. So what's the first thing that I do? I take that idea, I take that picture, and I start carving it up into pieces that will be relevant, but but not not separate pieces, just the idea that there even could be any way of of dividing it up, of relating to it as separateness, meaning that I'm going to carve that picture into puzzle pieces.

The puzzle pieces are still totally together in a picture, but now there is the possibility at the highest level, it's not it's not we'll call it רע, right? It's not something that's divorced at all from the original picture, but I start drawing those pictures, I start creating those splinters and drawing the lines so that the puzzle is now fully put together, it fully represents that picture, but it's still it's still totally in the frame. At that point, I start carving them up into separate pieces until you get to the world of חסד, גבורה, תפארת, right, נצח, הוד, יסוד, and so on, until I get to מלכות, where there's a total perception of separateness.

The pictures are totally the puzzle pieces are totally in a mess, and that's the world that we find ourselves in. Our avodah is now to appreciate if I had the picture, there would be no avodah to recognizing that it's one picture. Our avodah is to take all of the things that seem to be moving in totally separate directions, where you can't even imagine that they would go together, and to bring them back together, to put them into one puzzle. Now we we are starting off with the world of פירוד. So where is the source of the מלכות?

The source of the מלכות is actually the בינה, is the אמא, right? It's where there is a there is something that actually does represent itself as separate pieces, but it doesn't represent פירוד, which is יו״ד ק״י וא״ו ק״י, the the the ק״י representing בינה, the ק״י representing אמא, is the same as the letter, the ה that also represents Malchus. We are trying to bring it back to the source, and that is our avodah, taking the pirud, taking the separate pieces, and yes, that's in the world, but we work towards a unification, in order to line up all of the pipes, where really everything is, there is no פירוד, אין מלך בלא עם, we are the ones who have the avodah of reconnecting the world to its source.

So as we find ourselves in Malchus, all the way at the end of the chain, we're trying to make ourselves into a כלי קיבול so that we could receive the shefa and make sure that there's integrity and fidelity and so on to the system. How do we actually approach avodah? Meaning that when a כלי קיבול, when a receptacle views itself as ready, willing, and able to receive, whose role it is to receive, the fact that it does not have the contents, it does not have the or yet, but still its definition is to be a keli.

If it views itself, however, as independent, so then really all there is is emptiness, all there is is darkness, and since there's not going to be any contents in order to justify its existence, it will just sort of consume itself, or it'll be ripe to to be consumed, to be to be eliminated because it's not it's no longer part of the system. It's turned away from the system that is designed to receive shefa and energy in order to in order to sustain itself and ultimately in order to produce, which means that there's two levels of avodah.

One of them is the Malchus to turn towards, to turn towards the משפיע, to become ready to understand role and definition and make itself ready to receive, and then ultimately the second part is going to be the actual zivug between איש and אשה in order to produce. So we are going to start off this Torah and understand what comes before that zivug. In the context of tefillah, it will occur during Shemoneh Esrei, and what precedes Shemoneh Esrei is ה' שפתי תפתח, part of a תפילה אריכתא, it's part of the process. The first thing we ask הקדוש ברוך הוא is שפתי תפתח, in the context of a zivug of a wedding between איש and אשה, it's going to be preceded by the wedding, by the ריקודים, and we'll see how these things match up as well.

With that introduction, we begin. לשון רבינו זכרונו לברכה: ה' שפתי תפתח, and it's the name of Hashem of א-ד-נ-י. That will become important as we go through the Torah. So it's ה' שפתי תפתח, השם, my lips open up in anticipation of תפילה, והוא בחינת, and this is in the same vein as ריקודין של חתונה, the dancing of the חתונה, again, preceding the zivug. כי כל זמן שלא נתקנה לבחינת זיווג—the word בחינת depends on the גירסא—but as long as the Malchut, the kallah, the נערה is not prepared to engage in זיווג, היא נקראת נער בלא ה'.

It's coming off of there's a place in in Sefer Devarim where נערה is spelled without a ה, we're not going to go into it for now, but in any event, as long as the נערה, the kallah is not yet prepared to engage in the zivug, then she does not yet have the ה. Now נער without the ה is נ-ע-ר, that is gematria 320, ש״ך, gematria ש״ך דינים. That is a gematria of the 320 דינים, and we are going to then introduce the ה and that's going to make it 325. What is the significance of the 320 דינים?

So first of all, let's just reference something that we we addressed in the introduction: the idea of din, or the din really will start off with with גבורות, is not in in principle a bad thing. The idea of חסדים and גבורות go together, the idea of משפיע מקבל, in an appropriate balance, they get together, they complement each other, they form a שלמות in order that the משפיע gives over to the מקבל, and the מקבל is a כלי in order to receive. In the in the event that the כלי, that there's din, that there's גבורות, that there's structure, that there's boundaries that do not stand ready, willing, and able with the purpose of receiving, then it's essentially just חושך.

So this נערה that is not yet turned towards, it's not yet prepared and ready in order to be מקבל, that represents din. Now, on one hand, there din is, we could say that din that is gematria, ד' is 4, י' is 10, that's 14, ן' is 50, so that would be 64 together. 64 times 5 is 320, so there's five aspects of דין that are going to be present in Malchut. Now, in order to explain why five, so that's great that it's 64 times 5, I'm going to use Reb Chaim Kramer's note. For us to start unpacking it on our own would be a whole עבודה.

So page 410 and 411, he says, in the account of creation, which appears in the first chapter of Bereishit, the holy name Elokim appears 32 times. This is known in terminology of Kabbalah as as the 32 Elokim of the act of creation, and he has a reference point to Torah 19. The holy name Elokim which which corresponds to בינה, right, we said that that there's always this dynamic of משפיע מקבל, so at the highest levels there is חכמה and בינה. So, this name Elokim, which corresponds to בינה, or the פרצוף of אמא, so there's אבא and אמא that form the initial uh sort of act in the is an aspect of din, it's an aspect of judgment.

He brings down a Zohar which says that the source of judgment is בינה. Again, in our in our משל this is the source of פירוד. This is the first time that the חכמה even has a reference or a possibility, a היכי תמצי, the potential of being divided, even though at that stage the din is not really manifest because all of the puzzle pieces are still in the frame. It has not yet uh filtered down to מלכות. Uh and, therefore, he puts in parentheses, although the three upper ספירות of כתר, חכמה, and בינה are actually kindness and mercy, בינה itself is the source of the judgment that are ultimately manifest in the ספירות below.

What's more, the five letters Elokim indicate the judgments of בינה are five. These judgments are passed on by בינה to the other פרצוף in which the feminine aspect predominates, namely מלכות. So, the five aspects of din that ultimately come down to מלכות that she has to receive in order to connect back to the source are is that is going to be represented by the ה that gets added to נערה. The Hebrew term for a harsh judgment is din. The numerical value is 64, which we explained. The five דינים of בינה are thus 320, which is 64 * 5, din * 5.

In other words, there are a total of 320 judgments given to מלכות, which is why, at this point, מלכות is called נער, the numerical equivalent of which is also 320. And, therefore, once she is able to receive the ה and connect up to Elokim, to the aspect of בינה, so now she is turned towards the source and will be ultimately ready for a zivug between זעיר אנפין and מלכות. So again, going back to uh going back to the text, we had said that as long as the מלכות is not prepared for zivug, then the נערה does not yet have the ה, it's only נער.

How does she prepare herself for the zivug? Connecting up to בינה. How does she do that? By receiving the five aspects of din represented by Elokim, represented by בינה, connecting בינה and מלכות. And that's why נער is gematria 320, which is din * 5. Further, וכד אסתכנת לזיווג, once she's prepared for זיווג, אקריאת נערה בה', so now we're able to add the ה to נערה, שנתמתקין הדינין על ידי ה' אלפין של אהי-ה שבינה. So, again, where are we in the process? The נערה in anticipation, before she gets ready for zivug, she the נערה is gematria 320 represented by din, without uh yet being ready to be מקבל the שפע from above, not yet being ready for zivug.

How does she prepare herself for zivug? By connecting upwards to בינה. When she connects upwards, she pulls down the ה uh from for the ה' גבורות of בינה. That ה attaches to נערה and now takes it from 320 and adds the extra uh the extra five. Now, Rabbeinu just added something else. We had said that where does 320 come from? 320 is really din * 5 in the numbers. If we're adding five, so then that would actually be in instead of saying din * 5 + uh + ה, what we could say is it's din and an א, which means that we're not just adding a ה, what we're really doing is we're adding five אלפין.

Now, we'll we'll speak in a second where those five אלפין come from, but what this really means is what happens when you add, take each individual one, we had we said that there's five times din and five אלפין, what happens when you connect an א to דין in order to be an anticipation of a zivug, it becomes Adonai or di- uh דין is d- the letters of ד-י-ן, so that becomes Adonai. We said ה' שפתי תפתח, we didn't get to the significance yet of שפתי, but we start off with bringing the א into the דין in anticipation of the zivug.

Now, where do these five אלפין come from? How are they present up in בינה, the five אלפין that are going to get pulled down? So, he explains over here that sometimes when we discuss uh we need a mashal. We can't really discuss anything that's totally abstract beyond uh our ability to perceive, to articulate. So, we have meshalim. Sometimes we use משל אדם, uh within the structure of אדם, we talk about the right, we talk about the left, uh we're going to see we talk we're going to talk about ריקודין and רגלין. Sometimes we use משל אותיות, which is the שמות.

The שם of אהי-ה, we actually discussed earlier in the Torah, sometimes we pair together with כתר, I think it was in Torah ו', but sometimes אהי-ה, I it's in the future. The It's in the future tense. אהי-ה, I believe it's brought down, it's like י-ה-ו-ה, uh but It's, it's in the future tense, אהיה, I will be. Now, אהיה lines up with בינה perfectly, because we we explained earlier, אימא בינה, right? אם הבנים. That means that בינה is essentially taking in the חכמה and developing it in order to give birth to בנים. So, the significance is what בינה will ultimately give over.

It's associated with אהיה, אלף, ה, and a יוד, and a ה. Now, as we relate to the שמות, there are certain times that we will flesh it out to understand different aspects of the name. One of the tools that פנימיות התורה will use is to unfold out the letters so that an אלף will be אלף למד פא, a בית will be בית יוד תיו, and so on. How do you spell the name אהיה, אלף and a ה and a יוד and a ה? There's actually three different ways. So, let's write it out, and we'll write it out one above the other.

אלף can only be spelled one way, אלף למד פא. So, there's going to be three of those. We're going to write it out three separate times, so there's going to be three אלף's so far: אלף למד פא for the first time we spell it out, אלף למד פא, the אלף of that word from the second time we spell it out, and the third time. Now, how do you spell the ה and a יוד and a ה? Well, יוד also only has one way of spelling it, יוד ואו דלת. But why are there three ways of spelling out the אלף, ה, and a יוד, and a ה?

Because ה could be spelled three different ways. You could spell it ה ה, you could spell it ה יוד, or you could spell it ה אלף. So, if we take all of the ways of spelling out אהיה, we will end up with three אלף's from the three from the three times you spell out the word אלף, and from the one of the ways where we spell the ה as ה אלף and ה אלף, so you're going to have those other two אלף's. So, therefore, we have in terms of unfolding the name אהיה, אלף, ה, and יוד, and ה that's associated with בינה, we will be able to take those five אלף's represented from the way that we spell it out in the מילוי with the אלף's, and those five אלף's will ultimately be what come down to מלכות that that are represented in the ה that gets added to נער.

Parenthetically, I heard from Rav Yaakov Klein, he he mentioned that there there's a big chiddush in בינה associated with the אלף. In other words, אלף means one, it's a unified point. חכמה, we understand, is going to be represented by an אלף. בינה already seems to be the beginning of multiplicity. The idea that בינה, even at that stage, with all of the different puzzle pieces, but understanding that they are really totally one unified source and just the beginning of an expression of the unfolding, but ultimately really those are represented by the אלף, that is actually a chiddush that this אלף is connected with בינה.

So, therefore, we've now finished the statement of the Ari Hakadosh, and we're going to go forward, nimtza, as Rabbeinu folds it out. Before we do that, I'm just going to read just super quickly through this short piece that we saw from the Arizal to put it all together. He said, ה׳ שפתי תפתח, which we said will bring the אלף into the דין. שפתי תפתח, open up my lips in order to engage in זיווג. והוא בחינת ריקודין, also the beginning of the turning towards process of the חתונה in order to prepare for זיווג. And why is this?

כי כל זמן שלא נתקנה לזיווג, before the מלכות, the נערה, is ready for זיווג, איקריא נער בלא ה, then it's missing the ה, it's missing the connection to בינה. גימטריא ש״ך דינים, and it's still at the level of דין, not being prepared to receive the אור. It's just total גבורות, total blackness. כד נחתא כהנתא לזיווג, and when the נערה, the מלכות, now becomes prepared for זיווג, איקריא נערה בה׳, it bring it's called נערה, it adds the ה because now it's attached, it's turned towards the בינה, and it pulls down the ה to get it prepared for זיווג.

שנתמתקין הדינין על ידי ה׳ אלפין של אהיה בבינה, this מיתוק in the גבורות, meaning it's now preparing the כלים to be expressive, to being receiving the אור, כמו בפרי עץ כמו בפרי עץ חיים שער עמידה. Nimtza, says רבינו, הכלה עדיין בבחינת נער, meaning without the ה, so it's spelled נון עין ריש, בבחינת ש״ך דינים, like we explained, וצריך להמתיקו לתקנו. So, so far, so good. It comes out that this kallah, the מלכות, the recipient, the כלי קיבול, is still in the bechinah of גבורות without the ה, not yet being prepared to receive and ultimately express the or.

וזה נעשה על ידי ריקודין. How does this take place? Through the dancing at the wedding. We'll come back to the שפתי תפתח. Why? כי הרגלין הם בבחינת נצח והוד. How What is the flow from בינה into מלכות? So, we we if we go back to the ספירות as we explained them, we said that there's חכמה Sometimes we say כתר, חכמה, בינה, sometimes we say חכמה, בינה, and דעת, but איך שיהיה, there's חכמה to בינה, and this level of the מוחין will now give over to the next complement of ספירות. So there's אבא and אימא, and then that flows into זעיר אנפין, which is represented by חסד, גבורה, תפארת, נצח, הוד, יסוד, and then מלכות.

How does זעיר אנפין convey to מלכות? So the setup of זעיר אנפין, the setup of the ספירות that comprise of that פרצוף, if you imagine like upside-down triangles, so the flat part is on top, we will have חסד on the right, גבורה on the left, there's משפיע, מקבל, right? And then there's the ממוצע, תפארת giving over. Then we'll have נצח on the right, הוד on the left, giving over to יסוד, which would be like a funnel flowing into מלכות. So it's the נצח and the הוד that ultimately give over through יסוד into מלכות that that that are נכלל, that bring everything together.

The נצח and the הוד have to pull down from בינה. What is the connection of נצח and הוד pulling down from בינה and being able to give over to מלכות? So if we remember a second ago, we had said that sometimes when we relate to the שמות, we relate to the ספירות, sometimes we present them in a משל אותיות, we said אהיה, the שמות, and sometimes they're represented by משל אדם. If they were to be represented by משל אדם, נצח and הוד would be the like by the knees, they would be the רגליים. Or over here it quotes from Etz Chaim that they would be the ברכיים are the רגליים, the knees are the רגליים.

When a person dances, they lift up their knees in the dance. Now, why does a person dance? Really because it's a flow-through from the לב. בינה ליבא, the בינה is associated with the לב. So when when there's an association, there's a flow-through, what is the expression of the לב? It would result in dancing. What's dancing? It's picking up the נצח and the הוד. Which means that in our language, the ריקודים, the lifting up of the נצח and the הוד is done through their being associated with with with with the לב, with the heart, with the emotions, but that's really pulling down from בינה in order to ultimately convey the ה' אלפין down to מלכות, down to נערה, in order that she should be prepared for זיווג.

So again, inside the text, וזה נעשה על ידי ריקודים, כי הרגלין הן בבחינת נצח והוד, because the legs are represented by the ספירות נצח and הוד, or the נצח הוד represented by the legs, והם ננשאים על ידי הלב. They are picked up in dance through the connection of the לב. היינו על ידי שמחת הלב, כנראה בחוש שעל ידי שמחת הלב מרקדין, like we see in practice. This is represent, again, really our world is the משל, and the נמשל is up there, not the other way around. We're not trying to say that the reality is as we see it, and and therefore the רוחניות is a משל.

It's the opposite. This is the flow-through of how HaKadosh Baruch Hu relates to the world, and we see this represented in our world where when there's שמחת הלב, that results in a person dancing. כמו שכתוב גבי יעקב וישא יעקב רגליו, it says Yaakov picked up his feet, they were light. פירש Rashi, why? לבו נשא את רגליו. It's because of his לב that his feet were picked up, that they were light. ולב הוא בינה, and the לב is associated with בינה, כמו שכתוב בינה ליבא ובה הלב מבין. Meaning that when the נצח and when the when the לב lights up, so to speak, the רגליים, the נצח and הוד, in ריקודים, that is when the ה' is able to be conveyed through the נצח and הוד through יסוד to מלכות, that is how the נערה receives her ה'.

על כן צריך לכוון בריקודים להמשיך חמש אלפין שבלב על ידי הרגלין להכלה שהיא בחינת חמש פעמים דין גימטריא שכ״ך גימטריא נערה, without a ה'. So what this means is that there is a tremendous opportunity in the avodah of dancing. A lot of times we show up at a חתן, משמח חתן וכלה, but the opportunity in dancing in front of the כלה is a tremendous opportunity. And I'm just going to speak out an idea that we've spoken out in the past. The idea of what does it mean to be a בן עולם הבא. Without going through the entire mashal, I I would just use sort of the short version.

If you have a number of people that both or all of them move a piece of plastic a half an inch, and I ask all of these people, what did you do? Just define the action. One person is going to say, I moved a piece of plastic, it was sticking out of the wall, and I shifted it so that it was a quarter of an inch, a half an inch over, okay? And that is a true statement. Another person will say, I turned on the lights. It's also a true statement. How did he do that?

By turning on the the the piece of plastic. This person is operating at a higher level of consciousness, right? Sometimes we talk about what does it mean to be a בן עולם הבא? Yes, we're both living in this world, we're both moving things around. One person might pick up a branch and play with it, wave it all over the place. Another person makes a berachah, and he's shaking a lulav, which the Gemara tells us the significance of what a person could accomplish with a lulav, even at the level of of of נגלה, so to speak, and אגדתא.

Another person will say, I am getting the house ready for people to come over. I need to be able to see, and I need to I need to prepare the house. Another person will say, I'm making a party, right? Making a party for somebody. That's a higher level of significance. So we see that the כוונה really comes to define the act, depending where a person's headspace is, totally defines and creates an identity for the action that they are performing separate and aside from the actual physical thing that they're engaged in. And therefore says Rabbeinu, when a person does ריקודים in front of the כלה, similar to picking up the lulav or any other mitzvah that's done, eating the matzah, anything else that's done physically, right, we blow the shofar, the sefarim bring down unbelievable things what happens when we blow the shofar.

Now there's a separate הלכה, מצות צריכות כוונה, not צריכות כוונה, a person will get schar, but we're not talking about that. When a person goes and dances in front of the kallah, what do they have the opportunity to accomplish? They are able to make it that this world, מלכות, the כלי קיבול is literally upgrading, preparing itself, connecting to בינה, pulling down the ה' in anticipation of זיווג, becoming aligned to pull אור down into the world. This avodah can be performed when we do rikudim by the kallah. Hakadosh Baruch Hu's children are getting married, there's going to be a new איש and אשה, a new couple coming to the world, building a בית נאמן בישראל, bringing a זיווג, im yirtzeh Hashem, building building a family.

This avodah that's able to be performed by the with the rikudim, צריך, he says, צריך על כן צריך לכוון בריקודים. He seems to be saying if you know, if a person would just, you know, go across the room they wouldn't even be aware of the fact that they're at a wedding. Maybe they would dance in a funny way through the hall, they would think that it's I don't know, a mock wedding, just a bunch of people gathered together, would that avodah or would that those movements be able to perform this? Probably not. It's when a person has the kavanah, they understand what they're doing, they're able to effect things at the highest levels.

And therefore, halevai that even one person when we go to a wedding that we should have or at least to say l'shem yichud, I don't understand all these kavanos, but Hakadosh Baruch Hu, I understand the significance. And if the only kavanah that I have, I'm going to go and dance for a few minutes is Hakadosh Baruch Hu, whatever it is that I dance should be able, I understand that this is an avodah at the highest levels, and it should be able to effect רצון השם in order to prepare us to receive all of the berachah, both for the couple, for us, for the world at large.

Halevai that we should take advantage of these opportunities. ועל ידי אור הלב שנמשך לה, that the the the אור, the ה' גבורות that are being passed down, the ה' אלפין, נעשית נערה בה', the ה' gets pulled down to the נערה, this כלה, ונעשית ה' פעמים א-ד-נ-י, which again we had said that דין times five is 320, now we're going to pull down the five אלףs, and now with the א-ד-נ-י, that is a preparation for the זיווג. So these rikudim are in anticipation of the מלכות being ready for זיווג, preparing, and also the א-ד-נ-י. Now let's relate it to the השם שפתי תפתח.

וזה בחינת השם, pulling the אלף into the דין, שפתי תפתח. שעל ידי השפתים שהם נצח והוד, we had said that really these are there is a process, the process of הקדוש ברוך הוא's הנהגה and providing השפעה to the world, His התחברות, His התקשרות, the way that He relates to the world is through the ספירות. How we understand those relationships, sometimes we put them through אותיות, through שמות of השם, sometimes we understand them in the צורה of an אדם, sometimes we can even understand them just in the צורה of a face. It's just different ways of relating to these relationships.

So as much as we understand that נצח and הוד in the when we put the ספירות in the צורה of a body, if we understand those relationships in the context of a face, then the שפתים, the lips would relate to נצח and הוד, and then the tongue would be מלכות. נפתח ונמתק הכלה בבחינת זיווג ונעשית בבחינת א-ד-נ-י שהיא נערה שהיא ראויה לזיווג. So in this case, השם שפתי תפתח, open up my lips, that would correspond to like lifting up the legs. Again, the it's bringing the א-ד-נ-י the via the נצח and הוד either in the context of dancing by the wedding through the legs or in the context of opening up the the lips in anticipation of speaking the words of tefillah and being ready for the זיווג.

And therefore both השם שפתי תפתח and the ריקודים by a חתונה both represent pulling down the ה' אלפין into the into the מלכות, putting the ה' into the נערה, making the מלכות, the כלה, the כלי קיבול ready to receive and engage in the זיווג. וזה דאיתא במדרש כשנשא יעקב את לאה, now we're going to relate it to another Midrash, says that when יעקב married לאה, בשעה שהיו מרקדין, they were dancing, היו מזמרין, and the people that were gathered together by the wedding, they said הא ליה לרמוז ליעקב הא לאה, they were trying to make a remez to Yaakov that this was Leah.

But now we're going to see in the פנימיות of this, that Malchut actually has two aspects. It's interesting. From the bottom up, the most significant thing is the most revealed, right, the thing that seems to be the most visceral, the thing that we relate to the most, in a certain sense from top down, this is coming from the אין סופיות, that's the most פירוד, it's the most revealed because it's something that has the most expression, but on the other hand the things that are above it that come before it in the process are more concealed.

So Malchut is actually represented by two aspects: there's Leah and there's Rachel. Leah therefore is actually this aspect of Malchut, this is one level up the chain, which is more concealed, היינו כי לאה היא עלמא דאיתכסיא, which is brought down by the Zohar, again these things are hard concepts, but at least to understand שהוא בבחינת לב. This idea of the gevurot getting passed down that are still concealed, Leah is represented also as a בחינה of לב, כמו שכתוב בלבי צפנתי אמרתך. So we see that there's an aspect of the lev that is hidden, so relating to hiddenness to the lev, and the hiddenness of these five gevurot that are in potential we're saying is an aspect of Leah.

ומשם, and from this hidden aspect, the ה' that's still in the latent, I guess, maybe you would say, but in other words, these gevurot that will ultimately come down to prepare Malchut at the stage when they are still by בינה ליבא, they're at the the higher sort of more more latent and the potential expression of what Malchut will be, still at that higher stage, that's represented by the ה'. Over here, that's going to be represented by Leah. And therefore, like we just said, what brings a מיתוק to the din, what makes the 320 dinim ready and receptive to engage in zivug when we pull down the ה' from the עלמא דאיתכסיא?

וזה, ה' Leah, שצריך להמשיך מ'לאה' ה' אלפין, in פנימיות what they were saying is ה' Leah, in the פשט of the Midrash at least, it seems that they were advising Yaakov this was Leah, but what they were saying is ה' Leah, bring down the ה' from Leah, bring down the ה' אלפין from that aspect which will become מלכות, which is still in the hidden aspect. כדי להמתיק ולתקן את הכלה, in order to make the כלה, the מלכות, receptive to being able to engage in zivug, so that it could bring or into the world and bring תולדות into the world.

גם היו אומרים שהכלה שמה לאה שעל ידי בחינות עצמה נמתקת, so they were saying, when we read the words, I'm sure it's more significant than what I'm saying, that this כלה that Yaakov was engaging with already was not the נערה that was missing the ה', but since he was he was marrying Leah, and Leah represented מלכות as having the ה', I guess either at the upper levels of בינה, as the ה' in the poten- the ה' אלפין in the potential that have to be passed down, or you could say that since it already had the ה', now it was receptive, it was ready for zivug.

But in any event, it was a reference to to Leah, the idea of already this כלה already containing the five אלפין. Okay, so Baruch Hashem we've completed Torah ל״ב. If we're going to have to maybe suggest a takeaway, something to be מתבונן בתורת עבודה, we can say that we understand that our job in life is really to become a כלי. הקדוש ברוך הוא כביכול is ready, willing, able to be משפיע, חק הטוב להיטיב, he wants to give us the best in the best possible way. In order to do that, he allows us to participate, to be a partner in creation, to earn that success.

All we have to do to earn that success is essentially make ourself into a כלי that's ראוי. How do we do that? הקדוש ברוך הוא gave us the gift of a perception of separateness, of the puzzle pieces all having their own direction, their own עבודה, we have all of different priorities. The way that we're able to pull down the shefa is really b'etzem through emunah. In certain ways, we're limited by our perception, but when we understand that everything that seems so fragmented b'etzem is really a bunch of puzzle pieces that fit together, and really even the fact that they're pieces, they form one picture, and the fact that they're pieces at all is only because הקדוש ברוך הוא developed a system where that's possible, and the reason is ultimately for our benefit.

So all of the things that happen in the world that seem not to make sense, they seem not to be reflecting reflecting malchut back that of of ratzon Hashem, all this is b'etzem for our benefit so that we could see through it. The entire sort of chaos is only at our perception. When the sun shines through a lens, the sun doesn't change, only the perception from the point of view of of of the person who receives it, who sees it through the lens. All of the he'elem, all of the hiddenness is only from our perception, and our job, what we can do through emunah, is to look back and we see through it, we see behind the curtain, we attach to the source, and we say, הקדוש ברוך הוא, we're ready to connect.

And if we're not ready to connect, we want to be ready to connect, and if not, we want to want to be ready to connect. We already saw in the last Torah how tzedakah, emunah, and brit prepares for this. So therefore, our our job is to develop this emunah, to reattach to the source, to make ourself into a keli, and that's all we have to do in order to receive the best in the best possible way.