Chapter 20: “I Am” and “No Other Gods”: What G‑d’s Oneness Really Means

The last two chapters ended with a strong claim. A Jew who would never bow to an idol, even at the cost of his life, can use that same love to keep every mitzvah. This does not mean giving one’s life for every mitzvah; for most of them the halachah says not to. It means bringing the same depth of feeling to every mitzvah. But the love wakes up only when the test is clearly about faith in G‑d. Why should eating, speaking or giving charity be a matter of faith?

The first step of the answer: the whole Torah is already inside the first two commandments. “I am the L‑rd your G‑d” is the positive mitzvah to believe in G‑d, which rules out idolatry by implication; “You shall have no other gods” forbids it outright. It is easy to see that faith is the foundation of every mitzvah, as the Mechilta’s parable puts it: first accept the King, then His decrees. The Alter Rebbe says more. “I am” includes every “do”, and “You shall have no other gods” includes every “do not”. Of the Ten Commandments, the people heard only these two from G‑d Himself; the other eight came through Moshe. Since these two contain everything, at Sinai we heard the whole Torah from G‑d.

This is where the Alter Rebbe is heading: every mitzvah is, at heart, saying “I am”, and every sin is, at heart, a small “other god”. That is a striking thing to say about an ordinary sin. Before he can show it, he must first explain what G‑d’s oneness means.

“G‑d is one” could mean that there is only one G‑d and not two, or that He is not made of parts. The Alter Rebbe goes further. Before creation there was nothing but G‑d. The prayer says “You are He” before creation and “You are He” after it. If it only meant that G‑d is eternal, it would say “You were, and You are.” Saying “He” twice means: the very same, with nothing changed.

That is a real puzzle. Now there are angels, heavens, people and planets. How can G‑d still be “alone”? The answer is the last line: before Him, as they are in His presence, all of it counts as nothing. The worlds are not a second thing standing beside Him. The next lines explain why.

This sentence says two things. First, the world was made from nothing, by G‑d’s word: “By the word of G‑d the heavens were made.” Second, the same word must keep speaking. A craftsman makes a cup and walks away, and the cup stays, because he only reshaped silver that already existed. But something made from nothing has no existence of its own to fall back on; left to itself, nothing stays nothing. If the word stopped for a moment, the world would go back to being nothing.

A mashal: a stone thrown up into the air stays up only as long as the force of the throw is inside it. Nobody says “Look, a stone that flies!” It is not a flying stone; it is being flown. So too, the world really exists, but it does not own its existence. At every moment its existence is G‑d’s word inside it.

Now the Alter Rebbe brings an example from our own soul, in three steps. The soul expresses itself through three “garments”: thought, speech and action.

First, one word next to the power of speech. That power could produce words without end. The body sets a limit on how much we actually say, but the soul’s power to speak has none, and next to the endless, one word is nothing. Second, one word next to thought, the source of the words and their life. Here the gap is not only in amount but in kind. Third, one word next to the soul itself: its ten powers of mind and heart described in chapter 3, which the Alter Rebbe calls the very “being and essence” of the soul, as opposed to its garments. Thought is still made of letters, only finer ones. The soul’s own powers, as the next lines show, have no letters at all.

The point is not what a word can do in the world, but what one word is next to the person who says it: next to his whole self it is as nothing.

The Alter Rebbe now shows how deep the soul’s own powers are. A feeling, before you think about it, has no words. It is simply a longing. You do not love in a particular language. Deeper still is the stage before the feeling: the mind’s knowing that something is good, whether a subject to learn or a tasty dish.

Words appear only on the way out. The mind knows, the heart wants, and then the desire goes back up to the mind to plan: how do I get it, when do I start? That planning happens in letters, in English or Hebrew or whatever a person thinks in. So the spoken word is the last and smallest link in a long chain, and next to the source of the chain it is as nothing.

The chapter ends with the mashal and does not yet spell out its lesson. The lesson, carried into chapter 21: if one word is as nothing next to a human soul, the word that creates all the worlds is certainly as nothing next to G‑d, who is truly infinite. That is how He remains alone.