Chapter 22: Face and Back: Kelipah, Arrogance and Idolatry

Chapter 21 showed that G‑d’s speech is unlike ours. When a person speaks, the words leave him and become something separate. G‑d’s words never leave Him, because there is no place outside Him. So why does the Torah call it “speech” at all? The Torah uses human language, and the Alter Rebbe takes this seriously: the word is chosen because something in it is true. Human speech carries a separation, and in one sense G‑d’s word does too. Not from His side, where nothing is separate, but from the side of the creatures.

The life-force comes down through many contractions, and each kind of contraction brings out a different kind of creature. That is the source of the endless variety in creation. The higher creations, too, feel that they exist only because of such contractions, yet they still feel themselves as G‑dliness, as expressions of the word. This chapter goes further down.

Now comes the new step. Some contractions are not only many but so strong that they hide the “Face” altogether. This allows impure things to exist: kelipos (literally “shells” or “husks,” which cover the fruit inside) and the sitra achra (“the other side”), the forces opposed to holiness. It is not the number of contractions that does this, but their strength and kind.

A being can feel that it is something and still recognize G‑d; an angel, for example, does. That is not kelipah. A kelipah does not feel the Speaker at all, and can even deny Him. Yet it has no life of its own. It too is kept alive, every moment, by nothing but the word and breath of G‑d’s mouth. Its very power to deny comes from the One it denies.

Here the Alter Rebbe reads the name “other gods” in a new way. It does not mean, G‑d forbid, that there are other powers. It points to where the kelipos get their life. Every existing thing lives from holiness, and so do they, but not from its “Face.” They live from its “back” (achorayim). The word acherim, “other,” echoes achorayim, “back.”

The text’s own picture explains it. A gift to someone you love is given face to face, with a shining face, because you are in the giving. When a person is forced to give something to an enemy, he throws it over his shoulder and looks away. He gives, but he is not in it. The “Face” above is G‑d’s inner will, the giving He takes pleasure in: life for everything on the side of holiness. The “back” is a will that wants something only as a means to an end, never for itself.

That is how G‑d gives life to the sitra achra. He hates it, and gives it life only for a purpose: so that the wicked, who give in to it, are punished, and the tzaddikim, who subdue it, are rewarded. For that, the sitra achra must exist, so that a person has a real choice. Think of an obstacle race. The organizers put fences and logs across the course. They do not want the obstacles for themselves; the obstacles are there so the runners can get past them and show what they can do. The sitra achra is in the world in the same way: it is there to be overcome.

Even the “back” of the Will is not truly inside the sitra achra. It surrounds it from above, keeping it in existence without entering it. That is why the sitra achra is called “the place of death”: life means G‑dliness, and there G‑dliness is not felt at all.

Some light must be inside, since nothing can exist without it. But that tiny bit is in real exile, like the exile of the Shechinah described in chapter 19. An exile lives in a place where he cannot be himself, and his own powers are put to work for those who oppose him. So too the spark inside the kelipah gives it life but has no say in what it does. That is why one can never look at evil and say, “This too is just another expression of G‑d.” The G‑dliness in it is a prisoner.

This is a second reason for the name “other gods,” and a sharper one. The first looked from G‑d’s side: the kelipos get their life from His “back.” This one looks from the kelipah’s own side: it really does make itself into a god. Because the holy spark in it is in exile, it does not bow before G‑d at all (it is not battel, “given over”). It soars like an eagle and declares, “Only I exist; there is none but me,” or, like Pharaoh about the Nile, “The river is my own; I made myself.”

One way to understand the two reasons is through two kinds of life-force. One surrounds a creature from outside and does not touch its sense of self. With that one, a kelipah can admit that its life comes from G‑d and still feel independent; for that alone it would be called “other gods” only because it draws from the “back.” The other kind is inside, and is the creature’s very being. On this explanation, that one the kelipah cannot admit and still claim to be separate, so it denies it completely. That denial is idolatry in the plain sense.

Now the point comes home. The Sages say that arrogance is equal to idolatry. One might think that is only to show how bad arrogance is. The Alter Rebbe reads it as a statement of what arrogance is. Idolatry never rested on denying G‑d outright: its worshippers called Him “the G‑d of gods,” the highest power. Their error was to think that beside Him there is something else that is real in its own right. That alone cuts them off, because holiness rests only on what is battel to Him, as chapter 6 explained. The Zohar calls such forces “peaks of separation”: their pride towers over everything like a mountaintop, and that is exactly what sets them apart from Him.

So a person can keep Torah and mitzvos, believe in one G‑d and never bow to an idol, and still carry the root of idolatry through arrogance. He does not deny that G‑d exists; he denies that G‑d is the only true existence. In truth everything before Him is as nothing, brought into being from nothing at every moment by His will. A self that feels itself as a separate “something” is living the picture the concealment allows, not the truth.