Chapter 36: A Dwelling Place for G‑d Below

Chapter 35 showed that a mitzvah done in action draws the Shechinah onto the body and animal soul, not only onto the G‑dly soul. But why should they matter so much? The answer is one sentence of the Sages: G‑d desired a dirah, a dwelling place, in the tachtonim, the lower realms. In a person, the body and animal soul are the “lower realm”; in creation, this physical world is the lowest of all.

At once the Alter Rebbe raises a difficulty. G‑d is not in space, physical or spiritual; nothing is nearer to Him or further. He fills every world equally. So what can “lower” mean?

Creation changed nothing from G‑d’s side. Every bit of what we might call the “space” of creation held Him before and holds Him now. The change is on the side of the creations, which take in His light only through “garments” that cover it; without them they could not exist. If nothing were hidden, a man could not remain a separate, living self: “no human can see Me and remain alive.” The Sages read “and live” (vachai) as a hint to the angels called Chayos. Even they cannot see Him as He is; they too receive only through a covering.

This does not make the world an illusion. It means the world has no existence apart from Him; only His hiding lets it feel like a world of its own.

Now “upper” and “lower” have a meaning, but only from the side of the creations. A world is “higher” when more of G‑d’s light shows through it and “lower” when more is hidden; the word olam, world, is related to he’lem, hiding.

Our world is at the bottom. The higher worlds still feel that they live from G‑d. Here nothing points to Him; a person can live his whole life without the thought crossing his mind. Worse, things here can declare “I exist, and there is none but me”, denying Him outright. So tachtonim does not mean a place where G‑d is absent. He is just as present here. It means the place where He is most hidden.

Which end of the chain is the goal? Not the top. Even the highest world exists only because some light was hidden, so its revelation, compared with what was there before, is itself a hiding. And hiding cannot be an end in itself.

The goal is the bottom, because only here is there something to transform. Light can only be dimmed; darkness can be turned into light. The Zohar’s phrase quoted here says what gives G‑d “satisfaction”: when the sitra achra is subdued (iskafya) and the darkness is turned into light (is’hapcha).

And the result is not a small light. Light that comes out of darkness shines more strongly than the light of the upper worlds, which reaches them through garments and a hiding of its inner face, so they are not dissolved. This also explains how the great upper worlds can exist for the sake of this low one: once transformed, it will shine more than they do. Here G‑d is to be revealed with nothing covering Him. This is the meaning of dirah, a home: elsewhere a person shows one side of himself, but at home he is simply himself.

A problem follows. If the upper worlds would dissolve in an unfiltered light, how can people in bodies receive it? Through the Torah, called oz, strength. The Torah is G‑d’s own wisdom and will, so living with it now builds the strength to stand in His open light later, just as the Sages say G‑d gives the tzaddikim strength to receive their reward.

The verses describe that time. The Alter Rebbe explains the first one himself: G‑d will no longer hide behind the hem of a cloak or any covering. “Eye to eye” means people will see G‑dliness as clearly as G‑d’s own “eye” sees, and the sun will not be needed, because G‑d Himself will be the light.

Now the Alter Rebbe names when the dwelling will be complete: the days of Moshiach, above all the resurrection of the dead. That is the world as it was meant to be from the beginning.

Many think of Moshiach as the reward for our work. The note draws a distinction: the reward is mainly in the seventh millennium, after that time. The days of Moshiach are the completion of the work itself, the world our efforts have made into a home for G‑d, seen for what it is. Every mitzvah done now is part of building it.

At Mount Sinai the world already had a taste of that future. “You have been shown” means seen with the eyes, not only understood. G‑d’s word came from every direction, so wherever the people looked, nothing was hiding Him. They did not need to be persuaded that there is nothing besides Him. They saw it.

This happened because the Ten Commandments contain the whole Torah, G‑d’s inner will and wisdom, with no hiding at all. The people could not bear it, and at each utterance their souls left them. G‑d revived them with the dew of resurrection, which is the dew of Torah. So Sinai showed both halves of this chapter: an open revelation in the physical world, and the Torah as the strength to bear it.

Sinai did not last. The text gives the reason: the sin made the people and the world coarse again, until the End of Days (the Hebrew word used, yamin, also hints at G‑d’s “right hand”, His power). Then the body and the world themselves will be refined enough to hold the light, and it will shine to Israel through the Torah. Beyond the text’s own reason, one way to understand this: Sinai was given from above, while a lasting dwelling has to be built from below, by the work of people in this world.

The revelation will not stop with Israel. Its surplus will brighten the darkness of all the nations. In the verses, the nations walk by this light and say to the House of Yaakov, “come, let us go by G‑d’s light”, and every creature sees His glory as one. The verse about the cracks of the rocks speaks of the nations’ awe before His grandeur; Israel, at one with G‑d, will not seek to hide from Him. This is what we pray for on Rosh Hashanah: that G‑d appear over all who dwell in the world.