Chapter 5: Grasping and Being Grasped: Torah as the Soul’s Food

Chapter 4 ended with a bold claim: no thought can grasp G‑d, yet through Torah a person can grasp Him. Now the Alter Rebbe explains what “grasping” means.

When you truly understand an idea, two things happen. First, your mind holds the idea. It surrounds it, the way a hand closes around something, until nothing of the idea is left outside. Second, and this is the surprise, the idea also holds you. While you are working on it, your mind is wrapped up in it, clothed in it. You can see this in the fact that a mind busy with one thing cannot at the same moment busy itself with another.

The Rebbe explains that these two sides unfold in stages. First you catch the idea in a general way, and your mind “has” it. Then you begin to take it apart and test each detail, and now the idea has you: it is still bigger than your mind, and your mind lives inside it. When the work is done and the whole picture stands clear, your mind surrounds it again, now completely. That is why the text speaks of the mind “that understood it”, in the past tense.

Now the Alter Rebbe applies this to Torah. He calls the halachah G‑d’s wisdom and will: its reasoning is His wisdom, and its verdict His will, as chapter 4 explained. A quarrel over money between Reuven and Shimon looks very ordinary, but it is the form G‑d’s infinite wisdom takes in our world. So when you understand how such a case is judged, you are understanding G‑d’s own thinking.

That is why it makes no difference if the case will never come to court. If Torah study were only to tell us what to do, a law that will never apply would be pointless to learn. But its value is in the knowing itself, which joins the mind to G‑d’s wisdom. And that is why the text says “as the halachah is set out in the Mishnah, Gemara or poskim”: someone who reached the same verdict through another legal system would have human knowledge, not G‑d’s wisdom.

A mashal: a hand can close around a ball, but it cannot surround the ball and be surrounded by it at the same time. Physical things that join always stay two. In understanding, the idea becomes part of the mind while the mind is absorbed in the idea. And since this idea is G‑d’s wisdom, which is one with Him, the person and G‑d become one “from every side and angle”. What makes it so wondrous is how far apart the two are: a human mind and G‑d’s wisdom.

This also explains why chapter 4 pictured both the person embracing the King and the King embracing the person. In Torah the mind holds G‑d’s wisdom, and G‑d’s wisdom holds the mind.

Torah study itself has two sides: saying the words, a mitzvah of speech, and understanding them, which is knowing the Torah. One can say the words without understanding them. The understanding, says the Alter Rebbe, is infinitely higher than any mitzvah of action or speech, even the spoken side of Torah study.

The reason: every mitzvah is G‑d’s will. When a person gives charity or puts on tefillin, his energy goes into the act, and since G‑d is one with His will, the person is wrapped in G‑d’s light “from head to foot”, from the highest level of his soul to the lowest. But it is like a garment: it surrounds him from outside.

In knowing Torah there is also a clothing, since the mind is clothed in G‑d’s wisdom. And something more happens too: G‑d’s wisdom comes inside the person.

“Each according to his intellect” matters. This union does not depend on genius or on how deep the subject is. A simple person who truly understands a simple idea in Torah has joined his mind to G‑d’s wisdom just as truly.

A garment and bread both serve the body. A garment protects it from cold and heat, but it always stays outside the one who wears it. Bread goes inside, and the text names two steps: first it is taken in, then it is changed until it is no longer bread but your own flesh and blood.

Torah is the same. At first you take the ideas off the page and restate them in your own mind, at your own level. That is the chewing. As you keep learning, they become your way of thinking. That is the digesting.

Notice the condition: “who studies it well, with the concentration of his mind, until it is grasped”. The food is the understanding, not just being near the words.

And the life it gives is inner life, from the Ein Sof, the Infinite One, Who is clothed in the wisdom now inside the soul. What nourishes the soul is G‑d’s own life within it.

The verse speaks of Torah “within my innards”: Torah enters a person’s innermost being, like food that has been digested.

The Kabbalah says the same about the soul after this life. In Gan Eden the soul stands before the radiance of the Divine Presence. A finite soul can bear that infinite light only if it is clothed, and its garments are the mitzvos it did, since a mitzvah wraps the soul in G‑d’s light. But clothing alone keeps no one alive. The soul also needs food, a G‑dly light that has entered it: the Torah it learned.

Then the Alter Rebbe defines lishmah, and this is not the usual meaning of the word. It is not some other, special kind of motive that turns Torah into food. It is the very aim this chapter describes: learning in order to bind your soul to G‑d by understanding His Torah. (Chapters 39–41 return to this.)

So learning lishmah is within everyone’s reach. People differ in ability, but whatever a person truly understands, when he learns it to connect to G‑d, is real G‑dly bread for him.

The Alter Rebbe himself set this passage apart in parentheses. It answers a question: if the mitzvos are the soul’s garments and the Torah its food, each has its own role, so why is Torah greater?

Food stands for or pnimi, “inner light”, a G‑dly energy that enters and is absorbed. A garment stands for or makif, “surrounding light”, which embraces a person from outside without entering him. The mitzvos give surrounding light alone. Torah gives both. What a person has truly taken in and “digested” is food. And the soul is also clothed in the Torah while it concentrates and learns. One way to understand this: what he has not yet fully made his own still surrounds him like a garment, and it too keeps the holiness of a mitzvah. It recalls the start of the chapter: while you are still working on an idea, it holds you.

So Torah study equals all the mitzvos together. And when the words are also said aloud, the breath of speech adds still more surrounding light.