Seven days with the Chernobyler Maggid

So when the Torah speaks of "the life of Sarah," he reads it as the life of the body. The body gets a real life, he says, only when it learns humility. The Sages of the Negev told Alexander the Great, "What should a person do to live? Put himself to death" (Tamid 32a). The Me'or Einayim explains: put to death the nature you were born with, the pull "to chase after the vanities of the time, to make yourself big and to show off," and become low in your own eyes. Then the verse comes true: "I dwell with the lowly and humble of spirit" (Yeshayahu 57:15).

Rabbi Meir teaches that a person must say a hundred blessings every day, from the verse "what (mah) does Hashem your God ask of you" (Menachot 43b). Rashi there explains: read mah (what) as me'ah (a hundred). The Me'or Einayim quotes this reading and takes it his own way. Moshe taught the people his trait of saying "What are we?" (Shemot 16:7), and the Torah praises him as the humblest man on earth (Bamidbar 12:3). But humility has fake versions too. Only humility held in truth adds the aleph, Hashem, and turns mah into me'ah.

The last words are from the Gemara (Sotah 5a): about an arrogant person, Hashem says, "I and he cannot live together in the world." A humble person makes his heart a home for Hashem, and then he feels Hashem close, "the King is near him and inside him."

He builds on the day before. A person who reaches the level of me'ah, true humility, gives his body real life. Then he reads Sarah's ages. Rashi says Sarah at a hundred was as free of sin as she was at twenty, "because at twenty a person is not yet punished," and all her years were "equal in goodness." The Me'or Einayim explains why a person under twenty is not punished by Heaven: a person does not reach full understanding until twenty. When he then begins to serve Hashem in truth, he raises up his years as a young man, and even his years as a small child.

Then he reads the next verse as the steps. "Sarah died" means the self-centered nature dies. "In Kiryat Arba," the "town of four," he reads as Hashem's four-letter name, and "Chevron" as chibur, joining: the letters of Hashem's Name, which were, as it were, separated, are joined together. "Avraham came," the soul grows strong and starts leading.

Through that regret, he says, a person raises up even his first years, "and then it is good for him in this world and the next."

He opens with a question in the Gemara (the Talmud, Bava Batra 16b) on the words "Hashem blessed Avraham with everything": did Avraham have a daughter or not? To answer it, he first explains the name change. Rashi (the classic commentator on the Torah, on Bereishit 15:5) brings the Sages' teaching: "Avram has no son, but Avraham has a son." Why would one letter change that? The Me'or Einayim explains that Hashem created every world (each spiritual level of creation) through the letters of the Torah, step by step, from aleph down to tav (the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet). The work of joining all of those levels back to the aleph, Hashem, the "Master of the world," was handed to Israel, and through it they bring life and blessing down to everything.

Avraham served Hashem with love, until Hashem called him "Avraham, who loves Me" (Yeshayahu 41:8). So Hashem gave him the leading of all the worlds:

That is the added hei, whose number is five, and that is why "Avram has no son, but Avraham has a son": with the power of speech Avraham could draw down toladot, children, for himself. Then he adds a warning. The Gemara (Berachot 55a) lists iyun tefillah among three things that bring a person's sins to mind before Heaven. Literally it means "dwelling on one's prayer"; Rashi there explains it as expecting your request to be granted because you prayed so well. The Me'or Einayim reads it as a person imagining he has reached some high level. Avraham did the opposite:

Like Moshe, the humblest of all people (Bamidbar 12:3), and like Avraham himself, who said, "I am dust and ashes" (Bereishit 18:27).

This paragraph is one of his longer ones. He begins with the idea that the Torah is the "craftsman" Hashem used to make the world, and a story in the Gemara (Taanit 20a-b). Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon met a very ugly man and said, "How ugly you are!" The man answered, "Go and tell the craftsman who made me." The Me'or Einayim says the man was a great sinner, and reads his answer as a lesson:

That is, go to the Torah, the craftsman, so it can bring the person back in teshuvah (returning to Hashem). (In the Gemara itself, it is Rabbi Elazar who realizes he sinned by insulting the man and asks his forgiveness; the Me'or Einayim draws his own lesson from the man's words.) Then he states the main rule: "There is nothing besides Him." Whoever truly believes this will not need any other help, "and everything will be fixed by itself."

This comes from the Midrash (the Sages' teachings on the Torah, Bereishit Rabbah 53:14) on Yishmael in the desert, which Rashi brings on Bereishit 21:17: "the prayer of a sick person for himself is better than anyone else's." Then he takes up the Gemara in Berachot 5b. When a sick sage was told "give me your hand" and lifted up, why couldn't the healer heal himself? "A prisoner cannot free himself from prison." The Me'or Einayim finds a holy name of Hashem hidden in the first letters of "give me your hand," and says this kind of instant lifting cannot happen by oneself:

It happens, he says, through a tzaddik who is bound to Hashem. Through that bond the tzaddik reaches a place of pure mercy, with no judgment at all, and softens the judgment from there.

He starts from the Gemara (the Talmud, Sanhedrin 107b): until Avraham there was no old age, and people could not tell Avraham from Yitzchak. Avraham asked for mercy, and old age came. The Me'or Einayim explains: the world was created so that Hashem's qualities (merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness) could be revealed. But that needs a partner below. He brings Rashi on the rain:

So before Avraham, he says, the world was chaos: the generation of the Flood, the generation of the Tower, the people of Sedom. Nobody was awakening Hashem's kindness, and so it was not revealed.

The first of the qualities, he says, is recognizing that everything is Hashem's doing, and that is what Avraham taught:

The Midrash points to Avraham giving "a tenth of everything" to Malki-tzedek, the king of Shalem and a priest of God (Bereishit 14:20). The Me'or Einayim explains: there are channels through which Hashem's abundance flows down to a person. When a person goes wrong, he moves himself into a place of judgment, and the judgments stand in the way and block the channels. Giving a tenth softens those judgments until they agree to the blessing.

He reads "Hashem blessed Avraham" as Hashem together with His court: even the side of judgment agreed to bless him, because his giving had softened it.

The Midrash (the Sages' teachings on the Torah; see Tanchuma, Chayei Sara 3) on "Avraham was old" quotes the verse "Hashem my God, You are very great; You have clothed Yourself in glory and splendor" (Tehillim 104:1). In the form the Me'or Einayim quotes, Hashem was "clothed in splendor" at Sinai, when Israel said "we will do and we will hear." He explains with Hashem's thirteen attributes of mercy (Shemot 34:6-7). The Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) calls them the "thirteen parts of the beard" above, Hashem's glory, just as a beard is the glory of a face. This is only a picture: he stresses that the comparison is infinitely removed, and earlier in the chapter (paragraph 6) that Hashem has no form at all. He links the attributes to the thirteen rules by which the Torah is expounded.

These qualities were placed inside each of us, mixed with bad. Our work is to bring the good side of them into action, as the Sages say: "As He is gracious and merciful, so you be gracious and merciful" (Shabbat 133b). The Gemara (the Talmud) says that whenever Israel sins, "let them do before Me this order" of the thirteen attributes (Rosh Hashanah 17b). He stresses the word "do": not only say them, but live them.

That is why, the Gemara says, a heavenly voice called out at Sinai: "Who revealed to My children this secret that the angels use?" (Shabbat 88a). The angels too "do His word" first, then "hear the voice of His word" (Tehillim 103:20). He reads "we will hear" as receiving understanding from above. And that, he says, is the real meaning of zaken, "one who acquired wisdom": Avraham was "old, advanced in days," the days being the high qualities he had brought into his life.