Seven days with the Chernobyler Maggid

He names the Zohar and gives no place in it. The passage that fits his words is in the Zohar's section on the Torah portion Beha'alotcha (3:152a). Rabbi Shimon (bar Yochai) says there: woe to the person who says that the Torah came to tell mere stories and everyday words. All the words of the Torah, he says, are high words and high secrets. The story of the Torah, the Zohar says, is the Torah's garment, and it goes on, in harsher words, about one who thinks that the garment is the Torah itself and nothing more. It gives a picture of its own: wine sits only in a jar, and the Torah sits only in this garment. So one should look only at what is under the garment.

The print says "and splendor" (hadar), though the verse he brings as proof says "glory" (hod). The first verse is Tehillim (Psalms) 104:1. The second, "Set Your glory upon the heavens," is Tehillim 8:2. We add where the Sages read that verse as speaking of the Torah. In the Gemara (the Talmud, Shabbat 88b) Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi tells that when Moshe (Moses) went up to receive the Torah, the angels said this verse before the Holy One, blessed be He: they asked that the Torah stay in heaven.

The verse is Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) 23:29: "Is not My word like fire, says Hashem, and like a hammer that shatters rock?" We add: the Gemara (Taanit 7a) asks why words of Torah are compared to fire, and gives a reason of its own. Rabbah bar bar Chanah says there: as fire does not burn alone, so words of Torah do not last in one who learns alone.

He opens with the verse "And Yehudah approached him" (Bereishit, Genesis, 44:18) and asks why it was written. The teaching as printed breaks off before its end (see the seventh step). The verse is not mentioned again in what is printed.

The verse is Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 55:1. We add: the Gemara (the Talmud, Taanit 7a) reads it as speaking of the Torah. Rabbi Chanina bar Idi asks there why words of Torah are compared to water, and answers: as water leaves a high place and goes to a low one, so words of Torah last only in one whose mind is humble.

"He makes peace in His heights" is from Iyov (Job) 25:2. The saying about heaven is in the Gemara (Chagigah 12a): a baraita (an early teaching) reads shamayim as fire and water, and says that the Holy One, blessed be He, brought them and mixed them together and made the firmament from them. Rashi (the classic commentator, 11th century) has it on Bereishit (Genesis) 1:8 in nearly the words the Me'or Einayim uses: "fire and water, which He mixed together and made heaven from them." In Bereishit Rabbah (the Midrash on Genesis, 4:7) it is said in the name of Rav.

We add a Midrash on this parsha (Torah portion). The Midrash Tanchuma (a collection of the Sages' readings of the Torah; Vayigash 6) brings the same verse from Iyov. The angel Michael is of water and the angel Gavriel of fire, it says, and they stand before the Shechinah (the Divine Presence) and do not harm each other. Rabbi Shimon adds that the firmament (the sky) is of water and the angels of fire, and the water does not put out the fire. Then it turns to this parsha. Yehudah (Judah) and Yosef (Joseph), it says, are a lion and an ox (the Torah's blessings picture them so: Bereishit 49:9; Devarim, Deuteronomy, 33:17). Yesterday they were goring each other, and now the one is sent ahead to the other, as the verse says: "And he sent Yehudah ahead of him" (Bereishit 46:28).

The Aramaic line is from Patach Eliyahu, a passage at the opening of the Tikkunei Zohar (a companion book to the Zohar, the classic of the Torah's hidden teachings; 17a). There the words are said to Hashem: "You are He who ties them and unites them." The Me'or Einayim brings the line again, in those words, further on in this teaching.

He goes on: so the Creator, blessed be He, is "consuming, a fire that consumes all the fires of the world." The print is damaged here. The first word, "consuming," is Hebrew and stands alone, as if the word "fire" had dropped out before it. The rest is Aramaic, and its word for "fires" is oddly spelled. "A consuming fire" is the Torah's phrase (Devarim, Deuteronomy, 4:24), and in another place in the book (Additions 45) he brings that phrase with the same Aramaic line, spelled in the usual way. We add: the Gemara (the Talmud, Yoma 21b) counts six kinds of fire. The last is "fire that consumes fire," and the Gemara says that this is the fire of the Shechinah (the Divine Presence).

He brings the line without a reference. It is in the Tikkunei Zohar (a companion book to the Zohar, the classic of the Torah's hidden teachings; 25b). There the sentence has its subject: "Torah without fear and love does not fly upward." "Fear and love" in its Aramaic is dechilu u-rechimu.

The count is in the Gemara (the Talmud, Makkot 23b to 24a). Rabbi Simlai taught that 613 mitzvot were said to Moshe (Moses): 365 prohibitions, like the days of the solar year, and 248 positive commandments, like the limbs of a person. Rav Hamnuna gives a verse for it: "Moshe commanded us Torah" (Devarim, Deuteronomy, 33:4). "Torah" in gematria is 611, and "I am" and "You shall have no other" we heard from the mouth of the Almighty (the Hebrew is ha-Gevurah, "the Might"). In the Gemara, then, the two beyond the 611 are those two commandments, which were heard directly. The Me'or Einayim reads those two as love and fear.

The verses are Shemot (Exodus) 20:2-3: "I am Hashem your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves. You shall have no other gods before Me." He goes on to read "other gods" as other powers, and comes back to those words in the seventh step. The Torah commands love and fear in so many words. We add "You shall love Hashem your God" (Devarim 6:5). "Hashem your God you shall fear" (Devarim 6:13 and 10:20) is a verse he brings himself in the seventh step.

The verse is Devarim (Deuteronomy) 30:6: "And Hashem your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your children, to love Hashem your God with all your heart and with all your soul, for the sake of your life." He asks why Hashem would open the way for us to love Him for a motive, as the words "for the sake of your life" seem to say. His word for a motive of one's own is peniyah. He introduces all this as "our saying," a teaching he has said before.

"You are He who ties them and unites them" is from Patach Eliyahu, a passage at the opening of the Tikkunei Zohar (a companion book to the Zohar, the classic of the Torah's hidden teachings; 17a), where it is said to Hashem. There "them" is the ten sefirot, a term of Kabbalah (the Torah's hidden teachings); the Me'or Einayim applies the words to the worlds. The Rema's words are his own note in the Shulchan Aruch (the 16th-century code of Jewish law, Orach Chaim 6:1), where the blessing Asher Yatzar is explained phrase by phrase. On "and does wonders" he adds a further explanation: He does wonders in guarding a person's spirit within him and tying a spiritual thing to a physical thing, and that all this is through His being the healer of all flesh: for then a person is in health, and his soul is kept within him.

We add: a person as a "small world" is a phrase of the Sages. The Midrash Tanchuma (a collection of the Sages' readings of the Torah; Pekudei 3) says that the Mishkan (the Tabernacle in the wilderness) is equal to the whole world and to the forming of a person, "who is a small world."

His words here are that all a person's powers and his life-force "are the Creator." He writes the same line in his chapter on the Torah portion Shemot (paragraph 4). Sefer Baal Shem Tov, a book that gathers the sayings of the Baal Shem Tov (the founder of the Chasidic movement), reprints that passage (on the Torah portion Eikev, 60). There the line is printed once with one letter added, "are from the Creator," and a few lines later without it: "all his powers are the Creator."

He goes on, "And when you move any limb" (the print has a misspelled word here), and then:

The verse he reads is Devarim (Deuteronomy) 30:6. We add a verse from the end of the same chapter, which is not in his teaching here: "to love Hashem your God, to listen to His voice and to hold fast to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days" (Devarim 30:20; "He," as Ibn Ezra, the 12th-century commentator, reads it).

The question he is answering is in the step before this one: why would Hashem open the way for us to love Him for a motive? His word is peniyah, a turning toward one's own benefit. His answer is the reading above.

The words of the title, "the Master of all your powers," close the quote above. Just before them the print repeats a few words, and the quote passes over the repetition. The verse "Hashem your God you shall fear" is in the Torah twice (Devarim, Deuteronomy, 6:13 and 10:20). We add: the words he uses for the Name Elokim, "mighty, the Master of ability and the Master of all powers," are the words of the Shulchan Aruch (the 16th-century code of Jewish law, Orach Chaim 5:1) on what to have in mind when saying that Name in a blessing.

The verse is Devarim 11:16, in the second paragraph of the Shema (the declaration said morning and evening). A book that gathers the Baal Shem Tov's sayings on the Torah, Sefer Baal Shem Tov, brings this saying (on the Torah portion Eikev, 60) from three places in the Me'or Einayim, and names the end of this chapter as one of them. We add a verse that is not in his teaching here, the Torah's own words about a person's strength: "And you say in your heart: my power and the might of my hand made me this wealth. And you shall remember Hashem your God, for it is He who gives you power to make wealth" (Devarim 8:17-18).

He brings the same saying of the Baal Shem Tov in his chapter on the Torah portion Shemot (paragraph 4). There the saying itself reads: as soon as you turn from Hashem, at once you serve other gods. The Me'or Einayim explains it there as he does here, by what he calls the main knowledge: that all a person's powers and his life-force are the Creator. He is speaking there of Israel in Egypt, and of the charge made against them at the sea, that they too served idols, and he writes:

In Egypt this knowledge was in exile, he writes, and that is why there was the charge that these and these serve idols. He closes the point by saying once more, Heaven forbid, that they served idols in fact. The print is garbled in that line, and it is not quoted here.

The paragraph goes on to one more piece. He recalls a teaching he says he has given several times, on the verse "the righteous one rules, the fear of God" (Shmuel II, 2 Samuel, 23:3). In the Gemara (the Talmud, Moed Katan 16b) Rabbi Abbahu reads the verse this way: the Holy One says, I rule over man. Who rules over Me (the Hebrew is moshel bi)? The tzaddik (righteous person): I decree a decree, and he annuls it. The Me'or Einayim brings a question from the Zohar (the classic of the Torah's hidden teachings): is a tzaddik, then, one who goes against his Master? He begins his answer from the wording: it says bi (literally, "in Me"), he notes, where it should have said alai, "over Me." There the printed text stops. On Sefaria (an online library of Jewish texts) the next line is one word: "missing." He takes up the same saying in other chapters of the book (for example, his chapter on the Torah portion Devarim, paragraphs 3 and 4). This page does not cover it.

The Additions printed at the end of the Me'or Einayim hold one more short piece, headed "left out of the Torah portion Vayigash," that opens with the words "only the land of the priests he did not buy" (Bereishit, Genesis, 47:22). It is a separate teaching, and it is not part of this week.