Tetzaveh: Sleep, Colds, and Migraines: Symptoms of the Exile of the Soul and the Nation

00:08 Good evening to all the viewers and listeners of COL. This week we conclude the Book of Bamidbar with Parshas Masei. We strengthen ourselves with “Chazak, chazak, venischazek.” In its final parsha, the Torah sums up all forty-two journeys the Jewish people made in the desert, mentioning them one by one: they traveled and they camped, they traveled and they camped. On the opening verse, “These are the journeys of the children of Israel,” Rashi seems to have been troubled by a question: Why were these journeys written down? Why not? Because they had already been recorded when they happened. What does this summary add? Anyone who goes through the books of Shemos, Vayikra, and Bamidbar will see all the journeys—where they camped and where they traveled. So why summarize them at such length? Rashi offers two explanations. The first he brings from Rabbi Moshe HaDarshan. It highlights the kindness Hakadosh Boruch Hu showed them. One might think they were dragged from place to place throughout their forty years in the desert, constantly traveling. No. In one year they made twenty journeys, and the rest were spread over the remaining years. So Hashem showed them great kindness. But Rashi’s second explanation prompted the Rebbe to deliver an interesting sicha on the subject. Rashi says: “Rabbi Tanchuma gave another interpretation: This is like a king whose son was ill, and the king took him to a distant place to heal him. When they were returning, after his recovery, the father began recounting all their journeys. He said to him, ‘Here we slept. Do you remember? Here we felt cold, and here you had a headache,’ and so on.” And Bamidbar Rabbah adds: “So too, Hakadosh Boruch Hu said to him: Recount for them all the places where they angered Me.” Thus it says, “These are the journeys of the children of Israel.” So far, Rashi’s words. The Rebbe asks several questions. After all, a parable in the teachings of our Sages is not just

03:35 a literary device. Its details are precise. The Rebbe asks: Where do we find, in the case the parable represents, examples corresponding to the three things that happened to the king and his son—sleeping, feeling cold, and having a headache? He gave specific examples, so they must have counterparts in what the parable represents. More than that: Rashi mentions only these three examples, yet the question was why all the journeys were recorded. Why, then, did he give only three examples? That implies, the Rebbe says, that these three are broad categories. All forty-two journeys involve these three things: “we slept,” “we felt cold,” and “you had a headache.” So we need to understand how that is so. Did all this really happen on every journey? The Rebbe asks another question. Of the examples Rashi gives, we can understand “we felt cold” as a chill, and “you had a headache” as a headache. These could represent the places where “they angered Me,” where the king’s son had ailments. But “we slept”—what is wrong with sleeping? It is normal. How is that part of the king’s son’s illness? Even a healthy person goes to sleep at night. The Rebbe noticed another detail: In the example of sleeping, the king includes himself with his son—“we slept,” you and I. With feeling cold, he also uses the plural: “we felt cold,” the king and his son. But with the headache, he does not say, “We had headaches.” No. There is a reason Rashi changes the wording here, as the Midrash does. Before delving into the deeper meaning, the Rebbe first seeks to explain it in Rashi’s manner, according to the straightforward meaning of the verse. We can explain the three examples quite simply. Perhaps they allude to the first three journeys. How? On the first day after leaving Egypt, they traveled from Rameses, the place from which they left Egypt, to Sukkos. They came to a settlement

07:19 called Sukkos, and the next day they continued on. That day, they camped in Sukkos. For the first time after leaving Egypt, after that whole ordeal, they laid down their heads and slept. So “here we slept” refers to the first journey, to Sukkos. I should emphasize that this was not during the festival of Sukkos. The place was called Sukkos; otherwise, of course, they would not have slept in a sukkah. But here they slept. What happened on the second journey? They traveled from Sukkos to Eisam. The new thing there was that the Clouds of Glory came. Targum Yonasan also explains this; I’ll translate it from Aramaic. He says that the Jewish people traveled 130 miles from Rameses to Sukkos, and there they were surrounded by seven Clouds of Glory: four on the four sides and one above them, so that rain and hail would not fall on them and they would not be scorched by the sun’s heat. So what did the Clouds of Glory do? They shaded them and cooled them. That was where “we cooled off.” That was the first time we got air conditioning in the heat of the desert. What was the third journey? They traveled from Eisam and camped at Pi Hachiros, on the shore of the Red Sea. What happened there? Before the splitting of the sea, mind you, they complained: “It would be better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert.” Why did you take us out of Egypt? The Rebbe says this was the first time they raised a skeptical, intellectual argument. That is a headache—a problem in their outlook. They complained in other places too, but there it was out of distress: hunger or thirst. Here it began with an intellectual question: Why did we leave Egypt? This was the first instance of “you had a headache.” So, on the straightforward level, we can say that this is the meaning of the three examples. They do not refer to all the journeys, only to the first three. But the plain implication—since Rashi does not spell this out, and speaks of all the places where “they angered Me,” and of the king going

10:40 and returning—is that he means all the journeys. So why did he mention only these three? The Rebbe raises a possible idea: perhaps these three examples encompass the whole of Jewish history, from the Exodus from Egypt until “I will show you wonders” in the future, through to the Resurrection of the Dead. There are three stages here: the Exodus from Egypt, then the Clouds of Glory, then the splitting of the sea. The Exodus from Egypt was the first Geulah. The Clouds of Glory allude to the time of Moshiach, who will come “with the clouds of heaven.” And the splitting of the sea alludes to the Resurrection of the Dead, when the river will be split, and as it is written, “Then Moshe and the children of Israel will sing”—meaning that he will rise at the Resurrection of the Dead. So this encompasses the entire exile, right up to the complete Geulah. It is a beautiful idea. According to this approach, all the details, stages, and periods that followed are included in these three things. But the Rebbe says it does not fit, because “you had a headache” happened on the journey from Eisam to Pi Hachiros, before the splitting of the sea. And Rashi does not mention a fourth example describing the splitting of the sea. That implies that all three examples had already occurred before the splitting of the sea, and that they are of central importance. The Rebbe notes several more details. It says, “Recount for them all the places,” and that is why the verse lists all these journeys. The Rebbe asks: There were some journeys where “they angered Me”—the dispute over the spies, Korach’s dispute, the complaints. But not on every journey. On some journeys, there was no instance of “they angered Me” at all. So why call them “all the places where they angered Me”? It implies that all forty-two journeys were, in some sense, places where “they angered Me.” How can we understand that? Another question the Rebbe asks—and I’m saying this in parentheses—is that here we see how the Rebbe teaches us that a Torah parable is not just some story that... Every detail has to be precise.

13:42 Sometimes the parable speaks of a king’s son, sometimes of a king’s daughter, and sometimes of a minister. So if these details are stated here, they must be precise. The Rebbe asks an interesting question. The listing of all the journeys on the way out corresponds, in the parable, to the king taking his son to a distant place to heal him, passing through all those stops. But what does the parable say next? On their return, he begins pointing out each place they had passed: “Here we slept; here we were cold.” Where is there a return journey in the lesson of the parable? The King, Hakadosh Boruch Hu, led them through all these journeys to heal them, as we’ll soon see. But they kept going in one direction, toward Eretz Yisroel. They didn’t retrace all their journeys and go back as far as the splitting of the sea, with the King saying, “See? Here we slept, and here we were cold.” So what does “on their return” mean? This suggests that, according to the Midrashic interpretation, these three examples really encompass the entire experience of the wilderness, the entire experience of exile. They represent the whole process. Let’s see the explanation. It rests on the Kabbalistic explanation in Chassidus that all the journeys in the wilderness allude to the journey of Jewish history. In other words, the forty years from the Exodus from Egypt until the entry into the Land—a relatively short period in history—are a miniature model of all Jewish history since the first exile. Through them, they pass through all the stages of exile. It is all called “the wilderness of the nations,” and the goal is to refine the wilderness.

16:15 The wilderness. The Jewish people traveled through the wilderness with the Ark, while the cloud leveled all the mountains and destroyed the fiery serpents and scorpions. This alludes to the route the Jewish people take through the wilderness of the nations, through the historical wilderness, refining sparks and sanctifying each place they reach. When the forty-two journeys are complete—there it took forty years; for us, it has already been more than two thousand years, but it is a matter of scale—as the sparks are refined and we finally reach the end of the wilderness, we come to Yarden-Yericho. This alludes to Moshiach: Yarden hints to “he will instruct and judge,” and Yericho to his judging by scent, through ruach hakodesh. Beyond that, it alludes to the entire long exile. In other words, this applies not only on the small scale of the generation in the wilderness, but on the larger scale of all Jewish history until Moshiach comes. There is another important allusion here, too: the soul’s journey. Every Jewish soul goes through this process. It leaves the higher world and descends into this physical world, a world of constraints—a Mitzrayim, an Egypt. It is an enormous descent. Here it spends its life traveling through the world, through all sorts of places in the wilderness of the nations, with the goal of refining its surroundings and the people around it, until the soul ascends and returns to its Father in Heaven. That is the allusion. When we descend, when the soul descends, it is “these are their journeys from their points of departure.” There is “these are their points of departure for their journeys”—the soul’s descent. It leaves the higher world and sets out on its journey in this world. Afterward comes the return: the soul ascends, “their journeys to their points of departure,” returning to its source above. The reason Hakadosh Boruch Hu sends the soul down into the wilderness of the nations is not only to refine the wilderness, the world, and the sparks, and to eliminate the serpents, fiery serpents, and scorpions. It is also that the one carrying out this mission—the soul itself—rises through that descent.

19:44 In other words, “a descent for the sake of an ascent” does not mean only that the world will be elevated to holiness. It means that the soul, having descended, will rise as a result of the struggle, the challenge of refining the sparks. But what is the difference? While we are here in this world, what do we feel? The descent. Even if we understand that, ultimately, an ascent will come from it, right now we are in a state of descent. The ascent is still in the future. During the outward journeys, the ascent is not felt. As explained in a maamar of the Frierdiker Rebbe discussing how Hakadosh Boruch Hu made the tzimtzum, the contraction, in order to create the world: seemingly, the tzimtzum is so that revelation can follow. He says, yes, the tzimtzum is so that revelation can follow, but at the moment of tzimtzum itself, before the revelation, it is not—it is contrary to the will of the One bringing about the contraction. He does not feel good about contracting. He sees the goal that will come afterward, but at the moment of contraction, that goal is external; the contraction goes against His innermost will. When does the ascent become apparent? After the journeys are complete, when we finish Parshas Masei. When we reach the stage of ascent, when the soul rises back up—having been elevated in this world, it ascends to its higher source—it becomes clear in retrospect that all those descents on the outward journey were, in fact, an ascent. This, the Rebbe explains, is the meaning of “on their return”: there comes a point when the soul returns from its mission of refining the lower world and passes through the stages of ascent. Then it becomes clear that the King took His son on this whole journey not as a punishment, but “to heal him.” To heal him. What healing? The entire world is sick from the sin of the Tree of Knowledge, and everything the Jewish people do serves to repair that sin, until our righteous Moshiach comes. So the soul’s entire descent from the higher worlds, passing through all the difficulties of this world and all its tests—

23:10 On the outward journey, these look like hardships. On the return, you suddenly see that the whole time, “the king was taking his son to heal him.” This is expressed in the well-known verse in Yeshayahu, which we mentioned last week as well: when Moshiach comes, “I will thank You, Hashem, for You were angry with me.” Sometimes a father hits his child and later regrets it. The child then makes peace with him. Making peace means saying, “I’ll forget the harm you did me, and we’ll start fresh.” But he won’t say, “Thank you very much for the violence you inflicted on me.” Here, it is not merely that a Jew accepts suffering with love: “If Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave it to me, I have no choice, and afterward I’ll make peace with Him.” Rather, when Moshiach comes, it will be revealed that everything that seemed like “You were angry with me,” like a descent, will make me say, “Thank You so much. What a tremendous ascent came from it!” Here the Rebbe goes into more detail. He asks: How, then, can we call such a journey through the lands of the nations—amid exile, amid trials, amid serpents and scorpions—kindness and an ascent? Aren’t these negative things? This is what the parable Rashi brings from Midrash Tanchuma alludes to: “The king took him to heal him.” The king’s son does not go alone. He was not thrown to the serpents. No one told him, “Go find your own way, and when you’re better, we’ll bring you home.” At every step he takes, the King leads him, and the purpose is to heal him. That means that even during the descent itself, not only afterward, the purpose was for him to attain an ascent through that descent. It was not a punishment. It was necessary healing, a process of recovery. And what ascent does the soul achieve as a result of this descent? This is important to emphasize. The advantage is... Chassidus explains that when the soul was above, it was in the category of a tzaddik. When it descends below—any soul, not necessarily that of a wicked person. Every

26:22 When a soul descends below and encounters the animal soul, materiality and physicality, and struggles with them and prevails, it becomes like a baal teshuvah. Powers are revealed within it that are beyond what all the souls up there could long to experience. They do not have the “My soul thirsts for You” that exists in a dry and weary land. That is the elevation the soul gains. That is the Chassidic understanding of “ascent.” Because in the understanding that preceded Chassidus, the descent into this world calls for an ascent to Gan Eden. So what ascent will there be? We’ll reach Gan Eden. Wait—where was the soul before? Wasn’t it in Gan Eden? But according to Chassidus, the ascent does not happen there, in Gan Eden. The ascent happens here. Through this very struggle with the wilderness of the nations, and by passing through it and withstanding every test, the soul gains the tremendous strength of a baal teshuvah. So this entire descent was planned by Hakadosh Boruch Hu to bring His child to that ascent. Here the Rebbe asks: All this would be fitting to say about the descent into the wilderness of the nations as a whole. Likewise, all this can be said about the soul’s descent into the body itself: a soul from the World of Atzilus descends to Gan Eden, and from Gan Eden descends into Dizengoff Street and into a physical body. That is planned from Above. That we can understand. Its purpose is for a person to reveal his deepest strengths and thereby rise in holiness. So it was planned by Hakadosh Boruch Hu from the outset. But, the Rebbe says, what about all the times “they angered Me”? The soul’s descent into the world is like the Jewish people going out into the wilderness. They did not have to anger Him. They needed to cross the wilderness to reach the Land of Israel, so they went out into the wilderness. About that you can say it was planned by Hakadosh Boruch Hu: cross the wilderness, reach the Land of Israel, and all will be well. But what about those situations that are not the result of some Divine plan? They are the result of “they angered Me”—sins a person committed when he failed in the struggle and, of his own

29:19 free choice, did not overcome his yetzer and chose evil, angering Him. Is that, too, part of the process of “the king led him,” a Divine plan from the outset? It’s frightening to say that. An aside here: Although the descent a person brings upon himself through his sins is much more severe than the descent by which Hakadosh Boruch Hu brought his soul below, we can understand that afterward, when he does teshuvah for that excessive descent, the ascent that comes from it—the baal teshuvah he becomes—will be something far, far higher. Even higher than the ascent brought about by the soul’s descent without sins. But that, the Rebbe says, is looking forward. If I look to the future, I can say: Yes, I failed, I chose wrongly, I angered the King. But in the end we will transform it, make lemonade out of the lemon, and turn it into holiness. But that is what will happen afterward. How can you say that even those journeys on which “they angered Me” were ones on which “the king led him”? In other words, that this, too, was the result of the King’s plan and part of the process of healing? How can that be? These are sins committed by a person of his own free choice. Here the Rebbe touches on a very deep and sensitive point that we have to know how to explain, or we could get it wrong. He says that there is an idea in the Midrash, which the Mitteler Rebbe discusses at length, of “awesome in His dealings with mankind.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu does not only bring the soul down into a body in a general way, a descent from the atmosphere of holiness. Sometimes He also arranges situations involving sin and stumbling for a person, and that, too, is part of Hakadosh Boruch Hu’s plan. Let’s see what the Midrash says about this. On the verse “awesome in His dealings with mankind,” the Midrash says: Come and see. When Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world, He created the Angel of Death on the first day: “and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

32:25 The Angel of Death. Man was only created on the sixth day, and afterward He comes to Adam and tells him: You brought death into the world through the sin of the Tree of Knowledge. But You had already made “darkness upon the face of the deep”—the Angel of Death—on the first day. So You accuse me of bringing death into the world? And the Midrash gives an interesting parable. A man wanted to divorce his wife. So he went into the house, wrote a get, and kept it with him. He wanted to find a reason to give her the get. So he said, “Please pour me a drink.” When she poured it for him, he handed her the get. “Take the get. You’re divorced.” She said to him, “What did I do to you? What was my offense?” “Leave my house. You poured me a lukewarm drink. You didn’t make it hot.” So she said to him, “What are you talking about? Is that why you’re divorcing me? You already knew I would pour you a lukewarm drink when you wrote the get and brought it with you, before you even spoke to me.” And the same is said of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. In the Torah He wrote two thousand years before the creation of the world, it says, “This is the law: When a person dies in a tent.” So the concept of death already existed two thousand years before creation, before Adam had even been created. Then, when Adam came and sinned with the Tree of Knowledge, You told him that he had caused death. That is the meaning of “awesome in His dealings with mankind.” How does the Mitteler Rebbe explain this? There are situations in which, from Above, a person is enticed: his yetzer hara is stirred and aroused to bring him to this sin. Parenthetically, this does not contradict free choice. Why? Because the heavenly push, this impulse to draw him toward evil and let it overpower good, is not something the person feels. It is intensified from Heaven, but he does not feel it.

34:56 So he chooses of his own free will. And the Mitteler Rebbe adds another phrase: “And it does not compel him absolutely.” What does that phrase add? Even if he did feel it, what Heaven does is only create the temptation and time the encounter with the sin. There can even be situations like the one with Potiphar’s wife, which seem impossible to withstand. But in the end, if a person is determined, he can withstand even that plan. In any case, we see that Hakadosh Boruch Hu does not only bring the soul down into a body in a general way, lowering its level of holiness. He also arranges situations of tests and sins for a person, with the aim that, in the end, great teshuvah will come from it and he will reach a level far higher than he otherwise could. The entire descent is for the sake of an ascent. “The king led him” on every journey, including those on which “they angered Me.” What is the significance of the first three examples? In other words, the question is why the Midrash lists only the first three examples: we slept, we were cold, your head ached. It is because only in those three is the King’s kindness openly apparent. That was before “they angered Me.” Only after the Splitting of the Sea did they begin to sin. So in those first examples, we see explicitly that the King led them. But the truth is that even a person’s mistaken choices were planned from Above in order to bring him to the greater light that emerges from difficulty. Hey, what about free choice? So I wanted to add an explanation. Even when it comes to transgressions, “the king led him”—not to the transgression, but to the test. He places him in the most tempting situation. But after the person decides and chooses where he wants to go, it says, “A person is led along the path he wishes to take.” The king leads him, but where does he lead him? Where the person wanted to go. So here, too, the person’s choice plays a part. But the situation that Hakadosh Boruch Hu arranged for him

37:55 That difficulty, which is ninety-nine percent too hard to withstand, is meant to lead afterward to an even greater teshuvah and a greater love than that of a complete tzaddik. So it turns out that these journeys passed through three levels found in the world. Chassidus explains that the world includes inhabited places; there is a desert close to inhabited land, like the Aravah; and there is “a great and terrifying wilderness, with fiery serpents and scorpions.” What do these represent? An inhabited place is holiness. That is where the Higher Man dwells, where the Shechinah rests. A desert close to inhabited land is kelipas nogah. The great and terrifying wilderness is the three impure kelipos. And along all these roads, the king leads them. When do you see that? On the return journey, when he comes back safe and sound. Then the king says to him, “Ah, do you remember all those descents? Now see how they turned into ascents.” Here the Rebbe sums up the sicha with a very deep, central idea. He says: What do these three examples—“Here we slept, here we felt cold, here your head ached”—mean in the soul’s service, in a person’s life, in the soul’s descent below? First of all, he says, none of the three is yet a real illness. All three amount to a chill, a bit of a headache. Not an actual illness. But without these first three things, the soul’s entire descent, and the test and struggle intended for a person, could not take place. He explains why. The Divine purpose is to enable us to recognize: “I have set life and death before you; choose life.” That is the foundation of all Judaism. You have been placed in a world with two sides. It contains life and it contains death. You must choose life. To make that possible, the Rebbe says, there must be three stages. The first stage: the soul must be brought down from a place of light. When the soul is in Atzilus, nothing there allows for a state of death. Sin is not possible there. Indeed, any sense of separate existence is altogether impossible—not only sin,

41:23 but any sense of separate existence. So how could the soul face a struggle? It has no struggle at all. For a state of death to be possible, the soul’s immense light must first be concealed and withdrawn. Then, once that light has been concealed, the soul sees the world as a reality. It has something to contend with. But there must also be a small opening for light here—a measure of “He joined the attribute of mercy with it.” Otherwise, through the concealment of the soul’s Divine light, I can choose death, materiality. But how can I choose life if I know nothing at all about spirituality? If everything has been completely concealed from me? So a small opening must remain, through which a person, if he makes an effort, can see Divine light. In other words, the concealment must not be absolute. There must be a little mercy in it. The third stage: once I have, on the one hand, enough concealment to perceive death, and, on the other hand, a little light so I can perceive that there is also such a thing as life, a third stage is needed. A person must be given free choice, and that comes through the intellect. His animal soul must have intellectual capacity, not just desire. Desire is like a magnet; it cannot do otherwise. “This is what I want, and I cannot do otherwise.” To give it the possibility of choice, it must sense that it has an intellect and can choose. It can understand the virtue of spirituality and “weigh the reward of a sin against its loss, and the loss involved in a mitzvah against its reward.” That is possible only through the intellect. Once again, the three stages: first, concealing the Divine light so that physical existence can be possible. Second, leaving a little light, a hint that life, goodness, and spirituality exist. And third, enabling us, through

44:16 the intellect, to experience the deliberation that leads to choice and a reasoned decision. It really is remarkable. These three stages are alluded to in the three examples Rashi gives. The first example: “Here we slept.” Chassidus explains that this means the concealment and withdrawal of the soul’s light. All the powers of the person fall asleep. Only the body’s external, automatic functioning remains; all the insights, awareness, and feelings—everything else disappears. That is called sleep. That is the concealment. If the soul were fully awake there, the opposite of holiness could not be possible for it. There must be sleep. But the next stage is that the concealment must not be absolute, and this is alluded to by “we felt cold.” It is the blending of kindness into the severity of the concealments. Kabbalah says that concealment is hot; it is fire. Kindness is water, which cools. There is a beautiful Midrash on the subject of how, at the time of creation, Hakadosh Boruch Hu joined the attribute of mercy to creation. At first He wanted to create the world with the attribute of judgment; then He joined the attribute of mercy to it. The Midrash gives a beautiful parable. A king had delicate glasses, like the thin crystal glasses used for tea. The king said, “If I pour hot liquid into them, they will crack. If I pour cold liquid into them, they will cloud over”—the glass will steam up and no longer be transparent. What did the king do? He mixed hot and cold liquid, poured it into the glasses, and they held up. What does this represent? If I create the world with the attribute of mercy, people’s sins will be many; that is the clouding over. If it is cold—if it is the attribute of judgment—how will a person be able to withstand it? So I will create him with both the attribute of judgment and the attribute of mercy, and may he endure. It follows that “we felt cold” means cooling the heat of the concealment, which rises like fire, and easing that concealment a little. There must also be some Divine light, some kindness, so that a person can see the Divine side as well and not be completely shut off from it. Then comes the third stage: “Your head ached.” This refers to the animal soul, which

47:28 senses that it has a head—a material, human intellect that allows it to understand both sides, both physical materiality and the virtue of spirituality, and to weigh which is preferable. The Rebbe makes a wonderful point. This explains why “we slept” and “we felt cold” are in the plural, referring to the king and his son. “We slept” is the concealment: the soul’s light was concealed, and Hakadosh Boruch Hu also concealed His infinite light. So “we slept” applies to Him as well. “We felt cold”: He, too, blended in the attribute of kindness so that the concealment would not be absolute, allowing a little light to flow into the world and to the soul. But “your head ached”—the animal soul’s sense that it is an independent, thinking entity—belongs only to the king’s son. The king does not have that. So, based on this, the Rebbe sums up this Rashi: the parable shows that in the first three situations—“we slept,” “we felt cold,” and “your head ached”—it is plainly the king who leads him. From this you learn about the other places, too, the places where “they angered Me.” You might think: Now it is no longer the king leading him; you yourself caused the damage. So he says: Know that behind it... True, you chose. You have free choice. You sinned. But behind that stands a Divine plan to bring you into situations that afterward... Not so you would remain in those situations, but so you would turn them into a springboard for a higher teshuvah and a great ascent. We see examples of this in life as well. Not long ago, something was published about a very well-known Jew who became a baal teshuvah, Uri Zohar. He had reached such a state of distance, involved with actors and theater and comedy and all sorts of things. So it is not only that he rose from there. In the end, it became clear that this enabled him to reach and transform an entire world and bring dozens of people to teshuvah. If he had not descended to those depths—even though he himself did those things... True, the fact that he was born into such a home was ordained from Heaven. But

50:19 After that, all the descents he went through—those are the times “they angered Me.” But behind them was a Divine purpose: in the end, he would rise from there and bring dozens of baalei teshuvah along with him. This is a classic example from life of how even the greatest descents are part of the journey back. And this is the meaning of “On their return, the king said.” Physically, there was no return journey. The king did not retrace all the journeys through the desert. But on a spiritual level, the Rebbe says something beautiful. That is why Rashi says, “And Rabbi Tanchuma expounded it differently.” There are two points to examine here. First, as the Rebbe points out, what does “differently” mean? And why does he mention Rabbi Tanchuma? We have already seen the Rebbe explain that mentioning Rabbi Tanchuma alludes to nechamah, consolation. “Differently,” the Rebbe says, alludes to the fact that afterward the king returns, the soul rises back up, and the person becomes a baal teshuvah. A baal teshuvah follows an entirely different path. Something altogether different—with greater strength. It is like the verse, “May Hashem add for me another son.” Our Sages say that through Yosef, even someone who is an “other” can become a son. That is a different path. Interestingly, it also says of Calev, “He had a different spirit with him.” He was a baal teshuvah. At first he thought of going along with the spies, but afterward a different spirit was in him. So that is Rabbi Tanchuma. That is the consolation in the king’s leading him through all these stages, through 42 journeys of descent after descent—both descents brought about by Hakadosh Boruch Hu and descents a person brought about through his own free choice. All of them are only so that afterward it will be revealed how the desert we experienced during the Three Weeks, up to Tisha B’Av, will give way to days of joy and gladness. Then we will see how, on Tisha B’Av itself, the redeemer of Israel was born, and how this entire descent was for the sake of an ascent that, without a descent

52:56 so great, we could never have reached such a great elevation—the days of Moshiach, the resurrection of the dead, and the true and complete Geulah, when these days will become days of joy and gladness. Good Shabbos. All the best.