Receiving the Torah in the Middle of Winter?! | Parshas Yisro

00:00 There’s a wonderful story connected with this Shabbos, Shabbos Parshas Yisro. We read the parsha of Matan Torah again in the middle of the year, in the middle of winter—seemingly out of nowhere, you might say. We’re not in the middle of the festivals, but this Shabbos we read about Matan Torah and the Ten Commandments. The Frierdiker Rebbe tells a wonderful story that he heard from his father, the Rebbe Rashab. It was in 5626, when the Rebbe Rashab was only five years old. His grandfather, the Tzemach Tzedek, was still alive, though he was in the final period of his life in this world. The Tzemach Tzedek passed away on 13 Nissan 5626, and this was in the month of Shvat—just the last two months of the Tzemach Tzedek’s life in this physical world. The Rebbe Rashab related that he was a small child, and the custom was for him to visit his grandfather on Shabbos. Although his grandfather was already very weak and ill, he and his father, the Rebbe Maharash, would come to wish him a good Shabbos and receive his blessing. When the Rebbe Rashab came to visit his grandfather that Shabbos, Parshas Yisro, his grandfather asked his grandson whether there was anything he wanted to ask. The grandson said yes. He said he knew that this Shabbos we read the Ten Commandments, in Parshas Yisro. It was a child’s question, a simple question: What are the Ten Commandments doing here all of a sudden, in the middle of winter? He knew that the Ten Commandments have a special festival, Shavuos, when we read them. Everyone goes to shul; we celebrate an entire festival. Why, all of a sudden, in the middle of winter, in the middle of Shvat, do we read the Ten Commandments and Matan Torah? What is it doing here? Seemingly, a child’s question. The Tzemach Tzedek, although he was very, very weak and found it difficult to speak, asked him to come closer. He wanted to tell him something, to whisper it in his ear.

02:33 And the Tzemach Tzedek told him: The difference between Shabbos Parshas Yisro and Shavuos is the difference between the king in the field and the king in his palace. That was the Tzemach Tzedek’s entire answer. We have to understand that at the time it was very, very difficult for the Tzemach Tzedek to speak; every word caused him much pain and suffering. So those were all the words he could say. The difference between Shavuos and Shabbos Parshas Yisro is the difference between the king in the field and the king in his palace. Now, chassidim know this analogy of the king in the field as opposed to the king in his palace. It’s a very famous analogy found in maamarim of Chassidus about the month of Elul. In Likkutei Torah, the Alter Rebbe explains the idea of Elul as compared with Tishrei. There, too, the question is asked: Why are the days of Elul ordinary weekdays, as opposed to the great and holy days of Tishrei? The Alter Rebbe gives the analogy of a king. When the king is in his palace, he is there with all his royal garments, his throne, and all his majesty and grandeur. But when the king is in the field, he is in the setting of a field, wearing clothes suited to the field, and everyone can approach him more easily, more freely. And as is well known from the writings of Chassidus, this is what they explain to us about Elul: then every Jew can easily draw close to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, Who receives us graciously, and so on. Here the Tzemach Tzedek uses that same expression, that same analogy, in connection with the great parsha we read this Shabbos. He tells his grandson—he is explaining to him, really—that yes, Shavuos is the main festival of Matan Torah, but it is like the king in his palace. The king is in his palace; this is the time, the time of Matan Torah.

04:48 It’s the season when we all gather and prepare, with everything we do during the days of... beginning already with Sefiras HaOmer, and then Rosh Chodesh Sivan arrives. As is well known, there are all the preparations we make, and then Shavuos arrives. That is the great festival when, every year, Matan Torah is renewed. So that is like the king in his palace: the time of the festival, the season for receiving the Torah. By contrast, here we are in the middle of Shvat, reading Parshas Yisro. We are told all the details of the story: the Jewish people leave Egypt, and in the third month after the children of Israel left Egypt, the Jews receive the Torah. Then comes the long-awaited moment when “Hashem descended upon Mount Sinai,” and the Ten Commandments. That is the king in the field. In other words, we are in a “field” season—not actually the festival, not in the midst of it. Yet a Jew is given the opportunity that even when you are in the middle of the year, in the middle of winter, without any special preparations, on what is seemingly an ordinary Shabbos, you can receive this Shabbos everything the Ten Commandments at Matan Torah give us. You can relive this whole point, this entire historic and wonderful moment of receiving the Torah and the Ten Commandments, with all that it entails. When we speak about the Ten Commandments and Matan Torah, there is a very, very interesting point that many people don’t notice. The Rebbe addresses it at many farbrengens; it’s something wonderful. When we speak about receiving the Torah and the Ten Commandments, it’s generally understood—every Jew knows—that the Torah has many layers. The Torah has pshat and remez, drush and sod; it has the revealed dimension of Torah and the hidden dimension of Torah, the inner dimension of Torah, and so on. As the Zohar says, the Torah is like a person: “This is the Torah—a person.” A person, says the Zohar, is made up of different parts. There are the clothing and the body; there are

06:58 the nefesh, the ruach, the neshamah, and the “soul of the soul,” as the Zohar calls it. The Zohar says that all these layers found in a person are also found in the Torah. The stories of the Torah are what it calls the garments of the Torah. The halachic part of the Torah is called the bodies of the Torah. And there are the reasons and meanings within the Torah, which themselves have many kinds: pshat, remez, drush, and sod. These are all the layers of nefesh, ruach, neshamah, and the soul of the soul. Now, what we always say—what we would think at first glance—is that at Matan Torah we seemingly received the revealed dimension of Torah, the more, um, surface-level part of Torah, the more external, practical part: the Ten Commandments and everything connected with practical mitzvos. The secrets, meanwhile, remained secret, which is why they’re called the hidden dimension. The hidden remained hidden: “The hidden things belong to Hashem our G-d.” They remained secret. Only hundreds of years later came the great Tanna Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai—or at least, it was in the time of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai—that the secrets of the Torah, the Zohar, began to be revealed as well. And then it took many more years until the time of the Arizal, and until the time of the Baal Shem Tov and his students, when the secrets of the Torah gradually began to be revealed too. In other words, the secrets of the Torah came many years later. From Moshe Rabbeinu, we learned only the halachic part of the Torah. But when we look at the account of Matan Torah, when we simply read the weekly parsha—and certainly when we look at the Midrashim on the weekly parsha, the commentaries, and the Midrashim of our Sages—we find that the situation is exactly the opposite. It was precisely the revealed dimension of Torah that was not so revealed at Matan Torah. What actually happened at Matan Torah? All that Hakadosh Boruch Hu openly gave was the Ten Commandments. In the Ten Commandments

09:13 Most of the Torah’s laws are hidden—that is, they are not explicit. We have the Ten Commandments, and only a small part of them deals with practical matters. Even those are stated in very general terms. A Jew cannot know from the Ten Commandments what Hakadosh Boruch Hu wants of him. We know there are 613 mitzvos, and each mitzvah has many details and finer points. All of that is contained in the Ten Commandments only by allusion and in a hidden way. As is well known, Rashi says that the number of letters in the Ten Commandments is 620, corresponding to the 613 mitzvos and the seven mitzvos of the descendants of Noach, or the seven rabbinic mitzvos. Whichever interpretation we follow, it is all there by allusion, not explicitly. A Jew reading the Ten Commandments would not know exactly what Hakadosh Boruch Hu wants of him—how to serve Hashem and how to observe the mitzvos. These are things Moshe Rabbeinu revealed more and more over time: the Written Torah, the Oral Torah, and teachings that were revealed throughout the generations, and so on. That is regarding the revealed part of the Torah, its halachic part. But what do we know about the hidden part of the Torah? We know that at Matan Torah there was the most extraordinary Divine revelation in history, in the most open way. In other words, it was precisely the hidden part that was revealed. That is what the Jewish people saw: “And all the people saw the sounds and the flames,” the sound of the shofar, and the Shechinah that descended upon Mount Sinai. Hashem descended upon Mount Sinai. And in chapter 68 of Tehillim, the famous chapter describing Matan Torah, we are told that Hakadosh Boruch Hu did not descend alone. He descended with the ministering angels. Rashi also says that Hakadosh Boruch Hu descended

11:12 with the entire heavenly Chariot, with thousands upon thousands and myriads of hosts of the Chariot and the Shechinah. “Thousands of shinan; Hashem is among them, at Sinai, in holiness,” as it says in Tehillim. The shinan are the angels who descended from heaven. It is written in the sefarim that shinan is an acronym for shor, nesher, aryeh—the ox, eagle, and lion—and the nun alludes to the human figure. That is everything that descended in the Divine revelation of the heavenly Chariot, Maaseh Merkavah, and that is what the Jewish people saw openly at Matan Torah. So here we see two opposites. On the one hand, we know that the revealed part of the Torah is called “revealed” because it is open, and it is what a Jew must study first. The hidden part is called “hidden” because it is not open; it is something concealed, teachings we received only over the course of generations. But on the other hand, what happened at Matan Torah? The reverse. It was precisely the revealed part of the Torah that was hidden, while the hidden part was revealed. So what does this tell us? What is the wonderful message here? We need to understand that it is not quite as we might think. People sometimes think, “The hidden part of the Torah is hidden; it isn’t for me. It’s hidden, it’s a secret. It isn’t for us. These things need to be kept concealed.” And indeed, the Gemara does say that one must keep such things hidden. The Gemara in Tractate Chagigah discusses how careful one must be with the Torah’s secrets, that they must be guarded and not revealed to the public, and so on. But we also know that over the generations, the Torah’s secrets gradually began to be revealed in the world. As we said, it took time. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai had only just begun this process. After him came the Arizal and his students, until, little by little, the wisdom of Kabbalah began

13:18 to spread through the world. In particular, as the Alter Rebbe writes in the well-known letter, letter 26 in Igeres Hakodesh in Tanya, citing the Arizal and Rabbi Chaim Vital: today, in these generations of ours, in the footsteps of Moshiach, at the end of exile, it is a mitzvah and an obligation to reveal this wisdom. In other words, now it has become an obligation. It has become necessary for a Jew today to be able to truly serve Hashem. So it is precisely today that a Jew must study, know, and delve into these teachings. They were also given to us in a form that everyone can understand—especially through the Baal Shem Tov and his students, the Alter Rebbe, and the teachings of Chabad, which clothed the deepest secrets of the Torah in words and explanations accessible to everyone. But what we discover is that this is not something that began only now. When we all stood at Matan Torah—and by “all” I mean all the souls of the Jewish people, for it is known that everyone stood there and received the Torah—the Divine revelation of Maaseh Merkavah, the secrets, and the revelation of Hakadosh Boruch Hu with all the lofty Divine Names and supernal sefiros were right before our eyes. The people saw it all. The Jewish people saw, in the words of the Midrash, which Rashi also cites in the weekly parsha, “the normally heard.” What does it mean to see the normally heard? Chassidus explains this wonderfully. It does not mean only that they saw the sounds—the sounds of the thunder and lightning—that some miracle occurred and they saw the sounds and the flashes of lightning. Rather, Chassidus explains that they “saw the normally heard.” The Rebbe explains it beautifully: “the normally heard” refers to spiritual things. Usually, the spiritual is something I do not see; I only hear about it. A physical thing

15:15 a person sees. We are physical people, and our eyes perceive physical things. What our eyes grasp is the material aspect of things. We talk about the spiritual aspect, hear about it, understand it, but do not see it. At Matan Torah, something happened that was completely contrary to nature. It was precisely the spiritual, distant things—the normally heard—that were seen. In other words, the Jewish people saw openly; they were able to see the Divine light in the world, things that are spiritual and seemingly entirely removed from our reality. They saw it with their physical eyes. They saw the Divine light, the Divine revelation, Maaseh Merkavah. And that gave the Jewish people the strength so that, when the time came and permission was granted for the Divine light to begin being revealed to the world before the coming of Moshiach—when we entered this period of the revelation of the inner dimension of the Torah—a Jew today could also study, understand, and grasp its inner dimension to the extent possible now. Therefore, it is our obligation to make an effort to study and grasp the Torah’s secrets and inner dimension as well, each person according to their ability. And the truth is that the Rebbe revealed a most remarkable insight: this is actually alluded to even in the Rambam, although the Rambam is an expressly halachic work. These days we are beginning to study the Rambam anew. When the Rebbe established the practice of studying Rambam, we could see this in its opening chapters. The Rambam begins with Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah and discusses Maaseh Merkavah and Maaseh Bereishis. The opening chapters of the Rambam are extremely profound, and the Rambam writes there that it is not fitting for a person to “stroll through the Pardes”—that is, to enter the secrets of the Torah—until he has “filled his belly with bread and meat.” He means the halachic part. First, one must become proficient in and properly know the Torah’s laws, its revealed part, and only then can one stroll through the Pardes. And although

17:22 The Rambam himself begins his book with halachos connected to the inner dimension of Torah. What does that mean? The Rambam himself answers that question. He says that exploring Pardes is something you cannot do before you have “filled your belly with halachos.” Exploring means studying in depth—delving into it, enjoying it, learning it as deeply as possible. That comes later. But that does not mean staying out of Pardes altogether. At the very least, one must learn the foundations of the knowledge of G-d, which the Rambam says is the first mitzvah: “I am Hashem your G-d,” in the Ten Commandments. The first mitzvah is to know. The Rambam’s approach is a remarkable one, which he rules as halachah: the first mitzvah is not merely to believe, but to know. To know means to learn, understand, delve into and contemplate the greatness of Hakadosh Boruch Hu and His oneness. It means learning about G-dliness, about the Work of Creation to the extent we can understand it, and about the Divine Chariot to the extent that it is possible to understand it. Above all, it means learning what enables us to serve Hakadosh Boruch Hu, to love and fear Him. As the Rambam says, there is no way to love and fear Hakadosh Boruch Hu without contemplating His greatness. And this is one of the remarkable things the Ten Commandments teach us. The weekly parsha teaches us how necessary and important it is for a Jew, alongside studying the halachic part of Torah, to learn its hidden dimension as well. The body and soul of Torah go together. The inner dimension of Torah and its revealed dimension are one Torah. And in these days, when we receive the Torah anew—as we said, the King is in the field—we receive the Torah once again in the weekly parsha, in the Ten Commandments. So let us take to heart all of the Ten Commandments, including “I am Hashem your G-d”: to know the greatness of Hashem,

19:24 to recognize the oneness of Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and, to the extent our minds can grasp it today, to learn and know the inner dimension of Torah together with its halachic and revealed dimension, so that it is one Torah. In this way, may we merit “the Torah of Hashem is perfect, restoring the soul.” May we soon merit the great light of the inner dimension of Torah that will be revealed through Moshiach, when we will merit to learn the true secrets of Torah that will be revealed in the future, speedily in our days. Amen.