Learning Torah is not just about understanding, it is about inner transformation. When we stop at a shallow understanding of what we have learnt, this usually leads to misconceptions that make it hard to find the validity in other people’s understanding of the same topic or issue. What can be done?
The Me’or Einayim focuses on why Moses began to explain the Torah only when the Israelites had arrived at the border of the Land of Israel, after the completion of 42 journeys in the wilderness. He explains that these journeys were necessary to eradicate the husks that mask the Torah’s inner facets. His teaching shows a path to follow for the generations that followed: one must contemplate the Torah until eradicating all the judgments-kelipot that cover the truth. When the Torah’s deeper meaning is uncovered it leads to a stronger connection and to mutual responsibility between Jews, despite perceived differences of opinion.
This is a simplified version of Rav Ginsburgh’s teaching of the Me’or Einayim, Rebbe Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, on parashat Devarim. It was first published in Hebrew in the Devarim 5786 issue of Nifla’ot.
The Book of Deuteronomy opens with a quiet but strange detail. Before Moses delivers a single word of his farewell speech, the text pauses to tell us exactly where he is standing: "Across the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to explain this Torah, saying." Why does it matter so much where Moses was when he began to explain the Torah? And why did he wait until this very last stop, on the far edge of the wilderness, right up against the border of the Land of Israel?
The Me'or Einayim — authored by Rebbe Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, a disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov and of the Maggid of Mezritch — reads this verse not as a piece of geography but as a map of the spiritual life. His answer turns a one-time historical moment into a principle that applies to every person, in every generation, whenever they sit down to learn. This article walks through his teaching in simple terms.
Two Torahs in one
To understand the teaching, we first need to know that Jewish tradition speaks of two Torahs—two ways in which God’s revelation reaches our lives. There is the Written Torah — the text of the Five Books of Moses, the words delivered directly from God and written on parchment. And there is the Oral Torah — the explanation, the reasoning, the give-and-take that unpacks what those written words actually mean. The written words of the Torah are like a locked door; the Oral Torah is the key to entering their meaning and translating them into our lives.
The Me'or Einayim points out that the Book of Deuteronomy is special: it is the place where the Oral Torah first emerges to uncover a path leading out of the Written Torah. Moses is no longer just transmitting God's words; he is explaining them. And that explaining, the teaching says, could only begin at this exact point — after the entire journey through the desert was complete and the people were on the threshold of the Land.
The husks that hide the truth
The central image in this teaching is the kelipah (plural kelipot), a Hebrew word that literally means "husk" or "shell" — the peel you throw away to get to the fruit. In Chassidic thought, kelipot are the spiritual coverings that hide what is holy and true. They are the static on the line, the fog over the view. Unlike a fruit (this is where the analogy breaks down), the peel is not part of the Torah; it does not originate in the Torah. The husk or peel that surrounds the Torah is rooted in the self-consciousness of those engaging with it.
The Me'or Einayim describes these husks as a kind of screen stretched over the Torah, separating the learner from the Torah's true "face," from its inner message. Even when the words are right in front of you, the husks keep you from seeing what they really mean. So the whole drama of receiving the Torah in every generation is predicated on a type of removal: before the light can shine through, the covering has to come off. Every generation must peel the husk to uncover the Torah’s inner message.
This was true for the first generation of Israelites that came out of Egypt and received the Torah at Mt. Sinai. They too had to remove their self-generated husk before the Torah could be given to them. That is why, says the Me’or Einayim, that Torah was not given at Mount Sinai the instant the people left Egypt. First there were seven weeks — forty-nine days — and a series of journeys through the wilderness, including the miracle of the Splitting of the Red Sea. The people had spent generations "immersed in impurities," soaked in the spiritual atmosphere of Egypt. The wilderness itself was understood as a desolate place, the natural home of the husks. By traveling through it and witnessing open miracles, the people had faith in God’s Providence planted firmly in their hearts, and that faith gave them the strength to break down the husks — to clear the screen that stood between them and the Written Torah.
Why the number forty-nine
Here the teaching leans on a beautiful piece of number-play. A tradition in the Midrash says the Torah can be interpreted through "forty-nine faces of purity and forty-nine faces of impurity" — meaning it has vast interpretive depth in either direction. The Me'or Einayim connects this to the word Moab itself, whose value using gematria is exactly forty-nine.
Gematria does not stand on its own. The fact that two words, phrases, or concepts have the same numerical value does not in and of itself suffice to connect them. A numerical match is never the whole story. It is an invitation to look for the inner connection between them, not a proof on its own. The number is a doorway, not the room.
So what is the inner link between "Moab" and these forty-nine facets? The teaching ties the number to the forty-nine days — the number of days from the Exodus to the Giving of the Torah at Sinai. These were precious days of preparation. These forty-nine days of preparation became the Forty-Nine Days of Counting the Omer every year, between the second day of Passover and Shavu’ot, the festival commemorating the Giving of the Torah. The link between these days and the necessary soul-searching required to penetrate the Torah’s inner face is alluded to in a verse from Proverbs: "If you seek it as silver, and search for it as for hidden treasures." The verse is speaking of the search to understand Torah and hints at the number 49, since the Hebrew for "hidden treasures" can be read as "and as forty-nine are counted." The message: the treasure of the Torah is reached only through a long, deliberate count of preparation, one day, one step at a time.
Given to Moses, not yet to everyone
Now comes the pivot of the whole teaching. Tradition holds that the entire Torah — Written and Oral, down to the last detail a future student would ever discover — was given to Moses at Sinai. But there is a difference between something being given to Moses and something being available to everyone.
The Written Torah could be handed to the whole nation after those first forty-nine days. But the Oral Torah — the secrets, the explanations, the living meaning — stayed covered by husks for everyone except Moses himself. It had been revealed to him alone, "because of the greatness of his level," but the rest of the people simply could not reach it yet. That is what the extra forty years of wandering were for. Every stop, every encampment, was another husk removed, until at last the people arrived in the plains of Moab.
And in passing through Moab, they cleared away the husk of Moab too — the final barrier. Only then, with every covering stripped away, could Moses turn to the entire people and finally "explain this Torah." What had been his alone was now theirs. The revelation was complete not because Moses had learned something new, but because the audience had finally become able to receive it.
The same battle, at your own desk
The reason this matters — and the reason the Me'or Einayim insists it is not just ancient history — is that the very same process repeats every time any of us learns. This is where the teaching becomes deeply practical.
When you sit with a text and hit a difficulty, a question you can't resolve, that difficulty is not random. There is a kelipah covering that spot; the fog has rolled in, and understanding is blocked. And here is the striking claim: that fog is made of your own judgments. In Chassidic language, the obstacle is din — the harsh, self-focused, ego-driven part of us. The covering over the truth is, at root, our own sense of self getting in the way.
The way through is binah — the faculty of patient, deep understanding. When you refuse to give up on the question, when you dig in and truly try to understand, you are not just solving a puzzle; you are dissolving the husk. The truth was there all along, waiting behind a screen you yourself put up. Real effort in learning is spiritual demolition work.
Two ways of disagreeing
The teaching then draws out a broader principle about the human heart, contrasting two forces: loving-kindness (chesed, the warm, inward, "right-sided" energy) and judgment (din, the cold, oppositional, "left-sided" energy).
The key insight is about how each one handles disagreement. A person coming from chesed can disagree with another approach while still seeing the truth inside it and respecting its proper place. A person coming from din does not just disagree — they oppose, forcefully, often without regard for whether the other side has a point. One says "I see it differently, and here is where you're also right." The other says "you are simply wrong, and I will not hear you."
We can offer a pointed illustration from the world of Torah study itself: those devoted to the inner dimension of Torah generally value the "revealed" legal study and understand why it matters — but people focused only on the revealed, legal layer will often bristle at the inner teaching, so that a single Chasidic insight can trigger fierce resistance. The same contrast can be found in large measure in the political arena of our: the “Right” tends to disagree over substance while the “Left” opposes without regard for facts. The underlying spiritual point stands on its own: closed-off opposition is a symptom of din; openness that can hold disagreement without hostility is a sign of chesed.
Sweetening at the root
If judgment is the problem, how do you fix it? The Me’or Einayim gives a precise answer: "Judgments can be sweetened only at their root." You don't beat down a harsh reaction by force; you trace it back to its source and transform it there.
Practically, that source is the external dimension of understanding itself. External understanding means shallow understanding, the type that inexorably leads to opposition to other points of view and makes it impossible to see what validity they may have. The real labor, the teaching says, is sustained toil in study and inner reflection on your own viewpoint until you reach a genuine, inner grasp of the truth, not just an intellectual one. This process of unlocking the interior dimension of understanding is the heart of the Chabad Chasidic approach and is known as derher, or inner hearing, which when experienced properly is accompanied with a deepfelt supernal pleasure.
When that happens the shallow opposition remains and generally, one feels their opinion is validated just by the misconception that others are wrong. One might say that the external dimension of understanding leads to a feeling that “I am right merely because you are wrong.” But when the judgments emerging from shallow understanding are softened, then even the critical, oppositional part of a person can honestly see the validity of the other side and can stop fighting it. When that happens, Chasidic teachings reveal that harshness turns into supernal pleasure, and a person is able to embrace even someone he has treated as an opponent.
The fiftieth gate and the sweetness of Moab
There is warmth hidden in the very name of the final encampment in the wilderness, just before entering the Land of Canaan—"the plains of Moab.” This was the location where Moses began to reveal the Oral Torah. The "plains of Moab" in Hebrew is arvot Moav, and aravot echoes the word arevut, which means both sweetness and mutual responsibility. The sweetness is the harshness turning into pleasure, as discussed.
But the mutual responsibility is another thing altogether. I they stand on the edge of the Land, the people are being prepared for a new kind of togetherness, of mutual responsibility. The Torah is traditionally described as containing six hundred thousand letters, matching the soul roots of Israel, so that each soul corresponds to a letter in the Torah. And just as a Torah scroll is rendered invalid if even one letter is missing, so every soul needs every other. This is the deeper meaning of the famous phrase, "all of Israel are responsible for one another." Once the husks are gone and people can finally connect to the Torah without a screen, they discover that they are connected to each other, too.
The great danger: fooling yourself
The Ma’or Einayim ends his teaching with a warning. The same Hebrew word that means "to count" is also cognate with the word meaning "to deceive." That word-play carries a serious message: it is frighteningly easy, in study, to deceive yourself — to imagine you have fully understood, when in truth you have not even begun to see the real face of the Torah. And what causes the illusion? The same culprit as before: your own judgments and ego, quietly convincing you that you have already arrived, that you have already unlocked the Torah’s true meaning, that you have been privileged to understand the Divine mind..
This danger, the teaching notes, is most acute among accomplished scholars who think highly of themselves. It is possible to build a dazzling, intricate argument — clever, impressive, airtight-sounding — with no real inner understanding behind it at all. The great sages criticized this kind of empty cleverness, not because rigorous analysis is bad, but because brilliance can become a performance that hides the absence of true insight. Indeed, in our own times, a perfect example of purely external cleverness is artificial intelligence, which can produce polished results that are, in the end, external and artificial.
The Chassidic antidote is captured in a phrase said to be the essence of the entire Tanya: "Do not be a deceiver." Do not con yourself into thinking you are already a saint. Stay honest about where you actually are.
The real work
"Search for it as for hidden treasures," says the Book of Proverbs — and the real searching, the Me'or Einayim explains, is not only searching the text. It is searching yourself: examining your own conduct, refining your character, and bringing that refined self back to your study. Only by softening the judgments and clearing away the ego that fogs the page can a person finally see the Torah's true face — and, as the verse promises, "then you will understand the fear of God."
Moses could only teach in the plains of Moab because the long work of removal was finally done. The teaching's quiet claim is that the plains of Moab are not only a place on the map. They are a place each of us has to reach — the point where the last husk falls away, and the truth we were seeking turns out to have been waiting for us the whole time.
