Note that this was originally a tweet written by Rav Ginsburgh. We have brought it here in its original form, with very light editing, while retaining the Rav’s wording. We have added headings and source references.
On the verse, "You are children of Havayah your God; You shall not cut yourselves, nor make a bald spot between your eyes for the dead,"[1] the Sefat Emet, Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Gur (1847-1905), writes the following:
…In the holy Zohar (on Vayechi and Shelach) it is taught that a soul is sent into this world like a king's son sent to a village to learn the ways of the king's palace; once he has grown, he is sent for, to come to the king's palace. The village children weep. One clever child among them said, "Why do you weep? Is he not the king's son?" etc. So too Moses, who was clever, said "You are children," etc.
Every Jew must know and always remember that he was sent to this world only to learn the way of royalty. For, in truth, souls are children; but in this world, having become clothed in a body, the soul is in the status of a servant. Still, all that a Jew wants in this world and all that he should think of must be related to his inevitable return to his true place. As is written in the holy Zohar, on the verse “A wise man's eyes are in his head,” for this is why the Holy Blessed One, in His wisdom, placed the eyes in the head: so that one should always look toward the origin. The opposite of this is “the fool who walks in darkness,” all of his wants and all of his thoughts are focused on the passing world of darkness.
Of this it is written, "and they shall be for phylacteries between your eyes." And this is the allusion found in the words, “you shall not make a bald spot between your eyes for the dead,” meaning that you shall not be blind and instead focus on all the affairs of the body, which are already “dead,” in that the body stands to die. These affairs of the body should not confuse a person from the essential purpose for which he was sent from the World Above.
Indeed, if death itself does not grieve a person, since he knows that this entire world exists only so that he may attain the perfection of returning, rectified, to the World Above, then all the worries and sufferings of this world will not confuse him, and will not interrupt or create a “bald spot between your eyes,” which refers to the contemplation of the mind in the head. In any case, a person must see to it that when he truly dons tefillin, which are a remembrance and an illumination of the soul, he should not let his mind be diverted toward the body.
Likewise on the holy Shabbat, when tefillin are not required, since Shabbat is itself a sign, and the illumination of the soul shines within it, he should not let his mind be diverted. This is the meaning behind [the two words appearing in the Ten Commandments in the commandment regarding Shabbat] "Remember" and "Keep": to remember the root described above, and to keep himself from thinking about the labor of this world. As is written in Sefer HaBahir, “Guard [yourself] from [wandering] thought.” Similarly, when one stands in prayer, as the Sages of blessed memory stated, “even if a snake is wound around his heel,” which is an allusion to death, “he should not stop praying.”
The Sefat Emet connects the words of the Zohar[2]—that a Jew is a king's son who was sent to the world in order to learn there the ways of royalty and to return, wiser and more experienced, to the king's palace; and therefore, others should not mourn excessively over his passing, i.e., his return to his father's palace—with the requirement that every individual must always look back to remind himself of his root, meaning the origin of his soul. This is particularly true when donning tefillin “between your eyes,”[3] because the tefillin are regarded as a sign—a sign that reminds us according to the Sefat Emet of our true origin. And on Shabbat, when we do not don tefillin,[4] the Shabbat itself is a sign.[5] By remembering our true origin and the reason for which our soul entered this world, we prevent the affairs of the body and the physical world, which are called “dead,” even now, because they stands to die, and all the worries and troubles they carry with them, from distracting us from serving God.
In fact, when one constantly remembers one’s origin and does not allow his focus to be diverted form the true purpose of life—serving God—then the body and the physical world become a source of abundant blessing and assistance to one’s Divine service. This is alluded to in a special Kabbalistic intent. One of the 72 Names of God (סאל)[6] is understood as an acronym for Rabbi Yochanan’s phrase “the purpose of man is to die”[7] (סוֹף אָדָם לָמוּת). This holy Name is thus a source of contemplation not of death, but of the true purpose of life. However, the value of this Name is 91, also the value of another holy Name (פאי) emerging from the verse, “You open Your hand [and you provide all life with their will]”[8] (פּוֹתֵחַ אֶת יָדֶךָ [וּמַשְׂבִּיעַ לְכׇל חַי רָצוֹן]). The numerical equivalence indicates that there is a spiritual parallel between the two Names, which as we said, means that when one remembers that the end of life is death and uses that to focus on the true meaning of life, then one is also blessed with abundant physical blessings that not only will not divert the mind from the main task of life, but will also assist in fulfilling that task.
The opposite of looking to our origin—where all the souls of Israel are in a state of true unity[9]—is each individual’s preoccupation with himself alone (in Yiddish this is known as “far zich,” meaning, “for himself”). Self-involvement and self-centredness ultimately also cause the forbidden acts related to the Torah’s term “hitgodedut” (התגודדות), which refers both to self-laceration—when the individual hurts their own body in various ways—and to factionalism—when an individual or a group of individuals breaks off from the rest of the Jewish people, feeling that they do not fit in for whatever reason. Both these types of forbidden acts are the psychological (and even physical) equivalents of producing a bald spot, meaning a divisive void separating the individual or group from the people of Israel.
In this manner, the Sefat Emet also explains the Talmudic dictum, “Even if a snake is wound around one’s heel, he should not stop praying.”[10] One must not let matters of death, which the snake brought into the world when he enticed Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, interrupt one’s prayer and attachment to God. When one can focus properly in this way, then he will merit the fulfillment of the verse, “and you who cling to Havayah your God are all alive this day.” Not only will you be alive this day, you will be together: you will experience the true meaning of life and you will feel the deeply rooted unity of all Jewish souls. This verse begins with the same pronoun “And you” (אתם) found in the verse, “You are children of Havayah your God,” upon which this entire contemplation is based. Additionally, the notion of being alive “today,” sends us to contemplate the exchange[11] between Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi and the soul of Mashiach about when the Mashiach will come. The Mashiach replied, “today,” which Elijah the Prophet explained was a reference to the verse, “today, if you will heed His voice.”[12]
Let us see some of the mathematical phenomena in this teaching from the Sefat Emet. The value of the entire phrase, “Even if a snake is wound around his heel, he should not stop” (אֲפִילּוּ נָחָשׁ כָּרוּךְ עַל עֲקֵבו לֹא יַפְסִיקֹ) is 1300, or 50 times God’s essential Name, Havayah (י-הוה). Since the entire phrase has 25 letters, the average value of each letter is “son” (בֵּן), once again pointing to the verse with which we began, “You are children of Havayah your God.”
Amazingly, 1300 is also the value of the last word in this phrase, “stop” (יַפְסִיק) when written in the form of “run and return” (י יפ יפס יפסי יפסיק פסיק סיק יק ק) meaning that one should stop all extraneous thought, and then he will not stop or divert his consciousness from the true meaning of life and its goal.
It thus emerges that this lower world, the reality we currently inhabit, is the place where we perform the mission of learning the wisdom of royalty. Royalty here is the name of the lowest sefirah, which we usually translate as “kingdom” (malchut). There is higher wisdom and lower wisdom,[13] referring to mundane wisdom and supernal, Divine wisdom. Even though it would seem that because mundane wisdom does not come from a Divine source (it comes from spending a lifetime in our world), in truth, we know that the deepest revealed reason for Creation is that “the Holy Blessed One desired to have a dwelling place for Himself specifically in the lower realms.”[14] God’s desire to dwell in the lower realms will be fulfilled in the World of the Resurrection. Thus, the complete picture of life is that our soul descends into the physical world in order to ascend again to the palace of royalty, and to then descend once again into the physical world. But the second descent is into the World of Resurrection, where God will have “swallow[ed] up death forever”[15] then there will no longer be a possibility of making “a bald spot between your eyes for the dead.”
There is also a numerical phenomenon here since the value of “You are children”[16] (בָּנִים אַתֶּם) is the same as “I will be that which I will be”[17] (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה), which Rashi explains as meaning, “I will be with you in this descent, just as I will be with you in the future descent to come,” but here the word “descent” is interpreted quite literally as the descent of the soul into the physical world (normally, it is understood to mean a descent into exile). [259].
This conceptual scheme for life, this true outlook on life is the essence of the Book of Deuteronomy’s two essential verses that call upon us to “see”: “See, I set before you today a blessing…,”[18] and “See, I have set before you today life and good….”[19] These two verses are the secret of, “Israel shall then dwell in safety, alone, with the eye of Jacob.”[20] The eye of Jacob alludes to the perspective needed to dwell in safety in this world, isolated from the confusing reality of the physical world, seeing only that which is a blessing, is good, and is life. In fact the word “safety” (בֶּטַח) is an acronym for these three concepts “blessing, good, life” (בְּרָכָה טוֹב חַיִּים).[21]
[1]. Deuteronomy 14:1.
[2]. Zohar 1:245b and 3:159b.
[3]. Exodus 13:9; 13:16; and Deuteronomy 6:8.
[4]. Eiruvin 96a (and elsewhere).
[5]. Exodus 31:13 and 17.
[6]. These 72 Names are formed by taking the letters of three consecutive verses in Exodus (14:19-21) that each has 72 letters. For more on this Name, see our volumes: What You Need to Know About Kabbalah and Body, Mind, and Soul.
[7]. Berachot 17a.
[8]. Psalms 145:16.
[9]. See Tanya, ch. 32.
[10]. Berachot 33a.
[11]. Sanhedrin 98a.
[12]. Psalms 95:7.
[13]. See in length in our volume, Wisdom: Integrating Torah and Science.
[14]. Tanchuma, Naso 16.
[15]. Isaiah 25:8.
[16]. The value of “children” () is 102, the same as “faith” (אמונה). The letters of “you” (אַתֶּם) permute to spell “truth” (אמת). The value of “You are children” (בָּנִים אַתֶּם) together with “You are children” written out in full (בית נון יוד מם אלף תו מם) and in the filling of the filling (בית יוד תו נון וו נון יוד וו דלת מם מם אלף למד פא תו וו מם מם) is 4290, or 3 times 1430, a special number that among other things equals “God is all” and “all is God,” the cognitive pulse of the Jewish soul. Thsu, 1430 is the average value of these three methods of calculating “You are children.”
[17]. Exodus 3:14.
[18]. Deuteronomy 11:26.
[19]. Ibid. 30:15.
[20]. Ibid., 33:28. Note that the word translated here as “eye” (עֵין) is more commonly rendered “fountain” or “spring.” the derash here deliberately reads it as "eye" for the gematria wordplay with "blessing-good-life."
[21]. See our Hebrew volume Sod HaShem LiYerei'av, addendum to Gate 1, and elsewhere.
