Holding and Tasting the Secret
There is a phenomenon in the Zohar: after revealing something deep, the Zohar will announce, “this is a secret.” Which is somewhat perplexing. Is it a secret anymore if you’ve just revealed it? I read Rav Schorr’s explanation of this phenomenon the week my niece was born. That whole week, my brother kept saying, “her name is my secret, her name is my secret.” I wasn’t sure what to make of that, frankly, until he revealed her name, Razili, which literally means, “my secret.” He illustrated for me perfectly how if you don’t have the background, even if the words tell the secret, the secret is not revealed.
Rav Schorr explains that in the case of a spiritual secret, it’s not just the background that is missing. It’s the experience. Spiritual secrets can not be conveyed in words. They can only be experienced, similar to taste. Imagine I try to explain to you what an apple tastes like. It does not matter how carefully or accurately I explain it to you. If you have never tasted an apple, I could explain all day and you still would not know what it tastes like. The only way to know the secrets of the Zohar is to experience them.
With this in mind, we can look at Hashem’s response to Bnei Yisrael’s famous words, “na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and we will listen” in a new light. Hashem responds, “who revealed to my children this secret that the angels use? (Shabbat 88a)” At Har Sinai, we knew the secret of the angels, which means that we were able to experience, in some way, what the angels experience. We had reached the level of the angels, the level where we could do before we were even commanded, before we were told what to do.
This was the level of the Avot, who kept the Torah before it was given. It is the level of being so in tune with spiritual reality that every aspect of body and soul is ready and waiting to do the Will of Hashem. The angels were created to automatically fulfill the Will of Hashem. The Avot weren’t created this way, but they reached this level by purifying their bodies to such an extent that following Hashem’s Will came automatically, the way a swimmer when thrown into water will swim. All 248 of their limbs reflexively and automatically carried out the 248 positive mitzvot. Rav Schorr describes this path of the Avot as a path from above to below. Their avodah began in the spiritual realm, with a comprehension of the mitzvah at its source in the spiritual world. Their actions in the physical world were a reflection and concretization of the spiritual reality above.
This was the secret we understood, and lived, as we stood at Har Sinai. This is what the Haggadah was referring to when it says, “had You only brought us to Har Sinai and not given us the Torah it would have been enough.” Our entire nation stood as one person, with one heart, ready and waiting with every part of our being, to do the Will of Hashem. The combined experiences of the ten makkot, Yetziat Mitzrayim, the splitting of the sea, and working on ourselves for 49 days of travel in the desert, had brought us to the place where our bodies were reflexively ready to do the Will of Hashem.
This is a beautiful idea, but it raises a question. If this is the level of “na’aseh, we will do,” what was added by “nishma, listening to the command”? If we could do the mitzvot automatically, why did we need to be commanded? What spiritual level did we gain? The answer is that the giving of the Torah produced an entirely new method of receiving Torah, one which was the opposite of the avodah of the Avot.
The Maharal says that at the time of Matan Torah, what happened to the soul at man’s creation happened to the Torah. When we were created, Hashem blew into us a soul which reaches up to the highest heights. He clothed that soul in our body in such a way that we can connect, through our bodies, to the highest levels of our soul. At the time of Matan Torah, Hashem took hold of the spiritual Torah, the blueprint of our world, black fire written on white fire. He clothed it in the words of the Torah in such a way that we can connect, through the mitzvot of the Torah, to its highest spiritual reality. King Shlomo tells us, “The mitzvot are a candle, the Torah is light (Mishlei 6:23).” From the time of Matan Torah, the mitzvot are vessels that can hold the light of the Torah. Through the action of doing the mitzvah, we bring that light down.
This changed the entire meaning of doing a mitzvah. For the Avot, the mitzvah was the last part of the spiritual process, the concretization of the spiritual level they had already grasped and already knew. For us, each mitzvah is just a beginning. The Sfat Emet comments that King Shlomo refers to the Torah as a “lekach tov” in Mishlei 4:2. The word lekach is connected to kach, to take, and also to melkachayim, tongs. The words of the Torah and the commands of the Torah are like tongs that can be used to pick up the fire of the Torah. When we do a mitzvah, we have the ability to grasp hold of the part of the Torah which is pure fire. We get to taste the secret that is hidden within.
From the moment we said “nishma, we will listen” and we accepted the Torah in its current form, we gained a new method for discovering the secrets of spiritual reality. We are very far from the level of the Avot, and very far from living the secret of the angels. But at the time of Matan Torah, Hashem gave us a Torah that every generation and every spiritual level can hold onto. David HaMelech tells us, “Taste and see that Hashem is good (Tehillim 34:9)” In each mitzvah is clothed the taste of the secrets of the Torah.