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Chapter 5
And for a further explanation, to explain well the expression “taking hold” that Elijah said, “No thought takes hold of You,” and so on. Now every intellect, when it understands and reaches with its intellect some thing that can be understood, takes hold of that thing and encircles it in its intellect. The thing understood is taken hold of, encircled, and clothed inside the intellect that reached it and understood it. The intellect too is clothed in the thing understood, at the time when it reaches it and takes hold of it in its intellect. For example, when a person understands and reaches some law in the Mishnah or in the Gemara, in its true form and in its clear state, his intellect takes hold of it and encircles it. His intellect is also clothed in it at that time. Now this law is the wisdom and the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. It arose in His will that when Reuven claims thus and thus, for example, and Shimon thus and thus, the ruling between them shall be thus and thus. Even if this thing never was, and never will be, that one should come to judgment over these claims and these demands, still, since it arose thus in the will and the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, that if this one claims thus and that one claims thus the ruling shall be thus, then when a person knows and reaches this ruling in his intellect, in the way the law is laid out in the Mishnah, or the Gemara, or the decisors, he reaches, takes hold of, and encircles in his intellect the will and the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He. No thought takes hold of Him, nor of His will and His wisdom, except in their being clothed in the laws laid out before us. His intellect too is clothed in them. This is a wondrous union. There is no union like it, and nothing of its rank is found at all in bodily things, to be truly one and joined, from every side and every corner.
This is an extra advantage, great and wondrous without end, which belongs to the mitzvah (a commanded deed) of knowing the Torah and reaching it, over all the practical mitzvot (commanded deeds), and even over the mitzvot that depend on speech, and even over the mitzvah of Torah study that is in speech. For by means of all the mitzvot of speech and of deed, the Holy One, blessed be He, clothes the nefesh (the lowest level of the soul) and encircles it with the light of Hashem (God), from its head to its foot. In the knowing of the Torah, besides the intellect being clothed in the wisdom of Hashem, the wisdom of Hashem is also inside him. That is what the intellect reaches, takes hold of, and encircles in its intellect, of whatever it can take hold of and reach from the knowing of the Torah, each person according to his intellect, the power of his knowing, and his reach, in the plain sense, the hint, the homily, and the secret. Because, in the knowing of the Torah, the Torah is clothed in the person’s nefesh and his intellect and is encircled inside them, it is therefore called by the name bread, and food of the nefesh. For just as physical bread feeds the body when a person brings it inside the body, into its very inside, and it is turned there into blood and flesh like the body’s own flesh, and then it lives and lasts, so it is with the knowing of the Torah and the reaching of it in a person’s nefesh. When he studies it well, with careful thought of his intellect, until it is taken hold of in his intellect and united with him, and they become one, it becomes food for the nefesh, and life inside it, from the life of the Life, Ein Sof (the Endless), blessed be He, who is clothed in His wisdom and His Torah that are inside it. This is what is written (Psalms 40:9): “And Your Torah is within my inward parts.” As it is written in Etz Chaim, Gate 44, Chapter 3, the garments of the souls in the Garden of Eden are the mitzvot, and the Torah is the food for the souls that engaged in this world in the Torah for its own sake, as it is written in the Zohar, Vayakhel, folio 210. And “for its own sake” means in order to bind his nefesh to Hashem by reaching the Torah, each person according to his intellect, as it is written in Pri Etz Chaim.
[The food is the aspect of inner light, and the garments are the aspect of surrounding lights. Therefore the sages of blessed memory said (Mishnah Peah 1:1) that the study of Torah is equal in weight against all the mitzvot. For the mitzvot are garments only, and the Torah is food and also a garment for the thinking nefesh, in that one becomes clothed in it through careful thought of it and through learning it. All the more so when one brings it out with the mouth in speech, for the breath of the speech becomes an aspect of surrounding light, as it is written in Pri Etz Chaim.]
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