What is the Torah? The Torah is HaShem's Will, tightened, focused, constricted until from Its humble presentation as ink on paper, we can bear witness to His true greatness.
HaShem is crouching impossibly low so that His first born son can reach up and grasp at Him with the tips of his stubby little newborn fingers. When we reach up, He picks us up, embraces us ever so gently and fills us with light.
Every time we open our mouths to say a berachah, open our hands to give tzedakah, open our minds to explore the Torah, we are reaching up. Thought, Speech, and Action. Three ways to bring the Torah into us, three ways to wrap the Torah around us. Each way appropriate and essential to a corresponding part of our soul.
Our souls are rooted (the Alter Rebbe explains towards the end of the sefer) in HaShem's Wisdom, two steps from th essence of creation. But the Torah is the first leap, it is God's Will. Our little Godly soul, rooted in the supernal Wisdom takes infinite pleasure being wrapped up in its source, the Divine Will.
This is an extravagant pleasure available to the soul only here in this world. In the world to come, our souls will enjoy without bound the flow of divine influx -- each soul in accordance with what their merits will bear. But in this world, this dark place of absolute opposites, a lofty soul of light in a body hewn of darkness, here God embraces us totally.
There isn't anything else like it. Not even in the world to come.
With every moment of mitzwah performance and Torah study we are experiencing spiritual ecstacy, performing what is patently impossible -- hugging the Creator, the Sustainer of all that is.
Note that the quality and depth of this experience is directly related to our mitzwah performance in thought and speech as well as in deed. The thought component of a mitzwah is learning the Torah, the halachoth that pertain to that mitzwah. The speech component is the Berachah, where relevant, or the speaking of the halachot aloud while you learn. The action component is the physical act of mitzwah performance, sometimes this is as little as the motion of one's lips while learning.
Again the highest level of this experience depends on the depth of one's study of the halachoth pertaining to each mitzwah, and the coincident performance and perfection of all the mitzwoth.One incomplete mitzwah holds us back from our true potential. The mitzwoth have a cumulative and amplifying affect, performing 612 is not even comparable to performing all 613. All the same, even just a single mitzwah effects the union we described here, and this union is inconceivable, incalculably precious.
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