Tanya: Chapter 21

Last night my three-year old son told me that we are in HaShem's belly, "because that's where your voice comes from, from your belly." (We've spoken in the past about how HaShem created through world through speaking.) I told him he was right, and that it was a very wise insight. This morning I read this chapter for a second time, and my son's comment illuminated the central meaning of the chapter.

HaShem's speech is not like our speech. It doesn't leave His lips and begin some independent existence as sound waves. Through His speech, HaShem reveals something that was previously hidden to us, to us but not to Him. HaShem carries us as if in a womb, all of creation is an integral and intimate part of Him. And in a way, just as the mother is aware of the greater world beyond the wall of the womb as well as what goes on within the womb, HaShem is aware of all of creation in all of its glory. We, in the womb, carry on almost impervious to all that happens without, aside from an occasional jolt or the swaying motion of the waters around us as mom moves.

This is a visceral image that brings home some of the ideas, but the Baal HaTanya didn't use this imagery for a number of reasons, most of all I think because the baby inside a mother is still in many ways a foreign entity. Secondly the mother is very much ignorant of many things happening within the womb. Third because a fetus effects many changes in the mother, we bear no ability to effect a change of any kind in HaShem.

Why didn't the Baal HaTanya use any better choice of imagery to illustrate the point of this chapter? It is because there is really no analog in the physical world that demonstrates HaShem's innate Oneness. His ways are not like our ways.

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