Truth through Torah: The Answer to the Angels

1“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”¹ Several holy sefarim explain how the end of the Torah connects to its beginning: the Zohar, Mishnas Rabbi Eliezer, the Ramban's HaEmunah VeHaBitachon, the Degel Machaneh Efraim, and others.² On this subject I too “will offer my share.”³

2Chazal teach in the Midrash: “R' Simon said: When the Holy One, blessed be He, came to create Adam HaRishon, the first man, the ministering angels split into groups and factions. Some said, ‘Let him not be created,’ and some said, ‘Let him be created.’ This is what is written: ‘Kindness and truth met; righteousness and peace kissed.’ Kindness said, ‘Let him be created, for he will do acts of kindness.’ Truth said, ‘Let him not be created, for he is all falsehood.’ Righteousness said, ‘Let him be created, for he will do righteous deeds.’ Peace said, ‘Let him not be created, for he is all strife.’ What did the Holy One do? He took Truth and cast it to the earth, as it is written, ‘And truth was cast to the ground.’”⁴ But what kind of answer was that to the angels' claim? How could casting Truth to the earth allow Hashem, as it were, to prevail and create man?

3My holy father and teacher, zt"l, connected the beginning of the Torah to its end, building on a teaching of the holy Noam Elimelech.⁵ The Noam Elimelech teaches that if, Heaven forbid, there are harsh judgments in the world, the remedy is to bring forth new insights in Torah. Why does that help? The Zohar says that a person who learns Torah lishmah, for its own sake, and brings forth new insights in it creates new worlds.⁶ In those new worlds the judgments have not yet taken hold, so there they simply lose their force, and in this way the judgments are sweetened, that is, softened. This, my holy father said, is hinted at in the Torah's last verse. Its words “and all the mighty hand”⁷ allude to harsh judgments. How does one cancel them? The remedy lies in the Torah's very first words, Bereishis bara, “In the beginning He created.” The word Bereishis alludes to the Torah. Chazal read its first letter, be-, as “for the sake of,” and said, “For the sake of the Torah, which is called reishis.”⁸ In other words, learning Torah creates new worlds, and through this the judgments are sweetened. Those are his holy words.

4We can explain the Midrash this way. The angels' claim was that this world is a world of falsehood. We know that even when a person is privileged to do mitzvos, it is still very hard to do them with truth, because many ulterior motives can easily slip into them. The angels therefore argued: Why create a world and people at all, if no one can reach the way of truth? That is what they meant by “Let him not be created, for he is all falsehood.” Hashem answered them by taking Truth and casting it to the earth. We may say this means that He took the Torah, the Torah of “truth,” and cast it down to the earth; in other words, He gave us the Torah. The Torah is truth in its fullest sense, and by cleaving to it we will be able to reach truth in its completeness. Hashem's answer to the angels was therefore apt: against their claim that no one can come to truth, He gave us the Torah, through which we can.

5This is the meaning of a gematria cited in the holy sefer Aron Eidus. Bereishis bara Elokim, “In the beginning God created,” has the same gematria, the total numerical value of its letters, as Torah, Nevi'im, Kesuvim.⁹ This hints that all of creation came into being through the power of the Torah, since only through the Torah will people reach truth in doing the mitzvos.

6This explains a teaching of Chazal: “Every judge who judges a true judgment la'amitto, according to its full truth, becomes a partner with the Holy One, blessed be He, in the work of creation.”¹⁰ The commentators, among them Tosafos, the medieval glosses on the Gemara, and the Bach, a classic commentary on the Tur, ask what the word la'amitto adds.¹¹ At first glance it would be enough to say “who judges a true judgment” and no more. But we have seen that through the Torah a person can come to the middah of truth, truth as a character trait, so we may say that la'amitto refers to that middah. The statement then means this: a judge who “judges a true judgment,” that is, who engages in the Torah of truth, is privileged, in the merit of that study, to reach la'amitto, the middah of truth itself. This also lets us understand the rest of the statement, that such a judge becomes a partner with Hashem in the work of creation. The reason is that the angels' claim was refuted, and the world could be created, through this very gift: Hashem gave us a Torah of truth so that through it we would reach truth. So a judge who attains la'amitto is counted as a partner in the work of creation.

7The same idea explains another teaching of Chazal. The Holy One, blessed be He, set a condition with the work of creation: “If Israel accepts the Torah, you will endure; and if not, I will return you to emptiness and void.”¹² For the whole creation of the world, and its continued existence, rest only on Israel's accepting the Torah and reaching truth through it. Without that, the angels' claim, “Let him not be created, for he is all falsehood,” would stand. So had Israel not accepted the Torah, the world would have returned to emptiness and void.

8In the same way we can explain what Chazal say in the Midrash: “The Torah says, ‘I was the craftsman's tool of the Holy One, blessed be He.’ … He looked into the Torah and created the world.”¹³ What does it mean that Hashem looked into the Torah? We can explain that He saw the Torah's special power, that through it one can reach truth, and by this power He created the world. This is why we find that the Torah preceded the world; Chazal say that it was stored away with Hashem for 974 generations before creation.¹⁴ The reason is that only through the Torah does creating the world and its inhabitants have any purpose, for through the Torah every mitzvah done in the world will be favorably accepted, since it will be done with truth. That is why the Torah came first: just as a building first needs a foundation, so the Torah is the foundation on which the world is built.

9aWhat we have said also explains a teaching of Chazal in the Midrash Tanchuma, the Yalkut Shimoni and the Zohar: “R' Yitzchak said: The Torah should have begun only with ‘This month shall be for you’ … Why, then, did it open with Bereishis? Because ‘He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the inheritance of the nations.’ If the nations of the world say to Israel, ‘You are robbers, for you conquered the lands of the seven nations,’ Israel can answer them, ‘The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He. He created it and gave it to whoever is upright in His eyes.’”¹⁵

9bThe explanation follows from what we have said. The world was created only because Israel would accept the Torah and, through it, keep all the mitzvos with truth; without this, it would not have been created at all. The Holy One, blessed be He, offered the Torah to every nation and tongue, and they did not accept it. Only Israel accepted it.¹⁶ So the whole world exists only because of Israel, and therefore it belongs to Israel alone. All the other nations exist only to accompany Israel, in the spirit of Chazal's words, “The whole world was created only to accompany this one.”¹⁷ This is our answer to the nations: the whole earth belongs to Hashem; “He created it and gave it to whoever is upright in His eyes.” In other words, Hashem “created it,” the earth, only because we accepted the Torah. The earth therefore rightly belongs to us alone, and the charge “You are robbers” does not apply.

10[Earlier we cited the teaching of R' Elimelech of Lizhensk, zy"a, that learning Torah and bringing forth new insights in it create new worlds, and that this sweetens the judgments. In light of what we have explained, we may say that Torah study creates new worlds only when it is a Torah of truth, learned without ulterior motives. Only such Torah has the power to sweeten the judgments. For through it a person becomes, as it were, a partner in the creation of the world, as we saw with the judge who judges la'amitto, and so he can sweeten the judgments.]

11The connection between the end of the Torah and its beginning is now clear: “And all the mighty hand, and all the signs and wonders … before the eyes of all Israel. In the beginning He created.”¹⁸ It rests on R' Elimelech's teaching that the harsh judgments are sweetened through the Torah, which is called reishis, because the power of Torah study can create worlds and so sweeten the judgments. [This includes what we explained: through the Torah one reaches truth, which lets the world endure against the claims of the prosecuting angels, and so the judgments are sweetened.] So the words “and all the mighty hand, and all the signs and wonders …” hint at the sweetening of the judgments. This sweetening comes about through Israel's power, because Israel accepted the Torah. That is why “before the eyes of all Israel” leads straight into “In the beginning He created.”

12May Hashem grant that, in the merit of accepting the Torah and learning it, we be privileged to receive abundant blessing and success, and the sweetening of the harsh judgments that we need so very much now, until the coming of the Redeemer. Amen, may it be His will.