Heavy with Wealth: Abundance as a Burden

23“Avram was very heavy …” It seems to me that when the tzaddik receives a flow of abundance from Hashem, he is very afraid of it, in the spirit of Yaakov's “I have become small …,”¹ and so he grows even stronger in serving Hashem. This is what another verse means when it says of Avraham, “Avraham rose early in the morning”:² the chassadim, Hashem's kindnesses, are called “morning,” so when great kindnesses came to Avraham, he spurred himself on all the more and went up to a higher level. “And he saddled his donkey”: he saddled his chamor (חמור), his chomer (חומר), the matter of the body.

24This is the meaning of “Avram was very heavy with livestock”: what Hashem bestowed on him, livestock, “silver and gold,” weighed on him as a burden. “He went on his journeys”:³ he went to his root. This is what Rashi means when he says that Avram “paid off his hakafos,” the debts he had run up on credit.⁴ For every day we bless Hashem “Who clothes the naked” and “Who straightens the bent,”⁵ and these blessings speak of the outer shell of this world, which surrounds every person. When he stands on a great level, he is stripped of the outer shell of this world and left bare, until he is clothed in the chaluka derabbanan, the garment of the sages, from the upper world. That is the meaning of the saying “Be arum in fear”:⁶ be bare in fear. So when do we bless Hashem “Who clothes the naked”? When He “straightens the bent,” that is, when a person goes up to the upper world. And this is Rashi's “para his hakafos”: para as in “and he shall uncover (ufara) the woman's head,”⁷ and hakafos as what surrounds (mukaf) him, the outer shell that encloses him.