Abundant Mercy: All Israel Joined to the Pure

108aAl HaNissim says that Hashem stood up for them in their time of distress “in Your abundant mercy.” Why abundant mercy? In the Selichos we say, “He Who answers in a time of distress, may He answer us,” and “He Who answers in a time of favor, may He answer us.”¹ To answer in a time of distress needs no abundant mercy, for the distress itself moves Hashem to pity the sufferer. A time of favor is for one who needs abundant mercy before he is pitied: he is in no great distress, and is pitied only out of the compassion of the Creator, blessed be He. They were in great distress then. So why does the prayer say “in Your abundant mercy”?

108bThe answer is that by their deeds they were not worthy of a miracle, as the holy sefarim bring, so abundant mercy had to be added to the distress. Then abundant mercy was awakened from the very source of mercy, the mercy of the Exodus from Egypt. Of the Exodus it says, “I am Hashem,”² and the Haggadah reads it, “I, and not an angel …”;³ and it says, “I, Hashem, search the heart and test the kidneys.”⁴ That is, He has mercy, for His own sake, on the inner point of the Jew, in the spirit of “For My sake, for My sake, I will act.”⁵ For that inner point is known to Hashem alone, and within, every Jew is good. This explains the words “the impure into the hands of the pure.” In itself that is no wonder. It is not like the words before it, “the many into the hands of the few,” where the natural order is turned upside down. That the impure should fall into the hands of the pure is simply strict justice, and no miracle. But in the light of what we have said, here is the wonder. They were not pure and worthy of a miracle; yet Matisyahu and his sons nullified themselves before Klal Yisrael, the whole Jewish people, and so all of Klal Yisrael was counted among the pure, on the principle that whatever is joined to the pure is pure. That is a great miracle.

108cThis is the meaning of “From His dwelling place He watches over all yoshvei ha'aretz, the inhabitants of the earth”:⁶ those who dwell in earthiness and physicality, for whom the Holy One, blessed be He, works miracles. And how does it come about? The next verse says, “He Who fashions their hearts together (yachad),”⁷ and the Yerushalmi explains: “Their Fashioner wants their hearts to be one (yachid) toward Him.”⁸ The Kabbalists write on “Hear, Yisrael: Hashem is our God, Hashem is One”⁹ that through unity one becomes worthy of “Hear, Yisrael.” So this is what “Their Fashioner wants their hearts to be one toward Him” means, and this is how it comes about: through unity. Through the unity in which they bind themselves to one another, He can work a miracle for all of Klal Yisrael too, by the power of the pure among them who are joined together. For “whatever is joined to the pure is pure.”¹⁰

109“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity.”¹¹ Unity is as good as knowing how to direct the middos, the Divine attributes, and to draw down the flow of blessing and the wisdom that oil alludes to [in the next verse, “Like the good oil upon the head”]. As the holy sefarim put it, this is to draw down the flow that descends from Keser, the highest of the sefiros, to Chochmah, wisdom. “Like the dew of Chermon”:¹² like dew that comes down from a place so high that no sin reaches it, and so dew is never withheld.¹³ “For there Hashem commanded the blessing,” for there is the source of the flow, “life forever.”¹⁴ The holy sefarim say on “Yitzchak entreated (vaye'tar, ויעתר) Hashem”¹⁵ that he made a gate, a tar'a (תרעא). That is “forever”: this is a gate through which we can enter forever.