Shabbos, Chodesh, Milah: Strength from the Brink

81aHere is what lay behind the Greeks' wish to take these three mitzvos away from Israel: Shabbos; milah, circumcision; and Chodesh, the sanctifying of the new month. Shabbos hints that the Holy One, blessed be He, has set a fixed law and limit [to the darkness], and that salvation comes at the very last moment, when it is urgently needed. Twilight, says R' Yosi, lasts the blink of an eye: “this one comes in and that one goes out.”¹ So it is with Hashem's salvation, which comes in the blink of an eye: when the darkness grows strong above, at once the holiness of Shabbos grows strong against it. We said the same on Chazal's words “on Erev Shabbos as it grows dark”: out of the darkness of Erev Shabbos a person comes to the pleasantness and sweetness of holy Shabbos.² And Shabbos was given to Israel alone and not to the idol worshippers, as we say in the prayer, “And You did not give it …”³

81bChodesh: the natural philosophers say that before the moon is born it is like a tiny dot, truly on the point of vanishing, and only then does it begin to appear. In itself the moon is only a dark, polished mirror that receives anew from the strength of the sun's light. Israel counts by the moon,⁴ as a hint of the moon's virtue. Milah, too, hints at how precious the true sign is: the os bris kodesh, the sign of the holy covenant, the seal of the King, the King of the world, which is always with us, even in the worst and lowest places. As Chazal said, “When Dovid entered the bathhouse” and saw himself standing there without a single mitzvah, “once he remembered the milah in his flesh, his mind was set at ease.”⁵ The same power is at work in the Midrash: “If she says to him, ‘I have seen something like a red rose,’ he separates from her.”⁶ He holds back through the power given to us, the sefirah of Yesod, the foundation, which is called siyuma degufa, “the end of the body.”⁷ That is, if, Heaven forbid, a person imagines that he himself is already at that siyuma, the very end and last limit of the body, still we are sealed with the King's seal, and we still have the sign that we are His people, if we return to Him in truth.

81cThe natural philosophers also say that the drop of seed, as it goes out and as it comes in, before the embryo forms, is almost nothing, a bare and formless potential, and then the embryo forms. See the sefer Yesod HaAvodah, in its Michtavei Kodesh,⁸ [where he writes at length that as it is in the generation of a human being, so it is in the service of Hashem, blessed be He]. And milah is a sign between us and our Father, like a son who was lost for many years and, when he comes back to his father, makes himself known to him by the marks on his body. All this the Greeks wanted to abolish, so that we would not strengthen ourselves, and then, Heaven forbid, “we would perish utterly.”⁹

82In the same Michtavei Kodesh he brings a teaching in the name of the Baal Shem Tov:¹⁰ [These are his words: The Baal Shem Tov said to his disciples, “After all my attainments on high, in the roots of the Torah and the mitzvos, and after all the delight of my attainments, I set all my attainments aside and hold fast to simple faith: Ich bin a nar in gleib, I am a simpleton in faith.”] The Ramban's words in Emunah uBitachon are well known: faith and wisdom are one. The heart of wisdom is simple faith.¹¹