Re’shit ḥokhmah (Beginning of Wisdom): On Love

Love: Chapter One

The concept of Love is further explained in the Zohar [II, Ki Tissa, 190b], where it is stated as follows:

The idea is that the love of a man for his friend is through the soul, for it is the desire felt by the soul that constitutes love, notwithstanding that the bodies are distinct and separated from each other. The soul of each of them is of a spiritual nature, and spirituality is not separated; rather, it is united in the utmost degree of unity. As the soul of one friend stirs up its desire to love his friend, the soul of his friend will likewise become aroused, and he will love him. And thereby the two souls will become one, as the verse states in connection with David and Jonathan: And the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul (1 Samuel 18:1). And the love of David for Jonathan guided his love for him, as it is stated: And they kissed one another, and wept, etc., until David wept the most (1 Samuel 20:41). And likewise he declared at Jonathan’s [death]: “Wonderful was your love to me, surpassing the love of women!” (2 Samuel 1:26).

Now, this state of affairs—that souls become knit with each other when love is awakened—was taught to us by King Solomon, peace be upon him, when he stated: As in water, face answers to face, so too is the heart of man to man (Proverbs 27:19). And our rabbis of blessed memory have explained:

Now it is evident from what he explained there that just as with the waters inside the vessel, when a person gazes at them with his face, he can see his face in them. They are two kinds of face: the first, namely, the face with which he gazes at them, which constitutes direct light, and the face in the water which he sees, which is the reflected light returning from below upward—that is to say, from the water inside the vessel to him. The two faces are identical, knit together as one, and if a person were to remove his gaze from the water, nothing whatsoever would be able to be seen in the water, for if there is no direct light, there can be no reflected light. Thus it is with the heart of a man vis-à-vis his friend, for when a man evokes the desire of his heart to love his friend, that desire will likewise evoke the desire of his friend toward him.

Now, notwithstanding that we stated that the face with which a person gazes into the water constitutes direct light, that is only in accordance with physical reality. In spiritual reality, however, this constitutes the mystery of the arousal emanating from below, which ascends from our deeds unto the divine presence, and that is the notion of “the female waters” mentioned in the Zohar. And if there is no arousal emanating from below, there can be no arousal from above, as it is stated: And a mist went up from the earth and after that it watered [the whole surface of the ground] (Genesis 2:6), as the sages have explained in the Zohar on Genesis.

And so you may comprehend in their entirety the words of the analogy vis-à-vis the thing to which it is being compared, and to understand the details included therein, the matter is as follows: just as, when a man gazes at the water, two entities need to be present to enable him to see his face there, namely, water and a vessel, and should one of these be absent, no face whatsoever will be visible, so likewise both a soul and a heart are required. The sages have already explained several times in [the section of the Zohar known as] Ha-tikunim (“the repairs”) that the soul has its abode within the heart, and the heart is analogous to a vessel, while the soul is the water in the vessel. For a heart without a soul is like a vessel without water. Just as, when gazing in the water, if there is no vessel present, nothing will be visible, since the vessel, on account of its being thick and cloudy, is the cause of the image in question being reflected—for the water is plain and simple, and by virtue of its quality of simplicity the image that appears in it passes through it to the outside if there is no intervening object impeding the image. (This is akin to the polished mirror, where, if there is no thick layer at its rear impeding the image, the image will pass through it to the outside and the person will see nothing.) Similarly, a man cannot acquire love in the soul of a man who has not seen his physical form, so that when his love is aroused for him, the love of his friend for him will be similarly aroused. And the gazing of the face into the water represents the arousal of the love which is evoked through the desire of the soul in his heart for the soul in the heart of his friend, and then the two souls are knit together by a single bond in love, despite their being distant from one another, as the waters, which represent the souls, are fine and spiritual, all of them constituting a portion of God from above (Job 31:2). There is no separation between them, even though they are in separate vessels.

This is analogous to the divine internal essence contained in the vessels of sapphire in which the insides are all one and unified, even though the vessels are different. You know that in [the section of the Zohar known as] the Ra’aya mehemna (at the end of Bo), it compares the internal essence to water spreading out inside the vessels, in that, if the vessels were to break, the waters would return to their source, and they would all become a single source, just as they were prior to the spreading. Now as for the concepts of direct light and of reflecting light, analogous to “the face unto the face,” I am not going to elucidate these, as I rely on what has been explained by my teacher, peace be upon him!

And with this introduction, we may understand the statement: “In love and in brotherhood, they give their spirits to him, one in the other,” since the bonding of the respective natures [of the two individuals] through their mutual love is brought about by virtue of their inner spirit, for from the perspective of the vessels, they are separate vessels differentiated in accordance with their respective functions: one for kindness, one for justice, and one for mercy. But, by means of the spirit, which is a unity, as it is written: and they have but a single spirit (Ecclesiastes 3:19)—they bond together and give each other their spirits.