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The essence comes into physicality. That which is supreme, extends to the lowest levels and into the coarse garments.
This is a principle: essence is found specifically in physicality. There are many illustrations of this. As said above, the more refined and elevated something is, the more physical and coarse it is in this world.
This is like a lion and the ox. It is known that the face was on the right side of the G-dly chariot, which is a higher level than the face of the ox which is on the left side. But down here the ox is kosher and can be brought on an alter, but the lion is an impure animal that is fierce/destructive in it's manner.
Since the lion is higher above, it is impossible that even by many steps downwards that it would be resolved as a pure animal. It's download is by means of a fall and a beakdown – it breaks away from it's source and hence it arrives here below.
So too with the faculties of the soul. Sight and hearing: sight is of a higher level than hearing. “shmiah is not comparable to re-iyah” - what you see has a much more profound effect on one. Shmiah can relate to the sound which is a more physical presence, and sight relates to physicality. Further more, the experience of sight is due to the black pupil and not the white, which is more representative of human life.
Also the angels asked for Torah, but it was given to humans! This is because the true principles of torah cannot be expressed on a spiritual level, but rather on the level of physical mitzvoth/halacha!
When they made the request, Moshe Rabenu rebutted them by saying, “do they have a yetzer hara?!” The true ohr/light of torah can only come by virtue of birur/purification of the yetzer harah.
Birur of the yetzer hara, means one is no longer limited by his own personal experience and involvement. He goes beyond saying, “reality is true since I experience it”. This is the limit of physicality.
When one can step out of this limit, as the Rambam says, “the first principle of mind is that there is a first Being that makes everything” and one feels I am a creation of His and my significance of my existence is that I am aware of this first Being. This is real intelligence, this is real sensitivity. One breaks out of one's dark awareness of self, to an awareness of Him, a true existence and not a relative existence.
This is light out of darkness. This is the birur. One starts with one's own experience, where the first Being is not a necessity. “One prefers one measure of his own to 9 measures of his fellow” - why? The 9 of his fellow he came to know after the fact, the one portion of he knows, he saw it coming into being out of nothing. This is the supremacy of 'light out of darkness' - we first have to nullify the coarseness of the physical, and break away from the personal experience. And say, 'no, there is a Real Experience!'
We went as far as to say, there is light in the darkness.
How does one know the reality of something without coming into contact with it? The contact element and the knowledge it provides has to do with it's effect. Knowledge without contact is proof that it really exists, without my experience of it. This yisron, is such a fine point that there is no way to identify it except by fighting with the yetzer hara.
One tells the yetzer hara, that 'you need to put aside what you know now, then you will come to see something based on the truth...' There is something special about physicality – it is something one cannot denie. It is so real that it is inescapable. In total contrast to this is another opposite presence – the First Being – the real truth is also undeniable. One comes to the real truth through the physicality – through the birur of the physical.
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