“All Those Colors to My Dreams” p: 171

AyinBase with R' Paltiel Monday 5 MenachemAv 5772 

Page 171 – at middle of the page (line starts, 'yodin...') For text, see picture below or see link top right of the blog (needs update).

Light and essence are not comparable, yet this is light that essence has conceived. Essence wanted to be in light – revealed through light.

He wanted to be revealed in light. Thus there is an element of knowledge, but there is no way to know. The only knowing is of the lights and the revelations, rather than of the essence.

Colors are seen when the light is reflected from the object. The light does not insist on just illuminating at full power. This is indicative of the quality of being, mislabesh bekeilim (dressed in vessels).

In the sun, the light does not know darkness. It does not define itself as something that defies darkness. So too the soul in the body. It brings life to the body – to a lifeless body. So the life/soul at that level is defined as the 'bringer of life', but the essence of the soul is above this – it is the essence of life. This is why the impurity of death is the most severe. Why? Because from a perspective of real life/soul it cannot be related to.

So there is a level of light that recognizes darkness and provides for colors and brings out the 'light element' in the darkness.

This is the light that comes as a result of tzimzum/contraction and miut/reduction. Before the contraction, you have just simple, pure, 100% light. With contraction you have the concept of 'non-light' and then light comes and says, 'oh yeah, here too there is light'.

The fundamental reality is retracted. The physical world is fundamentally a lie. Why? Because you get to know it not because it exists, but because of its effect. There is no sense that, 'the table has to be there'. The Rebbe Rashab, when a young boy became ill and could not see physicality. His father the Rebbe Maharash came to visit him and brought his silver cane. The boy could see the cane. The father would leave it there so the boy could have a connection to physicality. This object had a fundamental reality.

The contraction is for the sake of enabling the light to relate to absence.