Truth Springs Up from the Earth

“Truth will sprout from the earth, and justice will look down from heaven.” There are moments when you feel that the “breath of your mouth” has been swallowed up. By that I mean the spark of holy speech, the inner stirring that rose in your heart while you prayed or studied Torah. The dust of the day, the worry of making a living, the heaviness of the body: all of these press down on it. In the end it seems to be buried completely under the ground. Dear young man, please listen: you may have thought this was a burial. That is a mistake. It is a planting. Cain and Abel: A Snapshot of the Inner Struggle At the very start of the Book of Books, at the very start of humanity, we find the drama that every Jew lives inside his own soul: the struggle between Cain and Abel. Cain “worked the soil.” He is the man of matter. The “soil” is inside him. Even when he gives, he does not really give. The Torah says: “Cain brought an offering to Hashem from the fruit of the soil.” He brought from what was left over, from the scraps. He gave in order to receive, not in order to give. This is exactly how the animal soul works, as Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi explains in the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought. Everything it does is mainly for itself. Even its “love” is really self-interest. Abel is the opposite. His very name explains who he is. In Hebrew, his name means “breath,” the breath of the mouth. He is all speech, all breath, all giving. The Torah says: “And he also brought from the firstborn of his flock and from their best parts.” He gave from the first, from the best, from the inside. True speech comes from the soul. And someone who speaks from the soul does not hold on to things for himself. He gives, he builds, he lifts up. This is the snapshot that the Tanya describes in detail in its first chapters. There are two souls inside one person, and between them there is a never-ending struggle. The Murder: An Attempt to Silence the Truth The Torah says: “Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.” What was really behind the murder? It was not just plain jealousy. When matter has no answer to the truth, it reaches for violence. Whoever cannot stand up to the “speech” that comes from the divine soul, and cannot disprove it or face it, tries to silence it by force and bury it. It is as if the Cain inside us says: “If I shut the mouth, the truth will stop existing.” This is how the forces of darkness work. They try to silence the “breath of the mouth” in the heart. The Verse Itself Answers: A Voice That Became a Cry But the verse itself defeats this attempt at the very moment it happens: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.” Notice: it does not just say “a voice.” It says “cries out.” Before the murder, Abel spoke. Now, after he has been buried under the ground, he cries out. The “silencing” did not silence him. It turned his speech into a cry. It turned a quiet voice into a call that is stronger and deeper. And know this: in Hebrew, “your brother’s blood” is in the plural, “bloods.” It is not only the blood of one Abel. It is all his potential, all the generations, all the “speech” that could have come out of him. All of them cry out. The hiding did not swallow anything. It only made it stronger. Truth Springs Up from the Earth: A Burial That Is a Planting And now we come to the new idea that is the heart of everything. King David said: “Truth will sprout from the earth.” “From the earth.” Specifically from the earth. Specifically from the very ground where Abel was buried. Specifically from the hiding, from the heaviness, from the lowest place of all. That is where truth grows from. This is no accident. This is the way growth works. A seed planted in the ground will not grow unless it is swallowed up and, as far as anyone can see, “dies.” It is precisely when it seems to disappear under the ground that the power inside it begins to work and grow with even greater strength. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi explains the same thing about the work of refining the physical world. It is precisely the descent into the physical earth, into matter and heaviness, that makes possible a rise to a level that could not have been reached from above. This is also the foundation laid by the Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, about “a descent for the sake of a higher ascent.” The descent is not a breakdown. The “burial” is not a failure. Just the opposite: it is the very condition that must come first for the great growth that is on its way.