THEMES of Featured Chasidic Masters Articles

Every person must create a tabernacle within himself; he must allow divinity to be revealed in his being. This is achieved through prayer - purification of the heart. When the heart is purified, divine reality becomes apparent in the world.

This parasha presents the concept of the Nazir, the consecrated one who vows not to partake of grape products, cut his hair, or voluntarily become defiled for the dead. The Sefat Emet explains that a man must learn "…to be detached from the desires of the physical world, yet at the same time live a worldly existence".

The pleasure of sin derives from the sparks of the Primordial Kings that fell during the Shattering of the Vessels into the Bright Shell. It is the role of human beings to uplift these sparks to their supernal root through the path of Torah and mitzvot, and in the case of sin, through the act of repentance.

A nazirite is prohibited to cut his hair. The Chasidic masters teach that hairs act as "straws" transmitting profound and inaccessible energy. Each strand of hair, shaped like a straw, communicates a level of soul-energy that due to its intensity cannot be communicated directly, only through the "straw" of hair, through the contracted, and curtailed medium of hair, which dilutes the intense energy.