Ultimate Understanding

"I shall descend in order to save…and to bring them out of this land..." (Ex. 3:8)

We have already explained that Moses himself was equated with the Jewish people inasmuch as Moses achieved the 49^th level of bina, intellectual insights, out of a possible total of 50 such levels. The reason that Moses never reached the 50^th and ultimate level of bina was that the achievement must parallel the effort expended on achieving the goal in question. Had the Israelites descended to the 50^th level of impurity, the effort at gaining the final level of insight would have been possible. Since Israel was never quite at the bottom of the spiritual levels, the effort to reach the top was of necessity a little less than total.

Moses' achievements were directly related to the condition of the Jewish people whom he represented.

We have been assured that in the future G‑d Himself will influence us by means of the Torah so that we will be able to achieve the fiftieth level of bina. We will be indebted to the cumulative exile experiences for that eventual achievement. The most important individual factor will be our present and final exile. One of the reasons the generation of the first exile was not able to attain that level of insight was that they had not yet had the benefit of Torah. Once we shall reach that level of insight we will be able to recapture any holy souls still under the control of the forces of impurity. At any rate, had G‑d led the Jewish people out of Egypt even a single day sooner than He did, the number of souls which had not yet been rescued would have been commensurable greater.

[Translated and annotated by Eliyahu Munk, Vol. I]