In the spirit of this series, Nishmat HaTorah, whose guiding aspiration is to explore the weekly parsha through the lens of Torat HaChassidut, I want to share one of the foundational Chassidic teachings on this week’s parsha. It is enigmatic and, as we will see, theologically daring. Still, in a series devoted to Chassidut on the parsha, I would be remiss not to include it. It is part of the basic Chassidic vocabulary of the parsha.
In this week’s parsha, Hashem commands Moshe to make two silver trumpets. These trumpets gather the people, summon the leaders, organize the movement of the camp, accompany moments of celebration, and are sounded in times of danger:
“When you go to war in your land against an enemy who attacks you, you shall sound the trumpets, and you shall be remembered before Hashem your God, and you shall be saved from your enemies.”
Ramban, in his critique of Maimonides’ Sefer HaMitzvot (Positive Commandment 5), derives his unique understanding of prayer from this verse. Maimonides counts daily prayer as a biblical mitzvah. Ramban disagrees. For Ramban, there is no biblical obligation to pray every day. The biblical mitzvah applies only in a time of distress, when a person or community faces danger and turns to God. The requirement to sound the trumpets in a time of distress is, for Ramban, the Torah’s concrete form of crying out to God in crisis.
That is significant. Ramban could have grounded prayer in a verse about petition, praise, or service of the heart. Instead, he grounds it in the trumpet blast sounded in a moment of danger. Of course prayer uses words. But here the words carry something more primal and visceral: not polished supplication, but alarm, distress, the raw cry of a person with nowhere to hide, standing desperate before God.
That is one kind of dependence: the dependence of crisis. For the Maggid of Mezritch, these trumpets point to a different kind of dependence.
The Hebrew word for trumpets is חצוצרות (chatzotzrot). R. Dov Ber of Mezritch, known as the Maggid of Mezritch, the premier disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, reads the word Chassidically, not in its plain sense but by letting its sound suggest another meaning: עשה לך שתי חצוצרות means make for yourself two חצי צורות (chatzi tzurot) two half-forms. On this reading, עשה לך (“make for yourself”) also means: look at yourself as a being of half-forms.
The Ohev Yisrael preserves the teaching in a strikingly brief form:
“I heard in the name of the holy Rav, R. Dov Ber, of blessed memory, that he said these words: ‘Make for yourself two chatzotzrot’ is an acronym for ‘two half-forms.’ But I did not hear the explanation of the matter.”
The Ohev Yisrael records the teaching but leaves it open. Two half-forms: half of what? Made whole through whom? By God? By another person? By Torah? By community? Later Chassidic teachers took the teaching in several directions. Some read it as a teaching about the relationship between the human being and God; others as a teaching about human interdependence, the need for another person, a teacher, a friend, or a community. In all of these readings, the human being is not whole alone.
But while some of the Maggid’s disciples received the teaching in incomplete form, we also have the idea in the Maggid’s own words. In Maggid Devarav LeYaakov (no. 24), the Maggid writes:
“‘Make for yourself two silver chatzotzrot’ means: two half-forms… For the human being is only dalet-mem, dam, blood… and when he attaches himself to Hakadosh Baruch Hu, who is the Aleph of the world, he becomes adam… This is the meaning of ‘two silver chatzotzrot’: the human being is a half-form, for he is only dam, and Hakadosh Baruch Hu is called the Aleph of the world. When they attach to one another, a complete form is made.”
The Maggid is working with the word adam. On its own, he says, the human being is only dam, blood (and flesh). What turns dam into adam is the aleph, the presence of the Divine, the Aleph of the world. Without that aleph, a person is alive, full of energy, movement, and desire, but something essential is missing.
So far, one could understand the teaching as a strong claim about human dependence on God. Without God, the human being is not yet fully adam. But the Maggid says more. He speaks not of one half-form, but of two. The human being is one half; God, as it were, is the other “half.” Only when they are joined does a complete form come into being.
Here the teaching becomes theologically bold. We are used to saying that the human being is incomplete without God. The Maggid appears to say that, in some mystical sense, God is also incomplete without the human being. Not God in God’s own infinite essence, of course. But God’s presence in this world, the Divine purpose in creation, remains somehow unfinished without human beings who turn toward God and bring His will into the world. One hears echoes here of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous formulation: “God in search of man.” The Maggid’s language is even more daring: the Divine presence in the world is somehow only a half-form until human beings bring the aleph into their lives.
The contrast is now clear. For Ramban, the trumpets are the source for prayer in a time of distress, the cry of crisis sounded before God by a person or community in danger. For the Maggid, chatzotzrot becomes chatzi tzurot, half-forms. The dependence is no longer only the dependence of crisis, but the deeper dependence built into the bond between God and humanity.
The trumpets gather, summon, and sound the alarm in danger. In the Maggid’s reading, they also suggest a deeper theological reality: the human being is not whole without the Divine aleph, and God’s presence in the world is not fully revealed without the human being who turns toward it and brings it into life. Only then does dam become adam; only then do the two half-forms become whole.
Daf of the Day
