The Secret of the Sweetness in the Holy Letters

Class No. 23 | Sunday, Parashas Pinchas, 11 Tammuz - Class in the Yeshiva.

At the age of 24, after much searching for inner truth, the Rav (Rabbi Berland) merited to discover the hidden light within the holy letters. This article reveals the depth of Torah 65 in Likutey Moharan, explaining how every single letter of speech carries within it an infinite sweetness that speaks directly to a person's soul.

At the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, I had been searching for the truth for exactly eight years. I noticed that people were looking for an outlet for their nonsense, but I decided to search for the absolute truth. During that period, I heard about a man who would beg people not to spoil the pure breath of the children. Every person must pray not to ruin the soft, pure infants, because the breath of school children (tinokot shel beis rabban) sweetens the harsh judgments over the entire Jewish people.

In those days, I prayed regularly on Friday nights at the Chazon Ish Kollel. I saw a light, sweetness, and earnestness there that cannot be seen anywhere else in the world. However, for two weeks, a thought had been nesting in my mind: "Maybe I should go see what is happening in Breslov?" Friday arrived, I changed into my Shabbos clothes, and doubts began to tear me apart. I felt that if I didn't go now, I would lose everything. It was a critical moment, an entire hour of inner struggle, torment, and fluttering of the soul.

Ultimately, I decided to go to the Chazon Ish Kollel. I was walking down the street, and suddenly Reb Nachman Rosenthal appeared before my eyes. These were the most critical moments of my life; I do not know how things would have unfolded had it not been for this moment. He asked me, "You promised me you would come, where have you disappeared to for almost two weeks?" I answered him that I was already on my way to Breslov. He thought I was joking with him, but at that moment, I simply broke into a run from Chazon Ish Street straight to the Breslov synagogue.

The Taste That Is Never Forgotten

On that Friday night, I witnessed a spiritual service there that I had never seen in my life, and to this day, I cannot forget it. Everyone around was certain that some crazy person had walked in, but what I experienced in that moment was the realization of what Rebbe Nachman writes in Likutey Moharan (Torah 65).

"That a person must pray with all the letters, to feel the delight of the first letter..."

To reach a state where you say, "Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov" (How goodly are your tents, O Jacob) and feel the immense sweetness of the first letter. It is forbidden to forget the sweetness of the first letter. You continue onward, saying, "Vehaya Hashem lemelech al kol ha'aretz" (And Hashem will be King over all the earth), "Hashem echad ushemo echad" (Hashem is One and His Name is One), and you still do not forget the sweetness of that very first letter.

Whenever I see Torah 65, I am reminded of my childhood. At the age of ten, I ate an apricot for the first time in my life. I went down to the Arabs who sold apricot leather that was arranged in a roll. The taste of that first time can never be forgotten in one's life. It took me thirty years until I rediscovered that taste in spirituality. It was a taste that simply blew my mind, a sweetness that is impossible to forget. There is such sweetness in the letters, such sweetness in holy speech, that Rebbe Nachman says we must never forget it.

The Letters That Speak to Us

Reb Noson writes regarding this Torah, praying that he should not forget any holy utterance. Sometimes people put on tefillin, take them off quickly, and run to study. But Reb Noson begs: "Have mercy on us and save us so that we may merit to understand where the perfection of our supplications and requests lies, that they should all be in ultimate unity."

The main thing is the speech. Every word must be sung; every letter is a splendor of gatherings and collections, awesome, magnificent, and majestic pearls. In every letter and in every utterance, there is a complete blessing. If we merited to incline our ears, we would discover that the letters themselves are speaking to us. This is not merely a tradition or a custom; every letter is a new creation, a new light.

The letter speaks to the person and cries out: "Say me with a melody! Say me slowly!" Just as in the future to come, every limb will cry out its mitzvah—the eyes will cry out to close them from forbidden sights, and the mouth will cry out to stop speaking idle words. When a person is caught in a desire and wants to hear or speak nonsense, the mouth itself roars from within: "Stop!"

If we merited to incline our ears to what we express from our mouths, we would see that these are precious pearls and gemstones. The holiness of every single utterance is immense. If we knew and heard even one letter speaking to us, we would remain with that letter for our entire lives and would never move from it. As the Baal HaTanya says, one could stand in the Shemoneh Esrei prayer for twenty-four hours, because one can become bound and intertwined from the very first letter of speech, and how could one possibly leave it?

How can one simply move on from a single letter? How can one leave the first letter of speech, which contains such power, preciousness, beauty, radiance, majesty, and splendor? The splendor of every letter is such that one can see beauty in it every single second. After all, in one second a person can utter fifteen or sixteen letters from his mouth, and in every such fraction of a second lies infinite beauty.

We must pray: "Master of the Universe, grant me the merit that the majestic beauty of speech should captivate me and not let me go." Perfection is to include all utterances into one, to feel the sweetness of every letter, and to never forget this sweetness. Our entire purpose in this world is to reach and reveal the beauty in holy speech, to discover that it is entirely good and entirely one.

A Field of Seers or a Field of Weepers

Reb Noson refers to himself in his prayers with expressions of lowliness, saying: "How can I even utter a sound from my mouth to speak the words of the Living God? For I have no hope, only to beg the Master of the Field, that tzaddik who revealed these things, to have mercy on me."

There is a spiritual field where all the souls stand. Every letter we utter from our mouths is a soul. When a person does not pray properly, the soul goes into exile; it is tormented and finds no resting place for the sole of its foot. For this we cry out: "For all the naked souls who do not merit to pray, disembodied souls (neshamos artila'os), because every letter rectifies tens of thousands of souls at all times."

The Master of the Field, the tzaddik, tells us: "When you pray letter by letter, I can bring about salvations." Then the field is called a "Sdeh Tzofim" (Field of Seers), and the eyes of the tzaddik shine. But when one does not pray letter by letter, it turns into a "Sdeh Bochim" (Field of Weepers). The tzaddik simply weeps over them. He arrives with crates of diamonds, with an abundance of salvations and miracles, and he has no one to distribute them to, so he ascends back and weeps. We ask the Master of the Universe that our field should be a "Sdeh Tzofim," that we may merit to pray word by word, letter by letter, and receive all the abundance that the tzaddik wants to bestow upon us.

Part 3 of 4 — Class No. 23

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