I was thinking today about what our sages say about Queen Esther. Some say that she was the most beautiful woman ever. Other’s say that she was extremely ugly. These seem like quite opposite views. However, things seem to converge at the extremes. It’s a funny thing. The source of this is that all is light and the deepest darkness is really the highest light, just in a state of suppression. So too, the depths of ugliness contains a very striking beauty. So really both explanations are the same - two sides of the same coin.
It was quite appropriate for Esther to be a model of this truth because she personifies the divine feminine. The ultimate expression of the divine feminine is the afterglow left in the wake of the primordial contraction. It was extremely dark in relation to the Infinite Light with withdrew from her area - casting her as “ugly of ugly”. Yet, she contained the highest light - the “beautiful of beautiful”. This was a light so powerful that it survived the primordial contraction. All the pressures of withdrawal couldn’t affect her to vacate from her location. She stayed put!
I was also contemplating this underlying concept in another situation earlier today. However, I temporarily seem to have forgotten what it was.
Yes ... the notion that we need a right balance between light and dark to do our job in this world. It actually takes off of this morning’s meditation. I left off with the question if darkness is really the highest light then why should we want revealed light?
The answer is that we need the revealed lights as tools for unraveling the darkness and opening up it’s lights. It’s not because the revealed lights are stronger. It’s only because light attracts light. The attraction lures the hidden light out of concealment. This is what happens with the body during the resurrection and beyond. The Lubavitcher Rebbe teaches that just like until now the body lives off the soul, during the resurrection the opposite will happen, the soul will live off of the body. This is consistent with Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s futuristic scenario where the body slowly dissipates into the soul. This is what happens to food. It slowly dissipates into the entity which is eating it. So this union between body and soul can be seen as a kind of eating - the soul is eating the body.
The question is why does the soul find the lowly body so sustaining? The answer might be because the body is from darker substance, meaning from greater suppressed light. Compared to the soul, it resembles a “relative afterglow”. In fact, there definitely is an afterglow of the soul within the body. It was once there and left an imprinted trace. So the soul finds the body spiritually nutritious and as she manages to dissolve more and more of the body into herself, she becomes spiritually brighter and brighter. Again, the power to dissolve the body does not happen because she’s ultimately more powerful. It mainly happens because “light attracts light”. So the revealed lights of the soul attract the hidden lights of the body inviting them to open up in her, as if they met a long lost confidante.
However, this seems to happen slowly over time. It’s an evolution. The fact that it does not happen in an instant, further supports the notion that the afterglow or the body is very spiritually powerful and the suppression runs very deep. Therefore, the lights of the body dissolve and illuminate the soul slowly, over a process of thousands of years. It’s a slow digestion. Its possible that the strength gained from previous openings of the lights are needed to elicit new openings of lights.
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