The Kabbalah Unveiled · 28 of 74

Greater Holy Assembly: Chapter XX.

CHAPTER XX. CONCERNING THE NINTH PART OF THE BEARD OF MACROPROSOPUS. 438. THE ninth conformation. The hairs are mingled with those hairs that hang down, neither is one pre-eminent above another. “Arise, Rabbi Abba!”

439.Rabbi Abba arose and said: “These are the hairs which are mingled with these which hang down, and they are called ‘the deep places of the sea,’ because they depart from above in the fluid places of the brain.

Insight

The deep places of the sea — because they depart from above in the fluid places of the brain. The ninth beard-conformation is read through the imagery of submarine depth. Mikhail Tehom, the deep waters, is the biblical primordial substance over which the Spirit of God hovers in Genesis 1:2; in the Jonah-narrative the prophet is swallowed into the depths and emerges three days later; in the Psalmist’s mimaamakim, ‘out of the depths I call,’ the depth is the place from which prayer rises. The Idra is identifying a specific beard-part as the channel through which all the prayers from the depths reach the divine ear — the place where the exactors of debts (the prosecutors who carry charges against humanity in the heavenly court) are subjugated and silenced. The function maps onto what Yom Kippur liturgy stages annually: on the day when the depths are unsealed, the prosecuting accusers are dismissed and the Holy Ancient One bears the iniquity directly.

440.“And from that place are cast out all the lords who are the exactors of the debts (of the trespasses) of mankind, and they are subjugated.”

441.Rabbi Schimeon said unto him: “Blessed be thou of the Ancient of Days!”