アマレクとケリールート

The Torah’s account of Amalek contains a strange word. Asher korcha baderech — who happened upon you on the way. The root can be read as chance, and Chassidus reads it also as kor, cold.

The nations were afraid of Israel after the sea. Amalek attacked anyway, and the midrashic image is of someone jumping into a scalding bath: he is burned, and the bath is no longer untouchable. The achievement is not victory. It is the reduction of temperature.

The structure of coldness

Kerirus is not disbelief. A person can hold a proposition to be entirely true and be completely unaffected by it, and this is the ordinary condition rather than a rare pathology. Everyone knows things about mortality, about the people they love, about what matters, that would reorganise their week if the knowledge were live.

Applied to religious life, this is the more serious problem by a wide margin. Argument addresses denial. Nothing in the register of argument addresses so what, because so what has already conceded the argument.

Why yechidah is the answer

Because the gap that kerirus exploits is the gap between a faculty and a person. Information sits in the intellect. Emotion sits in the heart. Either can be present while the person remains uninvolved, and coldness is precisely the condition of a self that has not been reached by its own contents.

Yechidah is the term for the person prior to that division. It cannot be cold about something in the way a faculty can, because it has no content to be cold about — it is the point from which the faculties are already expressions.

This is why the Messianic answer to Amalek in Chassidus is not more information and not more feeling, but daas: knowledge that has become attachment, which is the subject of the next chapter.