Discovering the Romance What is a marriage? Is it a contract of shared commitments and responsibilities or is it an expression of love and romance? The final portion of the book of Leviticus reads like a legal contract laying out the covenant between G-d and the Jewish people. If we follow the commandments of the Torah, then God will provide for us and bless us: If you follow My statutes and observe My commandments and perform them, I will give your rains in their time, the Land will yield its produce, and the tree of the field will give forth its fruit. (Leviticus 26:3-4) However, if we choose to violate the contract and abandon the Torah, we will be struck by terrible calamities, outlined in a painfully detailed description. Yet the Kabbalists look at this Parsha, and they see the poetry, the love, and the romance hidden between the lines of the formal contract. Toward the end of the rebuke, the verse states despite the terrible rebuke, G-d will not annihilate his people: But despite all this, while they are in the land of their enemies, I will not despise them nor will I abhor them to annihilate them, thereby breaking My covenant that is with them, for I am the Lord their God. (Leviticus 26:44) The Zohar focuses on the word "annihilate", "Lichalotam", and points out that the way the word is written in Torah is strikingly similar to the word bride, "Kallah". Read this way, the verse is saying that because the Jewish people are G-d's bride, not only will they survive, which is a given, but "I will not despise them nor will I abhor them"; the bride is always beautiful and beloved to G-d despite all external circumstances. The Zohar offers a beautiful parable: This is like a man who loves a woman who lives in a market of tanners In the Talmud, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai teaches that the Divine presence is with the Jewish people in all their exiles: It is taught in a baraita: Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai says: Come and see how beloved the Jewish people are before the Holy One, Blessed be He. As every place they were exiled, the Divine Presence went with them. (Talmud Megillah 29a) In this passage in the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon's son, Rabbi Elazar, says something far more profound. Not only is G-d with His people, but because of His profound love, He experiences only the pleasurable fragrances of the spice market. Indeed, the entire purpose of the exile is for the Jewish people to transform the world from a space of a figurative "tanners market" to a market of fragrant spices. Adapted from the teachings of the Rebbe, Toras Menachem Tiferes Levi Yitzchok, Bechukosai