Look around the world—how many people do you see? You don’t need to answer; it’s rhetorical.
All those people are fragments of seventy people—those “seventy souls” who went down into Mitzrayim, from whom all the branches of Israel unfold [Genesis 46:27; Exodus 1:5; Deuteronomy 10:22]. And the Torah hints that this “seventy” is not merely a count but a structure, so much so that it sometimes gathers them into a single collective “nefesh,” as if to say that the many are already held inside a living oneness even while being numbered [Genesis 46:26; Rashi on Genesis 46:26].: seventy is the number of branching faces in the human map of history—seventy nations, seventy roots of language, seventy offerings—multiplicity as a known spiritual grammar within creation, and even seventy “faces” through which Torah can be unfolded without losing its oneness [Genesis 10; Deuteronomy 32:8; Sukkah 55b; Bamidbar Rabbah 13:15]. And those seventy are really two people—Yaakov and his House, the root and the outflow—because all the tribes are contained within the single inner pattern of father and children, mind and extension, source and revealed form, as the Torah itself frames it: “with Yaakov, each man and his household” [Exodus 1:1]. And those two are one people, because “Israel” is not merely a census but a single living body with one shared interior, where what happens in one limb echoes in the whole—“all Israel are guarantors for one another” [Shevuot 39a]. And the inner voice of Chassidut makes that bodily metaphor precise: our souls are not separate flames but one soul appearing in many bodies, so love is not a moral hobby but the recognition of shared essence [Tanya, Likkutei Amarim, ch. 32]. And that one People—HaShem is: not as identity, but as indwelling; not that the Infinite is reduced into the nation, chas v’shalom, but that His Presence rests within them as the heart-life within a body—“I will walk among you… and you shall be My people” [Leviticus 26:12], and “They shall make Me a Sanctuary and I will dwell within them” [Exodus 25:8]. In the Zohar’s language, “Israel, Torah, and the Holy One, blessed be He, are one”—a unity of cleaving, of inner interpenetration, not a collapse of Creator and creation, and it is precisely this kind of unity that demands more refinement, not less, because it is easy to confuse closeness with sameness [Zohar III:73a].
Not that “they” are “He,” but rather: He is “these.” Not in the crude sense that creation is identical with the Creator, chas v’shalom, but in the deeper sense that the Divine is not “elsewhere”—He is the Life animating what is here, the One Who is present in and through the many without being limited to them: “You give life to them all” [Nehemiah 9:6], and “there is no place empty of Him” [Tikkunei Zohar 57]. Transcendent beyond all worlds, and yet immanent within them—so close that closeness itself becomes a test of how finely we can distinguish Presence from possession, unity from confusion.
It is as though a person is struggling with himself.
“Mi bara eleh” — “Who created these?” [Isaiah 40:26; Zohar I:2a]
[Mi + Eleh = Elokim] [Zohar I:2a; Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 1]—and the hint is exact even in number, because “Mi” is fifty and “Eleh” is thirty-six, together eighty-six, the value of Elokim, the Name that speaks through constriction and measured emergence, nature and its hidden conductor, the Name by which the world’s din and order are articulated before rachamim is revealed within it [Bereishit Rabbah 12:15].
It is very possible that much of what we experience as opposition in the outside world is, in truth, a reflection of ourselves. That is why the way we judge another is the way we are judged—measure for measure, not as punishment but as revelation: the world mirrors back the lens I keep polishing or clouding [Sotah 8b]. And in that mirror, the “other” becomes a messenger: not always pleasant, not always safe, not always to be trusted—yet still a surface in which my own inner stance toward reality is revealed and corrected. Judgment then becomes a faculty to refine, not a weapon to throw, and even when a boundary must be drawn, it can be drawn without hatred, because refinement is not denial; it is clarity.
And so it becomes easier to awaken empathy within ourselves for those who are ill or struggling—especially when these (“eleh”) are understood as Mi—as me. Because the secret hidden inside that phrase is not only a Name-formula, but a consciousness-formula: when I stop treating “these people” as objects outside my soul and begin to sense them as my own scattered limbs, compassion stops being a virtue I perform and becomes a recognition I can’t avoid. In that recognition, “love your fellow as yourself” is no longer poetry; it is anatomy [Leviticus 19:18], and the “as yourself” becomes newly literal: not because the other is you in biography, but because the other is you in root, in the shared inwardness that precedes the separating garments of body, place, and temperament.
Contemplate all of this on Shabbat, when the fight to control reality quiets down and the deeper unity underneath the week becomes audible again, like a single breath moving through many bodies—Shabbat as a taste of the world-to-come, when separation thins and the inner oneness becomes easier to hear [Berakhot 57b], and the soul receives an added spaciousness, a neshamah yeterah, to perceive what weekday pressure drowns out [Beitzah 16a]. On Shabbat, “Mi” is not a question asked from distance, and “Eleh” is not a pile of fragments; the question and the many begin to rejoin, until the One Who gives life to all can be felt—present within “these,” and beyond them, at once.