“And it shall come to pass that if you surely hear.” If you hear in this world, you will hear in the next world from the Creator. “And it shall come to pass that if you surely hear the voice of the Lord your God, be careful to do all His commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.” Rabbi Levi said, “What is as high as this upper one? If you are rewarded then you are above four fingers. If not, below four fingers.”

We should understand what being above four fingers implies. It is written, “One gold pan of ten, full of incense.” In other words, a person should have a pan, meaning a Kli [vessel] in which to receive the upper abundance, called Zahav [gold], from the words Ze-Hav [give this]. Likewise, out of the light of Torah, the pan, meaning the five fingers, must be dedicated to this.

The Zohar says that a cup of blessing should be held with five fingers. These are its words in the “Introduction of The Book of Zohar”: “‘As a rose among the thorns.’ As a rose of five hard leaves surround the rose, these five leaves are called ‘salvations,’ and this is the meaning of ‘I shall raise a cup of salvations,’ which is a cup of blessing. This is the meaning of the five times that ‘light’ is mentioned in the work of creation.”

This light was created and concealed. This is the meaning of what our sages said (Hagigah 12), the light that the Creator created on the first day, Adam was observing in it from the end of the world to its end. The Creator looked into the generation of the flood and the generation of Babylon and saw that their practices were corrupt. He stood and concealed it from them.

The five fingers are KHB ZON. If a person observes “to keep and to do,” the Creator makes the Keter above all of them, meaning that the Creator gives the power for the control of Keter or Hesed, which is called “a Kli [vessel] of bestowal.” If the control is given to the quality of below, namely to Malchut, which is reception without Hassadim, there is separation and it is not considered “one pan.”