T275 PNC - Every Mitzvah Makes a Candle — For Searching the King's Treasures

Every single mitzvah you perform creates one candle from it (Zohar Terumah 166). When a person passes away, if it is a great soul very precious to Hashem, the soul is granted permission to search the treasuries of the King — to take whatever it wants from Hashem's treasures. This is the ultimate of all the pleasures of olam ha-ba. And to search you need candles — as the Talmud says (Pesachim 10a): bedikah is done with candles, learning from "the candle of Hashem is the soul of man, searching all the chambers of the belly" (Proverbs 20:27). The candles are made from the mitzvot, in the secret of "a mitzvah is a candle" (Proverbs 6:23). With those candles, the soul searches the treasuries after departure. This is the secret of "ba-meitim chofshi" ("free among the dead," Psalms 88:6) — once a person dies, he is freed from the mitzvot (Shabbat 151a). "Chofshi" (free) is the same root as "chofeis" (search): the freedom is the searching that is enabled by the very mitzvot one performed. But there is a tzaddik who kills himself in his lifetime — through hitbatlut, through self-nullification — and he searches in his Father's treasuries even while still alive, accessing divine wisdom in this world.