And Rabbi Elazar said: The Holy One, Blessed be He, exiled Israel among the nations of the world only so that converts would join them, etc. A great man asked me [how this can be] given that we were desecrated from sin (alluding to Psalms 51:7), and the eye can see that it is the opposite — many Jews in every place trade in their glory and become apostates, either out of danger, or out of a matter of sin or something similar, whereas the righteous converts [are so few] that a child can record them. So I answered him that it is because of the sparks of holiness and the holy souls that have been mixed up into the Other Side. And that is the reason for the exile of Israel in many lands and the ends of the world. And the essence of this is that, through the [suffering], the [performance of] the commandments, and the study [of Torah] in every place, holy sparks are separated and begin to rise to the divine presence every day. And they will rest there until the redemption will come; and then these sparks will, by way of the divine presence, publicly go back to holiness in the way of the Man. So our rabbis, may their memory be blessed, spoke well when they said that Israel was exiled among the nations of the world so that converts would join them, as they constantly separate the sparks of holiness and bring them up to the divine presence until the time of the end, and as they said. And all the exiles are to separate the holy sparks; and they are separated by the power of [the study of] Torah], the [performance of] the commandments, and the exile, by way of the divine presence. And all of this is [done] in actuality and potential, but just not publicly. So we do not know it until the word of God arrives [allusion to Psalms 105:19]. And the Kabbalists have said there need not be the exile of the Jewish people to a city to separate [the sparks]. Rather, even one person who goes to a different city and it appears in his eyes to be for himself or his place or this time — the essence of it is that this righteous person has several sparks that belong to his soul, and, with his going this way, he separates them. And in this manner, I humbly explained the verse, The path of the righteous is like radiant [nogah] light, ever brightening until noon (Proverbs 4:18). It is well-known that half of nogah [husks containing radiance] is in holiness and half of it is in the mundane. And through the Torah and the commandments, we separate it from the mundane part and bring it into holiness. And that is [the meaning of] The path of the righteous — if there are some righteous people who travel for their needs, know that the matter is not coincidental. Rather, it is the separation of nogah [that is happening], to separate the sparks of holiness that belong to their souls, like the radiant light [of the sun] that becomes clearer. So it becomes holy from the part of the mundane. So too, is the path of the righteous, in order to separate. And this separation is, ever brightening until noon and there shall then be a complete unification.