Throughout the ages, many attempts have been made to “comprehend the incomprehensible,” particularly in the area of the Absolute and the concept of God. Not that any of these attempts have ever been able to prove the existence of the incomprehensible beyond a reasonable doubt, but they are all commendable for at least trying, and for occasionally being successful in making the incomprehensible a little more “palatable” to the discriminating human mind.
Having touched upon the Jewish mystical quest to comprehend God in a non-specific entry above, it would have been unimaginable for me to forego a direct entry in this section, expressly devoted to it, even though this subject was raised and discussed before in the Tikkun Olam, that is, in the Judaica section. So here it is.
There is no other nationalist like a Russian nationalist, in so far as the openness of the mind is concerned. It has been noted that a Russian, unlike any other national, feels at home wherever he happens to be, without stopping to be a Russian-first. In this sense, there is no wonder that I find many of my kindred spirits in the most unlikely places, in this case, among the classic Jewish mystic scholars of the Kaballah. But, quite objectively, these scholars all deserve the highest praise anyway, for their fearless and intellectually uncompromising delving into the mysteries of Creation, and into the greatest of all mysteries, which is God.
In this entry I am particularly interested in three special concepts of the Kaballah, known as Sefirot, Tzimtzum, and Gvul.
The profound theosophical concept of the ten Sefirot, Numbers, originally formulated in the Sefer Yetzira, takes off in style, with a full-blown controversy as to the number of Divine emanations: ten, as such is the number of the Sefirot, or perhaps, nine, assuming that the initial Sefira, the Crown (identical, or maybe not, with Ein Sof, the unknowable, being the causa prima of the emanations), should not itself be counted as an emanation, being an effect (!), thus reducing their number to nine.
Any true Christian mystic ought to marvel at this opening conundrum, as it so closely parallels, at least to me, the famous Christian theosophical controversy about filioque! (As a reminder to the reader, the gist of that matter was whether the Holy Ghost proceeded {emanated!!!} from God the Father only, or from both the Father and the Son {filioque} Jesus Christ! For those still in the dark, this is the historical controversy that split the Christian Orthodoxy of the Greek--- and thus the Russian Church, which never accepted filioque,--- from the Church of the West, which unilaterally postulated it...
From my personal standpoint, I am going to imply, talking about the Sefirot at all times, that there are ten Sefirot, but only nine emanations.
The delightfully sophisticated story of how the incomprehensible nature of God progressively reveals itself in the Sefirot through the nine emanations, each making itself more comprehensible than the previous one, yet, in the process, the impenetrably mysterious nature of God remaining unrevealed, is a monument “aere perennius” (to quote Horace) in the history of human thought. Its details, further developed from their first appearance in Sefer Yetzira by the masters of the Kaballah, above all, through the extensive cosmological commentary of Isaac the Blind.
The ten Sefirot start with the least comprehensible Keter Elyon, the Supreme Crown. Being the first of the ten Sefirot, it is necessarily vague, and even its specific relationship (namely, its identity vs. non-identity) to the unknowable Ein Sof, is effectively unknowable.
The other nine Sefirot are more or less intermediaries between the unknowable and the created world, the infinite and the finite. They are Chochma, Wisdom, Bina, Intelligence, Hesed, Loving Goodness, Gevura, Might, Tiferet, Beauty, Netzakh, Eternity, Khod, Majesty, Yesod, Foundation, and Malkhut, Kingship.
Each name is a description of one of the Divine attributes in the act of Creation, and our mystics believed that the rhythm of the successive emanations accurately represented the rhythm of the Creation itself. Also noteworthy was the effort to correlate these Sefirot (and, intriguingly, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet as well) to various parts of the human body, with the implication that man, too, is a microcosm of God’s Creation of the Universe.
The concept of the ten Sefirot and the nine emanations was the starting point for the concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, which lead us on an incredibly exciting journey, where Kabalistic Judaism encounters the main challenge of Christianity and responds to it in an act of selfless harmonious compatibility without seeming to care about such down-to-earth things as religious concordance. Needless to say, I am not trying to score a theological point here, on behalf of Christianity. My philosophical credo is speculation for its own, vastly important sake.
In my teasingly perplexed entry Christian Theology As A Philosophical Challenge (posted on October 13, 2011), in the Religion section, I marveled at the intricate complexity of Christian theology, as reflected in such intellectual puzzles as the multiplicity of Oneness, in the Trinity, or the harmony of incompatibilities, in the two Hypostases of Christ, to name just these two.
The highest irony, however, lies in the fact that the best theosophical argument ever made on behalf of the Christian theological dogma belongs to… the Jewish mystics of the Kaballah!
Earlier on in this section, while discussing the significance of Sefer Ha-Bahir, I made this comment:
“Bahir contains the earliest effort to characterize the ten Sefirot of Sefer Yetzira as manifestations of God’s powers. These awesome powers are not attributes, but hypostases of God. (Another uncanny conceptual link to the Christian ideas of the Trinity and of the two hypostases of Christ.) These hypostases are inseparable from the One God, but each possesses a personality of its own. (Once again, this argument parallels the idea of the multiplicity of oneness, contained in the Christian concept of Trinity!)”
The mystical concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, representing the contemplations of the Kaballah thinkers, are particularly remarkable in their philosophical capacity to explain the phenomenon of Jesus Christ. Just as Nietzsche, with his magnificent introduction of the Creative Child concept, reveals an unexpected affinity with Christianity, though each one of them is climbing up its own path to the summit, so does the concept of God contracting His Infinity of Self into certain finite manifestations, unexpectedly, perhaps, even for the Jews themselves, renders that bizarre and incomprehensible Christian idea of the Infinite God making His appearance in the human body of Jesus more palatable than even the brightest Christian theologians could ever have expected to make their own case for.
(This theme also resonates with Nietzsche’s mystical vision of philosophical unity, like this Kantian Ding-an-Sich, which I comment on, in my entry on Jenseits 20.)
Now, a little more on the subject of tzimtzum as represented in the so-called Lurianic Kaballah, which is a collection of Isaac Luria’s (of the Tikkun Olam fame) teachings, compiled after his premature death by the already mentioned Hayim Vital. Three main components are essential to Luria’s theosophy, which depicts the whole history of the world: its past, present, and future, as creation, degeneration, and redemption.
Retracing these stages in reverse order, redemption is represented by the tikkun olam, degeneration, by the shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels, and now the original act of creation is represented by God’s withdrawal into Himself, or his contraction, tzimtzum, thus making room for the material world, which is just about to be created. Incidentally, creation itself is accomplished by a thrust of God’s infinite light into the vacated space, where the light becomes trapped in finite receptacles, that break under such stress, and so on...
As for the concept of Gvul (the name is well familiar to every Israeli as a secular term in Hebrew, meaning “border, limit” and widely used in such dissimilar phrases as Mishmar Gvul [border police], or Yesh Gvul [the movement of conscientious objectors abstaining from the mandatory military service], but quite unfamiliar to most in its theosophical sense), I used to discuss it extensively with Rabbi Rice, but it is extremely hard to retrieve from the Internet, where I am often fishing to refresh my memory of various factual bits and pieces, as if this latter concept is somehow protected from outside intrusion. Eventually, it surfaced on a website of the Israeli free masons (!), and here is how a certain Errol D. Feldman, 33°, talks about it, bringing back to mind my stimulating conversations with that Hasidic pillar of learning in Marin County, California, Rabbi Yisroel Rice who has, without ever realizing it, taken up a permanent niche in the corridors of my consciousness.
“Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation) and Asiyah (Action) are the four worlds that emerge out of Hashem’s infinite light, and culminate in our finite, physical, and material universe. Atzilut is the first, and highest, of the four worlds. The Ten Sefirot (Countings) of the World of Atzilut, and of the other worlds, are the fundament of the Kaballah.
All the worlds are created and conducted by means of the Sefirot. The Ten Sefirot demonstrate both G-d’s infinite power (Koah HaBliGvul) and His finite power (Koah HaGvul). For, as is pointed out by the author of Avodat HaKodesh (Tikkunei Zohar reproduced in Siddur Tehillat HaShem), just as Hashem has infinite power, so too does He have finite power. For if you were to say that He possesses infinite power, but lacks finite power then you minimize His completeness, --- and He is the most complete entity of all.
It is within the Sefirot that infinity and the finite first coalesce, as it were, in order for worlds to be created and directed. For the Sefirot are composed of both orot (lights) and kelim (vessels).”
Observe how effortlessly the question of the two hypostases, that is, of the infinite and the finite, coming to form a composite entity, is resolved here, which now brings me to the key point of this entry.
The concepts of tzimtzum and Gvul are of great interest to me, as they are raising the intriguing question of how it may be technically achievable for the spirit to so-to-speak break the matter barrier. After Einstein’s profound breakthrough in the relativity theory, where his e=mc² formula establishes a relationship between energy and matter, without the need for anyone to engage in any kind of theosophical contemplation, such mental visualization and conceptualization of an actual contraction of the spirit as the causa prima and the creative impulse for the emergence of matter, ex nihilo (in the sense that John Scotus Erigena provides us, when he says that nothing, that is, something which is not, is not something entirely non-existent, but it is a substance which transcends everything that is!), that is, as a result of an activity of the universal spirit, the unknowable God, is thus by no means inconceivable, but is available to scrutiny well within the capacity of human comprehension.
By the same token, it is now comparably conceivable how the Spirit of God, in its exercise of its ability to move (not in the spatial sense of moving from place to place, which then turns it into matter, but in a very difficult, but not impossible to grasp, sense of contraction and expansion of itself, from the infinite to finite, and back) may not only cause matter to appear (that is, to be created), but may fill a material receptacle, or “vessel,” without any diminution of its own infinity (¥-X=¥), such as was, perhaps, the physical case with Jesus Christ, either at birth, or, which is more likely, during His Epiphany at the river Jordan, when He was filled with the Holy Spirit.
The argument expounded in this entry serves, as a matter of fact, to strengthen the contra-filioque case of the Christian Orthodox Church, as the capacity for Gvul, to continue our recourse to the Jewish mysticism of the Kaballah, is reserved for Ein Sof, God the Father, alone, rather than for any of His manifestations. On the other hand, it does not diminish the co-equality of the Trinity, once the two manifestations of God the Father (God the Son and The Holy Ghost) are seen as God’s Infinity filling them both, yet once again explained through the mathematical formulae of infinity, where even one tiny iota of infinity is still equal to the whole (¥/X=¥).
Having touched upon the Jewish mystical quest to comprehend God in a non-specific entry above, it would have been unimaginable for me to forego a direct entry in this section, expressly devoted to it, even though this subject was raised and discussed before in the Tikkun Olam, that is, in the Judaica section. So here it is.
There is no other nationalist like a Russian nationalist, in so far as the openness of the mind is concerned. It has been noted that a Russian, unlike any other national, feels at home wherever he happens to be, without stopping to be a Russian-first. In this sense, there is no wonder that I find many of my kindred spirits in the most unlikely places, in this case, among the classic Jewish mystic scholars of the Kaballah. But, quite objectively, these scholars all deserve the highest praise anyway, for their fearless and intellectually uncompromising delving into the mysteries of Creation, and into the greatest of all mysteries, which is God.
In this entry I am particularly interested in three special concepts of the Kaballah, known as Sefirot, Tzimtzum, and Gvul.
The profound theosophical concept of the ten Sefirot, Numbers, originally formulated in the Sefer Yetzira, takes off in style, with a full-blown controversy as to the number of Divine emanations: ten, as such is the number of the Sefirot, or perhaps, nine, assuming that the initial Sefira, the Crown (identical, or maybe not, with Ein Sof, the unknowable, being the causa prima of the emanations), should not itself be counted as an emanation, being an effect (!), thus reducing their number to nine.
Any true Christian mystic ought to marvel at this opening conundrum, as it so closely parallels, at least to me, the famous Christian theosophical controversy about filioque! (As a reminder to the reader, the gist of that matter was whether the Holy Ghost proceeded {emanated!!!} from God the Father only, or from both the Father and the Son {filioque} Jesus Christ! For those still in the dark, this is the historical controversy that split the Christian Orthodoxy of the Greek--- and thus the Russian Church, which never accepted filioque,--- from the Church of the West, which unilaterally postulated it...
From my personal standpoint, I am going to imply, talking about the Sefirot at all times, that there are ten Sefirot, but only nine emanations.
The delightfully sophisticated story of how the incomprehensible nature of God progressively reveals itself in the Sefirot through the nine emanations, each making itself more comprehensible than the previous one, yet, in the process, the impenetrably mysterious nature of God remaining unrevealed, is a monument “aere perennius” (to quote Horace) in the history of human thought. Its details, further developed from their first appearance in Sefer Yetzira by the masters of the Kaballah, above all, through the extensive cosmological commentary of Isaac the Blind.
The ten Sefirot start with the least comprehensible Keter Elyon, the Supreme Crown. Being the first of the ten Sefirot, it is necessarily vague, and even its specific relationship (namely, its identity vs. non-identity) to the unknowable Ein Sof, is effectively unknowable.
The other nine Sefirot are more or less intermediaries between the unknowable and the created world, the infinite and the finite. They are Chochma, Wisdom, Bina, Intelligence, Hesed, Loving Goodness, Gevura, Might, Tiferet, Beauty, Netzakh, Eternity, Khod, Majesty, Yesod, Foundation, and Malkhut, Kingship.
Each name is a description of one of the Divine attributes in the act of Creation, and our mystics believed that the rhythm of the successive emanations accurately represented the rhythm of the Creation itself. Also noteworthy was the effort to correlate these Sefirot (and, intriguingly, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet as well) to various parts of the human body, with the implication that man, too, is a microcosm of God’s Creation of the Universe.
The concept of the ten Sefirot and the nine emanations was the starting point for the concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, which lead us on an incredibly exciting journey, where Kabalistic Judaism encounters the main challenge of Christianity and responds to it in an act of selfless harmonious compatibility without seeming to care about such down-to-earth things as religious concordance. Needless to say, I am not trying to score a theological point here, on behalf of Christianity. My philosophical credo is speculation for its own, vastly important sake.
In my teasingly perplexed entry Christian Theology As A Philosophical Challenge (posted on October 13, 2011), in the Religion section, I marveled at the intricate complexity of Christian theology, as reflected in such intellectual puzzles as the multiplicity of Oneness, in the Trinity, or the harmony of incompatibilities, in the two Hypostases of Christ, to name just these two.
The highest irony, however, lies in the fact that the best theosophical argument ever made on behalf of the Christian theological dogma belongs to… the Jewish mystics of the Kaballah!
Earlier on in this section, while discussing the significance of Sefer Ha-Bahir, I made this comment:
“Bahir contains the earliest effort to characterize the ten Sefirot of Sefer Yetzira as manifestations of God’s powers. These awesome powers are not attributes, but hypostases of God. (Another uncanny conceptual link to the Christian ideas of the Trinity and of the two hypostases of Christ.) These hypostases are inseparable from the One God, but each possesses a personality of its own. (Once again, this argument parallels the idea of the multiplicity of oneness, contained in the Christian concept of Trinity!)”
The mystical concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, representing the contemplations of the Kaballah thinkers, are particularly remarkable in their philosophical capacity to explain the phenomenon of Jesus Christ. Just as Nietzsche, with his magnificent introduction of the Creative Child concept, reveals an unexpected affinity with Christianity, though each one of them is climbing up its own path to the summit, so does the concept of God contracting His Infinity of Self into certain finite manifestations, unexpectedly, perhaps, even for the Jews themselves, renders that bizarre and incomprehensible Christian idea of the Infinite God making His appearance in the human body of Jesus more palatable than even the brightest Christian theologians could ever have expected to make their own case for.
(This theme also resonates with Nietzsche’s mystical vision of philosophical unity, like this Kantian Ding-an-Sich, which I comment on, in my entry on Jenseits 20.)
Now, a little more on the subject of tzimtzum as represented in the so-called Lurianic Kaballah, which is a collection of Isaac Luria’s (of the Tikkun Olam fame) teachings, compiled after his premature death by the already mentioned Hayim Vital. Three main components are essential to Luria’s theosophy, which depicts the whole history of the world: its past, present, and future, as creation, degeneration, and redemption.
Retracing these stages in reverse order, redemption is represented by the tikkun olam, degeneration, by the shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels, and now the original act of creation is represented by God’s withdrawal into Himself, or his contraction, tzimtzum, thus making room for the material world, which is just about to be created. Incidentally, creation itself is accomplished by a thrust of God’s infinite light into the vacated space, where the light becomes trapped in finite receptacles, that break under such stress, and so on...
As for the concept of Gvul (the name is well familiar to every Israeli as a secular term in Hebrew, meaning “border, limit” and widely used in such dissimilar phrases as Mishmar Gvul [border police], or Yesh Gvul [the movement of conscientious objectors abstaining from the mandatory military service], but quite unfamiliar to most in its theosophical sense), I used to discuss it extensively with Rabbi Rice, but it is extremely hard to retrieve from the Internet, where I am often fishing to refresh my memory of various factual bits and pieces, as if this latter concept is somehow protected from outside intrusion. Eventually, it surfaced on a website of the Israeli free masons (!), and here is how a certain Errol D. Feldman, 33°, talks about it, bringing back to mind my stimulating conversations with that Hasidic pillar of learning in Marin County, California, Rabbi Yisroel Rice who has, without ever realizing it, taken up a permanent niche in the corridors of my consciousness.
“Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation) and Asiyah (Action) are the four worlds that emerge out of Hashem’s infinite light, and culminate in our finite, physical, and material universe. Atzilut is the first, and highest, of the four worlds. The Ten Sefirot (Countings) of the World of Atzilut, and of the other worlds, are the fundament of the Kaballah.
All the worlds are created and conducted by means of the Sefirot. The Ten Sefirot demonstrate both G-d’s infinite power (Koah HaBliGvul) and His finite power (Koah HaGvul). For, as is pointed out by the author of Avodat HaKodesh (Tikkunei Zohar reproduced in Siddur Tehillat HaShem), just as Hashem has infinite power, so too does He have finite power. For if you were to say that He possesses infinite power, but lacks finite power then you minimize His completeness, --- and He is the most complete entity of all.
It is within the Sefirot that infinity and the finite first coalesce, as it were, in order for worlds to be created and directed. For the Sefirot are composed of both orot (lights) and kelim (vessels).”
Observe how effortlessly the question of the two hypostases, that is, of the infinite and the finite, coming to form a composite entity, is resolved here, which now brings me to the key point of this entry.
The concepts of tzimtzum and Gvul are of great interest to me, as they are raising the intriguing question of how it may be technically achievable for the spirit to so-to-speak break the matter barrier. After Einstein’s profound breakthrough in the relativity theory, where his e=mc² formula establishes a relationship between energy and matter, without the need for anyone to engage in any kind of theosophical contemplation, such mental visualization and conceptualization of an actual contraction of the spirit as the causa prima and the creative impulse for the emergence of matter, ex nihilo (in the sense that John Scotus Erigena provides us, when he says that nothing, that is, something which is not, is not something entirely non-existent, but it is a substance which transcends everything that is!), that is, as a result of an activity of the universal spirit, the unknowable God, is thus by no means inconceivable, but is available to scrutiny well within the capacity of human comprehension.
By the same token, it is now comparably conceivable how the Spirit of God, in its exercise of its ability to move (not in the spatial sense of moving from place to place, which then turns it into matter, but in a very difficult, but not impossible to grasp, sense of contraction and expansion of itself, from the infinite to finite, and back) may not only cause matter to appear (that is, to be created), but may fill a material receptacle, or “vessel,” without any diminution of its own infinity (¥-X=¥), such as was, perhaps, the physical case with Jesus Christ, either at birth, or, which is more likely, during His Epiphany at the river Jordan, when He was filled with the Holy Spirit.
The argument expounded in this entry serves, as a matter of fact, to strengthen the contra-filioque case of the Christian Orthodox Church, as the capacity for Gvul, to continue our recourse to the Jewish mysticism of the Kaballah, is reserved for Ein Sof, God the Father, alone, rather than for any of His manifestations. On the other hand, it does not diminish the co-equality of the Trinity, once the two manifestations of God the Father (God the Son and The Holy Ghost) are seen as God’s Infinity filling them both, yet once again explained through the mathematical formulae of infinity, where even one tiny iota of infinity is still equal to the whole (¥/X=¥).
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