The profound theosophical concept of the ten “Sefirot,” Numbers, originally formulated in the Sefer Yetzira, and further developed by Isaac Luria, takes off in style with a full-blown controversy as to the number of the 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, God the Unknowable), being the causa prima of the emanations, ought not to be counted itself as an emanation, because all successive emanations are effects (!), thus reducing their number to nine.
(It would have been so much easier to avoid this discrepancy between Sefirot and Emanations by simply suggesting that all ten Sefirot are emanations originating with Ein Sof as their Causa Prima, but the Kabbalah does not make things easy, stubbornly but consistently refusing to fall into the trap of admitting our knowledge of the unknowable, by pronouncing positive judgment on the existence of a cause-effect relationship between Ein Sof and the first of the ten Sefirot, Keter Elyon. This knowable kind of relationship logically cannot possibly start with the absolutely unknowable Ein Sof!)
Any true Christian mystic ought to marvel at this opening conundrum, as it 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, who never accepted filioque, from the Church of the West, which unilaterally postulated it.
As my personal standpoint, I am going to posit, whenever talking about the Sefirot, 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 Kabbalah, 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 these 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.
Postscript: Any sensible, but unprepared for this gobbledygook, person may reasonably ask, who needs this kind of mental contortions? Ironically, the same question can be asked by that very same person wading into the waters of pure mathematics and physics, where the arcane discourse can be even more baffling. Indeed, this is exactly what the pure theoreticians do! However, as soon as the pure mathematician and physicist start reaping rich harvest in practical applications, the question about “usefulness” will surely dry up on the tip of the questioner’s tongue. By the same token here! The reader may have figured out already that these weird-thinking Stone Age Jews discussing the weirdest things of seemingly no relevance to the needs and interests of the world, are in fact talking about relativity, wave theory, and other marvels of modern physics, which very few people today understand even on an amateur level, but all, without exception, have benefited from, and are benefiting from as we speak…
(It would have been so much easier to avoid this discrepancy between Sefirot and Emanations by simply suggesting that all ten Sefirot are emanations originating with Ein Sof as their Causa Prima, but the Kabbalah does not make things easy, stubbornly but consistently refusing to fall into the trap of admitting our knowledge of the unknowable, by pronouncing positive judgment on the existence of a cause-effect relationship between Ein Sof and the first of the ten Sefirot, Keter Elyon. This knowable kind of relationship logically cannot possibly start with the absolutely unknowable Ein Sof!)
Any true Christian mystic ought to marvel at this opening conundrum, as it 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, who never accepted filioque, from the Church of the West, which unilaterally postulated it.
As my personal standpoint, I am going to posit, whenever talking about the Sefirot, 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 Kabbalah, 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 these 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.
Postscript: Any sensible, but unprepared for this gobbledygook, person may reasonably ask, who needs this kind of mental contortions? Ironically, the same question can be asked by that very same person wading into the waters of pure mathematics and physics, where the arcane discourse can be even more baffling. Indeed, this is exactly what the pure theoreticians do! However, as soon as the pure mathematician and physicist start reaping rich harvest in practical applications, the question about “usefulness” will surely dry up on the tip of the questioner’s tongue. By the same token here! The reader may have figured out already that these weird-thinking Stone Age Jews discussing the weirdest things of seemingly no relevance to the needs and interests of the world, are in fact talking about relativity, wave theory, and other marvels of modern physics, which very few people today understand even on an amateur level, but all, without exception, have benefited from, and are benefiting from as we speak…
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