Qabala for Beginners

4. "Tzimtzum" - Creation by Restriction

When God set about the actual business of creating, what was the first thing he did? Genesis 1:3 provides what seems to be a quick answer: "God said `Let there be light,' and there was light." The first act of creation was an act of building something, or making something where previously there was nothing. Before there was nothing; now, something (light) has been built. That was easy. Or was it?

Note that this is where semantic convenience starts to take prominence over strict accuracy; although I started referring to God as a being, and a male one at that, bear in mind that this is a shorthand device. I'm actually referring to the infinite light (AYN SVPh AVR) discussed earlier. This alone starts making life more complicated. Now, we have the infinite light creating light. That sounds a bit redundant.

It gets even more complicated if we back up a bit in Genesis. We see in Genesis 1:2 that before light was created, "the earth (was) unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and wind from God sweeping over the water". (Jewish Publication Society translation). It's difficult for us to grasp exactly what sort of physical environment is being described here: how, for example, can earth, a three dimensional form that we can see, touch, and walk on be "unformed and void." Are we, perhaps, dealing, not with soil and rock but the idea of the "world" or "universe" being unformed and void? Maybe. But the Torah does use the Hebrew word VHARTz, which really does translate to "and (V) the (H) earth ARTz)." ARTz can also translate as land. There is another word that could have been used if it was intended to mean "and the universe being unformed and void..." The Torah could have said VHAyLM. AyLM (ohlam) means universe. ARTz (eretz) means earth, ground, land. Whatever mystical ideas we might wish to pursue regarding this unformed, void earth, one thing is clear: we are being asked to deal with the notion that there was something (however hard it may be to actually imagine) before God said "Let there be light."

According to the qabalistic doctrine of "tzimtzum" (restriction or constriction), the first act of creation was not an act of building, but an act of carving out, or taking away. Consider a sculpture of a human figure. The sculptor can start by building, using a medium like clay, and working up to the shape of a human figure. Or, the sculptor can take a big block of, say, marble, start carving and work down to the shape of a human figure. A superficial reading of Genesis suggests that the process of creation was a building up, analogous to the sculptor who works from clay. But tzimtzum teaches us that the process of creation started as a working down, analogous to the sculptor who works with marble. (Actually, creation involves both processes, as we'll see.)

God, the so-called "sculptor" of our world, is really this infinite something or other - light (for want of a better word) - that is everywhere. Because God is infinite, there cannot be any place where God is absent. Where is there room for imperfection? Where is there room for evil, or more precisely, where is there room for free will which allows one to choose evil? Such things don't exist. They can't exist because God is everyplace - EVERYPLACE; take the idea of infinity, to the extent it can be grasped, very seriously.

If you'll forgive the loose physics, what we have here is a deity with a dilemma. He wants to create a world, but there's no place where he can put it because he, himself is already everywhere. Imagine that you are in a room with shaped walls that completely match and touch the contours of your body. In other words, your physical body completely fills every single inch of space in that room. You want to bring something else into that room, but how will you get it inside? There's no room because you are already hogging every bit of available space. If you are really determined to bring this new thing into the room, you're going to have to find some way to create some new space. How do you do that? Here's a suggestion: suck in your gut.

That's pretty much what God had to do in order to create. He could no longer fill up all of infinity. He had to create some space where something besides himself could exist. In less lofty terminology, God had to suck it in. That's exactly what tzimtzum (which translates to "restriction") is all about.

As explained by Aryeh Kaplan in Inner Space (Moznaim Publ. 718-438-7680, 853-0525 or available in many Judaica bookstores; there is no ISBN #), "God first `withdrew' His light, forming a `vacated space' in which all creation would take place." In other words, God restricted, or drew in, part of his divine light to create somewhere within all this light, a hollow sphere of darkness. Then into this carved out hollow sphere of darkness, God dropped a "ray" of his light, and this ray served as the vehicle through which creation took place. Again, in Rabbi Kaplan's words:

"God constricted His infinite perfection and created a concept of lack or darkness which would allow a `place' for man's free will and accomplishment. The ray of light that fills the vacated space is the perfection that man is able to draw down into the world as a result of his wakening from below."

(Note: Don't expect this to make sense in terms of conventional physics. This is a conceptual thing. The idea is that imperfection is being allowed to flourish in the midst of infinite perfection. The sphere of darkness within the block of light is simply a metaphor to allow us, to the extent we are able, to try to conceive of this juxtaposition. )

Is it then possible that God is no longer omnipotent, or all present? Here, again, human language limits us because the best answer we can give is: yes and no. In Song of the Soul (an apparently privately published book available through Judaica bookstores), Yechiel Bar-Lev explains the situation by asking us to imagine a wise scholarly rabbi instructing a young child.

"If the rabbi uses all of his intellectual abilities, all of his knowledge and astuteness, the young pupil will not understand anything. In order for that beginning student to understand the lesson, the rabbi must limit his ability and adapt to the abilities of his student. In doing so the rabbi's knowledge and abilities remain unimpaired.... If the rabbi had not limited his thoughts, his words would have been unclear to the pupil. Only because he limited his powers were his teachings understood."

Do you see what's happening here? The rabbi in Bar-Lev's example never loses one iota of his intellectual prowess. It's always present. It never leaves, and it's never diminished. But in order to create a setting in which his student can learn, the rabbi chooses to restrict some of his prowess. Rabbi Bar-Lev gives another example:

"Hands have great power, but we do not employ the same power while wielding a heavy hammer, as when writing with a sensitive pen. When someone writes gently, he limits his power. To do so does not injure him or prevent him from using that same arm again for the hammer."

On one level, Bar-Lev's illustrations allow us to envision how God could constrict his power, yet still remain all-present and all-powerful. But also, the examples of the scholarly rabbi and the writing hand give us a glimpse of what we can learn from tzimtzum; how we can apply it in our day-to-day lives.

Many times in the workaday world we are confronted with the need to decide between throwing our weight around or taking a back-seat approach. We face this in parenting; deciding how much "space" to give to children. We face this on the job; deciding when to delegate or take things into our own hands. Bar-Lev's rabbi example showed this in teaching; deciding when to refrain from using our full intellectual prowess. Many artists, especially those who work in watercolor, are familiar with choices like this; precise control of the medium, versus a willingness to allow for, and accept, the "happy accident." In these situations, and many others, we choose between injecting ourselves into a situation in a full, all-out way versus holding back and putting less than all of ourselves into a situation and leaving room for something and/or someone else to manifest.

The qabalistic doctrine of tzimtzum spotlights the importance of a willingness to hold back; to refrain from pushing all of ourselves into a situation; to refrain from being everywhere and everything or in complete control. The greatest creation we can imagine, the world itself, came about only because God was willing to constrict some of his infinite perfection for the specific purpose of allowing something else to flourish.

Qabala is not the only spiritual system that addresses the issue of restraint. We see it in many part of the Tao Te Ching. Verse 29 is just one example. It sates:

"One might wish to get hold of the world, and wilfully interfere with it. In my view, this is bound to fail. The world is a divine vessel. It cannot be interfered with. He who interferes with it spoils it, he who grasps it loses it. .... The sage, therefore, eschews the excessive, eschews the extravagant, and eschews the extreme."

The Tao Te Ching describes how the doctrine of wu-wei, non-interference, can make for efficient leadership and thereby benefit society. The Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita describe how restraint from extremes can benefit ourselves. One example is Dhammapada 24:334-36:

"If a man watches not for nirvana, his cravings grow like a creeper and he jumps from death to death like a monkey in the forest from one tree without fruit to another. And when his cravings overcome him, his sorrows increase more and more, like the entangling creeper called birana. But whoever in this world overcomes his selfish cravings, his sorrows fall away from him, like drops of water from a lots flower."

Bhagavad Gita 5:10 takes a different slant:

"Those who surrender to Brahman all selfish attachment are like the leaf of a lotus floating clean and dry in water. Sin cannot touch them."

A bit further, in 5:12, the Gita tells us:

"Those whose consciousness is unified abandon all attachment to the results of action and attain supreme peace. But those whose desires are fragmented, who are selfishly attached to the results of their work, are bound in everything they do."

Admittedly, these Eastern systems are not identical to qabala. They have different areas of emphasis. But underneath all, we can see a common thread shared by the qabalistic concept of tzimtzum: self restrain, holding back. Sometimes we restrain for the sake of society. Sometimes, we restrain for our own sake. But this idea of restriction is one that reaches far and wide in the area of spirituality.

Now... the qabala does not ask us always to restrain our desires, our selves, etc. Qabala comes from Judaism and Judaism is deeply and intricately concerned with participation in affairs of the physical world, something that is quite evident even from a casual skimming of the numerous laws of the Torah governing commerce, social relations, etc., and these are enhanced considerably in the later rabbinic writings. In The Mystical Qabala (Weiser, ISBN0-87728-596-9), Dion Fortune describes qabala as the "yoga of the West" suitable for the Western temperament, as something distinct from an Eastern temperament:

"The dharma of the West differs from that of the East; is it therefore desirable to try and implant Eastern ideals in a Westerner? Withdrawal from the earth-plane is not his line of progress. The normal, healthy Westerner has no desire to escape from life, his urge is to conquer it and reduce it to order and harmony."

Although Ms. Fortune was a Hermetic qabalist, the observations quoted here apply to Jewish qabala as well.

So there are times in life when a true qabalist will find it valid to throw his/her weight around, to take control, or to fill a situation with his/her presence, capabilities, etc. But this need not and should not obscure our vision of what lies ahead at the end of the rainbow. Although it is legitimate and proper for us to assert ourselves at times, we still ought not lose sight of the importance, the fundamental Godliness, of the choice to restrict or constrain ourselves. This is a concept we will have occasion to revisit in future topics.

E-mail Marc H. Gerstein

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Copyright © Marc H. Gerstein 1998. Posted on March 15th, 1998.
Editing, HTML-coding, and Web-pages design: Piotr Zembrowski.