The origin of evil
Isaac Luria was a 16th century visionary who came up with the most astonishing idea formulated about God. He was also regarded as a saint of the Kabbalism in Safed, between Damascus and Jerusalem. It may have been while studying the earliest passages of the Talmud that he saw the light. In those pages, it is said that God had made other worlds and had destroyed them before He created this one. He then filled the world as the soul fills a body, revealing himself in the tiniest breeze, in a blazing fire, in silence, in children splashing and shouting on the beach, in purring cats and swaying flowers, but also in the agony of the dying, in the screams of the injured and the sick, in the tears for a lost child . . . As all religious people experience over and over again in the course of their lifetime, Luria had to face the dilemma of theodicy. Unable to understand how a perfect God could create a world riddled with pain, even less able to discover from where evil sprang forth, he spent his life searching for the answer until it revealed itself to him.
Over the years, the idea of God had evolved. In Luria’s days, the Jewish theology of Kabbalah distinguished between the essence of God and the God whom we glimpse in creation. The essence of God was inscrutable, inaccessible, and unknowable. To distinguish this hidden God from the other, they called it En Sof—literally, «without end», in Hebrew. The other, they called Shekinah, God’s presence on earth. We know nothing of En Sof. He isn’t even mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud. To make Himself known to humanity, En Sof manifested Himself to the Jewish mystics under ten different aspects or sefiroth. Each aspect represented a stage in En Sof’s unfolding revelation and had its own symbolic name.
In his effort to explain evil, Isaac Luria imagined what had happened before En Sof created the world.
The world according to Luria
Long before the big bang, En Sof was boundless and shapeless, and all His various powers mingled together and existed within Him in perfect harmony. On the onset of genesis, He withdrew and formed a tiny pocket of emptiness within Himself in which He planned to make the world.
Luria called this withdrawal tsimtsum. He visualized the empty space created by tsimtsum as a circle, surrounded on all sides by En Sof. This was tohu bohu, the formless waste mentioned in Genesis. Thus, God’s first act is an exile from one part of Himself, a self-imposed limitation, quite like when the Christian God emptied Himself into the Son in an act of self-expression.
During tsimtsum, En Sof sheared His Wrath from His inmost being and cast it into the empty space. Now that God’s Wrath—which the Zohar had seen as the root of evil—was cut off from God’s Mercy and the rest of His powers, it could turn out to be destructive. Still En Sof did not forsake the empty space entirely. A ‘thin line’ of the divine light penetrated this circle and took the form of what the Zohar had called Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Man.
The big bang
God’s three highest sefiroth radiated from Adam Kadmon’s ‘nose’, ‘ears’ and ‘mouth’. Then, a catastrophe occurred, which Luria called ‘the Breaking of the Vessels’. The sefiroth needed to be contained in special ‘vessels’ to distinguish and separate them from one another and to prevent them from merging anew into their primal unity. These ‘vessels’ were not material, but were composed of thicker light that served as shells for the purer light of the sefiroth. When the three highest sefiroth had radiated from Adam Kadmon, their vessels had channeled them perfectly. However, when the next six sefiroth issued from his ‘eyes’, their vessels were not strong enough to contain the divine light, and all this fragile construction shattered to pieces and dispersed. Some of the divine sparks rose upward and returned to En Sof, but others fell into the empty waste and remained trapped in chaos. From then on, nothing was at its proper place. The original harmony had been ruined, and the divine sparks were lost in the formless waste of tohu bohu, in exile from En Sof.
The meaning of (our) life, part one
Again, God set Himself to create the world. His intent was to make it in such a manner that man’s ultimate goal would be to recover the divine sparks and help Him build Himself anew.
However, that was before Adam had sinned in the Garden of Eden. Had he not done so, the original harmony would have been restored and the divine exile would have ended on the first Sabbath. But Adam’s fall repeated the primal catastrophe of the Breaking of the Vessels. The created order fell and the divine light in his soul was scattered about and caught in broken matter. Thus, once more, in this trial and error manner, God evolved yet another plan with the difference this time that only Jews would be assigned a special mission. Since Israel, just as the divine sparks themselves, is scattered throughout the Diaspora, from then on, it would be its duty to redeem the fallen atoms. As long as these transcendent sparkles are separated and lost in matter, God shall be incomplete. Only by careful observance of Torah and the discipline of prayer, each Jew will help restore the sparks to their divine source.
In this vision of salvation, God is not gazing down on humanity condescendingly, but, as Jews had always insisted, actually depends on mankind, for only Jews have the unique privilege of helping God re-form and recreate Himself anew.
Luria’s mythology was embraced eagerly by Jews around the world. Recast in Jewish terms, it was able to touch a buried chord and give new hope in the midst of despair. It enabled the Jews to believe that despite the appalling circumstances in which so many of them lived, there was an ultimate meaning and significance. By the observance of the mitzvot, they could rebuild their God again.
The meaning of (our) life, part two
During the 18th century, Hasid scholars, like the Besht, brought yet another interpretation to the fall of the divine sparks. For them, it was a blessing in disguise. Until then, En Sof had been perceived as an inscrutable, inaccessible and unknowable entity. Now, God was again as He had been during the days of the Talmud, and the world seemed to be filled with His presence. A devout Jew could once more experience Him while he ate, drank, made love to his wife, in the wind that stroke his face, in the blades of grass that stirred beneath his feet. In this universal theophany, the Besht set aside Luria’s grand scheme of world salvation and preferred to consider man only responsible for reuniting the sparks trapped in his personal surroundings—in his home, in his wife and in his children. As one of the Besht’s disciples explained: ‘Every man is a redeemer of a world that is all his own. He beholds only what he, and only he, ought to behold and feels only what he is personally singled out to feel.’
Sometimes, the Hasidim went to somewhat far-fetched extremes in their attempt to save the world: many of them took to smoking a great deal to rescue the sparks in tobacco . . . One of the Besht’s own grandsons had a splendid court with magnificent tapestries and furniture, which he justified by declaring that he was only concerned for the sparks in these wonderful trappings. Others used to eat gargantuan meals to reclaim the divine sparks in their food . . .
Surely, from an outsider’s point of view, the whole Hasidic enterprise must have appeared as an attempt to find a meaning in a dangerous and cruel environment, by stripping the veil of familiarity from the world to discover the glory that lay within.
From the perspective of a devout Hasid, through the various disciplines he performed, he only knew that, day after day, he was becoming more and more aware of the divine energy that coursed through the whole created world, transforming it into a glorious place, despite the sorrows of exile and persecution. Gradually the material world would fade into insignificance and everything would become an epiphany.
The Hasidim considered both man and God as being part of the same process of self-realization, created by it, creating it, mutually interdependent. God was no longer perceived as an external, objective reality. Indeed, the Hasidim believed that in some sense they were creating Him by building Him up anew after His disintegration, and that by becoming aware of the Godly spark within them, they would become more fully human.
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