These are my own gleanings from a book by Netanel Miles-Yepez & Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, God Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: the Holy Ari and the ‘Contraction of God’ (2021, Albion-Andalus). I hope they encourage you to buy the book. I have paraphrased in order to clarify my own understanding, but there are also direct quotations from the book. The notes in square brackets are my own thoughts and responses, rather than ideas gleaned from the book itself.
- V Maggid of Mezritch: “The tzimtzum was a result of God’s love.”
Part 1: Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, the Holy Lion
- 11 Rather than imposing a penance on a rabbi who disrespected him, the Ari kindly said, “Rest well.”
- 17 Story: challah’s being placed in the synagogue ark; Jacopo, shammash, rabbi, and God all benefit.
Part 2: Paradigm Shift & The Divine Contraction
Tzimtzum
- 29 We can never grasp God, yet we always seek God.
- 29 “I am YHVH. I have not changed.” (Mal. 3:6) Ani YHVH lo shamiti.
Epochs & Reality Maps
- 34 “In the epochal period, the body of the slouched and breathless king has not yet yielded the throne, but nor has a clear successor emerged to clear away the ruined body and its influence.”
- 34 “It is a period of radical experimentation and rich cross-fertilisation; the empricial-experiential is raised above the legal-rational, and the once rigid forms become fluid again, opening tradition to revitalizing influences.” [Robert Pirsig: Dynamic Quality overtaking Static Quality]
- [Reb Zalman: “Let the future pull you.”]
- [We think of breathing in as the preparation for the act of making and doing, the stepping back before stepping forward. This is often described as contracting. But it can’t be – because when we inhale, we expand, and take up more space, not less. Inhalation requires physical release of abdominal muscles, and letting go in order to allow air inside us. Exhalation is also a letting go of the air we have inside us. Breathing in, I receive the gift of oxygen from the world; breathing out I give the gift of carbon dioxide to the world. Perfect symbiosis. Both in breathing in and in breathing out, I affirm life. At birth my first breath is inhalation; at death, my last breath is exhalation.]
Aries – Deistic Tzimtzum
- 39 Earliest notions à God can contract and take up a specific location that becomes sacralised e.g. the burning bush, the brook at Yabbok, the Ark, the Temple.
Pisces – Theistic Tzimtzum
- 41 God is the ‘being-maker’.
- 44 “Maimonides goes on to show that all the instances of speaking positively of God’s attributes in Torah are merely devices to deny any ‘imperfection’ in God.”
- 44 “we can know nothing of God except the fact of God’s existence”
- 45 Rambam: positive descriptions of attributes of God aren’t anthropomorphic, but devices to deny the imperfection of God. And to say that God exists doesn’t say what that means or what God is, but simply that God’s non-existence is impossible.
- [Is there really a dichotomy between finitude and infinity? Finitude is a human construct. What if everything is simply infinite?]
- [Religious philosophy shouldn’t be confused with normal philosophy. The latter requires discrete categories and logical consistency. The former doesn’t.]
From infinity to finitude
- 49 Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 57, 91b: “No place is devoid of God.”
Aquarius – Pantheistic Tzimtzum
- 52 “Do I not fill the heavens and earth?” (Jer. 23:24)
- 55-6 “It is the ‘hiding of God’ that allows us to perceive ourselves as separate, and thus also, allows us to build a convincing and difficult barrier to overcome on the road to discovering God. The greater the barrier, the greater the wholeness that can come from it being overcome. But, in actuality, there has never been any separation from God—God is here, now, in every space—‘No place is empty of God’. Thus, Reb Shneur Zalman teaches us that tzimtzum is actually a ‘concealment’ rather than a ‘withdrawal’… God’s light was never removed from the Void, and there never was a Void. It was merely concealed from our point of view. We are radically ignorant of God’s immanence right here and now, in this wonderful fiction we all, ‘Life’.”
Part 3: A Meditation on Tzimtzum
Deism, theism, pantheism & the problem of evil
- 61 “The withdrawal of light and life, and the death of the name, mean that the ‘old interface’ has ceased to work, and the ‘new interface’ has not yet arrived.”
- 62 Alan Watts: “Where is God? … On the inside of the inside; behind the inside!” Z & N: “That is the GOd who can reconcile all opposites, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ together.
Scaling-down the light & its imprisonment
- 63 “God scales-down infinite ideas for our finite minds.”
- 63 “parents tell their children parables, analogues that make tzimtzum for the child. Later, this parable can be re-explored and expanded to reclaim more of the truth.”
- 64 Maggid taught that Ani-I is an anagram of Ayin-Nothing – everything is created from nothing, and we can trace the origin of ‘I’ back to Nothing.
- 66 Death is our ultimate tzimtzum.
- 66 “What is an idol? It is an attempt to make the infinite finite.”
The death and resurrection of sparks
- 71 Messiah is constantly coming, e.g. relief of slavery in the USA [LGBTQ rights etc]
Tzimtzum as a function in Jewish Renewal
- 74 Our memory and tradition will survive through creativity and re-interpretation.
- [Our rituals are forms of tzimtzum, dense contractions of vast stores of memory, meaning, and potential.]
- 75 “We have to become more and more effective in making transmissions of Jewish Renewal.]
- 77 Distil our current Judaism to pass it on to future generations.
- [Judaism has accumulated so many details, practices, words – reduce to most important elements for current and future generations.]
Appendix A: The origin and meaning of the word tzimtzum
Appendix B: The Ari’s tzimtzum
Appendix C: The Alter Rebbe’s tzimtzum
Appendix D: Rebbe Nachman’s tzimtzum
- 92 “One who seeks God can surely find God”
- 93 “If one has no true knowledge, one thinks the dissembler wise.” [Can also be fooled by the uninformed.]
- 93 Beware those who argue [superficially, without wisdom] on points of logic, rather than to seek truth or insight.
- [Avoid getting caught in an argument that is not for the sake of heaven.]
- 104 “’Know how to answer the unbeliever’ with that portion of truth most needed to ply them and mend their partial truth.”
- [Know how to help the lost out of their lost-ness.]