Before we discuss some of the key principles of Kabbalah, it will be helpful to mention a few things. Kabbalah, for one, is not a linearly organized belief system. The system is many-layered and interwoven like a ball of string that is composed, instead of a single strand, of many, many strands wrapped tightly around one another. One principle segues into another and then another, and it is difficult to discuss one aspect of Kabbalah without going off on tangents to cover others. But despite its complexity, when broken down and evaluated Kabbalah offers a surprisingly sensible and congruent view of our place in the scheme of things.
For instance, we could talk about the significance of the number seven in the Book of Genesis, and we would have to draw a complex tree to include all the ways in which the number appears throughout Kabbalah and traditional Jewish history. In Kabbalah, the seven days of Creation (including the day of rest) are metaphors for seven of the forces of God that are responsible for Creation, which are depicted by seven of the spheres on the Tree of Life, the primary symbol of Kabbalah. (There are actually ten spheres on the Tree, but humans are capable of comprehending only seven of them; the other three, however, are implied in Genesis.) What's more, early mystics said there were seven levels to the realm of heaven, and Kabbalists say that we are now in the seventh cycle of Creation; that prior to the time recorded in Genesis, there were six other cycles of Creation.
But this is just seven as it appears on the esoteric level. There is also the mundane level. The seven days of Creation in Genesis also become the seven days of the week that put order into our lives; in Jewish tradition, seven is the number of days that family and friends sit in mourning for the dead; the seventh year in Judaism is a sabbatical year, when agricultural fields are supposed to lay fallow, when leased or sold land returns to its owner, and when slaves are freed and debts repaid.
Each of these examples has its own explanation and reasoning behind it, and each practice and belief is connected in some obvious or esoteric way to the greater scheme of Creation. The Kabbalists made it their mission to find these connections and give proof to the idea that there is order at all levels of the universe. The result is that there is essentially no end to Kabbalah. The universe runs on synchronicity, and once you begin to study Kabbalah, you begin to see its principles cropping up everywhere and in everything. It is the undercurrent pulsing throughout the universe.
The majority of Kabbalist writings focus on the Creation story, on describing how Creation unfolded. This is because it is mainly through the story of Creation that we come to “know” God, that God reveals aspects of Himself or gives us hints as to who He is and who we are in relation to Him. Throughout the Kabbalists' discourses on the events of Creation, however, they examine numerous other subjects, such as the nature and characteristics of God and the nature of humans and the soul. From these three topics — Creation, God, and humans — Kabbalists arrive at an understanding about our inner feelings and emotions and the nature of our human relationships. They address issues such as greed and jealousy, pride and humility, charity and lust, even the care and nurturing of a child; and it is at these levels that Kabbalah is brought into practice. Within the story of Creation is not only a model for understanding the universe but for understanding ourselves as well.
As with all complex systems of thought, some theories and aspects of Kabbalah are more developed than others. There are also important questions for which the Kabbalists fail to supply adequate answers; there are others that they simply ignore altogether. But there is so much that they do address that it would be ungracious of us to complain. What's more, Kabbalists did not arrive at their concepts arbitrarily. The ideas expressed here are the result of decades and centuries of contemplation and study by some of the most advanced minds at work in the Middle Ages.
However, when we say “Kabbalists believe” or “according to Kabbalists,” we are not talking about a group of unified minds. Different Kabbalists throughout the centuries have focused on different aspects of Creation and supplied different interpretations and symbols for their readings of Genesis. Some Kabbalists, for example, believe that the Book of Genesis can be viewed as a meditation guide for attaining closeness to God; others see in the story of Creation an intellectual process involving the evolution of thoughts and ideas into action through language and speech; others see Creation as a kind of de-evolution or stepping-down process of the God force, and they describe God as light and picture Him “pouring” Himself or His light into the world.
All of these are valid readings. Remember, there are seventy faces to the Torah, and more than one of these faces is a Kabbalist face. But as we said previously, this does not present a case for contradictions; instead it leads us to a basic Kabbalah concept about the Torah: There is no right or wrong answer. All interpretations are plausible. It is not a question of one or the other; Genesis has many possible readings, all of which lead us to a fuller understanding of the message within it. While the specific language and symbolism of the Kabbalists may differ, they are all describing the same phenomenon: the Creation of our universe by a force that originated in God. Whether the Kabbalists describe that force as a process of God dividing Himself, pouring Himself, or sending divine thoughts into the vast space doesn't really matter. All Kabbalist paths lead to the same conclusion: that Creation is an ongoing event and that there is a reason behind it.
I begin this description of Kabbalah with a few key concepts, to define some of the terms and ideas, and then show how they figure in the Kabbalist understanding of Creation. This will provide a broad view of how the Kabbalists believe the universe was formed as well as explain their ideas for why we are here.
In grappling with the principles of Kabbalah, however, we must understand that our vocabulary isn't up to par with some of the concepts we are discussing. Some terminology might seem inelegant or inadequate. The Kabbalists are dealing with concepts that are, quite literally, difficult to conceptualize. They don't have adequate language to describe these ideas, so they resort to words and descriptions that make the best sense. For instance, the Kabbalists describe God in ways that make Him seem human; they ascribe mortal qualities and emotions to Him — God “thinks” this, and “feels” that. This is not done in traditional Judaism, which frowns on assigning human characteristics to God. (This is one of the reasons why there are no paintings or statues of God in Judaism or Jewish art.) The purpose is not only to avoid the idolization of images, but also to acknowledge that God is beyond our comprehension. God is not human, and to depict Him in the figure of a person is to make Him mundane, to put flesh on something that is not flesh.
The Kabbalists get around this infraction, however, by repeating over and over again that what they are describing is not God Himself, but aspects of Him. This leads us to our first principle.
It is understood in Kabbalah that some things will never be known. Some things are beyond our comprehension as human beings. Who created the universe, however, is not one of them. About this, the Kabbalists don't quibble: God created the universe and everything in it.
But just who God is, or what God is, is undefinable. One of the first principles of Kabbalah, then, is that God cannot be known. This is fairly ironic, since all of Kabbalah is based on the impulse to know God and to understand His powers.
We can know God to a certain degree, the Kabbalists say; we can know some of the characteristics or aspects or parts of God that He reveals to us, but beyond these we are handicapped by our human limitations. We belong to the finite world, and God belongs to the world of the infinite, which is beyond our human comprehension. Any attempt to know Him, to define who or what He is, puts boundaries on the infinite, which essentially negates its infiniteness. Kabbalists liken this to trying to catch a thought in the palm of your hand. It cannot be done.
How do we know something? By defining it and by giving it a name; by describing what characteristics belong to it and then by assigning those characteristics names. Any animal that is warm-blooded, has vertebrae, mammary glands, and hair is given the name of mammal. We know it by the characteristics it has, and then we combine all of this information into a code (a name) which becomes shorthand for the thing itself.
Another way we know a thing is to distinguish it from what it is not. In other words, when we see a bird and don't know what kind of bird it is, we first eliminate everything that it is not. In the same way, we might try to approach God by defining Him by what He is not; only we don't get very far because there isn't anything that God is not. God is everything, so to assign Him a name would be to say that He is this, but He is not that. This we cannot do, because there is no end to what God is and what God includes. God, the congruence of all things past, present, and future, the representation of all time and no time at the same time, is within His essence unlimited, and if unlimited then undefinable, and if undefinable then unnamable, and if unnamable then ultimately unknowable.
This is why when religious Jews write the name of God in English, they spell it G-d, as a way to acknowledge that God cannot be captured by language, and why when Jews reading the Bible aloud come across the traditional four-letter name for God in Hebrew — YHWH (also known as “the Tetragrammaton,” from the Greek word for “four letters”) — they substitute the names Elohim or Adonai instead, which are less sacred names for God. God has a name — after all, we have to refer to him by something — but we cannot speak it.
YHWH is called “the Ineffable Name of God.” The infiniteness of God is actually expressed in this name. YHWH is a conglomeration of the past, present, and future conjugations of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God is all things and all places and time. He has no beginning — as far as we can determine — and He has no end — as far as we assume. He just is; or rather He was, is, and always will be. When all the Hebrew letters of the conjugations for “it was,” “it is,” and “it will be” are joined and double letters removed, we are left with the Hebrew letters yud-heh-vav-heh, which is unpronounceable as a word.
Some people have tried to pronounce it as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah.” But it is said that only the ancient Jewish High Priest in the Temple in Jerusalem knew how to say God's name, and he was only allowed to utter it one day a year, on Yom Kippur. One writer, Arthur Waskow, has suggested that the pronunciation of it is Yhewoooo, the sound of breath; which is an elegant idea — that God, the giver of life, is represented by the sound of life-giving breath. This recalls a poignant Jewish legend I read years ago, which states that before an infant is born, its soul stands before God and is given the secrets of the universe and Creation. But just before the child leaves its mother, an angel follows it to the womb and takes back the secrets, leaving the child in anguish. When the newborn takes its first shuddering breath and cries, it is really uttering the name of God, crying out at being separated from Him and having lost the knowledge of Him.
With the statement that God cannot be known, and thus named, comes what would seem to be the first Kabbalist contradiction, because the Kabbalists do in fact give God a name — Ein Sof. But this name is simply a kind of placeholder that only further emphasizes the fact that we cannot fence in the concept of God. Ein Sof in Hebrew means “without end,” so rather than naming God, the Kabbalists give a name to the idea that God cannot be named.
The name Ein Sof never appears anywhere in the Bible. Instead, the Bible mentions ten other names for God: Ehiyeh Asher Ehiyeh, Yah, YHWH (Elohim or Adonai), El, Elohim, Adonai Tzevaot, Elohim Tzevaot, Shaddai, Adonai, and El Chai. (The names inside parentheses indicate what should be vocalized instead of YHWH, when reading aloud.) In the English version of the Bible, of course, all of these Hebrew names are simply translated as God, or sometimes as Yahweh or Jehovah; there is no indication that the name keeps changing in the original.
According to Kabbalists, these ten variations actually represent distinguishable characteristics of Ein Sof, not Ein Sof Himself. They are attributes of Ein Sof that He emanates from Himself, in order to create the universe. These ten forces that created and continue to sustain the universe are called “sefirot” by Kabbalists. Each one of these sefirot has a God name; any time one of these names appears in the text of the Bible, particularly in the Book of Genesis, it is simply to tell us that that particular aspect of God is manifesting or acting at that time. God's real name, Ein Sof, never appears in the Bible because He exists in a realm above and beyond the realm of the sefirot, in an unlimited realm that is incomprehensible to us. The sefirot are the closest we can come to knowing God.
The concept of the sefirot is similar to the relationship between me and my creative talents. Let's say I have a knack for photography. You can say that this talent is a part of me, but it is not me in my entirety. It is only one aspect of me that I carry inside. I have other creative aspects too: the artist in me draws pictures; the cook in me prepares meals; the writer in me writes an article. All of these are aspects of me, but each one alone is not me. All of them together make up that one part of me that I would call my creative talents. But there are other parts to me as well. There are the parts that make up my personality, such as feelings and emotions, memories and experiences. There are parts that make up my relationships: daughter, sister, lover, friend. And there are the external parts that make up the part of me that the world sees at first glance: my physical appearance, mannerisms, and way of speaking. All of these are parts of who I am.
Now let's say I create a being that consists of all of my creative talents only, a selective cloning perhaps; and this being further divides itself into separate beings that represent each individual talent, and these beings together proceed to create something, each contributing the unique talent that defines it. I am still me, but I have focused a certain aspect of myself to accomplish a task. In the same way, God created an aspect of Himself to accomplish Creation, and this aspect was formed of ten forces depicted as the sefirot on the Kabbalist Tree of Life.
As one of the first acts of Creation, Kabbalists say, God withdrew from Himself to form a finite space for our universe. Put broadly, billions of years ago, the idea of Creation came to God (or rather the idea formed “inside” of Him) and He set about putting the idea into action through a series of steps, which involved first the contraction of Himself and then the emanation from Him of an energy force composed of seven forces (sefirot) that would serve as the agents or actors of all Creation.
Here's how Kabbalists describe what happened:
In the beginning of the beginning, there was only Ein Sof, who was represented by white light, which was everywhere and everything. The light that was Ein Sof filled everything. There were no empty or black spaces, just white, unrefracted, and unlimited light that irradiated everywhere. There was no beginning to this light, and no end. There was nothing outside of Ein Sof; there was only Ein Sof, which represented singular unity and oneness.
When the idea to create the world arose in the will of Ein Sof, He withdrew Himself from part of Himself to create a space for Creation to exist in; that is, He created a point of blackness, a vacuum in the center of His light, in order to create a space for Creation. It was only a very small space that He created, a “point” as Kabbalists describe it; but size is relative. Compared to the vast infinity that Ein Sof encompassed, the black space that He created for our universe was indeed a tiny point.
Since God encompasses everything, since He is everything, He had to create a space in which He didn't exist in order to create something that would be distinct from him. We can liken it to an architect clearing off his drafting table to create a working space. In Kabbalist language, what God did was create a space in which to create the universe by “removing” Himself from that space, by creating a “hole,” or a kind of nothingness or empty place in which He didn't exist.
Kabbalists call the creation of the black space the tzimtzum. Keter, the first sefira on the Tree of Life, represents this act of contraction. Keter is the darkness, the nothingness. Ein Sof creates this empty space by drawing Himself in or collapsing in on Himself. The result is blackness, which is a space in which the Light of God has regressed. The process of contraction can be compared to a cone. Light is drained or sucked into the cone, and then something emanates back out of the cone. It is as if God sucked in a part of the light that was Him, and then blew out a smaller stream of it. The black space created is at the center of the universe and into this space the emanation is sent. Recall that Arthur Waskow suggested that the name of God, YHWH, is the sound of breath. God “breathes” the letters of his name into the emptiness to create the universe. He breathes life into the universe. It is said in the Zohar that “without the soul-breath, the body could not conduct itself, would not be aware of the Will, could not actualize the Will of the Creator.”
The description is surprisingly similar to that of a black hole. A black hole is a place where the laws of physics as we know them today do not apply, a place in which what is believed to be a star collapses in on itself because its nuclear fuel is depleted and no longer balances the gravitational force. It's a space in which the gravitational force of an extreme concentration of mass causes light to be trapped inside rather than being emitted. Of course we can't know for certain if this is what happened scientifically, but it's amazing to think that thirteenth-century Kabbalists, through their meditations, may have tapped into a phenomenon that wasn't introduced by science until well into the twentieth century.
Once the black space was created, God poured a measured dose of His energy back into it. He sent out an emanation, a stream of pure, white light, into the center of the darkness or black space. Say, for instance, you lay a sheet of white paper onto a table and you cut a round hole in the center of it, an empty space in which there is no paper. But then you take the circle that you removed and you cut it into several small, white stars, and you sprinkle the stars onto the hole in the middle of the paper. You have created a space in the paper in which to place something else made out of the same material as that which you took out of the space. In the same way, God created a space by removing or withdrawing Himself, then poured Himself back into that space.
The white light descended into the center of the black space but remained connected to its source at the same time. Kabbalists call this stream the Ein Sof Or, the light of Ein Sof. This stream represents the pure, unrefracted “white” light of Ein Sof. The light is white because this is the color that is composed of all other colors and yet is no color itself. Refract white light through a prism and the colors within it become separated out from the white light. In the same way, the Ein Sof Or is composed of various aspects (the sefirot) of Ein Sof. Undifferentiated, they form white light; but as they are refracted, they separate out like the colors of light through a prism. The act of emanation from Ein Sof into the blackness is represented by the second sefira on the Tree, called Hochma.
Note that the initial step of Creation was a kind of dance of opposite movements. God emptied and then filled; He regressed into Himself and then sent forward a stream of Himself. As we will see later, this established an important precedent for Kabbalists with regard to spiritual evolution. The idea of taking one step back (an act of harsh judgment and self-limitation) and then many steps forward (an act of mercy and compassion) led Kabbalists to the concepts of sinning and making mistakes as steps toward redemption and renewal.
Through the interaction of the emanation with the darkness — the interaction between the first and the second sefira (Keter and Hochma) — the third sefira, Binah, emerges at the tip of the emanated light. Binah is the “mother” of all lower sefirot. From Binah, the remaining sefirot emerge, one after the other, one out of the other, like Russian nesting dolls. Each sefira on the Tree of Life becomes a vessel for God's energy as it emanates from Ein Sof, in an act that mirrors the original emanation into the black space. Each sefira plays a role in Creation, as the energy from Ein Sof flows through it and mixes with the qualities and elements therein to create something new that is passed to the next sefira and the next level. Think of a champagne tower at a wedding reception, with the glasses stacked in a pyramid. Champagne is poured into the glass on top until it overflows the glass and cascades down to the next level where it fills the next two glasses and cascades down to the third, and so on.
So, we have the all-encompassing white light; then the blackness; then the emanation of light into the blackness; and the end point of that emanation is the third sefira, which produces all other sefirot and, with them, our world. The force of God, at the point of Binah, the third sefira, breaks itself down from the all-encompassing one to the many, and forms the next seven sefirot, which consist of opposing powers and their balancing force. Our mind can only conceive of the lower seven sefirot. Beyond these, into the boundless light, we cannot know.
At each one of these stages on its way down from the upper spiritual realms to the lower and denser physical one, the pure form of energy or light that emanates from Ein Sof is “reduced” or refracted until finally the property produced is matter, our physical world. It's a bit like boiling a pot of river water. When the water is evaporated, what you are left with is the denser particles — the minerals — that cannot be carried by the lighter particles of steam.
There are other ways the Kabbalists depict the Creation process. Instead of depicting it as a flow of energy, they also describe it as a vast, never-ending source of water that divides into seven separate streams; or as the process of an idea evolving into thought and action. In this latter version, first there emerges within the Ein Sof the will or urge to create. Kabbalists call this the divine will and associate it with the sefira Keter. Once the will exists, it manifests itself in a thought in order to be recognized as existing at all. Kabbalists associate this thought stage with the second sefira, Hochma. Once the thought is created, the mind has to identify it, name it, determine its content and moral value, and begin to act on it. This is the sefira of Binah, in which differentiation occurs. (Is it a good idea or a bad idea? If it's a good idea, then what do I need to do in order to make it real?) The idea is named and begins to take shape. Now that we have a name for it, we can begin to create it. The remainder of the sefirot represent the process of actualizing or manifesting the original will to create.
It might seem that will and thought are the same thing, that the thought to move is basically the will to move. But science tells us otherwise. Take, for example, the simple act of moving your leg. Let's say your leg has been in a certain position for a while and is beginning to fall asleep, so you move it. But before you actually move it, you have the idea or thought to move it (of which you may not even be consciously aware), which signals your muscles to “move leg.” Some people might say that the thought to move is the beginning of the process. But even before you think about moving your leg, something deeper inside you has willed the thought itself in your subconscious. Scientists in the 1960s discovered this with a now-famous experiment in which they implanted electrodes into subjects in the part of their brain that was responsible for the movement of limbs. The subjects were seated at a slide machine and told to watch the slides and advance the carousel by pushing a remote button. The button, however, did not actually control the advancement of the slides at all. Instead, a signal from the subjects' brain passed through the electrodes to a mechanism that then advanced the slides before the subjects could push the button, indeed, before they were even aware that they wanted to push the button. The projector seemed to operate outside of the subjects' control and “anticipate” what they wanted to do before they made the decision to do it. Scientists thus concluded that somewhere in our brain a will exists that knows what we are going to do before we are conscious of it and have a thought to do it. This is Keter.
Kabbalists believe that our universe is composed of four worlds, four levels of Creation: our physical world and three others that are located between us and the source. These four worlds represent four phases through which the process of Creation passed from the act of tzimtzum to the final product, our physical world. The four, starting with the top one, nearest Ein Sof, are called:
Atzilut, the world of emanation, represents the process in which tzimtzum occurred and the white light emanated from Ein Sof into the darkness. This is the closest world to Ein Sof, but it is not Ein Sof. Atzilut is different from the other three worlds because it still belongs to the realm of unity and oneness. Briyah, the world of creation, represents the stage from which the forces of God begin to emerge as opposites, balanced by equalizing powers. Yetzirah, the world of formation, represents the stage of activity in which things begin to take shape through the interaction of the sefirot and the flowing energy of Ein Sof. And finally, Assiyah, the world of manifestation, represents the physical world, the final product of all this activity.
Each of the four worlds is represented by one of the letters of the Tetragrammaton — YHWH. Atzilut is yud (Y); Briyah is heh (H); Yetzirah is vav (W); and Assiyah is the final heh (H). This means that the sacred four-letter name of God is the propelling force of Creation. It is the secret of the structure of the whole universe. Each of the four letters represents a different strain of energy involved in moving Creation from inception to manifestation. To speak the name of God, Kabbalists believe, is to conjure the forces of Creation. But remember, no one knows quite how to pronounce it.
Yud is the stage of emanation. The flow of energy emerges from Ein Sof as yud into the darkness, where it begins to create order in the chaos. Yud organizes the chaos of the tzimtzum to produce Binah, from which the lower sefirot emerge and actual creation begins. Within Binah, a second force, heh, comes into play, which causes Binah to become impregnated with the remainder of the sefirot and “give birth” to the fourth sefira, called Hesed (the language of insemination and birthing comes from the Kabbalists themselves). To put it another way, within Binah, the forces of the light begin to differentiate, and the lower sefirot emerge. This is heh, the world of creation. As Hesed emerges from Binah, the flow passes through another change and becomes vav, the energy of formation. All the ingredients are measured and mixed, and now comes the process of giving them shape. At the end of the stage of formation, we have the world of manifestation, represented by the last heh.
All four worlds exist in parallel to each other. All four are essential for the continuous process of Creation, and we live in all four of them simultaneously. They surround us, and yet we are usually unaware of the energy from the worlds of emanation, creation, and formation that create and sustain us. It is similar to the many other forces and phenomena around us — electrical and magnetic waves, for instance — that we cannot directly sense. We know they are active because we see the results of their movement: the light turns on in our bedroom, the radio broadcasts the music of Bach and Madonna, the microwave heats the soup. But we cannot see the energy in action.
In the same way, these three other worlds exist around us, and we constantly receive energy from them. However, unless we focus our attention on them, we are not aware of them. One of the aims of Kabbalah is to teach us how to live consciously in all of these worlds and become aware of our place in the flow of Creation.
Creation, as Kabbalists understand it, is not a one-time event that occurred billions of years ago, but rather an ongoing process, an event that occurs over and over again every billionth of a billionth of a second. It is an ever-flowing source that is constantly changing and evolving as the universe itself changes and evolves.
The flow of energy that created the universe and everything in it continues to flow with every second. In fact, it is the constant flow and interaction of the sefirot, of God's energy, that sustains the universe and powers its existence. We can liken it to the theory of the Big Bang, which proposes that objects in the universe, initially propelled apart by some vast explosion in the past, are still moving away from each other. The event occurred billions of years ago, but its energy is still active today.
This means that the universe and everything in it is constantly receiving the force and energy from God, and if one day God were to close off that source, the universe — and us in it — would cease to exist. Science tells us that the constant exchange of electrons between atoms keeps molecules intact and bound together so that thousands of those molecules can form something, such as a chair. If those molecules suddenly lost their binding power, the molecules would break down and the chair would disintegrate. We would sit on it, but it would dissolve like a cube of sugar in hot water. In the same way, God's energy keeps the universe together, on both a macro and a micro level. His energy is in the planet and the stars, but it is also in the chair.
If all of this sounds like a description of particle physics, it may be. The Kabbalists, remember, do not see a contradiction between science and religion. The scientific explanation of how the world came into being is valid for them, but it is only part of the equation. As far as Kabbalists are concerned, scientists are ignoring the all-important question behind their theories, and that is, What created the matter in the first place? What force compelled it into existence? And why was it created?
Both science and religion are means to bring us closer to the truth about our universe. They both seek to answer questions about where we came from. So essentially they emanate from the same starting point — Creation — and they lead back to the same conclusion. In the end, Kabbalah says, either path you take will lead you to the same truth: that God is the beginning and the source of all things.
The Kabbalists depict the creation of the universe as a process that is very similar to the one that scientists espouse. They say that Yes, there was some singular event that occurred many years ago, but God was the catalyst for that event and there were many other “invisible” stages to Creation which preceded that event and are beyond the abilities of science to examine. These events occurred on another level of reality, an immaterial level that cannot be measured by the tools of science currently available to us. Science lags at the rate of human comprehension. Who knows what the future will reveal?
For Kabbalists, Creation is not a question of Darwin or God, but of Darwin and God. They see no contradiction between the two paths. As far as they are concerned, scientists and theologians are describing the same events. Scientists are describing Creation as it occurred on the material level — involving measurable energy forces and matter — and theologians are describing Creation as it occurred on the immaterial level — the source behind those energy forces and matter. It's an idea symbolized by the popular ornament that many people put on their car trunks, which depicts the symbol of Christianity, a fish, sprouting legs and bearing the name “Darwin” on its body. It's the perfect symbol for the breeding of irrational faith with rational science.
The idea that Creation is ongoing is essential to understanding that there is an ongoing link between us and God. It is not the case that billions of years ago God's presence was felt in the world, and that today we are abandoned to our own devices. If God's energy is continually flowing into the universe to sustain everything in it, including us, then this means that God's creative energy is forever flowing in and through us too. Our connection to Him is current. If we learn to see the energy flow coming down to us, in a manner of speaking, then we can climb our way back up that flow to be closer to God.
Kabbalah teaches us how to tap into that universal flow. The sefirot on the Tree of Life are the depiction of that flow of energy. They are the means to understand God and “travel” back to Him, and by becoming aware of the creative flow that sustains us and the world, we can grow closer to God.
It is said that God created and destroyed seven universes before creating the one in which we now live. Our universe, Kabbalists tell us, is based on principles of balance and harmony. In the previous universes, justice was too severe and the universes could not survive. They needed mercy and compassion to balance harsh judgment.
The understanding is not that complete worlds were created prior to ours, but that somehow, in the process of creating, certain things happened that caused Ein Sof to abort the mission. We could look at it as a series of false starts until slight alterations in the formula made the plan finally work. The implication is one of evolution on a cosmic level, of God getting the balance right.
Some Kabbalists explain it like this: When Ein Sof contracted Himself in the process of tzimtzum, He achieved the contraction by separating out the powers of Din (judgment) within Him, and concentrating it into one place. The power of this concentrated Din overwhelmed its opposite power (compassion) and pushed it out of the space. Din was not completely alone, however — there were remnants of God's other forces left behind that would be used as some of the mixing agents for Creation — but for the most part, this space was composed of Din. The space, then, represented an absence of mercy and compassion. The process of emanation that occurred next was a process of Ein Sof pouring a mixture of compassion and mercy back into the black space, thus creating a balance.
The Kabbalists theorize that God did not put enough mercy into the previous universes, and thus these universes could not survive. Judgment is imbalanced if not softened by compassion. Yud, the power that brings order into the chaos of the black space, represents an act of mercy, because it is helping to balance the blackness of judgment. Kabbalists consider the emanation, then, an act of love, because God showed mercy on this Creation by ensuring that it would have a chance to survive.
Why it took God seven tries before He succeeded is not completely addressed by the Kabbalists. But some Kabbalists believe the destruction of the previous universes introduced the idea of imperfection and mistakes into our world, and that of redemption. The number seven, as was mentioned earlier, is very significant in Kabbalah and points to the final redemption. Kabbalists believe that the final redemption, the return of the many to the One, will occur in the eighth phase of our current cycle of Creation (the cycle is counted from the inception of our universe, and each phase within the cycle corresponds to a certain number of years calculated by the Kabbalists). Many of them believe that we are currently in the seventh phase.
