Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology 9783110684285, 9783110684353, 9783110684421, 2020939307

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction An Unhistorical History of Tsimtsum: A Break with Neoplatonism?
Part 1: Tsimtsum and the Jewish Tradition
The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on Tsimtsum
Tsimtsum between the Bible and Philosophy: Levinas, Luria, and Genesis 1
Hasidic Thought and Tsimtsum’s Linguistic Turn
Part 2: Tsimtsum and Modern Philosophy
Tsimtsum and the Root of Finitude
Unfolding the Enfolded: Schelling and Lurianic Kabbalah
Tsimtsum, Lichtung, and the Leap of Bestowing Refusal: Kabbalistic and Heideggerian Metaontology in Dialogue
Taking Space Seriously: Tehiru, Khora and the Freudian Void
The Retreat of the Poet in Walter Benjamin’s “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin”
“The Kabbalistic Problem is not Specifically Theological”: Franz Rosenzweig on Tsimtsum
Tsimtsum as Eclipse: Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in Buber and Horkheimer
Part 3: Tsimtsum after the Holocaust
Tsimtsum as the Traumnabel of Modern Jewish Philosophy: Between History and Revelation
Tsimtsum and Political Theology in the Thought of Gershom Scholem
‘Abyss Calls Unto Abyss’: Tsimtsum and Kenosis in the Rupture of God-forsakenness
Traces of Tsimtsum: Berkovits, Fackenheim, Levinas
Transcendental Tsimtsum: Levinas’s mythology of meaning
Derrida Denudata: Tsimtsum and the Derridean Metaphysics of Non-Presence
Tsimtsum: Media and Arts
Notes on the Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Tsimtsum and Modernity

Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

Edited by Vivian Liska Editorial Board Robert Alter, Steven E. Aschheim, Richard I. Cohen, Mark H. Gelber, Moshe Halbertal, Christine Hayes, Moshe Idel, Samuel Moyn, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Alvin Rosenfeld, David Ruderman, Bernd Witte

Volume 16

Tsimtsum and Modernity Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology Edited by Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel H. Weiss

This publication was made possible thanks to the support of NCN Opus 13 Grant: The Marrano Phenomenon: The Jewish ‘Hidden Tradition’ and Modernity, registered in the OSF system as 2017/25/B/HS2/02901, and the Polonsky-Coexist Fund in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge.

ISBN 978-3-11-068428-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-068435-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-068442-1 ISSN 2199-6962 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939307 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Yu Heng/iStock/Getty Images Plus Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Preface Tsimtsum in Modernity: A Case of Dramatic Dissemination 

 VII

Agata Bielik-Robson Introduction An Unhistorical History of Tsimtsum: A Break with Neoplatonism? 

 1

Part 1: Tsimtsum and the Jewish Tradition Paul Franks The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on Tsimtsum   39 Daniel H. Weiss Tsimtsum between the Bible and Philosophy: Levinas, Luria, and Genesis 1  Reuven Leigh Hasidic Thought and Tsimtsum’s Linguistic Turn

 83

Part 2: Tsimtsum and Modern Philosophy Kenneth Seeskin Tsimtsum and the Root of Finitude 

 107

Alex S. Ozar Unfolding the Enfolded: Schelling and Lurianic Kabbalah 

 119

Elliot R. Wolfson Tsimtsum, Lichtung, and the Leap of Bestowing Refusal: Kabbalistic and Heideggerian Metaontology in Dialogue   141 Adam Lipszyc Taking Space Seriously: Tehiru, Khora and the Freudian Void 

 191

Eli Friedlander The Retreat of the Poet in Walter Benjamin’s “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin”   207

 61

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Benjamin Pollock “The Kabbalistic Problem is not Specifically Theological”: Franz Rosenzweig on Tsimtsum   219 Asaf Angermann Tsimtsum as Eclipse: Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in Buber and Horkheimer   247

Part 3: Tsimtsum after the Holocaust Przemysław Tacik Tsimtsum as the Traumnabel of Modern Jewish Philosophy: Between History and Revelation   269 Martin Kavka Tsimtsum and Political Theology in the Thought of Gershom Scholem  Simon D. Podmore ‘Abyss Calls Unto Abyss’: Tsimtsum and Kenosis in the Rupture of God-forsakenness   311 Michael L. Morgan Traces of Tsimtsum: Berkovits, Fackenheim, Levinas 

 339

Michael Fagenblat Transcendental Tsimtsum: Levinas’s mythology of meaning  Agata Bielik-Robson Derrida Denudata: Tsimtsum and the Derridean Metaphysics of Non-Presence   389 Christoph Schulte Tsimtsum: Media and Arts 

 419

Notes on the Contributors 

 435

Index 

 439

 361

 293

Preface Tsimtsum in Modernity: A Case of Dramatic Dissemination This volume is the first-ever collection of essays in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas and Derrida). The aim of the volume is to demonstrate that this seemingly obscure rabbinic notion, radically reinterpreted by Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century kabbalist from Safed also called the Ari (Lion), as the ‘contraction of God,’ played a crucial role in the evolution of modern philosophical and theological thought writ large – not merely esoteric thought, and not merely thought of Jewish origin. The metaphysical scheme, in which the original amorphic shape of the Godhead called Ein-Sof, ‘without limits,’ withdraws in order to create a vacuum which only then becomes a place for the created world, proved to be a powerful inspiration for a new theological vision and all its more or less heterodox variants emerging throughout the whole of modernity. Perhaps, even more than that: it became modern non-normative theology per se, inagurating its characteristic departure from the traditional theological absolutism, which portrayed divinity as eternal, immutable, and untouchable by the element of time, towards a new approach which emphasizes God’s inner negativity and crisis. The first scholar to draw attention to the secret inspirational presence of tsimtsum in European modernity was Gershom Scholem, who discerned its traces in the doctrine of Jacob Böhme, German Pietism and German Idealism, particularly Schelling and Hegel. Recent developments in the scholarly study of kabbalah demonstrate that this influence was, in fact, even stronger, deeper, and more extensive, and that it continues to the present day. Christoph Schulte’s Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung gives an impressive and comprehensive overview of the potential links and connections originating in the Lurianic theory of God’s contraction and branching off in all possible directions: from Christian Kabbalah, via German Idealism, up through Levinas, Derrida, Harold Bloom, and – even more surprisingly – the contemporary German painter, Anselm Kiefer.1 Our volume,

1 Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-202

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however, seeks to explore the philosophical and theological consequences of the doctrine of tsimtsum in a more speculative manner. While Schulte’s Zimzum describes the development of the Lurianic categories in the perspective of intellectual history, our anthology seeks to seize it philosophically. Such an attempt runs the risk of serious objections, most of all the reproach of ahistoricism. Many historians of kabbalah claim that the endeavor to read Luria philosophically can be undertaken only from a biased modern perspective that pushes Luria’s invention of tsimtsum into the realm of theoretical speculation, completely alien to the Safed milieu and its later followers in Europe. The fiercest exponent of this view is Moshe Idel, who emphasizes kabbalah’s resistance to philosophy and insists on interpreting it in harmony with its own mythological idiom. According to Idel, the characteristic feature of the Lurianic school was a deep hermeticism, completely uninterested in venturing outside, let alone influencing any external philosophico-theological school. There are many instances where Idel voices his anti-philosophical objection, but the following, in which he depicts the reception of Israel Sarug, Luria’s student, in Renaissance Italy, is particularly telling. Referring to the opinion of the Jewish-Platonic thinker, Leon Modena – “And I have heard, too, from the mouth of the kabbalist R. Israel Sarug, the outstanding pupil of Luria, blessed be his memory… that there is no difference between kabbalah and philosophy. And all that [Sarug] taught about kabbalah, he interpreted through philosophy” – Idel vehemently rejects it as improbable: Sarug presumably taught his version of Lurianic kabbalah without any philosophical quotations… Afterward, and apparently only orally, a philosophical interpretation was given. Yet how could Sarug offer a philosophical interpretation that had nothing to do with the original kabbalistic text?... [T]he insistence on a correspondence between kabbalah and philosophy stands in strong opposition to the Safedian reticence towards philosophy.2

More than that, Idel also claims that the ‘Safedo-centric vision,’ promoted by Scholem for whom “the gist of the history of Jewish mysticism was the triumphant conquest of the Jewish world by a messianically portrayed Lurianism” (ibid.,  257), is an artificial construct, most probably influenced by the impact

2 Moshe Idel, “Italy in Safed, Safed in Italy,” in Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, eds. David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 255–56.

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Luria had exerted, not so much on Jewish mystics across Europe, but on the circles of hermetic Christianity: It is a historical irony that Lurianic kabbalah, whose main founder insisted upon its esoteric nature and formulated a special interdiction regarding its dissemination, was dramatically disseminated in Christian kabbalah of the late seventeeth century, as the Latin translations of texts of R. Abraham Herrera and even texts of Luria himself in Knorr von Rosenroth’s Cabala denudata amply demonstrate. (ibid., 258)

To the extent that Idel was correct that Scholem’s more philosophically oriented presentation of Lurianic kabbalah was not ‘strictly historical,’ what does this imply for the present volume? While our focus is largely philosophical, we maintain that the results of our studies should also be of interest for scholars of kabbalah, and not just scholars of philosophy. For one, many of the essays in the book, while not restricting themselves only to Luria’s historical context, do indeed aim to take the results of historical studies into account. Secondly, far from viewing it as a departure from a pure source, it is precisely the dramatic dissemination of Lurianic ideas which interests us: a wide influence going beyond Luria’s own intentions and soon creating its own modern tradition on the crossroads of theosophy, theology, and philosophy, as well as Judaism and Christianity. We thus want to claim that, despite all its resolution to remain a recondite mystical sect, the Lurianic speculation proved to be simply too catchy, too modern, and too useful intellectually to lie low, concealed and withdrawn (as if itself engaging in an act of tsimtsum) behind the defensive enclosure which, resembling the famous ‘hedge around the Torah’ built by the early rabbis, might indeed be called a ‘fence around the Ari.’ Thus, while many of Idel’s corrections may be important, Scholem – being more (or less) than a historian3 – shows us a wide palette of tsimtsum’s possible

3 On the non-historical agenda of Gershom Scholem, who was more theologico-philosophically involved than he himself wished to admit, see most of all a daring diagnosis of Harold Bloom: “Gershom Scholem, masking truly as a historical scholar, was the hidden theologian of Jewish Gnosis for our time […] Rarely unmasking, Scholem sometimes hinted his truest desires. One of these hints is his sequence of ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,’ first printed in 1958: Authentic tradition remains hidden […] Indeed, for a host of contemporary Jewish intellectuals, the Kabbalah of Gershom Scholem is now more normative than normative Judaism itself. For them, Scholem is far more than a historian, far more than a theologian. He is not less than a prophet, though his prophecy is severly limited by evasiveness.” Harold Bloom, “Scholem: Unhistorical or Jewish Gnosticism,” in The Strong Light of the Canonical: Kafka, Freud and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture and Thought (New York: The City College Papers, vol. 20, 1987), 55; 76.

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philosophical applications, which still manage to inspire modern thought today: from Spinoza and Newton, to Derrida and Nancy. This oscillation or hesitation – between ‘building a fence’ around Luria and ‘opening the archive’ of tsimtsum, which would carry further its ‘dramatic dissemination’ – is also very palpable in the essays which constitute this volume. Some of our authors, like Idel, place more emphasis on the distinctiveness of Luria’s ideas and on the importance of appreciating them in the integrity of their original historical context– some, however, for whom “the Kabbalah of Gershom Scholem is now more normative than normative Judaism itself,” are happy to see Luria’s influence, however mediated and convoluted, on the seemingly least Jewish or even anti-Jewish thinkers of Western modernity, such as Hegel and Heidegger. But perhaps there is no need to create an unnecessary tension between Idel and Scholem. For the paradoxical – and most interesting – aspect of the conceptual reception of tsimtsum is that it did not follow the well-trodden paths of Neoplatonism (represented by Leon Modena), but attempted to give philosophical articulation to what at the beginning must have appeared as stubbornly mythic and simply unthinkable in late-medieval theological terms: the idea that God himself may be subject to crisis, harm, even catastrophe. It is precisely this mythical lore which first gave rise to the early-modern theosophical speculation (Böhme, Rosicrucians, Pietists) and then spurred modern philosophers to try a ‘sublation of theosophy into philosophy’ (Hegel), thus creating German Idealism. Idel is therefore right: the Safedian ‘reticence towards philosophy’ – philosophy as known and available in the sixteenth century: mostly Neoplatonism, with some elements of Aristotelianism – played a crucial part in the emergence of a new and alternative philosophical idiom which in its first few historical permutations remained steeped in theosophic mythology. But Scholem is also right: even if Luria wished to build a fence around his teaching, his legendary seclusion had an effect opposite to the intended one. Just as the Lurianic kabbalah passed into history as the fascinating account of the creation getting out of control and opening to ‘unintended consequences,’ so too was the manner of this passing: an unintended, wild, and dramatic dissemination that provoked the greatest minds of modernity to wrestle with God’s historicity, proneness to harm, and relation to finitude. Thus, the operating assumption of this volume is that while scholars of philosophy and of the history of philosophical ideas can benefit from reflection on the Jewish and kabbalistic sources of key streams of modern Western thought, scholars of kabbalah can also benefit from consideration of the various ‘unauthorized’ trajectories of Lurianic ideas. To adapt a phrase from Hermann Cohen, the chapters in this volume can be seen as exploring various historical permutations of

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‘philosophy and theology of modernity out of the sources of Lurianic kabbalah.’ By looking at certain modern ideas not as arising from pure autonomous thought, but in relation to a specific textual-conceptual heritage, we can not only gain a clearer sense of overlooked factors in the past development of these ideas; in addition, more conscious engagement with the specifity of tsimtsum can provide contemporary thinkers with new tools and perspectives for the future reshaping and reworking of these philosophical ideas. Conversely, by examining the wide range of philosophical-theological ‘fruits’ that Lurianic tsimtsum has produced, scholars of kabbalah can gain new insights into the internal dynamics and tendencies of the original ‘tree’ from which they developed. Even if the ideas of, say, Hegel, or Rosenzweig, or Levinas (or Scholem for that matter), do not correspond perfectly to indigenous Lurianic conceptions, and even if those authors had not all studied the Lurianic materials in the original, the former should not therefore be dismissed as of no relevance to understanding the latter. Rather, attention to the similarities and differences between the former and the latter can enable us to perceive some of the ‘actual potentialities’ of Lurianic thought. Discerning these dimensions would be more difficult (even if in-principle possible) if we restricted ourselves to examination only of ‘authentically Lurianic’ texts – and, as such, engagement with not-strictly-historical philosophical reworkings of tsimtsum can substantially augment historical efforts to arrive at deeper understandings of the earlier kabbalistic concepts. The essays in this volume, by examining the conceptual trajectories of Lurianic tsimtsum in modern philosophy and theology, thus place philosophical approaches in the service of historical goals, and historical approaches in the service of philosophical goals, with the hopes and aim of enriching both.

The Fruits of Tsimtsum What, then, is so special about tsimtsum in Isaac Luria’s version that accounts for its surprising career? Theologically speaking, it could be viewed as the first ever occurrence of the ‘death of God’: by contracting, God, the primordial Infinite, relinquishes absolutist attributes, retreats from being, and thus makes room for the creation of something radically other than himself: the world. Philosophically speaking, it could be the first ever radical implementation of the thesis of the univocity of being: by pulling in and limiting his original Infinity, God ceases to overshadow finite existence and grants it reality, autonomy, and freedom. For some, most notably Hegel, the ‘religion of the Death of God’ is coextensive with what he calls the ‘modern religious sentiment’ and its philosophical

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outcome in thinking under the auspices of the ‘speculative Good Friday.’4 And although Hegel explicitly means the ‘memory of the Passion,’ it well may be that, implicitly, he also thinks in terms of Luria’s tsimtsum: the other ‘death of God,’ which coincided with the first ‘externalization’ of the Spirit and the creation of the world. Bearing in mind that the Hegelian term ‘externalization,’ Entäusserung, is originally Martin Luther’s term for kenosis, we can immediately see the link between the two ‘deaths of God,’ Jewish-kabbalistic and Christian: the radical kenosis-in-creation as juxtaposed with (but not necessarily opposed to) the radical kenosis-in-incarnation. For Jürgen Moltmann, whose main inspiration was Ernst Bloch, already prone to read Hegel through Lurianic lenses, these two types of kenosis complement each other and only as combined create the unique strain of modern ‘death of God theology’: from Luria and his students, via Hegel and Bloch, up to Derrida, Altizer, Žižek, and Moltmann himself.5 For some thinkers, on the other hand, modern thought is coextensive with thinking in terms of univocatio entis: the thesis explicitly formulated by Duns Scotus, but perhaps executed fully, albeit implicitly, in Luria’s striking metaphysical image of God making room out of himself for finite being. Considering the fact that tsimtsum as such does not necessarily have to be interpreted as a ‘cosmic catastrophe,’ this gesture may be read philosophically as the ultimate affirmation of finite existence, in both metaphysical and ethical dimensions. And, because of this, it may also constitute a highly significant precursor to a secular metaphysics of finitude, already anticipating Spinoza – and thereafter Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, i.e., all those thinkers who openly admitted to being inspired by the principle of the ‘univocity of being.’ Thus, the two modern lines of thought, theological and philosophical, intersect at the point of God’s contraction: when examined through their ‘secret’ source, tsimtsum, they both suggest an alternative and far more subtle theory of modernity than the one offered by the dominant thesis of secularization. They suggest a complex a/theology in which God himself confirms that finite being – in contrast to a way of being that would aim to transcend finitude – is the most ‘legitimate’ way to be.

4 G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977), 134: “The feeling that God himself is dead is the sentiment on which the religion of modern times rests.” 5 See Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009); Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); Thomas Altizer, Radical Theology and the Death of God (co-authored with William Hamilton) (London: Penguin, 1966); Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

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Yet, the modern reception of the concept of tsimtsum, following the path of dramatic and unintended dissemination, is not free from controversies. For, although Scholem defined tsimtsum as God’s withdrawal ‘away from the point,’ thus emphasizing the moment of divine generosity, not all scholars agree that this account corresponds with Luria’s original intentions – at which we can only guess, considering the fact that he mistrusted written publications, and all we know about him is mediated by his two most distinguished pupils, Hayyim Vital and Israel Sarug, who frequently disagree with one another. After all, tsimtsum is also connected with the opposite connotation of anger and wrath, implied by the sefirah of Din, that of ‘severe judgment.’ We can thus find numerous occurrences of God’s contraction-in-anger and ‘to the point’: in the Lurianic heritage itself, as well as in Böhme, Christian Kabbalah, and Schelling, particularly in The Ages of the World. The concept of tsimtsum, therefore, contains a troubling ambiguity. Is it, as Scholem intended, a gesture of God’s generous withdrawal for the sake of the world – or, as Schelling envisaged it, a gesture of God’s angry contraction into himself, which removed his presence from the world? Are these two completely separate modern traditions of the Hidden God? And – can this difference be reconciled? As all the essays collected in this volume attest, the above dilemma is not the only aspect of tsimtsum which requires disambiguation. In the history of the concept’s modern reception, there emerge other important divisions: 1.

Between literal and metaphorical reading, i.e., ki-feshuto (Vital’s school) versus lo ki-feshuto (Sarug’s school). While the literal interpretation insists on the real restriction/depletion of the divine power which gives up on its absoluteness for the sake of the otherness of the world, the metaphorical reading prefers to see tsimtsum merely as an image which helps us to understand the inscrutable mystery of creation occuring beyond space and time. This difference can also be approached in terms of the modern theological debate between the partisans of analogy and the advocates of univocity. While the former wish to continue the theological absolutism in which God, despite all possible restrictions of his power, remains intact as the Absolute in his own meta-realm unknowable to his creatures, the latter adopt a new theology of the divine unrest which introduces negativity into the godhead itself. This tension immediately generates the next one:

2.

Between self-concealment and self-depletion. If tsimtsum is only metaphorical and God’s withdrawal does not change his essence, which remains immutable, then this gesture can only mean self-concealment, as in Moses Cordovero, Luria’s Safed contemporary, who can be said to elaborate on the traditional biblical motif of hester panim, the ‘veiled face.’ But if tsimtsum is literal, then it must imply a non-absolutist notion of God capable of sustaining

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a change – more than that: a damage. Depending on whether tsimtsum is only a self-concealment of God who remains unbound or an actual depletion/restriction of God’s power, there appears another controversy: 3.

Between the Neoplatonic creatio continua and the creative separation. If God remains unbound in himself and becomes bound only from the perspective of the creation, then the being of the world is constantly dependent on divine maintenance. But if tsimtsum truly creates a void which separates God and the world, then continuous creation is no longer possible: the world must be able to stand on its own and generate a separate and innovative category of being. This is also the point where the Lurianic thought must choose:

4. Between Nature and History. Those thinkers who tend to downplay the difference between Cordovero’s and Luria’s notions of tsimtsum remain in the eternal pulsating cycle of Nature: God alternately withdraws and expands, breaths in and out, simultaneously releasing creation into the open and pulling it back towards himself. Yet those thinkers who prefer to read Luria’s tsimtsum as a true crisis within the Godhead find themselves in a completely new realm: one of History understood metaphysically and absolutely as the time of creation, revelation, and redemption, which involves real change in the status of both God and the world. But if the latter – literal – reading is true, the Holy History becomes the centre of the new theological vision which then again vacillates: 5.

Between the cosmic catastrophe and the birth of the world. The Lurianic thought which chooses the catastrophic option tends to see the creation as the fall and error in the need of correction: the redemption subsequently means a tikkun as the return to the pre-cataclysmic integrity of the Godhead, this time immune to the crisis that started the erroneous process of creation in the first place. The latter metaphor, however, emphasizes the positivity of the passage from the infinite to the finite, which then becomes compared to natality: the Infinite cannot yet be said to exist, so it is only the series of crises within Ein-Sof which create a critical breaking point after which things truly begin to come into being. On this account, redemption would not be regression to the tranquility of Ein-Sof, but a progression into a future in which creation of being becomes complete. This difference in the interpretation of tsimtsum (as well as ‘breaking of the vessels’) often translates into yet another quandary:

6.

Between accidental and purposeful action. On the accidental reading of tsimtsum, God’s withdrawal is nothing but the expulsion of the ‘irritant’ factor which created a tension within the Ein-Sof: an attempt to get rid of

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the disturbance is thus a catharctic, semi-mechanical act which ‘creates’ the non-divine other non-intentionally, indeed by an accident. On the purposeful reading of tsimtsum, on the other hand, the emergence of the world expresses a pre-existent intention: to create the other which would serve as the mirror/ contrast to God and/or to gain self-knowledge. But the interpretation of the divine intention can also vary: 7.

Between self-cognition and self-sacrifice. This is a subtle difference, yet rich in consequences. On the first account, the purpose of tsimtsum is to initiate the process of self-cognition which ends with God’s gaining absolute self-knowledge. While the world was merely a subordinate element of this process, its separate existence no longer matters once the goal is achieved; the world, therefore, ‘returns’ to the divine pleroma and forms with it a new kind of unity, no longer to be disturbed. On the second account, however, the intention is different, and it is once again divided:

8. Between the desire to be and the will to invent the other. The desire to be means that the Ein Sof, the original Godhead ‘without limits,’ is not yet being proper and this creates a longing to become such: it thus makes the world by pouring itself into finite existence which it subsequently finds either a distastrous error to be cancelled (Böhme) or a chance to be continued (Rosenzweig). The desire to invent the other may be closely associated with the former, but it also stresses a different aspect of creation, which points to God’s original self-sacrifice for the sake of alterity – a motif which will put Lurianic tsimtsum in close vicinity to the Christian notion of kenosis. Most of the interpretations, however, combine the element of accident and intention, e.g. by delegating the catastrophic moment only to the ‘breaking of the vessels,’ and thus opening the play of creation to unintended consequences. This then produces the next possible bifurcation: 9.

Between the Fall and Felix Culpa. If, within this combination, the accidental element is stressed more strongly, the vision of creation tends to take the negative form of metaphysical pessimism which perceives the world as more a disastrous error than a chance for ontological innovation. But if the good intention of the original act of tsimtsum is emphasized, then the shevirat ha-kelim likewise becomes a kind of felix culpa that opens a radical dimension of futurity marked by both messianic hope and hazard, in which nothing is certain or teleologically predetermined.

The purpose of the anthology is to address all of these issues, by staging a discussion between philosophers, theologians, and intellectual historians who reflect

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upon the significance of the concept of tsimtsum in a broad range of areas of modern thought. Each author pursues his/her own interpretation of Lurianic heritage according to the options listed above, which can ultimately produce very disparate effects: a theosophic metaphorical speculation defending the prerogatives of theological absolutism, on the one hand – and a praise of the ‘dramatic dissemination’ of being in the form of a new and positive metaphysics of finitude, on the other. While the former group of essays contest the revolutionary character of tsimtsum and attempt to incorporate it into a mystical lore of Jewish-Neoplatonic piety, the latter group stakes on tsimtsum’s radical novelty and perceives it as a breaking point in the emergence of the modern intellectual world.

Synopsis This book commences with an introductory chapter and is then divided in three parts. The introductory chapter, written by Agata Bielik-Robson, “An Unhistorical History of Tsimtsum: A Break with Neoplatonism?” begins with reflection on Scholem’s attitude toward kabbalistic studies and argues that he was definitely more than a historian, deeply engaged in the speculative outcomes of Lurianic kabbalah, one of which may be a radical break with Neoplatonic metaphysics. The chapter outlines the space of the debate undertaken by the subsequent essays, by posing the main philosophical questions around which this discussion centers: to what extent is Lurianic tsimtsum innovative? Does it have a potential to revolutionize modern metaphysics and turn it away from the Neoplatonic tradition? And has it realized its potential? Part 1, Tsimtsum and the Jewish tradition, is devoted to the elaboration of the concept of tsimtsum in Isaac Luria and, subsequently, in connection to the Jewish textual tradition, from the Bible and classical rabbinic midrash up to contemporary Hasidism. Part 2, Tsimtsum and Modern Philosophy, tackles the development of the idea of tsimtsum in modern thinkers, from Spinoza to Horkheimer. Part 3, Tsimtsum after the Holocaust, deals with the period beginning in the second half of the twentieth century and venturing into the present and future. Throughout the volume, we have unified the spelling of the term ‘tsimtsum’ as the key concept and Leitwort of the book. For other Hebrew terms, we've allowed different authors to use different systems of transliteration. The first part, Tsimtsum and the Jewish Tradition, is comprised of three essays. In the first, “The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on Tsimtsum,” Paul Franks denies Luria’s concept of tsimtsum a radical novelty and claims that it simply reproduces the image of the concentrated divine presence that we already know from the classical midrashic collections. He also criticizes of Scholem’s thesis according

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to which Luria ‘inverted’ the original midrashic meaning of tsimtsum, by suggesting a different movement – not into, but “away from a point” – and insists that “it was in post-midrashic rather than counter-midrashic form that tsimtsum reached Lessing, Maimon, Schelling and Hegel.” While in the Introduction, Agata Bielik-Robson praises Scholem for his speculative daring, Franks questions his non-historical preferences (Vital over Sarug) and claims that we should approach Scholem’s definition of tsimtsum with critical caution. In the second, “Tsimtsum between the Bible and Philosophy,” Daniel H. Weiss draws upon Levinas to argue that the logic of Lurianic tsimtsum – at least in Scholem’s account of it – can be seen, surprisingly, as already present in the biblical portrayal of creation, in that both tsimtsum and Genesis 1 make room for the goodness of creation precisely as other and distinct from God. In accord with these shared conceptions, both tsimtsum and the biblical creation narrative can be understood as likewise sharing a critical orientation in common with Levinas’s later critique of the dominant tradition of Western philosophy. In the third essay, “Hasidic Thought and Tsimstum’s Linguistic Turn,” Reuven Leigh, following Franks’ critical thrust, challenges the idea of a dialogue between rabbinic literature of tsimtsum and modern philosophy. Leigh’s main objection is the distorted influence: “When rabbinic concepts such as ‘tsimtsum’ are considered relevant to the concerns of modern philosophy they are appropriated in a manner where they become severed and detached from the indigenous thinking surrounding the concept.” Without negating the influence which the concept of tsimtsum exerted on modern philosophical thinking, Leigh nonetheless questions the legitimacy of such ‘borrowing.’ The second part, Tsimtsum and Modern Philosophy, takes on the theme of the influence discussed in the previous part and develops it in a detailed manner. It begins with Kenneth Seeskin’s interpretation of tsimtsum in Spinoza, where it functions as a ‘root of finitude.’ The main question posed both by Luria and Spinoza is: “How can an infinite God be the cause of finite things?” By analyzing their parallel answers, Seeskin juxtaposes Luria’s uncompromising view of the absolute reality of finite things with Spinoza’s conviction that finitude is only an error of perspective – and, in the end, opts for the former solution as a more daring and fruitful venturing into philosophical modernity. The second essay, Alex Ozar’s “Unfolding the Enfolded: Schelling and Lurianic Kabbalah,” continues the motif of the passage from the infinite to the finite – this time in reference to German Idealism, most of all the thought of Schelling. By tracing the kabbalistic influences on the Schellingian system “under Habermasian inspiration,” his essay, instead of tracing the influence historically, “seeks the respective lights of Idealism and Kabbalah in their mutually refracting illumination.” In the next contribution, also drawing on Schelling’s appropriation of kabbalah, “Tsimtsum, Lichtung, and the Leap of Bestowing Refusal: Kabbalistic and Heideggerian

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Metaontology in Dialogue,” Elliot Wolfson compares “Heidegger’s conception of nothingness and the domain of Being’s withdrawal to the kabbalistic speculation on tsimtsum, the contraction of infinity to create the vacuum within the plenum, the space wherein what is ostensibly other than the divine can come to be.” While claiming that Heidegger’s direct precursor is Schelling, Wolfson also implicates Heidegger in the Schellingian paradox which seeks to account for the emergence of difference within indifference, but, in the end, that very possibility is subverted since the other is a manifestation of the same – darkness is an aspect of light, absence a facet of presence, evil an iteration of good.” Wolfson chooses to think about the status of the finite being in terms of a supreme paradox: finitude belongs to the realm of separation, yet at the same can be maintained in existence only thanks to the ongoing participation in the light of the divine. As creature, it is separate as participating in the differential distribution of the divine presence – and participating as separate in its own singular difference. Here continuity and difference form one pulsating totality which human mind can contemplate only if it maintains itself in this subtle paradox. In all of these essays there recurs the fundamental metaphysical question posed by Kenneth Seeskin: is finitude real or is it merely an illusion, an error of perspective? Can otherness be posited at all or is it only an ontological failure? Can there emerge an empty space within the divine pleroma or is it merely an illusion? While Wolfson tends to say No – there is no autonomous reality of the finite being – this problem is answered in the positive by the next essay, Adam Lipszyc’s “Taking Space Seriously: Tehiru, Khora and the Freudian Void,” where tehiru – the empty space vacated within the infinite plenitude – is indeed taken with full metaphysical seriousness as a force of separation which makes possible singular finite things. For Lipszyc, Luria’s invention of tsimtsum inagurates a truly modern  – and wiser – form of ‘theological materialism,’ free from the naivete of the most materialist thought which perceives space as a neutral container. By showing the presence of this dynamic thinking of space – first in Luria, then in Freud and Derrida – Lipszyc comes to the conclusion that “what arises from this process of interweaving is a truly materialist vision of space as making the finite subject and its finite objects possible while destabilizing their ontological status, a space shot through with anxiety, but also – with messianic desire.” A similarly positive account of tsimtsum as the passage from the infinite to the finite, which occurs for real as the metaphysical act, is given by the next contribution, Eli Friedlander’s “The Retreat of the Poet: On Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin’,” where the motif of separation is analyzed in reference to the practice of the artist who establishes the limit and detaches himself from his work in the manner analogous to God, who withdraws his presence from the work in order to release it as a separate ‘creaturely life’: “The

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establishment of the limit is ultimately tantamount to the tsimtsum or ‘retreat’ of the poet from his work.” But the issue is far from settled. The following essay by Benjamin Pollock, “‘The Kabbalistic Problem is not Specifically Theological’: Franz Rosenzweig on Tsimtsum,” once again touches upon the fundamental stakes around which the entire second part is organized: “Are self and world  truly  independent of God in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption? Or is God in fact the only true being in the Star, and hence the only being to actualize itself through reversals out of nothingness?” While Rosenzweig’s intention was to break with the Neoplatonic infinite continuum of beings, in which individuation and separation amount to nothing but an illusion, it may well be – argues Pollock – that Rosenzweig was not ultimately successful and that his failure can actually be traced to his philosophical wrestling with the notion of tsimtsum. After the series of essays dealing with the metaphysical implications of tsimtsum, the last contribution of the second part, Asaf Angermann’s “Tsimtsum as Eclipse: Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in Buber and Horkheimer,” analyzes the epistemological and ethical consequences of the Lurianic invention: by triangulating Scholem, Buber, and Horkheimer, Angermann argues that “similar to Scholem’s interpretation of tsimtsum as addressing the relation between God and humans, so shall Buber’s and Horkheimer’s concepts of eclipse be understood: their solutions to the epistemological and metaphysical problems depend largely on human agency and practice.” While modern instrumental reason forgot divine transcendence and unknowability, the concept of tsimtsum, reflected in the Buberian image of God’s eclipse, reinstates the moment of negative theology. Angermann’s essay already ventures into the third part of the book, Tsimtsum after the Holocaust, which concentrates mostly on the ethical dimension of the divine contraction. The caesura of the Holocaust seems absolutely crucial for the reception of the Lurianic kabbalah, as the concept of tsimtsum begins to play a new role in what Hans Jonas called “the search for Good/God after Auschwitz,” i.e., a new theological ethics which – thanks to the idea of God’s radical withdrawal – liberates the late-modern, both Jewish and non-Jewish, theology from the burden of theodicy. But it also opens Jewish thought onto historiosophical dimensions, which is precisely the subject of Przemysław Tacik’s “Tsimtsum as the Traumnabel of Modern Jewish Philosophy: History and/as Revelation.” By refering to Freud’s metaphor of Traumnabel, ‘the navel of the dream,’ Tacik assigns an analogously metaphorical status to the Lurianic invention of tsimtsum, which, as Scholem famously remarked, inaugurates the era of Jewish modernity. This is when Jewish thought begins to share the fate of all modern philosophy, i.e., must face the problem of ‘meaning in history’: “Tsimtsum functions as the Traumnabel of modern Jewish philosophy, namely as an obscure negative joint of history

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and thinking.” The issue of freedom and meaningful historical agency granted to the ‘liberated creation’ is also the main theme of the second essay of this part, Martin Kavka’s “A Political Theology of  Tsimtsum,” which addresses tsimtsum in the context of Scholem’s ‘pious atheism,’ a peculiarly Lurianic position which sees secular freedom as part and parcel of the divine plan of creation. This position, Kavka argues, translates into an equally singular political theology which “criticizes political Zionism and secularism, while also imagining Zionism as the framework within which the Jewish people, in the absence of God from history, have the freedom to  reinterpret  their own past and discover, through  testing those values that can ‘resist liquidation’ and most safely guarantee the future of the Jewish people.” The Lurianic motif of ‘God’s absence from history’ is thus highly ambivalent: it simultaneously ‘liberates creation,’ by turning it into a free self-interpreting historical agent – and encumbers the world with the messianic burden of seeking redemption on its own, without any ready clue as to the ‘mystery of evil.’ The latter aspect of this ambivalence lies in the centre of the next contribution: “‘Abyss Calls Unto Abyss’: Tsimtsum and Kenosis in Jewish and Christian Struggles with the Mystery of Evil,” in which Simon Podmore, inspired mostly by Hans Jonas, grapples with the issue of theodicy in Jewish and Christian post-Holocaust theology. By focusing on the work of Jürgen Moltmann – who in his God in Creation juxtaposed Christian kenosis with Lurianic tsimtsum – Podmore claims that “while the specific and disparate conceptual intricacies of tsimtsum and kenosis may defy elision or assimilation, the modern fascination with these concepts nonetheless reveals important mutual ground in which Jewish and Christian traditions might struggle, perhaps together, with the mysteries and anguish of irremediable theodicy.” The post-Holocaust Jewish theology, which had used the motif of tsimtsum, is then discussed in Michael Morgan’s essay, “Traces of Tsimtsum: Fackenheim, Berkovits, and Levinas,” which considers “three moments in recent Jewish thought where second-person encounters involve an element of contraction, withdrawal or concealment.” Once again, the ethical ambivalence of tsimtsum comes to the fore: while hester panim (concealing the face) as ‘God’s absence from history’ may be accountable for the evil of the Shoah, the moment of contraction is also a necessary ingredient of any dialogic relation with the other, making room for the other’s irreducible freedom. Tsimtsum as the model of dialogic subjectivity also becomes the topic of Michael Fagenblat’s interpretation of Levinasian thought: “Transcendental Tsimtsum: Levinas’s Mythology of Meaning,” which shows the crucial significance of the Lurianic concept for Levinas, despite his openly declared mistrust towards kabbalah. Just as the tsimtsum-inspired ‘religion of the death of God/ God’s withdrawal’ offers a subtler theory of modernity, it also delivers an alternative

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notion of the modern subject, strongly opposed to the Cartesian model of the selfcentered ego cogito. In his anti-Cartesian thrust, Levinas openly refers to Lurianic tsimtsum as the arch-model of ethical generosity for the sake of the Other. But Fagenblat does not follow this well-trodden path. His interpretation of Totality and Infinity shows it to be a revisionist struggle with Heidegger, where tsimtsum becomes a structural equivalent of the ‘withdrawal of Being,’ but then forces its own logic, more radical than the Heideggerian Entzug, towards the full estrangement of the Other and the creation of subjectivity as a response to this absolute strangeness: “This capacity to withdraw from signification while remaining of value, as a pure and entirely normative force, ‘renders concrete,’ as Levinas often says, the way of being as withdrawal and thus gives ‘ethics’ its privilege over being. The Other, then, is not the interiority of another person, like a set of descriptions or properties beyond my reach, but a way of Being as withdrawal, of separating by facing as Other and thus producing an ‘infinity that does not close in upon itself in a circle but withdraws from the ontological extension.’” It is not the Subject, therefore, which withdraws in order to make a sacrifice for the other, but Being itself in retreat, which makes something like subjectivity possible in the first place: it is Being itself which allows for the condition of separation. So, if the desire arises in Being to move beyond the fullness of participation or ‘simple presence,’ it is indeed hypostatic, because the Subject is only its product, not the original intender. This re/creative imitation of the divine gesture of tsimtsum as a ‘withdrawal of/from Being’ recurs in the next contribution, Agata Bielik-Robson’s “Derrida Denudata: Tsimtsum and the Derridean Metaphysics of Non-Presence,” where the Levinasian motif becomes further elaborated by Jacques Derrida, also in constant reference to Heidegger. In Bielik-Robson’s reading, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence should not be understood “as a ban on metaphysics as such, but as an oblique expression of his own highly speculative metaphysics of non-presence, for whom the thesis – il n’y a pas de horstexte – has nothing prohibitive about it; rather it formulates an invitation to think being as writing, being as a narrative, story, récit, which has its roots in the Lurianic kabbalah.” While in some approaches to the ambivalence of tsimtsum, God’s contraction is seen as the ‘root of all evil,’ followed by the subsequent series of cosmic catastrophies – Derrida turns Lurianic theosophy into an affirmative narrative where even the ‘breaking of the vessels’ is a positive act of giving birth to the radical otherness of the world. In Derrida, Bielik-Robson argues, the radical break with Neoplatonism, as envisaged by Scholem in his ‘unhistorical’ speculations on the Lurianic kabbalah, finally takes place and the old idiom of the ‘symbolic of light’ becomes replaced by a new and more adequate one: grammatology. This tendency to reinterpret the Lurianic ambivalence in an affirmative and demystifying manner also comes to the fore in the last essay of the book, Chris-

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toph Schulte’s “Tsimtsum: Media and Arts,” which shows the vitality of tsimtsum for the visual imagination of such prominent modern artists as Marc Rothko and Anselm Kiefer. Schulte enumerates eight stages of the semiotic dissemination of the tsimtsum motif – from the restricted oral tradition of Luria’s milieu to its contemporary media popularisation – and concludes by stating its ubiquity: “Today, all the eight stages of the semiotic history of tsimtsum coexist and are enacted and reenacted: Until today, the oral transmission of tsimtsum among kabbalists is practiced, but also the students of universities receive oral transmissions from their professors. Lurianic books in different languages and translations are printed and reprinted, along with scholarly books about the tsimtsum, with illustrations and without them. Works of art and music on tsimtsum can be used and reproduced infinitely by contemporary media. Almost all stages of our semiotic history of the tsimtsum today coexist in the Internet. The net turns the once esoteric kabbalistic tsimtsum into a universally known idea.” Schulte’s conclusion sums up very aptly the main purpose of this book: to put tsimtsum on the map of contemporary humanities research as one of the crucially influential categories that assisted the emergence of Western modernity. The essays in this volume originated at a conference held at the University of Cambridge on 31 May and 1 June, 2016. The final versions of the essays were shaped by the lively and engaged dialogue during the conference, and we are grateful to all who participated. We are also grateful to the Polonsky-Coexist Fund at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity for financial support, and to Lucy Cavendish College and Westminster College for their hospitality. Finally, we would like to express appreciation to Vivian Liska as well as to the team at De Gruyter, for helping shepherd this volume to publication. Agata Bielik-Robson Daniel H. Weiss

Bibliography Altizer, Thomas. Radical Theology and the Death of God (co-authored with William Hamilton), London: Penguin, 1966. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann, London: Verso, 2009. Bloom, Harold. “Scholem. Unhistorical or Jewish Gnosticism,” in The Strong Light of the Canonical. Kafka, Freud and Scholem as Revisionists of Jewish Culture and Thought, New York: The City College Papers, vol. 20, 1987. Hegel, G.W.F. Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977.

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Idel, Moshe, “Italy in Safed, Safed in Italy,” in Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, eds. David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope. On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Agata Bielik-Robson

Introduction

An Unhistorical History of Tsimtsum: A Break with Neoplatonism? The role of this introductory chapter is to outline the space of the tsimtsum debate, by posing the main philosophical question around which this debate centers: to what extent is Lurianic tsimtsum innovative? Does it have a potential to revolutionize modern metaphysics and turn it away from the Neoplatonic tradition? And has this potential been realized – or is it still a matter of future speculative developments? Gershom Scholem was the first thinker who emphasized the power of tsimtsum as a category that spurred modern thought to explore new metaphysical possibilities. One of his most intriguing hypotheses is that the Kabbalah, especially in its Lurianic version, sought to break with Neoplatonism, which it adopted as the most advanced default discourse of medieval metaphysics and simultaneously resisted as not fully suitable to convey its most important message. Scholem refers to this ‘most significant intention’ by calling it ‘mystical nominalism’: a view according to which the core of creation consists of concrete, material, and thoroughly individuated beings.1

1 Most likely the phrase  – der mystische Nominalismus  – emerges in Scholem’s Zehn Sätze, published in 1958, as the borrowing from Ernst Bloch whose Geist der Utopie appeared for the first time in 1918. There we read: “… modernity’s paths, the irreversible eruption of its mystical nominalism, have to be followed through to the end, or Egypt […] will again be enthroned”: Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27. However, neither Bloch nor Scholem explain exactly what they mean by ‘mystical nominalism’; we may only guess that they allude to the work of Gustav Landauer, who in Skepsis und Mystik. Versuche im Anschluß an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Berlin: Verlag von Egon Fleischer, 1903) presents a mystical version of the nominalist theology of Duns Scotus, which enthusiastically embraced the idea of heacceitas: the singular essences of concrete material things. Both Bloch and Scholem sense that this most innovative modern form of simultaneous materialism and mysticism has to be ‘thought to the end,’ but this tendency is resisted by the ‘Egypt’ of old metaphysical theories, most of all the hegemonic heritage of Neoplatonism with its negative view of the material individuation of beings. The only other occurrence of this phrase can be found in Leo Strauss’ letter to Scholem, dated 23rd March 1959, where, in reference to Zehn Sätze, he asks in the last sentence: “A matter of mere information – what is ‘mystical nominalism’?”: Leo Strauss, Hobbes’ Politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften-Briefe, in Gessamelte Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart/ Weimar: J. B. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-001

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In the seventh thesis of his Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah, Scholem states: Als das eigentliche Unglück der Kabbala darf man vielleicht (wie bei vielen nicht nach Hause gekommenen Formen der Mystik) die Emanationslehre betrachten. Die Einsichten der Kabbalisten betrafen Strukturen des Seienden. Nichts verhängnisvoller, als den Zusammenhang dieser Strukturen mit der Emanationslehre zu konfundieren. Diese Konfusion pervertiert ihre aussichtsreichsten Ansätze zugunsten der bequemsten und denkfaulsten aller Theorien. Cordovero wäre als Phänomenologe eher nach Hause gekommen denn als Schüler Plotins. Der Versuch, das Denken der Kabbalisten ohne Benutzung der Emanationslehre aufzubauen (und zu Ende zu denken), wäre die Begleichung der Schuld, die ein echter Schüler Cordoveros auf sich zu nehmen hätte, wenn es einmal einen geben sollte. In der Form der theosophischen Topographie, die die kabbalistischen Lehren in der Literatur angenommen haben, bleibt ihr sachlicher Gehalt unzugänglich. Der Widerstreit des mystischen Nominalismus und der Lichtsymbolik in den Kabbalistischen Schriften stammt aus dieser unausgetragenen Spannung zwischen ihren bedeutendsten Intentionen und ihrer Unfähigkeit, ihnen zu reinem Ausdruck zu verhelfen. [Perhaps the most essential misfortune of the Kabbalah (similar in this respect to many not fully realised forms of mysticism) was the adoption of the emanationist teaching. The insights of the Kabbalists were directed towards the structures of being. But there could be nothing more fatal than to confuse those structures with the theory of emanation. This confusion perverts the most perceptive kabbalistic theses when they are read in conformity with this most lazy and intellectually false of all theories. Cordovero would have fared much better as a phenomenologist than as a pupil of Plotinus. The attempt to think Kabbalah without the use of the emanationist teaching (and thus think it to the end) would be an expiation of the sin, which a true pupil of Cordovero – if there ever were going to be one – should have endeavoured. In the form of the theosophic topography, which the kabbalistic teaching assumed in the later literature, its content remains unaccessible. The conflict between the mystical nominalism and the symbolic of light in the kabbalistic writings derives from their irresolved tension between their most significant intentions and their incapability to articulate them clearly and fully.]2

The difficulty of this seventh aphorism lies in its use of conditionals, all of them in the most ‘unrealised’ modus irrealis: if only Cordovero had chosen ‘unhistorically’ to convey his message in the phenomenological terms, he would have been closer to the ‘realisation’ of his mystical-nominalist intention; if only there were ever going to appear a right pupil of Cordovero, and not just a student of kabbalistic history, he would have renounced the Neoplatonic garment of the misleading ‘symbolism Metzler, 2001), 739. But neither Scholem’s letter from the 21st January 1960, nor the subsequent correspondence, answers this question. 2 David Biale, “Scholem’s ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah.’ Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism, vol. 5, nr 1 (1985): 83, in my translation. In his commentary to the Zehn Sätze, David Biale, who finds this particular aphorism most enigmatic and convoluted, writes: “Perhaps the adoption of Neoplatonic language to describe a theosophy radically different from Neoplatonism guaranteed that the Kabbalah would reach a linguistic dead end: it attempted to express an inexpressible truth in language that could only be misleading” (ibid., 86).

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of light’ and given us a more ‘realised’ account of this peculiar type of mysticism where concrete material things actually matter; if only Plotinus’ emanation had not been adopted by the Kabbalists, the most ingenious and innovative content of their theory could have become more accessible and less mysterious; if only we, the contemporary readers of Kabbalah, were bold enough to break from the authority of history and dared to ‘think it to the end’ in the theoretical languages which appeared only later. If only… – as it is now, however, Kabbalah remains a ‘not fully realised type of mysticism’ which has not yet found its right medium. Its enigma – the highest mystery of sod – might have been less engimatic, if it weren’t for the wrong medium which the kabbalistic literature assumed to formulate it. This is Scholem speaking: not as a historian of the Kabbalah, for which he became deservedly famous, but as a radical kabbalist himself, trying to think the kabbalistic idiom to the end – yet, again, leaving it in the ‘unrealised’ mode, full of highly intriguing suggestions merely sketched in the conditional modus irrealis. Was he himself bold enough to break with the Neoplatonic hegemony in his other – not ‘unhistorical’ – works on the Kabbalah? Has he left us some clues as to how to wrench this caesura out of his interpretations of Cordovero and Luria? The main controversy of this book circles precisely around this point: was Scholem right in his ‘unhistorical’ conjectures or, quite to the contrary, does tsimtsum still belong to the traditional matrix of Neoplatonism, which it merely modifies and from which it can never be detached? In what follows, I will attempt to outline a Scholem-inspired, philosophical and deliberately unhistorical story of tsimtsum as a potentially revolutionary category which gradually realizes its potential the more it moves away from its traditional kabbalistic setting. Even if Scholem was already reading the Lurianic Kabbalah through the lenses of German Idealism of Schelling and Hegel (perhaps even Marx!), it does not matter: this hermeneutic ‘time loop’ only points to the astounding significance (or what the Germans would call Prägnanz) of tsimtsum as a philosophical concept whose potential we are only now beginning to understand and explore.

Luria According to Scholem Whether to their detriment or not, all kabbalistic writings are marked by an appropriation of Neoplatonic metaphysics which gives a high priority to the idea of emanation.3 God is imagined here as yitron, the Hebrew equivalent of 3 This and the following section is a modified and expanded version of the themes which I have alrredy discussed in my earlier essay, mostly devoted to the hypothesis of an indirect influence

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superessentia, Ein Sof, the Infinite or ‘without limits,’ as well as ‘Ayin, ‘nothingness.’ This divine source, which is hidden from any knowledge and can only be approached through strictly negative theology, emanates with the subsequent circles of reality which form a metaphysical hierarchy. This hierarchy is based on ten pillars of creation called sephirot, standing in two columns, left and right, from the highest (‘Ayin) to the lowest (Malkhut, kingdom). The divine light, overflowing from the hidden source of being (Ein Sof), flows through the channels formed by sephirot and thus differentiates and produces the variety of beings in the realm of Kingdom. But the lower it flows, the less perfect it becomes; the principle of emanation sees matter and the evil that pertains to the material form of being as the result of deprivation and distance from the origin. The further the being from the divine source, the weaker it is and the more prone to sin. Yet, Scholem claims, this quite traditional Neoplatonic chain of emanation gets broken with Isaac Luria’s invention of tsimtsum. Not all commentators agree that it was so path-breaking; some tend to see it as the darker, more Gnostically informed variant of Jewish Neoplatonism, which nonetheless maintains continuity with the idea of creation as emanation.4 According to Scholem, however, the Lurianic doctrine announces a radical break with Neoplatonism, which inagurated modern metaphysics of finitude and in this manner influenced German Idealism, particularly Schelling and Hegel. Scholem would always insist that, in Jewish theology, the act of creation is primarily a separation: that is, a creation of something emphatically and truly other of the Lurianic kabbalah on German Idealism, which was first articulated by Scholem: “God of Luria, Hegel, Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude,” in Mystical Theology & Continental Philosophy, eds. David Lewin, Simon Podmore, and Duane Williams (London & New York: Routledge, 2017), 32–50. 4 This critical view is often presented by Moshe Idel, who denies the Lurianic kabbalah the power to break with the Neoplatonic notion of creatio continua: e.g. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 197, but it also finds its exponents in this book. In their essays, Elliot Wolfson (“Tsimtsum in Heidegger”) and Benjamin Pollock (“‘The Kabbalistic Problem is not Specifically Theological’: Franz Rosenzweig on Tsimtsum”) question the idea of separation implied by the act of tsimtsum as metaphysically unfeasible. According to Idel, Scholem overstated the discontinuous effect of tsimtsum because of his own experience of exile which he subsequently projected on the Lurianic God as committing an ‘exile into Himself’: “The idea that the tzimtzum represents on a symbolic level, a divine exile into Himself is a fascinating speculative imerpretation of the Lurianic myth, and it became one of Scholem’s more dramatic contributions to modern Jewish historiosophy. However, despite the confident tone of these statements, Scholem himself seems to have been aware of their highly speculative nature. lndeed, in an early explanation of the emergence of this view he explicitly acknowledged that it was not corroborated by the Lurianic texts themselves”: Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors. On Jewish Mysticism and Twientieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 96.

Introduction 

 5

than God himself. Kabbalah offers two versions of the creation out of nothing, which constitute two opposing answers to the fundamental question concerning the nature of the first sephira, ‘Ayin [nothingness]: does it belong to the Ein Sof, the Infinite, or is it already something separate from God? The earlier solution, beginning with the speculations of Moses de Leon, which decides for the participation of ‘Ayin in Ein Sof, is, in fact, a very sophisticated variation of pantheism in disguise, which, as Scholem rightly points out, troubles all Neoplatonism, whether Christian or Jewish: it claims that ‘nothingness’ is a secret name of the Inifinite which is beyond being as we know it, and thus is a superesse, a hyperbeing which can be known to us only as nothing. According to this logic, creation is not at all separate from the nature of God, for it continuously participates in ‘the fountain of all life’: the secret transformation of shapeless nothingness into particular beings. And, as Gershom Scholem says, creatio ex nihilo then becomes nothing but a cover for the mystical theory of emanation: “In this way the theory of identity is given a pantheistic spin: the creation out of nothingness becomes only an encrypted code for the essential oneness of all things with God.”5 And in another place: “We cannot find here an authentic nothingness which would break the continuity of the chain.”6 There is no genuine separation; rather, as it was put by one of the Spanish Kabbalists from around 1500, Joseph Taitatzak, in a poetic formulation: “Everything lives in the palace of Nothingness” (ibid., 102). It is only the later solution, created by Isaac Luria, which, according to Scholem, gives true meaning to the notion of creatio ex nihilo as radical separation. Luria did not invent the term tsimtsum: the word had already existed and, moreover, also in the kabbalistic context.7 The first to introduce the midrashic concept of tsimtsum into the arcana of the kabbalist Neoplatonism was Isaac Luria’s older contemporary: Moses Cordovero. For Cordovero, tsimtsum is an act of God’s hiding, in which God withdraws into his secret and unknowable nature, choosing to show only his attributes of creative agency, i.e., the Tree of Sephirot that form the emanative back-bone of the worldly reality. God, therefore, reveals himself in concealment: these two agencies are strictly parallel and cannot be dissociated from one another. We could thus call it an aspectual theory of tsimtsum, where God changes aspects between his secret in-dwelling and his revelatory/creative action. But is it enough to give us “an authentic nothingness which would break 5 Gershom Scholem, Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1976), 268. 6 Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 99. 7 According to Joseph Dan, the term tsimtsum denotes in Talmud “the constriction of the shekhinah in the space between the images of the angels on the holy ark in the temple in Jerusalem”: Joseph Dan, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74.

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the continuity of the chain”? Or is creation only a different aspect of the godhead which constantly oscillates between ‘Ain and Ein Sof, nothing and everything, as if leaping from one to the other side of the Möbius strip? Perhaps it is precisely in an attempt to secure the ‘authentic nothingness’ that Luria took over the notion of tsimtsum with an intention to make it more real, or to use a contemporary philosophical idiom, to turn into a real Event: not so much a change of the aspect (or a Gestalt-switch), which still keeps the divine Infinity intact within the folds of its self-concealment, as the change within the Infinite itself, resulting in a true metaphysical catastrophe – and thus also in a need of a true metaphysical redemption. In Luria’s elaboration, tsimtsum is no longer just a concealment of God, a switch of aspects: it becomes a ‘contraction’ conceived as a radical transformation of God’s ontological status.8 The purpose is to square the circle of the creaturely nature of being as simultaneously different from God and yet linked to him by the very fact of creation. Tsimtsum, God’s self-reduction, is to account for this paradox and present nothingness (‘Ayin) not as a divine attribute of self-concealment, but as God’s first creative act. In the beginning, therefore, God created nothing: “in the reduction of the divine essence which, instead of acting outwards (as in the Thomistic formula of processio dei ad extra), acts towards its inside, there emerges nothingness” (ibid., 104). Only when God withdraws from himself ‘for real’ does a place of possible separation emerge, a room for something else: Creation out of nothing, from the void, could be nothing other than creation of the void, that is, of the possibility of thinking of anything that was not God. Without such an act of self-limitation, after all, there would be only God  – and obviously nothing else. A being that is not God could only become possible and originate by virtue of such a contraction, such a paradoxical retreat of God into himself. By positing a negative factor in Himself, God liberates creation.9

8 As Shaul Magid very perceptively notices, the kabbalistic speculation deals mostly with the conditions which must be fulfilled for the creation of the other/ the world to become possible: “The kabbalistic/cosmological reflection about creation is more accurately a discussion of protocreativity – the transformation of God from undifferentiated Infinitude (eyn sof) to cosmos – which creates the necessary condition for creation to unfold. Whereas Genesis 1 may teach its reader about the beginning of the world and God’s relationship to this ‘other,’ kabbalistic creation myths teach about the origins of existence, a phenomenon that takes place solely in the inner-life of God before any ‘other’ emerges… zimzum, which is often mistakenly seen as a creation myth, in actuality constitutes a myth about divine origins or, alternatively, the origin of the God who creates”: Shaul Magid, “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope of Reading in Post-Lurianic Kabbala,” in Beginning/Again. Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, eds. Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002), 164–65. 9 Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books), 1976, 283; my emphasis. The Scholemian emphasis put on separation

Introduction 

 7

This potentially catastrophic ‘negative factor’ in the godhead results first in the tsimtsum and, subsequently, in an even more dramatic Event: the ‘breaking of the vessels,’ shevirat ha-kelim, when the forms prepared by God to contain his creational word appear too weak, too tinged with nothingness, to withstand its power. Hence, the image of shevirat ha-kelim constitutes the theological model of the most antagonistic and destructive clash between transcendence and immanence: the moment of the most intense incompatibility in the very extremes of their paradoxical ‘relation without relation.’10 Everything that issues afterwards, the whole later dialectics of the post-traumatic reparation, devoted to the gathering of sparks of the divine light scattered through the material realm, belongs already to the redeeming work of tikkun. Scholem’s description of the Lurianic innovation is highly ambivalent: is separation and the ‘void of God’ something to be deplored and then messianically mended – or is it something to be affirmed as the necessary condition of a true creation? On the one hand, Scholem calls the divine trace a place of the metaphysical catastrophe in which transcendence and immanence come into a destructive clash: “the point at which the horrifying experience of God’s absence in our world collides irreconciliably and catastrophically with the doctrine of a Creation that explains why tsimtsum should be radically differentiated from histalkut, i.e. the divine ‘breathing in,’ which also appears in Luria’s vivid depiction of God’s life. If there is no difference, then tsimtsum becomes incorporated into the Neoplatonic eternal cycle of alternate expansions and contractions as we know it, for instance, from Nicholas of Cusa, where God breaths in and out: when he contracts, he manifests himself in the finite form as the world, but when he expands he appears in all his original infinity: “Considered contractedly, God is the world; considered absolutely, the world is God. Creatures, then, are theophanies: i.e., they are manifestations of God – or better, they are God in His finite mode of existence. Thus, every creature is deus creatus or infinitas finita – God in His created, finite state”: Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Metaphysics of Contraction (Minneapolois: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1983), 97. Yet from this seemingly very appreciative vision of creation follows that “if God is the Essence of all finite things, then finite things have no essence of their own, other than God” (ibid.; my emphasis). This double movement occurs also in Luria – and then in Schelling – but tsimtsum is a different manoeuvre that, according to Scholem, breaks with the Neoplatonic monotony of the perfect balance and introduces the imbalance of history. If tisimtsum is the emblem of the break, discontinuity and cutting of the umbilical cord, then it is irreconcilable with any Neoplatonic scheme of emanation which entertains the notion of creatio continua. If for Scholem, tsimtsum means anything in the theology of creation, it points to the concept of the creaturely life which precludes any continuous maintanance in being. It is a different – ‘birthing’ or emergent – concept of creation where creature is meant to gain ontological independence, i.e., ‘the essence of its own’: a view which Scholem attributes to the kabbalah under the enigmatic name of ‘mystical nominalism.’ 10 This phrase derives from Maurice Blanchot who in The Infinite Conversation praises Judaism for “holding itself in relation with what excludes all relation”: Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 127.

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renews itself” (ibid., 283). Yet, just a few lines later, Scholem reminds us that if it weren’t for the ‘creation of the void,’ the world as such could not have emerged; the void, therefore, is not just a side-effect of a cosmic error (as in the original Gnostic doctrine of kenoma), but originates from a ‘pious’ intention, i.e., has divine beginnings itself.11 This ambivalence is not just Scholem’s private hesitation. It constitutes the crucial breaking point in the development of the Lurianic doctrine which in modernity takes two very different paths: the religious-mystical reception which will continue its negative-Gnostic spin, on the one hand – and the philosophical reception, on the other, which, in the Hegelian vein, will attempt to sublate the kabbalistic theosophy into philosophy and thus deprive it of its cataclysmic connotations.12 Scholem himself is strongly divided on this point. In some places, he calls Lurianic kabbalah the best and strongest manifestation of Jewish Gnosticism which shares with the ancient Alexandrian Gnosis the unshakable conviction of the fallen nature of the creaturely world. Here evil is not just the Augustinian-Neoplatonist ‘privation of good’ (privatio boni), but the concrete principle of material being (klipot, the shards of the broken vessels) from which God had withdrawn his presence. The universe vacated by the living God is called in the idiom of the Gnostics a kenoma, ‘emptiness’ – and is contrasted with the divine pleroma, the fullness of being, life, and joy, which is radically lacking in the created world. On such a reading, Isaac Luria inagurates the typically modern line of thought which is characterised by the painful experience of God’s absence and the messianic hope of redemption which will bring back the divine presence, but only on the condition that the material world as such will be destroyed. According to this Gnostic interpretation: The emptying of the world to a meaningless void not illuminated by any ray of meaning or direction is the experience of him whom I would call the pious atheist. The void is the abyss, the chasm or the crack which opens up in all that exists. This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void – in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God (ibid., 283).

11 This line of thought is pursued by Adam Lipszyc in his essay, “Taking Space Seriously: Tehiru, Khora and the Freudian Void,” which gives positive spin to the concept of kenoma as the necessary ontological condition of separation. We will find a similar affirmation of tsimtsum as separation in Eli Friedlander’s “The Retreat of the Poet: On Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin,’” where the creative act, involving a necessary ‘cut’ letting creation go and thus be, is analyzed in a parallel manner in poetic and metaphysical terms. 12 This division is the main theme of Reuven Leigh’s “Hasidic Thought and Tsimtsum’s Linguistic Turn,” which very strongly contests the philosophical development of the motif of tsimtsum as detached from its original theological context.

Introduction 

 9

All of the essays in this book demonstrate the aptitude of Scholem’s thesis according to which the paradoxical experience of God as absent and withdrawn – for better or worse: as a cause for metaphysical lament for the abandoned mankind or as a joyful chance of liberation of the created saeculum – dominates the whole modern period, giving it a unique theological flavour. Theology and early modern history form here a mixture which cannot be disassociated, one flowing into the other. Thus Scholem, as well as his pupil, David Biale, speculate about the historical origins of Lurianic kabbalah and its unique messianic historicism, trying to prove that Luria’s vision of God as deactivated and dispersed throughout the material universe in the form of separated sparks is a metaphysically projected image of galut, the exile which Jews had been experiencing for ages and which became particularly acute after the destruction of traditional Jewish communities in Spain during the reign of Isabelle de Castille.13 The exiled God would therefore reflect the sense of hopeless diasporic dispersion experienced by the Jews, and Spanish Jews in particular, Luria’s family included. We could thus say, following Scholem and Biale, that Lurianic Kabbalah is the first typically modern testimony of detraditionalization, i.e., a destruction of the traditional type of community of faith: a predicament which soon would be shared by most modern men, undergoing a similar process of uprooting. If, as Karl Marx says in The Communist Manifesto, modernity is an era in which “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,”14 then the Jewish modernity, reflected in the Lurianic kabbalah, is a truly paradigmatic one, forming an illuminating example for all modern mankind. Yet there is also a possibility to see the divine ‘negative factor’ resulting in the tsimtsum and the breaking of the vessels in a more optimistic and promising light: not as the nostalgic motif of galut, the universal dispersion-diaspora of all things which can never find its right place in the created world, but as an act of what Nietzsche, already a modern philosopher, calls die schöpferische Zerstörung, creative destruction, in which the preestablished order of the universe disappears, paving way to a more liberated idea of creaturely life. The theosophical image of the broken vessels parallels thus the philosophical notion of the nominalistic demise of the universals: the destruction of the perennial divine order giving shape but also keeping in check the lower material spheres of emanation. As long as this leash  – or the umbilical cord  – exists, maintaining the intimate link between God’s creationist design and the actual created world, the latter can never become fully separate, fully emancipated. In order for the free 13 See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1982. 14 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel H. Beer (New York: Appleton-Century-Croft, 1955), 13.

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world to be born, the vessels/forms must break – and this is why, in this less pessimistic reading, the shevirat resembles more the violent ‘birth pangs’ than the Fall of all being resulting from the sudden death of God’s providential plan.15 For the world to be properly born, God’s perfect order must die – which also means that God must die as God the Father, God the Provider, God the Sovereign, who watches over his creation and keeps it according to his plan. When vessels break, time is truly out of joint – but that too indicates that this released temporality, now seen positively, becomes the proper element of the created being which gains an essence of its own. An essence no longer relative to and dependent on the divine eternity, but forming a separate quality of the finite realm with its own metaphysical role to play: the sphere of History. The world, discharged from all divine leashes and guidance, stands now on its own, but it does not mean that it is completely perfect. Far from it: all things are yet to find their right place in the ultimate rearrangement of being; they are all set on the move to form new configurations, and they cannot stop until one of these materialist constellations will finally manage to reproduce the lost Face of God. This is Luria’s theosophical symbol for encrypting the simultaneously troubling and exciting novelty of the modern era: the new historical dynamics in which all that was hierarchical and solid (alles Ständische und Stehende of simultanously feudal and Neoplatonic orders) melted into air and all that seemed perennial became temporal, earthly, profane, insolubly mixed with shards of matter. We will find something similar also in Jacob Böhme, who knew Lurianic kabbalah via its Christian appropriations and who called this ambivalent mobility of all things turba: chaos, trouble, but at the same time, pains of delivery. When overwhelmed by turba, the world is in the labor of nativity: it is literally being born. We could thus complement Scholem’s claim that Luria’s vision of the cosmic diaspora of all things mirrors the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the motherland of kabbalistic speculation, by adding to it a more philosophical spin: galut could also be a reflection on the nascent period of early modernity, this exciting-troubling nova era marked by both high hopes and deep unrest.16 15 See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 260–61. 16 On the ambivalent issue of ‘pious atheism’ as resulting from the Lurianic tsimtsum, see especially Martin Kavka’s “A Political Theology of Tsimtsum,” Asaf Angermann’s “Tsimtsum as Eclipse: Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in Buber and Horkheimer,” Przemysław Tacik’s “Tsimtsum as the Traumnabel of Modern Jewish Philosophy: History and/as Revelation,” and Michael Morgan’s “Traces of Tsimtsum: Fackenheim, Berkovits, and Levinas.” These four essays discuss the ambivalence resulting from the divine gesture of withdrawal: the possibility of the fall into the depths of godless profanity, as well as the possibility of freedom and the ontological self-assertion of the world. What, therefore, is the relation between tsimtsum and hester panim,

Introduction 

 11

Scholem’s Tsimtsum Scholem’s description of Lurianic tsimtsum accentuates the moment of God’s self-effacement, which suggests affinities with Christian kenosis: the divine sacrifice, self-emptying and self-humbling.17 Scholem defines Luria’s tsimtsum through the reversal of its original Talmudic meaning where it is occasionally used in reference to kodesh kodashim, the Holiest of Holies, in which God concentrates his presence (Shekhinah) into a single point: Here we have the origin of the term tsimtsum, while the thing itself is the precise opposite of this idea: to the Kabbalist of Luria’s school tsimtsum does not mean the concentration of God at a point, but his retreat away from a point […] One is tempted to interpret this withdrawal of God into his own Being in terms of Exile, of banishing Himself from His totality into profound seclusion […] The first act of all is not an act of revelation but one of limitation.18

The significance of this reversal cannot be overemphasized. We can imagine God’s autoreduction in terms of withdrawing into the circumference (as in Hayyim Vital), or, even without this striking visualization, as simply God’s withdrawal from being (as in Levinas and Jonas), but the most important aspect here indeed appears kenotic: tsimtsum is not a concentration of the divine presence, but the disappearance, deactivation, and weakening of God’s power to be and to reveal himself. Yet, Scholem’s understanding of Luria’s tsimtsum is, to say the least, tendentious. He clearly selects only one possible meaning of God’s compression as retreat and withdrawal: away from the point, so that God can make room  – nothingness – for the world to emerge as the truly separated other of God. This solution was favoured by Hayyim Vital, the founder of the ‘Eastern School’ in Lurianic Kabbalah, who interpreted the oral teachings of his master on tsimtsum the ‘veiled face’ understood also as ‘God’s eclipse’? Are they close or are they completely disparate in terms of meaning/intention – the former being retreat in kindness, and the latter withdrawal in resentment? The ambivalence in Scholem’s rhetoric could thus be seen as reflecting the crucial theological hesitation in interpreting God’s absence in the world: is it withdrawal or abandonement, tsimtsum or the eclipse (or, in Heidegger’s terms, Seinsverlassenheit or Seinsvergessenheit)? Here, the seemingly identical result – the divine absence – is caused in each case by a different agency: either God’s himself or worldly being’s. If it is the world that forgets and ‘eclipses’ God, then it is guilty of the Fall. But if it is God himself who wanted to be ‘forgotten,’ galut opens as a space of time, history, and freedom, which can only be confirmed by the divine verdict of ki tov: ‘yes, it is good.’ 17 On the affinities, but also differences, between tsimtsum and kenosis, see most of all Simon Podmore’s “Abyss Calls Unto Abyss: Tsimtsum and Kenosis in Jewish and Christian Struggles with the Mystery of Evil” in this volume. 18 Scholem, Major Trends, 260–61: my emphasis.

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as the voluntary act of the Infinite One who first gathers-in himself and only then vacates himself, by evacuating to the circumference and creating a vacuum in his wake. In Vital’s Ets Haim, it is stated: And when it arose in the Simple Will to create worlds […] then the Infinite tsimtsem itself at the central point within itself, at the exact centre of its light, and tsimtsem that light, and withdrew to extremities surrounding the central point, and then a vacant place and environment, and an empty space remained.19

In Israel Sarug’s version, which founded the ‘Italian School’ of Lurianic Kabbalah, the movement of tsimtsum is simpler and more mechanical than intentional: it is the cathartic compression of the Infinite which, by using the wrathful power of Din, the sephira of Judgment, withdraws into itself in order to release the ‘irritant’ and impure elements that disturb its inner bliss, and thus creates the opposition of inside and outside – self-contracted transcendence, which has gathered itself in itself, and dispersed immanence made of the rejected ‘alien’ substance. Moreover, Sarug tends to see tsimtsum merely as a metaphor  – lo ki-feshuto, i.e., figuratively – and not as a literal event marking a true crisis in the Godhead. For him, God does not create nothingness as a free space for another being, but maintains his presence in the creation; this decision of reading the tsimtsum in a metaphorical manner indicates, in fact, a step back towards the traditional Neoplatonic model of emanation.20 And even though both hereditary 19 Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, The Tree of Life: Hayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria – The Palace of Adam Kadmon, trans. Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padeh (Northvale, N.J. and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 1999) (Heykhal 1, Sha’ar 1, Iggulim ve-Yosher). There are three essays in this volume devoted directly to Scholem’s ‘tendentious’ definition of tsimtsum: Daniel H. Weiss’ “Tsimtsum between the Bible and Philosophy,” which affirms Scholem’s interpretation; Paul Franks’ “The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on Ẓimẓum,” which contests it; and Martin Kavka’s “A Political Theology of Tsimtsum,” which reads Scholem’s approach to tsimtsum in the context of his political choices. Paul Franks, most critical towards Scholem, indeed ‘unmasks’ him, in Harold Bloom’s vein, as a ‘non-historian’: “It should be recognised that, when Scholem made that suggestion and when he attempted to distract attention from Israel Sarug’s version of Lurianic kabbalah, he was not in fact operating as a historian. What is called for is, in the first instance, openness to the diverse ways in which ẓimẓum may be conceived. Only then will it be possible to have a well-informed debate about what is at stake.” 20 On the history of the concept of tsimtsum and the differences between the two Lurianic schools, see Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism, trans. Batya Stein (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 84–90 (where Liebes, elaborating on Scholem’s hint, also makes a reference to the second-century Alexandrian Gnosticism of Basilides and his image of the ‘non-existent God’ as the possible origin of the idea of the God who has withdrawn from being); Moshe Idel, “On the Concept Zimzum in Kabbalah and its Research,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10

Introduction 

 13

lines talk about God’s contraction in the traditional midrashic sense of the word ‘tsimtsum,’ it is only Vital’s variant which contains also its reversal, so strongly emphasized by Scholem; here, if God gathers himself into the point, it is only for the sake of literally giving himself away in the final movement. God, as it were, has to pull himself together from the vast expanses of the Infinite in order to give up on himself as God – the sovereign, the omnipresence, the centre – and marginalize himself as nothing more than a ‘circumference.’ He thus contracts in his divinity only in order to create a non-God, and then to lend this non-divine otherness all his being.21

(1992) (Hebrew); as well as Christoph Schulte, Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Jüdischer Verlag, 2014). 21 It is possible that the ‘gentler’ version of tsimtsum, in which God ‘takes in his breath’ and restricts his glory for the sake of enabling something else to emerge, derives already from Isaiah, as described by Elliot Wolfson in his interpretation of one of the bahiric texts: “The notion of withdrawal, itself withdrawn and thus not stated overtly, is a secret exegetically derived from the verse lema‘an shemi a’arikh appi u-tehillati ehetam lakh le-vilti hakhritekha, ‘For the sake of my name I will postpone my wrath and my glory I will hold in for you so that I will not destroy you’ (Isa 48:9). The plain sense of the prophetic dictum relates to divine mercy expressed as God’s long-suffering, the capacity to restrain his rage. The expression tehillati ehetam, literally ‘my glory I will hold in,’ is parallel to a’arikh appi, ‘I will postpone my wrath.’ One may surmise that at some point in ancient Israel the notion of a vengeful god yielded its opposite, the compassionate god who holds in his fury”: Elliot Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau. Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 132–3. The theme of ‘lenience’ towards men is also widely discussed in Genesis Rabbah (XIX, 8), where the rabbis quarrel about the meaning of le-ruah ha-yom, i.e., the circumstances in which God passes his judgment on Adam as now destined to die. Some claim that the judgment is mercifully deferred, so Adam and Eve have plenty of time and chances to prove their righteousness; some that the judgment took place on the Western side of Eden, the site of the setting sun which also symbolizes mercy – some, on the contrary, argue that the verdict was uttered in the East of Eden, the site of the rising sun representing severity: “Said the Holy One, blessed be He, to them: [He will die] le-ruah hayom, i.e. le-rewah ha-yom (after the day’s respite): behold, I will give him the day’s respite. For thus spoke I to him: ‘For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die’ (Gen. II, 17). Now ye do not know whether that means one day of Mine or one day of yours. But behold! I will grant him one day of Mine, which is a thousand years, and he will live nine hundred and thirty years and leave seventy for his children,’ as it is written, The days of our years are threescore years and ten (Ps. xc, 10). Le-ruah ha-yom. Rab said : He [God] judged him in the east side [of the universe]: Le-ruah ha-yom implies in the side (ruah) which rises with the day [i.e. sun]. Zabdi b. Levi said: He judged him in the west side: Le-ruah ha-yom implies in the side which sinks with the day. In Rab’s view, He was severe toward him, just as the more the sun ascends the hotter it becomes. In Zabdi’s view he was lenient toward him, just as the further the sun declines the cooler it grows”; my emphasis. We will find the metaphor of the setting sun as aptly depicting the process of tsimtsum in Derrida, especially in his ‘Lurinizing’ interpretation of Hegel in Glas (as well as in the Christian Kabbalah: see footnote 23).

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So, despite all the technical complications, which Scholem’s image of pulling ‘away from the point’ omits (at least in this crucial quote), the very thrust of Scholem-Vital’s speculation is clear: God contracts only in order to recede. God first becomes the point only to subsequently pull away from the point. And, unlike in Sarug’s version, where contraction is a catharctic self-purification of God who, as it were, shakes off from himself everything that bothers his inner state of harmony, Vital emphasizes God’s intention: tsimtsum is the act of the divine good ‘Simple Will’ – and this is only one step away from assuming that it was indeed God’s self-sacrifice. If we read this story through a Hegelian lens, Vital’s dual movement (first ‘into,’ then ‘away’) would signify the Idea-IntentionWill retreating into itself from the indifferent vastness of Substance and thus positing itself as the subjective pure negativity, which simultaneously indicates ‘becoming empty’ (Leerwerden): the Subject evacuates all being outside itself and, by becoming an abstract ‘I,’ ‘gives up’ on its own subsistence. But the Subject also leaves the trace of itself in alienated being – yet not in the form of theosophic ‘sparks’ scattered all over the world, but in the form of the memory which governs the movement of Erinnerung, i.e., Spirit’s coming back into itself: being ‘remembers’ that it came into being only thanks to the sacrificial self-emptying of the divine kenotic subjectivity.22 22 It may be, however, that even Hegel is less daring than Kabbalah in its ‘most significant intentions.’ The issue of the ‘mystical materialism’ following the literal understanding of tsimtsum is discussed by Scholem in his “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,” where Thesis 4 reads: “To approach the kabbalists as mystical materialists with dialectical tendency would be thoroughly unhistorical, yet not at all absurd […] The materialistic language of the Lurianic Kabbalah, especially in its theory of tsimtsum (the self-contraction of God), raises the question of whether the symbolism which avails itself of such images and expressions might not also be the thing itself”; Biale, “Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms,” 76. Biale perceives the above problem as the highest stake of kabbalistic studies: “Does a mystical, symbolic language merely ‘represent’ its subject or is the language an essential part of the ‘thing itself’? […] The specific problem of whether the Lurianic Kabbalah should be understood literally or metaphorically plagued all the disciples of Luria and continued to be a crucial issue in eighteenth century Hasidic theology (see Isaiah Tishby, Torat ha-Ra’ ve-ha-Klippah be-Kabbalat ha-Ari [Jerusalem, 1942]). If Luria had meant that God literally contracted Himself, then there would be a place where there is no God – a heretical proposition! But if Luria had meant such statements metaphorically, the whole system loses much of its originality and meaning” (ibid., 77). Precisely. But if Scholem was right in claiming that Lurianic Kabbalah wrestled with the Neoplatonic medium inadequate to express its ‘most significant intention’ (ibid., 75), then his unhistorical approach may indeed be more illuminating than a meticulous linguistic analysis faithfully sticking to the historical context of the Ari’s conception. So Biale continues: “If one can legitimately call those Kabbalists who understood the Lurianic theory of creation literally as ‘materialists,’ then it would be necessary to extend such unhistorical language and call them additionally ‘dialectical materialists.’ If God literally absented Himself from the empty space He had created, creation would have a

Introduction 

 15

But why does Scholem choose rather Vital’s than Sarug’s version? There may be three reasons, all interconnected. The first has to do with Scholem’s limited tolerance for theosophy: just as Hegel tarries with the theosophical idiom of Böhme, von Rosenroth and Oetinger, i.e., the three versions of Christian Kabbalah, Scholem tarries with the theosophical ‘darkness’ of Luria and tries to distill from his heritage what he finds philosophically most original and illuminating  – and this is tsimtsum as withdrawal, going-away-from-oneself (the prototype-equivalent of the Hegelian Aussichgehen).23 Secondly, Scholem’s phildialectical logic: the Becoming of the world would be the result of a movement of Being through Nothing” (ibid., 77). The anticipated result, therefore, is even more modern than the Hegelian phenomenology: it is the language of the Marxian Hegelian Left that planted Hegel back on his feet, thus purifying him of the last conceptual remnants of the Neoplatonic-theosophic hermeticism. This is exactly what Scholem aspires to in his deliberatly unhistorical approach: he wants to be to Luria as Marx was to Hegel within the same chain of ideatic influence, which started with the epochal invention of tsimtsum. 23 However, already the Christian Kabbalah of Knorr von Rosenroth, Francis Van Helmont, Anne Conway, Johann Wachter, and Henry More constitutes a serious philosophical achievement centred around tsimtsum as the most intriguing notion deriving from the Lurianic heritage. In this context, the most interesting seems the dialogue between Anne Conway, an enthusiastic proponent of the literal understanding of tsimtsum, and Henry More who rejected it as ‘crass.’ In her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Conway considers what she calls “the ancient hypothesis of the Hebrews” and paraphrases it as follows: “Since God was the most intense and infinite light of all things as well as the supreme good, he wished to create living beings with whom he could communicate. But they could in no way endure the very great intensity of his light. These words of Scripture apply to this: ‘God dwells in inaccessible light. No one has ever seen him, etc.’ (1 Timothy 6:16)… For the sake of his creatures (so that there might be a place for them) he diminished the highest degree of his intense light. Thus a place arose, like an empty circle, a space for worlds”; Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Alison Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10. The originality of Conway’s appropriation of tsimtsum lies in the way she accommodates it to the Christian notion of kenosis, but – and this is a strongly heterodox moment – shifts it towards the ‘kenosis in creation’: the ‘diminution’ which affects the Aensoph as God the Father transmuting into the Christ/Logos/Messiah: “According to the Hebrews, the infinite God, whom they call Aensoph, is said to exist outside the place of the world because a creature could not comprehend the immensity of his light […] Nor can he be said to exist in imaginary spaces, because evidently no space coincides with God, yet he can be said to act there through his own simple power. Whatever he does for creatures is done through the Messiah, who is not limitless like Aensoph” (ibid., 18). Conway also avoids the dramatic interpretation of tsimtsum as, in Scholem’s description, a rapid ‘creation of nothing’; she prefers a more gradual process of the ‘diminution of light’: “This void was not privation or non-being but an actual place of diminished light, which was the soul of the Messiah, called Adam Kadmon by the Hebrws, who filled this entire space […] This soul of the Messiah was united with the entire divine light, which remained in the void to a lesser degree, so that it could be tolerated. This soul and light constituted one entity. This Messiah (called logos or the world and the first-born son of God) made from within himself (the

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 Agata Bielik-Robson

osophical temper is modern, which, in terms of his kabbalistic theory, means moving away from the Neoplatonic henotheism towards more daring materialist vision of creation as truly standing on its own – and which, in terms of Christian theology, means the same as moving away from the realm of analogy, where tsimtsum, as well as the crisis in the Godhead, remain merely metaphors, into the realm of dialectics and univocity, where the divine crisis is presented as literally real (even up to ‘deipassionism’ or ‘Death of God theology’). What Sarug’s school regarded as a non-philosophical barbaric literality, Scholem sees as Luria’s greatest speculative achievement, securing him a precursorial place in the modern avant-garde championing the thesis of univocatio entis. He immediately senses that the Gnostic motif of God’s self-destruction, present in the Western thought diminution of his light having recently occurred for the convenience of the creatures) the succession of all creatures” (ibid., 10–11). Conway, therefore, wants to introduce a bold new motif of the ‘kenosis in creation’/tsimtsum, which she borrows from Lurianic Kabbalah, together with its tripartition of partsufim (Ein Sof, Adam Kadmon, and Shekhinah), and then present it to her Christian audience as the most convincing version of the Trinity: “This is the reason why the Trinity represents God. The first concept is the infinite God himself, considered above and beyond his creation; the second is the same God insofar as he is the Messiah; the third is the same God insofar as he is with the Messiah in creatures, with the lowest degree of light which is adapted to the perception of creatures” (ibid., 11). Henry More, however, begs to differ. In Questions and Considerations, a commentary on the Treatise on the Book of the Druze, an introduction to the Lurianic kabbalah wrongly attributed to Luria himself and translated by Knorr von Rosenroth, More writes: “Indeed, insofar as this Ensoph is of a necessary and immutable nature and everywhere similar to himself, how can it happen that he should withdraw himself from any point so as to leave a vast hollow in which there would be space for the creation of the world? This is as if to say that the nature of God is crass and corporeal and that the worlds are not able to be where he is”; quoted in Mogens Lærke, “Three Texts on the Kabbalah: More, Wachter, Leibniz, and the Philosophy of the Hebrews,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 25, 5(2017): 1025; my emphasis. More, therefore, stands firmly on the ground of the spiritual analogia entis against the radically materialist univocity implied by tsimtsum understood ki-feshuto, i.e., in a literal manner. As Mogens Laerke rightly comments: “More felt that the conception that God should limit himself in order to provide room for creation was doubly dangerous in that this doctrine did not establish a sufficiently strong distinction between God and the world while still in a sense evacuating God from the world. And this, for More, was nothing but atheism” (ibid.). Moreover, as a Cambridge Platonist, More professes his belief in creatio continua which, via the system of emanations, sustains the lower material being of the world in existence. In his letter to von Rosenroth, he thus states: “I should first note here that the word ‘to emanate’ should not be taken in a strict philosophical sense but should be understood metaphysically (lest imagination deceive reason) to signify only that all substances are created by God so that not even at the moment of their creation they could exist without him. But with God’s withdrawal, they would immediately disappear as a rainbow in the clouds when the sun sets”; quoted in Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century. The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 225; my emphasis.

Introduction 

 17

since Basilides, can be reused in a completely different context, i.e., as the foundation for the modern univocal metaphysics – which also bestows it with a new, fully original significance, unknown in the times of Alexandrian Gnosticism.24 But Scholem may also have an additional agenda: by overemphasizing the self-effacing moment of tsimtsum, he can be seen as attempting to conjure away the ‘Marcionite’ spectre, which had been constantly hovering over the ‘Jewish God’ in German Protestantism since Martin Luther, only to gather strength in the Weimar theology of crisis, represented by Karl Barth and Adolph von Harnack.25 In our context, it is essential to remember that this ‘Marcionite’ line was very strongly informed by Schelling and his rival adoption of tsimtsum: not as the kenotic self-effacement of the Infinite, but as the wrathful contraction of Godin-Anger, the hidden, irrational and jealous God the Father who forms the ‘dark ground of being’ and only then, in the second instance, becomes capable of the saving grace and love, by taking the form of Christ the Redeemer. The following quote from Schelling’s Ages of the World perfectly demonstrates his ‘Marcionite’ predilection to see the ‘holy and ancient one’  – that is, atika kadisha, the first of the divine partsufim – in dark, zornig, colours (the only difference being that, unlike the openly dualistic Marcion, Schelling is more dialectical: the hard ground of being is necessary to demonstrate the true power of love by contrast): Every single system acknowledges that the force of contraction is the real and actual beginning of every thing. The greatest glory of development is not expected from what easily unfolds. It is expected from what has been excluded and which only decides to unfold with opposition. Yet many do not want to acknowledge that ancient and holy force of Being and they would like to banish it straightaway from the beginning, before it, overcome in itself, gives way to Love.26


24 On the modern revolution in theological imagination, see Jacob Taubes, “Dialectic and Analogy,” in From Cult to Culture. Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Aleida Assmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 25 Scholem, who at the beginning falls under the influence of Karl Barth and Adolf von Harnack, gradually distances himself from their Marcion-inspired theology: in Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism, he calls Marcion openly an ‘anti-Jewish Gnostic’ and his metaphysical dualism ‘unthinkable for Jews” (Scholem, Major Trends, 65) and earlier, in the open letter, attacks Hans Joachim Schoeps for his wrong – implicitly Marcionite – interpretation of Franz Kafka as a ‘Barthianism without mediator,’ which gives in too much into a ‘Protestant terminology’: Gershom Scholem, “Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit,” in Briefe, vol. 1 (1914–1947), ed. Itta Shedletzky (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 486. 26 F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, (version 1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 107. On the affinities between the kabbalistic and the Schellingian philosophical imagery, see also Alex Ozar’s “Unfolding the Enfolded: Schelling and Lurianic Kabbalah” in this volume.

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 Agata Bielik-Robson

Although Scholem does not mention the word ‘kenosis’ in reference to Lurianic tsimtsum, his reading may indeed be a provocation against the Protestant milieu; while Sarug’s interpretation lends itself as a possible canvas for Schelling’s ‘Marcionism,’ Vital’s rendering, to the contrary, ruins the convenient representation of the First Person of the Trinity as the severe and hidden Sovereign-Creator who guards being ‘jealously.’ Scholem’s insistence on the ‘withdrawal from being’ as the kenotic version of creation imputes loving grace and good will already to the original ‘Jewish God,’ thus relieving him of the Schellingian label of ‘irrationality,’ or even ‘madness,’ which reserves kenosis only to the Second Movement of the revelatory love. In the end, therefore, tsimtsum as ‘compression’ lends itself to two very different imaginary understandings: either hardening or diminution. Putting all kabbalistic technicalities aside, and their often contradictory interplay between concentration and retreat, what really matters is the ultimate significance of this gesture: either ‘kenotic love’ or ‘wrathful jealousy,’ which may also be regarded as the most fundamental difference between Hegel and Schelling. However, in his lectures from 1830, Schelling dismisses this difference, treating Hegel as just a minor commentator of Böhme, possibly lesser than himself. He refuses to acknowledge the difference between “God vomiting himself into nature,” which may indeed derive from Sarug’s ‘mechanical’ version of tsimtsum, and “God releasing nature [from himself],” which, closer to Vital (and Scholem), talks about the intentional self-limitation of divine freedom and the emergence of the autonomous Freiraum of being.27 Yet, the difference is absolutely essential. In the former case, the world is simply removed from the self-contracting Godhead and enjoys a dubious independence of a ‘spittle,’ called by Schelling der Abfall, the garbage falling off from the Absolute. In the latter case, the world is granted ontological autonomy and importance, completely and literally univocal with the existence of God and as such indispensable in the history of his self-transformation. Perhaps, then, it is because of the ‘Marcionite’ leaning of Protestant esotericism that, in the translation of Luria’s ambivalence into the idiom of 27 Quot. in Glenn Alexander Magee, “Hegel’s Reception of Jacob Boehme,” in An Introduction to Jacob Boehme. Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, eds. Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei (London: Routledge, 2014), 262. In Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Magee in fact fully confirms the Sarug-Böhme-Schelling lineage, where contraction becomes the root of all evil: “Given that Din is the origin of evil, God’s contraction is the root of all evil. Luria’s follower Israel Sarug […] speaks of Ein-Sof before the tsimtsum in a way which is even more strikingly Böhmean”; Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (New York, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 229. Vital, on the other hand, either does not mention the ‘roots of Din,’ or reinterprets this motif by suggesting that, in accordance with Isaiah, God not so much withdraws in anger as withdraws his anger, so the creation can come out as an autonomous being and enjoy the divine tolerance.

Introduction 

 19

Christian kabbalah, from Böhme up to Schelling, the kenotic aspect of God’s self-withdrawal becomes underplayed at the expense of God’s Zorn. Even Hegel, who in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History quotes kabbalah apparently only according to its Lurianic version (as related by Brucker), explicitly repeats the same misreading. Yet it may also be shown that implicitly he follows the logic of the other Luria that he had never known directly: the logic that is much more in harmony with what he himself calls approvingly “modern age and its religion.”28 In his unique vision of God’s self-contraction – not at the point, but away from the point – Luria, as reconstructed by Scholem, pioneers the new modern religious sensibility of Shekhinah-Spirit which, as Hegel puts it in the preface to Phenomenology, abides only in and through its externality (Entäusserung), by restlessly ‘tarrying with the negative,’ that is, with extreme otherness of sheer finitude and materiality, which exposes it to constant risk: But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself […] Spirit is the power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. (ibid., 19; my emphasis)

This new religion, therefore, is something other than the traditional Christianity of love, which inspired Hegel in his early theological writings – just as in the case of Luria, it is no longer the traditionalist Judaism of law. The new concept emerges here as pivotal: the heavy labouring of the Spirit which has work to do and will not cease its mental fight until it transforms the world which had arisen as God’s other but also, simultaneously, as God’s new identity in the making, his new realm of becoming. The purpose of the Spirit is to convert what “barely is” (ibid., 19) – the immediacy of finitude – into proper being and thus to complete the act of creation. The Spirit, therefore, has to storm through the dispersed and disoriented material realm in order to turn it into a free, conscious and self-assertive mode of existence. This work – this serious task as opposed to the inner play of love within the Absolute conceived ‘analogically’ – is announced by Hegel in the following way: Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the serious-

28 “…it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward”; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 6.

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 Agata Bielik-Robson

ness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative. In itself, that life is indeed one untroubled equality and unity with itself, for which otherness and alienation, and the overcoming of alienation, are not serious matters. But this in-itself is abstract universality, in which the nature of the divine life to be for itself, and so to the self-movement of the form, are altogether left out of account […] the divine essence is not to be conceived and expressed merely as essence, i.e. as immediate substance of pure self-contemplation of the divine, but likewise as a form, and in the whole wealth of developed forms […] The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end it is what it truly is. (ibid., 10–11)

The Absolute, therefore, is in the process of becoming  – as Ernst Bloch would have said, in his Lurianic variation on Hegel: it is not-yet (noch-nicht). Yet the vehicle of this becoming is not love, not the immediate and easy reconciliation, for which Trinity delivers the first and most paradigmatic model  – it is rather the labour of overreaching which includes into this playful threesome the fourth, more recalcitrant element: the World as material Otherness itself. The Spirit thus leaves the eternal pleromatic circle of the triune God and enters the risky path of working-through the worldly alterity: “For Spirit is the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining its self-identity in its otherness” (ibid., 459).

Modern Work on the Lurianic Myth According to Hegel, modern religious sentiment is determined by the ‘death of God’: the unique event foundational only to Christianity. But is in fact the ‘death of God religion,’ proclaiming the modern passage from transcendence into immanence, truly a Christian monopoly, as Hegel suggests? All thinkers associated with the ‘death of God theology’ – Thomas Altizer, Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Žižek – insist on the absolute uniqueness of Christianity as the only religion which harbours atheism structurally within itself and as such paves the way to what we may tentatively call the modern process of secularisation. Yet, as we have seen, the precursorial manoeuvre of ‘atheologisation,’ in which God loses his traditional absolutist attributes, occurs for the first time in Lurianic thought. Tsimtsum is the originary act of the self-deposition of the divine Absolute: the first in the series of the modern demise of ‘theological absolutism.’29 29 On the Jewish variant of the modernisation of religious experience, see most of all the recent anthology of essays: Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, ed. Michael Fagenblat (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

Introduction 

 21

To some extent, Christian and Jewish modernity go hand in hand. The main feature of the ‘new religious sentiment,’ shared by both and already well spotted by Hegel, is restlessness, die Unruhe: God, previously imagined as an eternal substance beyond any change, enters the path of a dynamic self-transformation. Previously a synonym of restful immutability, God now becomes identical with a restless process: a movement which aims at solving the tensions and aporias tearing apart the original form of the Godhead. This seminal change found a paradigmatic expression in Martin Luther’s notion of Anfechtung Gottes, meaning struggle within God himself – Gott wider Gott – but also a struggle with God, an assertive attempt of finite being to find its place in the new metaphysical arrangement, founded on the Scotus’ proclamation of univocatio entis.30 Yet, the very origin of this new theological vision must be located in the ground-breaking system of Isaac Luria, who introduced change into the very heart of the divine with the invention of tsimtsum. Luria’s theory can indeed be seen as the first occurrence of the modern self-occlusion of God who retreats in order to make room for the world and subsequently hides behind created being. By hiding, withdrawing, absencing himself from direct influence; by giving up on his sovereign – and, as Derrida would have called it, ‘unscathed’ – status of the original Infinite (and in this manner playing out his inner contradiction), God en-crypts himself in both meanings of the Derridean phrase: he lays himself down in the tomb/crypt and erases any clear signs of his presence within the worldly immanence in which he leaves only oblique and cryptic traces.31 30 For Hans Blumenberg, Luther’s Anfechtung is the very beginning of modern self-assertion [Selbstbehauptung], i.e., the existential attitude paralleling the nominalistic thesis on univocatio entis, in which singular creatures begin to claim their share of being against God and his absolutist privilege to be the only and the highest being himself: “… [God] left to man only the alternative of his natural and rational self-assertion, the essence of which Luther formulated as the ‘program’ of antidivine self-deification”; Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, transl. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 178. 31 The refusal to treat timtsum ‘literally’ and thus the preference for its earlier Cordoveran version, which is a characteristic trait of Wolfson’s and Leigh’s contributions to this volume, also has an equivalent in Christian theology, where the defenders of analogia entis protest against the univocity thesis as a ‘bad metaphysics’ which fails to see the proper meta dimension of divine being. According to Kathryn Tanner, the insistence on treating God’s and world’s existence as alike is a sign of the crude modern times which have lost the metaphysical sense of analogy and can no longer abide in the paradox of God simultaneously changing in time (creating the temporal existence of the World) and staying immutable beyond time (subsisting in its own ontological realm). Yet, despite Tanner’s judgment, there is nothing crude (or ‘crass,’ as Henry More put it) about the modern use of Scotus’ univocatio entis: in its most subtle sense, which we can detect in Luria’s modification of Cordovero, it is an attempt to transcend the dualism of the absolute and the relative, and thus grant the finite worldly being a status which will no longer be ontologically

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 Agata Bielik-Robson

The assumption of Lurianic tsimtsum as the model of the relation between transcendence and immanence, God and World, but also theology and secularity, is the common characteristic of all the Jewish thinkers who entered the twentieth century debate on secularization: Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Jacob Taubes, Hans Jonas, as well as Jacques Derrida, their latest heir. The defining feature of the tsimtsum appropriated by modern philosophy is the affirmative emphasis put on the passage from the infinite to the finite. Although in the Lurianic system, the Absolute, the primordial Ein Sof undergoes a dramatic limitation, in the modern philosophical sublation of the myth, this is not a cosmic catastrophe: on the contrary, it is a welcome move of creating room [makom] for the other of the world. If anything, it is only the next Event – ‘the breaking of the vessels’ [shevirat ha-kelim], in which the forms/vessels prepared by God to sustain his emanative light give in under its powerful impact – that marks the moment of metaphysical crisis. Yet, as we have seen in case of Scholem, even this crisis, announcing the end of all Platonic static forms and eternal universals (alles Ständische und Stehende of the timeless Neoplatonic hierarchy), can be considered as simply paving the way to a new understanding of being as univocally finite. God had made himself finite and, after the last dispersion of the eternal forms-vessels, exiled/emptied himself into the material universe. He thus sets as the spiritual dependent on the divine creatio continua. By contrast, for Tanner, “everything non-divine must be talked about as existing in a relation of total and immediate dependence upon God”; Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), 84. There is, therefore, no possibility of an ontological competition between God and World – and no need for the Lutheran rivalry/Anfechtung Gottes – because the divine agency does not operate on the same plane as creaturely agency: “A contrastive definition [of divine agency] will show its failure to follow through on divine transcendence by inevitably bringing God down to the level of the non-divine to which it is opposed” (ibid., 46). By dismissing all the possible motives of rivalry, competition, and contrast, Tanner also makes – perhaps an involuntary – allusion to the restrictive power of tsimtsum: “creatures can be said to gain those qualities [of power and efficacy] not in the degree God’s agency is restricted, but in the degree God’s creative agency is extended to them” (ibid., 85; my emphasis). As Simeon Zahl, himself defending Luther, nicely sums up the whole discussion: “In Tanner’s view, then, the contrastive accounts of divine and human agency that theologians have presupposed ‘from the time of the Reformation’ are built upon a fundamental philosophical and theological mistake: ‘To exclude genuine created efficacy as a possible direct effect of God’s agency is to misunderstand […] the nature of transcendence implied by the supremacy, sovereignty and holiness of God.’”: Simeon Zahl, “Non-Competitive Agency and Luther’s Experiential Argument Against Virtue,” Modern Theology, vol. 35, nr 2(2019): 201. But once we begin to question the traditional absolutist attributes of God – “supremacy, sovereignty and holiness” – and introduce, after Luria, into the godhead a moment of essential ‘unrest,’ the neat structure of the analogia entis reasoning breaks. It is not a question of misunderstanding the nature of transcendence – it is a question of perceiving this nature in a completely new theological light.

Introduction 

 23

Platonic sun and enters the material ‘night of the world’ in the form of scattered sparks and oblique traces. We have also seen how the Scholemian image of the Lurianic ‘liberated creation’ resurfaced in Hegel, who concludes his Phenomenology with the last lines of Schiller’s poem – “Only ‘from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude’”32  – which indicates that from now on the infinite can only be interpreted as the community of finite spirits that recreate the divine Gestalt, yet without restoring the Absolute to its original ontological infinity. Modern onto-theology, therefore, is all about finite being, and univocatio entis simply means the absolute rule of finitude. This, for Jean-Luc Nancy, is the ultimate sense or ‘dis-enclosure’ of Christianity as the religion of the ‘death of God’: sealing the metaphysical passage from infinite to finite being, where even – or most of all – God cannot enjoy infinite existence, but undergoes the paradigmatic ‘exposure,’ thus becoming an ontological model for all other beings.33 For Derrida, on the other hand, this passage, although related to the ‘death of God’ as the Sovereign and Infinite, does not necessarily have to be thought in the Christian way of kenosis: without automatically connotating ‘negativity’ of Passion, sacrifice and self-offering, deep down it merely announces that, in modernity, God ‘a/ theologizes’ himself, because he is no longer thought in terms of ‘the unscathed Absolute’ [indemne] – the sovereign, infinite, eternal, unchanging, invulnerable,

32 Hegel, Phenomenology, 493. 33 We also find a version of tsimtsum in Nancy which is close to Agamben’s idea of radical profanation: God dies as God and in this manner withdraws his sacredness from being, which is now abandoned to the materialist status of the profane. The withdrawal is thus neither a creation of the void, nor the split between substance and subject, but the radical emptying of the world from the divine element: the birth of the world as, literally, God’s dead body – hoc est enim corpus meum – bereft of his living spirit. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 147, as well as Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 63: “Thus, indeed, he’s the one who’s exposing himself dead like the world of bodies […] In other words: no God, not even gods, just places. Places: divine through an opening whereby the whole ‘divine’ collapses and withdraws, leaving the world of our bodies bare. Places of bareness, of destitution, place of limon terrae.” But the most direct reference to tsimtsum appears in Nancy’s essay on globalisation, where it is understood as God’s self-destruction: “the ‘nothing’ of creation is the one that opens in God when God withdraws in it […] God annihilates itself [s’anéantit] as a ‘self’ or as a distinct being in order to ‘withdraw’ in its act – which makes the opening of the world”: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 70.

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safe and sound, whole and holy – but is given over to the continuous ‘trial’ of finite immanent reality.34 Derrida’s deeply affirmative reading of the tsimtsum model, where affirmation precedes negation,35 is the crowning of a long development within the secret Lurianic line of thinkers who – to use Blumenberg’s phrase – had been working on the ‘Lurianic myth’ in order to adopt it to the ‘modern temper’ and unveil its ‘most significant intentions’ hidden, not unlike the scattered ‘sparks’ themselves, under the Gnostic/Neoplatonic garment of its inventor’s original idiom. Luria did not leave us much in writing, but from the works of his pupils we can infer that he tended to overemphasize the cataclysmic moment of the ‘breaking of the vessels’ at the expense of the positivity of tsimtsum. We also know that some of his acolytes – Israel Sarug most of all – saw God’s manoeuvre of going into hiding as a gesture of anger and wrath, thus confirming Blumenberg’s worry about the continuation of the ‘Gnostic danger’ in any modern theology of deus absconditus. Yet, the modern work on the Lurianic inspiration took a precisely reverse turn and by affirming the ‘hazard of creation’ produced a peculiar cryptotheological line of the self-asserted World: a thread already visible in Scholem, Bloch, Taubes, Jonas, and Levinas, but becoming fully explicit only in Derrida.36 This philosophical reworking of the Lurianic narrative begins already with Spinoza, where tsimtsum becomes an affirmative ‘root of finitude.’37 Such a reading was confirmed by Leo Strauss’ Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, in which Strauss grants Spinoza the invention of the truly modern understanding of the word ‘progress’ – a dynamic, open, non-teleological and hopeful process of the worldly transformation and striving, which never wishes to go back to anything that was ‘before,’ and chooses the path of proleptic ‘conversion,’ or, in Hegel’s

34 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 58. 35 “Negativities may ensue, but even if they completely take over, this yes can no longer be erased”: Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 593. 36 On the affirmative turn in the Derridean interpretation of tsimtsum, see Agata Bielik-Robson’s “Derrida Denudata: Tsimtsum and the Derridean Metaphysics of Non-Presence” in this volume, where Knorr von Rosenroth’s formula of denudatio is applied precisely to describe Derrida’s efforts to strip the kabbalistic discourse of its Neoplatonic ‘outer garment’ and ‘denude’ its grammatological core. Michael Fagenblat’s essay in this volume, devoted to Levinas, also goes in this positive direction. 37 See Kenneth Seeskin, “Tsimtsum and The Root of Finitude,” in this volume, which stages an illuminating confrontation between Luria and Spinoza. And although Seeskin reproaches Spinoza for being not radical enough (in fact, less radical than his kabbalistic precursor), tsimtsum indeed surfaces in his Ethics as the positive condition of the emergence of finite singular being.

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 25

words, the power which “converts nothing into being.”38 Though Strauss does not make this connection explicitly, we can nonetheless interpret the epochal change he notices in Spinoza as the crucial moment of the work on the Lurianic myth: His speculation resembles Neo-Platonism; he understands all things as proceeding from, not made or created by, a single being or origin; the One is the sole ground of the Many. Yet he no longer regards this process as a descent or decay but as an ascent or unfolding: the end is higher than the origin […] Spinoza thus appears to originate the kind of philosophic system which views the fundamental processus as a progress: God Himself is not the ens perfectissimum. In this most important aspect he prepares German idealism.39

Luria’s modification of Neoplatonism is thus crucially modified once more: emanation is no longer a fall of beings into lower material regions of existence, but, to the contrary, a proper expansion or, as Deleuze would call it, an expression of God’s “magical power to convert nothing into being”; the created world is thus ‘greater’ than God himself alone. And if Strauss’ last statement may not be completely true in the case of Schelling, it certainly is in the case of Hegel. Scholem’s classical account of Lurianic tsimtsum is still ambivalent and hesitant, because he, visibly torn between his role as a historian of Jewish thought and his unhistorical speculative temper, wishes to remain faithful to the original doctrine, but Hans Jonas’ philosophical paraphrase of the ‘Lurianic myth,’ deriving from his essay “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” is already free of both the ‘Gnostic lament,’ deploring the cosmic catastrophe of creation, and the ‘Gnostic danger,’ exposing creation to some hidden, not necessarily benign power. What Jonas offers is a ‘Lurianic myth’ reworked according to the requirements of the ‘modern temper’ which asserts finite existence and thus rejects immortality, ahistorical vision of the cosmos, and divine providence. He interprets tsimtsum as the self-limitation of the divine which deliberately gives itself over to chance, to the risk of becoming. God, emptied and contracted, becomes an Event of past-perfect history, an immemorial arche-trace; always already there in the distant moment of creative decision, but no longer retrievable in the present state of creation. But as a trace of transcendence – or, in Jonas’ own terms, as ‘transcendence awakened in the immanence’ – God remains a sense/orientation in the world that makes us ethically prefer something rather than nothing, that is, choose the very project of becoming as a non-arbitrary and not fully contingent process, in which the mythic story continues towards its messianic fulfilment (yet without metaphysical guarantee). This

38 Hegel, Phenomenology, 19. 39 Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 16; my emphasis.

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is also why Jonas immediately insists on not conflating the Lurianic narrative with pantheism, in which the World, fully identical with God, is already complete: In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give itself over to chance an risk an endless variety of becoming. And wholly so: entering into the adventure of space and time, the deity held back nothing of itself: no uncommitted or unimpaired part remained to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the devious working-out of its destiny in creation. On this unconditional immanence the modern temper insists. It is its courage or despair, in any case its bitter honesty, to take our being-in-the-world seriously: to view the world as left to itself, its laws as brooking no interference, and the rigor of our belonging to it as not softened by extramundane providence. The same our myth postulates for God’s being in the world. Not, however, in the sense of pantheistic immanence: if world and God are simply the same, the world at each moment and in each stage represents his fullness, and God can neither lose or gain. Rather, in order that the world might be, and be for itself, God renounced his being, divesting himself of his deity – to receive it back from the odyssey of time weighted with the chance harvest of unforeseeable temporal experience: transfigured or possibly even disfigured by it. In such self-forfeiture of divine integrity for the sake of unprejudiced becoming, no other knowledge can be admitted than that of possibilities, which cosmic being offers in its own terms: to these, God committed his cause in effacing himself from the world.40

The apology of the ‘unprejudiced becoming,’ where there are no safety nets, no metaphysical guarantees, just an unpredictable sea of possibilities, is the strongest praise of contingency modern philosophy ever offered, thus completing the reversal of perspectives. Unlike in the traditional realm of analogy, contingency not only is not a weak being, dependent on the necessary divine one, but is now the only being on which the divine one depends. Hence Jonas’ Lurianic imperative: “It is not God who can help us, but we who must help God” (ibid., 191).41

40 Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality. A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, trans. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 134. 41 The positive reworking of the Lurianic myth, culminating in Jonas, has also been confirmed by Hannah Arendt who, usually critical of mysticism as an anti-worldly and anti-political way of life, became fascinated with the Sabbatian application of Lurianic metaphysics after she learned it from Scholem’s Major Trends. In 1944, in an attempt to promote the English translation of Scholem’s work, Arendt wrote an essay, “Jewish Religion Revised,” in which she perceives the Lurianic type of mysticism as a welcome exception leading to active messianic concern for this world as opposed to the traditional forms of the acosmic religious attitude. It is, after all, not an accident that Jonas’ essay on the only possible ‘God after Auschwitz’ was dedicated to ‘H. A.’ – the initials most probably suggesting Hannah Arendt. On the reception of Scholem’s writings on Jewish messianism by Arendt, before their fall-out after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, see most of all Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife. A Tenuous Legacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), especially the chapter “Tradition and the Hidden: Arendt Reading Scholem,” 17–25.

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 27

But – must we? Where does this obligation come from and how can it be reconciled with ‘unprejudiced becoming’? The modern story of tsimtsum involves constant overlapping with the Christian notion of divine self-humbling, especially in Hegel’s heterodox version of the ‘kenosis in creation,’ where the term Entaüsserung rings simultaneously with Lutheran ‘self-emptying’ and strictly philosophical ‘externalisation.’ Still in Jonas, the divine ‘giving itself over’ to risk and chance sounds equally self-sacrificial: the becoming, therefore, would not be so ‘unprejudiced’ after all, but rather encumbered by a secret moral obligation to ‘help God’ to be restored to a new glory. In the end, however, these two theosophical narratives part ways – mostly thanks to the intervention of Jacques Derrida who, although almost never using the Hebrew word ‘tsimtsum’ explicitly, developed the most convincing theory of a self-retreating gift of being as alternative to the sacrificial gift of creation in which ‘God himself dies’ in order to let the world be.42 In Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Derrida severs the kenotic link between tsimtsum and moral obligation, giving created being a generous permission to forget, which only now finally lets beings be: As the condition for a gift to be given, this forgetting must be radical not only on the part of the donee. It is also on the part of the donor ‘subject’ that the gift not only must not be repayed but must not be kept in memory, retained as symbol of a sacrifice, as symbolic in general. For the symbol immediately engages one in restitution […] From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt […] The simple consciousness of the gift right away sends itself back the gratifying image of goodness or generosity, of the giving-being who, knowing itself to be such, recognizes itself in a circular, specular fashion, in a sort of auto-recognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude.43

In this dense passage, Derrida addresses Christianity in general  – and Hegel in particular. Following Freudian diagnosis, according to which Christians feel superior towards the Jews, who pretend not to remember that they have killed

42 It is by having in mind tsimtsum as the perfect non-sacrificial gift, that Derrida writes his commentary on Hegel whom he tries to read along a secret Lurianic curve. For Hegel, who understands creation in terms of the Christian kenosis, it simply must take on the form of self-offering: “The gift can be only a sacrifice, that is the axiom of speculative reason”: Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1986, 242. On the not so ‘secret’ dependence of Derrida on Lurianic kabbalah, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Assaulting the Border: Kabbalistic Traces in the Margins of Derrida,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 70, nr 3 (Sept. 2002): 475–514. See also my essay, “Derrida Denudata,” in this volume. 43 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 23.

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their God, Derrida presents Christianity as the religion of the mournful ‘memory of the Passion,’ which overestimates the obligation to commemorate the kenotic God and thus annihilates the very idea of the creaturely gift. The Christian God does not give, because he remembers his sacrifice all too well and demands the narcissistic return at the apocalyptic ‘end of history.’ What for Freud is the guilty memory of Judaism, all the worse for the fact that it is repressed and thus seemingly forgotten, Derrida assumes in an affirmatory manner, by reversing the value of this oblivion. For him, the condition of forgetting becomes absolutely necessary for the gift to constitute itself as such, i.e., beyond the guilt-inducing economy of sacrifice. Forgetting, therefore, is no longer a ‘category of the psyche’: “it cannot be unrelated to the forgetting of Being, the sense in which Blanchot also says, more or less, that forgetting is another name of Being” (ibid., 23). Forgetting thus acquires metaphysical – or rather, cryptotheological – features. If there is no forgetting, the memory of the sacrifice enslaves beings within the symbolic economy of restitution, or in what Walter Benjamin calls the suffocating Schuldzusammenhang (the net of guilt). Thus, if tsimtsum is to be reinterpreted affirmatively as a truly radical Seinlassen – ‘letting beings be’ – the donor ‘subject’ must be erased also from memory.44 44 Derrida not only criticizes Hegel and his mournful ‘religion of death of God,’ but also Heidegger, whose concept of Seinlassen is not yet as liberating as it could be. This critical line has been recently undertaken by David Farrell Krell who, in his meditation on late Heidegger (Black Notebooks included) points to Heidegger’s not fully reflected indebtedness to nominalist-voluntaristic theology, which bestows Being (or rather Beyng, Seyn) with an enigmatic power that certainly does not let beings be. The dark mystery of inscrutable omnipotence keeps beings in check even as it hides and withdraws: it seemingly vacates the space for ontic entities, but in fact always lurks in the letheic depths and does not allow for any ontological independence. In Heidegger’s thought nach der Kehre, this extremely nominalistic moment begins to play an increasingly important role. While formerly, Heidegger was ready to blame Western metaphysics for its willful Seinsvergessenheit, and imagined being as a vengeful power, ready to jump back and correct the hubris of oblivious mortals – later on he disinherited them even of the capability to forget and, in the gesture of the Asharite fatalists, made all vicissitudes of human history dependent on the enigmatic moves of Seyn itself, the unconcealment of aletheia as well as the withdrawal of Abzug. This, says Krell, is the canvas for the absolute tragedy, for, as Heidegger himself notes in Schwarze Hefte: Das Seyn selbst ist ‘tragisch’. This diagnosis chimes very well with Krell’s reading of German Idealism (most of all Hölderlin and Schelling, but not Hegel) which, for him, created a notion of the ‘tragic absolute’: the restless godhead that splits internally, suffers a ‘wounding,’ and then vainly strives to heal itself in the process of history, possibly to repeat the same tragic cycle again and again, thus succumbing to ‘tragic fate.’ The tragedy here lies in the stifling hopeless monotony of the One that can neither form a restful whole or truly produce something else, a real Other to itself. See David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1. Krell’s reading finds confirmation also in this volume, in the essay of Elliot Wolfson who implicates Heidegger in the Schellingian para-

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The question therefore – which death of whose God: Nietzschean, Hegelian, Lurianic?  – constitutes the principal problem of modern a/theology, bearing on the multiple shapes of modernity itself. This is precisely the moment when Christian and Jewish modernity begin to part ways. In the end, the Lurianic tsimtsum is not the same as the Christian kenosis: it is not God’s self-sacrifice which encumbers the world with the sense of a terrible and scandalous loss. Even if it is a ‘death of God’ as the Sovereign Infinite, it is also God’s survival; his only mode of ‘living-on’ in and with the world which he simultaneously makes his own creation and lets go as a free other-being. The tsimtsem God does not die ‘for us’: he limits his primordial infiniteness and becomes finite not in order to make creation eternally guilty and obliged (‘the infinite grief of the finite’ in Hegel), but in order to affirm finite being as the right and final way to be: in fact, the only way to exist. In the modern reworking of the Lurianic myth, therefore, God himself emerges as the most powerful spokesman for the principle of univocatio entis – which also makes spurious all the Nietzschean attempts to ‘kill’ him, because he no longer poses a danger to the reality of the finite world.

Tsimtsum as Destitution Although the most intriguing modern philosophical reinterpretation of tsimtsum circles around the shift towards its positive connotations, there is also a deep tradition of negativity that continues to receive tsimtsum in its most catastrophic version. While Derrida can be regarded as the last of the Jewish Hegelians, working through the Lurianic lore towards a grand affirmation, Simone Weil is the late-modern hero of the powerful Gnostic counter-narrative which, thanks to her, acquired a new validity. This renewal of the interest in the dark side of Luria was spotted very aptly by Maurice Blanchot who, in The Infinite Conversation, in the section devoted to Simone Weil’s Notebooks, writes:

dox which “seeks to account for the emergence of difference within indifference, but, in the end, that very possibility is subverted since the other is a manifestation of the same.” But on Derrida’s reading, which follows Hegel insofar as he wished to make comedy superior to tragedy (ibid., 2) – but not where Hegel himself falls into a tragic-mournful mood of the ‘infinite grief’ – the tsimtsum narrative is definitely more in the style of the ‘divine comedy’ than the ‘tragedy of the cross.’ There is indeed something comical about the Seinlassen implied by tsimtsum: the sudden divine retreat, the equally sudden interruption which invents the other, and the cheeky hardnecked forgetfullness with which the other refers back to his ‘donor subject.’

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 Agata Bielik-Robson Simone Weil conceived of creation in a manner that may seem strange and, in any case, foreign to tradition. It is an interesting conception. First, because it once again reveals to us the true sources of her certitude, but also because this conception puts her, without her knowing it, back into the Jewish tradition from which she turned away with such violence and often such obstinate incomprehension; a mystical tradition, it is true. In fact, it is Isaac Luria (a saintly man and profound thinker of the sixteenth century, whose influence we know was great) who, interpreting an idea from the ancient Cabala (the Tsimtsum), recognized in the creation an act of abandonment on the part of God. A forceful idea. In creating the world God does not set forth something more, but, first of all, something less. Infinite Being is necessarily everything. In order that there be the world, he would have to cease being the whole and make a place for it through a movement of withdrawal, of retreat, and in ‘abandoning a kind of region within himself, a sort of mystical space’ [here Blanchot quotes Scholem’s Major Trends – A. B.-R.]. In other words, the essential problem of creation is the problem of nothingness. Not how something can be created out of nothing, but how nothing can be created in order that, on the basis of nothing, something can take place. There must be nothing: that the nothing exists is the true secret and the initial mystery, a mystery that begins painfully with God himself – through a sacrifice, a retraction, and a limitation, a mysterious consent to exile himself from the all that he is and to efface and absent himself, if not disappear. It is as though the creation of the world, or its existence, would have evacuated God from himself, posed God as a lack of God and therefore had as its corollary a sort of ontological atheism that could only be abolished along with the world itself. Where there is a world there is, painfully, the lack of God. A profound thought indeed. Now this is the thought Simone Weil rediscovered, for nothing permits us to say she borrowed it. The numerous formulations she employs are well known: ‘For God, Creation consisted not in extending himself, but in withdrawing.’ ‘On God’s part creation is not an act of self-extension but of retreat, of renunciation. . .  . in this creative act he denied himself, as Christ has told us to deny ourselves.’ ‘God, in a sense, renounces being the whole.’ ‘Because he is the creator, God is not all-powerful. Creation is abdication. But he is all-powerful in the sense that his abdication is voluntary.’ ‘The Creation is an abandonment. In creating what is other than himself, God necessarily abandoned it’… The only truth: abandonment, renunciation. Through renunciation God created the world; through renunciation we de-create the world. Renunciation is truly God in us… So that Simone Weil can say: ‘The World, inasmuch as it is entirely empty of God, is God himself’ or again: ‘The abandonment in which God leaves us is his own way of caressing us. Time, our single misery, is the very touch of his hand. It is the abdication by which he makes us exist.’45

Blanchot proceeds cautiously because, indeed, there is no single explicit reference to Isaac Luria in Weil who, following the Marcionite reading of Paul’s Letter to Romans, associates – and thus repudiates – the whole Judaic tradition as the one of law, letter, and death, and opposes it to the radical Christianity as the religion of love, spirit, and life. For Simone Weil, the creative divine retreat has nothing to do with tsimtsum or any other concept of Judaism: it is a variation on ‘kenosis in creation,’ a motif already contemplated by some of the Church Fathers, from whom her

45 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 116–17; my emphasis.

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argument – that God demonstrates his omnipotence precisely in the potentiality for self-limitation – directly derives.46 Yet, as we have already indicated apropos Hegel, ‘kenosis in creation’ is not a standard Christian idea; even if presented in a Christianized manner as a tragic sacrifice, it is nonetheless Lurianic in origin. Likewise, the ethical implications that Weil draws from her notion of divine retreat – the imperative to repeat the divine gesture of self-renunciation – cannot be simply accomodated within the classical Christian doctrine of imitatio Christi; they bear far too strong an affinity with the Lurianic formula of a ‘righteous one’ who helps God (or whatever is left of him in the de/form of scattered sparks) to undo the error of ontological creation. In her Notebooks, Weil writes: “The destruction of the ‘I’ is the one and only free act that lies open to us.”47 And indeed, the destruction of the ‘I,’ which inagurates the act of decreation, bittul ha-yesh, is the steady motif of the Hasidic reception of the Lurianic doctrine, which did not choose the Hegelian – dialectical (or, as Scholem even more daringly implies, dialectical-materialist) – path, but staked instead on the traditional Gnostic idea of reversio, the return to the original divine pleroma. A good example here is the description of the ‘righteous’ (Lamed Vav) as ‘standing in nothingness,’ in Dov Baer’s Likkutei Amarim: The Talmud states: ‘The deeds of the righteous are greater than the making of the heavens and the earth’ (Ketubot 5a). The explanation of this is that the creation of the heavens and the earth was the formation of the reality of something from nothing. By contrast the rightous transform reality back to nothingness. For from all the things they do, even physical things like eating, they raise the holy sparks from this food upward, and the same is true of every matter they engage in. So we find that they transform the real into the divine Nothing.48

Nachman of Bratslav’s definition of wisdom in Likkutei Moharan strikes a similar chord: For it is said, ‘Wisdom will be found from nothingness’ [already a midrashic reinterpretation of Job 28:12 “From where can one find wisdom?”; ‘from where’, me-ayin is read here as

46 Take, for instance, Origen, who accentuates the new and even higher glory of God, achieved through self-humbling: “One must dare to say that the goodness of Christ appears greater, more divine, and truly in the image of the Father, when he humbles himself in obedience onto death – the death of the Cross  – than had he clung onto his equality with the Father as an inalienable gift, and had refused to become a slave for the world’s salvation”; quoted in Hans-Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale. The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols, O.P. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 15. 47 Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 2, trans. Arthur Wills (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1956), 337. 48 Quot. in Alan Unterman, ed. The Kabbalistic Tradition: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 47; my emphasis.

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‘from nothing’]. Therefore, the wise men, who are ‘nothing’, merit the Glory, because they do not produce the shadow to divide them from God, for they have no physicality. (ibid., 248)

Blanchot, who also partakes in the Gnostic sensibility, sums it all up very aptly in an oblique reference to da’at, the secret truth and its knowledge: “The only truth: abandonment, renunciation. Through renunciation God created the world; through renunciation we de-create the world.” If the world indicates a ‘painful lack of God,’ then the only way out of this ‘ontological atheism’ is the regressive path of decreation, which aims to undo the catastrophe of creation and reverese to the divine pleroma from before the Jonasian ‘odyssey of time.’ Yet, stubbornly and despite all evidence, Simone Weil refuses to associate the topos of God’s withdrawal with the Jewish tradition which, for her, remains wholly in the grip of the evil law-giving Archon-Jehova who never stops supervising the world he botchedly created. Her confusion culminates in Gravity and Grace, where she reproaches Judaism for the way in which it contaminated Christianity, which supposedly advocated God’s kenotic retreat, with the cult of perpetual divine intervention: Christendom has become totalitarian, conquering, and exterminating, because it has not developed the idea of God’s absence and non-activity here below. It has attached itself to Jehovah no less than to Christ, and conceived of Providence in the manner of the Old Testament.49

It is certainly not the first and not the last time that the tsimtsum motif has wandered into realms very far removed from its place of birth, as if in repetition of the fate of the self-retreating origin: the withdrawn God who generously concealed himself for the sake of the ‘hazard of creation’ with all its unpredictable vicissitudes. But the fact that it could have travelled from the kitvei Ari, the lore of Jewish mysticism deeply identified with Judaism, to the explicitly anti-Judaic (if not simply antisemitic) quasi-Gnostic systems of late modernity, as represented by Simone Weil, only testifies to its power as one of the most ‘vital hypotheses’ of modern philosophico-theological thought, addressing directly what Hegel called the ‘new religious sentiment.’ The ‘dramatic dissemination’ of the concept of tsimtsum has been, in fact, so wide, that it would be impossible to name and analyze all its avatars in modern philosophy and theology. This chapter – as well as the following ones – offers only a sample of the numerous intellectual trends that tsimtsum had engendered.

49 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 241.

Introduction 

 33

Bibliography Balthasar, Hans-Urs von. Mysterium Paschale. The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols, O.P., San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990. Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. _____. “Scholem’s ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah.’ Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism, vol. 5, nr 1/ 1985, 67–93. Bielik-Robson, Agata. “The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude,” in Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy: Interchange in the Wake of God, edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, and Duane Williams, London: Routledge, 2017, 39–58. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1993. Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, transl. Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Conway, Anne. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Alison Coudert and Taylor Corse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Coudert, Allison. The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century. The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698). Leiden: Brill, 1999. Dan, Joseph. Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1986. _____. A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. _____. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. _____. Acts of Religion, Gil Anidjar ed., New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Fagenblat, Michael, ed. Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hopkins, Jasper. Nicholas of Cusa’s Metaphysics of Contraction, Minneapolois: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1983. Idel, Moshe. “On the Concept Zimzum in Kabbalah and its Research,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10, 1992 (Hebrew). _____. Kabbalah and Eros, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005. _____. Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Krell, David Farrell. The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Landauer, Gustav. Skepsis und Mystik. Versuche im Anschluß an Mauthners Sprachkritik, Berlin: Verlag von Egon Fleischer, 1903. Lærke, Mogens. “Three Texts on the Kabbalah: More, Wachter, Leibniz, and the Philosophy of the Hebrews,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 25, 5/ 2017.

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Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality. A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, trans. Lawrence Vogel, Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Liebes, Yehuda. Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism, trans. Batya Stein, Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. Liska, Vivian. German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife. A Tenuous Legacy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Magee, Glenn Alexander. “Hegel’s Reception of Jacob Boehme,” in An Introduction to Jacob Boehme. Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, eds. Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei, London: Routledge, 2014. _____. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, New York, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Magid, Shaul. “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope of Reading in Post-Lurianic Kabbala,” in Beginning/Again. Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, eds. Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid, New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002, 163–214. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel H. Beer, New York: Appleton-Century-Croft, 1955. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Dis-enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. _____. Corpus, trans. Richard Rand, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. _____. The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Schelling, F. W. J. The Ages of the World, (version 1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth, Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken Books, 1961. _____. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser, New York: Schocken Books, 1976. _____. Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1976. _____. The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken Books, 1991. _____. “Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit,”·in Briefe, vol. 1 (1914–1947), ed. Itta Shedletzky, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994. Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. Strauss, Leo. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. _____. Hobbes’ Politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften-Briefe, in Gessamelte Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Heinrich Meier, Stuttgart/ Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001. Vital, Hayyim ben Joseph. The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria – The Palace of Adam Kadmon, trans. Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padeh, Northvale, N.J. and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 1999. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Assaulting the Border: Kabbalistic Traces in the Margins of Derrida,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sept. 2002, 475–514. _____. Alef, Mem, Tau. Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Tanner, Kathryn. God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment?, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988. Taubes, Jacob. From Cult to Culture. Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Aleida Assmann, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Tishby, Isaiah. Torat ha-Ra’ ve-ha-Klippah be-Kabbalat ha-Ari, Jerusalem, 1942. Unterman, Alan, ed. The Kabbalistic Tradition: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism, London: Penguin Classics, 2009.

Introduction 

 35

Weil, Simone. The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 2, trans. Arthur Wills, New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1956. _____. Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, London: Routledge, 2002. Zahl, Simeon. “Non-Competitive Agency and Luther’s Experiential Argument Against Virtue,” Modern Theology, vol. 35, nr 2/2019, 199–222.

Part 1: Tsimtsum and the Jewish Tradition

Paul Franks

The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on Tsimtsum The concept of tsimtsum is the most significant concept of recent Jewish thought, both within literature addressed to Jews and within philosophy more generally conceived. Yet it is all too often construed in contemporary work in a misleading way because of the influence of Gershom Scholem.1 Although its roots are much older, as I will argue, the concept first appeared in print in 1612 in Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz’ eponymously titled book, Shefa Tal.2 In the 1680s, what are now considered canonical texts concerning tsimtsum from the so-called Lurianic writings appeared in print in Latin translation, although these texts in their original Hebrew/Aramaic versions continued to circulate only in manuscript for another century. In their Latin form, the texts immediately gave rise to discussions among non-Jewish philosophers such as Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, Henry More, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Georg Wachter.3 A century later, in the 1780s, they played an important role in discussions between Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn that are now regarded as the birth of German Idealism.4 At roughly the same time, at the end of the eighteenth century, two conflicting groups  – the Hasidim and their opponents (mitnaggedim)  – emerged within Eastern European Jewry and, according to one well-known account, the

1 I am grateful to Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Weiss for organising the conference at which this talk was first presented as well as for their enormous patience. Thanks too to all who commented at Cambridge University, Colgate University and the University of Toronto. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2 Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz, Shefa Tal (Hanau: Hans Jakob Hene, 1612). 3 See Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury Van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 4 See Paul Franks, “Inner Anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism’s Relationship to Judaism,” in Yearbook of German Idealism, Volume VII, Faith and Reason, eds. Fred Rush, Jürgen Stolzenberg and Paul Franks (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 254–279; “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism,” in The Impact of Idealism, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley, Vol. IV, Religion, ed. Nicholas Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 219–245; “‘Nothing comes from Nothing’: Judaism, the Orient and the Kabbalah in Hegel’s Reception of Spinoza,” in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael Della Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017), 512–539. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-002

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controversy turned ultimately on differing conceptions of tsimtsum.5 In the twentieth and twenty first centuries, the concept has continued to feature in the philosophical thinking of figures such as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas and Jürgen Habermas, while it has also been developed by kabbalists such as Shlomo Eliashiv and Yehuda Ashlag, and it has even spawned popular works such as The Tzimzum of Marriage, as well as works of graphic art by Anselm Kiefer and others.6 By far the most influential interpreter of tsimtsum in the last hundred years is Gershom Scholem. However, I will argue that Scholem’s proposal that “tsimtsum” be translated as “withdrawal” and that the kabbalists inverted the meaning of the term in its midrashic use is tendentious. There is no reason to abandon the standard translation of “tsimtsum” as “contraction” in the sense of concentration, and the scriptural-midrashic tradition remains essential background for understanding the concept. While it is possible not to translate but to interpret tsimtsum in terms of withdrawal, such an interpretation has been marginal both to the kabbalistic tradition and to its philosophical reception until very recently, and to accept Scholem’s translation proposal would be to close oneself to much of the concept’s significance. In particular, as I will argue, it is to close oneself, not only to the mainstream of Jewish thought over the last four centuries, but also to the most explicit version of tsimtsum in the post-Kantian tradition, which is to be found in the work of Schelling.

Scholem’s Tendentious Proposal Scholem’s account of tsimtsum in his magisterial wartime lectures, published as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, established the main contours of his influential interpretation. According to Scholem, the term is drawn from midrashic literature, but its meaning was not only changed but actually “inverted” by the kabbalists into “its precise opposite … Tzimtzum does not mean the concentration

5 The well-known account was given by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, a major protagonist on the Hasidic side, but he was extrapolating from a known controversy to the unknown motivations of Elijah of Vilna. For an argument that this was not in fact the issue, in light of the much greater amount of information available today, see Franks, “Beyond the Ban: Rav Dessler’s Vision of a Yeshiva combining Lithuanian Lomdut, Chabad, and Polish Chasidut,” forthcoming in Contemporary Uses and Forms of Ḥasidut ed. Shlomo Zuckier (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2020). 6 For a helpful overview of the history, see Christoph Schulte, Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014).

The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction 

 41

of God at a point, but His retreat away from a point.”7 Consequently, “Tsimtsum originally means ‘concentration’ or ‘contraction,’ but if used in the Kabbalistic parlance it is best translated by ‘withdrawal’ or ‘retreat.’” This would be remarkable if it were merely an interpretive claim. But Scholem’s contention  – which has been frequently repeated by others  – is that the term tsimtsum should actually be translated as “withdrawal.” Bearing in mind J. L. Austin’s observation that, “A word never – well, hardly ever – shakes off its etymology and its formation,” this contention stands in need of considerable proof.8 Not only does the word mean “concentration at a point” in midrashic discussions to be discussed later, but in the fourth-century C.E. Targum Neofiti it is used to translate the verb used for Rebekah’s self-concealment behind a veil,9 and in Talmudic passages such as BT Sanhedrin 76b-77a, it is used to describe the act of confining an animal or human being. In his eleventh-century lexicon, Nathan ben Yehiel of Rome translates the verb as “to press, confine, conceal.”10 In any event, what Scholem offers is not evidence but rather a strong reading. In the most famous presentation of Lurianic kabbalah, Ḥayyim Vital’s Eẓ Ḥayyim, three passages merit consideration. I will leave the term in question untranslated. Best known is the first: Eẓ Ḥayyim, Heikhal 1, Shaar ha-Kelalim, Shaar 1, Anaf 2/Shaar ha-Hakdamot, Hakdamah 4: ‫אז צמצם את עצמו א"ס בנקודה האמצעית אשר בו באמצע אורו ממש וצמצם האור ההוא ונתרחק אל צדדי‬ ‫סביבות הנקודה האמצעית ואז נשאר מקום פנוי ואויר וחלל רקני מנקודה אמצעית ממש‬ Then ein sof tsimtsem Itself in the central point in It, really at the centre of Its light, and tsimtsem that light and was distanced [nitraḥek] to the extremities surrounding the central point, and then was left a void and an ether and a space vacant of/from that central point, really.11

7 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, NY: Schocken, 1946), 260. 8 J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers eds. J. O. Urmson and G. L. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 201. 9 Alejandro Diez Macho, trans. and ed., Neophyti 1: Targum Palestinense ms. de la Biblioteca Vaticana, I, Genesis (Madrid-Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1968), 149; Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis trans. and ed. Martin McNamara M.S.C. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 127. 10 Nathan ben Yehiel, Aruch Completum sive Lexicon Vocabula et Res quae in Libris Targumicis, Talmudicis et Midraschichis continentur, trans. Alexander Kohut (Vienna: A. Fanto, 1891), 7: 24–25. 11 Ḥayyim Vital, Eẓ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: n.p. 1987/8), vol. 1, 27. For a translation of this section, see Ḥayyim Vital, The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria: The Palace of Adam Kadmon trans. Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padeh (New York, NY: Arizal Publications, 2008), 9–27.

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A second passage occurs in Eẓ Ḥayyim, Shaar ha-Kelalim, Shaar 1, Anaf 2/Oẓerot Ḥayyim, Derush Adam Kadmon: ‫הנה צמצם עצמו באמצע האור שלו בנקודת המרכז האמצעי אל הסביבות והצדדים ונשאר חלל בנתיים‬ Behold [ein sof] tsimtsem Itself in the centre of Its light, at the central mid-point, to the surroundings and the extremities, and a void was left between them.12

And a third is to be found in Eẓ Ḥayyim, Shaar ha-Kelalim, Shaar 1, Anaf 3: ‫א"ס צמצם עצמו וסילק האור הרב ההוא מן המקום ההוא לגמרי‬ Ein sof tsimtsem Itself and withdrew [silek] that great light completely.13

It seems to me that, in each of these passages, there are two moments: a moment of tsimtsum at the central point, and a moment of hitraḥkut, tsimtsum or siluk to or at the extremities. Between the central point and the extremities, a void is left. Later I will address the question of the void and in what sense it is an empty space from which the light and/or presence of ein sof is withdrawn. But, even on an interpretation that thematises withdrawal, I can see no reason why “tsimtsum” should not continue to be translated as “concentration”; the withdrawal of divinity would be constituted by the two tsimtsumim and would be expressed as hitrahkut and siluk. Two other features of Scholem’s discussion merit attention here. First, Scholem suggests that tsimtsum, understood as withdrawal, should also be seen as exile: “One is tempted to interpret this withdrawal of God into His own Being in terms of Exile, of banishing Himself from His totality into profound seclusion.” In later writings, Scholem gives in fully to this temptation, which fits the view that kabbalah responds to historical experiences such as the expulsion from Iberia.14 Second, Scholem emphasizes that Ḥayyim Vital’s version of Lurianic doctrine is to be preferred and not that of Israel Sarug, whom Scholem considers an impostor who probably was not an actual disciple.15

12 Vital, Eẓ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: n.p. 1987/8), vol. 1, 31. 13 Vital, Eẓ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: n.p. 1987/8), vol. 1, 34. 14 See, e.g., Scholem, Kabbalah (New York, NY: Quadrangle, 1974), 245: “All being has been in exile since the very beginning of creation and the task of restoring everything to its proper place has been given to the Jewish people, whose historic fate and destiny symbolize the state of the universe at large.” 15 See Scholem, Major Trends, and “Israel Sarug, Student of the Ari” (Hebrew), Zion (1940), 214–243. Ronit Meroz, “Israel Sarug, Student of the Ari: A Fresh Examination of the Issue” (Hebrew), Da’at 28 (1992), 41–50 and “The School of Sarug: A New History” (Hebrew), Shalem 7 (2002), 149–193, argues that Sarug was an early student of Luria. For a helpful overview of Sarug’s distinctive teachings, see

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This last point is particularly noteworthy. After Luria’s untimely death, Vital was appointed leader of a group, members of which signed a document authorizing him as interpreter of Lurianic doctrine. Vital also mentions names of Luria’s disciples in his writings. But the fact that Sarug is not mentioned could mean only that he did not accept Vital’s authority, or that he was considered unworthy by Vital, or that he had studied with Luria earlier. In any case, it is surely inappropriate for a historian – which Scholem professed to be – to endorse Vital’s claim to authority. In the decades immediately following Luria’s death, while Vital was teaching a small group and composing texts that he did not intend for the wider world, Sarug was extremely active in promulgating his version of Luria’s teachings. Sarug found disciples in Italy, the Balkans, Germany and Poland. By the time that contraband versions of Vital’s overview found their way to Europe, their reception was already prepared by Sarug, whose influence may be seen in early Lurianic works by Menahem Azariah de Fano’s Pelah ha-Rimon (1600), Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz’ Shefa Tal (1612), Naftali Hertz Bacharach’s Emek ha-Melekh (1648), and Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Shaar ha-Shamayim (1655).16 In addition to an extract from a version of Eẓ Ḥayyim known as Sefer Derushim, Sarugian extracts from Bacharach and Herrera were published in translation in Kabbala Denudata.17 In Europe then, Sarug decisively shaped not only the reception of Lurianic doctrines, but also the reception of Vital’s version of those doctrines. Leon Modena wrote, “I … heard from the mouth of the sage, Israel Sarug, eminent student of the Ari, of blessed memory, who used to say that there was no difference between philosophy and kabbalah. Everything he learned from kabbalah, he would explain in a philosophical manner.”18 Scholem’s opposition to philosophical interpretation of kabbalah is, I suspect, one reason why he besmirches

Sharron Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-Cordoverian Encounter”, The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011), 158–187. 16 Printed Sarugian works during the first part of the seventeenth century include Menahem Azariah de Fano, Pelah ha-Rimon (Venice: Daniel Zanetti, 1600); Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz, Shefa Tal (Hanau: Hans Jakob Hene, 1612); Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Taalumot Ḥokhmah (Basel: n.p., 1629); Naftali Hertz Bacharach, Emek ha-Melekh (Amsterdam: Immanuel Benvenisti, 1648); and Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Shaar ha-Shamayim (Amsterdam: Immanuel Benvenisti, 1655). 17 See Christian von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata seu doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theological. Vol. I (Sulzbach, Abraham Lichtentahler: 1677); Appendix to Vol. I (Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtentahler, 1678); Vol. II (Frankfurt am Main: Balthasar Christoph Wust, 1684). 18 Leon Modena, Ari Nohem, ed. Nehemiah S. Libowitz (Jerusalem: Darom, 1929), 53. See Yaacob Dweck, Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 139.

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Sarug’s authenticity: Scholem wants to establish kabbalah as an independent discipline with its own register of meaning. This is not the occasion for a full exploration of Scholem’s views. But it seems to me worth considering the possibility that privileging Vital’s version instead of Sarug’s and emphasising withdrawal rather than concentration, may both be in the service of Scholem’s general narrative. According to his story, Lurianic kabbalah prepared the way for Sabbatian antinomianism as well as Frankian nihilism, which played an important role in the transition to modernity. Moreover, Franz Kafka was, in an important sense, the greatest kabbalist of the twentieth century, who expressed a pious sensibility to which Scholem himself rarely gave voice. In one such passage, however, Scholem emphasized tsimtsum, which he characterized as “a paradoxical retreat of God into Himself” which liberated creation but with terrifying consequences: This act ... is not a one-time event; it must constantly repeat itself; again and again a stream streams out into the void, a ‘something’ from God. This, to be sure, is the point at which the horrifying experience of God’s absence in our world collides irreconcilably and catastrophically with the doctrine of a Creation that renews itself. The radiation of which the mystics speak and which is to attest to the Revelation of God in Creation – that radiation is no longer perceivable by despair. The emptying of the world to a meaningless void not illuminated by any ray of meaning or direction is the experience of him whom I would call the pious atheist. The void is the abyss, the chasm or crack which opens up in all that exists. This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void – in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God.19

Though hardly prominent, this fascinating passage may be the culmination of Scholem’s narrative. Or it would be, if not for the fact that Scholem presents himself in the guise, not of a theologian, but of a historian. Whatever its theological and philosophical merits, Scholem’s narrative is, however, a very partial history. For many kabbalists, including those adhering to the mainstream variants of Jewish thought, the concept of tsimtsum was understood, not as an inversion, but as a further elaboration of a scriptural-midrashic tradition that focused on both divine transcendence and divine immanence in a version of panentheism. Indeed, thanks in large part to Cordovero and Sarug, the reception of Vital by Jewish and non-Jewish readers was shaped in part by those who understood tsimtsum in a panentheistic way. I will address later the question whether it is valid to interpret tsimtsum in a way that emphasizes histalkut or 19 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology”, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, trans, Werner J. Dannhauser (New York, NY: Schocken, 1976), 283. On this essay, see Kavka in this volume, 277–282.

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withdrawal as its principal aspect. For now, my point is that it would be wrong to accept the translation of tsimtsum as “withdrawal” and thereby to close oneself off to all but Scholem’s narrative, to all the other interpretations that have in fact been mainstream.

Scriptural and Midrashic Roots The most obvious midrashic allusion employed in classic accounts of tsimtsum is the reference to the dwelling of the divine presence “between the two staves of the ark.” In scriptural terms, this is the location “between the two cherubs” whence the divine voice addresses Moses in the tabernacle. The midrashic expression, “between the two staves of the ark,” is used both by early kabbalistic sources, such as the commentary on Sefer Yetsirah attributed to Naḥmanides, and by Lurianic texts stemming from Vital himself as well as Joseph ibn Tabul, and also by Horowitz’ Shefa Tal.20 I will return to this expression shortly. The larger point, however, is that this indicates a broader scriptural-midrashic background for the kabbalistic concept: the descent of the divine presence to dwell in the tabernacle in the wilderness and eventually in the temple in Jerusalem, which is a transfer of the divine presence

20 See Moses Naḥmanides, Peirush ha-Ramban le-Sefer Yeẓirah, according to a manuscript transcribed by Scholem, “Perakim me-toledot sifrut ha-kabbalah”, Kiryat Sefer 6 (1929–30), 402–3: “Supernal crown . . . contracted the essence of its glory according to the measure of the surface of the cover and as between the two cherubim, and there was darkness on the face of the all, for the negation of light is called darkness”; Joseph ibn Tabul, “Derush Ḥeftsi Bah”in Massoud ha-Kohen Elhadad, Simḥat Kohen (Jerusalem: 1921), 1b: “And when it arose in Its simple will to emanate and to create worlds, as It did, It self-contracted Its light in the manner of ‘contracted His shekhinah between the staves of the ark’”; Ḥayyim Vital, “Derush al Olam ha-Azilut” in Likkutim Ḥadashim, ed. D. Touitou (Jerusalem, 1985), 17: “When the supernal emanator wanted to create this world so that it would be material, It contracted Its shekhinah, in the manner of what [the sages] said, namely that ‘He contracted His shekhinah between the two staves of the ark”; Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz, Shefa Tal (1621), 29b: “When the simple will arose to create worlds in such a way as to have kings, nobles, princes and servants at lower levels, but not at the level of Its essence so that Its essence and greatness would be revealed to them, rather so that It could rule over them and direct them as a king directs his people, It needed as it were to self-contract, like their [i.e., the rabbis’] saying, ‘contracted His shekhinah between the two staves of the ark’. Similarly, before the creation of the world, It self-contracted in the midst of Its essence, as It were, from Itself to Itself and in the midst of Itself, and vacated an empty place in the midst of Its essence, as it were.”

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that descended upon Mount Sinai.21 It is thus, so I claim, the scriptural and midrashic elaboration of the divine presence’s arrival at Sinai, in the tabernacle, and in the temple, that underlies kabbalistic formulations of tsimtsum, which is a retrojection of revelation to creation’s emanative prelude.22 This retrojection makes sense insofar as creation is proto-revelation. Creation involves divine utterance and naming, and rabbinic literature elaborates this idea into the notion that creation was actualized by means of ten utterances, which become in kabbalah the ten sefirot or luminous forms.23 The doctrine of tsimtsum is concerned, not directly with creation, but with that which is prior to creation: the generation by the Infinite (ein sof) of the ten sefirot in their primordial versions, in accordance with which creation can then occur. Strictly speaking, the kabbalists distinguish the worlds of emanation (aẓilut), creation (beriah), formation (yeẓirah) and making (asiah), while Lurianic kabbalah also discusses the worlds of the primordial human (adam kadmon) and of the points (nekudot) as prior to the world of emanation. The first tsimtsum occurs at the most primitive stage of the coming to be of the worlds, although it is also echoed repeatedly at later stages. Thus, tsimtsum is a precondition for the possibility of emanation, then of creative utterance and of revelatory utterance at Sinai, and ultimately of the possibility of ongoing dialogical encounter with the divine in the tabernacle and temple. Doubtless we see here a tradition that is intimately related to Neo-Platonism, which is also animated by the problem of the emanation of multiplicity from the One, and the emanated world of the primordial human is clearly related to the emanated intellect of Plotinus. However, there are some features that distinguish kabbalah. Although, like Neo-Platonism in general, Lurianic kabbalah is profoundly interested in hierarchy – which it calls the seder hishtalshelut (chain-like order) – it is also committed both to a kind of panentheism that emphasizes identity as well as difference, and to the possibility of disrupting the hierarchy.24 As

21 See Moses Naḥmanides, Peirush al ha-Torah, ed. C. D. Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1959) on Exodus 25.2, Exodus 40.34, and Leviticus 1.1, as well as the introduction to Numbers, for on the mystery of the Sanctuary. 22 For a helpful account of the relationship between scripture, midrash and Lurianic kabbalah, see Shaul Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). However, Magid discusses the relationship between tsimtsum and Adam’s sin, not the tradition that I reconstruct here. 23 See Mishnah Avot 5:1: “With ten utterances the world was created”; A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yesira: Edition, Translation and Text-Critical Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), Mishnah 2: “The ten sefirot are the basis and the twenty-two letters are the foundation.” 24 Compare Ernst Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Chicago), 25–26 on the undermining of Platonic-Aristotelian hierarchy by Nicholas Cusanus’ doctrine of the infinite: “Th[e] ‘classical’ Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of the

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developed by Luria’s predecessor and sometime teacher, Moses Cordovero, the Zoharic notion that souls are garbed in bodies gives rise to a logic of appearance according to which the higher is garbed in the lower, in such a way that the higher is both concealed and manifest in the lower, because the lower is the higher in a less adequate guise.25 Hence, there is neither rock nor tree of which one should say, “This is not God,” while at the same time the world does not exhaust God, so that God is the place of the world, but the world is not God’s place.26 Moreover, the divine presence’s descent into the sanctuary “between the two staves of the ark,” like the descent of the soul into the body, is a disruption of the hierarchical order.27

cosmos contradicts in two ways the basic speculative principle developed by Cusanus in his De docta ignorantia. On the one hand, it orders the element of the heavens and the four elements of the earth in a spatial relationship that also implies a gradation of values. The higher an element stands in the cosmic stepladder, the closer it is to the unmoved mover of the world, and the purer and more complete is its nature. But Cusanus no longer recognizes any such relationship of proximity and distance between the sensible and the supersensible. If the distance as such is infinite, all relative, finite differences are annihilated. When compared to the divine origin of being, every element, every natural being is equally far and equally near to that origin. There is no longer any ‘above’ and ‘below’, but a single universe, homogeneous within itself as empirical cosmos, it stands opposed to Absolute Being, just as, on the other hand, it participates as a whole in the Absolute to the extent that the nature of the empirical allows of such participation. Since this kind of participation is in principle valid for all existence, it cannot be attributed to one of its constituent elements in a higher, to another in a lower degree. Thus, with one blow, the whole difference in value between the lower sub-lunar world and the higher celestial world is eliminated. Instead of the stepladder of elements that Peripatetic physics had accepted, we have Anaxagoras’ proposition that in corporeal nature, ‘everything is in every thing’.” Much of what Cassirer says about Cusanus’ role in preparing the way for modern physics and mathematics by overcoming Platonic hierarchy and Aristotelian logic could be said about Lurianic kabbalah. Whether or not kabbalah impacted Cusanus, it is possible that Christian Knorr von Rosenroth was influenced by Cusanus in his decision to translate tsimtsum in Kabbala Denudata by using Cusanus’ term, “contractio.” 25 See the passage, recited by many Jews weekly or daily, known after its opening words as “Pataḥ Eliyahu”, Tikkunei ha-Zohar, ed. R. Margoliot (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), 17a, and the commentary on it in Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim (Krakow: Isaac ben Aaron of Prossnitz, 1591), Part 4, “Aẓmut ve-Kelim”, chs. 5–6; Pardes Rimonim: Orchard of Pomegranates. Parts 1–4 trans. Elyakim Getz (Monfalcone: Providence University, 2007), 168–185. 26 Bereschit Rabba eds. J. Theodor and Ch. Albeck (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1928) 68.9, vol. 2, 777–778: “‘And he came upon [a/the] place.’ (Gen. 28.11) Rav Huna said in the name of Rav Ammi, ‘Why does one give the Holy One blessed be He a name and call him Place? Because He is the place of the world. Rav Yossi the son of Rav Halafta said: ‘We do not know if God is the place of the world or if the world is His place. From what is written: ‘Behold there is a place with Me.’ (Ex. 33.21) it is evident that the Holy One blessed be He is the place of the world and the world is not His place.’” 27 Moses Cordovero, Or Yakar (Jerusalem: Achuzat Israel, 1967), vol. 4, 125–126.

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If we consider the scriptural narratives of the divine presence’s descent, we find the following pattern. 1) There is a problem that must be overcome if revelation is to occur: namely, the divine presence is a threat to all other existents. God instructs Moses to set boundaries around Sinai in order to prevent the people from coming to harm, not once but twice, as Moses himself points out (Ex. 19.12–13, 21–23). The Lord is a consuming fire (Deut. 4.24), and it is from this fire that the people hear the divine voice and become afraid that they will die (Ex. 24.17; Deut. 4.12). Later, when the people withdraw and Moses represents them in the encounter with God, the divine presence appears to them from a distance as a consuming fire (Ex. 24.17). That anyone survives this fire is a wonder. (Deut. 5.18–22) Indeed, when the divine presence moves from Sinai to the Tabernacle, Nadab and Avihu, two sons of Aaron, are killed by divine fire when they commit some misstep while performing their new, priestly duties (Lev. 10.1–2; Num. 3.4). 2) In addition to human boundaries, the danger is averted through the descent of a cloud on Sinai (Ex. 19.9, 19.16, 24.15), later on the Tabernacle (Ex. 33.9), and later still on the Temple (1 Kings 8.11, 2 Chron. 5.14). By means of the cloud, the glory of the Lord fills the Tabernacle and later the House of God, precluding entry by human beings (Ex. 40.34; 2 Chron. 5.14). It is possible, however, like Moses, to be invited into the cloud (Ex. 24.16–18). The purpose of the cloud is to enable the people to hear when God speaks to Moses, thereby establishing Mosaic authority and making revelation widely available (Ex. 19.9). 3) It is in the midst of this cloud – where the cloud is thickest – that the Lord chooses to dwell (1 Kings 8.12; 2 Chron. 6.1). Surrounded by this cloud, God descends to a specific location: the top of the mountain (Ex. 19.10), then later, in the Tabernacle and the Temple, the region of the ark-cover, between the two cherubim (Ex. 25.22; Num. 7.89). It is from this location that God speaks to Moses. That God chooses to dwell in a specific location is a mystery, and Solomon exclaims, “Does God really dwell with man on earth? Even the heavens in their uttermost reaches cannot contain You; how much less this House that I have built!” (2 Chron. 6.18). 4) At times when revelation is impractical, for instance when the Tabernacle must be disassembled for travel in the wilderness, the cloud lifts (Ex. 40.36–38). The concept of tsimtsum is developed in midrashic elaborations of stages 2, 3 and 4 of this pattern. According to the Mekhilta (mid-third century C.E.), the cloud acts as a partition (meḥitsah).28 In other words, it precludes entry but also makes it 28 Mekhilta trans. and ed. Jacob Lauterbach (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1933), Tractate Ba-Ḥodesh, 9, 274. According to this passage there are three divisions that Moses must pass in order to approach God: darkness, cloud, and thick darkness. According to Aaron ben Jacob ha-Kohen of Lunel (thirteenth-fourteenth century), each worshipper re-enacts this passage into the thick darkness when taking three steps forward immediately before beginning

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possible for someone to enter if invited, as Moses enters, and as the High Priest later enters the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and the Temple on the Day of Atonement.29 Pesikta Rabbati (fourth to ninth century C.E.) and an otherwise unknown version of the Mekhilta ask whether the space into which the divine presence descended was previously empty of divinity, and answer that it was not, citing Habbakuk 3.3: “His majesty covers the skies, His splendour fills the earth.”30 Midrash TanḥumaYelammedenu, Vayakhel 7 (eighth-tenth century C.E.) uses the language of tsimtsum to characterize the localization of the divine presence between the cherubim: ‘And Beẓalel made the ark’ (Ex. 37.1) You do not find Beẓalel’s name associated with any vessel made for the Tabernacle other than the ark. All the other work and all the other implements were made at his suggestion and at his advice. Why did he make an exception in the work of the ark by doing it himself? Because it was to be a shade [ẓel] for the Holy One, blessed be He, in which He would contract His presence. That is why He called Beẓalel to make a shade for the Holy One, blessed be he, between the cherubim, as it is said: ‘And there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you from between the two cherubim.’ (Ex. 25.22) Has it not already been stated: ‘Do I not fill heaven and the earth? (Jer. 23.24) Rabbi Joshua of Sikhnin said in the name of R. Levi: This may be compared to a cave situated at the edge of the sea. Though the sea rushes forth and fills the cave, the sea lacks nothing. Similarly with the Holy One, blessed be He, may His name be blessed, for though it is written, ‘And the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle’, (Ex. 40.34) nevertheless ‘His glory is above the heaven and the earth. (Ps. 148.13) You should not say that the Holy One, blessed be He, contracted His presence only into the Tabernacle. He likewise contracted his presence into the ark that Beẓalel made, as it is written, ‘Behold the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth.’ (Joshua 3.11) This indicates that the Holy One, blessed be He, was within it. Who other than Beẓalel could have made it, since it says, ‘And Beẓalel made the ark’?31

the standing prayer (amidah) thrice daily. See Aaron ben Jacob ha-Kohen of Lunel, Orḥot Ḥayyim (Florence: Isaac di Pass, 1750), Hilkhot Tefilah, sec.27, 15a. In addition to its midrashic background, the doctrine of tsimtsum and the geography of the temple also inform aspects of daily Jewish practice and the formation of subjectivity. 29 Perhaps the human boundaries anticipate the soreg and ḥeil that kept the impure from entering the inner areas of the Temple according to Mishnah Middot 2.3 and Mishnah Kelim 1.5, while the cloud anticipates the parokhet dividing the Holy of Holies from the less holy area of the altar. For a recent account of the difficulties involved in reconstructing the various partitions based on biblical passages, Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, rabbinic literature and archaeological evidence, see Matan Orian, “Josephus’s Seven Purities and the Mishnah’s Ten Holinesses,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 47 (2016), 183–211. 30 Abraham ben Azriel of Bohemia (thirteenth century) cites this otherwise unknown version of the Mekhilta in Arugat ha-Bosem, ed. E. E. Urbach (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1938), part 1, 136, as noted by Menahem Kasher, Torah Shelemah (New York, NY: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1948-), Exodus, vol. 15, 112, entry 251. 31 Midrash Tanḥuma -Yelammedenu trans. and ed. Samuel A. Berman (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1995), Parashat Vayakhel, Siman 7, 637 (with some adjustments to the translation).

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Shemot Rabbah (tenth century C.E.) ascribes an antecedent of Solomon’s exclamation to Moses, making it into a problem in need of a solution: When God said to Moses, ‘Make for Me a Tabernacle’ (Ex. 25.8), he exclaimed in amazement, ‘The glory of the Holy One blessed be He fills heaven and earth and yet He commands, ‘Make for Me a Tabernacle’! God said, ‘Not as you think do I think; twenty boards on the north, twenty on the south and eight in the west [suffices for Me]; moreover, I will descend and even contract [va-aẓamẓem] my Shekhinah within one square cubit.32

Finally, in the Baraita de-Rabi Yishmael that serves as an introduction to Torat Kohanim (mid-third century C.E.), the word “nistalek” is used to describe the lifting of the cloud from the Tabernacle.33 Samuel ben Meir (c.1085–c.1158) brings together the two midrashic terms that the kabbalists would later use in his comments on the verses, “Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud had settled upon it and the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. When the cloud lifted from the Tabernacle, the Israelites would set out . . .” (Ex. 40.35–36): ‘. . . because the cloud had settled upon it’: immediately, in order to show the love of the Holy One blessed be He for Israel, but afterwards the cloud was withdrawn [mistalek] from the midst of the tent and settled on the ark, as it is written, ‘There I will meet with you, and I will impart to you – from above the cover, from between the two cherubim’. (Ex. 25.22) And then Moses came into the Tent of Meeting, as it is written, ‘When Moses went into the Tent of Meeting to speak with Him, he would hear the voice . . . between the two cherubim; thus He spoke to him.’ (Num. 7.89) And so you find in the Temple: ‘And the priests were not able to remain and to perform the service because of the cloud, for the presence of the Lord filled the House of the Lord’ (1 Kings 8.11 ) At the time of the completion of the House, God sanctified it by means of the cloud and afterwards He contracted His presence on the ark between the staves.34

Here we find in a single passage both the histalkut of the cloud and the tsimtsum of the divine presence “between the staves.” Moreover, the histalkut of the cloud, mentioned in the Baraita de-Rabi Yishmael, is explained here as the tsimtsum of tsimtsum: the divine presence that was contracted to the whole of the tent is now further contracted to the ark of the covenant that occupies only one region of the tent.

32 Shemot Rabbah (Vilna: Romm, 1878), Terumah, 34.1. This passage is from the second and apparently older part of the midrash, stemming from the Tanḥuma literature, according to Avigdor Shinan’s critical edition of the first part, Midrash Shemot Rabbah 1–14 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1984). 33 Sifra ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York, NY: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1956), vol. 2, 11. Here the Midrash is addressing the apparent contradiction between the cloud blocking Moses’ access to the tent, and Moses’ entry. 34 Samuel ben Meir, Peirush ha-Rashbam al-ha-Torah, ed. M. Lokshin (Jerusalem: Ḥorev, 2009), vol. 1, 329.

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My suggestion is that the kabbalists retroject and elaborate this scripturalmidrashic tradition into an account of the origin of emanation.35 1) The obstacle apparently precluding revelation becomes an obstacle apparently precluding, not only creation, but also, prior to creation, the emanation of a plurality of forms or sefirot: how could the Infinite, which is One beyond number, be compatible with multiplicity? Instead of consuming that which is already existent, as happens to Nadab and Avihu, the Infinite seems to pre-empt not only the coming into being of any finite existent, but even the emanation of the multiplicity of forms required to make finite existence so much as thinkable. 2) Just as the cloud delineates a space within which God can become manifest in revelation – a space into which Moses or his successor may be invited – so too at the origin of emanation must a space be delineated or rather constituted, a space into which forms may be emanated. 3) The delineation of the space occurs between two instances of tsimtsum or concentration, which we may call the concentration of localized or immanent divine presence at the centre and 4) the concentration of transcendent divine presence at the circumference of the circle described around the central point. The latter, transcendent tsimtsum may also be described in terms of histalkut or withdrawal, since the space constituted between the two concentrations is a void in which the forms are to be emanated. After immanent tsimtsum and transcendent tsimtsum or histalkut, the emanation is a sort of expansion or hitpashtut. Thereafter, the pattern of tsimtsum/histalkut and hitpashtut is repeated many times, as the sefirotic configurations required for the creation of each of the four worlds is emanated. While the picture presented here differs from Scholem’s, could it not be argued that a modified version of Scholem’s interpretation is defensible? The modified interpretation would accept the translation of “tsimtsum” as “concentration” or “contraction to”, but would nevertheless emphasize the moment of histalkut or withdrawal and the constitution of a ḥalal or void.

35 Some of this development is already evident in thirteenth century Iberian texts. See Moshe Idel, “Al toledot musag ha-‘ẓimẓum’ be-kabbalah u-be-meḥkar,” Meḥkarei Yerushalayim beMahshevet Yisrael (1992), 59–112, and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Theology” in Suffering Religion eds. Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (London: Routledge, 2002), 101–162. Examination of these texts and their midrashic motifs would deepen the analysis, but I focus here only on kabbalistic works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the development and promulgation of Lurianic and, more generally, Safedian kabbalah. It would also be worthwhile elsewhere to examine the relationship between conceptions of tsimtsum and the hormanuta de-malka and kav ha-midah motifs of the Zohar. For an introduction to these motifs, see Pinchas Giller, Reading the Zohar: Sacred Text of the Kabbalah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69–87.

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Kabbalists have been sensitive to this possibility, just as the Mekhilta was sensitive to the possibility that one might take Sinai or the sanctuary to have been empty of divine presence prior to the descent of the cloud. For the most part, they have sought to pre-empt such interpretations, often citing Raya Mehemna: “He fills all worlds.”36 As Cordovero insists, there can be no genuine ḥalal or void.37 Some emphasise, as Sarug does, that there remains a reshimu or trace of divine presence even prior to emanation.38 This trace may be understood as pertaining to the whole of the void, where lie the roots of din (judgment or finitude). Accordingly, the void is empty, not absolutely and not with respect to divine presence, but either in relation to the two tsimtsumim, or in relation to the emanations that are to come. Interestingly, Vital is unusual  – perhaps even unique  – insofar as he does not address this issue. That is what makes him so useful for Scholem’s case. But Vital’s versions of Lurianic teaching were for a long time kept for use by himself and his students alone, while other versions, especially those developed by Sarug and his students, were spreading. For Sarug, tsimtsum involves, not a divine withdrawal that vacates a space, but rather an intensification of the divine presence that renders any region where the divine presence is not intensified relatively lacking in divine presence. This is symbolized by the “folding” (kippul) of the “garment” (malbush) composed of letters. Indeed, Sarug is not the only one who speaks in these terms. Kanfei Yonah, by Luria’s student Moses Yonah, considered by some to be the earliest Lurianic text concerning tsimtsum, which remains in manuscript but which is thought to underlie both Menahem Azariah de Fano’s book of the same name and some sections of Vital’s Eẓ Ḥayyim, also speaks of the “folding” of the light as the tsimtsum of divinity.39 Here too, it would seem, tsimtsum is not contraction as withdrawal but rather contraction as intensification.

36 Zohar ed. R. Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1999), 3.225a; The Wisdom of the Zohar ed Isaiah Tishby and trans. David Goldstein (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 1989), 1.259. 37 See, e.g., Moses Cordovero, Sefer Tikkunei ha-Zohar im Peirush Or Yakar (Jerusalem: Achuzat Israel, 1983), 206–207, where Cordovero points out that, according to philosophy too, there is no vacuum. On Cordovero’s account of tsimtsum, see Bracha Sack, “Torat ha-ẓimẓum le-Moshe Kordovero,” Tarbiẓ 58 (1999), 207–237. 38 See, e.g., Israel Sarug, Limmudei Aẓilut [ascribed falsely to Hayyim Vital] (Munkacs: Blayer and Kohn, 1897), 22a: “And it is not actual contraction [ẓimẓum mamash], heaven forfend, which would leave a place empty of [ein sof]. Rather it is to give preparation to a place to receive as it were a certain materialization [hitgalmut; alternative version: revelation, hitgalut]”. 39 For a transcription, see Alexander Altmann, “Notes on the Development of Rabbi Menahem Azariah Fano’s Kabbalistic Doctrine” (Heb.), Meḥkarei Yerushalayim be-Maḥshevet Yisrael

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When selections from Vital’s Eẓ Ḥayyim were finally published in print under the title Oẓerot Ḥayyim in 1784, they were accompanied by the annotations of the kabbalist and poet Moses Zacuto, who had clearly been influenced by Cordovero and Sarug. He noted that when Vital spoke of a “void,” it was to be understood “not specifically as a void, because the trace [reshimu] of the light remained, but with respect to ein sof it is called a void.”40 Yet the reshimu is discussed by Vital not in this context but only elsewhere. The point of the annotation is to pre-empt any suggestion in Vital’s text of a withdrawal of divine presence, and thereby to reconcile Vital with Sarug. Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, one of the most influential kabbalists of the last three centuries – banned by rabbinic authorities in his lifetime, universally revered after his death – addresses the question directly. One may ask: if tsimtsum is merely histalkut, how are establishment and existence relevant? Answer: the Will that wants to actualize the revelation of all things is what does all this, but what it wants to reveal is the finite power, and it is for this that it negates from itself the infinite [power], so that the act of tsimtsum is the establishment of revealed limit which the Will reveals, and the negation of the infinite [power]. Metaphorically: in the place that remains contracted, is revealed the root of judgment, which is what is established in this act.41

I take Luzzatto to be rejecting the question’s assumption: tsimtsum is not merely histalkut. It is a withdrawal only relative to infinity, insofar as it involves limitation, and this limitation is for the sake of revelation. In a similar vein, Luzzatto notes that, “What is lacking infinity is called void, and the remaining trace is the empty ether, and there is no void without trace.” (Tishrei-Tevet 1984), 241–267, and for a partial translation, see Eliyahu Klein, The Kabbalah of Creation: The Mysticism of Isaac Luria, Founder of Modern Kabbalah [in fact a translation of Vital’s Shaar ha-Kelalim] (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2005), 276–277. The relevant passage reads: “It was in this manner that the light folded and contracted the quality [of ein sof] within itself, from itself and in itself, in order to be the interior of [the first sefirah] crown [keter].” See Wolfson in this volume, 150. 40 Hayyim Vital, Oẓerot Hayyim (Koretz: Johann Anton Krieger, 1783), 1b. On Sarug’s influence on the reception of Lurianic kabbalah, e.g. in the Habad tradition, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York, NY: 2009), 60; Naḥum Grunwald, “Al kabbalat MaHaRi Sarug be-Torat ha-Ḥasidut: ‘Reshimu’, ‘Malbush’ ve-ha-ẓimẓum she-lifenei ha-ẓimẓum ha-Rishon be-Ḥasidut Ḥabad,” Part 1, Heikhal ha-Besht 31 (2011), 48–60; Part 2, Heikhal ha-Besht 32 (2012), 35–44; Part 3, Heikhal haBesht 33 (2013), 63–83; Part 4, Heikhal ha-Besht 34 (2014), 28–48; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-Reshimu – The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit,” Kabbalah 30 (2013), 75–120. 41 Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Kelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah ed. Ḥayyim Friedlander (Bnei Brak: Students of the Editor, 1992), Petah 24, 62–63.

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There are some exceptions to the rule. Naḥman of Bratslav notably emphasizes the void in his version of tsimtsum, and even portrays the void as an aspect of the created world.42 Perhaps closest to Scholem’s interpretation is the suggestion of Judah Fetayya, in his commentary to Vital’s works, that, It seems to me that it should say ‘[And then Ein Sof contracted itself] from the point’ and not ‘at the point’, for Ein Sof extended Its light from the central point and elevated it above the place of contraction; [the passage would be improved] without the expression ‘at the point’, which suggests the opposite, for its interpretation would be [that Ein Sof] contracted Its light in the midst of the central point, as our sages said: ‘between the staves of the ark’.43

These interpretations are fascinating and at the same time marginal. It is telling that Fetayya suggests emending the text in order to fit with something very much like Scholem’s interpretation: all other versions of Lurianic doctrine besides Vital’s reject the idea of a withdrawal of divine presence, and it does not fit even Vital’s text perfectly. To call these interpretations marginal is in no way to diminish their significance. What is marginal can, of course, subvert the mainstream, or become mainstream, and one could argue that Scholem’s interpretation has become mainstream among twentieth and twenty first century thinkers. My objection is to the promotion of Scholem’s interpretation as if it had been mainstream all along, and – even worse – as if it were not an interpretation at all, but rather a translation.

Schelling Reconsidered I want to single out one of the many effects of Scholem’s account: the characterization of Schelling’s use of the concept of tsimtsum as discontinuous with Lurianic kabbalah. In fact, Schelling is not only the most explicitly kabbalistic of the German Idealists; he is also profoundly Lurianic. Franz Rosenzweig drew attention to the kabbalistic dimension of Schelling’s philosophy, specifically his conception of tsimtsum.44 Schelling’s use of the 42 Shaul Magid, “The Absence of God in R. Naḥman of Bratzlav’s Likkutei MoHaRan”, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 88, no. 4 (October 1995), 495–519. 43 Judah Fetayya, Beit Leḥem Yehudah (Jerusalem: n.p., 1936), 3a. 44 Franz Rosenzweig, “‘Urzelle’ des Stern der Erlösung”, in Rosenzweig, Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, eds. Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 125; Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 57. For more on Schelling on tsimtsum, see Alex Ozar’s contribution to this volume.

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notion did not come out of the blue, since the idea had figured in what is arguably the founding document of German Idealism, the conversations between Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi reported by Jacobi in letters to Moses Mendelssohn.45 In those conversations, however, which cite the Christian kabbalists of the seventeenth century, kabbalah is identified as a less abstract version of Spinozistic pantheism, and tsimtsum, which could readily be used to articulate a less obviously problematic panentheism, was treated only as a joke.46 Nevertheless, the idea of the infinite as self-limiting became central to German Idealism thanks to Salomon Maimon and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Schelling was also independently familiar with Christian kabbalah through his family. His interest in kabbalah is expressed in a remarkable footnote to his 1815 treatise, The Deities of Samothrace: I do not know what opinion is currently adopted in textbooks or other writings on Jewish philosophy or Kabbalah arranged in accordance with prevailing views; but I am daring enough, from a fairly superficial acquaintance with it, to prove that it contains fragments and remnants, very disfigured if one wills, but nevertheless remnants of that primordial system which is the key of all religious systems, and that the Jews do not speak entirely untruly when they present the Kabbalah as the transmission of a doctrine which, apart from the system of the revealed, manifested (and therefore open) scriptural documents, was more comprehensible but secret, neither universally communicated nor communicable. The announcement of a Hebrew-rabbinic work, recently arrived from Vienna, which promises to collect all the doctrines of Ben Jochoi [i.e., Simeon bar Yohai], author of the well-known work of Zohar, from the sources, is thus greatly anticipated by the connoisseur. Would that a Jewish or other scholar could find support enough to edit the entire Zohar and open other sources! It is almost sad to see how, even in these researches, one has completely turned away from the true sources.47

Schelling admitted the superficiality of his knowledge, but was sufficiently interested to follow announcements of relevant Hebrew books in Vienna. Schelling’s most extended, explicit account of tsimtsum occurs in his Stuttgart private lectures, a transcript of which was published posthumously. Of this

45 Jacobi’s report of the conversation is included inter alia in Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Breslau: Gottfried Löwe, 1785), 1–45. For a translation, see The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 181–200. 46 Jacobi, Über die Lehre (1785), 33, 35; Main Philosophical Writings (1994), 195, 196. 47 Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling, Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake (1815), Sämmtliche Werke ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61) VII, 417–18, n.113. Robert F. Brown omits from his translation, Schelling’s Treatise on the Deities of Samothrace (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975), 39, the part of the note whose translation I provide here.

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account, Christoph Schulte wrote, “For Luria God contracts Himself away from a ‘place’, for Schelling He contracts Himself into a ‘place’, the ground.”48 But Schulte’s remark is clearly based on accepting Scholem’s translation or interpretation. If Lurianic texts about tsimtsum are read as I suggested above, however, Schelling turns out to be considerably more Lurianic than Schulte suggests. Schelling rejects “the usual concept of God of so-called rational religion and all abstract systems” as “something complete and immutable”. In order to conceive God “as a living, personal being”, Schelling pursues an analogy with everything human, “except for dependency.”49 In human life, to limit oneself, to concentrate oneself in One point, yet also to hold onto the latter with all one’s might and not to let go until it has been expanded into a world, constitutes the greatest power and perfection. . . Contraction, then, is the beginning of all reality. . . It is exactly the descent of God that is the greatest, even in Christianity.50

In human personality formation, “a state of unconsciousness in which everything still exists without separation” gives way to “two principles, an unconscious, dark one and a conscious one.”51 So too God contracts into the real, while at the same time expanding as the ideal. The real, or matter, is God’s unconscious, which shows itself as infinite over the course of evolution, and the task of history is to transfigure matter, to let “clarity break through the night of His essence.”52 What Schelling retrojects into the preparation for creation is the pattern of tsimtsum/histalkut and hitpashtut that will be repeated, according to his philosophy of nature, in the evolution of organic and ultimately conscious, natural beings. It is not revelation as dwelling in the sanctuary in the midst of the people, then, that Schelling retrojects, but rather revelation as personalisation. He does not thematise any void between the real and the ideal, and his conception of tsimtsum is unquestionably designed to fit his own philosophy as well as his version of Christianity, with its emphasis on divine incarnation. Nevertheless, in Schelling’s pattern of tsimtsum/histalkut and hitpashtut, there is surely a creative development continuous with the Lurianic tradition. For Schelling, as for Sarug, tsimtsum is contraction as intensification. It is not the absence but the presence

48 Christoph Schulte, “Ẓimẓum in the Philosophy of Schelling,” Iyyun 41 (January 1992), 35–36; Ẓimẓum (2014), 316–317. 49 Schelling, “Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen” (1810), Sämmtliche Werke (1856–61), VII, 432. 50 Schelling, “Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen” (1810), Sämmtliche Werke (1856–61), VII, 429–430. For a published translation, see “Stuttgart Semnars,” Schelling and the Endgame of Theory trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1994), 195–243. 51 Schelling, “Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen” (1810), Sämmtliche Werke (1856–61), VII, 433. 52 Schelling, “Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen” (1810), Sämmtliche Werke (1856–61), VII, 433.

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of divinity, raised to a higher power – the garment of light folded upon itself – that is the origin of darkness. Yet, if one’s conception of tsimtsum is formed primarily by Scholem, one may readily conclude, as Schulte does, that Schelling’s conception of contraction is based on a misunderstanding or is discontinuous with kabbalah. I make no claim to carry out an exhaustive survey here, but I would wager that interpretations of numerous texts and figures have been similarly distorted by Scholem’s influential but problematic remarks. I have said nothing in this paper about the comparative philosophical and/ or theological merits of different conceptions of tsimtsum. If one wishes to argue for the significance of Scholem’s conception, then this would be an interesting discussion. If, however, one relies on Scholem’s suggestion about the translation of the term and to its inversion of the midrashic tradition, then this seems to me impossible to defend. It should be recognised that, when Scholem made that suggestion and when he attempted to distract attention from Israel Sarug’s version of Lurianic kabbalah, he was not in fact operating as a historian. What is called for is, in the first instance, openness to the diverse ways in which tsimtsum may be conceived. Only then will it be possible to have a well-informed debate about what is at stake.

Bibliography Altmann, Alexander. “Notes on the Development of Rabbi Menahem Azariah Fano’s Kabbalistic Doctrine” (Heb.), Meḥkarei Yerushalayim be-Maḥshevet Yisrael, Tishrei-Tevet 1984. Austin, J. L. Philosophical Papers eds. J. O. Urmson and G. L. Warnock, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Bacharach, Naftali Hertz. Emek ha-Melekh, Amsterdam: Immanuel Benvenisti, 1648. ben Azriel of Bohemia, Abraham. Arugat ha-Bosem, ed. E. E. Urbach, Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1938. ben Meir, Samuel. Peirush ha-Rashbam al-ha-Torah, ed. M. Lokshin, Jerusalem: Ḥorev, 2009. ben Yehiel, Nathan. Aruch Completum sive Lexicon Vocabula et Res quae in Libris Targumicis, Talmudicis et Midraschichis continentur, trans. Alexander Kohut, Vienna: A. Fanto, 1891. Bereshit Rabba, eds. J. Theodor and Ch. Albeck, Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1928. Brown, Robert F. Schelling’s Treatise on the Deities of Samothrace, Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975. Ernst Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Cohen de Herrera, Abraham. Shaar ha-Shamayim, Amsterdam: Immanuel Benvenisti, 1655. Cordovero, Moses. Pardes Rimonim, Krakow: Isaac ben Aaron of Prossnitz, 1591. _____. Or Yakar, Jerusalem: Achuzat Israel, 1967. _____. Sefer Tikkunei ha-Zohar im Peirush Or Yakar, Jerusalem: Achuzat Israel, 1983.

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_____. Pardes Rimonim: Orchard of Pomegranates. Parts 1–4, trans. Elyakim Getz Monfalcone: Providence University, 2007. Coudert, Allison. The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century. The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698). Leiden: Brill, 1999. Delmedigo, Joseph Solomon. Taalumot Ḥokhmah, Basel: n.p., 1629. de Fano, Menahem Azariah. Pelah ha-Rimon,Venice: Daniel Zanetti, 1600. Dweck, Yaacob. Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Franks, Paul. “Inner Anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism’s Relationship to Judaism”, in Yearbook of German Idealism, Volume VII, Faith and Reason, eds. Fred Rush, Jürgen Stolzenberg and Paul Franks, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010, 254–279. _____. “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism”, in The Impact of Idealism, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley, Vol. IV, Religion, ed. Nicholas Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 219–245. _____. “‘Nothing comes from Nothing’: Judaism, the Orient and the Kabbalah in Hegel’s Reception of Spinoza”, in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael Della Rocca, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. _____. “Beyond the Ban: Rav Dessler’s Vision of a Yeshiva combining Lithuanian Lomdut, Chabad, and Polish Chasidut”, forthcoming in Contemporary Uses and Forms of Ḥasidut ed. Shlomo Zuckier, Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2019. Fetayya, Judah. Beit Leḥem Yehudah, Jerusalem: n.p., 1936. Genesis. Targum Neofiti 1, trans. and ed. Martin M.S.C McNamara, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991. Giller, Pinchas. Reading the Zohar: Sacred Text of the Kabbalah, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ha-Kohen of Lunel, Jacob. Orḥot Ḥayyim, Florence: Isaac di Pass, 1750. Hayman, Peter. Sefer Yesira: Edition, Translation and Text-Critical Commentary, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Horowitz, Shabbetai Sheftel. Shefa Tal, Hanau: Hans Jakob Hene, 1612. ibn Tabul, Joseph. “Derush Ḥeftsi Bah”in Massoud ha-Kohen Elhadad, Simhat Kohen, Jerusalem: 1921. Idel, Moshe. “Al toledot musag ha-‘ẓimẓum’ be-kabbalah u-be-meḥkar”, Meḥkarei Yerushalayim be-Mahshevet Yisrael (1992), 59–112. Jacobi, Heinrich. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. Kasher, Menahem. Torah Shelemah, New York, NY: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1948. Klein, Eliyahu. The Kabbalah of Creation: The Mysticism of Isaac Luria, Founder of Modern Kabbalah, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2005. Luzzatto, Moses Hayyim. Kelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, ed. Ḥayyim Friedlander, Bnei Brak: Students of the Editor, 1992. Macho, Alejandro Diez, trans. and ed. Neophyti 1: Targum Palestinense ms. de la Biblioteca Vaticana, I, Genesis, Madrid-Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1968. Magid, Shaul. “The Absence of God in R. Naḥman of Bratzlav’s Likkutei MoHaRan”, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 88, no. 4 (October 1995), 495–519.

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_____. From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Mekhilta, trans. and ed. Jacob Lauterbach, Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1933. Meroz, Ronit. “Israel Sarug, Student of the Ari: A Fresh Examination of the Issue” (Hebrew), Da’at 28 (1992), 41–50. _____. “The School of Sarug: A New History” (Hebrew), Shalem 7 (2002), 149–193. Midrash Tanḥuma -Yelammedenu, trans. and ed. Samuel A. Berman, Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1995. Modena, Leon. Ari Nohem, ed. Nehemiah S. Libowitz, Jerusalem: Darom, 1929. Naḥmanides, Moses. Peirush ha-Ramban le-Sefer Yeẓirah, Kiryat Sefer 6 (1929–30). Orian, Matan “Josephus’s Seven Purities and the Mishnah’s Ten Holinesses”, Journal for the Study of Judaism 47 (2016). Rosenroth, Christian von. Kabbala Denudata seu doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theological. Vol. I, Sulzbach, Abraham Lichtentahler: 1677; Appendix to Vol. I, Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtentahler, 1678; Vol. II, Frankfurt am Main: Balthasar Christoph Wust, 1684. Rosenzweig, Franz. “’Urzelle’ des Stern der Erlösung”, in Franz Rosenzweig, Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, eds. Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. _____. Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000. Sack, Bracha. “Torat ha-ẓimẓum le-Moshe Kordovero”, Tarbiẓ 58 (1999), 207–237. Sarug, Israel. Limmudei Aẓilut, Munkacs: Blayer and Kohn, 1897. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef. Sämmtliche Werke ed. K. F. A. Schelling, Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York, NY: Schocken, 1946. _____. Kabbalah, New York, NY: Quadrangle, 1974. _____. “Reflections on Jewish Theology”, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, trans, Werner J. Dannhauser (New York, NY: Schocken, 1976 _____. “Israel Sarug, Student of the Ari” (Hebrew), Zion (1940), 214–243. Schulte, Christoph. “Ẓimẓum in the Philosophy of Schelling”, Iyyun 41 (January 1992), 21–40. Shatil, Sharron. “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-Cordoverian Encounter”, The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011), 158–187. Shinan, Avigdor, ed. Midrash Shemot Rabbah 1–14, Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1984. Sifra, ed. Louis Finkelstein, New York, NY: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1956. Tishby, Isaiah, ed. The Wisdom of the Zohar, trans. David Goldstein, Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 1989. Vital, Hayyim. Oẓerot Hayyim, Koretz: Johann Anton Krieger, 1783. _____. Derush al Olam ha-Azilut in Likkutim Ḥadashim, ed. D. Touitou, Jerusalem, 1985. _____. Eẓ Ḥayyim, Jerusalem: n.p. 1987/8. _____. The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria: The Palace of Adam Kadmon trans. Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padeh, New York, NY: Arizal Publications, 2008. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Theology” in Suffering Religion eds. Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson, London: Routledge, 2002.

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_____. Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, New York, NY: SUNY, 2009. _____. “Nequddat ha-Reshimu – The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit”, Kabbalah 30 (2013), 75–120. Zohar, ed. R. Margaliot, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1999.

Daniel H. Weiss

Tsimtsum between the Bible and Philosophy: Levinas, Luria, and Genesis 1 In this essay, I explore ways in which the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum can be understood as implicitly constituting a fundamental critique of the dominant tradition of Western philosophy. Alongside this, I seek to show how, despite potential appearances to the contrary, the logic of tsimtsum can also be found in the opening chapter of the book of Genesis, and how this text in turn can also be located within a functionally similar pattern of critique. My philosophical guide in this endeavor will be Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on the relation between the same and the other, particularly as expressed in Totality and Infinity: specifically, the idea that otherness and separation, rather than undermining connection and relation, can in fact function to ground relationality. In connection to tsimtsum and to Genesis 1, this same pattern of reasoning manifests in the notion that the created world, as well as individual human beings, are able to relate to God precisely on the basis of their non-divine status, on the basis of their otherness from God. Such a stance stands in contrast to an assumption that proper relation to the divine and to truth can be achieved only on the basis of sameness, only by overcoming otherness. We will see that what Levinas does to the tradition of Western philosophy can be seen as structurally paralleling what Lurianic tsimtsum does to neoplatonism and to earlier kabbalistic understandings, and then also to what Genesis 1 does to Ancient Near Eastern theologies of divine/human mediation. Although Levinas, Luria, and Genesis express themselves in quite different ways, we can find a similar pattern of reasoning across all three by looking at, to borrow a term from Steven Schwarzschild, the type of ‘twist’ they perform on the dominant inherited tradition that they engage.1 Thus, Levinas’s specifically philosophical language can aid us in discerning a similar conceptual pattern in the seemingly non-philosophical formulations of Lurianic tsimtsum and of Genesis 1. Likewise, by looking all three together, we will be able to highlight ways in which the Lurianic notion of tsimtsum can be understood as an important conceptual bridge linking biblical conceptuality and formulations with those of Levinas. In all, we

1 On the notion of a ‘Jewish twist,’ see Steven S. Schwarzschild, “An Agenda for Jewish Philosophy in the 1980’s,” in Studies in Jewish Philosophy: Collected Essays of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy 1980–1985, ed. Norbert Samuelson (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), 101–125. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-003

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will trace two competing streams of thought across a range of historical and literary instantiations: a stream of relation through otherness, as found in Genesis 1, Lurianic tsimtsum, and Levinasian philosophical alterity, standing critically over against a stream of relation through sameness, as found in Ancient Near Eastern theology, neoplatonism, earlier kabbalistic thought, and the dominant mode of Western philosophy.

Methodological Considerations In the discussion below, I will be arguing for parallels among the three following conceptual pairings: Levinas/Totality and Infinity ←→ the dominant tradition of Western philosophy Lurianic tsimtsum ←→ Neoplatonism/earlier kabbalistic thought Genesis 1 ←→ Ancient Near Eastern theologies

However, before delving into these parallels, it is first important to state beforehand what I seek (or do not seek) to designate by each of these terms. First of all, in disussing Lurianic tsimtsum, I will draw most primarily on Gershom Scholem’s account of this concept. While some scholars have queried the extent to which certain aspects of his account do or do not in fact align with ‘the historical Luria’s’ concept of tsimtsum, Scholem’s conception is nevertheless well-suited for my purposes here, as a basic heuristic model for the purpose of philosophical and phenomenological comparison. Further studies could then assess whether or not the patterns I highlight would also apply to understandings of Lurianic tsimtsum that diverge from Scholem’s. In general, moreover, the main features of Lurianic tsimtsum that my argument draws from Scholem are generally not those that have been matters of scholarly controversy.2

2 Moshe Idel, in particular, has criticized a tendency in Scholem to downplay pre-Lurianic predecessors of the concept of tsimtsum, and has also argued that Scholem’s claim of a link between Lurianic tsimtsum and the expulsion from Spain lacks a basis in the kabbalistic sources themselves. See Idel, “On the concept of tsimtsum in kabbalah and in scholarship” [Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10 (1992): 92–100; see also further scholarship cited in Idel, “Conceptualizations of Tzimtzum in Baroque Italian Kabbalah,” in The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 29. However, Idel does not reject the claim that the Lurianic account of tsimtum contains many innovative elements, and he also agrees with Scholem that the concept is absent from many (though not all) pre-Lurianic kabbalistic texts, including, most notably, the Zohar (“On the concept of tsimtsum,” 77, 93). Likewise, even if

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Similarly, in discussing Levinas’s critique of what he views as the dominant stream of Western philosophy, it is possible that Levinas has oversimplified the actual history of Western philosophical thought. Yet, his critique can nevertheless be valuable for characterizing at least one significant strand of past philosophical thinking, regardless of the specific extent to which that strand was dominant in all historical periods. Thus, in the case of both Scholem and Levinas, I focus on the philosophical dynamics of the conceptual contrasts that they explore, and I set aside, for the purpose of this essay, the question of the precise degree of historicity of their posited conceptual accounts. Likewise, both Scholem and Levinas engage the notion of ‘neoplatonism’ as part of their analysis. In this regard, there is certainly room for asking whether such ‘neoplatonism’ is more reflective of Scholem and Levinas’s concerns about nineteenth-century German idealism than of historical pre-modern neoplatonic traditions.3 Again, however, my purpose here is focused more on a phenomonelogical comparison of competing modes of thought, and less on the question of the extent to which those modes of thought correspond in terms of historicity to specific past thinkers. While in making my arguments I strive to remain cognizant of the actual historical traditions of neoplatonism, and while I do think that Levinas and Scholem’s arguments do have real value for the analysis of historical neoplatonism, I do not focus on the specific degree of historicity or nonhistoricity of their presentations of neoplatonism. Finally, Genesis 1 has certainly been subject to a wide range of interpretations over the centuries. For my purposes here, I draw upon contemporary biblical scholarship that has sought to place Genesis 1 in a comparative context vis-à-vis other Ancient Near Eastern theologies and theopolitical conceptualities. I thus explore Genesis 1 through the tools of modern historical methods of study, as distinct from the ways in which the chapter was understood in Jewish and Christian traditions of theological interpretation. However, the conceptual account of Genesis 1 of which I make use may in fact also have parallels to classical rabbinic conceptuality, and so it may also be possible to trace a historical thread through to the rabbinic-kabbalistic account of tsimtsum later formulated by Luria. Thus, again, my focus in the present essay remains on a philosophical comparison of different conceptual understandings, while at the same time these comparisons have the potential to bear further fruit in the context of future studies exploring

he sometimes highlights Luria’s innovativeness, Scholem himself points to historical precursors to Lurianic conceptions (Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schocken, 1995], 258–259). 3 I thank Isidoros Katsos for emphasizing this point.

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the details of development and influence among these texts and thinkers from a more strictly historical perspective.

Levinas’s Philosophical Challenge to the Western Intellectual Tradition’s Privileging of Unity and Participation over Otherness and Separation Let us first explore Levinas’s critique of the dominant tradition of Western philosophy. In this tradition, which according to Levinas runs “from Parmenides to Hegel and Spinoza,” there is a privileging of “unity,” and a corresponding view of “separation” as “incompressible and irrational.”4 In this dominant framework, the task of philosophy, in the form of metaphysics, would be to “endeavor to suppress separation, to unite.” While initial appearances of the phenomenal world may give rise to an impression of multiplicity and separation, linked to otherness, the Western philosophic quest for true wisdom seeks to overcome that apparent multiplicity and otherness, and to arrive a reality in which unity has been achieved. In this framework that opposes separation, the relation of “the same” to “the other” (TI 102) is viewed as problematic: if the other is in fact other, then separation persists, and truth is not achieved. By contrast, if unity and union with the erstwhile other were achieved, then the other would no longer be other, and the relation of ‘the same to the other’ would be overcome. In this regard, Levinas portrays Western philosophy as “engaged in reducing to the same all that is opposed to it as other,”5 resulting in the “reduction of the other to the same.”6 If the other remains other, such separation is viewed as precluding the desirable and true mode of being, which can achieved only via unity. Levinas links this orientation of thought to an emphasis on “participation” as necessary for maintaining “contact with the other,” whereas separation and lack of participation would result in an undesirable loss of contact (TI 61). By contrast, Levinas maintains that, contrary to these assumptions, there can in fact be relation of the same to the other, characterized by a radical separation, which, far from hindering contact and relationality, in fact establishes a

4 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity [hereafter TI] (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 102. 5 Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 48, italics in the original. 6 TI 43.

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different type of contact and relationality, in which otherness and non-sameness ground relationality rather than undermining it. In this sense, the type of separation Levinas intends “is not a movement away from the other” but instead makes possible a relation “to the absolutely other, to Infinity” (TI 61). Thus, while such separation does indeed entail the negation of participation, it does not bring about loss of contact, but rather maintains contact, albeit in a different, non-participatory form (TI 61). For Levinas, separation is a “relationship within independence” (TI 104): a type of relationship that depends on the other truly being other, in which both parties are other to one another and thus each retain an important element of independence. It is not simply that that relation and contact can be maintained despite otherness, but that these take place precisely through otherness. Put more radically, this type of relationship requires otherness, and would in fact be lost or undermined if otherness were reduced to the same: such unification would in fact eliminate the relation to the Infinite, to the Other. Thus, whereas the dominant tradition of Western philosophy holds that the otherness of separation is to be eliminated in participatory unity, the relation that Levinas posits demands that otherness be maintained. Rather than seeking the achievement of a totality that overcomes multiplicity as the relational goal, Levinas posits the achievement of true multiplicity (of a different type) through the breaking of totality.

Scholem and the Lurianic Twist on Neoplatonism and Earlier Kabbalistic Thought Notably, in challenging Western philosophy’s privileging of unity over separation and otherness, Levinas also employs language emphasizing the significance of ‘contraction.’ He writes that “Infinity is produced” via “a contraction that leaves a space for the separated being” (TI 104). This idea of ‘contraction’ appears to be a direct allusion to the Lurianic notion of tsimtsum, in which God is held to have enacted a ‘self-contraction’ in order to ‘make space’ for the created world. It might, at first glance, seem surprising to find reference to the more ‘mythical’ framework of tsimtsum in a work written primarily in an abstract philosophical register. Yet, the fact of its inclusion indicates that, at the very least, Levinas himself viewed the idea of tsimtsum as bearing relevance to his philosophical project. In order to gain a better sense of why he might have thought so, we can benefit from an examination of Gershom Scholem’s account of Lurianic tsimtsum. In the Lurianic framework, prior to the act of creation, all existence is permeated in an undifferentiated manner by the ‘light of the Infinite’ (or ein sof), with

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no space for finite creatures. However, as formulated by Luria’s disciple Hayyim Vital, “When it arose in the simple will [of the Infinite] to create the worlds and to emanate emanations…the Infinite contracted itself in [or: contracted itself from; tsimtsem et ʿatzmo] its centermost point, in the very center of its light, and this light was contracted and withdrew to the sides around the central point, and thus was left a vacant space, an empty vacuum.”7 The empty space left behind by the initial withdrawal/contraction (tsimtsum) of the light of the Infinite makes possible the subsequent creation of differentiated created beings. Commenting on this cosmogony, Scholem states that the Lurianic conception of tsimtsum was “intended to give an explanation for the existence of something other than God.”8 Likewise, he asserts that tsimtsum consists of God “banishing Himself from His totality into profound seclusion” and that tsimtsum “guards against the danger of the dissolution into the non-individual being of the divine ‘all in all.’”9 While Scholem’s presentation of Lurianic tsimtsum is formulated in a more philosophical idiom not directly native to the Lurianic texts, it is nevertheless notable that Scholem, writing before Levinas, presents tsimtsum in distinctly ‘Levinasian’ terms, in connection with the affirmative creation of ‘otherness,’ of that which is ‘other than’ God, and with an act that marks a break from ‘totality’ and that upholds the individual being’s separation from dissolution into an ‘all in all.’ That is to say, according to Scholem, Luria’s notion of tsimtsum presents ‘otherness from God’ and the breaking of totality not as the result of evil or unfortunate happenstance, but as stemming from a positive and deliberately intended act on God’s part, and indeed as God’s very first act in the process of creation. Moreover, Scholem also states that the Lurianic notion of tsimtsum represents a major revision of earlier kabbalistic systems, many of which had been more in keeping with neoplatonic notions of emanationism.10

7 Hayyim Vital, ʿEtz Hayyim (Unterhendler: Warsaw, 1891) 1:2; translation mine. 8 Scholem, Major Trends, 262. For reflections on Scholem’s philosophical reasons for aligning more with Vital’s approach to tsimtsum than with that of Israel Sarug, another Lurianic disciple, see Agata Bielik-Robson, “The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude,” in Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy: Interchange in the Wake of God, ed. David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, Duane Williams (London: Routledge, 2017), 40. In a related vein, Oona Ajzenstat recognizes that not all schools of interpretation of Lurianic tsimtsum are equally conducive to Levinas’s philosophy; see Ajzenstat, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’ Postmodernism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 190. 9 Scholem, Major Trends, 262, 261. Cf. Levinas: “The unicity of the I conveys separation. Separation in the strictest sense is solitude” (TI 117); “The breach of the totality that is accomplished by the enjoyment of solitude – or the solitude of enjoyment – is radical” (TI 119). 10 Scholem, Major Trends, 260.

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In order to appreciate Scholem’s posited ‘Lurianic twist,’ let us consider the way in which dynamics of same and other manifest themselves in traditional neoplatonic thought. As put forth prominently by Plotinus, the divine One, as part of a series of emanations, first generates Intellect as the image of the One; subsequently, the World Soul is generated by Intellect.11 These emanations, although in one sense separated from the One, simultaneously remain in a state of connection and unity with the One. However, the human soul, by contrast, is separated from the One in a different, undesirable manner, due to its having descended into the world of matter. The typical state of affairs of a presently embodied soul is marked by a problematic distancing from the immaterial realm of intellect and the One. Yet, although the human soul is currently situated in the specifically non-divine and material human body, the soul is in its true immaterial essence composed of the ‘same stuff’ as the divine One, the Intellect, and the World Soul. The task of the contemplative life, then, is to seek to ‘return’ the soul to the connection with the divine One, a task that requires a distancing of the soul from its de facto starting relation of attachment to the material world and to the material body and its passions. Thus, while the current worldly situation involves a separation from the immaterial realm of the One, the practice of contemplation can help to overcome this separation and lead the soul back to participatory unity with the One. Although the embodied soul, to the extent that it remains in an attitude of attachment to the body and the material world, is in a relation of otherness to the divine One, it can, through contemplation, succeed in reducing that otherness through a returning ascent to the divine. Through this process, the relation of the divine soul to the divine One transitions from a relation of same to other into a relationship of mystical union in which that which was other has been reduced (or restored) to the same. Moreover, the current undesirable state of separation is accounted for in neoplatonism by a creation narrative in which the soul began, as befits its divine essence, in a relation of union and unity with the immaterial realm of the divine One. However, the unitary state was ruptured through a ‘fall,’ in which the soul moved away from that original unity and became enmeshed in a separated material body. Although for Plotinus (in contrast to the sharper anti-material stance of some gnostic systems) this enmeshment in matter is not inherently to be denigrated, it does problematically distance the soul from the One. Thus, the soul’s contemplative task represents a restoration of the original unity that had been lost, a return to original ‘sameness.’ In this narrative, the current existence of

11 For a thorough account of the basic dynamics of Plotinus’s conceptual framework, see the commentary in Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 1994).

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otherness, insofar as it is bound to materiality, constitutes a state of affairs that has come about but which is not ultimately desired by the divine One. Otherness means that the soul has fallen out of true relation to the One, and the overcoming of otherness enables restoration of the soul’s proper relation to the One. As such, the separated existence of the material world and the embodied human being represent a diminution of relation to the divine, while the overcoming of such separation enables an augmented relation to the divine. As Scholem emphasizes, many pre-Lurianic kabbalistic accounts seem to be largely in keeping with this basic neoplatonic orientation. In the Zohar, to take a prominent example, creation begins not with contraction but with emanation.12 Likewise, the soul is understood as ‘descending’ into corporeal existence in the material world.13 This descent into corporeality results in a diminished relationship between God and the soul. However, though currently situated in the material world, the soul, as originating from the divine sphere, also longs to return to that sphere and to separate itself from attachment to the material world.14 Thus, the soul’s current state of otherness from God represents a situation not ultimately intended by God’s initial emanatory act of creation and is thus a situation which the kabbalist seeks to overcome. By contrast, in Scholem’s account of Lurianic tsimtsum, the created world’s otherness from the divine is not merely an unfortunate result of the soul’s undesirable descent or fall. Rather, tsimtsum alters the neoplatonic narrative so that the otherness of the created world stems from a deliberate act of God in the very beginning of the process of creation: God’s self-contraction enables the world to come into existence as something other than God, and this otherness accordingly retains a positive status. Because God created and desired otherness through an intentional action, conceptual space is carved out for affirming the otherness, finitude, and non-divinity of the created world not as undermining relation to God, but as establishing a positive relation to the divine, albeit of a type quite different from the traditional neoplatonic framework, in which the material world’s otherness from God constitutes a hindrance to relation to the divine.15

12 See discussion in Idel, “On the concept of tsimtsum,” 77. 13 Nathan Wolski, A Journey into the Zohar: An Introduction to the Book of Radiance (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 75. 14 Wolski, Journey, 78. 15 Thus, in contrast to Charles Mopsik, who argues that Lurianic tsimtsim is unlike Levinas, in that the former is about establishing relation between creator and creation, rather than being about separation between creator and creation, we can instead view both Levinas and Lurianic tsimtsum as being about (a different type of) relation between creator and creation precisely by means of (a different type of) separation between creator and creation. See Mopsik, “La Pensée

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Importantly, when Scholem asserts that tsimtsum assigns a distinctly positive role to ‘otherness from God,’ we should not assume that he is unaware of the fact that the neoplatonic scheme of emanation can itself be described as a complex relation of sameness and otherness, of unity and multiplicity. Thus, when intellect is first emanated from the One, intellect is on the one hand different and other than the One, and thus this emanation constitutes a form of multiplicity and separation. Yet, on the other hand, the intellect simultaneously retains a relationship of unity and sameness with the One. Thus, the act of emanation can be understood as constituting an act that is simultaneously differentiation and non-differentiation. Yet, in Scholem’s presentation, tsimtsum as the first act of God’s creation constitutes a radical separation, a sharp break from sameness, which stands in contrast to the extension of different-yet-unified emanationism. Drawing on the Levinasian terminology discussed above, we can view tsimtsum as an “absolute alterity” (TI 197), an “absolute gap of separation” (TI 293), an “absolute distance” (TI 36), an “absolute difference” (TI 194), marking it as qualitatively dissimilar to the same-yet-different dynamic of emanationist participation, in which the positive dimensions of separation and otherness are specifically not ‘absolute.’ Thus, in neoplatonism, the non-problematic otherness of the initial stages of emanation is not properly ‘other,’ while the properly ‘other’ otherness of the material world constitutes a problematic and undesirable hindrance to relation to the divine.16 By contrast, the act of tsimtsum presents the created world as properly ‘other’ from the creator, yet casts this act of separation as deliberately performed by God, such that this otherness is something to be upheld rather than overcome.17 d’Emmanuel Lévinas et la Cabale,” in Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Lévinas, eds. Catherine Chalier and Miquel Abensour (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1991), 380. 16 My argument about the relation of Lurianic tsimtsum to neoplatonism is not dependent on the historical question as to whether or to what extent ideas akin to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum can be found in some pre-Lurianic kabbalistic texts. Indeed, if in fact a similar notion of tsimtsum as radical otherness can also be found in certain pre-Lurianic texts, this would show that efforts to resist or break from neoplatonism were already present in the kabbalistic tradition and may have provided inspiration for Luria’s more explicit formulation of the idea. At the same time, while certain streams of kabbalistic thought may have contained precursors to Lurianic tsimtsum, there were simultaneously other prominent streams of kabbalistic thought, most notably the Zohar, that notably lacked the notion of tsimtsum as the first act of creation (see Idel, “The concept of tsimtsum,” 77, 101). As such, Scholem’s claim of the revolutionary transformation constituted by the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum would indeed have a stronger historical basis particularly in relation to this latter category of kabbalistic streams of thought. 17 In this regard, the notion of tsimtsum can be seen as having the advantage of upholding God’s power and control over the affairs of creation, whereas the neoplatonic assertion of otherness as arising from an undesirable fall faces the challenge of explaining how such a catastroph-

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Levinas and Lurianic Tsimtsum Through this description of an affirmative otherness, we can discern ways in which the twist that the Lurianic notion of tsimtsum performs on previous kabbalistic and/or neoplatonic tradition parallels the twist that Levinas performs on the dominant tradition of Western philosophy. In both, otherness that breaks from sameness is raised from a fault to a virtue. Although this transformation is presented in more ‘mythological’ terms in the Lurianic framework, and in more abstract-philosophical terms in the Levinasian framework, the similarity between the two comes out most strongly when we consider the type of ‘moves’ that they perform on the respective traditions with which they stand in critical relation. Furthermore, the fact that Levinas explicitly uses the term ‘contraction’ may indicate his self-conscious awareness of this parallel. Through the use of this term, he may have actively intended to convey: I seek to perform the same type of move on the tradition of Western philosophy as Lurianic tsimtsum performed on neoplatonism.18 This suspicion gains further weight when we consider the fact that in the same section of Totality and Infinity in which Levinas speaks of ‘contraction,’ he does so alongside discussion of Plotinus and Plotinian notions. Thus, he discusses Plotinian “descent,” and describes Plotinus as linked to the notion that multiplicity is to be understood as an “ontological fallenness” (TI 103, 104). Moreover, whereas in another passage he characterizes the opposition to multiplicity and otherness as stemming from “Parmenides to Spinoza and Hegel,” he here specifically states that, with regard to the view of multiplicity as fallenness, “[s]ince Parmenides across Plotinus we have not succeed in thinking otherwise” (TI 104). Levinas’s use of ‘we’ in this sentence points to a broader philosophical tradition continuing to his own generation – yet he specifically notes Plotinus as a key figure in this trajectory. By an affirmation of ‘contraction’ and ‘separation’ over against a specifically neoplatonic background, Levinas appears to indicate strongly that he sees Lurianic tsimtsum (in a Scholemian key) as a crucial precursor in his philosophy of affirmative otherness.19 In this sense, though Luria himself may not have ic accident could have taken place ‘on God’s watch.’ Cf. Levinas, TI 102: “But the philosophy of unity has never been able to say whence came this accidental illusion and fall, inconceivable in the Infinite, the Absolute, the Perfect.” 18 See Jacob Meskin, “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in The Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,” Levinas Studies 2 (2007): 49–77, 217–223; at 49. 19 Indeed, it may be that it was from Scholem that Levinas took the idea that tsimtsum challenges the neoplatonic/Plotinian tradition. As Jacob Meskin has highlighted, Levinas’s own study of kabbalistic material was shaped at least in part by Scholem’s guidance. See Meskin, “The Role,” 220. For analysis of additional links between tsimtsum and Levinas’s philosophical program in Totality and Infinity, see Meskin, “The Role,” 58–67.

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drawn out the implications explicitly, Levinas points to the possibility of viewing the concept of tsimtsum, beyond its kabbalistic framework, as instantiating a profound if implicit critique of the dominant tradition of Western thought, and it would be fruitful to further analyze the subsequent reception of tsimtsum in philosophical and theological thought after Luria in light of this critique. Yet, before continuing, we should note the specific sense in which one can properly speak of Luria as a conceptual precursor to Levinasian philosophy. Michael Fagenblat has rightly criticized scholarly tendencies that draw an unqualified connection between Lurianic and Levinasian thought. Against such tendencies, Fagenblat argues that Luria’s “monism” stands in sharp contrast with Levinas’s more “dualistic” approach.20 While Fagenblat is speaking specifically about a moral dualism between good and evil, we can also apply this ‘non-monistic’ label to Levinas’s affirmation of a type of dualism between self and other. By contrast, to describe Luria as a ‘monist’ would place him more properly in the tradition of thought linked to neoplatonist affirmation of the divine One and the desirability of unity. Nevertheless, we can affirm the legitimacy of linking Levinas to Luria not only on the basis of Levinas’s own allusion to tsimtsum, but by distinguishing the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum from other aspects of Luria’s thought. That is to say, while some or even many aspects of Luria’s thought may remain in keeping with the neoplatonist monism and emanationism that he inherited from earlier kabbalah, the insertion of the distinctive element of tsimtsum as the first act of creation, prior to any emanation, can nevertheless be seen as pushing the kabbalistic tradition in the direction of an affirmation of otherness, even if it does not completely arrive at a fullfledged philosophy of otherness as we find in Levinas.21 Thus, while Luria (along with his kabbalistic successors) may not be consciously Levinasian per se, we can nevertheless, on phenomenological grounds, view the Lurianic account of tsimtsum as representing a significant conceptual signpost in connection with Levinas’s later critique of Western philosophy, whose allergy to otherness he links closely to Plotinian neoplatonism. 20 Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010), 60–61. 21 For an analysis of Levinas’s thought that simultaneously discerns connections between Levinas and Lurianic thought, while also emphasizing important differences between them, see Elliot Wolfson, “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic Traces In the Thought of Levinas,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14:1–2 (2006): 193–224, especially 213–215. However, whereas Wolfson argues that historical kabbalistic treatments of tsimtsum are ultimately dominated by monism, and thus, despite seeming similarities, fall short of Levinasian alterity, I emphasize the ways in which tsimtsum remains an irreducible factor of alterity within such systems, even against the conscious goals of their formulators, and particularly when compared with other monistic frameworks that lack that originary moment of tsimtsum.

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Tsimtsum and Genesis 1 We have argued that Levinas’s philosophical affirmation of otherness can be seen as linked, if not to Lurianic kabbalah in a general sense, then at least specifically to the idea of tsimtsum. In light of this, we can then ask: how can we account for Luria’s own affirmation of this idea, which significantly distinguished his system from neoplatonism and from much of earlier kabbalah? Notably, Michael Wyschogrod has asserted that, in its affirmation of the difference between the creator and the creation, the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum “Judaizes the emanation of Neoplatonism.”22 (If so, it may also be the case that tsimtsum likewise constitutes a Judaizing of kabbalah, or at least of the Zohar!23) What, however, is implied by the notion of ‘Judaizing’ here? What are the earlier conceptual or textual sources within Jewish tradition that might have given rise to such a transformation? In the remainder of this paper, I will posit that the affirmation of otherness characteristic of Levinas and of tsimtsum can be traced back in important ways to the biblical text, and specifically to the creation narrative of Genesis 1. We will see that a comparison of Genesis 1 to Ancient Near Eastern understandings of creation and divinity shows that Genesis may be performing the same type of ‘twist’ on inherited materials as Levinas performs on Western philosophy and that Luria performs on earlier kabbalah and neoplatonism. As such, Luria’s notion of creation as tsimtsum can be viewed as the product of an active application of the logical dynamics of Genesis 1 to the neoplatonic framework. In this sense, tsimtsum can be seen as ‘Genesisizing’ neoplatonism, which in turn raises the question of whether Genesis 1 itself can be seen as already containing, or at least prefiguring, the later Lurianic idea of tsimtsum. This, in turn, through the connection to Levinas, will enable us to ask whether in fact Genesis 1 can be seen as already enacting a Levinasian critique of the dominant tradition of Western philosophy. In what follows, I draw upon methodological directions in recent biblical scholarship that analyze Genesis 1 (as well as other biblical texts) as polemical responses to dominant Ancient Near Eastern, and particularly Mesopotamian, theological and political understandings.24 That is, the biblical text is analyzed

22 Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 98. 23 Cf. Scholem’s claim that Luria “gave the Zohar, for all its intrinsic pantheism, a strictly theistic interpretation” (Major Trends, 262). See also Joseph Ben-Shlomo, “Gershom Scholem on Pantheism in the Kabbala,” in Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 56–72. 24 See, for instance, Ronald Hendel, “Genesis 1–11 and Its Mesopotamian Problem,” in Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity, ed. Erich S. Gruen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005),

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not simply by noting differences from other ancient texts, but specifically by exploring how the biblical text appears if we read it as seeking critically to engage with, resist, and transform existing conceptual understandings. While other ways of analyzing Genesis 1 are also possible, the tools of polemical-comparative methods constitute one prominent scholarly form, which both falls within the sphere of basic historical plausibility and which also proves particularly fruitful in relation to the topic of tsimtsum and relation via radical separation. By seeing how Genesis 1 differs from Ancient Near Eastern Theology, and by reading it as a polemical differing, we can gain a sense of the ‘twist’ that Genesis 1 performs with regard to the presence or absence of mediating sameness in connection with the divine sphere’s relation to the created world and to humanity. In the context of Ancient Near Eastern theology, relation to the divine was typically understood as achieved by the special mediating agency of the king and the priest – with these roles often combined in a single person – within the special mediating space of a temple. In this framework, ordinary people were not viewed as capable of relating directly to the divine realm. Instead, this latter capability devolved specifically upon the king/priest, who was able to pass on the fruits of this divine connection to the populus as a whole. As the mediator, the king/priest could receive communication of divine wisdom from the gods and pass it along to the people through wise rulership and wise authority over life and death, and could simultaneously represent the people to the gods.25 Notably, the king/priest was often given the title of ‘image of god,’ pointing to the special relationship he shared with the divine realm.26 And, by contrast, ordinary, nonroyal and non-priestly human beings were not designated by the title of ‘image of god.’ Likewise, the temple represented a special sacred space, within which direct connection to the divine was able to take place. By contrast, ordinary or profane spaces and places in the material world were not seen as standing in the same direct relation to the divine realm. Within this framework, the dynamics of same and other can be seen as playing out as follows. Ordinary human beings are ‘other than’ the divine and so are not able to engage in direct relation to the divine. In this sense, otherness undermines true relation. By contrast, while the king/priest is, from one perspective, a mere embodied human being, his ability to relate to the divine is specifically not on the basis of this embodied humanness, since this is something that he shares with ordinary human beings. Instead, the priest/king, often through 23–36, and more broadly J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005). 25 Middleton, Liberating Image, 172–173. 26 Middleton, Liberating Image, 26–28, 93–145.

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a special ceremony of anointing, has been endowed with an additional quality that differentiates him from other human beings and enables him to serve as a mediating channel to the divine realm. This additional quality appears to have been understood as a bestowing of a ‘divine’ status of the office of kingship or priesthood, and it is the special ‘divine’ status of the office that enables the holder to relate to the divine sphere. Thus, relation to the divine takes place specifically on the basis of sameness and not of otherness, i.e., not on the basis of non-divine humanness. In this context, the fact that the divinely-consecrated king/priest, but not the general human population, is able to relate to the divine, parallels the Plotinian/neoplatonic notion wherein it is the divinely-originated soul, and not the general material human body, that is able to relate to the divine. Likewise, in broad Ancient Near Eastern theologies, normal profane spaces are ‘other’ than the divine realm and cannot facilitate direct connection to the latter. By contrast, the space of the temple, on the basis of its special sacredconsecrated status, above and beyond normal material elements, is able to serve as a bridge to the divine, a place where the divine dwells on earth. Thus, the world of ‘ordinary creation,’ as other than the divine, does not stand in relation to the divine, and only the special space of a bridging ‘sameness’ can relate to the divine. In this sense, the temple, as the special meeting-place of the divine, constitutes a space that is other from the divine (since it is in one sense an earthlymaterial space) and yet simultaneously not-other from the divine. Thus, the king/ priest within the space of the temple – both of them on the basis of their special consecrated status  – are able to mediate the divine to the merely human individuals situated in the profane space of the general material creation. Moreover, many Ancient Near Eastern creation narratives culminate with the construction of a specific temple-space, thus establishing the role of a temple-space, with its role of mediating the divine realm via a type of sameness, as part of the originary structure of the created cosmos.27 By contrast, the narrative of Genesis 1 puts forth a radically different perspective. As Jon D. Levenson has pointed out, the vocabulary and structured ordering of Genesis 1 have close parallels to other textual accounts of the construction of a temple.28 However, Genesis 1 differs from a creation account in which one specific

27 Middleton, Liberating Image, 81, 84; Hendel, “Genesis 1–11,” 31–32; Jon D. Levenson, “The Temple and the World,” The Journal of Religion 64:3 (July 1984): 275–298, at 287–288; Moshe Weinfeld, “Sabbath, Temple and the Enthronement of the Lord  – The Problem of the Sitz im Leben of Genesis 1:1–2:3,” in Mélanges bibliques et orientaux en l’honneur de M. Henri Cazelles, ed. Andre Caquot and Mathias Delcor (Kevelaer: Butzon and Bercker, 1981), 501, 504, 507. 28 Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 82–90; Weinfeld, “Sabbath,” 501–506; Middleton, Liberating Image, 77–88.

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sub-area of the material world is designated as a special temple-space. In contrast to one special space standing in relation to God, while the remaining ordinary spaces do not, we can read Genesis 1 as presenting an account in which all of creation is presented as standing in positive relation to God, in which the creation of all the earth is described in the language of construction of a sanctuary.29 By the same token, however, there is no part of the earth that is described as having the direct-participatory status of divine mediation that is normally associated a specific temple-space. In other words, Genesis 1 can be understood as a narrative that presents the world as created without any specific temple-space. From the perspective of typical Ancient Near Eastern theology, this could appear like a catastrophic absence  – with no special place of sameness-mediation, human beings will be unable to relate to the divine! In other words, if we look at Genesis 1 after reading typical Ancient Near Eastern creation narratives, Genesis 1 can appear, in comparison, as an account in which the expected temple-space of direct divine participatory presence has been conspicuously withdrawn and removed from the world, in which the creator remains separate from the creation, without any designated space of mediation and sameness. Yet, this situation of separateness is not presented in Genesis 1 as a catastrophe that stands in need of overcoming.30 Instead, the text presents the world without a special temple-space as having a positive relation to God, with the repeated refrain of “God saw that it was good.” The narrative culminates not with the divine presence coming to rest in a constructed temple-space, but with the establishment of the Sabbath: a temporally special day of the week, rather than any special spatial domain.31 Thus, rather than the lack of sameness-mediation 29 Casting all creation in the language of sanctuary need not be seen as inherently negating the actual space-specific Temple in Jerusalem, although it would certainly serve to transform and perhaps relativize the meaning and significance of the latter. Notably, elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah 66:1–2 can be understood as taking a specifically negative attitude towards a space-specific Temple precisely because the whole creation is already God’s Temple; see Levenson, Creation, 88–89. 30 Although the Temple (as well as human kingship) come to play a role in later biblical narrative, it is significant that these are not presented as crucial for the original structure of creation. This pattern may also have a parallel in the Lurianic dynamic in which tsimtsum is the original act of the process of creation, and emanation occurs only after this first framing act. In both cases, the first beginnings may serve to mitigate the status of the subsequent narrative components (kingship/Temple in the case of the Hebrew Bible, emanation in the case of Lurianic kabbalah). 31 Weinfeld (“Sabbath, Temple, and the Enthronement of the Lord,” 501, 507) points out that the Sabbath represents the culmination of creation in the Bible, whereas in other Ancient Near Eastern theologies the culmination is found in temple-construction – however, he does not emphasize the conceptual contrast of ‘time versus space.’ Conversely, although he does not high-

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having the effect of undermining relation, the narrative presents God’s separation and non-sameness in terms of a celebratory positive relation, albeit of an apparently different type: while no part of creation participates in a relation to the divine based on sameness, all of created space now enjoys the positive relation to God founded on otherness and on the absence of sameness. A similar dynamic can be seen as applying to Genesis 1’s designation of all humanity as the image of God. In the typical Ancient Near Eastern framework, only the special king/priest is designated as the image of God, and this special individual receives the divinely-charged authority and power to rule over and mediate the divine to other merely human human beings.32 In Genesis 1, all human beings are designated as image of God  – and yet none of them are granted the ability to mediate divine power and authority over against other human beings. Thus, just as the absence of a special temple-space can appear as withdrawing divine presence and divine access from the created world, so too the absence of a special king/priest mediator figure could appear, to typical Ancient Near Eastern readers, as withdrawing divine presence and divine access from the human-social world. That is, Genesis 1 presents only the ‘ordinary’ world of creation and ‘ordinary’ humanity, with no special mediating space and no special mediating human figure. Yet, instead of the absence of a special king/priest precluding relation to God, Genesis 1 presents all human beings as standing ‘immediately’ in relation to God.33 Again, however, this type of relation appears to be of a different type, with profound ethical and theopolitical implications. Although it designates all human beings, even the most ordinary, as the image of God, Genesis 1 does not assign each human being ruling authority over the life of other human beings. Rather, it seems to indicate that God alone retains the power of ruling over the life of human beings, and that no human being is designated as mediating that power. Instead, human beings are designated as engaging in wise rulership only over the birds, beasts, and fish – which, from the typical Ancient Near Eastern perspective, would appear as a highly diminished and contracted role, a far cry

light the contrast between Gen. 1:1–2:3 and Ancient Near Eastern creation theologies, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951) notably describes the Sabbath as “a palace in time” (12) and emphasizes the contrast between sacred time and sacred space in this regard. 32 See Middleton, Liberating Image, 108–111, 118–122. 33 Cf. Levinas’s contrast between his criticism of “mediation (characteristic of Western philosophy)” in which “[t]he relation to the other is…accomplished only through a third term” (TI 44) and his affirmation of “the very straightforwardness of the face to face, without the intermediary of any image” (TI 200).

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from the ‘full’ sense of ‘image of God.’ Thus, Genesis 1 can appear as having totally removed from human beings the divine-sameness power of rulership over other human beings. In this regard, the sense of ‘image of God’ has been transformed from a meaning of mediating-sameness into a meaning of relation to God in the absence of that mediating-sameness.34 Thus, in connection with the status of the created world and the status of human beings in particular, Genesis 1 can be seen as enacting a revolution of the same to the other, in which God now relates to creation and human beings not through sameness but precisely through otherness. The non-kingly/non-priestly status of ordinary human beings as separate from the divine no longer constitutes a hindrance to relation, but now forms the very basis of relation, just as the non-temple status of the ordinary material world, as lacking participation in the divine, likewise constitutes a basis of relation rather than a hindrance. Thus, the ‘twist’ that we have seen in connection with Levinas’s relation to the dominant tradition of Western philosophy and in connection to Lurianic tsimtsum’s relation to earlier kabbalah and neoplatonic thought can likewise be discerned in Genesis 1’s transformation of the status of the ordinary created world and of ordinary human beings. Just as in tsimtsum God contracts from and withdraws from creation, so too the comparison with Ancient Near Eastern creation theologies highlights the ways in which Genesis 1 can be viewed as ‘removing’ God’s sameness-mediation from its account of the created world. Moreover, we can also discern a connection in Genesis 1 to the notion of the ‘trace,’ which appears in Levinas’s account of created existence’s status of separation from the Infinite, as well as in the Lurianic notion of reshimu.35 Levinas states, in the same section in which he alludes directly to tsimtsum, “Creation leaves to the creature a trace of dependence, but it is an unparalleled dependence: the dependent being draws from this exceptional dependence, from this relationship, its very independence, its exteriority to the system” (TI 104–105). The notion of ‘dependence’ would normally be linked to sameness and participation, while Levinas generally seeks to affirm the notion of the created being’s separation and independence. Yet, he grants here a certain ‘trace of dependence,’ although he emphasizes that this ‘exceptional’ type of dependence-trace in fact serves, paradoxically, to highlight the absolute independence from the creator that the created being enjoys. We can view the Lurianic notion of reshimu, the trace of the divine that remains in creation after the act of tsimtsum, similarly: 34 Cf. Hendel, “Genesis 1–11,” 27: “It is likely that the P writer (or the tradition on which he drew) appropriated the Mesopotamian concept of the king as the ‘image’ of god and revised it for a new purpose.” See also Middleton, Liberating Image, 207. 35 Cf. Scholem, Major Trends, 164.

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rather than downplaying the radical separation of tsimtsum, the notion of reshimu can be understood as emphasizing that it is only an infinitesimal trace that remains. Hence, the relation of the finite to the infinite remains qualitatively different from the participatory sameness-within-otherness that characterizes neoplatonic emanationism and which exceeds the notion of ‘trace’ in a fuller substantial dependence. Similarly, rather than viewing Genesis 1’s new usage of ‘image of God’ as simply extending kingly-priestly divine-mediation to all human beings, and thus as placing all human beings in a position of sameness-participation vis-à-vis the divine, we can view it instead as transforming the concept into the status of a ‘trace.’ The substantive meaning of channeling the ruling divine authority over human life and death has been fully removed, leaving human beings in a status of separation from that divine power. Yet, the status of ruling-power remains with human beings insofar as they exercise dominion over the animals – a qualitatively different role, which can nevertheless be seen as a ‘trace’ of the previous notion of exercising dominion over other human beings. However, rather than functioning as mitigating the human status of separation from and nonsameness with the divine, the new meaning of image of God as ‘rulership over the animals’ serves precisely to underscore that radical lack of mediating power, in comparison with typical Ancient Near Eastern theology: it is precisely only over the animals, and thus not at all over any other human beings that the status of ‘image of God’ is retained. Likewise, the absence in the Genesis 1’s creation narrative of a special sacral temple-space corresponds to the separation and ‘independence’ of the creation from the creator. However, although there is absolute separation of the creator from the creation with regard to space, the biblical narrative does not simply omit the idea of a culminating temple-construction, but instead transforms this idea by culminating in the establishment of the holiness of the Sabbath. By assigning sacrality (linked to divine-presence) specifically to time in contrast to space, we can view the narrative as retaining the former notion in the transformed status of a ‘trace’: the separation of the creator from the creation is absolute, yet a notion of ‘connection’ still remains, albeit in a form that could also be described as the absence of (spatial) connection. In addition, if we look beyond Genesis 1, we can discern similar themes in the other books and chapters of the Hebrew Bible. In particular, the repeated emphasis that Israel remains in relation with its God even in exile, despite the loss of king, Temple, and functioning priesthood, parallels the narrative of Genesis 1 wherein the creator relates to the creation and to humanity in the absence of a special temple-space or a special king/priest mediating figure. The fact that these mediating figures and spaces are absent from the originary creation helps

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to provide a framing ground for Israel’s subsequent continuing relation to God in exile: if, in their origins, the created world and humanity relate to God via separation and otherness rather than by sameness, then Israel’s loss of such sameness-institutions, however mournfully presented, do not constitute a ontological catastrophe in the same way in which they would in a typical Ancient Near Eastern framework, where such sameness-mediation is unqualifiedly required for relation to the divine. These biblical dynamics, as discerned through the aid of Levinasian philosophical concepts, can in turn point to ways in which the biblical text may have served historically as a key origin point for the stream of thought and philosophy that later manifests itself in Levinas’s ideas. Levinas writes, “What is essential to created existence is its separation with regard to the Infinite. This separation is not simply a negation. Accomplished as psychism, it precisely opens upon the idea of Infinity” (TI 105). If ‘separation with regard to the Infinite’ is indeed part of the fundamental origin of created existence – rather than such ‘absolute’ separation constituting a mere temporary accident stemming from a cosmic fall – then the goal of existence, specifically in seeking to relate to God or the Infinite, would not be to overcome that separation but rather to engage in it all the more deeply.36 Thus, in a philosophical framework that takes its cue from the dynamics of Genesis 1, all the elements that manifest otherness from God  – the material world, or fleshly human embodiedness – can now become means of relating to God, rather representing hindrances from which one must distance oneself. In fact, seeking to transcend these elements of separation from God – which is the goal of the neoplatonic-influenced stream of thought – not only does not enable relation to God but in fact undermines relation to God. Rather, one can draw near to God only by affirming the absolute separation from God. Thus, Western philosophy’s goal of reducing the other to the same in fact leads away from truth, not towards it. Rather than the soul seeking to ascend to unity with the divine One, the goal should be for the soul to ‘ascend to true separation’ from God – which may in practice be no easy or facile goal. Or, put differently, rather than seeking to become ‘similar to God’ by breaking away from their relation to material embodiment, human beings can come to relate to God precisely through the ethical task of deepening their embodied human finitude, which constitutes their non-divine otherness from God.

36 Michael Fagenblat, though focusing more on themes of moral good and evil then on themes of separation between creator and creation, provides a similar link between Levinas’s thought and Genesis 1: “[A]ccording to both Levinas and Genesis 1, it is the created world that is good and the transcendence of worldhood that is evil” (Covenant of Creatures, 50).

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In terms of historical continuations of the Hebrew Bible, classical rabbinic literature can be seen as continuing many of the patterns described above, in strongly emphasizing human beings’s embodied nature as a basis for human relation to God, in the notion of Israel’s close relation to God not in spite of but on the very basis of human beings’s non-sameness vis-à-vis God and God’s nonmediated separateness from the created world, and in casting the very notion of ‘image of God’ in terms of the living and dynamic body-soul combination, rather than as the soul in contradistinction from the body.37 While subsequent medieval Jewish thought – in both kabbalistic and philosophical forms – at times lost sight of this biblical affirmation of otherness and slipped back towards a neoplatonic philosophy of sameness, Lurianic tsimtsum can be seen as redirecting Jewish-rabbinic thought back again towards the value of radical otherness. Moreover, since Luria himself does not reject previous kabbalistic-neoplatonic thought outright, but instead transforms it through the insertion of tsimtsum as the ein sof’s first act of creation, we can view the Lurianic notion as a translation of Genesis’s conceptuality into the language of neoplatonic theology, as a ‘Genesisizing’ of neoplatonism. And, to the extent that precursors to Lurianic tsimtsum can be found in some (but not all) streams of kabbalistic thought,38 this would provide an additional historical thread that further bridges the distance between Lurianic otherness and earlier rabbinic and biblical thought. In other words, the Genesisizing of neoplatonism may have begun even before Luria, although Luria can still be viewed as having given a fuller and more radical articulation of this ‘twist.’ After Luria, this translation and transformation generates other new formulations that in turn, through the subsequent history of Jewish and Christian thought and philosophy, end up enabling Levinas (perhaps with Scholem’s assistance) to develop the tools that enable him to engage in his own ‘twist’ on Western philosophy along similar lines, drawing upon the notion of tsimtsum as contraction and separation in order to raise again the fallen banner of otherness in a clear and stark manner.

37 See, e.g., Daniel H. Weiss, “Embodied Cognition in Classical Rabbinic Literature,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 48:3 (September 2013): 788–807; Yair Lorberbaum, In God’s Image: Myth, Theology, and Law in Classical Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 87:2 (April 1994): 171–195. On connections between Levinas’s approach to ‘image of God’ and these biblical and classical rabbinic approaches, see Fagenblat, Covenant of Creatures, 88–91. 38 See note 2 above.

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Conclusion In methodological terms, we have used Levinasian conceptions in order to draw out ways in which Lurianic tsimtsum, by an affirmation of ‘absolute separation,’ can be seen as differing from earlier kabbalistic and neoplatonic thought. We have then used this analysis to read Genesis 1 as differing in similar ways from Ancient Near Eastern creation theologies. In turn, this move from contemporary philosophy to kabbalah to the Bible has enabled insights into a posited historical trajectory of thought running from the Bible to kabbalah to contemporary philosophy. While the language of Levinasian philosophy differs significantly from the more mythical language of Lurianic tsimtsum, and while both of these differ from the language of Genesis 1, our analysis highlights ways in which, surprisingly, Genesis 1 can be seen as already establishing a dynamic akin to creation through tsimtsum, centuries before Luria. Likewise, the structural parallels among Levinas, Lurianic tsimtsum, and Genesis 1 can enable a deeper appreciation of the philosophical force and implications of the non-philosophical formulations of Genesis and of Luria. Finally, these connections can cast many Levinas’s central ideas not merely as a development of twentieth-century philosophical thought, but as part of a stream of intellectual tradition that traces back through Lurianic tsimtsum, classical rabbinic literature, and Genesis 1 and that persists historically alongside more neoplatonically-inflected streams of Jewish and Christian thought. As such, these points of continuity can set the stage for further exploration of other historical texts and thinkers in the Western tradition, broadly construed, that may similarly uphold ‘relation through absolute separation.’ Through such investigations, the battle to redeem the conceptual value of otherness from the denigrations of its cultured despisers can reveal itself in greater clarity as a scarlet thread that unites a series of historically disparate intellectual efforts.

Bibliography Ajzenstat, Oona. Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’ Postmodernism. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Ben-Shlomo, Joseph. “Gershom Scholem on Pantheism in the Kabbala,” in Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, 56–72. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Bielik-Robson, Agata. “The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude,” in Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy: Interchange in the Wake of God, edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, and Duane Williams, 39–58. London: Routledge, 2017. Fagenblat, Michael. A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010.

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Gerson, Lloyd P. Plotinus. London: Routledge, 1994. Goshen-Gottstein, Alon. “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature.” Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 2 (April 1994): 171–195. Hendel, Ronald. “Genesis 1–11 and Its Mesopotamian Problem,” in Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity, edited by Erich S. Gruen, 23–36. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951. Idel, Moshe. “On the Concept of Tsimtsum in Kabbalah and in Scholarship” [Hebrew]. Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10 (1992): 59–112. _____. “Conceptualizations of Tzimtzum in Baroque Italian Kabbalah.” In The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience, edited by Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson, 28–54. Leiden: Brill, 2015 Levenson, Jon D. “The Temple and the World.” The Journal of Religion 64, no. 3 (July 1984): 275–298. _____. Creation and the Persistence of Evil, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. _____. Collected Philosophical Papers, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. Lorberbaum, Yair. In God’s Image: Myth, Theology, and Law in Classical Judaism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Meskin, Jacob. “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in The Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.” Levinas Studies 2 (2007): 49–77, 217–223. Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1, Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005. Mopsik, Charles. “La Pensée d’Emmanuel Lévinas et la Cabale.” In Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Lévinas, edited by Catherine Chalier and Miquel Abensour, 378–386. Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1991. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, 1995. Schwarzschild, Steven S. “An Agenda for Jewish Philosophy in the 1980’s.” In Studies in Jewish Philosophy: Collected Essays of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy 1980–1985, edited by Norbert Samuelson, 101–125. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987. Vital, Hayyim. ʿEtz Hayyim, Unterhendler: Warsaw, 1891. Weinfeld, Moshe. “Sabbath, Temple and the Enthronement of the Lord – The Problem of the Sitz im Leben of Genesis 1:1–2:3.” In Mélanges bibliques et orientaux en l’honneur de M. Henri Cazelles, edited by Andre Caquot and Mathias Delcor, 501–512. Kevelaer: Butzon and Bercker, 1981. Weiss, Daniel H. “Embodied Cognition in Classical Rabbinic Literature.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 48, no. 3 (September 2013): 788–807 Wolfson, Elliot. “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic Traces In the Thought of Levinas.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14, no. 1–2 (2006): 193–224. Wolski, Nathan. A Journey into the Zohar: An Introduction to the Book of Radiance, Albany: SUNY Press, 2010. Wyschogrod, Michael. The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996.

Reuven Leigh

Hasidic Thought and Tsimtsum’s Linguistic Turn The concept of tsimtsum is arguably the rabbinic idea of the modern period that has become most integrated into the canon of modern Western philosophical thought.1 While the majority of modern rabbinic ruminations on Biblical exegesis, Talmud, halakha and kabbalah remained foreign to the non-Jewish world, tsimtsum managed to traverse the seemingly impenetrable divide between the idiosyncrasies of rabbinic thought and the mores of modern philosophy. Some have gone so far as to argue that tsimtsum was not merely adopted and adapted by modern thinkers to complement their thinking, but that tsimtsum is the very structural origin of modernity that has determined the direction of modern thought. In this chapter I will question the extent to which modern philosophical thought can be said to be engaged with the concept of tsimtsum as a rabbinic concept. For whereas the basic and rudimentary skeleton of the idea of tsimtsum as described in the Lurianic writings has found expression in the writings of a number of modern thinkers, the specific understanding of the idea as explained and expounded in the vast collection of rabbinic writings on the subject is largely absent in these philosophical texts and their surrounding scholarship. It would seem that when rabbinic concepts, such as tsimtsum, are considered relevant to the concerns of modern philosophy, they are often appropriated, both by the philosophical thinkers themselves and also in subsequent scholarship on their works, in a manner whereby they become severed and detached from the indigenous thinking surrounding the concept. We find within post-Luria rabbinic literature how the idea of tsimtsum is fundamentally problematised, leading to the development of many divergent and sophisticated configurations of the original concept. Yet, this extensive literature has had no discernible impact on philosophy in the modern period, resulting in a stark distinction between the way tsimtsum has developed as a philosophical idea and tsimtsum as a rabbinic concept. The very integration of the basic concept of tsimtsum in modern philosophical thought would suggest that the extensive rabbinic deliberations on the subject could contribute further to a philosophical understanding of tsimtsum. Notwithstanding the historical absence of a substantive interaction between modern philosophical thinkers and rabbinic texts on tsimtsum, this chapter will argue 1 For a thorough review of tsimtsum in the works of non-Jewish thinkers see Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Judischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-004

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that rabbinic texts can be shown to have philosophical relevance, and need not be of interest solely to religious adherents or scholars of Jewish thought. Recognising the philosophical relevance of rabbinic thinkers can enable those interested in Western philosophical thought to draw from an additional source of modern thinking that could enrich understanding of key philosophical issues. To illustrate this point I will first present ways in which rabbinic thinkers have complicated the concept of tsimtsum, resulting in some cases in bitter disputes and social disharmony. The presentation of this vibrant, and oftentimes acrimonious, analysis of tsimtsum by rabbinic thinkers will indicate some of the areas of rabbinic thought that have largely remained isolated from the philosophical concerns of the modern period.2 Furthermore, I will argue that these overlooked and ignored rabbinic texts can serve as useful and relevant interlocutors with modern philosophy, especially in the field of tsimtsum, where there is already an existing, albeit limited, common locus of discussion. Pointing in that direction, I will present one example of a specifically linguistic theory of tsimtsum in the writings of a late nineteenth century rabbinic thinker, and will indicate how it can demonstrate the philosophical potential that could be gained from greater engagement with different rabbinic notions of tsimtsum. Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn (1860–1920), in his series of discourses from 1898, likens the process of tsimtsum to the articulation of speech. The abstract terminology of tsimtsum, where the infinite light (ohr eyn sof) is removed, leaving behind a trace (reshimu) in an empty space (makom panui) to allow for the emergence of a finite world, is compared to a suppression of the sensible thematised content of spoken language, and an emphasis on the somatically produced symbols of 2 The rabbinic tsimtsum has received considerable attention by scholars of Jewish mysticism; however, with only a few exceptions, these studies have not attempted to engage the rabbinic texts with their philosophical counterparts. See Moshe Idel , “Conceptualizations of Tzimtzum in Baroque Italian Kabbalah” in Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson, The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 28–54, and the extensive footnotes for references to the major works on the rabbinic tsimtsum. For an example of an exception where the rabbinic texts are brought into discussion with the philosophical presentations of tsimtsum see Elliot Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-Reshimu – The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace” in Kabbalah: Journal For The Study Of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013): 75–120, where he briefly suggests how tsimtsum as formulated in the 1912–15 writings of Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn could inform our understanding of the trace as it is found in the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. See also Elliot Wolfson, “Achronic Time, Messianic Expectation, and the Secret of the Leap in Habad” in J. Meir & G. Sagiv, Habad Hasidism: History, Thought, Image (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2016), 45–86, where he undertakes a more extensive analysis of the Habad tsimtsum in the context of Schelling and Heidegger. Similarly, this chapter seeks to read rabbinic texts in a manner that highlights their philosophical relevance.

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speech. Through concealing and suppressing the primacy of the cognitive self that takes the form of the sensible and rational content of language, a transcendence beyond cognition can emerge in the act of speaking. As will be explored shortly, Schneersohn regards tsimtsum not in terms of divine absence, but as an act that allows for the emergence of the divine essence (atsmut). Similarly, for Schneersohn, language at its most semiotic and somatic articulates an ontological primacy that is prior to any meaning and sense. This perspective of language that emphasises the significance of the oft-maligned spoken word would subsequently become a central concern of philosophy of language in the twentieth century. Hence, I will present Schneersohn as a prescient precursor to an orientation that accentuates the importance of articulated speech that has found expression in the concept of the saying (le dire) in the works of Emmanuel Levinas, a thinker who also engages and utilises the concept of tsimtsum in his work. This coupling of language and tsimtsum by Schneersohn could helpfully associate and connect what may be perceived of as two distinct threads in Levinas’ thought.3 A goal of this chapter is to show how looking more closely at the rabbinic tsimtsum can illuminate the philosophical tsimtsum by firstly suggesting a thematic link between Levinas’ deployment of tsimtsum in Totality and Infinity and his focus on the trace in the saying in Otherwise than Being. I will argue, therefore, that this ‘linguistic turn’ in the rabbinic tsimtsum can be appreciated for ways in which it constructively extends the ideas of Levinas in new directions, and suggest how an appreciation of the philosophical potential of the rabbinic tsimtsum can point to ways in which the thought of other modern philosophers who have engaged with the concept of tsimtsum, such as Franz Rosenzweig, as well as other modern linguistic thinkers who do not

3 A dominant line of enquiry in Levinas scholarship has been whether or not there is a discernible presence of kabbalistic influence on the thought of Levinas; e.g. see Charles Mopsik, “La Pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas et la Cabale,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Ce Cahier de l’herne, eds. C. Chalier and M. Abensour (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1991), 428–41; Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 241–73; Oona Ajzenstat, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’s Postmodernism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 139–99; Catherine Chalier, La Trace de l’infini: Emmanuel Levinas et la source hébraïque (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2002), 77–106; Elliot Wolfson, “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic traces in the thought of Levinas” in Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14, no. 1–2 (2006): 193–224; Jacob Meskin, “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel levinas” in Levinas Studies 2 (2007): 49– 77; Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s philosophy of Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) 60–1. In this chapter, by contrast, I will focus on the way in which rabbinic texts that have been explicitly influenced by kabbalah can inform our understanding of Levinas as well as other modern thinkers, regardless of any biographically identifiable encounter between Levinas or others with kabbalistic texts.

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explicitly engage with the concept of tsimtsum, might be illuminated in new ways. The objective here is not to claim a possible influence or even confluence of ideas, but an attempt to see how Schneersohn and Levinas, and how the rabbinic tsimtsum and the philosophical tsimtsum, might mutually illumine each other.4

The Rabbinic Tsimtsum The reception history of kabbalistic thought (especially in its Lurianic form) in European philosophical thought reflects how the concept of tsimtsum became largely detached and severed from its original texts and the indigenous discussions surrounding them. Jewish kabbalistic thought entered into the consciousness of European philosophers primarily through the works of renaissance Christian kabbalists, who collated and translated a variety of kabbalistic texts into Latin. Many of these kabbalists were indebted to the writings of Abraham Cohen de Herrera (1570–1635), which offered an important bridge between the world of kabbalah and European philosophy.5 Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Denudata, first printed in 1677, provided a collection and translation of the largest number of kabbalistic texts available to the Latin-reading public prior to the nineteenth century and included Herrera’s Sha’ar ha-Shamayim. Von Rosenroth’s close friend and collaborator Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–98) traveled extensively, and with evangelical zeal introduced the kabbalah to influential figures such as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)6 as well as the Cambridge Platonists Henry More (1614–87) and Anne Conway (1631–79).7 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, works by Friedrich Oetinger (1702–82)8 and Franz Molitor (1779–1860)9 provided further access to 4 See Elliot Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 179, for a similar observation on the relationship between Derrida and kabbalah. 5 See Abraham Cohen de Hererra, Gate of Heaven, trans. K. Krabbenhoft (Leiden: Brill, 2002). See also Miguel Beltran, The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Kabbalah on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Brill: Boston, 2016). 6 See Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (London: Kluwer Academic, 1995). 7 See Sarah Hutton, “Henry More, Anne Conway and the Kabbalah: A Cure for the Kabbalist Nightmare?” in Judaeo-Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Allison P. Coudert et al (New York: Springer, 1999), 27–42. 8 Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Theologia ex idea vitae deducta, ed. Konrad Ohly (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979). 9 Franz Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition (Münster, 1834). See also Katharina Koch, Franz Joseph Molitor und die jüdische Tradition: Studien zu den kabbalistischen Quellen der “Philosophie der Geschichte” (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006).

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kabbalistic texts and ideas, and are believed to have had a significant influence on Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854).10 However, as Christoph Schulte has noted, even though Schelling possessed all “the philological requirements, he does not appear to have studied original kabbalistic texts at any time. Schelling’s knowledge of Kabbalah was derived exclusively by indirect means, that is, through works that refer to and use kabbalistic sources.” Schulte further observes, “what is generally true for Schelling’s reading of the Kabbalah applies particularly to his knowledge of the Lurianic concept of zimzum, which is adopted in his various attempts to conceive of God’s contraction.”11 Schelling exerted a profound influence on Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929),12 who has been cited (although perhaps in fact inaccurately13) as the first person to note the relationship between Schelling and Lurianic kabbalah in his letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg (1884–1969) in 1917. And similarly to to Schelling, it would seem that Rosenzweig had hardly any direct interaction with kabbalistic thought in the original Hebrew, let alone with its rabbinic exposition. In a fascinating account by Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) on Franz Rosenzweig’s familiarity with kabbalah, Scholem claims that Rosenzweig would have acquired a familiarity with kabbalistic ideas from the works of Heinrich Graetz, Philip Bloch and Erich Bischoff. He goes on to suggest that what Rosenzweig says about tsimtsum was taken from the translations of Bloch and Bischoff since “Rosenzweig did not take something from real kabbalistical sources. He has never read a kabbalistical book, in Hebrew, as he was not yet good enough for that.”14 This brief outline of a history of tsimtsum in modern philosophical thought reflects the extent to which the original concept has been, for the most part, removed 10 See Eveline Goodman-Thau, Gert Mattenklott, & Christoph Schulte, Kabbala und Romantik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 97–118; Christoph Schulte, “Zimzum in the works of Schelling” in Iyyun 41 (1992): 21–40. 11 Schulte, “Zimzum in the works of Schelling,” 23–4. 12 See Werner J. Cahnman, “Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 48 (1981): 1–56; Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine: Love, Poetry, and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996). 13 Schulte, “Zimzum in the works of Schelling,” 22. In fact, prior to Rosenzweig a number of scholars had already noticed and commented on the similarities between Schelling’s thought and kabbalah in general and Habad thought in particular, see Friedrich Mieses, Korot haFilosofiyah ha-Hadashah (Leipzig, 1887), 155; S. Alexandrov, Mikhtevei Mehkar u-Bikoret v. 1 (Vilna: Rom, 1907), 77. 14 Gershom Scholem, “On Franz Rosenzweig and his Familiarity with Kabbala Literature” in Naharaim 6 (2012), 5–6. See also Moshe Idel, “Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah” in Paul MendesFlohr, The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 162–71; Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 159–67.

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both from the original Hebrew of the Lurianic texts, and from the extensive speculation on tsimtsum of subsequent rabbinic thinkers. As such, the prevalence of the concept of tsimtsum outside of the Jewish kabbalistic tradition should not be mistaken as an example of a substantive interaction between usually distinct fields of thought (modern philosophy and traditional rabbinic thought), but rather as a borrowed idea mainly divested of its Hebrew origins and dissociated from its rabbinic interpretation. We are not required to assume that rabbinic speculation on tsimtsum will always offer philosophical insight that will enhance our appreciation of tsimtsum as found in the philosophical texts; however, there is an argument to be made that insofar as they possess generally similar, or at least comparable, religious assumptions as the original authors of the early philosophically-appropriated tsimtsum texts, these subsequent rabbinic thinkers deserve greater attention when considering the philosophical concept of tsimtsum. Whereas scholars of Jewish thought have at times pointed towards the philosophical importance of certain rabbinic thinkers,15 this chapter hopes to thematise this process so that scholars of philosophical thought may come to acknowledge the potential benefit of engaging more broadly with modern rabbinic texts. While the focus of this chapter is on the potential philosophical benefit of a direct engagement with modern rabbinic thought, there is obviously a comparable benefit for these hitherto isolated rabbinic texts in being brought into conversation with philosophical thought: in addition to the way in which a familiarity with the philosophical implications of certain rabbinic texts can lead to an enhanced reading of philosophical thought, similarly, an awareness of philosophy can provide the tools and categories to appreciate previously undiscovered aspects of rabbinic texts. By way of example, a fundamental issue that dominated rabbinic discussions of tsimtsum was the extent to which the idea should be perceived as a real event in God. In the first half of the eighteenth century Rabbi Joseph Irgas (1685–1730) in his Shomer Emunim16 argued against reading the Lurianic tsimtsum in a simple and straightforward way, “for if anyone wishes to understand the concept of the tsimtsum in its actual simplicity (kipshuto mamash), then he will fall into many confusions and contradictions on most fundamentals of faith.”17 Among the many reasons he enumerates there for opposing a straightforward reading of tsimtsum, Irgas says it would suggest that God has a form that is circular with an empty 15 See for example Steven Schwarzschild, “An Introduction to the Thought of R. Isaac Hutner,” Modern Judaism 5, no. 3 (October 1985); Elliot Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 16 First published posthumously in Amsterdam in 1736. 17 Yosef Irgas, Shomer Emunim (Vilna, 1876), 42.

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space inside with a line going through it, undermining the principle that God has no form. He concludes that the account of tsimtsum is an “analogy (mashal) and a comparison (dimyon) to understand the existence and creation of the world.”18 Rabbi Raphael Immanuel Hai Riki (1688–1743) however, argued “anyone who has mercy on the honour of his creator is required to think of this tsimtsum straightforwardly (kipshuto).” Notwithstanding the problem of applying a form to God, Riki was more concerned with the implications of suggesting that God’s essence is present “in lowly physicality,” which is a dishonour to God. A straightforward reading of tsimtsum whereby God is removed from the finite space of existence ensures that God’s honour is preserved by not being present in what is perceived as lowly and undignified. Furthermore, he argues that since “at any time He wishes, He can refill the place of the tsimtsum, and return it to its former strength,” there is no real image (temunah) in Him.19 The objection to a straightforward reading of tsimtsum, that a space where God is absent suggests a limited form in God, is diminished if we preserve the divine right to reenter the finite space at will. Thus, when presented with a choice between a blemished thought (mahshevet pegam) that implies an image of God or showing a lack of honour to God, Riki opts for the blemished thought and interprets the tsimtsum kipshuto.20 These disputes whether to interpret tsimtsum ‘simply’ or not, remained a major issue of concern in the second half of the eighteenth century. Probably the largest and most consequential debate on the matter was between Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (1720–1797), commonly known as The Vilna Gaon, and Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1812). Some scholars have disputed whether there was in fact any substantial theological difference between the Vilna Gaon and Rabbi Shneur Zalman, claiming instead that, concerning the fundamental ontological understanding of God’s immanence as a result of the tsimtsum, they were broadly in agreement.21 These scholars assert that Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s claim that the

18 Ibid., 44. 19 E. H. Riki, Yosher Leivav (Cracow, 1890), 7b-8a. 20 These rabbinic authors, who had the utmost respect for Luria, were trying to reconcile an account of tsimtsum with the legacy of medieval Jewish philosophical tradition that posited God as omnipresent and without form. The implication of a straightforward reading of tsimtsum was a limitation on God and Its absence from a particular place, whereas a non-straightforward reading would fail to protect God’s essential presence from a lowly and corrupted physical world. Neither position, however, construes the significance of tsimtsum as positing a radical independence of created finite existence, but rather asserts its significance as a way of solving perceived imperfections in God caused by creation. 21 See Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 16–20; Paul Franks, “Beyond the Ban: Rav Dessler’s Vision of a Yeshivah Combining Lithuanian lomdut, Habad, and Polish Hasidut,” forthcoming in

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Vilna Gaon held a simple view of tsimtsum (similar to Riki above) is not borne out by the Gaon’s writings, and furthermore, Rabbi Shneur Zalman would have been unaware of these at that time unpublished writings, implying that Rabbi Shneur Zalman was intentionally misrepresenting the Gaon’s views. However, it is relevant to note that close disciples of the Gaon had switched allegiances and become followers of Rabbi Shneur Zalman, providing a possible oral source of knowledge on the Gaon’s understanding of the doctrine of tsimtsum.22 Rabbi Shneur Zalman in a letter to his followers in Vilna frames his dispute with the Gaon as follows: “according to what is heard in our region from his students that this is indeed the understanding of the Gaon and Hasid of Likutei Amarim23 and similar texts, that it is explicit in them that the explanation of ‘He fills all worlds’ and ‘there is no place devoid of Him’ [is to be understood] literally, and in his eyes it is absolute heresy to say that God is found in actual lowly and corrupted things. And in the interpretation of the aforementioned statements they have an esoteric and wondrous way, and ‘fills all the world with His glory’ is [a reference to Its] providence, etc.”24 Rabbi Shneur Zalman claims to have heard from students of the Vilna Gaon that the Gaon objected to the explanations found in the hasidic texts that God is indeed present in the entirety of existence, and that the Gaon explained the verses that imply God’s presence as referring to God’s providence. Indeed, this interpretation of a divine presence referring to a providence is attested to in the Gaon’s commentary to Isaiah 6:3 suggesting a certain God-cosmos dualism in contrast to Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s emphasis on divine immanence.25

Neo-Hasidism (Orthodox Forum), eds. Shmuel Hain and Shlomo Zuckier. See also See M. Teitelbaum, Ha-Rav mi-Ladi u-Miflegeth Habad (Warsaw, 1931); Walter Wurzberger, “Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin” in Guardians of our Heritage, (New York: Bloch, 1958), 202–5; Norman Lamm, Torah Lishmah (Jerusalem: Mosad HaRav Kook, 1972), 71–2; Tamar Ross, “Two Interpretations of the Theory of Tzimtzum: Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin and Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi”, Mehkerei Yerushalayim be-Mahsheveth Yisrael 2 (1982): 153–69. 22 Rabbi Moses Meislish was a close student of the Gaon who later became a follower of Rabbi Shneur Zalman. See P. M. Gribsky (1932), Mi-Ginzei Yerushalayim 22, 13–14. It is also possible that Rabbi Shneur Zalman saw the Vilna Gaon’s letter dated 11 Tishrei 5557 where he clearly and unequivocally opposes Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s interpretation, see Mordecai Wilensky, Hasidism u-Mithnagdim v. 1 (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik Mosad Bialik: Jerusalem, 1990), 188. 23 A reference to Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s book commonly known as The Tanya. 24 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Igrot Kodesh (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1987), 88. 25 Elija of Vilna, Adereth Eliyahu al Neviim u-Khetuvim (Tel Aviv, 1962), 45. However, in his commentary to the Safra de-Zeniutha he appears to take a more figurative understanding of tsimtsum that asserts God’s omnipresence, see Elija of Vilna (1820), Safra de-Zeniutha im Pirush ha-GRA (Vilna), fol. 38a.

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The dispute between the Vilna Gaon and the Rabbi Shnuer Zalman was again debated in the first half of the twentieth century in the context of whether the Vilna Gaon’s primary student Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhyn (1749–1821) differed from his teacher to the extent that his views aligned with Rabbi Shnuer Zalman. This debate was conducted between Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (1892–1953), author of Micktav me-Eliyahu, and Rabbi Yitzchak Horowitz (d. 1941), known as Reb Itche der Masmid. However, behind the scenes Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), the seventh Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch branch of hasidism, penned a letter to one of his followers in London setting out his opposition to Dessler’s position.26 Dessler claimed that Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhyn in his Nefesh ha-Hayyim explains tsimtsum in comparable terms to Rabbi Shneur Zalman and as such there should be no basis for continued division between hasidim and mithnagdim on this matter. Rabbi Menahem Mendel in his letter argues that while Reb Hayyim indeed moves away from his teacher’s position of tsimtsum being an actual removal of God’s essence and instead says that the tsimtsum is not an actual removal but just a concealment, Reb Hayyim still nevertheless suggests that the concealment is of God’s essence. By contrast, according to Rabbi Shneur Zalman the concealment only affects the manifestation of God and not God’s essence.27 This is just a brief outline of one area of concern that has occupied rabbinic thinkers in connection with the concept of tsimtsum. These disputes, among many others, are part of a rich and lively debate about tsimtsum to be found in modern rabbinic literature, and in many ways such debates have shaped the religious Jewish communities of Europe and their present day diasporas in North America and Israel. And yet, engagement with this rabbinic discourse of tsimtsum in both modern European philosophy and its scholarship has been noticeably absent, leading many scholars to approach the concept of tsimtusm in philosophical texts from a limited perspective.28 A greater awareness of the rabbinic treatment of the concept of tsimtsum would enable scholars to broaden 26 Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Iggrot Kodesh 1, (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1987), 19–21. 27 See Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-Reshimu,” 79. 28 For example, apart from Wolfson’s treatment, Schelling’s tsimtsum is assumed to accord with the perspective of tsimtsum kipshuto. See Paul Franks, “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism,” in N. Boyle, L. Disley, and N. Adams (eds.) The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, Vol. 4: Religion (Cambridge: CUP, 2013) 237–38); Greenberg, Better Than Wine, 41; Agata BielikRobson, “Mysteries of The Promise: Negative Theology in Benjamin and Scholem,” in Jewish Modernity as Negative Theology, ed. Michael Fagenblat (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017) 258–281.

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the possibilities of the philosophical texts they study, as well as providing additional points of concern with which to critically appraise the use of tsimtsum in modern philosophy. The absence of any serious philosophical engagement with European rabbinic thought of the modern period is a matter of general concern, and even more so with regards a concept that originates from within rabbinic thought, bringing into question whether a true dialogue between rabbinic and philosophical thought has (yet) occurred.

The Linguistic Tsimtsum Let me now turn to the development of a specifically linguistic theory of tsimtsum in the writings of a late nineteenth century rabbinic thinker that can serve as an indicator of what could be a potentially rich dialogue between modern philosophy and rabbinic thought surrounding the concept of tsimtsum. Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn (1860–1920) was the fifth leader in the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty, a great-great grandson of the movement’s founder, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady mentioned earlier. His scholarship is noted for its systematic approach to Hasidic thought,29 exemplified by his use of the hemshekh, a longer continuous series of discourses and essays on a particular theme as opposed to the shorter and less developed presentations of his predecessors.30 The hemshekh became a regular and fixed method of exposition for Schneersohn starting from the year 1898,31 which marked the establishment of his new yeshiva in the town of Lubavitch, Belarus.32 The hemshekh of 1898 consists of eight discourses that were delivered over a seven-week period, and whilst not being the earliest exposition that couples theories of language with tsimtsum in Habad writings, it presents arguably the most extensive and detailed example of the genre. The concept of tsimtsum underwent a thorough and forensic examination in the works of each of the Habad rebbes, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to present a complete appraisal of their readings and innovations. Still, for the purpose of better appreciating the novelties in Schneersohn’s 1898 writings I will 29 See Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Likutei Diburim v. 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1992), 296a. 30 The hemshekh was in fact pioneered by Schneersohn’s father Rabbi Shmuel but was utilised most prolifically during Schneersohn’s tenure. 31 From 1898 until Schneersohn’s passing in 1920 there were over thirty separate hemshkehim. 32 The yeshivah was established a year earlier in 1897 and was initially located in Zhebin. On the Yeshivat Tomkhei Temimim Lubavitch see Yehoshua Mondshine, Kerem Habad: divrei yemei yeshivat tomkhei temimim (Kfar Habad: Machon Oholei Shem, 1987).

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first present a general schema of the treatment of tsimtsum in Habad thought. Rabbi Shneur Zalman professed a strong allegiance to the writings of Luria,33 but, as we will see, he carefully developed an original version of the Lurianic tsimtsum that sought, whilst maintaining God’s immutability, to overcome a version of theism that placed the created world entirely outside of God. A reading of Luria’s tsimtsum that involved God’s withdrawal (tsimtsum kipshuto) and God’s absence from creation was unacceptable according to Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s notion of divine unity. At the same time, if God participates in the act of creation (tsimtsum lo kipshuto) the newly emerged creation suggests a change in God that is equally unacceptable to Rabbi Shneur Zalman. To overcome these problems, the Habad tsimtsum is dependent on a clear distinction between God (atsmut) and the expression of God (ohr eyn sof).34 Characteristics that identify something as essential (atsmi) in Habad thought are self-containment and a lack of dependency on anything else. An atsmi is not interactive and is not perceptible by anything other than itself. In contrast, what is classified as expressive (giluy) is reliant on an original luminary and is interactive in its aim to express its source. God (atsmut) is therefore conceived as that which has no origin and cause, and moreover has no compulsion to be expressive. In contrast, the expression of God (ohr eyn sof) does have an origin in God and serves to convey divine qualities such as omniscience and omnipotence. Consequently, when the objective of creation to create separate entities that would submit their will to God was conceived, it stood in conflict with the objective of the expression of God (the ohr eyn sof) to convey the exclusivity of God. Habad thought explains the motivation of God to create a world as the desire to create an entity that is sufficiently independent to willingly subject itself to divine sovereignty, and the infinite nature of the ohr eyn sof precluded the emergence of sufficiently independent beings that could satisfy the desire for divine sovereignty (ta’anug be-melukhah), in which a seemingly independent and separate entity would submit their will to God. Subsequently, the act of tsimtsum was interpreted by Rabbi Shneur Zalman in a manner that rejected the notion of God (atsmut) actually withdrawing from any void; rather, the impact of tsimtsum was instead on the ohr eyn sof, the withdrawal of which thereby made possible the creation of an independent entity.35

33 Shneur Zalman of Liady, Igrot Kodesh, 89. 34 On the emergence prior to tsimtsum of divisions and distinctions in God, see Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-Maamarim 5678 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1984), 101. 35 On the division of ohr ein sof before tsimtsum into three levels: ‘the essence of the light’ (etsem ha-ohr), ‘the light that is revealed only to Itself’ (ha-ohr she-be-giluy le-atsmo), and ‘the light that is relevant to the worlds’ (ha-ohr ha-shayakh le-olamot), see Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Be-Sha’ah she-Hikdimu 5672 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1991), 247–49.

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The distinction between God and the expression of God aimed to resolve the concerns that tsimtsum brought about a change in God, since the tsimtsum only affected the expression of God. This would seemingly allow for a more literal reading of tsimtsum, where the expression of God is actually removed; however, the tsimtsum is still not interpreted literally (kipshuto); rather, the ohr eyn sof is described as being concealed and suppressed rather than removed. Similarly, just as the withdrawal (siluk) is not interpreted as an actual removal of the ohr eyn sof but its concealment and the suppression of its opposition to creation, so too the resultant empty space (makom panui) is understood as being empty only of the expression of the ohr eyn sof that would oppose creation. Through this suppression of the ohr eyn sof there emerges in its place a trace (reshimu) of God (atsmut). The idea of reshimu, which originates in the school of Israel Sarug (d. 1610), is identified with God’s ability of limited expression (koah ha-gvul) that prior to the tsimtsum was overwhelmed and concealed by God’s ability of unlimited expression (koah ha-bli gvul), namely the ohr eyn sof. Through the act of tsimtsum, this divine ability for limitation emerges in the place now empty of God’s infinite expression.36 This interpretation of the tsimtsum protects God from any question of change, since the tsimtsum only impacts the ohr eyn sof, and even then not literally, and God thus remains omniscient. Drawing on the imagery of engraving in the Sefer ha-Zohar’s37 account of creation and the explicit connection of the reshimu with letters in Naphtali Bachrach’s Sefer Emek ha-Melekh,38 Rabbi Shneur Zalman and subsequent Habad thinkers emphasise the identification of letters (otiyot) with the trace (reshimu). The letters of the reshimu are thus considered to be at the very epicenter of created reality and provide the link between God and creation. This linguistic metaphor found its fullest exposition in the 1898 discourses of his great-great grandson Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn that will be the focus of the remainder of this study.39 Schneersohn’s conception of speech and language involves a sharp distinction between the phonetic pronunciations of spoken letters (otiyot ha-dibbur) and the intellectual or emotional content of an oral communication. Schneersohn contends that there is no obvious link between the articulated phonemes and the concepts they convey, and that the vocalisation of somatic letters is not

36 For one of the clearest descriptions of this idea, see Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-Maamarim 5670 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1998), 30–44. 37 Sefer ha-Zohar I:15a: “He engraved engravings in the Supernal Purity.” 38 See Naphtali Hertz Bacharach, Sefer Emek ha-Melekh (Amsterdam, 1648). 39 For the most comprehensive example of this interpretation of tsimtsum in Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s writings, see Shneur Zalman of Liady, Likutei Torah (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1999), additions to Leviticus 54a.

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to be thought of as the product and expression of a conceptual idea or emotional state, but in fact constitutes a concealment and suppression of the latter.40 The functions of intellect and speech are thus initially depicted as being in tension with each other, the intellect being inherently private and internalised (ohr pnimi ve-atsmi) as opposed to speech, which is public and external (bishvil ha-zulat). In order to externalise and communicate the naturally private intellect, the letters of speech contain and restrict the intellect to the extent that an element of the idea can be communicated (ohr hitsoni). The function of speech is understood here in a manner not dissimilar to a Platonic or Aristotelian conception, whereby speech serves to limit, reduce and contain the expansiveness of the intellect. Schneersohn describes speech as a container of and recipient from something else: “All that is articulated by speech stems from the intellect and emotions, since on its own, speech has nothing more than what it receives from the higher faculties.”41 Furthermore, speech does not receive intellect and emotions directly but only after they have been received in thought,42 the effect of which is that “the idea is far more revealed in thought than it is in speech, since thought precedes speech in the line of reception from the intellect and emotions.”43 It should therefore ostensibly follow that no additional “insight and enlightenment could be attained through speech that is not already present in the idea as it is in the brain, since the brain is the source of all that speech reveals.”44 Schneersohn thus initially tries to show, in a manner that accords with a familiar Western philosophical (and logocentric) perspective, that speech would seem to be only a container and receptacle for the intellect, so that intellectual ideas expressed in speech are more restricted and diminished than they were in thought. It would therefore stand to reason that speech would have no impact or effect on the ideas that it conveys. Yet Schneersohn surprisingly goes on to point out how experience demonstrates that the articulation of ideas in speech does in fact have the ability to enhance the quality of those ideas. Schneersohn describes how “every intellectual idea that emerges from the source of intellect appears in a measured and limited form”; however, “when it takes the form of speech, we see clearly that the idea expands immensely…with many details and ramifications, incomparably surpassing its

40 S. D. Schneersohn, Sefer ha-Maamarim 5659 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 2011), 47. 41 Ibid., 4. 42 See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Likutei Amarim Tanya (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1978), 8a.; Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Ohr (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 2001), Gen. 13c on the categories of intellect, emotions, thought and speech. 43 Schneersohn, Sefer ha-Maamarim 5659, 4. 44 Ibid., 5.

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initial stage in the words of thought.”45 Schneersohn contends that from experience one observes that speech can effect an enhancement of the intellect, even though speech, in theory, has no content of its own except that which it receives from the intellect: “We see that there is an increase in light in intellect when it expresses itself in the letters of speech than there was prior to its expression.”46 Schneersohn identifies the reason for this effectiveness as due to the primacy of “speech in its root, which transcends even the source and origin of intellect.”47 This ontological primacy of spoken language in general and more specifically the physically vocalised component letters of speech (otiyot ha-dibbur) enables speech to “force” the faculty of intellect to express itself to a greater extent than it could do out of its own urgency. Prior to speaking, a person can develop an idea using their intellect together with their faculty of thought, a process that will initially be limited by that person’s level of intellectual development. However, beyond this, through expressing the idea in speech, an essential dimension of the self is triggered and filters through to the intellect, thereby expanding the horizons of the original idea. Now, even though the component letters of speech are not considered to be generated by the intellect or emotions and ontologically precede any state of intellectual or emotional consciousness, the emergence of these letters in a tangible and discernible form, and not just as mere sounds, occurs by way of that consciousness. Schneersohn observes that while the letters of speech (otiyot ha-dibbur) may originate from a primordial source within the self, they lack, on their own, the capacity to articulate and convey that sublime source. As explained above, the characteristics that identify something as essential (atsmi) in Habad thought are self-containment and a lack of dependency on anything else; this stands in contrast to what is classified as expressive (giluy), which displays its reliance on an original luminary. Consequently, were these letters (as essential and primordial) to become isolated from the coherence of intellectual or emotional consciousness, they would fail to communicate the profundity of their source, since they lack the quality of expression. Schneersohn’s appreciation for the superior origin of the letters does not lead him towards a reification of a non-sense that merely inverts the traditional Aristotelian and Platonic hierarchical relationship between consciousness and speech and leads to the degradation of consciousness. Instead, he recasts intellectual and emotional consciousness: instead of being the true inner meaning of speech as conceived

45 Ibid., 5. 46 Ibid., 5. 47 Ibid., 8.

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in much of Western and rabbinic thought, they take on the role of tools for conveying the sublime qualities that are here assigned to speech. This conceptualisation of the relationship between consciousness and speech provides Schneersohn with a distinctive framework in which to describe the tsimtsum.48 The ohr eyn sof, which is analogous to consciousness, is suppressed in order to allow for the emergence of the reshimu (the trace), which is compared to the letters of speech.49 Prior to the tsimtsum, the ohr eyn sof was fully expressed and totally overshadowed the otiyot ha-reshimu, to the extent that “the letters were not in existence at all (bi-behinat metsiut klal).”50 However, through the process of tsimtsum – portrayed as divine speech – the ohr eyn sof is concealed and the letters are able to emerge. Schneersohn asserts, as he did with regard to the phonetically articulated letters of human speech, that the letters of the trace (otiyot ha-reshimu) precede and are rooted more deeply in God’s essence (atsmut) than the ohr eyn sof. Since an essential quality of God is self-containment and independence from anything else, the inanimateness of letters and their division from one another is identified with God’s essence. Schneersohn’s cosmogony sees tsimtsum not as the removal or concealment of God, but as the process that facilitates the emergence of the more essential divine qualities of autonomy and self-sufficiency, which were previously obscured by the quality of attachment exhibited by the ohr eyn sof.51 The act of tsimtsum could be described as a removal of divine qualities (giluyim) to allow for the emergence of God (“she-elokut atsmo yihye be-behinat metsiut yesh.”)52 However, even this qualified “removal of the light” (siluk ha-ohr) is not understood “simply” (kipshuto), i.e., that the ohr eyn sof was removed; rather, the overwhelming presence of the ohr eyn sof is itself overawed by the supreme essential quality of the reshimu. Subsequently, the newly enlightened ohr eyn sof, similarly to intellectual and emotional consciousness above, becomes the expressive device to convey divine essence to the finite world. Just as in the case above of the letters of speech, the divine essence is not natu-

48 Ibid., 58–66, for the full exposition of this understanding of tsimtsum. 49 Ibid., 46–7. The key terms used to express this notion of tsimtsum are ohr (light) and otiyot (letters/signifiers). Light denotes the quality of attachment to and dependence on a luminary thereby being a true reflection of it; furthermore, the deference of light to its source is highlighted to indicate how light lacks an identity beyond the reflection of its source. By contrast, letters, and signifiers more generally, denote something separate and detached from their source. Consequently, the term used to describe divine manifestation in a manner of attachment is light, and the term used to describe divine manifestation in a manner of separation is letters. 50 Ibid., 59. 51 Ibid, 88. 52 Ibid, 59.

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rally in a state of expression (“eyno be-geder pe’ulah li-f’ol,”)53 and as such it relies on the expressive tool of the ohr eyn sof to actualise the creation of the world. Even though the problem that tsimtsum is said to resolve was the impossibility of creation (lo hayah makom le-amidat ha-olamot) due to the intensity of the ohr eyn sof, according to Schneersohn, the post-tsimtsum ohr eyn sof is not so much a diminution of its intensity as an enhancement of its awareness of the essential quality that inheres to the separateness of creation. Whereas previously the ohr eyn sof was singularly focused on expressing the virtue of attachment to God and thus treated the separateness of the otiyot ha-reshimu and creation in general as anathema’ after the tsimtsum, however, the ohr eyn sof is able to appreciate the profundity of separateness as a divine quality. The tsimtsum is thus not presented as a cataclysmic event that altered the components of reality by removing something or other, but as a continuous moment of clarity when the essential origin and purpose of both the otiyot ha-reshimu, as a trace of God, and the ohr eyn sof, as its tool of expression, becomes pronounced. Let me now turn to ways in which Schneersohn’s linguistic reading of tsimtsum could enhance our understanding of tsimtsum and the trace as found in the works of Emmanuel Levinas (1905–95). Levinas’ association with kabbalistic themes has been the subject of considerable scholarly research.54 Levinas himself remarked in a 1982 interview how “there is even in Totality and Infinity, the evocation of the tzimtzum.”55 However, Levinas’ own rejection of kabbalah in “its Hasidic excesses,”56 and his positive regard for the mitnagdic thought of Hayyim of Volozhyn have resulted in a limited focus by Levinas scholars on an affinity between Levinas and aspects of Hasidic thought. The objective here is not to claim a possible influence or even confluence of ideas, but an attempt to see how Schneersohn and Levinas might mutually illumine each other.57 The evocation of the tsimtsum in Totality and Infinity appears most clearly at the end of section one, where Levinas affirms the importance of separateness: “Infinity is produced by withstanding the invasion of a totality, in a contraction that leaves a place for the separated being.”58 For the Infinite to be truly infinite

53 Ibid., 99. 54 See footnote 3 above. 55 Philosophy and Theology 4, no. 2 (Winter 1989), 107. 56 Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic readings and lectures (London: Continuum, 2007), 150. 57 See again Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift, 179, as a model of such confluence of ideas between Derrida and kabbalah. 58 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 104.

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and not restricted and limited to a totality that precludes multiplicity and separateness, there must be a contraction (tsimtsum) that allows for the emergence of independent beings. Furthermore, the “multiplicity and limitation on the creative Infinite is compatible with the perfection of the Infinite; they articulate the meaning of this perfection.”59 Instead of assuming the perfection of the Infinite as a unity, Levinas states that it is specifically through the separation that is enacted through creation that the Infinite can become pronounced and expressed. Creation is thus understood as the possibility for separate and independent beings, “for an existent is an existent only in the measure that it is free, that is, outside of any system…creation ex nihilo breaks with system, posits a being outside of every system.”60 Levinas is seeking to overcome the totality of a system where separateness is seen as an ontological “fallenness,” where beings limit each other in their finitude. The contraction of the Infinite in creation ex nihilo rejects a system of totality that seeks unity, and instead projects the infinite quality of limitation and separateness. Levinas recognises that the resultant created beings are nonetheless dependent on the Infinite for their existence; however, he describes it as “an unparalleled dependence: the dependent being draws from this exceptional dependence, from this relationship, its very independence, its exteriority to the system.”61 In what he calls ‘the paradox of creation,’ Levinas describes how the separated being is the articulation of the Infinite, and the preservation of its separateness and independence “opens upon the idea of Infinity.”62 This Levinasian exposition of tsimtsum contains striking parallels to the Habad version of tsimtsum. The totalising impulse of an infinity that resists a multiplicity and separateness is akin to the notion of ohr eyn sof, and there needs to be a contraction-tsimtsum to ‘withstand the invasion of a totality.’ The outcome of overcoming this totality-ohr eyn sof is not a diminution of the Infinite-atsmut (“this separation is not simply a negation”63) but the ‘articulation’ of its very infinitude. The use of the term ‘articulate’ by Levinas could be interpreted as pointing towards his ideas concerning the saying and the said (in his second major work), which he links with the idea of the trace. In the reading that follows I will suggest that the way Schneersohn overtly connects his linguistic theory to tsimtsum can inform our reading of Levinas and more clearly link the evocation of tsimtsum in Totality and Infinity and the reshimu (trace) in Otherwise than Being.

59 Ibid., 104. 60 Ibid., 104. 61 Ibid., 104–5. 62 Ibid., 105. 63 Ibid., 105.

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In Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence, Levinas covers much of the same ground as Schneersohn while explaining the relationship between the saying and the said. Even though communication involves the “subordination of the saying to the said,” and “as soon as it is conveyed before us it is betrayed in the said that dominates the saying which states it,”64 nevertheless, the saying is recognised as antecedent and “pre-original” to the said. In fact, Levinas considers this to be one of the central theses of his book: “Saying signifies otherwise than as an apparitor presenting essence and entities.”65 The Levinasian saying bears striking conceptual affinity with Schneersohn’s otiyot ha-dibbur (letters of speech), originating prior to being and its thematisation in the said. Although Levinas locates that origin in a ‘beyond essence’ or as a ‘transcendence,’ while Schneersohn uses the term ‘essence,’ they both appear to be referring to that which is “outside any qualification…and outside any attribute.”66 Levinas recognises, as does Schneersohn, that a focus on the saying could lead to “the possibility of pure non-sense invading and threatening signification,”67 and clarifies that his project will not “fail to recognize being or treat it, ridiculously and pretentiously, with disdain.”68 Furthermore, Levinas explains how, far from cognition and thematisation standing in conflict with signification or saying, in fact within the saying is “the latent birth of cognition and essence, of the said.”69 The said then serves as the explanation of the saying and not vice versa, since “the saying is fixed in the said.”70 Yet this beyond-essence of saying does not become dominated by the said, but rather “overflows both cognition and the enigma through which the Infinite leaves a trace in cognition.”71 This trace of the Infinite, which parallels Schneersohn’s reshimu, is both the “breaking point where essence is exceeded by the infinite,” and also “the binding place” that allows for the said to convey the beyond essence of the saying. Levinas recognises the importance of the said, which is comparable to Schneersohn’s treatment of the intellectual and emotional consciousness, as the means by which to communicate the infinite and transcendent trace of the saying. Having already established in Totality and Infinity that the separation brought about by the tsimtsum “is the very constitution of thought and

64 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 7. 65 Ibid., 46. 66 Ibid., 16. 67 Ibid., 50. 68 Ibid., 16. 69 Ibid., 157. 70 Ibid., 159. 71 Ibid., 162.

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interiority,”72 Levinas in Otherwise than Being introduces the idea of the reshimu and its representation in speech to convey the meaning of created existence: “A trace is sketched out and effaced in a face in the equivocation of a saying. In this way it modulates the modality of the transcendent.”73 The transcendent as an atsmi is not in a mode of expression, and it is specifically through the sense of a saying that the transcendent can be articulated.

Conclusion I have tried to demonstrate how a familiarity with and an understanding of Schneersohn’s 1898 discourses can provide helpful conceptual categories with which to read Levinas and his approach to tsimtsum. We have seen how Schneersohn reframes the idea and process of tsimtsum from a concern about the presence and absence of God, to a question of the dominance and subordination of the totalising impulse of the ohr eyn sof. The created world of separated beings is thus not a result of divine absence, but is attributed to the independent otherness and self-sufficient character of atsmut that is pronounced through the act of tsimtsum. This understanding of tsimtsum and its parallels in consciousness and speech have provided a helpful framework through which to read the evocation of tsimtsum by Levinas in Totality and Infinity and his use of the trace in Otherwise than Being. As mentioned earlier, I am primarily interested in how these intellectual traditions can illumine one another, and am less interested in questions of possible historical influence. In that vein, our appreciation of a more complex and nuanced reading of tsimtsum in post-Luria rabbinic texts has been shown to provide valuable insight into the modern philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas, and I suggest that this example could indicate more broadly the rich potential of a more sustained dialogue between modern rabbinic thought and modern philosophy.

Bibliography Ajzenstat, Oona. Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’s Postmodernism, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Alexandrov, Shmuel. Mikhtevei Mehkar u-Bikoret v. 1, Vilna: Rom, 1907. 72 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 104. 73 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 12.

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Bacharach, Naphtali Hertz. Sefer Emek ha-Melekh, Amsterdam, 1648. Beltran, Miguel. The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Kabbalah on Spinoza’s Metaphysics, Boston: Brill, 2016. Bielik-Robson, Agata. “Mysteries of The Promise: Negative Theology in Benjamin and Scholem,” in Jewish Modernity as Negative Theology, edited by Michael Fagenblat, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Cahnman, Werner J. “Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 48 (1981): 1–56. Chalier, Catherine. La Trace de l’infini: Emmanuel Levinas et la source hébraïque, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2002. Cohen de Hererra, Abraham. Gate of Heaven, trans. K. Krabbenhoft, Leiden: Brill, 2002. Cohen, Richard A. Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Coudert, Allison. Leibniz and the Kabbalah, London: Kluwer Academic, 1995. Elija of Vilna. Adereth Eliyahu al Neviim u-Khetuvim, Tel Aviv, 1962. _____. Safra de-Zeniutha im Pirush ha-GRA, Vilna, 1820. Fagenblat, Michael. A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s philosophy of Judaism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Franks, Paul. “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, Vol. 4: Religion, edited by Nicholas Boyle, Liz Disley, and Nicholas Adams, 219–245, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Goodman-Thau, Eveline, Mattenklott, Gert and Schulte, Christoph. Kabbala und Romantik, Niemeyer: Tübingen, 1994. Greenberg, Yudit K. Better Than Wine: Love, Poetry, and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hutton, Sarah. “Henry More, Anne Conway and the Kabbalah: A Cure for the Kabbalist Nightmare?” In Judaeo-Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Allison P. Coudert et al, 27–42. New York: Springer, 1999. Idel, Moshe. “Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, 162–171, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. _____. Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. _____. “Conceptualizations of Tzimtzum in Baroque Italian Kabbalah,” in The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience, edited by Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson, 28–54. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Irgas, Yosef. Shomer Emunim, Vilna, 1876. Koch, Katharina. Franz Joseph Molitor und die jüdische Tradition: Studien zu den kabbalistischen Quellen der “Philosophie der Geschichte,” Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. Lamm, Norman. Torah Lishmah, Jerusalem, 1972. Levinas, Emmanuel. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, London: Continuum, 2007. _____. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008. _____. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008. Meskin, Jacob. “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.” Levinas Studies 2 (2007): 49–77, 217–223.

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Mieses, Friedrich. Korot ha-Filosofiyah ha-Hadashah, Leipzig, 1887. Molitor, Franz. Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, Münster, 1834. Mondshine, Yehoshua. Kerem Habad: divrei yemei yeshivat tomkhei temimim, Kfar Habad: Machon Oholei Shem, 1987. Mopsik, Charles. “La Pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas et la Cabale,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Le Cahier de l’herne, edited by C. Chalier and M. Abensour, 378–386. Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1991. Nadler, Allan. The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph. Theologia ex idea vitae deducta, trans. Konrad Ohly, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979. Riki, Emmanuel. Yosher Leivav, Cracow, 1890. Ross, Tamar. “Two Interpretations of the Theory of Tzimtzum: Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin and Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi,” Mehkerei Yerushalayim be-Mahsheveth Yisrael 2 (1982): 153–169. Schneersohn, Shalom Dovber. Sefer ha-Maamarim 5678, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1984. _____. Sefer ha-Maamarim 5670, Brooklyn:Kehot Publication Society, 1998. _____. Be-Sha’ah she-Hikdimu 5672, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1991. _____. Sefer ha-Maamarim 5659, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 2011. Schneersohn, Yosef Yitzchak. Likutei Diburim v. 2, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1992. Schneerson, Menachem Mendel. Iggrot Kodesh v. 1, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1987. Scholem, Gershom. “On Franz Rosenzweig and his Familiarity with Kabbala Literature.” Naharaim 6, 2012. Schulte, Christoph. “Zimzum in the Works of Schelling.” Iyyun 41 (1992): 21–40. _____. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, Berlin: Judischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. Schwarzschild, Steven. “An Introduction to the Thought of R. Isaac Hutner.” Modern Judaism 5, no.3 (October 1985): 235–277. Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Likutei Amarim Tanya, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1978. _____. Igrot Kodesh, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1987. _____. Likutei Torah, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1999. _____. Torah Ohr, Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 2001. Teitelbaum, Mordecai. Ha-Rav mi-Ladi u-Miflegeth Habad, Warsaw, 1931. Wilensky, Mordecai. Hasidism u-Mithnagdim v. 1, Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990. Wolfson, Elliot. “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic traces in the thought of Levinas.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy vol. 14, no. 1–2 (2006): 193–224 _____. Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. _____. “Nequddat ha-Reshimu – The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace.” Kabbalah: Journal For The Study Of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013): 75–120. _____. Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. _____. “Achronic Time, Messianic Expectation, and the Secret of the Leap in Habad.” In Habad Hasidism: History, Thought, Image, edited by J. Meir & G. Sagiv, 45–86. Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2016. Wurzberger, Walter. “Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin,” in Guardians of our Heritage, edited by Leo Jung, 187–206. New York: Bloch, 1958.

Part 2: Tsimtsum and Modern Philosophy

Kenneth Seeskin

Tsimtsum and the Root of Finitude The central question of this essay is easy to state, though as we will see, not easy to solve: How can an infinite God be the source of something finite? If God is both infinite and eternal, and if no cause other than God is responsible for the existence of the world, why do we encounter things like cats, trees, and mortal human beings? If God were finite, like Plato’s Demiurge, there would be no problem: we could just say that he did the best job he could given the materials with which he had to work. But a monotheistic God is nothing like this. He can bring to bear infinite power and is responsible not only for the formal structure of the world but for its material component as well. This question is not unique to philosophy. Even if we were to think of creation as an explosion from a point of infinite density, heat, and pressure, we would face the problem of why some parts of space are relatively crowded while others are relatively empty. Why, in other words, do we not have a single, uniform cloud of gas? I want to explore two answers to this question: a mystical one and a rational one. The mystical one is that of Isaac Luria and invokes the concept of tsimtsum (contraction, concentration, withdrawal). The rational one is that of Baruch Spinoza and invokes the relation between cause and effect. My reason for bringing these thinkers together is that they represent the starkest possible alternatives that Jewish philosophy has to offer.1 If the first turns finitude into a mystery, the second tries to explain it away.

I Let us begin with Luria and tsimtsum. The key passage from Etz Chayyim reads as follows:2 You should know that before all the emanations were emanated and the creations created, a most supreme, simple light filled the whole of existence. There was no vacant place, no aspect of empty space or void, but everything was filled by that simple, infinite light. It had

1 For the view that these alternatives are not really distinct – that Kabbalah is nothing but “expanded Spinozism,” see Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004):67–96. 2 For Hebrew text and English translation, see The Tree of Life, Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padesh, trans. (New York: Arizal Publications, 1999), 11–13, 407. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-005

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no aspect of beginning or end, but was all one pure, completely uniform light, and this is what is called the light of the Infinite (‘or Eyn Sof). When it arose in His pure will to create worlds and to emit Emanations, to bring out the perfection of His actions, His Names, and His attributes […] then the Infinite contracted Itself as its midpoint, in the exact center of its light. And after He contracted that light and withdrew away from that mid-point to the sides surrounding it, it left a vacant space – an empty hollow void…

The basic idea here is that if the light had remained as it originally was, there would have been no space in which the world could come to be. Instead everything would have been pure and undifferentiated. By an act of will, God decided to limit himself, allowing for a distinction to arise between God and everything else. Following Scholem, the passage should not be read as saying that God concentrated himself at a point (along lines suggested by a midrash in which God’s shekhinah squeezes into the Holy of Holies) but rather that God retreated or withdrew from a point.3 After the withdrawal, God caused a second light to shine into the empty space, a light that initiates a series of emanations from which the world eventually emerges. There has been no end of debate on how literally the doctrine of tsimtsum should be interpreted. The problem with literal interpretation is that it leads to questions that have no obvious answer and, I would add, no hope of finding one. Does the undifferentiated light occupy space before the act of tsimtsum? If so, what is the nature of this space and from what does it come to be? If not, what does it mean to say that God withdrew himself from something that has no location? How can the space left behind be devoid of God if, as Isaiah tells us, the whole earth is full of God’s glory (kavod)?4 Some proponents of the doctrine answered the latter question by saying that there is a trace or residue (reshimu) of the original light left over in the empty space much as a tiny bit of oil or wine might be left in a bottle. The problem with this answer is that it uses one metaphor to explain another. What exactly does a trace of light signify? Does it occupy a space contiguous with ours? Does it manifest any creative power of its own? However we interpret the doctrine, there is little question that it was intended to avoid the pantheism implied by traditional theories of emanation. If everything is an outpouring or manifestation of God, then how can anything 3 Exodus Rabbah 34:1. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Press, 1941, rpt. 1961), 260. Also see David Biale, “Jewish Mysticism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Paul E. Szarmach, ed., An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 322. 4 Cf. Jeremiah 23:24.

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have an existence separate from God? Luria’s answer, it would seem, is to say that instead of coming directly from God, the world arises in a space God has left open and for that reason is metaphysically distinct from God. The problem is that if there is a trace of God left over, if the withdrawal is not complete, then pantheism becomes an issue again because God would be present, albeit it in a limited way, in everything else. Putting metaphysics aside for the moment, the notion of self- limitation has a number of parallels in ordinary life. A parent must limit himself to allow a child to grow and develop into a mature person. A teacher must limit herself to allow a student to master a discipline. An author of fiction must limit himself to produce believable characters. The question is whether these situations are applicable to God. No contradiction is involved in saying that a finite being can withdraw her presence or influence to make room for something else. Eventually the parent will die and the child will live a life of its own. The question is whether an infinite being can do the same and still remain infinite. If God not only creates the world but sustains it, if the world would cease to exist if God were to withdraw himself completely, then we are back to the idea that God must have left a trace of himself behind, whatever that may mean. It hardly needs to be said that Luria did not venture into systematic metaphysics. I take him to be assuming from the outset that pantheism is false as if to say: it is obvious that the world we experience is not pure and uniform but contains finite things that are separate from though still dependent on God. How can this be? The answer is that God must have imposed some kind of limit on himself. How can a being who is by definition without limit do this? At bottom, this remains a mystery. The best we can do is to represent it to ourselves in spatial terms as a voluntary withdrawal. Like any metaphor, withdrawal runs into problems if you press it too much. But still, it is the best we can do given the facts of our experience and the limitations of our minds.

II That brings us to Spinoza, who made systematic metaphysics his stock in trade. For Spinoza God is infinite and eternal, self-caused, self-sustaining, and indivisible. As the only substance there is, he is the only thing that exists in himself and is conceived entirely through himself. Everything else is either an attribute of God (indicating his essence) or a modification, something whose existence and essence are conceived through God. Though God possesses an infinite number of attributes, we are capable of understanding only two: thought and extension.

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Thus God presents himself to us as either an infinite system of ideas linked in causal order or an infinite system of extended things linked in the same order. In view of this, we might put to Spinoza the same question we put to Luiria: How is it that an infinite God can be the cause of finite things? Luria’s answer was to say that God withdrew in order to create the space into which the creation of the world could take place. It is not hard to see why Spinoza would reject this approach. For him God cannot be anything but infinite both in respect of essence and in respect of power. Nor can God decide to do anything different from what he has always done and is now doing. Beyond that, Spinoza would reject any suggestion that there could be a vacuum or space whose existence is separate from God.5 How, then, does Spinoza account for finitude? He does say that from the necessity of the divine nature, there must follow (or flow) infinite things in infinite ways; in other words, everything that can come within the scope of the infinite intellect (Ethics I, P16). It should be noted however that the truth of this claim is not the result of anything specific that God does but the necessary result of what God is. To put this another way, it is not that God suddenly decides to throw the switch on a cosmic production machine but that the eternal and infinite power of God cannot help but produce eternal and infinite effects. Thus: “Nothing exists from whose nature an effect does not follow” (Ethics I, P36). If the cause is infinite, then the number and nature of the effects will be infinite as well. Although Spinoza goes on to distinguish proximate and remote effects, he continues to insist on what we might call the principle of causal similarity. According to Ethics I, P21, what follows from the absolute nature of an eternal and infinite cause must also be eternal and infinite – in Spinozistic terminology, an immediate infinite mode. And again Ethics I, P22: what follows from a mode that is necessary and infinite, must itself be necessary and infinite – a mediate infinite mode. Putting all this together, let us grant that it is necessary for God to be modified by modes that are themselves infinite. To take the most obvious example, from God conceived under the attribute of extension, there necessarily follows the idea of motion and rest, the most immediate way in which the infinite power contained in extension manifests itself.6 From motion and rest, there would follow what Spinoza calls “the face of the whole universe, which, although varying in infinite ways, yet remains the same.”7 Although it is far from clear

5 See Ethics I, P15, scholium. 6 Letter 64 to G. H. Schuller. 7 Ibid.

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what Spinoza means by this, I take him to mean something like the basic laws of physics, laws which apply everywhere and at all time across the ever shifting realm of extension.8 The problem is that while such laws would be necessary to explain why it is raining outside my apartment right now, they would not be sufficient. If they apply everywhere and at all times, in addition to the current conditions in my neighborhood, they would also apply to the current conditions in the Sahara Desert – in fact, to the current conditions on Mercury and Pluto as well. So what causes the specific conditions in my neighborhood to differ from those in the Sahara Desert? Our question remains: How does God come to be the source of finite things? How, that is, can an eternal and infinite cause produce anything that exhibits finite duration or differentiation? Leibniz raised this question in the seventeenth century and concluded that Spinoza had no answer.9 To be sure, Spinoza neither gives nor attempts to give a deduction of a finite thing from an infinite cause. The most he could say is that once the attribute of extension is given, one could derive the shape or configuration – what he calls the formal essence – of every finite thing that could ever exist.10 This would be an infinite class whose membership would be determined for all eternity. The problem is that a formal essence is not the same as an actually existing thing. How do we get from the possible shape of any cat that could ever exist to the existence of the one now sitting on my desk? Spinoza does not make it easy for himself when, in a famous letter, he says: “Between the finite and the infinite there is no relation.”11 If there is no relation, then a deduction is out of the question. If the laws of geometry and motion and rest are constant throughout the universe, they are compatible with any event that will ever take place and therefore cannot explain the outcome of any particular one. Spinoza seems to admit as much when he claims at Ethics I, P28 that the only thing that can be the cause of a finite mode is another finite mode, which is caused by yet another finite mode, and so on ad infinitum.

8 Here I follow E. M. Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 48 ff. 9 Leibniz, “Refutation of Spinoza,” in Leroy Loemker, ed. Leibniz Selections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 497. 10 For further discussion of this point, see Steven Nadler, “Spinoza’s Monism and the Reality of the Finite,” in Spinoza on Monism, ed. Philip Goff (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 223–243. 11 Letter 54 to Boxel.

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E. M. Curley explains Spinoza’s position as follows.12 There are two ways in which a thing can follow from God: it can follow from God’s absolute nature, in which case it is infinite and eternal, or it can follow from God’s nature as modified by a finite thing, in which case it is also finite. Both types of causality are mentioned at Ethics I, P29. Thus God is the proximate cause of things that follow from his absolute nature and the remote cause of things he produces through the mediation of infinite modes. This leads Curley to say that each finite mode is dependent on an infinite series of finite modes (the sequence of events leading up to a thing) and a finite series of infinite modes (the causal laws that govern the sequence). Each type of causation is necessary, and only jointly are they sufficient. Thus the explanation of every finite mode refers to the preceding finite mode. Because the world is eternal, no matter how far back we go, there will always be an explanation available to us. Suppose, however, that we were to shift the question from “Why did this particular event occur?” to “Why are there particular events in the first place?” It may well be that Spinoza did not feel the need to answer this question. Since it is obvious that the world contains finite things, he may have thought that he could take finitude for granted. Note that while he offers no deduction of how finite modes can be produced by an infinite source, by Book II of the Ethics, he introduces the idea of God not in so far as he is infinite but in so far as he is modified or affected by something finite.13 The question is how such modification can occur if, as we saw, there is no relation between the infinite and the finite. It is not that God does not have enough power to produce a finite thing but that he has so much power that there is no way to account for the limited nature of the product – unless, of course, God were to limit himself in a manner suggestive of Luria and tsimtsum. But there is no way Spinoza can allow such a self-enforced limitation to occur. So we are back to Leibniz’ question. Leibniz was followed by a long line of thinkers including Hegel who argued that there is no room for finitude in Spinoza’s system.14 According to Harold

12 Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics, 66–74. Cf. Martial Gueroult, Spinoza Vol. 1 (Paris: AubierMontaigne, 1968), 338–40, who also argues that finite modes are subject to a double determination. 13 Ethics II, P 9. 14 Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, T. G Geraets, W. A. Suchtig, and H. S. Harris, trans., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991, 227 as well as Lectures on the History of Philosophy, E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simpson, trans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 257–58. Maimon also viewed Spinoza this way. See Melamed, “Salomon Maimon” ibid. For a reply to Hegel’s criticism, see Melamed, “Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the

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Joachim, finite things are illusory to the degree that they are viewed in their particularity and real only to the degree that they express God’s nature as a single, indivisible whole.15 In other words, this group of interpreters see Spinoza as a precursor to absolute idealism. Hegel went so far as to call Spinoza a modern day Eleatic. Although modern interpreters, especially those trained in the Anglo-American tradition, generally oppose this interpretation, it cannot be denied that there are passages where Spinoza seems to echo Parmenides. For example, when explaining the claim that whatever is, is in God, he says (Ethics I, P15 scholium):16 If I am now asked why we have this natural inclination to divide quantity, I reply that we can conceive quantity in two ways, to wit, abstractly, or superficially – in other words, as represented in the imagination – or as substance, which we do only through the intellect. If therefore we consider quantity in so far as we represent it in the imagination – and this is what we more frequently and readily do – we find it to be finite, divisible, and made up of parts. But if we consider it intellectually and conceive it in so far as it is substance – and this is very difficult – then it will be found to be infinite, one, and indivisible, as we have already sufficiently proved. This will be quite clear to those who can distinguish between the imagination and the intellect, especially if this point also is stressed, that matter is everywhere the same, and there are no distinct parts in it except in so far as we conceive matter as modified in various ways.

I take this to mean that quantity, which is another word for finitude, is something that arises when we look at the world from the standpoint of the imagination and therefore does not present reality as it truly is. In truth, reality is eternal and indivisible. Part of the problem in interpreting Spinoza may be semantic. Joachim is surely wrong to say that finite things are illusory. Looking at a finite thing like my cat is nothing like watching a magician pretend to saw someone in half. It would be better to say, with Steven Nadler, that any perspective we take on the world that includes finite things, any spatial or temporal boundaries that we impose,

Finite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2010): 77–92. Against Curley, Melamed sees the substance/mode relation not in terms of cause and effect but in terms of subject and the properties that inhere in it. In brief, the crux of Curley’s position is that it is counter-intuitive to say that a finite mode like a cat or chair is a property of something else. The crux of Melamed’s position is that Curley has no way to account for immanent causation as mentioned at Ethics I, P18. Although the resolution of this dispute is well outside the bounds of this paper, I have adopted causal terminology for the sake of simplicity. Cf. n. 8 above. 15 Harold Joachim, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 75–82, 112–3. 16 Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, Samuel Shirley, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), 42. Cf. Letter 12 to Ludwig Neyer.

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depend on our interests or point of view.17 An evolutionary biologist would divide the world differently than a microbiologist, a microbiologist differently than a particle physicist, a particle physicist differently than an astrophysicist. Where some see things, others might see fields, where some are looking at nanoseconds, others are looking at eons. To the question “Which standpoint is the correct one?” Spinoza could rightly say that all are correct depending on what kind of question one is trying to answer. To use one of his own metaphors, we can look at a bowl of water as a collection of individual drops or as a space composed of different regions. But this does nothing to obscure the fact that overall we are dealing with a single, indivisible whole. By the same token, God or nature (Deus sive natura) is a single, indivisible whole even though human existence would be impossible unless we imposed boundaries useful for a medium sized creature on a medium sized planet.18 All of this is compatible with saying that to attain the highest form of knowledge and with it a state of true blessedness, we need to rise above our normal perspective and view the world sub specie aeternitatis. In Lurianic terms, it is as if Spinoza is asking us to think of how things would be if God never withdrew from the pre-existing space. God, then, is the only thing that is substantial. There is no force or power above God and no space or realm outside of him. We saw that Spinoza holds that the idea of a space with nothing to occupy it, i.e. a vacuum, is incoherent.19 To repeat (Ethics I, Pl5): whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God. To the question of cosmic uniformity, he would no doubt return us to the idea that the face of the whole universe, although varying in infinite ways, yet remains the same. I take this to mean that while there are variations in time and space at a micro-level, at a macro-perspective, God or nature is eternal and unchanging.

III Let us now return to tsimtsum. Before God’s withdrawal, there was no space for anything else, so all that existed was the pure, uniform light of the Infinite. To avoid misunderstanding, let us understand “space” not in terms of physical containment but in terms of logical possibility. This allows us to say that before 17 Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 168–9. 18 For the phrase Deus sive natura, see Ethics IV, Preface. 19 Ethics I, P15 Scholium.

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God’s withdrawal, there was no possibility for anything other than God to exist. If, as Spinoza argues, there is no relation between the infinite and the finite, then something other than God must be introduced to explain how we get from one to the other. The history of philosophy has no shortage of candidates to fill that role: angels, heavenly intelligences, logoi, and, of course, sephirot. It may well be that Spinoza’s mediate infinite modes do the same thing.20 The problem is that whatever candidate one picks as an intermediary, the same dilemma will present itself. If it is other than God, what is the source of its existence? If it is an emanation from or manifestations of God, then it is hard to see how we can avoid some form of pantheism. If there is no way to solve the above-mentioned dilemma, then the only alternative is to accept one of its horns. The first horn is to follow Luria – or at least Luria as presented by Chaim Vital and as I have interpreted him. We do not know and will never know how an infinite God can choose to limit himself  – except to say that if God can do anything, then perhaps self-limitation is a genuine possibility. For all intents and purposes, then, creation is a mystery.21 We can give metaphors to point the mind in the right direction and help it to come to grips with the mystery, but a metaphor is not a theory and does not offer what would normally be considered an explanation. The second horn is to embrace pantheism, which in most religious circles is something of a dirty word. Hermann Cohen went so far as to say that Deus sive natura involves a contradiction on the grounds that monotheism is completely committed to the separation of God and nature.22 Others have accused Spinoza of

20 This at any rate is the view of Harry Wolfson, who argues that Spinoza’s metaphysics is structured so that the infinite series of finite modes follows from a mediate infinite mode, which follows from an immediate infinite mode, which in turn follows from God. As Wolfson sees it, Spinoza’s predicament is reminiscent of the medieval Aristotelians. Each begins with an infinite God and the things that follow from him. Each adheres to the idea that the effect must resemble the cause. Each honors this resemblance in the first causal connection. In one case, God, who is pure intelligence, generates another intelligence; in the other, an eternal and infinite substance generates an eternal and infinite mode. Each then puts a series of intermediate causes between God and finite things. The gist of both explanations is that things that cannot follow directly from God follow indirectly if we interpose a series of intermediate causes. See Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, Vol. 1 (New York: Schocken Books, 1934), 249–61. 21 Cf. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3.23: “Our intellects do not reach the point of apprehending how these natural things that exist in the world of generation and corruption are produced in time . . .” 22 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, Simon Kaplan (trans. 1972, rpt. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 45.

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atheism.23 Putting labels aside for the moment, Spinoza’s position comes to this. Granted that the world may look as if it contains finite things if we view it from the perspective of ordinary experience, but strictly speaking there is only one thing that can be considered substantial and that is an indivisible whole. The question of how to get from unity to apparent plurality is the same as the question of how to get from infinity to apparent finitude. From a religious perspective, Spinoza concludes the Ethics by saying that human welfare and perfection consists in the intellectual love of this substance. What he leaves out – in my opinion intentionally – is any mention of the awe or reverence that this substance should instill in us.24 In fact, in the Appendix to Book One, he castigates those who “gape at nature like a fool” and goes on to say that the dispelling of ignorance entails the disappearance of astonishment. Against the prevailing trend of medieval philosophy, he argues that God does not present himself to us as a mystery. Again, God is either an infinite system of ideas arranged in causal order or an infinite system of extended objects arranged in the same order. Can there be a God who is one with nature and does not inspire awe or reverence, a God who represents the point where all sense of mystery or unknowing dissipates? Although I cannot say that I find this conception of God attractive, I think we should resist the temptation to say that it is not a conception of God at all. If people object to the term pantheism, we can simply say that Spinoza was a monist who thought that the one substance has many of the qualities we normally associate with divinity: infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, self-caused, self-sustaining, and, of course, one in number. Whether we designate this substance as God, or nature, or both is irrelevant as long as we keep in mind that nothing else can be or be conceived without it. Which horn of the dilemma one chooses will depend on how one views the world of finite things that we encounter in ordinary experience – as a mystery that we may never be able to unravel or as so many drops in an infinite sea of water whose existence is necessary and eternal. Luria or Spinoza? Although some may be surprised to hear it, my heart is with Luria – not because I think the concept of tsimtsum meets normal standards of theoretical rigor but because when I contemplate the existence of the world, I am still left with a profound sense of awe and reverence.

23 For example, Nadler, Spinoza, 119–21. Note however that in saying that Spinoza is an atheist, Nadler means that he is not a pantheist because pantheism is still a form of theism. 24 See Nadler, ibid.

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Bibliography Biale, David. “Jewish Mysticism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Paul E. Szarmach, ed., An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, Albany: SUNY Press, 1984. Curley, E. M. Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Gueroult, Martial. Spinoza, vol. 1, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic, T. G Geraets, W. A. Suchtig, and H. S. Harris, trans., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991. ______. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simpson, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Joachim, Harold. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901. Leibniz, Wilhelm. “Refutation of Spinoza,” in Leroy Loemker, ed. Leibniz Selections, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951. Maimonides, Moses. Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, University of Chicago Press, 1963. Melamed, Yitzhak Y. “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004): 67–96. ______. “Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2010): 77–92. Menzi, Donald Wilder and Zwe Padesh, trans. The Tree of Life, New York: Arizal Publications, 1999. Nadler, Steven. “Spinoza’s Monism and the Reality of the Finite,” in Spinoza on Monism, ed. Philip Goff. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 223–243. ______. Spinoza’s Ethics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken Press, 1941, rpt. 1961. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Wolfson, Harry. The Philosophy of Spinoza, Vol. 1, New York: Schocken Books, 1934.

Alex S. Ozar

Unfolding the Enfolded: Schelling and Lurianic Kabbalah In a system, every concept has its definite place where it is alone valid and which also determines its meaning as well as its limitation. Whoever now does not examine the inner core [das Innere], but lifts only the most general concepts out of their context – how can he judge the whole correctly? Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 73

That the Lurianic idea of divine ‘contraction’ as central to the creation and ontological structure of the cosmos enjoys unmistakable parallels in the work of F.W.J. Schelling was already noted in passing by Franz Rosenzweig in his 1917 “Urzelle” letter to Rudolph Ehrenberg.1 Likewise Gershom Scholem presented the observation without comment, mentioning offhand in a footnote that a certain passage of Schelling’s “reads like a description of the tsimtsum and its significance for the personality of God.”2 It is safe to say that the historical factoid is a well-established and worthy scholarly footnote.3 But Jürgen Habermas, in celebrating the unassuming but powerfully deep imprint of Kabbalistic thinking in the development of German Idealism, leads us a step deeper: “Because the legacy of the Kabbalah already flowed into and was absorbed by Idealism, its light seems to refract all the more richly in the spectrum of a spirit in which something of the spirit of Jewish mysticism lives on, in however hidden a way.”4 Because Jewish mystical thought was integral to the genesis of German Idealism, Habermas argues, it follows that the insights of Idealism may be fruitfully “developed in terms of the experience of the Jewish tradition.”5 The claim is that here genes are destiny, or at least they can and ought to be. Actively reflecting on the intertwined histories of Jewish thought 1 See Franz Rosenzweig, “Urzelle to the Star of Redemption” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, eds. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 54–55. 2 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, (New York: Schocken Publishing House, 1941), 412 n. 77. 3 For a helpfully broad bibliography appropriately gathered in a footnote, see Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, and Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 392 n. 2. 4 Jürgen Habermas, “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers” in Philosophical Political Profiles, transl. Frederick G. Lawrence, (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988), 37–59. 5 Ibid. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-006

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and German Idealism promises to refract their respective and shared lights all the more richly. Engaging this kind of historical proposal seriously demands interrogation of various technicalities and clarification as to the criteria for success. For instance, can we establish, beyond the sheer concurrence of terms and concepts, a compelling historical bridge linking Jewish thinking to works confirmably studied by Schelling? Must we, and can we, substantiate the stronger, counterfactual proposition that had these ideas not been developed by Jewish thinkers, they would not have been employed by Schelling? Though rabbinic scholars were attracted to his teaching,6 there is no evidence of their having requited the favor, and tellingly, at no point in his wide-ranging body of work does Schelling directly cite any kabbalistic text.7 There is a record of his borrowing volumes of the leading Lurianic expositor Hayyim Vital, though it appears he did soon behalf of his correspondent Franz Molitor, and there is no evidence he studied them himself.8 And interestingly, in the only cases of which I am aware that he does explicitly employ the term ‘kabbalah,’ the referent would seem to be distinctively non-, or pre-Lurianic, which we will see is just the sort of linear emanation scheme Schelling works to overcome.9 But a case can indeed be made. We know that among Schelling’s important influences was a man named Oettinger, whose work does incorporate explicit interest in kabbalistic ideas. Under the leadership of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, a substantial digest of kabbalistic writing was in the mid seventeenth century translated into Latin under the title Kabbalah Denudata, effectively introducing kabalistic thinking into the shelf of canonical world literature and Christian mysticism in particular. Schelling encountered this tra6 Werner J. Cahnman, “Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism,” in Proceedings of the Academy for Jewish Research, Vol. 48 (1981), 7. 7 See Christoph Schulte, “Zimzum in the Works of Schelling,” in Iyyun, the Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 41 (Jan. 1992), 23. 8 Ibid, 24–25. 9 See F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, transl. Andrew Bowie, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 78: “But Spinoza is, of course, an emanationist, admittedly not a physical one but a logical one; he also admittedly does not maintain an eternal beingseparated from its source of that which flows out, as emanation is usually understood (for whether emanation has ever and in any system been comprehensible in this way, e.g., in the Jewish kabbalah, is still a big question); rather what follows from God remains in God.” See also F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, transl. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albanay: State University of New York Press, 2006), 73. “Thus, in order to prove that there are only two manners of explaining evil – the dualistic, according to which there is assumed an evil fundamental being [Grundwesen], no matter with which modifications, under or next to the good one, and the Kabbalistic, according to which evil is explained through emanation and distancing…”

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dition through substantial engagement with the work of Böhme, Hamann, and his friend Franz Baader.10 More broadly, we know from various sources involving Jacobi, Lessing, and others that viewpoints associated with the kaballah generally, and the concept of contraction in particular, played prominently formative roles in and around the fault lines of enlightenment thinking. But even the most incisive, rigorously foolproof historiography is worth its philosophical salt only when duly galvanized with active, living reflection. And so what I want to try here – joining Habermas’ spirit in seeking the lights of Idealism and Kabbalah in their mutually refracting illumination – is an experiment in trans-historical philosophical conversation: What happens when Schelling’s and Lurianic works are read side by side, as partners in a shared reflective enterprise? And what I want to say is that the ecumenical exercise can indeed elicit fruitful insight on all sides, bringing into relief aspects of each and aspects of their common engine that would more likely evade the notice of an exclusivist, onetradition reader. Both camps share the cause of articulating the meaning of finitude and difference as organically emergent within a unitary absolute, and both to that end seek to transcend regnant dualist and linear emanationist schemes.11 This emerges as an inherently dialectical enterprise, demanding a complex series of recurrently spiraling “double rhythms” and dynamic (re)negotiations.12 For us as scholarly spectators, it is helpful to see these efforts at articulation – whether in logical-idealist or mythic-figural idiom – as metaphorical, in the sense of that which seeks to answer the “in principle unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence.”13 In working to uncover the “logical ‘perplexity’ for which metaphor

10 See Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 117, and accompanying references. 11 For the Lurianic side of the equation, see Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 128. For Schelling’s criticism(s) of emanation schemes, see for example the aforementioned Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 73; System of a Philosophy in General in F.W.J. Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, transl. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 150. 12 See Scholem, Kabbalah, 131. “Just as the first movement in creation was in reality composed of two movements – the ascent of Ein-Sof into the depths of itself and its partial descent into the space of zimzum – so this double rhythm is a necessarily recurring feature of every stage in the universal process. The process works through the double beat of the alternately expanding movement of Ein-Sof and its desire to return to itself…This double-facedness in the process of emanation is typical of the dialectical tendency of Lurianic Kabbalah.” 13 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, transl. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 14.

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steps in,”14 we may not quite attain a monolithic set of a priori transcendental conditions permanently governing discourse, but we can hope to bring light to the “metakinetics of the historical horizons of meaning,”15 that is, to see the patterns, mechanics, and dynamics indigenous to grappling with a particular menu of problems, regardless of idiom or conceptual style. And so the question is this: In pursuing difference within absolute unity, what kinds of moves is a thinker liable to make, and why? In what follows I present, in suitably dialectical progression, a series of investigations looking at Schelling’s cosmogonic/ontological efforts, principally his “Stuttgart Seminars” and the bookending Freedom essay and Weltalter drafts, incorporating and highlighting along the way illuminating selections from Lurianic thought, principally that of Hayyim Vital in his Etz Hayyim. In the closing section, I conclude with a brief attempt to further ramify the particular salience of Schelling’s work as illustrative of the possibilities of Jewish philosophy.

I A consciously-constructed, idealist system, Schelling claims, can never hope to catch the fullness of the real, dynamically organic world in its nets, because the real, given world, the one with rocks, about 400,000 species of flowering plant, and a dazzling array of platypuses, is surely more than what is constructible by rational thought alone. The world to be understood is a world of the living, and “No living progress is possible between propositions that follow dogmatically.”16 The system, therefore, to the extent that it can in fact encompass the cosmos that is, must be not manufactured but “uncovered as one that is already inherent in itself.”17 It is, necessarily, receptively discovered and “recounted,”18 or “read off.”19 Philosophy must become history in content and form.20 But then by what light may we hope to achieve holistic understanding?

14 Ibid, 3. 15 Ibid, 5. 16 Schelling, Ages of the World, in Slavoj Zizek and F.W.J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, transl. Juidth Norman, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 119. 17 Ibid, 197. 18 Ibid, 114. 19 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, transls. Paul Guyer and Allan Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 108. 20 Schelling, Ages of the World, 114.

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What is needed, Schelling argues, is access to a principle which is itself unconditioned by and yet encompasses the whole of the cosmos without exclusion or suppression, one that is “reproduced in each part of the whole,” and which (thereby) allows for a strictly systematic “method of development and progression to ensure that no essential link has been omitted.”21 The principle fulfilling these criteria, and thus the only hope for a system of living reason, is what we call the absolute, or God. It is God who, as absolute, all-encompassing – and like a fractal image, ubiquitously “reproduced” in microcosm – underwrites for us the possibility of purposive orientation in incorporating the complex whole of the given world, in all its polychromatic diversity and contingency, into a singular system of reason. And it is God himself who grounds the possibility of a genuinely living philosophy, which is to say, a philosophy with realism as its body and idealism as its soul.22 To play the role, God must fit the bill, being neither ideal alone or real alone but “the absolute identity of the Real and the Ideal.”23 God in the first place must be the real and ideal in perfect, seamless unity, an absolute singularity in which all inheres in “complete indifference and indistinguishability.”24 Schelling in other words wants to say that there is in fact a necessary moment, conceptually prior to all difference, in which the effective equi-luminescence of nocturnal bovine optics is clearly, emphatically established.25 And that moment posited as such is necessarily eternal, never to be transcended, as “It is a founding principle and rule of science (though few know it) that what is posited once is posited forever and cannot be sublated again, since otherwise it might just as well not have been posited at all.”26 Positing is an always or nothing game. The unity of divine indifference is the first,27 and it is eternally the first, always and everywhere the beginning and foundation. And yet, that moment is not the whole story, because the same essence which is the primordial unity is itself the ground for the organic emergence of diversity: All of creation is properly the gradual self-explication of absolute identity and perfect unity, the dynamic becoming of the primordial absolute. It is precisely this persisting disjunction between primordial unity and present difference – between eternity and time – that catalyzes

21 Ibid, 198. 22 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 26. 23 Ibid. 24 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 203. 25 Reference is to G.F.W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9. 26 Schelling, Ages of the World, 135. 27 Ibid, 132.

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the creative dynamism that is life. Contradiction is the necessary fuel, but it is the endless striving to tear itself away, to raise itself up from contradiction that makes life alive. And that, the yearning to transcend contradiction, would be unintelligible were eternity “not behind all life like a permanent background.”28 Life and time are, essentially, what is on the way between eternity and eternity.

II That absolute, all-encompassing, holistic unity is the foundation of all creation is given vivid expression by Hayyim Vital near the beginning of his classic Etz Hayyim: Before the emanations were emanated and the creations were created, the highest light was spread out, filling all of existence, and there was absolutely no place free as an empty space and void, but rather all was filled with the spread out light of the Ein Sof, and it had neither beginning nor back but rather all was one, spread out equally in a single equivalence.29

Prior to creation, in Vital’s depiction, the primordial light of the Ein Sof (literally “no end”) was holistically pervasive – there was no free space or void, because all space was maximally saturated with light – and the world was as a result perfectly homogonous, categorically brooking no difference or distinction. The light, spread out equally and maximally everywhere, by nature allowed neither front or back nor up or down to pervert the perfectly singular equivalence of all. And indeed, it is hard to see how such a setup would generate any delimited thing, by what stimulus would emerge difference from the kind of holistically seamless unity Vital takes care to describe. Difference and finite, delimited things do emerge, however, and Vital has a precise reason for why. At stake is the essential character, and consequently the reality, of God. For instance, if God is by nature gracious, as he surely is, then on pain of contradiction, there must be individuated, finite things in the universe toward whom he can exercise his grace. “Were there no one in the world to receive his mercy from him, how could he be called merciful?... And if there were no creatures, he could not be called ‘master.’”30 Likewise with all his established relational attributes: they can only be true insofar as there are finite beings  – beings which are not simply God himself, as any infinite being would be  – to 28 Schelling, Ages of the World, 125. 29 Hayyim Vital, Etz Hayyim, 1:2:2. 30 Etz Hayyim, 1:2:6.

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whom he can relate. Vital clarifies the threatened privation, and what it means to fix it, in terms of relative perfection, or better, completeness. He does not say that without finite beings to whom to exercise his mercy God would not exist, but that he would be as God incomplete, unfulfilled, and it is righting this imperfection which is the founding impetus for creation: The reason was that God was compelled to achieve fullness in all his actions and powers, and in all his names denoting greatness, elevation, and glory, and were he to not put his actions and powers into action and effect, he would not, as it were, have been called complete, neither in his actions, nor in his names, nor in his monikers.31

To be a merciful God without creatures on whom to bestow that mercy is to be as God unfinished. In the primordial state of all-pervading, differentiation-prohibiting light, God was in this sense only in potentia, and so it is only with creation that God’s character can achieve the transition from potential to actuality. On Schelling’s view, the primordial essence of God – the absolute identity of the real and ideal – is likewise in and of itself not yet real: As we first encounter it prior to differentiation, rationally ascertaining the absolute “offers us the concept of the primordial Being, thought not [this Being] as an actual, authentic one.”32 To rationally deduce the essence of God, the nature of what he is in himself, is to know God only subjectively – only as subject – whereas to encounter God in the fullness of his actuality requires that we apprehend him objectively no less. It is only through the creatively oppositional interplay between the subjective and the objective that the transition from potentiality to actuality can be achieved: The absolute identity of the Real and the Ideal must not only be in and of itself but also outside itself, [that is,] it must be actualized – it must also disclose itself in existence as that which, in its essence, is the absolute identity of the Real and Ideal. However, everything can become manifest only through its opposite, i.e., identity through non-identity, difference, and distinguishable principles.33

As a mere concept, the unity of real and ideal is only that which it is in and of itself, merely a defined set of properties, perfectly valid but in themselves vacuous, inert. That collection of properties becomes real only to the extent that it is projected out beyond the empty self-consistency which it is, not only being itself but disclosing itself to that which it itself is not, because it is only by way

31 Etz Hayyim, 1:1:1. 32 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 200. 33 Ibid.

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of the frictional disjoint between self and non-self that the self can achieve a manner of active progress and development, personality, and life. This is what Schelling refers to as the ‘fundamental law of opposition’: “Without opposition [there is] no life…Everything, if it is to become manifest, requires something that it itself is not sensu stricto.”34 Where there is only an idea, only reason or consciousness, only light with no check or balance, the outcome is necessarily either nothing or an indifferent everything which is nothing – as Vital would put it, an all-pervasive light with neither beginning nor end. And where there is only that which is not ideational in itself, where there is only darkness, the outcome is necessarily just that – darkness. It is only when the light has that against which it can figure itself, and that to which it can communicate its essence but cannot communicate itself without resistance, that the dynamic, personal, gradual development that is life can achieve actuality. “Without contradiction there would be no life, no movement, no progress; a deadly slumber of all forces. Only contradiction drives us – indeed forces us – to action.”35 Why, then, for Schelling, does God move to shatter the tranquility of perfect indifference? It is on account of an (un/not-yet)conscious yearning, or a “will in which there is no understanding” despite that “understanding is really the will in will.”36 What is this will that is not quite a will? It is, Schelling says, for the absolute a “longing to come to itself, to find and savor itself.”37 And so where Vital explains that “the reason was that God was compelled to achieve fullness in all his actions and powers, and all his names,” Schelling articulates the implied syllogism’s major premise: “Everything that is something without actually being it must by nature seek itself.”38 The world becomes so that God can become, that is, can transfigure his slumbering potentiality into dynamically active actuality. Among the characterizing names Vital mentions as necessitating God’s actualization through creation is the Tetragramatton ‘Y-H-V-H,’ taken as a construction of the triliteral root “H-V-H” meaning “to exist.” According to Vital, God is called by this name by virtue of the “demonstrations of his eternal existence and his being in perpetuity, past, present, and future – before the creation, contemporaneous with the creation’s existence, and after its transmutation into that which was.”39 It follows, therefore, that “were the worlds and all that is in 34 Ibid, 208. 35 Schelling, Ages of the World, 124. 36 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 28. 37 Schelling, Ages of the World, 136. 38 Ibid, 137. 39 Etz Hayim, 1:1:1.

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them not created, the truth of the demonstration of his eternal blessed existence in the past, present, and future, and so would not be called by the name of H-V-Y-H.”40 For God to truly live up to his reputation as eternally existing, Vital argues, it is not enough that he perdure without beginning or threatened end. Eternity worthy of the name, rather, can be achieved only in live contrast to the finite, differentiated time of the created world. Or, as Schelling puts it, “God, conceived of absolutely…is neither eternity nor time but the absolute identity of the two,”41 and such an identity, we have seen, becomes actual as that which it unites is divided and reunited. “Eternity,” Schelling says, is “impelled to seek itself.”42

III Schelling’s God is intimately entwined with all there is. Every thing is as a thing dependent on God; sever the tie, interrupt the ever-renewing, sustaining creativity, and the thing is no more.43 This he says is the correct version, or aspect, of what has come to be known as pantheism: all that there is, is in and depends on God. Thus, if “pantheism denotes nothing more than the doctrine of the immanence in things in God, every rational viewpoint must be drawn to this doctrine.”44 And yet, Schelling argues, to the extent that there are indeed dependent things, though they are assuredly immanent in God, the fact that they are things entails that they are no less decidedly not God, since God is surely not dependent, and surely not a thing.45 The statement that “everything is God” is true, but not in the sense in which the logical uninitiated are liable to misconstrue it. We must attain precision in the art of the copula. What “A is B” does not mean is a sheer “sameness” of A and B: “For example, the proposition, ‘this body is blue,’ does not have the meaning that the body is, through that in and through which it is a body, also blue, but rather only the meaning that the same thing which is this body is also blue, although not in the same respect.”46

40 Ibid. 41 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 205. 42 Schelling, Ages of the World, 136. 43 See Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 11–12. 44 Ibid, 11. 45 Ibid, 12. 46 Ibid, 13.

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The meaning of ‘A is B,’ requires reference to some third entity, some X, which is both A and B but is neither A as A nor B as B. “A in this judgment is not A, but rather is X, which is A; B is not B, but rather is X, which is B.”47 The copula then reads: The X which is this body, is blue. The law of identity, the meaning of A = B, is now seen in its proper light as a non-tautological, non-reversible,48 “unfolding” of the enfolded.49 Adverting to an X standing behind the copula, as it were, allows for a critical measure of distance, the possibility of oppositionality, between subject and predicate, thus empowering the logician to avoid, even in the thick of an identity, indifferent sameness by thinking “something different with respect to the subject of the sentence than with respect to the predicate.”50 Identity, it is revealed, is not simple but complex: “A doubling lies at the ground of even the simple concept.”51 The proposition that God is all things, as the pantheism-minded put it, rightly intends not that God (“A”) and things (“B”) are the same (A = B), but rather the set of doubled judgments that there is an X which is both A and B. God is the world, but the world is not God; or, God is the world, but not as God. Without adjudicating whether it is ultimately logical jujitsu or sleight of hand, we can observe that this maneuver is the key to Schelling’s programmatic effort to exhibit God as the principle of living systematicity encompassing the given world: It is a method for articulating difference within integral unity, and so for showing how it is that to be integrally unified is not, or at least is not necessarily, to be vacuously self-identical or merely indifferent. Because it is all and everywhere in God, the world exists as a rationally accessible, coherent and connected whole; because it is not God, but rather only an X which is God but not as God, it is a distinct, potentially free entity in itself, genuinely independent in its dependency. But what exactly is this mysterious X which is God but is not God as God, not God himself? Or, just how is it that God allows things to be truly in him and yet not him? Whence the required distance, the logical space enabling the intradifferentiation of unity and hence the copula as a substantial, unidirectional unfolding? As Schelling himself puts it, “it seems remarkable that God should contain a principle that is not God himself.”52 Schelling employs an analogy:In a human person we can identify, he says, the person themselves, sensu eminenti, 47 Schelling, Ages of the World, 129. 48 Ibid, 129. 49 Ibid, 14. 50 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 14. 51 Schelling, Ages of the World, 129. 52 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 108.

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with that in them which is conscious, understanding, self-aware  – the properly subjective, or ideal. But human persons are, notoriously or otherwise, far more than self-conscious subjectivity. They are in the first place bodies, composed of various crude stuffs, run by endocrine systems and the like, finding themselves delivered over without choice or warning to worldly existence in all its colorfully, horrifyingly concrete contingencies. “The self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power…Thus ‘Being-a-basis’ means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being from the ground up.”53 This, the given, unor pre-conscious aspect of ourselves, Schelling denotes as the substantive ‘Being’ [Seyn], distinguished here in the English by the capital ‘B.’ Now, the “highest moral act of man” is his relating to this aspect in the proper way, namely “separating himself qua being from his Being.”54 The key is not to annihilate our Being but to achieve awareness of its qualitative status as merely instrumental, a tool at the disposal of our “inner, superior, and more truthful essence.”55 So too, Schelling says, with God: “If God were to remain as immersed in his Being, there would be no life, no growth. Hence he separates Himself from His being precisely because it is merely a tool for Him.”56 God, as a living, personal being, is like the human party to the progressive development of consciousness. “All living existence proceeds from a preconscious state,”57 God included, and “life in its entirety is properly speaking always only an intensified coming to consciousness.”58 The crux here is the operational desideratum of development and progression, of life as such: It is because the goal is that there be life, both in and as a consequence of God, that the separation of real and ideal in God is effected. Again, the fundamental law of opposition: “Without opposition there is no life.”59 A systematically comprehensible world is one wherein God has made his essence manifest in living existence. The ideal in God alone is not adequate to the task, because, like light without gravity, without mediation the ideal has no grounding substance, nothing to lend it definition. and so unresisted it will spread out into a textureless everything that is nothing.60 Likewise, asserting the real in God independently of the ideal would result in a

53 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 330. 54 Schelling, Stuttgart Semianrs, 208. 55 Ibid, 209. 56 Ibid, 209. 57 Ibid, 206. 58 Ibid, 207. 59 Ibid, 208. 60 See Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 29.

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deafeningly silent nothing, a resisting force with nothing to resist. Another physical metaphor from Schelling’s earlier philosophy of nature is helpful: Suppose, for illustration, a stream; it is pure identity; where it meets resistance, a whirlpool is formed; this whirlpool is not an abiding thing, but something that vanishes at every moment, and every moment springs up anew – Originally, in nature, there is nothing distinguishable; all products are, so to speak, still in solution, and invisible in the universal productivity. It is only when retarding points are given that they are thrown off and advance out of the universal identity  – At every such point the stream breaks (the productivity is annihilated), but at every step there comes a new wave which fills up the sphere).61

A stream without “retarding points,” say, a rock or fallen branch, is pure identity. All is the same because all flows and flows the same – no center can hold. Difference requires something hard, something dark and heavy, to refuse the flow. But of course without the stream, the retarding point retards nothing. The royal, and only, road to whirlpools lies in the generative integration of the essentiallyopposed-in-character stream and rock  – a dynamic unity of opposites. It is important though to notice a certain vital asymmetry between the forces: They are not equal and opposite, which is why they do not simply cancel each other out. The whirlpool is created precisely because the stream, having encountered the resisting point, continues to flow  – the current is shaped but not wholly defeated by the retardation. It is not only that there are two distinct forces, but that the bifurcated forces are qualitatively distinct in character: one is by nature expansive, assertive, creative, subjective, and the other by nature contractive, withdrawing, inward-turning. In the project of whirlpool-creation, therefore, while both are essential partners, it is the lead role which naturally belongs to the expansive stream, with the resisting force featuring as supporting cast. In this sense, to return from the metaphor, “we have something superior and something inferior, that is, an axiological difference. The Ideal ranks higher than the Real in respect to its dignity.”62 The ideal is axiologically primary, and this despite the fact that the real in an important precedes the ideal: That each of the real and ideal is primary is coherent, Schelling clarifies, because “In the circle out of which everything becomes, it is no contradiction that that through which the One is generated may itself be in turn begotten by it.”63 The real is first in the sense that it is the necessary ground, the resistance which first makes it possible for the ideal to manifest at all; the ideal is the “prius” in that the ground 61 F.W.J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of a Philosophy Nature, transl. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 206. 62 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 202. 63 See Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 28.

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would likewise be no ground without what to ground.64 But again, that the forces comprise a closed circuit does not erase their fundamental asymmetry: The ideal, though slowed, outruns and flows past the real, and it is that conjunction – resistance with that which overcomes it – which produces the world. If the real is to fulfill its potential as the prior ground of God that is not God, it must be posited as actually prior in this way.65 That is to say, God in his allencompassing fullness must become specifically Being, the real, dark ground that is the ground of God’s existence but is not God himself. God, in this moment, contracts himself, positing himself as and thereby concentrating himself into the real ground of his ideal existence. It is a kind of pledge of existential identification: As a human might say “Yes, I have (am) a body, but from now on, my body is not me” God proclaims the ambitious resolution that his Being is not he himself. At the same time, since there can be no ground without that which it grounds, God performs the complementary act in positing himself as himself, in his conscious, subjective selfhood: He cannot concentrate His self into the Real without expanding as the Ideal, that is, [He] cannot posit Himself as the Real, as an object, without positing Himself simultaneously as a subject (that is, without freeing the ideal); and both of these [moments] constitute one act of absolute simultaneity; with His actual concentration into the Real, God also posits His expansion into the Real.66

Ideal and real are two sides of the same coin, and so the objective, which is logically but not axiologically first, immediately entails its superior counterpart, the subjective. This proceeds, all in the same instant, through a sort of conceptual rebound effect. For God to posit himself as merely Being, the subsidiary ground of God that is not God himself, is for God to quite straightforwardly “contradict His essence,” which is to exist in all ways.67 This contradiction plays out like our stream facing off with its opposed retarding point: God’s existence progressively expands beyond the resisting ground, flowering as its ideal, subjective self, but that expansion is definitively grounded and shaped by its continuing encounter with the contractive resistance. In “being spontaneously only One, although capable of being All,”68 God fashions a perpetual, asymmetric imbalance which issues in a creatively spiraling dialectic. The result is life.

64 See ibid. 65 Ibid, 203. 66 Ibid, 207. 67 Ibid, 203. 68 Ibid, 203.

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In the Lurianic tradition narrated by Vital, the primordial event in the creation process – the process of God becoming actual – is the contraction of the all-pervasive light into itself and away from its center, leaving a cleared out, circular void of empty space.69 It is important that the void forms a circle, Vital stresses, as the definitional equidistance of the circumference’s points to the center reflects the perfect equivalence of the primordial light.70 In this way that which comes to be within the circle will receive the light equally throughout; even as difference is developed, in this first stage it is necessary that it remain in principle under the power of unity. With this free space secured, the process continues with a “single, straight line” of light, like a “thin pipe,” descending from the top carrying the light downward into the void. It is important that the line (1) makes contact with the light at its head, but (2) that its terminus not reach all the way to the light on the other side. The reason, Vital explains, is that securing this asymmetry is a desideratum for the emergence and stability of any differentiation: If the two ends both received the light from the Ein Sof, the two ends would have been to each other as equal heads and therefore would not have been as up and down. And so too, if the Ein Sof were drawn from the entire circumference of the sides of that void, there would have been neither up nor down, neither front nor back, neither East nor West, North, or South. But as the light of the Ein Sof was drawn through one line, a thin conduit alone, up and down, front, back, East, and West were set aright in it.

This is the reason why the light had to enter the void by way of a “single, straight line” in the first place: If the light entered from all sides, the difference between bestower and bestowed would collapse back into a seamless sameness.71 Likewise if the line were not “thin,” allowing more than the minimally requisite (“k-dei tsarkam”) amount of light, no distinction or delimitation would have survived.72 Like Schelling after him, Vital is in these pictorial ways engaging the problematic of how to resist the ideal just enough and in just the right way for it to find determinate shape in partnership with the real  – or, if I may, how to delay the stream’s rush just enough to create a dynamically stable whirlpool. The challenge, in whichever vocabulary-set, is to articulate a point of at which light 69 Etz Hayyim, 1:2:2. 70 This is an old Parmenidean point: “It [namesly, what is] is complete from all directions, like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, equally matched from the middle on all sides; for it is right for it to be not in any way greater or any lesser than in another” (Parmenides Fragment 11.8 in Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction With Texts and Commentary, ed. Richard D. McKirahan, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2010, 148). 71 Etz Hayyim, 1:2:4. 72 Ibid.

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and darkness meet in frictional asymmetry, thus underwriting the emergence of difference out of yet still within identity. The bottom line: Living development occurs not through unity, and not through opposition, but only through the unity, division, and reunification of unity and opposition. The subjectively active, consciously purposive, and therefore axiologically primary force of light can be its subjectively active, consciously purposive self if and only if it is accompanied by that of itself which is not but is rather the real ground of itself, which must therefore be clearly delimited, contracted, as such. Vital here asks a pertinent question: If the plan from the beginning was to bestow the light through the thin line back into the effected void, why contract the light in the first place? Why not streamline the process and save a step by simply clearing away all but a single thin stream of light?73 “The reason,” Vital says, was because the vessels could not come to be until the light was removed entirely, and after the vessels came to be he started back up and extended the light by way of the line in proper measure and degree, according to the amount sufficient for them to illuminate them and vitalize them, in such a way that they could sustain, surviving and not becoming null.74

The moral is that the coming to be of finitude within infinity is necessarily an extended process, not simply a result. The process, therefore, cannot be bypassed by fine-tuning a static state of affairs just so. If initially divine life “contains everything in itself…though in utter indifference,”75 and the goal is to raise that indifference to an organic integration, it is essential on the way that each element – real and ideal, light and dark, unity and difference – be allowed the space to achieve integrity as definitively individuated. All remains essentially united throughout, but the achieved conceptual moments of differentiated objective Being as itself and subjective existence as itself transmute the otherwise inert identity into a dynamically creative, internally divided but organically united, singular principle of life. Scholem points out that Vital, in his initial discussion leaves out the idea of the “reshimu,” the residue of divine light remaining in the post-contraction void  – a concept Vital does endorse and discusses extensively elsewhere. On this Scholem remarks simply that “Vital seems to have had some reason for not mentioning the theory of reshimu in its proper place but only later,” adding a reference to a subsequent section of Etz Hayyim.76 With what we have seen, we 73 Etz Hayim, 1:3:1. 74 Ibid. Emphasis added. 75 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 206. 76 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 411 n. 57.

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can suggest that Vital felt it necessary at the outset to make definitively clear the complete conceptual purity and integrity of the individual stages in the process of finitude’s coming to be within God. Whatever further dialectical subtleties are to be accrued along the way, it is essential to begin with a clear recognition of sharp, categorical differentiation. Each individual moment matters. Only if “the light is removed completely”77 can the Real secure its footing to join in creative entanglement with the Ideal.

IV It is not as if, in the process of contraction, God could wholly isolate and surgically excise the real from his broader totality, with the newly-individuated real now opposing itself to the ideal remaining in God. Were that to happen, we would have underlying the system two competing foundational principles  – two Gods, as it were – which is precisely the sort of anti-rational chaos Schelling set out to avoid: “This system…if it is really thought as the doctrine of two absolutely different and mutually independent principles, is only a system of the self-destruction and despair of reason.”78 For Schelling, rational comprehensibility is systematic comprehensibility, and systematic comprehensibility is comprehensibility under a unitary, all-encompassing, and universally iterable principle.79 If God is the first principle of rational comprehensibility, therefore, the idea of two Gods, or two entities strictly dividing up the one God’s portfolio, is ruled out as straightly incoherent. And so the idea that God, who is the absolute identity of the real and ideal, is the principle of the system means that at no point, not even in the furthest reaches of the system’s articulation, can subject or object appear as wholly separate from the other. Indeed, in his 1804 Wurzburg lectures, Schelling had announced with emphatic finality that “We now abandon forever that sphere of reflection that discriminates between the subject and the object…In truth, there does not ever nor anywhere exist a subject, a self, or any object or nonself.”80 It is of course precisely this that makes the idea of a bifurcation in God so apparently impenetrable. How can the indivisible be divided? The resolution Schelling offers, to start, is to ensure that even as the real and ideal are separated, each nonetheless remains contained, albeit in suppressed, subordinated

77 Etz Hayyim, 1:3:1. 78 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Eseence of Freedom, 24. 79 See Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 198. 80 Schelling, System of a Philosophy in General, 143.

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form, in the other. Post-division, the real is not merely the real, but the real and ideal together under the power of the real, and vice versa. If A = the ideal, and B = the real, Schelling will symbolize the real as (A=B)B, and the ideal as (A=B)A. What does it mean for, say, the whole of God’s real and ideal aspects to be under the power of the Real? One recurring image in Schelling’s attempts to articulate the idea is that of a seed buried in the soil. If the real in God is truly the real and the ideal together under the exponent of the real, that is to say that the real contains the ideal, the active personality that is God himself, in potentia: “God is in nature in His entirety, although in a seedlike form; nature is God in His involution, or the potential God, whereas the Ideal is the actual God.”81 Schelling’s maneuver to avoid the conclusion that the contracted Being of God is one-sidedly realist, dualistically dichotomized from the ideal, is to argue that the subjective self of God is latent in that which is the real, and that mere latency amounts to a meaningful presence – that which is latent is not non-existent. The ground of God’s existence is itself, potentially, God’s existence: “Because…this being…is nothing else than the eternal ground for the existence of God, it must contain within itself, although locked up, the essence of God as a resplendent glimpse of life in the darkness of its depths.”82 To the Lurianic mind as well, the impetus to posit a clearing of free space through the primordial divine light’s contraction is met with the dialectical counter-impulse to modulate the dichotomization by securing a higher-order level of unity. Here the work of Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz, who was notably relentless in his efforts to maintain a strict fidelity to God’s wholly unsullied unity, is helpful. In his semi-eponymous early seventeenth century work Shefa Tal, he clarifies the aftermath of God’s contraction as follows: And that space which was cleared out in the midst of his self is called ‘tehiru’…It is not called ‘cleared out space,’ God forfend, as if it were so it would have been, God forfend, devoid of the holiness. But this is not so, as the residual mark [‘roshem’] of the holiness of the light of the Ein Sof blessed-be-he remains eternally in that very cleared out place, under the mystery of ‘the holy presence did not stir,’ for such is the way of holiness that it leaves a residual mark of holiness and blessing in its wake. Therefore, though he contracted himself from himself into himself and within himself, as it were, and cleared a clear space within himself, as it were, with all that the holiness never stirred from there.83

For unity-minded thinkers like Schelling and Horowitz, it would be to perpetrate an unconscionable dualism to suggest that the Being of darkness was ever 81 Ibid, 212. 82 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 30. 83 Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz, Shefa Tal Le-vracha 3:5.

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wholly devoid of the subjective, conscious, ideal light. How, then, to articulate the state of division? For Schelling and Horowitz, the solution that suggests itself is to distinguish and relate the real and ideal as one would the body and soul in a living person. In Horowitz’s words, “The light of the holiness of the Ein Sof blessed-be-he stands firm in the reshimu under the mystery ‘soul’ [‘neshama’]. That is, as the soul supports and sustains the body and itself contracts itself in the body, and it itself is the sustaining of the body.”84 The light bears a relation to the cleared out ground of the created world to be much as the human person enjoys to what Schelling calls “the spiritual or angelic aspect of his body.”85 Whether for the individual person or the world as a whole, there is necessarily differentiation, but that differentiation is necessarily underwritten, and definitively modulated, by a deeper unity. For Schelling, that subject and object, light and darkness are never solitarily isolated – each comes to be, rather, under the power of the other – means that the whole, overall unity of God is effectively reconstituted in microcosm within each differentiated potency, resulting in a kind of fractal structure: “Thus we would have to assume that the primordial essence would remain whole in each of the separated entities and that it would be posited as the whole in them; thus B would be composed of B (i.e the Real), of A (i.e., the spiritual), and of their unity.”86 The essential indivisibility of principles within God entails that no aspect can go anywhere without taking the rest along and without preserving their holistic interrelatedness and identity. Executing a similar dialectical regimen, Horowitz tempers the implied divine multiplicity of the traditional ten sefirot with the claim that each of the ten themselves contain each of the same ten, the only difference being the overall leading name given to this or that particular set of the ten.87 Though they are manifest under varying banners, that they each possess all and the same qualities  – “what is found in this one is what is found in that one”88  – entails that they are essentially, numerically identical. But if so, Horowitz worries, have we not simply made things worse? If God’s division into ten was difficult, all the more so his division into a hundred (10 x 10)! To this he responds that the ten sefirot are essentially unitary even in their differentiation, analogously to the way the human intellect can focus itself into variable capacities, from weaving to sewing to plowing to planting.89 In sum, what we have in the system of sefirot is a 84 Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz, Shefa Tal Le-vracha 3:5. 85 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 237. 86 Ibid, 201. 87 Horowitz, Shefa Tal, 1:1. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid, 1:2.

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single, complex unity which is reproduced, fractally, under differentiation within the overall unity which it itself is. Or, if we have A, B, and A=B, then A will contain within itself A, B, and A=B, and so on and so forth. These are the kinds of “difficulties of the most complex sort,”90 as Scholem says, which impress themselves on he who seeks difference within unity. It is because the Ideal and Real are never truly separated, because each contains the other in potentia, that the act of division entails the possibility of reunification. In an instance of like engaging like, the active, axiologically superior Ideal can reach the Ideal lying dormant in the Real, sprouting the seed and unlocking the resplendent glimpse to flourish and shine forth. This, in fact, is the point of the process from the outset: God…excludes the inferior [dimension] of his essence from the superior one and expels it as it were from Himself; yet [He does so] not for the purpose of leaving it in this state of Nonbeing but to raise what He excluded from Himself as nondivine – that which He Himself is not and which therefore he separated from Himself – to educate, transfigure, and create from it what [eventually] will be similar and cognate to him. All creation, then, involves a soliciting of the superior and properly divine [dimension] within what had been excluded.91

If the end-goal is unity and identity, why bother with division in the first place? The answer is what we have already seen: Unity is worthwhile just to the extent that that which is unified could have been separate – unity born of indifference and sameness is no accomplishment. It is only in and through the process of reunification that we witness development, progress, personality, and life. And it is only through God’s soliciting to consciousness that which he separated as unconscious that we witness the becoming of the actual, living God.

V By way of conclusion, I want to return briefly to the broader question of the import of Schelling’s example for assessing the possibility of an authentically Jewish and authentically philosophical Jewish philosophy. The way in which Schelling creatively incorporates prior kabbalistic motifs into his philosophical constructions – constructions that are, purportedly, more truly uncoverings92 – is in itself a valuable exemplification of what it could mean to practice the art of

90 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 264. 91 Ibid, 207. 92 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 197.

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reason from a standpoint rooted in the given, a philosophy from somewhere. For Schelling, philosophy ought to be of a kind as to ultimately converge with history, as it is only in that way that philosophy may hope to become free and alive.93 “Perhaps he will yet come, who will sing the great heroic poem, encompassing in spirit…what was, what is, and what will be.”94 The path to that glorious promised day is by way of the Ideal’s return to the Real as its “necessary and eternal base,” thereby returning the essence, and life, to science.95 Philosophy, then, is essentially not a top-down movement of speculative construction beginning and ending in the full light of reason but rather a gradually progressive transfiguration of the unconscious darkness that is given Being up into its destined home amidst the light of eternal, divine consciousness. “Life in its entirety is properly speaking always only an intensified coming to consciousness,” but of course, the process is necessarily gradual and step-wise, and so “There always remains a residual obscurity.”96 It should be no surprise that Schelling’s philosophy has come to be a fertile soil and testing ground for contemporary efforts in political theory to articulate the meaning of a rational politics grounded in the concrete, contingently particular flesh-and-blood beings that it happens people and nations actually are.97 Similarly, I want to say, if philosophy is a living whole only with idealism as its soul but realism as its body, it ought to be the case that for those for whom Jewish experience is the concrete, given base of their Being – if Judaism and Jewishness are for them the always-already prior real – philosophy may, and indeed perhaps ought to, be in that sense Jewish. “The individual in God thus is the basis or foundation of the universal.”98 The work of such a philosophy will of course be to transfigure that hard kernel of given identity into the medium of universal light – to translate the given. But as Schelling was at such pains to maintain, that which is first is necessarily and eternally first, never to be sublated.

93 Schelling, Ages of the World, 118. 94 Ibid, 119–120. 95 Ibid, 199. 96 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 197. 97 The work of Slavoj Žižek is particularly representative and helpful here. See, for example, the chapter “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself” in Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 200–237; and Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, (New York: Verso, 1996), esp.1–91. 98 Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, 210.

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Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction, New York: Routledge, 1993. Cahnman, Werner J. “Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism,” in Proceedings of the Academyfor Jewish Research, Vol. 48 (1981). Habermas, Jürgen. Philosophical Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988. Hegel, G.F.W. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allan Wood, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. McKirahan, Richard D. Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction With Texts and Commentary, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2010. Rosenzweig, Franz. “Urzelle to the Star of Redemption,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, eds. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, 48–72, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000. Schelling, F.W.J. Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. _____. First Outline of a System of a Philosophy Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. _____. On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. _____. and Zizek, Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. _____. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken Publishing House, 1941. Schulte, Christoph. “Zimzum in the Works of Schelling,” in Iyyun, the Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 41 (Jan. 1992), 21–40. Wolfson, Elliot. Language, Eros, and Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. _____. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. New York: Verso, 1996.

Elliot R. Wolfson

Tsimtsum, Lichtung, and the Leap of Bestowing Refusal: Kabbalistic and Heideggerian Metaontology in Dialogue Before the Creation, God is All. … The All is invisible. Visibility lies between All and Nothing, in each little bit taken from the All. In order to create, God went outside Himself so that he could penetrate and destroy Himself. Edmond Jabès

Let me begin by offering the theoretical justification for the ensuing comparative analysis of Heidegger and the kabbalah, a juxtaposition of two seemingly disparate domains of discourse that will undoubtedly strike some as provocative and others as preposterous. In Heideggerian terms, the merit for this analysis consists of the methodological assumption that it is precisely what is not identical that warrants the quality of belonging together (Zusammengehörigkeit). The selfsameness (Selbigkeit) demanded by this apposition is based on the concurrence of what remains disparate rather than the identicalness (Gleichheit) that is based on the coincidence of what is sublated in the dialectical resolution of difference.1 The distinction between the identical (das Gleiche) and the same (das Selbe) appears frequently in Heidegger’s oeuvre.2 To cite one example, in Die Onto-TheoLogische Verfassung der Metaphysik, a lecture delivered on February 24, 1957 in Todtnauberg as part of a seminar on Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, Heidegger wrote, “But the same is not the merely identical [Allein das Selbe ist nicht das Gleiche]. In the merely identical, the difference disappears [verschwindet die Verschiedenheit]. In the same the difference appears [erscheint die Verschiedenheit], and appears all the more pressingly, the more resolutely thinking is concerned with the same matter in the same way [von derselben Sache auf dieselbe Weise].”3 When the same is contemplated from this standpoint, it “bursts the oneness of 1 Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, translated by Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 25; Feldweg-Gespräche [GA 77] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 39. For discussion of this theme, see “Translator’s Foreword,” xiv-xv. 2 See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 309; Wegmarken [GA 9] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), 409. 3 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated and with an introduction by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 45; German text: 111. See ibid., 29; German text: 92. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-007

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the indifference [Gleichgültigkeit] of what belongs together, even more it holds them apart in the most radical dissimilarity [Ungleichheit]; it holds them apart and yet does not allow them to fall away from each other and hence disintegrate. This holding-together [Zussamenhalten] in keeping-apart [Auseinanderhalten] is a trait of what we call the same and its sameness.”4 Utilizing the Schellingian locution, Heidegger delineates the same as the relational quality that bursts the indifference of what is conjoined, holding apart what is held together in radical dissimilarity as opposed to the oneness of the indifference of an endlessly repeatable identity presumed by the Hegelian dialectic and its sublation of antinomies. Without denying the cultural and existential disparities too obvious to warrant delineation, it is justifiable to ponder kabbalistic theosophy in light of Heideggerian poetic thinking, and the later in light of the former, on three accounts. Firstly, historical connections between Heidegger and kabbalah  – through secondary channels like Böhme5 and Schelling6  – cannot be ruled out unequivocally. Secondly, Heidegger’s relation to gnostic, mystical, and esoteric currents in

4 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 89–90; Der Satz vom Grund [GA 10] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 133. 5 On Böhme and the kabbalah, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Holy Cabala of Changes: Jacob Böhme and Jewish Esotericism,” Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018): 21–53, and reference to other scholars cited on 22 n. 1. On the more specific relationship between Böhme and Christian kabbalah, see the sources cited, op. cit., 22–23 n. 4. 6 Previous scholarship has documented the possible influence of kabbalistic motifs on Schelling. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), xv-xvi, 99–105, and references to other scholars cited on 392–393 n. 2. Particularly relevant for this essay are the following studies: Jürgen Habermas, “Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History,” in The New Schelling, edited by Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (London: Continuum, 2004), 43–89; Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014), 296–323; Agata Bielik-Robson, “The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude,” in Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy: Interchange in the Wake of God, edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, and Duane Williams (London: Routledge, 2017), 32–50. See also Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 21–22; and Paul Franks, “Inner anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism’s Relationship to Judaism,” International Yearbook of German Idealism 7 (2010): 254–279.

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Western Christian thought,7 including principally Meister Eckhart8 and Angelus Silesius,9 suggest the possibility that he may have been enamored with ideas from these sources that have strong parallels in the Jewish material. Thirdly, and most importantly, leaving aside the historiographical question of influence – a mode of analysis maligned by Heidegger10 – the comparative analysis is justified methodologically by conceptual affinities. Indeed, the path of Heidegger’s later thought turns in a paradoxical manner – predicated, as it is, on the poetological heeding of the unspoken in what is spoken – that is particularly appropriate for the study of the apophatic dimension of the kabbalah. To contextualize my approach, it would be beneficial to mention briefly the hypothesis of Marlène Zarader’s La Dette impensée: Heidegger et l’héritage 7 On the gnostic resonances in Heidegger’s thought, see Susan A. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism,” The Journal of Religion 34 (1954): 155–172, esp. 157. Parallels between Heidegger’s ontology articulated in Sein und Zeit and ancient gnostic sources were noted by Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Erster Teil: Die mythologische Gnosis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 90–91, 107–108; idem, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Zweiter Teil: Von der Mythologie zur mystischen Philosophie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 7, 359–379; idem, “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism,” Social Research 19 (1952): 430–452, esp. 441–442, 445, 449–450; idem, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 62–65, 320–340; and see the analysis of David J. Levy, Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 25–30; Wolfgang Baum, Gnostische Elements im Denken Martin Heideggers? Eine Studie auf der Grundlage der Religionsphilosophie von Hans Jonas (Neuried: Ars Una, 1997); Mario Enrique Sacchi, The Apocalypse of Being: The Esoteric Gnosis of Martin Heidegger, translated by Gabriel Xavier Martinez (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002). The relationship of Heidegger and Gnosticism is explored from a standpoint of archetypal psychology in Robert Avens, The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1984). 8 On Heidegger’s indebtedness to and engagement with Eckhart, see sources cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 283 n. 101. On Heidegger’s interest more generally in medieval mysticism, see Sean J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 120–150. 9 Particularly relevant is the fact that Silesius became acquainted with the works of Böhme, perhaps through his camaraderie with Abraham von Franckenberg, one of Böhme’s nobleman friends. See Sibylle Rusterholz, “Elemente christlicher Kabbala bei Abraham von Franckenberg,” in Christliche Kabbala, edited by Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (Ostfildem: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2003), 183–197, esp. 194–197. 10 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 24; Überlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938) [GA 94] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), 32. Heidegger does not deny the relevancy of the matter of influence when examining a thinker, but he insists that what is most important is the “peculiarity” of the influence and not merely to gossip about the repetition of a “general opinion” that is “rootless and homeless.” The latter amounts to idle chatter.

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hébraïque that the Hebraic heritage influenced Heidegger’s thought, principally in his appropriation of biblical faith through the medium of Christianity, which together with Greek thought, comprise the foundations of occidental culture.11 The experiences of being and language that Heidegger sought to retrieve from the Pre-Socratic thinkers as an alternative to what was forgotten in the history of Western metaphysics can be traced to what has been more overtly expressed – “in letters black on white” – in Jewish sources.12 And yet, as Zarader also contends, following Ricoeur, Heidegger occludes the Hebraic component of his thought “to the point of leaving something like a blank space in his text.”13 Zarader thus concludes that Heidegger both “restored to Western thought the determinations central to the Hebraic universe” and “effaced it from thought and, more broadly, from the West itself.”14 Zarader’s own effort was to fill the blank space by making explicit the Hebraic dimension of Christianity that was obfuscated or perhaps consciously repressed by Heidegger with his alternate narrative of a Heilsgeschichte that revolves linguistically and historically about the poles of ancient Greece and modern Germany.15 Just as Heidegger spoke of the oblivion of being (Seinsvergessenheit) as the oblivion to the difference between being and the being,16 so Zarader identifies Judaism as what is left unthought at the heart of his thinking. In line with Heidegger’s hermeneutic, the more pronounced the concealment, the more profound the disclosure, the more resonant the silence, the more poignant the bearing witness. Particularly relevant to this study is the author’s comparison of Heidegger’s conception of nothingness and the domain of beyng’s withdrawal to the kabbalistic speculation on tsimtsum, the contraction of infinity to create the vacuum within the plenum, the space wherein what is allegedly other than the divine can come to be.17

11 Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 12 Ibid., 199. 13 Ibid., 7. 14 Ibid., 185. 15 John D. Caputo, “People of God, People of Being: The Theological Presuppositions of Heidegger’s Path of Thought,” in Appropriating Heidegger, edited by James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85–100, esp. 89–92. 16 Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 275; Holzwege [GA 5] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), 364. 17 Zarader, The Unthought Debt, 130–138. For another attempt to compare Heideggerian thought to the kabbalah, see Johanna Junk, Metapher und Sprachmagie, Heidegger und die Kabbala: Eine philosophische Untersuchung (Bodenheim: Syndikat Buchgesellschaft, 1998). On the affinity between Heideggerian and kabbalistic speculation on the indissoluble interweaving of being and

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Being’s Self-Concealing Revealing In this chapter, I will suggest that the thinking underway in Heidegger concerning the clearing (Lichtung) and the appropriating event (Ereignis), wherein beyng and nothing are the same in the proximity of their difference, provides a useful template to understand the path traversed by kabbalists in their attempts to account for the derivation of all beings from the infinite nothingness of Ein Sof by means of the doctrine of tsimtsum, the self-limitation or contraction of the limitless light. The complex idea espoused by Luria and his disciples is based on the cosmological principle whose roots go back to the thirteenth-century, but which is expressed more explicitly in the sixteenth century: all that exists is a manifestation of the light of infinity, but every manifestation of that light perforce must be an occlusion, since what is hidden can be revealed only insofar as it endures as being hidden. To cite one salient example from Moses Cordovero: “The cause of the disclosure is the cause of the concealment and the cause of the concealment is the cause of the disclosure [sibbat ha-hitgallut hu sibbat ha-he‘lem we-sibbat ha-he‘lem hu sibbat ha-hitgallut]. And the matter is that by the concealing of the strong light and its being garbed in a garment, it is revealed. The light is thus hidden and verily it is disclosed, for if it were not hidden, it would not be disclosed.”18 The kenosis of tsimtsum is based on the paradox that the light cannot be exposed unless it is shrouded.19 Translated phenomenologically, every appearance of the infinite is a nonappearance, since the nonapparent cannot appear except as inapparent, whence it follows that the infinite is present in the world to the degree that it is absent from the world; indeed, the infinite is present precisely as that which is absent, not as a presence presently absent nor as an absence absently present, but as the absent presence that continuously withdraws in the spectacle of its present absence. In a manner that is consonant with the kabbalists, Heidegger grasped that the supreme manifestation of the hidden essence of beyng consists of its refusal nothingness, or more precisely, the nihilation, the no-thing, whence being emerges, see Donatella di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks, translated by Murtha Baca (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 172–173. I concur with the conjecture of di Cesare, op. cit., 285 n. 483, that this affinity can be explained by the fact that the works of Eckhart and Böhme played a significant role for Heidegger. 18 Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim (Jerusalem: Yerid Sefarim, 2000), 5:4, 63. For other sixteenth-century sources that preserve variations of this dictum, see reference to my study in the following note. 19 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (London: Routledge, 2002), 101–163, esp. 110–117.

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to be manifest, and hence it can be said of beyng that it reveals itself as the nihilation of being. A likely channel to explain the affinity between Heidegger and the kabbalists on this matter is Schelling. More specifically, Heidegger advances Schelling’s insight that the ground of revelation is precisely what negates all revelation20 by relating the motif of the twofold nature of the unveiling and veiling of being to the character of truth as the unconcealment in which the concealment prevails as the concealing that conceals the unconcealing. Being’s “primordial self-illumination” is thus described in “Der Spruch des Anaximander” (1946) as the “unconcealment of the being” that “darkens the light of being,” which leads to a rhetorically startling conclusion that coincides with the principal paradox of the kabbalistic understanding of infinity, “By revealing itself in the being, being withdraws.”21 Along similar lines, in “Die seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus” (1944–1946), Heidegger argued that what is necessary is not to overcome the inauthenticity of the essence of nihilism, which is interpreted as the omission of being in the unconcealment of beings, but to encounter being by undertaking a thinking “encouraged by Being itself. … Such thinking to encounter rests primarily on the recognition that Being itself withdraws [Das Sein selbst entzieht sich], but that as this withdrawal Being is precisely the relationship that claims the essence of man, as the abode of its (Being’s) advent [die Unterkunft seiner (des Seins) Ankunft]. The unconcealment of the being as such is bestowed along with that abode. … By thinking to encounter Being itself, thinking no longer omits Being, but admits it: admits it into the originary, revealing unconcealment of Being, which is Being itself.”22 The essence of the transformation from human to Dasein is related to the fact that we become through the thinking encounter (Entgegendenken) the dwelling  – the opening of being-there  – wherein being reveals itself as the there-being in its withdrawal from being. At times, Heidegger expresses this motif in more confounding ways that demonstrate an even keener resemblance to the doctrine of tsimtsum. For instance, in the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), composed between 1936–1938, Heidegger describes the eventfulness of beyng variously as the excess (Über-maβ) that

20 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World, translated, with an introduction, by Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 16; Die Weltalter in den  Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813 (Nachlaβband), edited by Manfred Schröter (Munich: Beck, 1946), 223. 21 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 253; Holzwege, 336–337. 22 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, edited with notes and analysis by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 225, 227 (emphasis in original); Nietzsche: Zweiter Band [GA 6.2] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 332, 335.

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springs from the self-concealment “of all quantification and measurement,” the “self-withdrawing [Sichentziehen] of measuring out,” the “hesitant self-withholding” (zögernde Versagung), the “ripeness of ‘time’,” which is “gravid with the original ‘not’ [ursprünglichen »Nicht«],” the “abyssal ground” (Ab-grund) of the “originary essential occurrence of the ground,” the “staying away of the ground,” the “essence of truth,” the “primessential clearing-concealing,” the appropriation that opens itself in the “primordial ground” (Ur-grund), the emptiness of the abyss (Ab-grund), the ground that is the repudiation of ground (Ab-grund), and the nonground (Un-grund). The threefold characterization of the groundless ground as Abgrund, Urgrund, and Ungrund, is surely indebted to Schelling, but Heidegger has transposed the latter’s thinking into a deeper mystical key, a poetized translation of an older esoteric doctrine – perhaps unearthed from the residual of kabbalistic theosophy in Schelling due to the influence of Böhme or Ötinger – albeit stripped of any theological import. What is most notable is the following comment of Schelling in Philosophie und Religion (1804), “there is no continuous transition from the Absolute to the actual; the origin [Ursprung] of the phenomenal world is conceivable only as a complete breaking-away [Abbrechen] from absoluteness by means of a leap [Sprung]. … There is no positive effect coming out of the Absolute that creates a conduit or bridge between the infinite and the finite. … The Absolute is the only actual; the finite world, by contrast, is not real. Its cause, therefore, cannot lie in an impartation of reality from the Absolute to the finite world or its substrate; it can only lie in a remove [Entfernung], in a falling-away [Abfall] from the Absolute.”23 The shift from infinity to finitude by the falling-away or the removal from the Absolute rather than through a bestowal of reality from the Absolute parallels the contraction/withdrawal of the light of Ein Sof according to the teaching propounded by kabbalists overtly since the sixteenth century even though the roots

23 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophy and Religion (1804), translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Klaus Ottmann (Putnam: Spring Publications, 2010), 26 (emphasis in original). I have taken the liberty to correct some errors and alter the translation based on the original Philosophie und Religion in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke 1804, edited by Karl Friedrich August Schelling, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860), 38. For discussion of this passage, see Paul Franks, “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of PostKantian German Thought, vol. 4: Religion, edited by Nicholas Boyle, Liz Disley, and Nicholas Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 237–238. Franks duly notes the “recognizably Lurianic direction” of Schelling’s remark and draws the further implication that “the fall of the human is an image of the fall that is creation itself, which is an exile of divinity from the world, demanding reparation.” I consent that in Lurianic teaching creation is a fall but I would contend that the divine is exiled in the world rather than from the world. See Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” 115–117.

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for the idea stretch further back in history. More astonishingly, the comparison is enhanced by the fact that Schelling’s view that the world is nonessential (NichtWesen) or nonbeing (Nicht-seyn) echoes the acosmism embraced by, or at the very least implied by, by some kabbalists. To speak of the cosmos in this way is not to deny Schelling’s commitment to the idea that nature is a progressive disclosure of the Absolute, but it does accentuate the paradox that this disclosure perforce must be a concealment, that the darkness contracting into light is the expansion of that light into the constricted forms of the determinate beings that make up the world perceived through the cognitive prism of space and time. In my judgment, this is a perfectly suitable explanation of kabbalistic cosmology. Most tellingly, the detachment or elimination from the infinite is designated by Schelling as a leap, which intimates, as we find in some kabbalistic texts, the sense of agency outside the strictures of temporal causation. Even to think of Ein Sof as a cause requires an acausal causality that breaks with the conventional understanding of causality insofar as the latter requires some degree of reciprocity between cause and effect that is interrupted by the assumption that Ein Sof is a cause that does not have the capacity to be an effect. The metaphor of the leap, in other words, conveys that the criterion for predictability can be established unpredictably by a disruption of the noncomputable chaos of infinity whence the computational structure materializes imaginally in the coincident spatialization of time and temporalization of space. The Schellingian-kabbalistic understanding of the leap coincides with much of what Heidegger had to say about Ereignis in his later philosophy and the assumption that the activity attributed to the hidden essence of Seyn is outside the confines of the conventional understanding of causal determinacy, that beyng is a spontaneous event that is neither the effect of a preceding cause nor the cause of a succeeding effect.24 The characterization of the inceptual act as the leap denotes a concomitant intensification and attenuation of the lighting up of beyng in the shelter of the self-concealing clearing.25 With this we arrive at one of the signature ideas that shaped Heidegger’s thinking, an idea that corresponds to the paradox of esotericism at play in kabbalistic theosophy: the essence of truth is the unconcealment that “discloses and at the same time conceals”26 – an idea grounded philologically in the fact

24 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translation and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 44; Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962), 42–43. 25 See Ryan S. Hellmers, “Reading in Ereignis: Schelling’s System of Freedom and Beiträge,” Epoché 13 (2008): 133–162. 26 Heidegger, Pathmarks, 148; Wegmarken, 193. See the analysis and citation of sources in Wolfson, Giving, 48–52, and reference to other relevant scholarly discussions listed on 314–315 n. 106.

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that lēthē is an integral part of alētheia  – or as Reiner Schürmann succinctly put it, absence abides in the heart of presencing.27 In Heidegger’s own words, “Retaining belongs to concealment. The mystery [of being] is concealment, which is [at the same time] unconcealing itself as such.”28 It follows, hermeneutically, that the uncovering will always also be a cover-up, and in that sense, untruth is inseparably linked to truth, a belonging together that resists the dialectical overcoming of antinomies insofar as the truth is an untruth that is neither and therefore both true and untrue, and hence what is manifest is the concealment in the double form of refusal (Versagen) and dissembling (Verstellen).29 “Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet uncovered, the un-uncovered, in the sense of concealment. ... Truth occurs as such in the opposition of clearing and double concealing.”30 I suggest that the epistemological basis of the kabbalistic tsimtsum is likewise predicated on the assumption that the manifestation of the light of the infinite transpires from a double concealment that is both refusal and dissembling, withholding and dissemination. Being is the appearance of the appearance of being, the dissimulation of the imageless at the breaking-point of the imaginal. Moreover, just as Heidegger insists that Dasein is uniquely endowed with the language that is the house of being within which all beings are disclosed in the nothingness of their being,31 so the kabbalists view the performativity of language with respect to the secret as revealing and concealing, not sequentially but concurrently; that is, language has the capacity to unmask the mystery to the extent that the nature of the mystery it unmasks is masked: what shows itself does so in the occultation of its showing.32 For both the kabbalists and Heidegger, unconcealment is not a disrobing of naked truth, but the disclosure that there is no nakedness to disclose. What is unveiled in the removal of the final veil is the unveiling of the veil. “All revealing,” writes Heidegger in a decidedly kabbalistic tone, “belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees – the mystery – is concealed and always 27 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, translated by Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 314 n. 46. 28 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, edited by Medard Boss, translated from the German and with notes and afterwords by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 171; Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle – Zwiegespräche-Briefe, edited by Medard Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006), 216. 29 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translation and introduction by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 54; Holzwege, 41. 30 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 60; Holzwege, 48. 31 Heidegger, Pathmarks, 239; Wegmarken, 312. 32 Wolfson, Language, 10, 16, 17–19, 26–31, 133–135, 160, 220, 224–225, 232–233, 287, 384.

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concealing itself. … Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils.”33 Alternatively expressed, the Heideggerian Seyn and the kabbalistic Ein Sof each denote the nothing about which one cannot speak in contrast to there being nothing about which to speak, a presence that is always a nonpresence, a presence that can be present only by not being present, the secret manifest in the nonmanifestation of the secret. In Derridean terms, the ultimate secret is the open secret, the secret that there is no secret,34 and hence the watchword of the secret of secrecy (secret du secret) is that “no more secrecy means more secrecy” (plus de secret, plus de secret).35 By continuing on the path of Heidegger,36 Derrida, perhaps unwittingly, came upon a central tenet of kabbalistic esotericism: the truth of the nonbeing of being cannot be unveiled but through the veil of truth, which is to say, the veil of untruth.37

33 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, revised and expanded edition, edited, with general introduction and introductions to each selection, by David Farrell Krell, foreword by Taylor Carman (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 330; Vorträge und Aufsätze [GA 7] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 26. 34 Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 156. See John D. Caputo, “Toward a Postmodern Theology of the Cross: Augustine, Heidegger, Derrida,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, edited by Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 221; Wolfson, Giving, 157 and 194. 35 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 100 ; Donner la mort (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1999), 137. See Wolfson, Giving, 191–192. 36 Caputo, “Toward,” 223, sharply contrasts the Derridean insight that the truth is that there is no truth, and the secret is that there is no secret, with the Heideggerian Denken, “which is steered by a mighty Geschick, a destiny and moira, our destiny on Derrida’s account is ‘destinerrance,” destiny gone errant, cut off from destiny and the Truth of Being.” In my judgement, the gap between the two thinkers is not so wide insofar as Heidegger, too, disavows an idea of truth that can be surgically disentangled from untruth. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the Derridean dissimulation of secrecy is indebted to Heidegger’s insight that every truth is enveloped inevitably in a veil of untruth. 37 On the possible influence of the doctrine of tsimtsum on Derrida, related as well to the symbols of the primordial space (ṭehiru) and the trace (reshimu), see Wolfson, Giving, 168, 177–178, and reference to other scholars cited on 412 n. 92. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but I would argue that Derrida’s utilization of this kabbalistic motif betrays his indebtedness to Heidegger. The same can be said about Levinas’s embrace of the kabbalistic tsimtsum to express the idea of the contraction of the infinite. See Wolfson, Giving, 101, 362–363 nn. 83–84.

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Hesitant Denial and the Givenness of Ungiving The idea of tsimtsum is an audacious articulation of this more rudimentary paradox. We may conjecture that the limitations of language forced the kabbalists to express themselves linearly, as if the withdrawal was the first act followed by the bestowal. The enlightened, however, discern the contemporaneity of these two processes: the withdrawal is itself a bestowal and the bestowal a withdrawal. Contrary to what is usually presumed, therefore, the beginning for the kabbalist is not a receding that precedes the extension; the extension is a form of receding inasmuch as the infinite cannot extend unless the character of its infinitivity recoils. Generalizing even more broadly, we can say, following Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, there is a necessity for contraction in each and every disclosure (inyan ṣorekh ha-ṣimṣum ha-na‘aseh be-khol gilluy we-gilluy).38 Scholem was no doubt influenced by an articulation of this sort when he emphasized that tsimtsum is not a one-time event but rather constantly repeats itself,39 what he envisioned as the dialectic of expansion and withdrawal that corresponds to the “two tendencies of perpetual ebb and flow,” which “continue to act and react upon each other. Just as the human organism exists through the double process of inhaling and exhaling and the one cannot be conceived without the other, so also the whole of Creation constitutes a gigantic process of divine inhalation and exhalation.”40 I would modify Scholem’s view by noting that it is not only that the “perpetual tension” of the cosmic process entails that every expansion (hitpashsheṭut) is preceded by withdrawal (histallequt) – a relationship, parenthetically, that I would construe correlationally as opposed to dialectically – but rather, more paradoxically, that the expansion is itself a withdrawal in the same manner that every disclosure (gilluy) is a concealment (he‘lem), since what is disclosed is the concealment and the concealment cannot be disclosed as concealment unless it is concealed.

38 Solomon ben Hayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2006), 43. Compare the letter of Eliashiv in Ma‘yan Moshe, edited by Moshe Schatz (Jerusalem, 2011), 238: “Prior to the disclosure of each configuration [parṣuf], an aspect of contraction [ha-ṣimṣum] preceded it in the light of the configuration related to it, which is the aspect of the infinite vis-à-vis the lower one. … Thus, every contraction is verily an aspect of judgment, for it bestows boundary on the light.” See Raphael Shuchat, “Ṣimṣum Taken Literally – An Investigation into the Thinking of Emanuel Ḥai Ricci and R, Solomon Eliasov,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 37 (2017): 271–301 (Hebrew). 39 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1956), 261; idem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, edited by Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 283. 40 Scholem, Major Trends, 263. See Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” 114–115.

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In language that reads uncannily like a philosophical translation of the kabbalistic myth of tsimtsum, Heidegger speaks in the Beiträge of the event as the oscillation or strife between beyng (Seyn) and its negative (Nichthafte), that is, nonbeing (Nichtsein), the withholding of the “hesitant denial” (zögernde Versagung) or the “refusal” (Verweigerung) and the bestowing of the ripeness (Reife) that bears the fruit (Frucht) and the gift (Verschenkung).41 The event is described similarly as the “resonating [Anklang] of beyng as refusal in the abandonment of beings by being [der Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden].”42 The event, which Heidegger also called the “happening of being” and the “happening of truth” (Sein- und Wahrheit-geschehnis),43 occurs in the chiasm of that vacillation, the open realm, between beyng and beings, which Heidegger insists is not a “void” (Leere) but the “abyssal undepletion” (ab-gründige Unerschöpfung), the “clearing for selfconcealment” (Lichtung für das Sichverbergen). This abyss, which is the fullness of the nothingness of beyng that withdraws from all beings, is also identified as the ground in which the truth as the essence of grounding is grounded, the ground that is without ground, and as the “time-space – the site of the moment of the strife (beyng or nonbeing).”44 I shall return to the matter of the time-space below, but let me here underline the essentially negative character that Heidegger attributes to the event of beyng as the clearing or the abyss. The “not” (das Nicht), as he puts it in another passage in the Beiträge, belongs to the essence of beyng and, conversely, beyng belongs essentially to the “not,” that is, the negative, which is not to be understood as nothingness (Nichts) grasped as the representational denial of something (die vorstellende Verneinung des Etwas), but as the nonbeyng (Nichtseyn) that is the nonessence (Unwesen) that permeates beyng with negativity (nichthaft).45 Heidegger’s depiction of the event as a wavering between beyng and nonbeyng provides a remarkably good analogue to the kabbalistic Ein Sof, which likewise can be described as the beyng that is permeated with negativity, as opposed to the nothingness that is the negation of somethingness, that yields the positivity of the entangled manifold that constitutes the temporal-spatial fabric of the multiverse, the abyssal inexhaustibility, at once desolate and abounding, depleted and overflowing, the effluent emptiness of being that is the womb of all

41 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), § 9, 25; Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [GA 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 29. 42 Heidegger, Contributions, § 51, p. 86; Beiträge, 108. 43 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 22; Überlegungen II-VI, 29. 44 Heidegger, Contributions, § 9, p. 25 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 29. 45 Heidegger, Contributions, § 146, p. 210; Beiträge, 267.

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becoming.46 Rather than succumbing to the ontotheological economy of presence and absence, Ein Sof can be described in Heideggerian terms as the beyng whose essential nature consists not in being present as absent nor in being absent as present, but in the self-withdrawing concealment, that is, the concealment of beyng concealed in the unconcealment of beings.47 We can apply to Ein Sof as well Heidegger’s characterization of Lichtung as the “open center” that “encircles all that is, like the Nothing which we scarcely know. That which is can only be, as a being, if it stands within and stands out within what is lighted in this clearing. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.”48 The kabbalistic infinite is aptly described as the “open middle,” which “is not surrounded by what-is, but the illuminating middle itself surrounds – like Nothing, which we hardly know – all that is. Every being that is encountered maintains this strangely ambiguous presence, in that it always simultaneously holds itself back in concealment.”49 By viewing Ein Sof in this metaontological way, we appreciate the extent to which the medieval kabbalists themselves – and, as a consequence, many subsequent generations still indebted to the rhetoric and symbolism of the former generations – did not have the precise nomenclature to convey their axial insight that the light of the infinite is the nothingness present in by being absent from all beings. Heidegger and kabbalists share the view that the presence and absence attributed to the ultimate being should not to be construed as either sequential or coincidental, but rather as simultaneous, and thus, just as Heidegger declares for Seyn, so kabbalists would maintain that Ein Sof surpasses the metaphysical dyad of transcendence and immanence. From this perspective, which eradicates all perspective as it is the perspective from which there can be no perspective, transcendence and immanence are indifferently the same.50 To be sure, the nonessence

46 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Nihilating Nonground and the Temporal Sway of Becoming: Kabbalistically Envisioning Nothing beyond Nothing,” Angelaki 17 (2012): 31–45; idem, Giving, 78, 171–174, 197–198. 47 Heidegger, Contributions, § 52, p. 88 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 111. 48 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 53, Holzwege, 40. 49 The comment of Heidegger from the course offered at the University of Freiburg in the summer semester of 1935 is cited in Graham Parkes, “Thoughts on the Way: Being and Time via LaoChuang,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 137. 50 For a more detailed analysis, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Zeitliche Entzweiung und offenes System: Die Atonalität der Kabbala und Heideggers anfängliches Denken,” in Martin Heidegger: Die Falte der Sprache, edited by Michael Friedman and Angelika Seppi (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2017), 146–150.

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of Seyn or Ein Sof – the essence that is the exemption of essence – must be reckoned from the incommensurability of individuated beings, but precisely because this is so, as Heidegger writes with respect to the abysmal ground,51 the fullness of beings is the emptiness of beyng and the fullness of beyng the emptiness of beings. We may infer, therefore, that in kabbalistic theosophy, the hiddenness of the infinite does not, as Scholem argued,52 signify the transcendence that protects the theistic dogma of divine separateness; on the contrary, the concealment of this concealment – the concealed concealment – relates to the mystery of the disclosure of the nothing in the eternal cycle of temporal becoming. The inessential essence of Ein Sof is illumined by Heidegger’s last god, which denotes not the god who is chronologically last, but the unique and ultimate divine being (Gottwesen),53 the godship (Gottschaft) that never comes but is always coming,54 the event of the truth of beyng55 that stands outside the calculative determination of monotheism, pantheism, and atheism,56 the abyss of

51 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 303; Beiträge, 384. The text is cited in Wolfson, Giving, 245. 52 Scholem, Major Trends, 262. See ibid., 413 n. 87. Scholem’s view is expanded in the fifth of his ten unhistorical aphorisms on the kabbalah. See Gershom Scholem, Judaica 3: Studien zur jüdischen Mystik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 267–268, and the critical evaluation in David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism 5 (1985): 79–80; and my own brief critique in Wolfson, “Nihilating Nonground,” 33–34. See, however, Scholem, Major Trends, 272–273, where he attempts to resolve the tension between theism and pantheism in Lurianic kabbalah by arguing that the world of emanation is identical with the divinity of Ein Sof whereas the other three worlds of creation, formation, and doing are separate even though the spark of godliness is found in them. In my judgment, Scholem’s attempted solution only intensifies the paradox, for it is not possible to posit an uninterrupted emanation of the infinite light in all the worlds, on the one hand, and argue that the lower three worlds should not be considered divinity as is the first world, on the other hand. In the final analysis, there is an irresolvable tension between the theistic and the pantheistic elements, and one must accept the paradox that the infinite is transcendent to the world only insofar as it is immanent in the world. 53 Heidegger, Contributions, § 254, 322; Beiträge, 406. Compare Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 228 (Überlegungen II–VI, 314), and the fuller analysis in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Gottwesen and the DeDivinization of the Last God: Heidegger’s Meditation on the Strange and Incalculable,” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology, edited by Mårten Björk and Jayne Svenungsson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 211–255. 54 Martin Heidegger, The History of Beyng, translated by William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 179; Die Geschichte des Seyns [GA 69] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 211. 55 Heidegger, Contributions, § 256, 328; Beiträge, 415. 56 Heidegger, Contributions, § 256, 325–326; Beiträge, 410–411. Compare Heidegger, Contributions, § 253, 321; Beiträge 405.

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the between (Abgrund des Zwischen)57 that is the divinization (Götterung)58 that makes possible the world’s becoming world.59 Needless to say, kabbalists relate to Ein Sof theistically, and thus they use language that presumes the volitional and anthropomorphic nature of a deity, typified in the expression ein sof barukh hu, the infinite blessed be he, but there is also ample evidence that kabbalists recognized the bolder and more subversive potential of their musings to undercut the personalistic representation of infinity as either the transcendence of the supreme being or the immanence of that transcendence in the plethora of discriminate beings. Insofar as Ein Sof is beyond theopoetic confabulation – some kabbalists famously asserted that no letter in the Torah refers to it – the contemplative ascent culminates in an atheological disfiguration, or what Heidegger would call, the de-divinization that facilitates the divinized finitude of being. Here it is apposite to recall Heidegger’s observation: “You may wander through each and every being. Nowhere does the trace of the god [die Spur des Gottes] show itself. You can arrange all beings, never will you encounter a free place for housing the god.”60 On the face of it, this appears to be an austere critique of the theological idea of providence. While this is undoubtedly so, it should not blind us to the deeper phenomenological truth that transposes rather than undermines that belief: it is precisely in the nonshowing that divinity shows itself. Correspondingly, the paradox of kabbalistic theosophy pivots around the possibility of the appearance of the inapparent coinciding with the horizon of the nonphenomenolizable, the givenness that can be given only as ungiven. This dimension of the myth of tsimtsum has not been sufficiently noted by previous scholars. My choice of the term “myth” is a deliberate effort to bypass the debate, attested in kabbalistic sources themselves, between a literal versus a figurative interpretation of tsimtsum, the question that has commanded the most attention in scholarly literature as well. From a philosophical standpoint, however, even the so-called literalist perspective must be understood figuratively, since the Ein Sof, to which the self-withdrawing bestowing is attributed, is the nothingness that is not only beyond embodiment but also beyond disembodiment, indeed, beyond any and every form of conceptualization and linguistification, whether apophatic or kataphatic. The question, then, is what is meant

57 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 250; Überlegungen II-VI, 344. Compare Heidegger, Contributions, § 259, 338; Beiträge 428. 58 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 326; Überlegungen II-VI, 449. 59 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 22; Überlegungen II-VI, 29. 60 Heidegger, The History of Beyng, 178; Die Geschichte des Seyns, 211.

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ideationally by those who argued that tsimtsum is to be taken literally (kefshuṭo).61 In my opinion, what is intended is best captured by the notion of myth understood as a form of discourse in which the binary of literal and figurative is overcome. One can, and indeed must, distinguish between the sign and the signified, but it is not possible for there to be a signified that is not enmeshed in a web of signification such that every signified is disclosed to be a sign for another signified. There is nothing literal that is not metaphorical, no objectivity that is not subject to symbolic confabulation. To advocate for the literalness of tsimtsum, therefore, means to presume that its reality is virtual, whereas those who insist that tsimtsum is figurative (mashal) presume that the virtuality is real. With this in mind, we can return to the main point. It has been well documented that, according to the kabbalistic doctrine, the withdrawal of the light leaves in its wake a trace (reshimu) of that light in the vacuum (ḥalal) or empty space (maqom panuy) that comes to be as a consequence of the withdrawal. What has been less appreciated is that the withdrawal itself is a withdrawal of a prior withdrawal; that is to say, the light of which the clearing is the trace is a trace that is neither present nor absent, neither being nor nonbeing, but rather the trace of the erasure of the trace – what Derrida called the arche-trace62 – which disappears in its appearance and appears in its disappearance. A striking analogy to the kabbalistic idea is found in a passage from Heidegger’s notebooks: “Beyng – the trace [Spur] of the divinization of the absconded gods [der Götterung der entflohenen

61 The matter deserves a separate treatment, but for the time being, see the brief comments in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-Reshimu – The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 29 (2013): 76–79, and compare the list of other scholars mentioned on 77–78 n. 6. 62 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, translated, with an introduction, by David B. Allison, preface by Newton Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 156; idem, Spurs/Nietzsche’s Styles, introduction by Stefano Agosti, translation by Barbara Harlow, drawings by François Loubrieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 20–23; idem, Margins of Philosophy, translated, with additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 65–67; idem, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 61. On the Derridean trace and arche-writing, see sources cited in Wolfson, Giving, 426 n. 271, to which should be added David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 165–204. On the possible kabbalistic nuance of the Derridean archetrace and the gesture of writing, see the views of Habermas, Bloom, and Handelman discussed in Wolfson, Giving, 155–156, 177–178, 180, 182, 184–186. See ibid., 161, where I note the thematic link between time as the originary iterability, the non-identical identity of the Jew, and the trace as the repetition of the same that is always different.

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Götter], a trace that broadens a clearing [Lichtung]. … That tracing [Spuren] of the divinization, the tracing that in itself is this assignment, may be grasped as the appropriation [Ereignung].”63 The identification of the event of beyng as the trace of the divinization of the absconded gods is elucidated by a comment in a later essay on Anaximander’s saying, where Heidegger speaks of the origin of being as a trace of the presencing occluded in what is present, the oblivion of being that forgets the ontological difference between being and beings, an obfuscating of the obfuscation that can be uncovered through the recovery of language, that is, the naming of the being that is nameless.64 For the kabbalists, as for Heidegger, the originary trace, the trace of the origin, is not a phenomenal trace of a plenary presence, but a nonphenomenal trace of the plenitudinal void, a trace of a trace of the being that is otherwise than being, the erasure that is the inception of writing, not as a token of difference but as a stroke of différance, the genuine iteration of the other that cannot be reduced to the same.65

Trembling, Divinization, and the Bestowal of Self-Refusal Strengthening the kabbalistic resonance of Heidegger’s Seynsdenken, I note another passage from the Beiträge where he depicts the fissure (Zerklüftung) as the “self-contained unfolding [sich bleibende Entfaltung] of the intimacy of beyng itself, to the extent that we ‘experience’ [»erfahren«] beyng as refusal [Verweigerung] and as the encompassing refusal [Umweigerung].”66 Heidegger

63 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 311 (emphasis in original); Überlegungen II-VI, 429. 64 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 275; Holzwege, 364–365. My interpretation accords with the comments on Heidegger’s text in Derrida, Margins, 23–24. See my previous analysis in Wolfson Giving, 195–196, 425–426 n. 271. Compare the discussion of the Derridean trace against the background of Heidegger’s thinking in Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 87–176. 65 On this account there is affinity between Heidegger’s Spur and Levinas’s notion of the other as the trace of illeity. See Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 106–107; idem, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 12, 94; and see the analysis in Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, second edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 158–164, 224; Wolfson, Giving, 98–99, 142, 144–148. 66 Heidegger, Contributions, § 127, 192; Beiträge, 244.

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adds that it is incumbent on us to “try to think the fissure on the basis of the fundamental essence of beyng, in virtue of which beyng is the realm of decision [das Entscheidungsreich] for the battle among the gods. This battle is waged over their advent [Ankunft] and absconding [Flucht]; it is the battle in which the gods first divinize and bring their god into decision [Entscheidung]. Beyng is the trembling of this divinization [die Erzitterung dieses Götterns].”67 Elsewhere in the Beiträge, Heidegger writes that the refusal “is the highest nobility of bestowal and is the basic trait of the self-concealment whose manifestness constitutes the originary essence of the truth of beyng. Only in this way does beyng become estrangement itself [die Befremdung selbst], the stillness of the passing by of the last god.”68 In the same tenor, Heidegger wrote in the Schwarze Hefte, “Beyng – self-refusal as the trembling of the divinizing of the last god [die Verweigerung als die Erzitterung des Götterns des letzten Gottes]. The trembling is a keeping open [das Offenhalten] – indeed even the openness of the spatiotemporal field [Offene des Zeit-Spiel-Raums] of the ‘there’ [des Da] for Da-sein.”69 There is much to unpack in these statements, but for the purposes of this analysis I will underscore that they confirm the point made above that Heidegger is committed to the proposition, which resounds with the axiom of kabbalistic esotericism, that the bestowal itself is a refusal to bestow; what is bequeathed must be held in reserve to be bequeathed – the concealment of the concealment cannot be revealed unless it is revealed as that which is concealed. Heidegger’s insistence that “as refusal, beyng is not mere withholding and seclusion,” and hence the “refusal is the intimacy of an allocation,”70 well expresses the fundamental paradox that informed the path of his thinking focused on the self-refusing appropriation (die verweigernde Er-eignung) of beyng, the “still illumination of self-concealment, which liberates the human being from the mere rational animal into the grounder of Da-sein.”71 The motif of trembling, which arises from the self-refusal, presents an interesting conceptual correspondence to the Lurianic

67 Heidegger, Contributions, § 127, 192; Beiträge, 244. 68 Heidegger, Contributions, § 254 (emphasis in original), 321; Beiträge, 406. 69 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 311; Überlegungen II-VI, 429. 70 Heidegger, Contributions, § 123, p. 189; Beiträge, 240. 71 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 299; Überlegungen, 410–411.

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teaching promulgated by Israel Saruq72 about the jouissance (sha‘ashu‘a)73 that is associated with the initial withdrawal or constriction of the light of infinity.74 To understand the meaning imparted by kabbalists to sha‘ashu‘a, one must bear

72 In scholarly literature, there is debate whether Saruq was a genuine disciple of Luria, an independent and perhaps less authentic interpreter of Lurianic doctrine, part of a separate circle of kabbalists in Safed that evolved alongside Luria’s school, or perhaps someone who transformed Cordoverian themes in a Lurianic key. See Gershom Scholem, “Rabbi Israel Sarug: A Student of Luria?” Zion 5 (1940): 214–243 (Hebrew); Ronit Meroz, “R. Yisrael Sarug – Luria’s Disciple: A Research Controversy Reconsidered,” Da‘at 28 (1992): 41–50 (Hebrew); idem, “Faithful Transmission versus Innovation: Luria and His Disciples,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: 50 Years After, edited by Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 257–275; idem, “The School of Sarug – A New History,” Shalem 7 (2002): 151–193 (Hebrew); Moshe Idel, “Between the Kabbalah of Jerusalem and the Kabbalah of Israel Sarug,” Shalem 6 (1992): 165–173 (Hebrew); idem, “Italy in Safed, Safed in Italy: Toward an Interactive History of Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah,” in Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, edited by David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 254–256; Sharron Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-Cordoverian Encounter,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011): 158–187. Finally, it is worth noting that Abraham Cohen de Herrera, who studied with Saruq in Ragusa and transmitted oral teachings in his name, considered him a disciple of Luria. Moreover, he attributes the doctrines of sha‘ashu‘a and malbush to Luria directly and not to Saruq. See Abraham Cohen de Herrera, House of Divinity (Casa de la Divinidad), Gate of Heaven (Puerta del Cielo), annotated translation with introduction by Nissim Yosha (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2002), 7–8 (Hebrew). See the passage from the Puerta del Cielo, op. cit., 488, where contraction (ṣimṣum), measurement (shi‘ur), attribute (middah), bemusement (sha‘ashu‘a), movement (tenu‘ah), and alteration from pleasure (ḥilluf me-oneg), are identified and all ascribed to the master (rav), i.e., Luria. For the original Spanish, see Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Puerta del Cielo, edition, introduction, and notes by Miquel Beltrán (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2015), 291, and English translation in Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Gate of Heaven, translated with introduction and notes by Kenneth Krabbenhoft (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 295. See Gerold Necker, Humanistische Kabbala im Barock: Leben und Werk des Abraham Cohen de Herrera (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 156–157, 159 n. 103. 73 For my previous analysis of this motif and reference to other scholars who have discussed it, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 69–72, 189–192 nn. 174–180. See also idem, Language, 271–287; idem, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 131–136. The motif of quivering in both Lurianic kabbalah and Heideggerian thought may be profitably compared to the state of trembling (durchzittern) in Hegel to mark the tension of the interiorization of alterity when the subject feels like an “other” in relation to itself. See Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, translated by Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 32. 74 I have taken the liberty to repeat some of the discussion in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Heidegger’s Seyn/Nichts and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof: A Study in Comparative Metaontology,” in Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited by Micha Brumlik and Elad Lapidot (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 177–200.

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in mind that this term was used to depict God’s relation to the Torah prior to the creation of the world in older rabbinic sources, based on the description of Wisdom in Proverbs (8:30) and echoed in Psalms (119:77, 92, 143).75 The Saruqian materials reflect the connotation of this term in the writings of previous kabbalists,76 including the zoharic compilation, where it is connected most frequently to the theme of God taking delight with the souls of the righteous in the Garden of Eden,77 and Moses Cordovero, where it connotes, inter alia, the infinite’s contemplation of its own essence, which is beyond human comprehension,78 the first stirrings of the divine will to be garbed in the sefirotic gradations.79 Moreover, the erotic element more fully developed in Lurianic sources is latent in some passages in Cordovero’s voluminous corpus.80 It would take us too far afield to analyze properly the various versions and embellishments of the Saruqian doctrine. Suffice it to mention the explanation of

75 Bere’shit Rabba, edited by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 1:1, 1–2, 8:1, 57; Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 89a. 76 Compare the analysis of the motif of sha‘ashu‘a in the Bahir in Wolfson, Language, 277–278. 77 Zohar 1:178b, 245b; 2:173b, 217b, 255a; 3:193a. 78 Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1962), 12; idem, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1974), 20, and compare idem, Shi‘ur Qomah (Jerusalem: Or Ḥadash, 1999), 53a, 58a; idem, Elimah Rabbati (Jerusalem: Nezer Shraga, 2013), 8. Given the fact that kabbalists universally accepted the Galenic idea that the semen originates in the brain, it stands to reason that self-contemplation and auto-sexual arousal should be deemed two sides of the same coin. 79 Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 16 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1989), 37, cited in Bracha Sack, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University, 1995), 71–72 (Hebrew). In some passages, Cordovero emphasizes that the sha‘ashu‘a of Ein Sof is related to benefitting the emanations and created beings outside of his essence. See, for example, Moses Cordovero, Zohar in Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 21 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1991), 95; idem, Shi‘ur Qomah, 13b, 15a, 18b-c. The motif of sha‘ashu‘a in Cordovero has been discussed by Joseph Ben-Shlomo, The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), 60–61, 174, 187, 239 n. 202 (Hebrew); Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,” Diogenes 80 (1972): 182 n. 62; Bracha Sack, “The Doctrine of Ṣimṣum of R. Moses Cordovero,” Tarbiz 58 (1989): 226–227 (Hebrew); idem, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, 73–76, 150–176; Shatil, “The Kabbalah,” 164–174. For the influence of Cordovero on the Saruqian notion of sha‘ashu‘a, see also Yehuda Liebes, “Towards a Study of the Author of Emek ha-Melekh: His Personality, Writings and Kabbalah,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 11 (1993): 105 n. 24 (Hebrew); Meroz, “The School of Sarug,” 154; Miquel Beltrán, The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Kabbalah on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 33–39. 80 Sack, “Doctrine of Ṣimṣum,” 226 n. 79; idem, The Kabbalah, 73 n. 79. Shatil, “The Kabbalah,” 169, minimizes the autoerotic and narcissistic elements of the myth of divine bemusement in Cordovero, emphasizing the speculative element.

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Saruq offered by Eliashiv.81 In his typically methodical manner, he notes that the sha‘ashu‘a of the infinite is the “aspect of the arousal [hit‘orerut] and the movement [tenu‘ah] that quivers within himself, and every movement is in the aspect of constriction [qimmuṣ] and contraction [ṣimṣum] from place to place. That is to say, the movement that is in the bemusement [sha‘ashu‘a] is the aspect of the contraction from himself to himself, and thus there are two aspects, the forces that quiver and the contraction that is made between the forces, and this is the quivering [ni‘anu‘a] and the contraction. These quiverings … are in the aspect of the glowing [hitnoṣeṣut], for by means of the bemusement the glowing of many lights was revealed and produced, and this is the aspect of the quivering.” The glimmerings disclosed through the bemusement of the infinite are the aspect of points. These points and the contraction are identified respectively as mercy and judgment  – expressions of the more concealed aspects of the will (raṣon) and thought (maḥashavah) – the former is the quality of illuminating and the later the bestowing of boundary. By the abundance of the illumination, the points were joined together until they formed the letters of the Torah.82 In comparing the themes of the fissure and the trembling of Ein Sof in the Saruqian kabbalah and the application of similar motifs to the originary leap of Seyn in Heidegger’s inceptual thinking,83 we must note the obvious discrepancy: although in both instances there is a mythical underpinning to the conceptual formulation, for Heidegger these issues seemingly have no overt or tacit sexual meaning as we find in the kabbalistic texts wherein the primal shaking connected to the jouissance seems to connote the self-erotic rhapsody of noetic bliss in the infinite. Setting aside this vital difference, some astonishing affinities can be noted. Firstly, just as Heidegger speaks of the leap as a fissure and self-refusal of beyng that is experienced as a trembling, an enfolding that is an unfolding to create the doubling of the ontological difference, so the kabbalists envision the inception as the withdrawing of the infinite from itself to itself, the rending of the beginning characterized by the pulsating rapture (sha‘ashu‘a) and the ensuing 81 On Eliashiv’s use of the Saruqian version of Lurianic kabbalah, see Eliezer Baumgarten, “History and Historiosophy in the Teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Elyashov,” MA thesis, Ben-Gurion University, 2006), 18–20 (Hebrew). 82 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim, 126. 83 In this case as well, it is not impossible that Heidegger was influenced by the kabbalistic motif in an indirect or secondary way via Böhme or Schelling. The Saruqian kabbalah was made accessible to the Christian world through the inclusion of several texts (including sections from Naftali Bachrach’s Emeq ha-Melekh and Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo and Casa de la Divinidad) in Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata. See Wilhelm SchmidtBiggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, Band 3: 1660–1850 (Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 2013), 76–85, 127–130, 132–134.

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rupture (beqi’ah) – a caesura that is expressed, based on a zoharic idiom, as the infinite breaking and not breaking through its own aura (baqa we-lo baqa awira dileih)84 – or the folding of the garment (qippul ha-malbush).85 The commencement is thus marked by the secret of the fold, the doubling of difference, encoded semiotically in the opening letter of the Torah, the beit in the word bere’shit, the lingual-mathematical encryption for the antecedent that is consequent.86 Secondly, for both Heidegger and the kabbalists, these images attempt to describe the theopoetic process by which the divine becomes manifest iconically as the image that makes absently present the supreme hiddenness and imagelessness of the Godhead beyond God, a theme affirmed independently by kabbalists since the thirteenth century and likely known to Heidegger from both Eckhart87 and Schelling.88 Thirdly, the mystery of being connected to the trembling, according to the kabbalah and Heidegger, is disclosed through the garment of language whose task is to manifest the self-concealing grounding of the stillness that is the origin of speech.

Self-Concealment as the Unconcealment of the Inceptual Beginning The affinity to the kabbalistic symbolism is buttressed by the following passage in which Heidegger describes “the thoughtful projection of beyng [der denkerische Entwurf des Seyns]” as a crack (Durchriß) that “spreads all the way through what then for the first time announces itself as ‘being’ [»Seiendes«] in the open, that an errancy, in clearing, snatches into itself everything to make what is true

84 Zohar 1:15a. See the account of Saruq’s kabbalah in Joseph Delmedigo, Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah (Basle, 1629), 78b. Regarding the zoharic style of oxymoron and paradox, see Scholem, Major Trends, 166–167. 85 Israel Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut (Munkács: Blayer & Kohn, 1897), 36a; Naftali Bachrach, Emeq ha-Melekh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-Sefarim, 2003), 4:1, 171; Joseph Delmedigo, Novelot Ḥokhmah (Basle, 1631), 164a-b. On the folding up of the Torah, see Scholem, “The Name of God,” 182. 86 For an extended discussion of this symbolism, see Wolfson, Alef, 123–132. 87 Many scholars have written about this distinction in Eckhart. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Patriarchy and Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Klaus Hermann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, with the collaboration of Alex Ramos (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 1059–1075, and reference to other scholars cited on 1060 n. 33. 88 Schelling, The Ages, 25; Die Weltalter, 236.

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possible. … Thoughtful and explorative questioning [Erfragen]: the renunciation [Verzicht] that takes action, that adheres to the refusal and thus brings it into the light.”89 Questioning on the part of Dasein is an act of renunciation, an arresting gesticulation that adheres to and thus brings to light the errancy of the rupture, the opening bestowal that is the refusal of beyng, the event marked mythopoeically by an “intrusion [Anfall] and remaining absent [Ausbleib], advent [Ankunft] and absconding of the gods [Flucht der Götter].”90 Embracing the paradox forthrightly, Heidegger notes that the “refusal is the first and highest gift of beyng [daß die erste höchste Schenkung des Seyns], indeed its primordially essential occurrence itself.”91 Seyn is thus demarcated as “the allocating refusal” (die zuweisende Verweigerung),92 which “eventuates as the withdrawal [Entzug] that incorporates into the stillness in which truth, in accord with its essence, comes anew to the decision as to whether it can be grounded as the clearing for self-concealment. This self-concealment is the unconcealment [Entbergen] of the refusal; it is the allowance to belong in the strangeness of another beginning.”93 Just as the Lurianic kabbalists mark the beginning that engenders the space wherein beings will come to be through and in the withdrawal of the light, so Heidegger contends that the concealment as refusal “is not simply and only the limit of knowledge in any given circumstance, but the beginning of the clearing of what is lighted.”94 Another entry from the Schwarze Hefte reverberates even more poignantly with the kabbalistic tsimtsum: “We never grasp the inceptual [Anfängliche]: in order not to become something present at hand and thereby forfeit itself, the inceptual must constantly withdraw. Therefore, the beginning [Anfang] can never present itself; it can only be carried out, namely, in the downgoing of recession [Untergang des Zurücktretens], such that the withdrawal [Entzug] truly remains a withdrawal.”95 The inceptual can never be apprehended objectively because the beginning as such cannot be turned into a thing that is present (darstellen) and subject to representation (Darstellung) but only carried out or enacted (vollziehen) through the undergoing of the retreating, that is, the withdrawal that withdraws and thereby persists in being withdrawn. In another aphorism from the notebooks, Heidegger speculates that beginnings (Anfänge) withdraw from every will to seize hold of them, and in

89 Heidegger, Contributions, § 262, 352 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 447. 90 Heidegger, Contributions, § 120, 186; Beiträge, 235. 91 Heidegger, Contributions, § 123, 190 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 241. 92 Heidegger, Contributions, § 123, 189; Beiträge, 240. 93 Heidegger, Contributions, § 123, 190; Beiträge, 241. 94 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 53–54, Holzwege, 40. 95 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 243 (emphasis in original); Überlegungen II-VI, 334.

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withdrawing, they leave behind the outset (Beginn) as their mask.96 It is the comportment of the beginning – what Heidegger calls its “extraordinary character” – that it withdraws itself constantly and hence is always in the status of being simultaneously most ancient and most novel, reaching backward to the farthest past and extending forward to the farthest future. The greatest power accorded us as humans is to draw near to beyng – that which is most question-worthy – but the beyng to which one can draw near presents in the mode of self-refusal, which is the pure relation of the withdrawal of its being. But what is withdrawn in the self-withdrawal of beyng? The origin, Ursprung, the source whence the leap of the beginning ensues. Heidegger thus describes the inceptual as “the grounding of the origin of what is simplest in its uniqueness and unsurpassability.” The beginning, as Heidegger put it in Was Heißt Denken?, is “the veil that conceals the origin .… The origin keeps itself concealed in the beginning.”97 The complex of ideas proffered by Heidegger presents a precise conceptual affinity to the kabbalistic presumption that the beginning is marked by a contraction that results in the elongating of the empty space wherein beings are manifest in their concealment and concealed in their manifestation. For the kabbalists, too, the beginning is the veil that conceals the origin that both precedes and succeeds it; that is, the divine wisdom (Ḥokhmah), symbolized by the letter beit, etymologically related to the word bayit, is the house within which the plethora of beings contained in the Ein Sof or the nothingness (ayin) of the divine crown (Keter), symbolized by the letter alef, the wonder (pele) that is the master of the world (alufo shel olam), take refuge and gain release.98 Although the expression alufo shel olam suggests the traditional theological sense of a volitional creator, careful scrutiny of its usage in kabbalistic sources indicates that the overtly theistic language actually signifies the very opposite: the aluf is the alef, which is the pele, the covering (kissuya) and garment (levusha) that garbs the hidden ancient light (nehora setima attiqa),99 the covering of that which cannot be uncovered, the being of nothing unfurled in the nothing of being, the mystery outside the polarities imposed by the structure of worldhood, including the distinction between 96 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 208; Überlegungen II-VI, 283. 97 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? translated by Fred W. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, with an Introduction by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 152; Was Heißt Denken? [GA 8] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 156. In that context, the words used respectively for origin and beginning are Anfang and Beginn. On this terminology, see Wolfson, Alef, 234–235 n. 15. 98 On the nexus of alef, pele, and alufo shel olam, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 333 n. 68. 99 Zohar 3:193b.

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transcendence and immanence, as I discussed above. Hence, the originary event can be described enigmatically as the opening of a cleft in the self-contained unfolding, an inceptual projection that is a withholding, an act expressive of both constrictive judgement and expansive mercy. Astoundingly, Heidegger, too, speaks of a bestowing that is an excess of pure refusal (Übermaß der reinen Verweigerung),100 the self-withdrawing (Sichentziehende) that is the grounding (Gründung) that clears the self-concealing (lichtet das Sichverbergen).101 From this vantagepoint I would argue, contra Scholem’s well-known distinction, that the midrashic connotation of tsimtsum as concentration of the divine presence to a point in place is not diametrically opposed to the kabbalistic connotation of that term as the withdrawal of the divine presence from a point in place.102 When kabbalists cite or paraphrase the relevant aggadic passage in their exposition of the doctrine of tsimtsum, and this includes Luria in one of the few texts that he authored,103 they are doing so because they believed, and with good reason, that their idea flows naturally out of the older sources.104 The compression of the limitless to a delimited space is perforce a contraction and a withdrawal of the limitlessness. As I noted above, every creative act of the infinite must be seen through the prism of this twofold process, although I must emphasize again that the two processes occur contemporaneously and not consecutively. The same paradox should be applied to the beginning, the expanding contracting of the contracting expansion, which sets the motion of time into place, the clearing within which the structure of worldhood lights up as the shadow play of the pleromatic abyss. Temporally speaking, the beginning, which is the oldest and therefore the youngest interlude – the oldest because the youngest and the youngest because the oldest – displays the quality of the retroactive not yet, the achronic fecundity of the future that is the origin continually emptying itself in the coming to be of the beginning, the trace of infinity that is, simultaneously, antecedent and consequent to the withdrawal of the constricted light, the past that comes before as what comes after.105 The linear circularity of time necessitates a reversal of the timeline to the 100 Heidegger, Contributions, § 128, p. 193 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 245. 101 Heidegger, Contributions, § 130, p. 195 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 247. 102 Scholem, Major Trends, 260; idem, Kabbalah, 129–130. For a similar argument, see the essay by Paul Franks, “Contraction and Withdrawal: The Midrashic Roots of Philosophical Conceptions of Tsimtsum,” contained in this volume. 103 Gershom Scholem, Lurianic Kabbalah: Collected Studies, edited by Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2008), 256 (Hebrew). 104 See Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim, 128. 105 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, edited by Brian Ogren ( Leiden: Brill, 2015), 48–50.

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point that the transporting into the to-come simultaneously entails the bursting open the what-has-been, an inversion of past and future that can be accessed only through a remembering expectation (erinnernde Erharren).106 This brings to mind Heidegger’s Heraclitean understanding of nature (φύσις) as “an emerging and an arising, a self-opening [das Sichöffnen], which, while rising, at the same time turns back into what has emerged, and so shrouds within itself [in dem sich verschließt] that which on each occasion gives presence to what is present [was je einem Anwesenden die Anwesung gibt]. Thought as a fundamental word, φύσις signifies a rising into the open: the lighting of that clearing [das Lichten jener Lichtung] into which anything may enter appearing [erscheinen], present itself in its outline, show itself in its ‘appearance” (εἶδος, ἰδέα) and be present as this or that. φύσις is that rising-up which goes-back-into-itself; it names the coming to presence of that which dwells in the rising-up and this comes to presence as open.”107 The outpouring of being, which is always a disappearance into nonbeing – referred to as well as the fullness of “the truth as the clearing for self-concealing” (der Wahrheit als Lichtung für das Sichverbergen) or as “the essential occurrence of the negative in beyng as event” (das wesende Nichthafte des Seyns als Ereignis)108 – offers a remarkable parallel to the nonontological nothingness109 promulgated by the kabbalists; that is, the presumption that absolute nothingness, the nothingness that is less than and therefore more than nothing, the infinitesimal source of the self-negating negation that is the affirmation of all that exists, can be given only inasmuch as it is not given.110 In the formulation of a particularly complex strata of zoharic literature, “the mystery of unity is hidden in the supernal concealment [raza de-yiḥuda go ṭemira illa’ah setim] and

106 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 303 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 383–384. 107 Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), 79; Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung [GA 4] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), 56. On Heidegger’s interpretation of the Heraclitean notion of kosmos as an anticipation of his understanding of Sein selbst, that is, being in distinction from beings, see Richard Capobianco, “Heidegger on Heraclitus: Kosmos/World as Being Itself,” Epoché 20 (2016): 465–476. See also Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 303–307. 108 Heidegger, Contributions, § 146, p. 211 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 268. Compare the analysis in Claude Romano, There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing, translated by Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 213–236. 109 The expression is coined by Jean-Luc Marion, “Nothing and Nothing Else,” in The Ancients and the Moderns, edited by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 183–195. 110 On the question of whether there can be a phenomenology of nothingness and the controversy between Heidegger and Carnap regarding this matter, see Romano, There Is, 177–212.

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revealed through the concealed engravings [we-galya go gelifei ṭemirin], to ascend in its gradations to be completed above.”111 The secret of divine unity hidden in the supernal concealment can be revealed only by way of the engravings that are concealed. The process of disclosure is depicted figuratively as an act of writing, but what is written nonetheless remains obscure, maintaining a sense of secrecy even in – indeed precisely as a consequence of – the act of exposing. The concealed engravings, we could say, come about as the result of a form of writing that is itself an erasure. To cite another illustration from a different but equally difficult stratum of the zoharic compilation: Within the concealment of the concealed [bi-ṭemiru di-ṭemirin] was etched a trace [reshimu] that was not seen or revealed. That trace was etched and not etched [rashim we-lo rashim]. Masters of understanding and of open eyes cannot understand it. It is the foundation of all [qiyyuma de-kholla]. That trace is miniscule, it is not seen and not revealed. It abides in the will to establish everything, to receive what it receives from that which has no trace or will, and is not seen.112

Just as for Heidegger, the giving of es gibt, the letting-be (Seinlassen) of being, is the mystery of the “concealing of what is concealed”113  – and hence what is manifest of necessity is eclipsed in its very manifestation114 – so for the kabbalist, every bestowal of Ein Sof – a trace that is etched and not etched in the concealment of the concealed  – is concomitantly a withholding, a masking of what is unmasked in the unmasking of the mask.

Tsimtsum and the Metaontological Difference: Hermeneutic Bifocality Undergirding the shift from the metaphysical is what Heidegger called the ontological difference between beyng and beings, the uncovering of which is decisive to the recovery of the thinking that is proper to the origin to be retrieved in the second beginning. The history of metaphysics is marred by the fact that beyng “is

111 Zohar Ḥadash, 56d (Qaw ha-Middah). 112 Zohar 2:68b (Tosefta). 113 Heidegger, Pathmarks, 148; Wegmarken, 193–194. For a more complete citation of this passage and analysis, see Wolfson, Giving, 129. 114 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, with an introduction by John M. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 55; Gelassenheit (Stuttgart: Neske, 1959), 24.

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always grasped as the beingness of beings [Seiendheit des Seienden] and hence as these beings themselves.”115 In Der Anfang der Abendländischen Philosophie, the lecture course Heidegger offered in the summer semester of 1932 at the University of Freiburg, the thesis is stated epigrammatically: “beings are indeed on the basis of Being, but Being itself is not a being. Being and beings are different – this difference is the most originary one that could ever open up. Therefore the result: Being is not the beings.”116 Oddly, and perhaps somewhat inconsistently, Heidegger’s battle with the essentializing tendency of Western metaphysics smacks of its own essentialism,117 and thus he insists categorically that “all previous thought” is tainted by the failure to disentangle being from beings.118 The unfolding of Western metaphysics commences with the forgetfulness of beyng that results in beyng’s failure to appear and its truth remaining unthought (ungedacht).119 Unbeknownst to Heidegger, the kabbalistic tradition provides a major exception to his generalization with respect to the obfuscation of beyng and the nihilistic essence of metaphysics.120 Prima facie, my assertion seems unwarranted, since the concept of nihilism is very far from the worldview of traditional kabbalists. However, Heidegger’s idiosyncratic understanding of nihilism as the means to expose the nothingness of beyng has a precedent in kabbalistic theosophy where the diffusion of the luminal darkness of infinitivity can be described as well as a recoiling into the truth of its “self-concealing shelter” (das sich verbergende Bergen) through which “we catch a glimpse of the essence of the mystery in which the truth of being essences.”121 In language that is deeply kabbalistic in its cadence, Heidegger writes: Truth is the clearing-concealing [lichtende Verbergung] which occurs as transporting [Entrückung] and captivation [Berückung]. These, in their unity [Einheit] as well as in excess [Übermaß], provide the encompassed open realm [umstellte Offene] for the play of beings which, in the sheltering of their truth, come to be as thing, tool, machination, work, act,

115 Heidegger, Contributions, § 145, p. 209; Beiträge, 266. 116 Martin Heidegger, The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 26 (emphasis in original); Der Anfang der Abendländischen Philosophie: Auslegung des Anaximander und Parmenides [GA 35] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012), 32. 117 On Heidegger’s notion of essences as a replacement for metaphysical foundations, see Joseph S. O’Leary, “Theological Resonances of Der Satz vom Grund,” in Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, volume 1: Philosophy, edited by Christopher Macann (Routledge: London, 1992), 214. 118 Heidegger, Contributions, § 145, p. 209; Beiträge, 266. 119 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 196; Holzwege, 263. 120 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 197; Holzwege, 264. 121 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 197; Holzwege, 265.

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sacrifice. … That essence of truth, however, the transporting-captivating clearing and concealing as the origin of the “there” [Ursprung des Da], essentially occurs in its ground which we experience as ap-propriation [Er-eignung].122

For the kabbalists, too, the metaontological mystery is beset by the paradox of the clearing-concealing, the clearing that conceals the concealing that clears, the primal absence of absence that occasions the coming to presence of the vacuum within the plenum, an act that can be envisioned as transporting and captivating, approaching and absconding, advent and retreat, or in terms more familiar to kabbalistic rhetoric, extension and contraction. The space that emerges in the infinite expanse is both boundless and bounded, an encompassed open, which manifests the surplus of the appearance of beings and conceals the unity of the essence of their being – in Heidegger’s language, the leaping ahead into the essential occurrence of beyng, which entails “the thrusting out of its beings so that the truth of beyng might preserve as an impetus the power of beyng to endure historically”123 – the shelter that gathers in the manner that it projects and projects in the manner that it gathers. It is plausible that Heidegger absorbed some kabbalistic motifs through secondary sources, most notably Schelling, a point to which I shall return, but what is more crucial to my argument at this juncture is that these affinities disrupt his own adverse portrayal of Jewish thought as irrefutably metaphysical124 and therefore exemplifying the empty rationality and calculability associated with machination (Machenschaft) and technology (Technik).125 Heidegger could have found in kabbalistic sources a precedent to his inceptual thinking, a counter narrative to the story he tells of Western philosophy as the tale of a depreciating Seynsvergessenheit, the philosophical equivalent of the fall from grace. Of course, this was demonstrably not the case, but the scholarly restitution might be enacted – and here the intellectual agenda cannot be separated from an ethical mandate – by positing a hermeneutic of bifocality whereby the reflections on nothing and being

122 Heidegger, Contributions, § 32, p. 56 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 70. 123 Heidegger, Contributions, § 32, p. 57; Beiträge, 72. 124 Many have weighed in on this issue. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 74; Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, translated by Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 18–37; di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews, viii-ix, 106–115, 164–168, 201–202; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Banality of Heidegger, translated by Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 52. 125 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII-XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941) [GA 96] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), 46.

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enunciated by kabbalists would be scrutinized through the Heideggerian lens even as the reflections on nothing and being enunciated by Heidegger would be scrutinized through the kabbalistic lens. One of the repercussions of this mode of speculating for the study of kabbalah is a challenge to the depiction of the infinite as a substance that remains circumscribed within an ontological scheme of being, even if it is labeled the being beyond being or the being of the one that is nonbeing. The term ein sof, as the denomination of ultimate reality, has its roots in the metaphysical terminology of medieval philosophical literature, which was informed, at least in part, by classical Neoplatonism; the way it functions, however, may have the potential to subvert its own ontotheological presuppositions. Rather than viewing Ein Sof as if it were the equivalent to the Neoplatonic hyperousios, the beyond-being, which is a being nonetheless, it is more fitting to think of the unthinkable as proousios, the expression used by Iamblichus and his school to name the One as the pre-essential fount of all things,126 or perhaps even more suitable is anousios, literally, that which lacks being, a term applied in some Gnostic treatises to the nonexistent but still not unreal first principle.127 Ein Sof, similarly, is real but inexistent, the infinite essence that cannot be essentialized, not even as the essence of the nonessence or as the nonessence of the essence, the no-thing of the apophatic tradition, since the illimitable nothingness cannot be constricted by images of negation that affirm the positivity they ostensibly negate.

126 Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon and Jackson R. Hershbell (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 8:2, 262.4, 308–309; 10:5, 291.7, 350–351. See Jean Trouillard, “Note sur proousios et pronoia chez Proclus,” Revue des études grecques 73 (1960): 80–87; idem “Procession néoplatonicienne et création Judeo-Chrétien,” in Néoplatonisme, mélanges offerts à Jean Trouillard (Fontenay-aux-Roses: Les Cahiers de Fontenay, 1981), 14; Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 112–113; idem, “The Chôra of the Timaeus and Iamblichean Theurgy,” Horizons 3 (2012): 123 n. 95. 127 For example, see the words of Markos the Valentinian cited by Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, translated with an Introduction and Notes by M. David Litwa (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2016), 6:42.4, 455: “When the Father, who is inconceivable, beyond substance [νούσιος], and neither male nor female, first willed his unspeakable nature to be spoken, and the invisible to take shape, he opened his mouth and emanated a Word similar to himself. He, standing alongside him, showed him what he was, having become manifest as the form of the Invisible [αὐτὸς τοũ οράτοθ μορφ φανείς].” For a learned note on the philology of the term anousios, see George Wright, Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 153 n. 242. See also John Dillon, “Monotheism in the Gnostic Tradition,” in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, edited by Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75; Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 159.

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To substantiate the point textually, I will cite a passage from the “Secret of the Contraction” (sod ha-ṣimṣum) attributed to Elijah ben Solomon, the Gaon of Vilna: Know that one cannot think at all about the infinite, blessed be he, for it is forbidden to name it, even as the necessary of existence [ḥovat ha-meṣi’ut]. The first sefirah is called “nothing” [ayin] and the second is named “something” [yesh], for we know that it exists, and we comprehend this only with respect to it and not with respect to the first, and all the more so, with respect to the infinite, blessed be he and blessed be his name, as it is forbidden to think at all and even to call it ein sof. What we speak with regard to it and the sefirot, everything is from his will and his providence so that he will be known from the perspective of his actions. This is the principle [kelal] for all the ways of kabbalah. It is known that just as he is without limit so also is his will. Thus the incomposite will is infinite, and it is even forbidden to think of this at all, but it is known that the worlds are finite and everything is enumerated. Therefore, he contracted his will in the creation of the worlds, and this is the contraction [ṣimṣum].128

The acute apophaticism expressed here is halting: so excessive is the ineffability of the infinite that it cannot even be named the necessary of existence, the designation for God that entered the Hebrew philosophical lexicon through the translation of Maimonides’s borrowing of Avicenna’s wājib al-wujūd.129 Indeed, the author goes so far as to say that it is prohibited not only to deliberate about the infinite but even to call it ein sof. So beyond linguistic demarcation is the infinite that it cannot be designated as infinite. Grammatically, ein sof is a nominal form, but ontically it does not demarcate something that can be named or even nothing that cannot be named; it hints rather to the void disclosed in the annulment of the void, the infinite negation of the negation of the infinite, the concealment of disclosure disclosed through the disclosure of concealment. A critical part of this metaontology – the assumption that the utmost reality is not a definable subject with identifiable properties but rather what Badiou calls an evental occurrence of being, that is, an event of presence that is in excess of being present,130 the axiomatic decision (or in the

128 Elijah ben Solomon, The Commentary of the Gaon Rabbi Elijah of Vilna to Sifra di-Zeni‘uta, edited by Bezalel Naor (Jerusalem, 1998), 138 (Hebrew). 129 See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Via Negativa in Maimonides and Its Impact on Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah,” Maimonidean Studies 5 (2008): 397–400, and further reference to primary and secondary sources cited on 397–398 nn. 12–13. 130 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 14. The various facets of Badiou’s mathematical conception of metaontology are explored in great detail by Burhanuddin Baki, Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). On the excess of presence in Heidegger’s thinking about nature

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original French, la decision ontologique) regarding the “non-being of the one,”131 or axiom of the void-set,132 which implies the irrevocability of the un-presentation and the un-being of the multifactorial singular, the event-without-event133 wherein the supplement of what-is-not-being-qua-being originates134 – demands an inversion of the Aristotelian classification of substance (ousia). Kabbalistically, the presumption is that the projection of being must always be gauged from the standpoint of the nonbeing of the withdrawal of being  – the more absent, the  more present; the more secreted, the more transparent. What there is can never be there but as what is not there; what is given cannot be given but as what is nongiven. This, I propose, is the phenomenological import of the doctrine of tsimtsum, the self-depleting undepletion of the insubstantial substantiality of the infinite as it assumes the substantial insubstantiality of the finite through the agency of the sefirotic emanations, the “limited force that is unlimited” (koaḥ bi-gevul mi-beli gevul), in the language of Azriel of Gerona.135 As the anonymous author of Sefer ha-Peli’ah glosses Azriel’s words, “Since there is no deficiency in his perfection, we must say that he has a limited force that is unlimited. That which comes forth from him initially are the sefirot, which are a complete force [koaḥ shalem] and a deficient force [koaḥ ḥaser]; when they receive the efflux that issues from his perfection, they are a complete force, and when the efflux is thwarted from them, they are a deficient force. Thus they have a potency to act in perfection and in deficiency.”136 According to this interpretation, the two contingencies are mutually exclusive: when the sefirotic gradations receive the overflow, they are complete, but when they do not, they are deficient. However, it is feasible to explicate Azriel’s words differently such that the status of the gradations vis-à-vis the infinite as the limited force that is unlimited tenders the possibility of interpreting the two qualities not successively but synchronously: each of the sefirot is complete and deficient all at once – the power of infinity is protracted only to the extent that it is retracted. This interpretation is corroborated by Eliashiv’s statement, drawing on Azriel’s language, that “the boundary that is without boundary [ha-gevul mi-bilti gevul] is merely the emanation from concealment to disclosure,

(physis), see Joël Balazut, Heidegger: une philosophie de la présence (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013), 61–81. 131 Badiou, Being and Event, 31. 132 Ibid., 67–69. 133 Ibid., 356. 134 Ibid., 15. 135 Azriel of Gerona, Be’ur Eser Sefirot, in Ma‘yan Moshe, 85. 136 Sefer ha-Pel’iah (Przemyśl: Zupnik, Knoller, and Hammerschmidt, 1883), 11b.

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and it is evident that the concealment and disclosure are not antinomies, but they are in one subject.”137 Oratorically, the will of the infinite is referred to as the foundation (yesod) and the telos (takhlit), the essential unity that contains everything indifferently.138 Indeed, the purpose of the emanation is cast by Eliashiv, following the view expressed by kabbalists already in the thirteenth century, as an apocatastatic restitution of everything to the incomposite unity of the infinite. The cause of the emanation is the infinite light, which is also from the category of disclosures, and all of them issue from him and are subject to him, for he is the first disclosure that is revealed from his concealed truth in the aspect of the disclosure of the infinite light, and he is the cause of causes and the telos of everything. Only for this did he bring forth everything, to restore everything at the end to him, and in order to effectuate this telos, he initially contracted [ṣimṣem] the light of the infinite [or de-ein sof] in the aspect of the central point [nequddah ha-emṣa‘it] that is within him, and he produced therein the place [maqom] for the totality of existence, and afterwards he emanated there the line of the infinite [ha-qaw de-ein sof] and he brought forth there by means of this the entirety of existence in order to bring them to this goal, for they came forth from the infinite and they will return to the infinite. … Thus the contraction entirely [kol ha-ṣimṣum] is verily as it is literally and plainly [ke-mashma‘o ukhe-feshuṭo mammash].139

The logic of the apocatastasis implies a symmetry of the first contraction (ṣimṣum ha-ri’shon) and the final rectification (tiqqun ha-aḥaron): just as the condensation of the infinite light at the beginning into the central point, the phallic aspect of the kingship of the infinite (yesod de-ha-malkhut de-ein sof),140 the primordial will (raṣon), also referred to as the inner point (nequddah ha-penimit) of the kingship of the kingship (malkhut de-malkhut),141 the essence (aṣmut) that is intermediate between the limited and the limitless,142 is to be taken literally, so the elevation of all the worlds and the disclosure of the inner light of Malkhut when it is restored

137 From a letter of Eliashiv printed in Ma‘yan Moshe, 238. On the use of Azriel’s locution, see also Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim, 217; idem, Leshem Shevo weAḥlamah: Sefer ha-De‘ah (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2005), 222. 138 Solomon ben Hayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-Kelalim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2010), 2. 139 Solomon ben Hayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-Be’urim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2011), pt. 1, 18. 140 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-Be’urim, pt. 1, 20. 141 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim, 129, 130. On the identification of malkhut de-ein sof as the will that bears existence, see Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-Kelalim, 217. 142 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-Kelalim, 217.

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to its source in the aspect of the kingship of the infinite (malkhut de-ein sof) at the end must be taken literally.143 However, when one delves beneath these rhetorical casings  – when one views the matter from the perspective of the garbing of the interior in the interior (hitlabbeshut ha-penimi be-ha-penimi) as opposed to the garbing of the exterior in the interior (hitlabbeshut ha-ḥiṣoni be-ha-penimi)144  – one discerns that the foundation is no foundation and the telos is no telos because the nothing at the beginning and the nothing at the end respectively sabotage the notion of beginning and end with discernibly fixed boundaries. More accurately, these terms signify the emptiness of being rather than the being of emptiness, the ground that is the absence of ground, the goal that is the absence of goal. But even more profoundly, as I intimated previously, the groundlessness enframing all that exists suggests that, notwithstanding a commonly held misperception, the act of constriction is not a one-time occurrence; each inundation of the infinite light is possible because that light is diminished. The ideational implications of the kabbalistic teaching are on a par with Heidegger’s insistence that the enactment of being is always a revocation of nonbeing. For the kabbalists, too, contraction is expansion, and not its opposite, inasmuch as the nameless can manifest itself only through the garment of the name. Phenomenologically, therefore, what is given – a givenness lacking intentionality or teleology – is always also withheld from being given. Indeed, from the vantagepoint of the chiasmic middle excluded by the law of the excluded middle, the indeterminate space where opposites converge in their divergence, the giving is the withholding and the withholding the giving.

Measuring the Immeasurable and the Temporal Granting of Place According to the view articulated in any number of Lurianic sources, the purpose of the contraction/withdrawal of the infinite, at least on the exoteric plane, was to create a place (maqom)  – the force of potentiality (koaḥ efsharut)  – for the

143 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim, 110–111. Compare ibid., 120, where the apocatastasis is described symbolically as the restoration of all things to the womb of Binah, the supernal Mother, in the seventh millennium, which is the time of the rule of Malkhut. 144 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-Kelalim, 313.

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formation of the ostensibly independent worlds.145 The diminution of light comes about as a result of the stimulation of the aspect of judgment lodged in the boundless mercifulness of infinity, the actualization of the potential for determination within the indeterminable, the enactment of the place of contraction in the center of the illimitable expanse of nothingness.146 The spatial metaphor, however, needs to be complemented by the temporal, for the place that emerges as a consequence of the tsimtsum is an unravelling of the knot of the eternality of Ein Sof.147 “Time becomes space,” writes Heidegger in his notebooks. “But the originary time [die ursprüngliche Zeit] becomes the fore-space [Vor-raum] of the duration.”148 Kabbalists share with Heidegger this insight regarding the codependency of time and space such that the duration of the temporal dimension of infinity – not the privation of time but the time before there was a time before time – creates the forespace of the various worlds in the concatenation of being. A common theme that runs through the different phases of Heidegger’s thought is the challenge to the mathematical understanding of time a linear series of interchangeable now-points. Time is not the measure of change or that which is measured by change but the interlude or the between in which change happens in its twofold magnitude as measure and measured. Kabbalists similarly proffered a conception of temporality that was not beholden to the Aristotelian model of a unilateral evolution from past to future. Time and space are not to be construed primarily as material substances nor are they conceived respectively as the measure of bodies in motion or as the three-dimensional container in which all bodies are positioned. These philosophical understandings were undoubtedly known to kabbalists, and even occasionally explicitly affirmed by some,149 but on the whole they proffered a different conception related to the incarnational investiture of the light of Ein Sof, which corresponds to Heidegger’s contention that space and time are “the opening [Ausbruch] and upsurge [Anbruch] of being.”150 Or, as he put in the Beiträge, commenting on the relation of time-space and the facticity of Dasein: “Time-space as arising out of, and belonging to, the essence of truth and as the thereby grounded structure (joining) of the ‘there,’ a structure of transport-captivation. (Not yet a ‘schema’ for the representation of things, not yet mere flowing-by in the order of

145 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-De‘ah, 222. 146 Immanuel ben Abraham Hai Ricchi, Yosher Levav (Jerusalem: Alei Ayin, 2010), 10. 147 For a previous attempt to consider the temporal implications of the motif of tsimtsum, elicited specifically from the thought of Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, see Wolfson, “Retroactive Not Yet,” 44–50. 148 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 29 (emphasis in original); Überlegungen II-VI, 38. 149 See Joseph Ergas, Shomer Emunim (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 2010), 2:17, 106. 150 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 14; Überlegungen II-VI, 18.

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succession).”151 The calculative representations of space and time arise out of the more originary time-space that belongs to the truth of the originating essential occurrence of being as event: Time-space is the appropriated sundering of the turning paths of the event, the sundering of the turning between belonging and call, between abandonment by being and beckoning intimation (the trembling in the oscillation of beyng itself!). Nearness and remoteness, emptiness and bestowal, verve and hesitation – in these the hidden essence of time-space resides, and so they cannot be grasped temporally and spatially on the basis of the usual representations of time and space.152

The originary conjunction of time-space is the site of the moment, which is “the uniqueness and the intrusion of the most luminous transposal into the domain of the intimation out of the gentle captivation by what is self-withholding and hesitant, nearness and remoteness in the decision, the where and the when of the history of being as self-clearing and self-concealing out of the appropriation of the basic disposition of restraint.”153 Brushing against the grain of centuries of philosophical speculation, Heidegger argues that time is not predominantly subjective any more than space is predominantly objective; the essence of time and space can be gleaned from their original unity in time-space, which is the abyssal ground of the “there,” that is, the opening/lighting, the clearing ground wherein the truth of beyng is revealed in the concealment of its concealment.154 The originary unity of space and time is the unifying unity of the abyss that allows the spatial and the temporal to diverge into their separateness.155 Consistent with his understanding of the idea of juxtaposition, Heidegger emphasizes that the irreducibility of time and space is not compromised by their unity or interpenetration; on the contrary, they are “radically different … in their most proper essence, and only in virtue of this extreme difference do they point back to their origin, time-space.”156 The kabbalistic inflection of Heidegger’s account of time-space comes to the foreground when we consider his depiction of the abyssal ground (Ab-grund) as “the staying away of the ground” (das Weg-bleiben des Grundes), the “self-concealing in a protruding that bears” (das Sichverbergen im tragenden Durchragen).157 In a tone amazingly

151 Heidegger, Contributions, § 238, p. 293; Beiträge, 371. 152 Heidegger, Contributions, § 239, p. 294; Beiträge, 372. 153 Heidegger, Contributions, § 239, p. 296; Beiträge, 375. 154 Heidegger, Contributions, § 240, p. 297; Beiträge, 376. 155 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 299; Beiträge, 379. 156 Heidegger, Contributions, § 241, p. 298; Beiträge, 377. 157 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, 299–300; Beiträge, 379.

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evocative of the kabbalistic tsimtsum, Heidegger remarks that the withholding of the self-concealing is “not nothing,” but a “leaving empty” that is “a preeminent kind of opening up. … The lack of the ground of the lack of the ground [Der Abgrund ist Ab-grund]. In withholding itself, the ground preeminently brings into the open, namely into the first opening of that emptiness which is thereby a determinate one. Inasmuch as the ground, even and precisely as abyss, still grounds and yet does not properly ground, it abides in hesitancy.”158 The concealing-revealing, withdrawing-protruding, that kabbalists ascribe to Ein Sof is well captured in Heidegger’s claim that the “primordial ground” (Un-grund) opens itself as the self-concealing in the “abyssal ground” (Ab-grund), which is then disguised in the “distorted ground” or literally the nonground (Un-ground).159 Just as kabbalists portrayed the vacuum, which is the aftermath of the withdrawal of the light, as an empty fullness, an emptiness that is empty of its emptiness, so Heidegger writes that the clearing of the concealment is “not the mere emptiness of vacancy; instead, it is the disposed and disposing emptiness of the abyssal ground [die gestimmt stimmende Leere des Ab-grundes] which, according to the attuning intimation of the event, is a disposed abyssal ground.”160 Like the kabbalistic infinity, wherein the absolute necessity is pure contingency, the emptiness of the event of beyng “is actually the fullness of what is still undecided and is to be decided, the abyssal ground that points to the ground, i.e., to the truth of being.”161 Heidegger’s identification of time-space as the horizon of being,162 which is the abyssal ground, translates kabbalistically into the identification of time and space as the elliptical axes of the imaginally configured body of the divine persona. According to this model, the two modalities are conceptually inextricable, linked together in the entangled folds of syncopation. Priority, however, is still ascribed to time inasmuch as in its most rudimentary sense – designated by the rabbinic phrase seder zemannim, the achronal order of time that precedes the chronological durée of time, meshekh ha-zeman163 – it is the measure of the immeasurable ebb and flow of infinity that generates the polarities of light and dark, which translate into the sentient experience of the temporal forged by the binary rhythm of day and night. Time, on this account, is not simply an accidental property that lacks intrinsicality; it is rather the vital energy of the nothingness that is the being

158 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 300 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 379–380. 159 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 300; Beiträge, 380. 160 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 301; Beiträge, 381. 161 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 302; Beiträge, 382. 162 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 39; Überlegungen II-VI, 51. 163 Wolfson, Alef, 62, 73, 77–79, 84–88, 94, 109, 111, 217 nn. 108 and 111, 220 n. 151, 222 nn. 178, 180, 230 n. 283.

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that both infuses and retreats from all beings. In Heideggerian terms, time is “the transcendental horizon of the question of being.”164 Space, in turn, is the exteriorization of the interiorization of the pulsating fluctuation of existence from the nocturnal to the diurnal and back from the diurnal to the nocturnal.165 In his later thinking, Heidegger proffers a view on time that is even more proximate to what may be elicited from the kabbalistic sources, and especially related to the motif of tsimtsum. Thus, Heidegger describes the event of beyng “as the hesitant self-withholding and therein the ripeness of ‘time,’ the mightiness of the fruit, and the greatness of the bestowing, but in the truth as clearing for self-concealing.” This sense of ripeness  – the vegetal image that communicates the construal of time as the future perfect tense, that is, the present that perpetually awaits its futural unfolding166 – bespeaks the character of the original not (ursprünglichen Nicht), which is expressed in the oscillation as the bestowing that is both not yet and no longer, the withholding of the hesitation, the captivating in the transporting, that signals “the essential occurrence of the negative in beyng as event.”167 The event of beyng is thus permeated with negativity in the oscillation or strife between beyng and not-being, the truth of which  – as the clearing for the selfconcealing – is ground in the abyss of time-space.168 The Heideggerian spacetime occurs in the dimensionality of beyng that is neither spatial nor temporal in the ordinary sense determined by computable representation,169 but in “the originary open spaciousness” (die ursprüngliche offene Geräumigkeit) through which “is thrown the swing of time” (der Schwung der Zeit), and in which “the world forms itself.”170 This cogitation seems far from the kabbalists, who adamantly deny that temporal and spatial qualities can be affixed to the infinite. A closer examination, however, offers another perspective that complicates this ostensibly clear distinction and brings their thought closer to Heidegger. Explained esoterically, what kabbalists had in mind in their depictions of the initial withdrawal of the light can be expressed in Heideggerian terms as the infinite betraying a dual structure of time-space through which the fissure of beyng is concealed and revealed, transported and captivated. Utilizing Derrida’s reformulation of Heidegger, we can say

164 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a forward by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), § 8, 37; Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 39. 165 Wolfson, Alef, 61–87. 166 Wolfson, “Zeitliche Entzweiung,” 138–142. 167 Heidegger, Contributions, § 146, p. 211 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 268. 168 Heidegger, Contributions, § 221, 273; Beiträge, 346. 169 Heidegger, Pathmarks, 254; Wegmarken, 334. 170 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 59; Überlegungen II-VI, 78.

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the remnant of the infinite light in the primordial space, whence the luminosity of the infinite withdraws, is “a simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself … the sign of the sign … and a trace of the erasure of the trace.”171 Time so conceived is the granting of place and place the endowing of time. To elucidate the relevance of this allegation, let me refer again to what is considered to be one of the few texts authored by Luria, a commentary on the zoharic passage that seeks to explain the opening verse of Genesis as a symbolic reference to the issuing forth of the sefirot from infinity. The key sentence worthy of our attention, “prior to the emanation he and his name alone were and he filled the space of all the worlds,”172 is based on the celebrated remark from Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, “Before the world was created he and his name alone were.”173 Needless to say, the spatial element, which underlies the description of Ein Sof filling all worlds, cannot be understood literally, since before the emanation, there are no worlds of which to speak. The expression “filling all worlds,” therefore, must be taken as a metaphor to convey its opposite, that is, the omni-expansiveness of infinitivity subverts the possibility of topographical allocation. To fill all worlds means there are no worlds to be filled; there is nothing but the utter darkness of the unalloyed luminescence beyond the polarity of light and dark. With respect to the temporal element, by contrast, there is no equivalent disavowal; to the contrary, there is an ascription of time to the infinite. This is implicit in the reference to the ineffable name that was coeternal with the divine prior to the creation. According to a widely held view in midrashic, philosophical, and mystical texts, the Tetragrammaton signifies the compresence of the three tenses. One might argue that blurring the boundaries between past, present, and future raises questions about the suitability of applying the category of time to the divine. Luria and his followers elaborated this theme, relating it to what is perhaps the profoundest paradox, the positioning of the demarcating point in the sea of infinitude that defies all demarcation. The name  – identified as the Torah, the garment, and the aspect of the kingship of the infinite – represents the quality of judgment by which the propensity of the limitlessly expanding light is delimited.174 The matter is explained lucidly by Eliashiv: With regard to the central point that is verily in the middle of his light: the aspect of the point is attributed to the sefirah of Malkhut, for it is the main source for each sefirah and for all of existence, and thus it is called a point, for it is the source, like the seed of the fruit in

171 Derrida, Margins, 23–24. 172 Scholem, Lurianic Kabbalah, 256. 173 Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, edited by David Luria (Warsaw, 1852), ch. 3, 5b. 174 Moshe ben Menaḥem Graf, Wayaqhel Moshe (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-Sefarim, 2005), 40.

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relation to the fruit. The central point that is in her is on account of the aspect of the foundation [yesod] that is in her, the foundation of the kingship [yesod de-ha-malkhut], for this is always called the central point; the deportment of the foundation [eikhut ha-yesod] and the inner potency [koaḥ ha-penimi] within it are from the knowledge of the central line [da‘at ha-qaw ha-emṣa‘i]. Therefore, the foundation of the kingship is called the central point. … And this is the import here with regard to the aspect of the kingship of the infinite [malkhut de-ein sof], and the aspect of the foundation in her is the central point of the kingship of the infinite. Thus all of the contraction was only in the kingship of the infinite and in the aspect of the foundation in her.175

The aspect of judgment, which was the catalyst that instigated the contraction of the light, is located in the nucleus earmarked as the feminine, the aspect of Malkhut, which is the capacity for boundary (gevul) and measure (middah) within the boundless and immeasurable. The phallic nature of that nucleus is apparent from the emphasis on the aspect of the foundation (yesod), which is linked to the knowledge (da‘at) of the central line (qaw ha-emṣa‘i), a symbolic reference to the masculine potency of Tif’eret. From the context it appears, more technically, that the foundation of the kingship refers to the uterus, the place of gestation, but it is also clear that this part of the female anatomy is interpreted through a phallocentric lens.176 Be that as it may, the Lurianic teaching, explicated by Eliashiv, identifies malkhut de-ein sof as the name that was coextensive with the namelessness of the infinite. Against this background we can turn to the implication of this teaching to apprehend the kabbalistic notion of a fourth dimension arising from the coalescence of the three tenses in the moment wherein the temporal is eternalized and the eternal temporalized. If we assume that everything was contained indiscriminately in the incomposite oneness of Ein Sof prior to the tsimtsum, then what appears to us as the progression of time is in fact the manner in which the single instant of eternity – a moment shaped by the paradoxical simultaneity of immeasurable velocity and interminable rest – is manifest on the phenomenal plane. We deduce further that, on the one hand, we cannot speak of anything absolutely new occurring as a consequence of the withdrawal, since all was encompassed in the infinite, and hence time would appear to be illusory like a dream; on the other hand, the trace that remains in the space after the withdrawal is a light that may be considered a temporally new emanation that provides the place for all

175 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-Be’urim, pt. 1, 20. Compare Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim, 91–92, 128–129. 176 Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” 156 n. 128; idem, Language, 77, 458 n. 241.

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that will come to be.177 Time is thus accorded the significance of the trace that instantiates the uniqueness of repetition. From this vantagepoint, the kabbalists would concur with Heidegger’s assessment that the “eternal is not the incessant [das Fort-währende]; it is instead that which can withdraw in a moment so as to recur later. What can recur: not as the identical [das Gleiche] but as the newly transforming [Verwandelnde], the one and unique [Eine-Einzige], i.e., beyng, such that it is not immediately recognized, in this manifestness, as the same [das Selbe]!”178 Drawing on Schelling’s inference from the self-becoming of the divine that eternality is embodied in the temporal not-yet, the circling of the ground and existence in the unity of the primordial movement,179 an idea that is in accord with the attitude of kabbalists, Heidegger argues that the eternal is not a state of timeless perpetuity, the nunc stans, but rather the unrelenting transformation of the same  – as opposed to the identical  – that is always different. Heterogeneity entails that we find the singularity within that which repeats, the novelty within reiteration, the return of the same in which the same is nothing but the recurrence of difference, the ungiven that is the prerequisite of all that is given, the principle of nonphenomenality that accounts for the phenomenality of every phenomenon. It goes without saying that I do not wish to argue that Heidegger’s views about time are identical to the kabbalists nor do I think it is justifiable to treat the complex ruminations of the latter monolithically. Indeed, even with respect to the emphasis on futurity, the very topic that will yield interesting convergences of thinking, there is an unbridgeable chasm that separates Heidegger and the kabbalists. For Heidegger, the ultimate measure of the future is the imperishable perishing that we each must endure in the nonrelational ownmost potentiality of our being-toward-death, the possibility of our absolute impossibility, the constant being-there of the prospect of not being there, the not yet that is already no more.180 By contrast, the kabbalists understand the future – signified by the scriptural name Ehyeh – as the surplus of no more that is always not yet, the capability for renewal, and, in the most profound sense, the return to the nondifferentiated 177 Compare Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, edited by Ḥayyim Friedlander (Benei Beraq: Sifrayyati, 1992), ch. 26, 66, and see analysis in Wolfson, “Retroactive Not Yet,” 47–48. 178 Heidegger, Contributions, § 238, p. 293 (emphasis in original); Beiträge, 371. 179 Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 113–114; Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) [GA 42] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), 196–198. 180 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Not Yet Now: Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking,” in Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic Thinking, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 128–142.

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nothingness of infinity wherein the distinction between time and timelessness is no longer operative, not because time is subsumed in the timeless, but because timelessness is the measure of the fourth dimension that precedes the triadic division of time.181 In kabbalistic lore, moreover, the future is not gauged by the imperishability of our perishability, but by the power of regeneration, which is epitomized in the proclivity of repentance – the halakhic foundation for the mystical ideal of restitutio – to break the karmic chain of causality so that the fate of an individual is not irrevocably determined by past events.182 And yet, in spite of this and other disparities between the kabbalah and Heideggerian thought, some striking similarities cannot be ignored. What is most relevant to this study pertains to the coalescing of past, present, and future symbolized by the Tetragrammaton, which is reminiscent of Heidegger’s idea of the equiprimordiality (Gleichursprünglichkeit) of the three ecstasies of time,183 and the viewing of that name as that which yields the time-space as the open enclosure of all being, the self-revealing concealment of the self-concealing revelation of the site of the moment. Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me conclude by restating unequivocally that the question of influence – the issue that typically consumes the mind of intellectual and social historians working within the confines of the academy – is not of paramount importance. Far more tantalizing is the fact that there is a constellation of thought, a belonging-together, based on the conceptual congruence of what persists as irreducibly incongruent.

181 For a previous attempt to compare and contrast the notion of futurity in Heidegger and the biblical conception based on the epiphany of the divine name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3, see Gabriel Motzkin, “‘Ehyeh’ and the Future: ‘God’ and Heidegger’s Concept of ‘Becoming’ Compared,” in Occur Desire: Sehnsucht des Auges, edited by Aharon R. E. Agus and Jan Assmann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 173–182. 182 Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 242. 183 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 65, p. 314; Sein und Zeit, 329.

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Luzzatto, Moses Ḥayyim. Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, edited by Ḥayyim Friedlander, Benei Beraq: Sifrayyati, 1992. Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During. London: Routledge, 2005. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Nothing and Nothing Else,” in The Ancients and the Moderns, edited by Reginald Lilly, 183-195, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Marrati, Paola. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ma‘yan Moshe. Edited by Moshe Schatz. Jerusalem, 2011. McGrath, Sean J. The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Meroz, Ronit. “Faithful Transmission versus Innovation: Luria and His Disciples,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: 50 Years After, edited by Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan, 257-275, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993. _____. “The School of Sarug—A New History.” Shalem 7 (2002): 151-193 (Hebrew). _____. “R. Yisrael Sarug— Luria’s Disciple: A Research Controversy Reconsidered.” Da‘at 28 (1992): 41-50 (Hebrew). Motzkin, Gabriel. “‘Ehyeh’ and the Future: ‘God’ and Heidegger’s Concept of ‘Becoming’ Compared,” in Ocular Desire: Sehnsucht des Auges, edited by Aharon R. E. Agus and Jan Assmann, 173–82, Berlin: Akademie, 1994. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Banality of Heidegger, trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Necker, Gerold. Humanistische Kabbala im Barock: Leben und Werk des Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. O’Leary, Joseph S. “Theological Resonances of Der Satz vom Grund.” In Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, vol. 1: Philosophy, edited by Christopher Macann, 213–256, Routledge: London, 1992. Parkes, Graham. “Thoughts on the Way: Being and Time via Lao-Chuang,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes, 105–144. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987. Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer. Edited by David Luria, Warsaw, 1852. Ricchi, Immanuel ben Abraham Ḥai. Yosher Levav, Jerusalem: Alei Ayin, 2010. Romano, Claude. There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing, trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Rusterholz, Sibylle. “Elemente christlicher Kabbala bei Abraham von Franckenberg,” in Christliche Kabbala, edited by Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, 183-197, Ostfildem: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2003. Sacchi, Mario Enrique. The Apocalypse of Being: The Esoteric Gnosis of Martin Heidegger, trans. Gabriel Xavier Martinez, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002. Sack, Bracha. “The Doctrine of Ṣimṣum of R. Moses Cordovero.” Tarbiz 58 (1989): 207-237 (Hebrew). _____. The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero. Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University, 1995 (Hebrew). Saruq, Israel. Limmudei Aṣilut, Munkács: Blayer & Kohn, 1897. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. The Ages of the World, translated, with an introduction, by Jason M. Wirth, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

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_____. Philosophy and Religion (1804), translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Klaus Ottmann, Putnam: Spring Publications, 2010. _____. Sämmtliche Werke 1804, edited by Karl Friedrich August Schelling, vol. 6. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860. _____. Die Weltalter in den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813 (Nachlaβband), edited by Manfred Schröter. Munich: Beck, 1946. Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm. Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, Band 3: 1660-1850, Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2013. Scholem, Gershom. Judaica 3: Studien zur jüdischen Mystik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. _____. Kabbalah, Jerusalem: Keter, 1974. _____. Lurianic Kabbalah: Collected Studies, edited by Daniel Abrams, Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2008. _____. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, 1956. _____. “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala.” Diogenes 80 (1972): 164-194. _____. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, Edited by Werner J. Dannhauser, New York: Schocken, 1976. _____. “Rabbi Israel Sarug: A Student of Luria?” Zion 5 (1940): 214-243 (Hebrew). Sefer ha-Pel’iah. Przemyśl: Zupnik, Knoller, and Hammerschmidt, 1883. Sefer ha-Zohar. 3 vols. Edited by Reuven Margaliot, Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978. Shaw, Gregory. “The Chôra of the Timaeus and Iamblichean Theurgy.” Horizons 3 (2012): 103–129. _____. Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Shuchat, Raphael. “Ṣimṣum Taken Literally—An Investigation into the Thinking of Emanuel Ḥai Ricci and R, Solomon Eliasov.” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 37 (2017): 271-301 (Hebrew). Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. Schürmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Shatil, Sharron. “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-Cordoverian Encounter.” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011): 158-187. Taubes, Susan A. “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism.” The Journal of Religion 34 (1954): 155-172. Trawny, Perter. Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Trouillard, Jean. “Note sur proousios et pronoia chez Proclus.” Revue des études grecques 73 (1960): 80–87. _____. “Procession néoplatonicienne et création Judeo-Chrétien,” in Néoplatonisme, mélanges offerts à Jean Trouillard, 1–30, Fontenay-aux- Roses: Les Cahiers de Fontenay, 1981. Wolfson, Elliot R. Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. _____. Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. _____. “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson, 101-163, London: Routledge, 2002.

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_____. A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination, New York: Zone Books, 2011. _____. Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. _____. “Gottwesen and the De-Divinization of the Last God: Heidegger’s Meditation on the Strange and Incalculable,” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology, edited by Mårten Björk and Jayne Svenungsson, 211-255. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. _____. “Heidegger’s Seyn/Nichts and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof: A Study in Comparative Metaontology,” in Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited by Micha Brumlik and Elad Lapidot, 177-200. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. _____. “The Holy Cabala of Changes: Jacob Böhme and Jewish Esotericism.” Aries—Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018): 21-53. _____. Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. _____. Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. _____. “Nequddat ha-Reshimu - The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit.” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013): 75–120. _____. “Nihilating Nonground and the Temporal Sway of Becoming: Kabbalistically Envisioning Nothing beyond Nothing.” Angelaki 17 (2012): 31-45. _____. “Not Yet Now: Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking,” in Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic Thinking, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, 127–193. Leiden: Brill, 2015. _____. “Patriarchy and Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Klaus Hermann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, with the collaboration of Alex Ramos, 1049–1088. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. _____. “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, edited by Brian Ogren, 15-50. Leiden: Brill, 2015. _____. “Via Negativa in Maimonides and Its Impact on Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah.” Maimonidean Studies 5 (2008): 393–442. _____. “Zeitliche Entzweiung und offenes System: Die Atonalität der Kabbala und Heideggers anfängliches Denken,” in Martin Heidegger: Die Falte der Sprache, edited by Michael Friedman and Angelika Seppi, 121-167. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2017. Wright, George. Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes, Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. Wyschogrod, Edith. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, second edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Zarader, Marlène. The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Zohar Ḥadash. Edited by Reuven Margaliot. Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978.

Adam Lipszyc

Taking Space Seriously: Tehiru, Khora and the Freudian Void It is rather clear that the idea of tsimtsum was one of the key notions in Gershom Scholem’s conceptual universe. This is true in at least two respects. First, tsimtsum was a crucial category in Scholem’s description of the contemporary world and the contemporary status of revelation. Second, tsimtsum was a crucial category in his understanding of Jewish theology as such. The former, perhaps more interesting, complex of ideas has been analyzed in detail by Irving Wohlfahrt.1 Here, it is the latter issue that I want to address briefly in order to define my starting point. Scholem’s grand historical narrative includes a series of strong and controversial propositions concerning the very structure of Jewish theology, many of which focus on the idea of creation in general and on the idea of tsimtsum in particular. These propositions inform the way Scholem presents the history of Jewish mysticism and the history of specific concepts in Judaism. They remain more or less implicit in most of Scholem’s historical writings, but they come to the fore in his two “unhistorical” pieces, namely Ten Unhistorical Theses on Kabbalah and Reflections on Jewish Theology.2 On the basis of these two crucial texts, I would like to present what one may call Ten Scholemian Theses on Tsimtsum. The first three of them are the following: Thesis 1. Judaism cannot survive without the idea of creation, the gist of which is the separation between God and the world. Thesis 2. The idea of creation does not make sense if it is not meant as creatio ex nihilo.

1 Irving Wohlfarth, “Haarscharf an der Grenze zwischen Religion und Nihilismus”. Zum Motiv des Zimzum bei Gershom Scholem, in Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (ed.), Gershom Scholem: Zwischen Disziplinen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995), 176–256. 2 Gershom Scholem, Reflections on Jewish Theology, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 261–297; Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala, in Judaica 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), 264–271. Important, quasi-normative statements on the idea of creation can be also found in Scholem’s essay Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes, in Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 53–89. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-008

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Thesis 3. The idea of creatio ex nihilo does not make sense if it is not understood in terms of tsimtsum. The first two of these statements are neither controversial nor original and they would be accepted by most of Jewish theologians. Thesis 3 is certainly more controversial, but it is rooted in a tradition which seems to begin – as I have learned from Christoph Schulte’s great book on tsimtsum  – with Yosher Levav by Emmanuel Chai Ricchi (1736).3 However, this is not all. For if the idea of separation and thus the idea of creation can be understood only in terms of tsimtsum, then Scholem has to take a radical position in the age-old controversy concering the literal or metaphorical nature of tsimtsum, a controversy that Christoph Schulte reconstructs so carefully in his book: Thesis 4. The idea of tsimtsum must be understood literally and not metaphorically; any metaphorical understanding of tsimtsum is either a thin disguise for its literal understanding or, worse, a disguise for a pantheistic reading which ruins the idea of creatio ex nihilo. This point, however, if followed to its most radical conclusions, results in a point that Scholem identified with the Sabbatian theology and that he quite explicitly accepted4: Thesis 5. The idea of tsimtsum should be understood as affecting Ein-sof itself; thus, due to tsimtsum, which posits a negative moment in the divinity, God cannot be seen as identical with himself. The next point seems to be rather idiosyncratic and thus of lesser importance, but it demands our full attention. Namely, if tsimtsum is the only proper way of expressing the idea of creatio ex nihilo, then the idea of tsimtsum must have been implicitly present in any notion that successfully expressed the idea of creation even before Luria. Thus: Thesis 6. The idea of tsimtsum was already embedded in the notion concerning the strict separation between Ein-Sof and the first sefirah (keter or ayin), a separation without which the idea of Creation is reduced to the idea of Emanation and thus ruined in its essence. This thesis is far from obvious. It is one thing to say that this separation is necessary in order to save the transcendence of God and the idea of Creation as such, i.e., in order not to reduce Creation to Emanation, an idea which Scholem

3 Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014), 227–234. For Scholem’s own explicit articulation of this statement see Reflections on Jewish Theology, 283. 4 Scholem, Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala, 267.

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explicitly despises. It is quite another to say that the idea of the separation follows the logic of tsimtsum. Now, Scholem does make this stronger claim as he points out that the passage from Ein-Sof to keter/ayin is in fact the passage from full being to full nothingness and thus a full-fledged tsimtsum.5 However, this argument implicitly contains an even more important statement. Namely, Scholem claims that this passage from being to nothingness contains (in an infinite condensation) everything that follows in the drama of creation, i.e., the coming-intobeing of all the multiple orders and strata of the created world. Thus, this passage is a liberation of multiplicity, a liberation which finds its full expression in the very idea of tsimtsum: “By positing a negative factor in Himself, God liberates creation,” writes Scholem. However, the dark side of this liberation is an unavoidable rift present in every created thing, a rift clearly visible for one whom Scholem calls “a pious atheist”: “The void is the abyss, the chasm or the crack which opens up in all that exists.”6 It is clear, then, that Scholem is utterly unable to think of the liberated multiplicity of the created things otherwise than in terms of the catastrophic breaking of the vessels. Thus, we arrive at the next point: Thesis 7. The idea of shvirat ha-kelim is already embedded in the idea of tsimtsum; in other words, you cannot have tsimtsum without catastrophe; for if anything appears in the void created by the act of contraction, it must be internally broken; otherwise, it would be divine and thus tsimtsum would be undone; in other words, no created thing can be identical with itself. Furthermore, the idea that God’s non-self-identity posited by tsimtsum liberates a multiplicity of broken, non-self-identical things of the created world, results in the two following theses on the question of representation.7 Thesis 8. The second Commandment should be understood not as a prohibition, but as a statement of impossibility of representing the divine; as such, it is equivalent to the idea of tsimtsum, for if tsimtsum is a fact, then no created thing in the non-divine void can fully represent the divine; if it could, it would be divine. Thesis 9. No thing of the created world can be fully represented, either, but not because it is divine, but precisely because it is not; if something is to be represented it must be self-identical and no created thing is. 5 Scholem, Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala, 267–268. For Scholem’s most explicit rejection of the idea of emanation see ibid., 269–270. 6 Scholem, Reflections on Jewish Theology, 283. Perhaps it is worth pointing out that for Nachman of Bratzlav tsimtsum, which creates the godless space, is both (in Christoph Schulte’s words) “the condition of possibility of creation, but also of the real atheism.” Schulte, Zimzum, 277. 7 For the textual basis of the following two propositions, see Scholem, Reflections on Jewish Theology, 280.

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Finally, this sefirotic system of propositions finds its fulfillment in the malkhut of the tenth thesis. In the fourth of his Ten Unhistorical Theses on Kabbalah Scholem claims that kabbalists may be seen as “mystical materialists of a dialectical bent.”8 Scholem’s own argument supporting this claim is that the Lurianic logic of tsimtsum and shvirat ha-kelim requires a material substratum in the divinity. This, however, is not to be read in terms of a naturalist claim that everything, including God, is made of a material substance. Such a crude naturalism has nothing to do with dialectic and with the idea of creation. Rather, I suggest that Scholem shows how the very idea of tsimtsum enables us to become better materialists than any naturalist can ever be. The meaning of this materialism is grasped by the following, final proposition: Thesis 10. The idea of tsimtsum implies radical materialism; such materialism escapes Platonism as well as naturalism, both of which imply the belief in a stable structure of the world, which can be immanently known – and thus both can be seen as forms of idealism, self-conscious and inadvertent, respectively; radical materialism is to be understood less in terms the ultimate substance of the world – although matter does matter – and more in terms of the anti-idealist belief in the essential non-self-identity of all things; in order to be a proper materialist, you have to believe in tsimtsum. Now, I am aware of the fact that this final thesis is the result of a radical interpretation of Scholem’s thought, a reading which brings him close to the conceptual realms of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Derrida. Leaving Adorno aside,9 I would like to focus on the latter connection, i.e., the one between Scholemian tsimtsum and Derrida’s thought. However, I am less concerned with the explicit references to tsimtsum and the kabbalah in general that appear here and there in Derrida’s writings – such as a reference in an important, early essay on Edmond Jabès or a passage in Dissemination10  – and more with his meditations on the Platonic concept of khora.

8 Scholem, Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala, 266–267. 9 For the definition of dialectical materialism as an anti-idealist metaphysics of non-identity in Adorno’s work (with a crucial reference to Second Commandment), see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1975), 193–207. 10 “Negativity in God, exile as writing, the life of the letter are all already in the Cabala.” Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1978), 74. For an explicit reference to tsimtsum, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981) 344. I am grateful to Agata Bielik-Robson of the Franz Kafka University of Muri for drawing my attention to the latter reference.

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Reading Derrida’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus against the background of the traditional debates on creatio ex nihilo shows the full originality of his interpretation. It is rather well known that the models of divinity and the world’s coming-into-being bequeathed by ancient philosophy were highly problematic from the point of view of monotheistic religions. Scholem was just one among many to point out that Neoplatonism with its vision of the One emanating everything else without any need for an additional substratum was, in fact, a false friend of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, not only because it excluded the idea of creation being a voluntary process, but mostly because it cancelled the crucial separation between God and the world. At best, Neoplatonism permitted one to think of creatio ex nihilo as a creation out of divine Nothingness, which is just a fancy name for emanatory pantheism.11 As we have seen, according to Scholem, the point of the distinction between ein sof and ayin/keter was to avoid this very danger.12 Resorting to the original Platonism as a remedy for this problem seems at first rather extravagant: true, the demiurgos seems to be a person endowed with divine will, but apart from the forms (which we can always – as has been done – locate in the divine mind), there is always the question of that strange additional substratum named khora whose independent existence seems to exclude any thought of creatio ex nihilo. However, this is precisely where Derrida’s reading is of much help. As he points out, it is simply wrong to follow Aristotle in his reading of khora as hyle, as a material substratum of the making-of-the-world.13 Khora is not a substance. It is, indeed, a very strange element of the structure of the universe, a triton genos, which is neither sensible nor intelligible, neither a phenomenon nor a form.14 As a receptacle for the imprint of the forms, it is necessary for the phenomenal things to appear and hence for the Platonic dualism to constitute itself. However, being the third element, it also dismantles this dualism at the very moment of its constitution. This is not just the question of counting the number of the world’s ultimate elements. For if khora is needed for the phenomena to appear, then if the phenomena are to be what they are – i.e., something different from the forms – khora must both link the phenomena to and radically separate them from the forms. But this means that while giving rise to the phenomena, it must also subvert their identity, make them non-identical with themselves, for a phenomenon which is identical with itself is a form. But if so, 11 Gershom Scholem, Das Ringen zwischen dem biblischen Gott und dem Gott Plotins in der alten Kabbala, in: Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, 9–52. 12 Scholem, Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala, 367–368. 13 Jacques Derrida, Khora, trans. Ian McLeod, in: On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 127. 14 Ibid., 89–91.

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then Platonism is really deconstructed at its very origin, for the phenomena, in order to exist, have to be catastrophically broken and hence not really subsumable under the general categories defined by the forms. Thus, khora gives rise to the phenomena and deconstructs them at the same time. “Indeconstructible” in itself, it is the very “spacing of deconstruction,” a realm of “infinite resistance” against any organizing gestures.15 But if khora is not hyle, then what is it? It is a space which provides room for the phenomena. However, it is a peculiar kind of space  – in fact, the only one which truly deserves that name. It is “a third kind” also in the sense that it escapes what Henri Lefebvre defined as the double illusion concerning the nature of space: the illusion of transparency which reduces space to a geometrical construct and thus to the realm of forms; and the realistic illusion which reduces space to a physical container and thus to the realm of the phenomena.16 Indeed, the two aspects of the illusion may be related to the two forms of idealism I have defined in thesis 10: the straightforward idealism which reduces everything to forms and the inadvertent idealism disguised as naturalism which assumes the self-identity of material things and the presence of a logos in the world of phenomena. The idea of khora as the space that spaces the phenomena and cracks their identity while providing room for them enables us to avoid the double reduction of space, a reduction which tries to do away with its uncanny, deconstructive strangeness. But if all this is true, then it is hard not to take the next step. For in his analysis of Sabbatai Horowitz’s understanding of tsimtsum, Christoph Schulte points to the element which – precisely like Derridean khora – both mediates between and separates the creator and the created: it is the tehiru, the original empty space produced as the first result of tsimtsum.17 Thus, I would suggest that on Derrida’s reading, khora is not hyle, but tehiru. Identifying khora and tehiru is a move of double effect. On the one hand, it places Derrida’s ostensibly “pagan” meditations on khora within the context of Jewish thought. On the other hand, it enables us to stress what may be seen as the most crude, but what in fact is the most primal aspect of the very idea of tsimtsum: namely, that tsimtsum means, first of all, letting the space be. Everything else, including the deconstructive catastrophe of materialist non-self-identity, should be seen only as a logical consequence of this primal move. Tsimtsum is 15 Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in: On the Name, 80; Jacques Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Samuel Weber, in: Acts of Religion (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 59. 16 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 27–30. 17 Schulte, Zimzum, 104–105.

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the proper way to think something that seems to be so simple, but is most difficult to think without any reduction: to think space – and take it seriously. Now, having linked khora with tehiru, I would like to relate them both to a third vision of space, which I derive from the psychoanalytic tradition. What I mean is something that may be called “the Freudian void,” the space which appears when the mother and the child are separated. This void appears as a result of what deserves the name of the “maternal tsimtsum” which is necessary for the child to come into being as an individual creature, but which also leaves it in a state which can be seen as parallel to a cosmic catastrophe. On the most general level, the status of the created being and the status of the infant as described by psychoanalysis can be seen as isomorphic at least in one fundamental respect: they are both separate-from-but-dependent-on or, if you will, dependent-on-but-separate-from their existential source (God and mother, respectively). This paradoxical status of the created world, which is so hard to conceive – if it is separate, can it be dependent rather than autonomous? if it is dependent can it be separate rather than epiphenomenal? – has been most natural for the theorists of psychoanalysis. More specifically, the benefits of bringing together tehiru and khora on the one hand and the Freudian void thus understood on the other are twofold. First, it can help us re-read and reorganize the Freudian universe. Second, it enables us to enrich the Scholemian/Derridean, materialist space with a libidinal and affective dynamic. From the psychoanalytic perspective, our spatial condition is the one of being inevitably misplaced, de-centered, always lacking the fundamental object. If Freud recognized that even though culture is our element, we are always at war with it, always feeling the unease, das Unbehagen, in culture, we may also speak of das Unbehagen im Raum, the unease in space, of our feeling of loss, exile and misplacement.18 From this point of view, the Freudian void is a field of affective forces, a zone filled with alluring and dangerous objects, with afterimages, anticipations and false copies of what is most important and what is always lacking. In particular, this affective dynamic of Freudian tehiru seems to be marked by three distinct moments: mourning, anxiety and desire. The subject torn apart by the predicaments of space is inevitably a mourning, anxiety-stricken and desiring subject. I would like to look at these three moments, focusing especially on anxiety. Let us begin with mourning. This is an obvious starting point, as the defining condition of the Freudian subject is that of loss of, and separation from, the

18 For a partly successful attempt to use Freudian perspective for thinking about space and geography, see Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 96–120.

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primary object, the mother who has withdrawn in the act of tsimtsum. At various stages of their development, the child resorts to a variety of strategies and activities aimed at coping with the situation, one of the crucial strategies being the practice of play. Freud tried to analyze this practice in the seminal passage devoted to the fort-da play in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.19 However, it was Donald Winnicott who developed this analysis in full – even if in a peculiar way – thus offering also the first full-fledged psychoanalytic vision of space.20 According to Winnicott, if things go well, the child is not traumatized by the void, for it is able to cope with maternal absence by playing with the so-called “transitional object” – e.g. a piece of cloth, thread or string  – which is an effective symbol of the missing mother. This object occupies the dynamic field that grows between the mother and the child, the intermediate zone which Winnicott calls “the potential space.” Remarkably enough, this space is also marked by an essential thirdness: it is neither the internal space of child’s fantasy, nor the objective physical space; rather, it is the paradoxical third sphere of play between them, filled with transitional, symbolic objects, which then extends itself into the field of what we call culture. However, this kind of thirdness is not enough to bring Winnicott’s potential space in line with tehiru and khora. Indeed, I believe it can be equated with the two latter concepts, but only if crucially modified. Moreover, such a modification would bring the potential space closer to the spirit of Freud himself. Unlike for Winnicott, for the father of psychoanalysis things can go badly or worse, but they cannot go really well: you cannot have tsimtsum without a catastrophe. In particular, what needs to be revised is Winnicott’s all-too mild vision of the transitional object as a symbol of the mother. As things stand, Winnicott’s symbols are strings that attach us to the center and hence, effectively, prevent true separation – and so we feel no Unbehagen in the cozy, homely potential space. If we are to get closer to Freud’s catastrophic imagination – and to bring the potential space closer to tehiru and its discontents – every transitional object, apart from symbolically representing the missing mother, must include the moment of mourning, the aspect of loss, the consciousness of futility of all representation. If you take space seriously, you cannot believe in the Neoplatonic symbols that offer an unbroken passage to eternity or in Winnicott’s transitional objects uncontaminated by the aspect of loss. In the space in which we live, some objects, in various ways and degrees, manage to refer to the missing existential center of our lives, but they are able to do it only in a highly indirect, broken way. If they do not incorporate the knowledge of loss, the 19 Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, in: Studienausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), 224–227. 20 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), especially 1–34 and 128–139.

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wisdom of mourning, the Scholemian crack which runs right through them, they cannot represent the transcendent. Paradoxically, they can represent it if and only if they know they cannot do so accurately.21 Thus, the humming of mournful sadness permeates the Freudian tehiru. However, another affective tune is perhaps more easily heard in this space: that of anxiety. Indeed, Freud believed that “the problem of anxiety is a knot in which the most diverse and the most important issues meet, an enigma the solution of which would throw strong light on human life as a whole.”22 In the present context, I would like to stress two important, intertwined moments of Freud’s analysis of anxiety, namely, its temporal and spatial dimensions. Indeed, there is an intriguing temporal dialectic embedded implicitly in his analysis, which makes this affect conceptually more complex than the past-oriented mourning. This dialectic can be derived, by means of an interpretative twist, from Freud’s book on Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety (1926). Here, Freud repeats his old idea that the model for all reactions of anxiety is the primary moment of birth.23 However, he opposes Otto Rank’s thesis according to which every moment of anxiety can be seen as a return to the trauma of birth and an attempt at its “abreaction.”24 There are numerous reasons for Freud’s protest, one of the most important being that Rank’s theory questions the central position of the Oedipus complex and the castration anxiety, which mattered so much to Freud. More importantly for our purposes, however, agreeing with Rank would mean reducing a highly complex vision of human anxiety and life’s temporal axis to all-too-simple a picture. Freud himself presents human life as a series of real, potential or feared separations: birth, weaning, castration, death of loved ones, etc. All of these separations can be understood as object losses: all but the first one, because – as Freud

21 In suggesting such a modification of Winnicott’s transitional objects, I am partly inspired by Hanna Segal’s vision of symbol developed on the basis of the Melanie Klein’s idea of the depressive position. For Segal, symbols are “healthy” precisely if they include the consciousness of loss which prevents them from being confused with the object they refer to. However, Segal stresses the intra-psychical nature of symbols, whereas for Winnicott symbols exist in the “thirdness” of the potential space, an idea which I find most valuable. See Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London: Routledge, 1991). 22 Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, in: Studienausgabe, vol. 1, 380. 23 Sigmund Freud, Hemmung, Symptom und Angst, in: Studienausgabe, vol. 6, 239. For an earlier articulation of this idea see Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, 383–384. 24 Otto Rank, Das Trauma der Geburt unds seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse (Leipzig-WienZürich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1924).

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insists – at the moment of birth the mother is still not perceived as an object.25 Anxiety reaction – modeled, indeed, on our reactions during birth – may appear either in a dangerous moment of separation that leaves the subject in the state of helplessness; or, as a signal of warning against a coming danger, when such a separation is anticipated.26 This distinction is perhaps rather problematic, as it may be argued that if we feel anxiety in a moment of an actual danger it is because we still anticipate something more to come. What is more important, however, is the fact that, in Freud’s analysis, all anxiety moments are marked by peculiar reference both to the past and to the future. Again: all except for the moment of birth. If we put things in order, we may see the following pattern arising from Freud’s slightly chaotic analysis. The relative and artificial unity of mother and child reestablished after birth is ultimately broken by the second act of separation, the loss of the breast. This moment serves as a repetition of something that was the primal moment of anxiety, but which was not yet an object loss, i.e., the moment of birth. It is only this repetition that retroactively establishes the moment of birth as the moment of primal tsimtsum according to the logic of Nachträglichkeit, the “afterwardsness,” developed by Freud in his analysis of the Wolf-Man, the logic of a later event establishing an earlier one as the cause.27 Moreover, it is only this very moment of the loss of the breast that establishes the full temporal dialectic of anxiety. For einmal ist keinmal and twice is infinity. If something happened twice, nothing can stop it from happening again. And so, every moment of anxiety – every new moment of the actual or expected separation, of the renewed maternal tsimtsum – is marked both by the memory of a previous separation and by the anticipation of a new loss that, as our memory teaches us, is inevitably to come. We have fallen into the Freudian tehiru and we keep on falling in the unlimited series of renewed acts of separation. Now, Freudian analysis of anxiety links it to what might be called its agoraphobic dimension. Freudian anxiety is the terror of the open space which – as we anticipate – is to be broadened again and again, each time leaving us even more helpless than before. However, it is Freud himself who points out that there is an etymological connection between the word Angst and the word Enge, narrow straights or predicament.28 In Freud’s argument, this connection supposedly strengthens the idea that during the process of birth, the baby is afraid of the approaching separation from the mother. And yet it is all too natural to suggest that if this etymology is 25 Freud, Hemmung, Symptom und Angst, 271–272, 278–279. 26 Ibid., 275–277, 299–300. 27 Freud, Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose, in: Studienausgabe, vol. 8, especially 220 and 223. 28 Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, 383.

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meaningful, then it points rather to a different spatiality of anxiety, i.e., its claustrophobic character. It was Jacques Lacan who seems to have understood anxiety along these lines. The official text of his seminar on anxiety, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, differs from the unedited typescripts in a substantial (and rather astonishing) way, but the general structure of the argument remains the same. I quote the Millerian version, adding phrases from the unedited version in square brackets: “Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast [for what is called the maternal womb] that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap [that we are going to re-enter it]. It is not, contrary to what is said, the rhythm of the mother’s alternating presence and absence. The proof of this is that the infant revels in repeating this game of presence and absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack. […] Anxiety isn’t about the loss of the object, but about its presence.”29 And slightly later, even more explicitly: “A certain void is always to be preserved […]. The disruption wherein anxiety is evinced arises when this void is totally filled in.”30 Now, I certainly do not want to take sides in this debate between Freud and Lacan. Nor am I competent to decide which version of Lacan’s sacred scripture is the correct one, even though, for understandable reasons, it would be rather good to know if the French heresiarch was actually talking about the breast or about the womb as the source of anxiety! And as, fortunately, I do not have to pledge allegiance to any of the schools or sects, I would take the liberty of suggesting that Freud and Lacan (in whatever version) are talking about two opposing, but complementary aspects – the agoraphobic and the claustrophobic – of any anxiety felt in the tehiru which appears as the result of the maternal tsimtsum. Indeed, nothing seems to be more natural than to claim that we are terrified both by the void into which we are falling as the result of the first-though-repeated separation that anticipates all the other cuts to come and by the possibility that the space will close upon us, that the maternal pleroma will reconstitute itself and erase our singular being. This double anxiety of spatial existence is the price we pay for our liberatedbut-fallen or fallen-but-liberated being in the Freudian void. 29 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 53–54. The unedited version: Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, trans. Cormac Gallagher, http:// www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Seminar-X-Revised-by-MaryCherou-Lagreze.pdf (accessed on 27 Dec 2016), 46–47. 30 Ibid., 65.

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Before I move to the final element of the affective/libidinal sequence which already appeared briefly in the quote from Lacan – i.e. the moment of desire – I would like to draw the reader’s attention to two peculiarities of the Freudian “Lurianism” I am reconstructing here. First, it is worth pointing out that the original maternal tsimtsum – which is established as such retroactively by its own repetition – the catastrophic and liberating separation, the first disappointment of our love life and the fall into the Freudian void, might be seen as parallel to the crucial split in the psyche itself. For it is only from that moment on that one can begin to think about the ego and the id as really distinct. Thus, we may perhaps venture a speculation according to which the external tsimtsum of separation is paralleled by the internal tsimtsum of the primal repression that establishes the split between the ego and the id. Moreover, it is only from that point on – once space as such exists – that Freud finds it possible or even necessary to think about the human psyche itself in spatial terms: according to him, the negotiating ego – which is also the actual locus of anxiety31 – develops on the surface, while the angry id remains withdrawn into the recesses of our psyche.32 And it is only now, when catastrophically cut off from immediate satisfaction and thrown into the treacherous space, that the drive comes into being as a distorted form of the biological instinct, which will aim at a transcendent object and will be never satisfied with what is immanently given. Secondly, the gender aspect of the Freudian psychotheology demands a commentary. In Platonic/Derridean narrative khora is a “mother” which mediates between, but at the same time separates the paternal forms from the filial phenomena.33 The gender map of Lurianic kabbalah is of course much more complex, but at least one may say that the strong connection between the emanatory light and the paternal sperm suggests a similar pattern. Now, Freudian narrative inverts this scheme: the original pleroma is maternal and it is the mother – rather than the father – than withdraws in the act of tsimtsum. The paternal element completes the separation between the creator and the created by entering between the child and the mother as the partner of the latter in the Oedipal drama. Thus, following Lacan’s identification of the father as the source of law, one might perhaps suggest that in the psychoanalytic universe the paternal law is the key source of existential stability in the Freudian void which, as we have seen, is marked by mournful sorrow and the double anxiety. The paternal law is a grid of right paths that charts the vertiginous space. Under the rule of law, instead of feeling the contradictory anxiety in every point of tehiru, we simply walk in sorrow and patience the right 31 Freud, Hemmung, Symptom und Angst, 238. 32 Freud, Das Ich und das Es, in: Studienausgabe, vol. 3, 293–294. 33 Plato, Timaeus, 50. In Derrida’s memorable phrasing: “Khora […], this strange mother.” Derrida, Khora, 124.

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paths of the father and feel the well-defined fear of straying into the zones of sin. This is what we have our superegos for: in order to transform our indefinite anxiety into an organized fear, the source of which we can then avoid. However – and this is my final point – this relatively stable space organized by the law which at least partly wards off our anxiety is never free of the element of desire. To use André Green’s elegant definition, desire  – the desire for the transcendent Other – “is the movement by which the subject is de-centered,”34 a movement only natural for an inhabitant of the Freudian tehiru. One of the ways to cope with the predicament of this transcendent desire is narcissism, which Green, again very lucidly, defines as the “desire of the One, in which all trace of desire for the Other is erased.”35 In other words, when we yield to the temptations of narcissism, we no longer need the law, for in our fantasy we have supposedly overcome the separation, the anxiety-producing space, as well as our internal splits. Now, if we resist the temptations of narcissism – i.e., the temptations of egological immanentism – we are left in a peculiar condition: we are protected by the law, but troubled by desire. Lacan rather disastrously claimed that he discovered the death drive at the heart of desire. However, he is definitely worth listening to when he states that the relationship between the law and desire is of a dialectical nature.36 Desire transcends the symbolic order of the law, but it does not exist without it. For without the law, which organizes our space and solidifies the separation, there is no longing for the transcendent object of desire, but rather the claustrophobic horror of maternal immediacy which alternates with the agoraphobic horror of maternal absence. Desire may be antinomian, but it does not strive to regress to the state before the law: rather, it aims at going beyond it. Thus, finally, we can define the aim of desire, which in this context perhaps deserves to be characterized as messianic. It should not be identified with the reestablishment of the union with the maternal or with the reconstruction of

34 André Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. Andrew Weller (London and New York: Free Associations Books, 2001), xix. 35 Ibid., xvii-xix. 36 Playfully, but brilliantly paraphrasing the passage from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans on the relation between the law and sin (7: 7), Lacan says: “Is the Law the Thing [the cause-object of desire]? Certainly not. Yet I can only know the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: «Thou shalt not covet it.» But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. […] The relationship between the Thing and the Law could not be better defined than in these terms. […] The dialectical relationship between desire and the Law causes our desire to flare up only in relation to the Law, through which it becomes the desire for death.” Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), 83–84.

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Empedocles’ sphairos of the Love that Freud fantasized about in his later writings.37 For Freud, this utopian state was equivalent to the triumph of the gathering principle of Eros over the dispersing forces of death. However, as a fantasy of loving union it is a state in which all object love seems to be sublated, thus yielding to the triumph of narcissism. Moreover, as a state which does away with all difference and separation, this narcissistic utopia would be ultimately indistinguishable from the triumph of what Green identified as “negative narcissism,” the apocalyptic victory of the death drive which undoes tsimtsum, erases the troubling, broken multiplicity of the created world and thus brings the peace of total annihilation.38 If the triumph of narcissism – positive or negative – undoes that resistant thing called space, then the messianic desire beyond the law must aim at something different. Again, desire is born within the paternal law as a protest of the subject, for whom the legal stability of immanence is not enough. It is born because the maternal has been lost, but the maternal is not its proper object. Thus, paradoxically, the messianic desire – which responds to our fundamental loss – must aim at something familiar and yet wholly new, at re-finding an object we have never really had.39 The triumph of desire would be marked by our ability to exist in space without anxiety together with the object of our desire. Alas, this truly transcendent, messianic state can be glimpsed only in fleeting moments, through the deconstructive cracks in the wall of the law. And yet, if I am right that all this happens in space that is to be understood not only as the Freudian void, but also as Derridean khora and Lurianic/Scholemian tehiru, then we may be sure that such cracks will always appear. The space, that strange, subversive element, will space the law. We only have to help it here and there.

37 Sigmund Freud, Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse, in: Studienausgabe. Ergänzungsband, 384–386. 38 “Alongside positive narcissism we need to put its inverted double, which I propose to call negative narcissism. So Narcissus is also Janus. Instead of sustaining the aim of unifying the ego through the activity of the sexual drives, negative narcissism, under the influence of Nirvana principle, representing the death drives, tends towards lowering all libido to the level zero, aspiring for psychical death. […] Absolute primary narcissism seeks the mimetic sleep of death. This is the quest of non-desire for the Other, of non-existence, non-being; another way of acceding immortality”; Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 222. 39 Drawing on Freud and Walter Benjamin’s theory of language as well as his definition of happiness as a paradoxical combination of uniqueness and repetition, I try develop and explain this messianic dialectic in my essay “The Name as the Navel: On Refinding Things We Have Never Had,” in Nassima Sahraoui and Caroline Sauter (eds.), Thinking in Constellations: Walter Benjamin in the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 31–47.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1975 (English translation, London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion, ed. Gill Anidjar, New York and London: Routledge, 2002. _____. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, London: The Athlone Press, 1981. _____. On the Name, Thomas Dutoit, ed., trans. John P. Leavey Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. _____. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1978. Freud, Sigmund. Studienausgabe in zehn Bänden mit einem Ergänzungsband, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989. Green, André. Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. Andrew Weller, London and New York: Free Associations Books, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. _____. Anxiety, trans. Cormac Gallagher, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/ uploads/2010/06/Seminar-X-Revised-by-Mary-Cherou-Lagreze.pdf (access on 27 Dec 2016). _____. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lipszyc, Adam. “The Name as the Navel. On Refinding Things We Have Never Had,” in Nassima Sahraoui and Caroline Sauter (eds.), Thinking in Constellations: Walter Benjamin in the Humanities, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 31–47. Steve, Pile. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity, London: Routledge, 1996. Rank, Otto. Das Trauma der Geburt unds seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse, Leipzig-WienZürich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1924. Scholem, Gershom. Judaica 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973. _____. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, New York: Schocken Books, 1976. _____. Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970. Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. Segal, Hanna. Dream, Phantasy and Art, London: Routledge, 1991. Winnicott, Donald W. Playing and Reality, London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Wohlfarth Irving, “Haarscharf an der Grenze zwischen Religion und Nihilismus. Zum Motiv des Zimzum bei Gershom Scholem,” in Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith, eds., Gershom Scholem: Zwischen Disziplinen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995, 176–256.

Eli Friedlander

The Retreat of the Poet in Walter Benjamin’s “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin” I would like to consider the way in which the theological problematic of tsimtsum is refracted in the poetic work, its critique and the truth it opens onto. I will do so by providing a commentary on Benjamin’s early and difficult essay “On two poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.” Let me state at the outset some difficulties this choice might present: First, it is somewhat peculiar to speak of a moment of tsimtsum in relation to the vocation of the poet in Hölderlin, since it is the Greek world that pervades his poetry. Tsimtsum clearly is not a mythological moment. The Greek divinities are precisely present in the world and can manifest themselves in their nonfinite being through it. To nevertheless avail oneself of the term tsimtsum in connection with Hölderlin presupposes at least the possibility of finding, as Benjamin does in reading Hölderlin, a critique of the mythological, even an overcoming of the mythic, and with it the emergence of what he calls an Oriental spirit that pervades Hölderlin’s poetry. A second difficulty for bringing together the divine and the realm of art concerns Benjamin’s view of the relation of the work of art and the created world, for Benjamin insists on sharply distinguishing those two registers. The work of art is made, not created. But this leaves open the possibility of articulating the space of the poetic as it were on its own terms, while leaving open the possibility of recognizing in and through it what answers to the moment of creation. This would not merely establish an analogy between the work of art and creation, but would rather ask how the work of art can open onto the dimension of the created. An account of the nature of the work of art must involve the possibility of recognizing through it a limit, internal to it, in which there is, as it were, a crossover from the sphere of the poetic to the fulfillment of the creaturely in human language. To speak of this as a limit moment means that it is reachable only from an investigation of the poetic space of the work and at the same time, it will be what the work can only open onto, and thus does not properly belong to it. Putting the matter this way allows us to make the first step into Benjamin’s essay and the important idea of the poetized.1

1 The peculiar limit position we are trying to identify, that of being inside and outside the space of thework, will be elaborated in Benjamin’s later conception of the aesthetic by providing an essential role to criticism in the realization of the work. Thus, the recognition of the moment of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-009

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The poetized is, one could say, presupposed as an ultimate ground, which the investigation of the work can exhibit, by realizing it as a recognized limit of its inner, constructed, form. Benjamin also calls this presupposition of the poem its a priori. It is its necessity to exist, or, one could say, it is what in it bears witness to necessity in existence, to the highest existence. The poetized is a limit concept, therefore it touches upon the outside of the poem, which is life. But this is not an emergence onto the space of unformed life or lived experience. Rather, since the poetized is recognized in the utmost poetic forming, life can receive through it its highest intelligible articulation. Benjamin’s procedure in the essay is peculiar insofar as he does not engage in the interpretation of a single poem, but is rather concerned with the consolidation of the poetized in a transition from an early to a late version of a poem, entitled, respectively, “The Poet’s Courage” and “Timidity.” The transition between the two versions can be characterized initially as doing away with immediate figuration. Benjamin calls the first version ‘mythological,’ insofar as it appeals to and relies on already available figures of Greek mythology, thus on what can be called pre-figurations. Since the identity of the divinities pre-exist the relation that is to be established to them in the poem, that relation in turn can only be external. The second version, in contrast, is described as rigorously adhering to a presentation of individual unities solely through the intensification of relatedness within the space of the poem. Benjamin refers to the higher logic that governs this identification of substantive elements in the convergence of series of functional characterizations, as the Law of Identity. This is, one might surmise, an echo of Schelling’s understanding of the mirroring of absolute identity in the interpenetration of the ideal and the real in art. Benjamin’s concept of the poetized can be therefore further characterized as exhibiting the standpoint of absolute identity through the intensification of relatedness. The poetized would be the “intelligible-intuitive [geistig-anschaulich] structure of the world that the poem bring forth”2 (SWI, 18). creative life within the work of art will be, in later texts of Benjamin, attributed to a possibility of critique, rather than set as a task of the poet. It will involve what Benjamin calls the actualization of the creative in the afterlife of the work. In that respect the early text on Hölderlin, and perhaps also the position of Hölderlin for Benjamin, is unique. As is suggested also in the appendix to “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Hölderlin holds a place that is not properly elaborated either in the identification of critique and fulfillment in Romanticism, or in the uncriticizable character of Goethe’s classicism. Hölderlin can truly occupy both the place of poetry and that of critique. 2 All references to Benjamin’s work will be provided in the text following the quotation, according to the following abbreviation: SW1 – The Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, vol.1 edited by Howard Eiland, Gary Smith, Michael Jennings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

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Original or absolute Identity, one should bear in mind, is not inert sameness, but rather the identity of the infinitely affirming and the infinitely affirmed. The poetic forming that would be true to that ultimate presupposition, would primarily involve the weaving of space and time.3 The construction of intelligible-intuitive interpenetration of essential content as symbol, would first and foremost be manifest as a poetic schematism of space and time. This poetic schematism would be distinguished from contingent determination as mere succession in time or the co-existence of parts in infinitely extended space. Space and time will be involved in different ways in bringing out the substantial identity of every one of the ‘domains’ of beings of the poem. We can identify three such distinct domains or ways of being that crystallize through the poetic intensification of relatedness: the living (which are also known as “mortals”), the heavenly ones, and the poet. The very fact that they can only be recognized in their interrelation problematizes the traditional hierarchy that places heavenly ones as being of self-sufficient origin and the living as wholly dependent on those higher orders. The living and the heavenly ones are brought equiprimordially to manifestation in the poem. Benjamin figures this reciprocity as a balanced scale on which “the orders of gods and men are curiously raised up toward and against each other. The one balanced by the other. (Like two scales: they are left in their opposing positions, yet lifted off the ground)” (SWI, 25 translation modified). The two sides are kept separate and opposed but are raised or brought to reciprocal manifestation by the relatedness that the poet establishes.4 Consider, to start with, Benjamin’s understanding of how this plays itself out with respect to the living in the poem. We call a contingent determination of

3 So as to try and suggest the importance of space, say, think of the way in which already for Kant, the standpoint of identity, which he calls the ideal (or the intuitive intellect), is modeled on our sense of space. The relation of the infinite and the finite, the determining and the determinable, is to parallel that of space as an infinite given whole to a delimitation of that space. That is, all finite determination is ultimately to be recognized as a delimitation of the unique infinite or absolute identity. It is this character of taking the limited to be a delimitation of what is an absolute identity that establishes the prevalence of space and time in the emergence of substantial unities out of relationships in the poem. 4 This figure of the scale is later used by Benjamin to express how the infinite plurality of the living is what can bring out the discrete multiplicity of the order of ideas constellated. And the recognition of the order of ideas raises or redeems the plurality of the phenomenal. See Benjamin’s Arcades: “All historical knowledge can be represented in the image of balanced scales, one tray of which is weighted with what has been and the other with knowledge of what is present. Whereas on the first the facts assembled can never be too humble or too numerous, on the second there can be only a few heavy, massive weights” (N6,5).

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space a “situation” (Lage), and a contingent determination of time an “event.” But time and space can come together as a fit in the happening of a situation. This would be expressed in Hölderlin’s poem by the term opportune (Gelegen), that is, by the peculiar spatio-temporal character of an opportunity (Gelegenheit). Opportunity is neither captured in objective, extensive, terms as a specific fact, nor reducible to that which would fulfill a subjective tendency in inner sense. A situation does not present an opportunity in and of itself, but rather it becomes an opportunity only for the one who has the presence of mind to take it. Conversely, the conditions for something being a fortunate fit, can never be predicted subjectively, for they are not reducible to the abstract characterization of pre-existing goals or aims for whose fulfillment an object is sought. That an opportunity is unpredictable means that it can only be recognized in its concrete reality. Hölderlin figures the extensive spatio-temporal expanse of the living made into an environment of opportunity as a carpet on which the poet steps. A carpet consists first and foremost of threads that hold together by criss-crossing, as warp and woof, thus figuring poetic work as a weave of tightened relatedness, a concentration of relationships. The carpet is also a surface onto which the poet steps and which, as it were, allows free movement in any direction. This freedom means that each such step is in the right, or is opportune. Benjamin further suggests how this is implicit in the pattern one finds in a carpet. For the ornamental pattern brings together the arbitrariness of choice or the splitting of the ways that one has in its linear elements, as well as the sense that whatever way is taken, it would ultimately unfold freely and fittingly based on a deeper ground. The recognition of the pattern is, one might say, the emergence of the whole within which the choices are made and directions taken, thus the recognition of a ground of actuality of the possibilities merely opened by the will that chooses. The latter, wherever they go, or whatever the choice is, all come back to being part of the pattern. Through the figure of stepping onto the carpet, the poet’s existence in the extensive space of the living is thematized. For the poet, one might say, every step is an opportunity to bring out of the extensive endless multiplicity of people, each existing through the arbitrariness of the will that chooses, an order, a pattern or a fundamental orientation, for the living. This order that is revealed can be called the emergence of destiny in the space of the living. Benjamin thus points to the duality of active and passive in the word “geschickt” (connected to the term destiny “Schicksal”) in the last verse. It can be read both as expressing that the poet is being sent into the expanse of the living, as it were passively determined by a task allotted to him, and how he stands secure in that space by being skilled

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for some end, actively transforming its contingent happenings into an order of destiny for the living.5 Since all in the poetized is reciprocal relationship, these themes of the gait, the existence of the poet in the expanse of the living, and the emergence of determinate boundaries as an order of destiny, will be further deepened in Benjamin’s investigation, until we reach the emergence of the full poetic space. This intensification of meaning is already evident in the way in which the poet exists in relation to the heavenly ones. Destiny is indeed the presence of the infinite in the finite. Thus the manifestation of the order of the infinite is not disjoint from the relationship of the poet and the living. It literally reveals a further dimension, internal to the emergence of the expanse of life as destined. It is the connectedness of the living with the heavenly through poetry, that allows them to exist in a configured space of destiny. This higher measure of the expanse for walking through the addition of a dimension is presented in an astonishing figure of verticality, or of what allows the uprightness of the living: “Our Father/ the god of heaven,/ Who grants the thinking day to poor and rich,/ Who, at the turning of time, holds us, who pass away in sleep,/ Drawn erect on golden/ Leading strings, like children.” Strings of light bind the living to the heavenly. Drawn leading strings, just like the weave, are wholly relationship. The poet is the agency of binding, and he does not appear in the traditional role of the mediating hero, as so to speak a messenger bringing to mere mortals intimations of the divine. The realization of the law of identity in the dimension of the heavenly, just as in the order of the living, is expressed through a spatio-temporal unity of determining and determinable. If the surface or carpet was a paradigm for the expanse of the living, here

5 The planar or surface character through which Hölderlin relates the poet and the living is given a further twist by Benjamin, as he writes: “… a planar unity of the people with its poet (in the poetic destiny) is once again the conclusion. Now, depersonalized, the people appears (may we compare this with Byzantine mosaics?) as if pressed in the surface around the great flat figure of its sacred poet.” (SWI, 28) The figure of the mosaic is not only interesting in suggesting further the Oriental quality that was already implied in the majesty of the expanse of life as a carpet to stride. The poet is merely the limit or boundary that makes the multiplicity of the living appear, as it were in a perspicuous overview, as a determinate image. The image is constituted by the living brought together as an order. In other words, it is no more the poet that steps into the space of the living and whose every step or encounter with the living is an opportunity, but rather he retreats in favor of the emergence of a formed space at all for the living. It is significant to note the central place that the mosaic will occupy in Benjamin’s later ‘Epistemo–Critical Preface’ to the Origin of the German Trauerspiel. There it serves to express how the presentation of truth takes the character of an original image (archetype), emerging out of the endless multiplicity of contingent phenomena.

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the addition of a dimension leads to a concern with plasticity. And, just as the plane or the surface was figured as an expanse of opportunity, plasticity should be taken as an expression of the fulfilled, the blissful that is restful in itself. Restfulness and repose, characteristic of beauty in the work of art, are attributes of the eternal, of that which is one with itself. In contrast to the ‘stepping forth’ of the poet into the extensive and proliferating expanse of the living, the repose of plasticity places the poet in the realm of eternal forms or of ideas. The possibility of conceiving a higher notion of plasticity as fulfilled identity makes clear that it is not to be understood only spatially, as inert threedimensionality. Time partakes in that intelligible-intuitive determination as the unity of the day. Whereas the first version speaks of the “joyful day,” the second version calls it the “thinking day,” relating the day to the origin of thinking in the realm of ideas. And if the joyful day is granted, Benjamin notes how the thinking day is ‘conceded’ (gönnt). The first version is thus based on the mythological idea of the day as a gift of the gods. That is, it is to be understood through the register of excess and abundance experienced in joy. Joy in the freely granted would be, in the early version, the mode of partaking in the manifestation of the heavenly. Yet, the language of the gift would retain the hierarchy of a plenitude that offers itself bountifully in moments of joy for those who are limited. ‘Conceding’ opens a wholly different register. It expresses first that the heavenly are themselves, bound, in the bind of poetry: the poet brings the heavenly, just like the living, to establish the poetic configuration of a world. Conceding is, furthermore, very close to begrudging (which is used not only to speak of withholding or not giving, but also of giving begrundgingly, that is, without really wanting to, as if being forced or conceding). This proximity of the positive and the negative will be apparent in all aspects of the manifestation of the heavenly. So as to bring out the significance of this transformation, consider further whether the day is to mean only daylight or rather that which we call the day to day, and which involves both day and night, or light and darkness. If we think too literally of the relation of clarity to plastic presence we might be tempted to identify the day with daylight that gives things their clearest outlines (as in noontime where shadows retreat altogether and things rest wholly in themselves). But note that the poem speaks of the “turning of time”; this expression is essential for understanding what plasticity comes to. For time is not just conceived, as with the living, in terms of striding forth, but as involving a turning back or inward, which belongs to the very possibility of manifesting self-standing identity. Were we concerned with human capacities, this turn would express how the return of memory is essential to things achieving their highest intelligibility. But, ontologically speaking, obliviousness and the turn of recollection come together in the day as that which returns or repeats, in short, what is called the everyday.

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The plasticity of the idea is recognized in the poet’s ability to concretize and make clearly delimited the everyday, to which the living are for the most part oblivious. It is in the actuality of the everyday that the world is recognized through the discrete multiplicity of the order of the idea. The gait of the poet which was essential to establishing his place in the expanse of the living, thus receives a further meaning, for walking is what most expresses the prosaic character of human activity. Not for nothing is the ordinary or everyday also called the pedestrian. But establishing in this manner the centrality of the everyday also makes clear the kind of proximity of presence and withholding that we recognized in the language of “conceding the day.” That is, the proximity of the manifestation of the idea and its occlusion is essentially expressed in the repetition inherent in the everyday. For the everyday is both what veils itself, through its repetitive character (as such we call it the average, or the uneventful and dull), but it is also what we cannot hold to, and whose value must therefore be repeatedly recognized. Already in the first version we had a vision of the poet attuned to the “fleeting” and “ephemeral” in life. But the second version brings out how that passing away in which the self-same idea is present is the other side of the dull repetition of the everyday. To underscore this, Benjamin quotes a line from Hölderlin’s Chiron which establishes the intrinsic duality of shining forth and turning away in contemplation: “Where are you that contemplates, that must always/ Go to one side at times? Where are you Light?” (SWI, 30) To bring out from a different angle the duality of veiling and clear radiance in the manifestation of the idea, note the following dissonance in the figure of vertical binding: even in the clarity of day the living need to be held upright by rays of light because they are referred to as those “who pass away in sleep.” Sleep could refer to the obliviousness of everyday existence. But it is also veiling that allows the completeness that belongs to the idea to be intuited: “The deepest identity of form,” Benjamin writes, “is present (in sleep).” He also quotes at this point a fragment of Heraclitus: “Indeed, in waking we see death, but in sleep we see sleep.” Selfidentity only appears as veiled, which is to say that veiling, as would characterize the dream, is internal to the intuition of that which rests blissfully in itself.6 This dimension of semblance internal to our sense of completeness suggests further that the manifestation of the heavenly is not the moment of highest actuality in the poem. The center of the poem belongs to another, and as hinted in the fragment from Heraclitus, its sobriety or wakefulness, will be identified with death.

6 This is what is most powerful in the character of semblance of the beautiful: “Beauty is not a semblance, a veil covering something else. It itself is not appearance but purely essence – one which, of course, remains essentially identical to itself only when veiled.”

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The register of death can already be sensed in Benjamin’s characterization of the poetic bringing forth of the heavenly ones. The golden leading strings against the ground of infinite space have for him something like a “killing (or deadening) effect.” He further notes how the heavenly become present as dead form, and how the vault of heaven has the character of buried (or coffined) plasticity. An adequate interpretation of these enigmatic formulations should follow from the proper understanding of how the heavenly ones are concretizations of ideas. Thus the reference to the sky should at the outset be contrasted with the classical presentation of the gods as plastic symbols in Greek sculpture. In the latter case they are ideally formed individuals, identified through particular attributes and perfected capacities. But in Hölderlin’s “Timidity,” that which matches the delimitation of the life-world in the everyday is the architectonic plasticity of the vault of the sky. The idea is not inert being, but a power that underlies reality. Through the poetic bond, the intensity of manifestation is completely turned into the concrete delimitation of everyday extension. This is the reason why Benjamin now calls it “dead form.” The identity of the opposition of the intensive (the idea as force) and the extensive (the everyday as delimited) is expressed in the plastic figure of the vault of heaven as having the character of what is turned inside out: “the plastic dimension is turned inside out, and now the god becomes wholly an object” (SWI, 32). The sky is for the living that outside, the external extension, identical to the inner intensity, which is the idea as force. Infinite intensity is manifest by being transferred onto the unity of the infinite expanse of the sky. One could also say that the infinite intensive force of that order is completely manifest and completely “covered up” by the infinite extension of the sky. It is in this sense that something is “buried” in the vault of heaven, that the sky has the character of “buried plasticity.” Benjamin also refers to this turning inside out as a hubris of the heavenly. The heavenly ones relinquish ruling power, by fulfilling completely their own principle, that is, the power of forming. The reference to dead form and buried plasticity is something we must now trace to its ultimate source in the poem, which is tantamount to recognizing the poet in the poetic world. For strictly speaking the poet will have no place in that world. The poet is the concentration or center of the world conceived as a nexus of relationships. The intensive concentration of relationships is identical to the opening of an expanse in which the elements emerging from that relatedness are held in measured balance, as it were fully separated in and through their relatedness, each occupying its own place. The term ‘concentration’ suggests a retreat to a vanishing center of what opens as a delimited circumference. Put schematically, that retreat of the poet to a point without extension is the very condition of

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opening the space in which the living and the heavenly can be brought together, yet separated by clear boundaries. The concrete identity of the world of the poet will be predicated on his vanishing from it, or, one could also say, on his detachment from it. The title of the second poem “Blödigkeit,” “Timidity,” may serve initially to characterize how retreat is correlative to the emergence of an open expanse. The timid one retreats into himself out of a sense of exposure, or, to use the words of the poem, like a “solitary wild beast” (ein einsam Wild) reduced to immobility in the open. But this also presents a puzzle. Indeed, how exactly are we to understand this stance of utter passivity in the open as what truly constitutes the courage of the poet. It is not as though Hölderlin changes his mind and sees the poet not as courageous but rather as timid. The transformation of the title from “The Poet’s Courage” to “Timidity” should point to a higher realization of the stance of courage. To recognize this, it would be necessary to bring out more clearly the sense in which there is a danger that the poet faces. Once again the difference between the two versions provides a key: The first, mythological, version of the poem takes the poet’s own death to be what threatens. It stands as a power opposed to, and destructive of, his creative life. The poet’s capacity to draw force and courageously face that ultimate limit is expressed in the first version by an analogical identification with the sun god who disappears in beauty.7 “His purple flood awaits him, takes him, too,/ Where the hour comes – look! And the noble light/ Goes, knowing of change,/ With equanimity down the path.” “Thus pass away then, too, when the time has come/.” The beauty of the passing, of transience, would be the consoling moment that allows the poet to face death. But a tension emerges, for the life of the poet is devoted to beautiful forming, and yet with the conception of death as the disintegration of what is formed, beauty itself becomes formless, a purple flood. If, as expressed in the next lines, “the spirit nowhere lacks its right,” death too must be, poetically speaking, a moment of spirit, pertaining to form. As long as the poet and death were set apart, death was conceived as threatening to the poet’s creative life. This antithesis of life and death in their externality to each other is overcome in the second version, where death is introduced into the very possibility of configuring spirit. Death is the innermost moment of poetic existence that configures the world. Rather than being a moment of conciliated dissolution in beauty, it belongs to the very emergence of the articulated

7 Note that this is an analogy and is to be distinguished from the space of relationships of the second version whose center the poet is. See in this context Benjamin’s fragment “Analogy and Relationship.”

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delimited poetic world, which Benjamin now calls a dead poetic world. There follows a repositioning of all the fundamental terms: danger, death, courage and overcoming.8 “Courage,” Benjamin writes, “is the life feeling of the man who surrenders himself to danger so that in his death he expands the danger to the world and at the same time overcomes it.” Danger is now that which threatens the living, and the threat is in their expanse being penetrated throughout by infinite forces. It is a field of perverted manifestations of the infinite in the finite: a field of fate, guilt, and misfortune, rather than a world in which orientation, destiny or opportunity appears. (The word Schicksal can mean both the guilt-context of mere life as well as the fortunate vocation in destiny.) In other words, what we earlier characterized as the bringing forth of the heavenly in the concretization of the everyday, must be reconceived as that through which is overcome the danger inherent in these very forces manifesting themselves as threatening ambiguity. One might say that the poetic has the capacity to transform life ruled by fate, into an order of the existence of the living where fundamental orientation or destiny emerges. The plastic concretization that establishes clear limits is not merely the overcoming of the dullness or averageness of the everyday, but rather emerges from struggle in the field of life as a decentering of forces. And it first of all demands making danger reach the world at all. Think of this peculiar logic along the following lines: Even though fateful life repeats the suffering of a fallen everyday, the danger in this guilty existence does not become concrete for the living. The existence of the living in danger is their existence in a field of unknowing repetition, and their suffering is the carrying of an unlocalizable burden. The fallen character of their existence is its being steeped in ambiguity. Ambiguity doesn’t even allow the concretization in which the contradictions of such existence can be recognized. It is in that sense that Benjamin speaks of “the immense forces which everyday, in the form of bounded things, surround the body.” The moment of concretization which was essential to the understanding of the bringing forth of the heavenly is the centering of all the forces that are manifest as fatal in unformed everyday existence. The danger only becomes visible as a danger to the existence of the living through the heroic poet, which now is merely the inert center of this environment saturated with danger. Thus concretization makes present infinite forces in the space of the living. It is the bringing forth of danger to the world and at the same time, its overcoming (or the

8 In the first version, Benjamin writes, “the danger of death was overcome through beauty. In the later version, all beauty flows from the overcoming of danger.”

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binding of the forces in balance, or their centering): “In his death, however, it is overcome; it has reached the world, which it no longer threatens. In it is liberation and at the same time stabilization of the immense forces which everyday, in the form of bounded things, surround the body. In death these forces that threatened the courageous person as danger have already abruptly changed, are calmed in him.” And Benjamin relates this moment to the earlier discussion of the heavenly when he adds, “This is the concretization of the forces, which already brought the essence of the gods closer to the poet.” One could say that the very same forces that are danger in the chaos which is life as a field of fate, are in the poetic delimitation and concentration held in balance and are calmed, or achieve the repose of the fulfilled plasticity of the everyday in its essential configuration. This predicament is what truly positions the poet at the vanishing center of the world opened by the poem. Submission to danger is complete passivity at that center. The injunction that opens the poem receives thereby a new meaning: The poet has no care, or is absolutely safe, by having no possibility whatsoever (what Benjamin calls in the figure of the tragic hero “dying of immortality”). This center is truly the origin of the delimitation of beauty in death. “It is evident,” Benjamin writes, “that death, in the form of ‘homecoming’ (Einkehr), was transposed to the center of the poem; that in this center lies the origin of song…” (SWI, 34). The retreat of the poet was hinted at in earlier moments of what Benjamin identifies as his depersonalization. They culminate in the caesura of the last stanza: “When we come with art, and bring one/ From among the heavenly beings./ Yet we ourselves/Bring suitable hands.” The poet is said not only to bring the heavenly but also his hands. My body is precisely what I do not bring (we say, “bring yourself over here,” but we wouldn’t add, “and don’t forget to bring your hands too”). What creates the caesura is the sense that the poet’s own corporeal existence has become for him one of the concrete presences in the world. It no longer marks a privileged position for himself in the world. The poet becomes mere limit, or is the delimitation of the world that he brings forth. His detachment is correlative with the emergence into the truth of the poetized. Such detachment is the perfection of the work. It expresses the proper objectivity of the poem, where it opens onto an articulation of the space of life as spiritually delimited. The emergence of the poetized in bringing suitable hands is the release of the work from the hands of the maker. It opens onto the articulation of life, not of the life of the poet, for whom there is no possibility whatsoever, but of the space of the living. This is the most explicit Oriental moment in this elaboration of the poetic through the forms of the Greek world. For centering is precisely the unique identity. It is the oneness presupposed and expressed as the harmony of the essential multiplicity of the heavenly, or of the mythic world and its gods. It is, one would say, the monotheistic moment and its presence in the poem is precisely

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mirrored in the retreat of the poet. As Benjamin concludes, the objectivity that is established is “the distance that the poet ought to have from all form and the world, as its unity. The structure of the poem confirms the insight of these lines from Schiller: ‘Therein consists … the true artistic secret of the master: he eradicates the material reference through the form … the sensibility of the spectator and listener must remain completely free and inviolate; it must emerge from the artist’s magic circle pure and perfect as from the hands of the Creator’” (SWI, 35).

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. _____. The Origin of German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. _____. Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings, vol. 1, edited by Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings and Gary Smith, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Benjamin Pollock

“The Kabbalistic Problem is not Specifically Theological”: Franz Rosenzweig on Tsimtsum To hear Rosenzweig tell it in The Star of Redemption, before God is to be fully actualized as the “One and All” in the redemptive future, God has to endure repeated struggles with His own nothingness. God must first generate Godself as an “element” out of His own particular nothing, in a process through which God’s elemental freedom “is born out of the original negation of the nothing,” while God’s substantiality emerges through “the affirmation of the not-nothing, circumscribing as the inner limit the infinity of all that is not nothing.”1 Upon having attained a certain stability as elemental God at the end of the Star’s first part, however, God must then reverse back into a nothingness of a certain sort in order to be able to advance towards complete self-actualization: “If [the elemental] God were to go out beyond his vitality already here achieved and become the living God of life, then the result attained up till now on the path from nothing must itself again become a nothing.”2 It is only in the ultimate redemption, finally, that God attains to a factuality that is at last secure from this recurring “fall back into nothing.”3 But as those who have perused the Star know, God isn’t the only being who must endure such bouts of standing “face-to-face with the nothing”4 before arriving at self-actualization. Self and world – their separate paths of self-actualization are likewise described as requiring sustained struggles with their own respective nothings.

1 Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1996), 31, 29. 2 Stern, 42. 3 Rosenzweig writes that “only that which eternally comes, the kingdom,” i.e., redemption, is “factual in the full sense,” and “only the fact is secure from the fall back into nothing” (Stern, 269–70). For a developed account of the relationship between factuality and nothingness in the Star, see Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially, 167–68, 203–204, 213–14, 230–33. 4 Cf., Stern, 4: “It is well necessary that the human being step out once in his life. Once he must take down the precious vial full of devotion; once he must have felt himself in his terrifying poverty, loneliness and torn-ness from the whole world, and for one night long be stood eye-to-eye with the nothing.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-010

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But are self and world truly independent of God in the Star? Or is God in fact the only true being in the Star, and hence the only being to actualize itself through reversals out of nothingness? In this paper, I will examine a number of different instances of Rosenzweig’s use of the notion of tsimtsum, but from the outset I want to flag this question – how many beings in fact are there? – as the most important question that arises when we think about the myriad applications of the notion of tsimtsum in the Star and in Rosenzweig’s thought, in general. That the question of the independence of self and world from God should arise in the context of a discussion of tsimtsum is hardly accidental. Gershom Scholem often presented tsimtsum precisely as the Lurianic response to the question of how the creation of an independent world can even be conceived given the assumption of the infinity of God. “Luria begins by putting a question… How can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is ‘all in all,’ how can there be things which are not God? How can God create the world out of nothing if there is no nothing? This is the question,” writes Scholem, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.5 We can thus reasonably expect that Rosenzweig’s views about the relations among God, world, and human beings will be expressed in his use of the notion of tsimtsum. Investigating Rosenzweig’s use of tsimtsum may confirm that Rosenzweig’s view regarding the independence of the world and selves from God changes dramatically during the years in which Rosenzweig develops the insights which eventually crystalize in the Star. Or it may show instead – Rosenzweig’s own protests to the contrary notwithstanding – that Rosenzweig’s thinking doesn’t change all that dramatically in the years leading up to the writing of the Star and, as a result, that some of his more brazen claims to have broken with traditional philosophy remains unjustified. Rosenzweig appears to have engaged in very little direct study of Kabbalistic texts.6 But quite early on in the development of those thoughts that he would later

5 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1974), 260–61. 6 In Gershom Scholem’s oral response to papers given by Moshe Idel and Ze’ev Harvey on Rosenzweig and Kabbalah on May 1, 1980, published together with Scholem’s handwritten notes as “On Franz Rosenzweig and his Familiarity with Kabbala Literature,” Naharaim 2, 1 (2012): 1–6, Scholem offers an educated guess regarding the extent of and the form of Rosenzweig’s familiarity with Kabbalistic texts and ideas. Scholem rejects the possibility that Rosenzweig may have learned Kabbalah with Nehemiah Nobel (although he gives no reasons for this claim). On the other hand, he suggests it probable that Rosenzweig acquired some basic knowledge of Kabbalah from secondary sources like Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews, Erich Bischoff’s Die Elemente der Kabbalah (Berlin: Barsdorf, 1913); and Philip Bloch’s Die Kabbalah auf ihrem Höhepunkt und ihre Meister (Pressburg: Alkalay, 1905) as well as Bloch’s contribution on Kabbalah published first in the third volume of J. Winter and A. Wünsche, eds., Die jüdische Litteratur seit Abschluss des Kanons (Trier: Mayer, 1893) and then later, independently, as Geschichte der Entwickelung

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systematize in the Star he identified the kabbalists as his intellectual predecessors – along with Schelling – in thinking about divine contraction.7 The different essays in this volume make it abundantly clear that there are competing images of what exactly tsimtsum is meant to describe – a contraction? a withdrawal? – and we might note at the start that Rosenzweig is not particularly choosy when it comes to making use of such competing images. Thus he speaks with equal ease of divine self-restriction, of divine interiorization, of reversals within the divine, and of divine self-negation, and he makes use of an array of images of contraction and expansion in the Star.8

der Kabbala und der jüdischen Religionsphilosophie kurz zusammengefasst (Trier: S. Mayer, 1894). Rosenzweig possessed copies of all but the Bischoff in his personal library. See “Bibliothek von Franz Rosenzweig vor 1933 angeschafft…,” Franz Rosenzweig Nachlass, University of Kassel Library, A46. 7 Moshe Idel suggests that the “affinity between some of Schelling’s views and kabbalistic literature” coupled with Schelling’s “profound influence” on Rosenzweig’s thought presents “a major stumbling block” for any attempt to evaluate the direct influence of the kabbalah on Rosenzweig’s thinking. See Moshe Idel, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah,” in P. Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Hanover/London: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988), 162. 8 We’ll explore the different meanings of tsimtsum appropriate to the different uses Rosenzweig makes of the term in what follows. But it is perhaps worth noting that the sources on Kabbalah from Rosenzweig’s personal library that make mention of tsimtsum define the term diversely as “contraction,” “restriction,” and as “concentration.” Thus, Graetz describes Sod Ha’Tsimtsum as “the doctrine of the self-contraction [Selbstcontraction] of the Godhead,” Geschichte der Juden vol. 9 (Leipzig: Leier, 1891), 410, note 1. Bloch identifies tsimtsum as the “self-restriction [Selbstbeschränkung] of God for the good of the world,” in Die jüdische Litteratur seit Abschluss des Kanons, 283, and likewise explains, in his Kabbalah auf ihrem Höhepunkt und ihre Meister (36), that “God, who is all existence and contains all that exists within Himself must, in order to permit to the world-idea a creative unfolding, contract Himself into Himself [sich in sich selbst zusammenziehen  – literally, “drawing Himself together into Himself”] and therewith make an empty space and release it, in which the ideas can develop and activate an independent existence. This is the doctrine of Zimzum, of God’s self-concentration, with which Luria enriched the Kabbalah, without our being able to demonstrate exactly why he created this new original thought.” Curiously, in a footnote on the same page, Bloch corrects his own assertion from Die jüdische Litteratur seit Abschluss des Kanons (283) that it was Cordovero who first put tsimtsum to kabbalistic use. Bischoff’s Elemente der Kabbala – which Rosenzweig did not possess in his library but which Scholem suggests Rosenzweig most likely read – does the most out of the secondary studies at Rosenzweig’s disposal to get at the different contours of the image, describing the “doctrine of Zimzum” as “of the ‘Contraction’ [Zusammenziehung] of the Absolute, of Its self-concentration or self-restraint [Selbsteinschränkung], or one could well also say: of Its ‘becoming concrete!’ … The meaning of the root ‘z-m-m’ is that of contracting-in-oneself, and thereby at once of an increase in density (thus a becoming ‘compact’ or ‘concrete’) while at once a decrease in volume; the infinite thus comes to finite, determined, tangible appearance!” (19).

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I will highlight three themes in the discussion of which Rosenzweig employs images of tsimtsum. We will thus explore Rosenzweig’s use of the term 1) as a way of explaining the possibility of human freedom under conditions of monotheism (in which case divine self-restriction is central to Rosenzweig’s conception of revelation); 2) as a way of illustrating the move that the elemental God, world, and self must undergo in order to enter into those reciprocal relations that ultimately will lead to redemption (in which case tsimtsum finds expression in Rosenzweig’s method of “reversals” [Umkehrungen]); and 3) as a way of indicating the relationship between the Jewish people and Christianity, the proper balance between which makes it possible for readers to see the ultimate Star in its entirety. But the question of whether beings in the world, i.e., beings other than God, are truly distinct from God to the extent to which Rosenzweig at times would have us believe – this question lurks in the background throughout this essay.

I There is evidence in the notes Rosenzweig sent home from the warfront in 1916– 1917 – collected together as his “Paralipomena” – that the war years marked a period of philosophical transition for Rosenzweig, as he moved from a dualistic position of world denial towards the account of developmental monism he would eventually work out in the Star. Although by 1916 Rosenzweig had rejected Gnosticism and was committed to the view that there is one God and that all beings participate in a single path to redemption, it nevertheless still appeared to him that there are some questions that are easier to answer on Gnostic grounds, such as the question of evil or of the possibility of acting against divine will. If Rosenzweig was to maintain his newly-minted commitment to monotheism, he had to answer a number of questions for himself: how are human decisions and actions to be understood if we assume a single divine source of heaven and earth? What significance could human actions have, given the assumption that the one God is the ground of everything? In a number of letters and notes in the “Paralipomena” from 1916, we find Rosenzweig thinking about this problem of human actions under the conditions of monotheism. The view that emerges from these notes collectively may be summarized as follows. Contrary to dualist accounts of self and world, the freedom of the self is in fact to be grounded in revelation and creation together. Space for human freedom has been opened up by an act of divine self-limitation intended, from the beginning, to complement the divine creation of the world. The purpose of the created world is wrapped up in the capacity human beings have for free

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decision. And it is the very situatedness of human decision within a historical course that begins in creation which grants that decision its significance. I’ve traced the development of this new position Rosenzweig formulates in 1916 in some detail elsewhere9; here I want to highlight one particular note from the “Paralipomena” in which Rosenzweig makes use of the notion of tsimtsum to articulate that position. In this note, from January 29, 1916, Rosenzweig writes: He who does not simply ignore the ethical (thus he who doesn’t pantheize), he is compelled to posit a restriction [Beschränkung] in God Himself. As metaphysician, he will then posit evil as independent counter-divine power and misplace [verlegen] the restriction already in the first concept of God. Or he can maintain the “first” concept in the utmost purity, but then must posit the restriction itself as a “second” [concept]: revelation. So – once the consideration of the ethical is assumed – creation (i.e., the denial of all hyle) is the necessary correlate of revelation. Since now the ethical can only be eliminated by force (because it is posited through the subjective side of thinking together with the thought of the true), so in fact there is only the alternative of either positing God as restricted (thus not as God) or as self-restricting (thus revealed). Tertium non datur. And for this reason it is rightly said of the pagans that they “know nothing of God”; the Aristotelian let there be one Ruler only makes God into the Lord but not into the Origin of hyle.10

Rosenzweig’s musings in this note center around this question: how can the possibility of human action be reconciled with an all-powerful God? Rosenzweig’s response is that the “ethical” realm of human action can only be maintained if God is conceived as limited or constrained. Rosenzweig entertains two ways of conceiving of such divine limitation. There is, first of all, the route of the Gnostics: one can ground God’s limitation metaphysically in an “independent counterdivine force,” like the devil or an independent demiurge. Although noting this as a coherent alternative, Rosenzweig here rejects this metaphysical dualism as a “misplacement” [verlegen] of the restriction required for thinking human action into the very concept of God itself. But it is the other alternative that captures Rosenzweig interest: one can reconcile the possibility of human action with the concept of an all-powerful God, if that God is conceived as “restricting itself” through revelation, and thereby clearing space for the human being to act ethically. Revelation  – God’s entry into a relation of love with human beings – is depicted here as an act of divine

9 Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 84–96. 10 Franz Rosenzweig, “Paralipomena,” Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften III: Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken [Zweistromland], edited by Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 63.

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self-restriction that clears space for moral action.11 Rosenzweig grasps revelation here, that is to say, as tsimtsum. Tsimtsum is conceptually necessary not to explain creation  – i.e., to explain the nothingness within which the world has been created – but rather to explain the possibility of freedom in a created world. But the important and perhaps counter-intuitive consequence Rosenzweig draws from these considerations is that the possibility of human action under this alternative depends not only on revelation alone, but rather “once the consideration of the ethical is assumed, creation (i.e., the denial of all hyle) is the necessary correlate of revelation.” Why does Rosenzweig conclude that the realm of the ethical can only be reconciled with God if one posits creation and revelation together? I think Rosenzweig answers this question as follows. Only if God is grasped as the absolute ground of all that is can God’s self-restriction and revelatory call be conceived as making human selfhood and free action possible. For as long as the world is conceived as grounded in something other than God – whether it be in “matter” or in a counter-deity – human action will always be rooted causally in either of two metaphysical grounds, either in the good God or in matter/evil. Only if God is first conceived as the creator of all, and then conceived as restricting God’s own being, is space opened up within which there is no metaphysical grounding and hence within which human beings can freely determine their own actions. For revelation to do its job – i.e., to awaken its recipient to her free selfhood – revelation must come from the God who is the sole “Origin of matter.” It is not enough for revelation to come from one Lord among many. Said differently, the possibility of human freedom depends on the presupposition that the world is a place amenable to free, ethical action. And the world can be thus conceived only if it has been created by the same God who awakens human beings to freedom through revelation. On November 18, 1917, nearly two years after writing his note about divine self-restriction, Rosenzweig writes an intricate letter to his cousin, Rudolf Ehrenberg, known today as the “Urzelle” of The Star of Redemption. In it, Rosenzweig develops his ideas about the relation between divine contraction and human

11 On the use of the image of tsimtsum in German Idealist accounts of reciprocal recognition, wherein the summons to the free other is shown to involve an act of self-limitation, see Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Kabbalistic Realism: Summons as zimzum,” in G. Gottlieb, ed., Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 92–116. See also Israel Koren, “Martin Buber’s Dialogistic Interpretation of the Doctrine of ‘Tsimtsum,’” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 71 (2002), 225–247, for an exploration of the parallel claim that tsimtsum grounds the possibility of dialogue between God and human being, and between I and Thou, in Buber’s thinking.

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freedom in distinctly Schellingian terms.12 It is in this context that Rosenzweig likewise makes explicit reference to the revolutionary kabbalist Isaac Luria13: Just as there “is” a God before all relation, whether to the world or to Himself, and this being of God, which is wholly unhypothetical, is the seed-point of the actuality of God, which Schelling, on whom (and on Hans) you must naturally have perpetually thought, calls the “dark ground,” etc., an interiorization of God, which precedes not merely His self-externalization, but rather even His self (as the Lurianic kabbalah teaches, so far as I know).14

Rosenzweig’s insistence that there is a seed-point of actuality prior to reason (what Rosenzweig will call the “Always-Enduring” in the Star), and his distinction within this seed of actuality between God’s being and God’s self, draws, as Rosenzweig himself notes, on the thought of the late Schelling. Rosenzweig identifies this train of thought with the teachings of the Lurianic kabbalah, although confessing he doesn’t know much about the kabbalistic sources. Here Rosenzweig alludes to a conception of tsimtsum as an act of interiorization.15 Divine contraction is conceived as a divine act of drawing back inside Itself, akin to something like recollection on the intellectual plane,16 which Rosenzweig claims must precede the externalization or actualization of divine selfhood.17 12 On Schelling’s own reception of the notion of tsimtsum, see Jürgen Habermas, “Dialectischer Idealismus im Übergang zum Materialismus  – Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee der Contraction Gottes,” Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1980), 172–227, and Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 296–323. For a recent account of affinities between Schelling’s late kabbalah-influenced developmental metaphysics and Peircean views of evolution and explanation, see Paul Franks, “Peirce’s ‘Schelling-Fashioned’ Idealism and ‘the Monstrous Mysticism of the East,’” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23, 4 (2015): 732–55. 13 As Moshe Idel points out, Rosenzweig had likewise proposed in his epistle on Jewish education from March, 1917, “It is Time,” that Judaic studies teachers be given the option, in their last year of training, to gain exposure to the study of the Zohar and Lurianic kabbalah, thus suggesting Rosenzweig himself had at least some basic familiarity with these texts. See Moshe Idel, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah,” 166. 14 Franz Rosenzweig, “‘Urzelle’ des Stern der Erlösung,” Zweistromland, 128. Translated in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, P. Franks and M. Morgan, trs. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 56–57. 15 On tsimtsum in the “Urzelle” as a kind of interiorization, see also Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014). See also note 29 below. 16 The Grimm Deutsches Wörtebuch, at http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemma=verinnern, lists “verinnern” (“interiorize”) as an older variant of “erinnern” (“recollect”). 17 In “Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah,” 167, Idel writes that “This relationship [of God to Godself] appears only in the process of contraction, and the relationship of God to the world is expressed in the process of emanation after the contraction.” On Rosenzweig’s notion of tsimt-

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sum as interiorization, see Zev Harvey, “How Much Kabbalah in the Star of Redemption,” Immanuel 21 (1987), 131: “It seems to me that Rosenzweig’s phrase “internalization of God” reflects the Lurianic term zimzum (commonly translated “contraction”), although I am not certain just how Rosenzweig’s concept is related to the Lurianic doctrine of zimzum (or at least to what Rosenzweig might have understood to be that doctrine).” Harvey notes that when Scholem responded to his paper, originally delivered in 1980, he “expressed doubt that “Verinnerung” would be used as a translation of zimzum” (131, n. 12). Indeed, in Scholem’s 1980 comments on Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah, he claims that “certainly the simple meaning of tsimtsum for kabbalists was: how could something which is not God [be] if God did not contract Himself to make place for it?” Scholem proceeds to question Rosenzweig’s implication that the notion of tsimtsum designates a divine act of self-interiorization. Scholem thus claims Rosenzweig’s understanding of tsimtsum in terms of “interiorization” [Verinnerung] is “a very curious misuse of the original symbol, which was not a symbol of internalization in spirituality.” Given that Scholem never developed his comments for publication, they should be taken with a grain of salt. But his criticism does also appear to go hand-in-hand with his regular insistence that Kabbalistic tsimtsum (in contrast to Midrashic tsimtsum) be understood as a divine “retreat away from a point” rather than as “the concentration of God at a point” (Major Trends, 260), that “kabbalistic contraction” “is not the concentration of God’s power in a place, but its withdrawal from a place” (“Zimzum: Contraction,” Kabbalah [New York: Penguin/Meridian, 1978], 130). Although there are certainly numerous Kabbalistic texts that describe divine withdrawal through the term tsimtsum, many likewise present contraction and withdrawal as two sides of the same act. Indeed, even the examples Scholem himself brings to illustrate the concept don’t abide by his one-sided definition. Thus, immediately after offering the above distinction in Kabbalah, Scholem describes tsimtsum as a process that involves both contraction into a point, and a subsequent withdrawal away from it. Scholem describes how “when the primal intention to create came into being, Ein-Sof gathered together the roots of Din, which had been previously concealed within Him, to one place, from which the power of mercy had departed. In this way the power of Din became concentrated. Zimzum therefore was an act of judgment and self-limitation, and the process thus initiated was intended to continue by means of a progressive extraction and catharsis of the power of Din that was left in primordial space…” (130). The literature since Scholem has, in any case, suggested the term has connoted a far more diverse array of meanings across the kabbalistic tradition than Scholem granted; and it has questioned both the originality of Luria’s account of tsimtsum (encouraged, in fact, by questions Scholem himself raised) and the sharp division Scholem posited between Midrashic and Kabbalistic notions of tsimtsum. See Paul W. Franks’ contribution to this volume: “The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on Zimzum,” 35–53. For a sense of the nuance in contemporary scholarly discussions of Kabbalistic tsimtsum, see, for example, Moshe Idel, “On the Concept of Zimzum in Kabbalah and its Research,” [Hebrew] Jerusalem Studies on Jewish Thought 10 (1992): 59–112; Dalia Hoshen, “Zimzum and Rabbi Akiva’s School: Kabbalah and Midrash,” [Hebrew] Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah 34 (1995): 33–60; Bracha Zak, “R. Moses Cordovero’s Doctrine of Zimzum,” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 58, 2 (1989): 207–37; Boaz Huss, “Genizat Ha-Or in Simeon Lavi’s ‘Ketem Paz’ and the Lurianic doctrine of Ẓimẓum,” [Hebrew] Jerusalem Studies on Jewish Thought 10 (1992): 341–61; and Jonathan Garb, “The Kabbalah of Rabbi Joseph Ibn Sayyah as a Source for the Understanding of Safedian Kabbalah,” [Hebrew] Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 4 (1999): 267–89.

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What most interests me in this context, however, is how Rosenzweig proceeds to describe this act of divine interiorization: I now assert that everything that proceeds between the Absolute and the relative “before” it is revelation, and everything between the Absolute and the relative “after” it is nature, world, or whatever you want to call it. … While the Absolute definitely stands in “relation” to the relative after it, it is essential for the relative before it that the Absolute stands to begin with in no relation to it as such. Rather, this relative stands, for the time being, as crooked, lopsided dust and ashes, but even so on its own feet; it is no B that first secures its permanence through the “=” sign, rather it has its “=” sign already in itself and asks after no A. It is B=B. But the A asks after it. The “dark ground” would never give birth to the Godhead but would rather doze along eternally in its dull B=B; but God can produce himself out of it and only out of it, out of this truly undivine wanting-to-be-itself B=B. The mere “interior” of God is still unfruitful; first the interiorization, first the descent of God, in His own depths is “beginning.” … A becomes active against B=B, until this, as B=A, of itself recognizes its dependence on it.18

What we have here, first of all, is a depiction of revelation in terms that are similar in important ways to the account of revelation Rosenzweig will later develop in the Star. Revelation occurs here between the Absolute and a particularity which, despite its being particular, has a kind of grounding within itself. In the Star, Rosenzweig will identify this self-grounding particular as the elemental human self. But already here  – as in the Star  – it is identified as “B=B,” to indicate that despite its particularity (“B” for “das Besondere,” i.e., particular), it is identical to itself, serving as its own ground. God awakens this self, calls it in revelation, by addressing this particular being as “You” and commanding love, thereby summoning the individual self to her capacity for free activity and relation: His I is dull and dumb and awaits the saving word from the mouth of God: “Adam, where are You?” in order that the first, hesitant, timid I of shame reply to the first unhesitating You asking after him. … In the I of revelation and in the You of conscience in its questioning, or of command, and responding in Adam’s I of shame or in Abraham’s readiness, and back again in the I of repentance and in the You of prayer and in the I of salvation.19

It is revelation once again, here in the “Urzelle” as it was in Rosenzweig’s 1916 note, which makes human freedom possible through a kind of divine self-limitation.

18 Rosenzweig, “Urzelle,” Zweistromland, 129; Philosophical and Theological Writings, 58–59. 19 Rosenzweig, “Urzelle,” Zweistromland, 131; Philosophical and Theological Writings, 61–62.

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Rosenzweig proceeds to suggest that such an idea should be astounding from the perspective of the world: Revelation says: Do my will! Carry out my work! So it’s a presupposition that God’s own, God’s will, God’s work, is entrusted to man, so that he may carry it out. What a paradox is that, seen from the standpoint of the world! The highest, instead of demanding our devotion, devotes itself to our very selves; instead of raising us to its height, it lowers itself down to us … . Thus through revelation, man becomes capable of his own devotions to the ideal.20

God’s command to human beings entails a paradox from the side of the world for it suggests that God’s work is entrusted to human beings, and that to that degree it is they – and not God – who are tasked with actualizing divinity. That is to say, God’s command to human beings is that divine act of self-restriction which Rosenzweig had claimed two years before was the condition for human freedom. And yet the most remarkable element of Rosenzweig’s account of revelation here – certainly for those accustomed to Rosenzweig’s account of revelation in the Star – is that the whole of this process of God calling the human self to actuality, awakening the human self to her capacity for free action through a command that places the keys to God’s car in human hands  – the whole of this process is depicted as occurring within God’s act of self-interiorization! In the “Urzelle” version, revelation in the full sense of the divine call to awaken the human self to I-hood through love just is God’s act of tsimtsum, God’s drawing back into God’s own depths. The revelation of God to human beings occurs within God. And thus the Absolute’s call to B=B is both a call to the individual human being with the capacity for freedom, awakening her for redemptive action in the world; and it is at once God’s interiorization into the divine “dark ground,” God’s descent into His own depths.21 Now, when we read the “Urzelle,” as Rosenzweig suggests we should, on the background of Schelling’s adaptation of tsimtsum, this picture is not all that surprising. For when Schelling makes use of the distinction between the “ground” and the “existence” of God, in The Essence of Human Freedom, in order

20 Rosenzweig, “Urzelle,” Zweistromland, 133–34; Philosophical and Theological Writings, 64. 21 Stéphane Mosès understands the divine of tsimtsum and its relation to the human being in slightly different terms, claiming that “Man is thus at the same time within the Absolute and outside it: the locus of his existence is the empty space that the Absolute has carved out of its own substance. … It seems as if God was freely depriving himself of a part of his own being so as to enable man to exist outside him. It is this negation of God’s self for man’s benefit that will define the Revelation in The Star,” System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, C. Tihanyi, tr. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 42.

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to differentiate his account of the relation between God and particular beings from pantheism, he likewise posits the grounding for particular beings in a divine ground which is as yet “not God Himself”: In order to be separate from God they [things] would have to become in a ground that is different from Him. But since there can indeed be nothing outside of God, this contradiction can only be solved insofar as things have their ground in that which, in God Himself, is not He Himself, that is, in that which is ground for His existence.22

It is precisely this rooting of the human being in the divine ground in such a way that does not amount to an immediate identification of the human being with the divine self, according to Schelling, that makes possible human freedom for good or evil, and thereby distinguishes Schelling’s account from pantheism. Thus Schelling claims that… … the will of man is the seed, hidden in eternal longing, of the God who is as yet at hand only in the Ground; the divine glimpse of life enclosed in the depths, which God saw when he grasped the will to nature. In him (in man) alone has God loved the world, and just this image of God is what longing grasped in the center, when it stepped over against the light. Man has, insofar as he comes into being out of the Ground (is creaturely), an independent principle in itself relative to God. But insofar as just this principle – without it thereby ceasing to be dark according to the Ground – is clarified in light, there at once arises that which is higher in him, spirit. … Now in that the soul is the living identity of both principles, it is spirit; and spirit is in God. Were now the identity of both principles just as indissoluble in the spirit of man as in God, then there would be no difference, that is, God as spirit would not be revealed. That unity which is inseparable in God must thus be separable in man – and this is the possibility of good and evil.23

Rosenzweig’s account of divine self-interiorization and human freedom in the “Urzelle” surely echoes the view Schelling presents here. According to Schelling, the human being is to be conceived as a seed of God within the divine ground, independent of the divine self, on the one hand, and as such the recipient of divine love through God’s act of reflecting back into His own depths. Insofar as the human being brings his own independent principle into the divine light, thereby becoming spirit, the human being becomes identical to God. But the fact that the human being’s independent principle is not spirit without further ado – that it must be actualized in light in order to become spirit – is, for Schelling, an

22 F.W.J. Schelling, “Die Philosophischen Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,” in K.F.A. Schelling, ed., Sämmtliche Werke I.7 (Stuttgart: Cota, 1860): 359. 23 Schelling, “Die Philosophischen Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,” 363–64.

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expression of human freedom, of the human potential for both good and evil. And the revelation of divine spirit is understood here as the process through which God’s act of love directed towards the human being in the divine depths calls that human being to decide between an ultimate unity with the divine, i.e., the good, and the dissolution of that unity, i.e., evil. Reading the “Urzelle” on the backdrop of Schelling’s account of God and human freedom thus may give the appearance that Rosenzweig is making an unremarkable proposal when he describes the revelation that awakens the human self to freedom as an act of divine interiorization. But this suggestion should indeed be surprising for those of us who take seriously Rosenzweig’s critique of the philosophical tradition and his proposed alternative philosophical starting point at the beginning of the Star! There, as we’ll recall shortly, Rosenzweig rejects the assumption that All is One from the beginning, and posits instead three different nothings – of God, of world, and of self – as the starting points for his system, none of which is to be reduced to the other, each of which constructs itself out of its own nothing. At the end of the “Urzelle,” as Rosenzweig reflects back on what he has written, he even intimates that this change – from the Schellingian position to the position which the beginning of the Star introduces – may have occurred to him in the act of writing this very letter. Thus Rosenzweig notes, “From a certain point on, B=B means exclusively humans: during the relatively awkward development it still also means the translogical actuality, the transpersonal Godhead.” At the beginning of the ruminations of the “Urzelle,” Rosenzweig here suggests, B=B means not merely the human being who stands on his own feet, but at once that divine ground which is not yet identical with the divine self, which has not yet been actualized through the dialectic of reason. But this changes over the course of the “Urzelle,” perhaps suggesting that Rosenzweig is already beginning to see the call to B=B as a call that is no longer simply identical to divine interiorization, but should be conceived differently, as the relation between a commanding, loving, and hence self-restricting God and an independent particular human being.

II In the Star, Rosenzweig does not present God as the only being who goes through a process of self-limitation that opens up space for the free actions of others. The Star begins not with a divine infinity which limits itself to make space for the world, but rather in difference. Instead of beginning to philosophize with a “one

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and universal Nothing,” Rosenzweig insists that “wherever a being element of the All rests in itself, indissoluble and always-enduring, for this being it is valid to assume a nothing, its nothing.”24 From this starting point, God, world, and self are shown to be three elemental beings irreducible to and independent of one another. Through the course of the first part of the Star, God, world, and self all construct themselves as elements out of their respective nothings. But the being (or factuality) which these particular elements attain by the end of the book’s first part remains fragile, hypothetical. In order to attain the certainty of their being, God, world, and self must enter into “unambiguous relation” with one another, stepping thereby into the one course of world time. Doing so demands that all three elements undergo a kind of tsimtsum. Elemental beings undergo what Rosenzweig calls “reversals” [Umkehren or Umkehrungen] in order to become points in a course of reciprocal relations that leads from creation through revelation to redemption. In this context, Rosenzweig’s earlier account of divine self-limitation for the sake of human freedom, in which the relation of love and command sets the fate of the divine in human hands, is now implied to be simply one example of a process which every elemental being must undergo in each of its relations with its others. Each must give up its own elemental completeness in order to attain actualization through relations with others. Rosenzweig depicts the reversals from completed elemental beings to points in the relational course of actuality in a number of interrelated ways that recall the notion of tsimtsum, three of which I want to highlight here. 1) Becoming Nothing. In order to develop into actual beings through relations, the completed elements must first become “nothings” again, that is, nothings out of which their respective actual being can emerge. In creation, for example, both elemental world and elemental God – each fresh from having generated itself out of its own nothing! – must become nothings once again in order to make the relation between them possible. Of the course the world thus takes from element to creation, Rosenzweig writes, “should the figured world itself once more become Nothing in order to represent the ‘Nothing’ out of which the world is to be created? So it is.”25 And of the step God would have to take in order to leave the realm of myth and become, as creator, the God of life, Rosenzweig claims, “If God were to go out of his vitality already achieved here and become the living God of life, then the result attained up till now on the path from Nothing must itself again become a Nothing, a

24 Stern, 23, 22. 25 Stern, 132.

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starting-point.”26 Such a return to nothingness may be conceived, I think, as a move of contraction or intensification, on the part of the element, which then allows each elemental being to extend out of itself into relations.27 2) Becoming Past. In order for the substantial and the subjective forces within each element to be revealed in time, each’s elemental identity is described as being drawn back temporally into a kind of eternal past. Here, divine contraction is conceived as a pulling back from the elemental “result” into a “beginning” of the actual. According to Rosenzweig, The forces, which flowed together ultimately in the results, act of power and necessity of fate in God, birth and genus in the World, defiance of will and character in Man – these forces are thus not forces of visible actuality, but rather … secret forces beyond all our visible actuality, dark powers, which are at work in the Inside of God, World, Man, even before God, world, man – are revealed. But their becoming revealed then turns all those secret forces-of-construction into the past, and makes that which itself appeared to us up to now as result, into beginning.28

We may describe the way tsimtsum functions in this passage in different, even competing ways. On the one hand, the becoming-past of the elemental constructions and the becoming-actual of God, world, and self are described as one and the same act: revelation in actuality just is the concealing of the elements into the past, the contracting of elemental result into beginning of the actual. On this description, the contraction and expansion of tsimtsum appear like two sides of the same coin.29 But I think Rosenzweig’s 26 Stern, 42. Elliot Wolfson has noted this way in which the divine movement into creation in the Star mirrors Lurianic tsimtsum: “The kabbalists, like Rosenzweig, perceive that creation is dependent on delimitation, which implies, therefore, that expansion and contraction, egression [hitpashtut] and regression [histalkut], are not mutually exclusive antinomies,” “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997):76. 27 Compare Daniel C. Matt, “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism,” The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy and Mysticism, ed., Robert Forman (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 121–159, esp., 134–39. 28 Stern, 96–97. Cf., Elliot Wolfson, “Light Does not Talk but Shines: Apophasis and Vision in Rosenzweig’s theopoetic Temporality,” New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, A. Hughes and E. Wolfson eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 115: “In a manner similar to many kabbalists, though likely indicating the influence of Cohen as well, Rosenzweig clearly differentiates between the beginning and the origin: the former denotes a temporal moment, the point of creation of something from nothing, in contrast to the latter, which is before any temporal demarcation, the creation before creation…” 29 One strain of Cordoveran tsimtsum seems to designate just this two-sided activity. Considering views of the “Fire and Spheres” parable in Pardes Rimonim (Gate 4: “Substance and

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constructions allow us to see things in an alternative way. Once our perspective is that of participants in the actual relations between the elements, relations we can conceive of as extending between actual beings, then the whole story of the first part of the Star, the respective self-constructions of the elemental God, world, and human being, may be viewed as movements of interiorization without which such extended relations between actual beings would not be possible.30

Instruments,” Chapter 9) as an account of tsimtsum, Yosef Ben Shlomo distinguishes between Cordoveran and Lurianic tsimtsum, and writes: “it is clear even at a first glance that there is no tsimtsum here in the sense of Lurianic kabbalah. To the contrary, the En-Sof doesn’t withdraw in order to make possible the process of emanation. Rather, It activates the quintessence of this process. The first act according to Luria is negative, while here it is positive. Indeed, according to the rule, ‘revelation is cause of the concealment and the concealment is cause of the revelation,’ behold this positive action is at one and the same time also negative; that is to say, the emanation of the first Sefira is itself the act of tsimtsum, concealment and the dressing of the light of EnSof,” The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1965), 98. See also Zak, “R. Moses Cordovero’s Doctrine of Zimzum,” Tarbiz 58, 2(1989), 216–20. 30 Indeed, a number of scholars have suggested that the way Rosenzweig describes each element as generating itself out of its own respective nothing, in the first part of the Star, draws on the notion of tsimtsum, as mediated through Schelling’s doctrine of potencies in the Weltalter, according to which God’s inner life is depicted as eternal past. Robert Gibbs writes that “Schelling’s discussion of a prior contraction in God is the tsim-tsum of the Lurianic Kabbalists filtered through Boehme” and that “the basic Lurianic theosophical move, the discontinuity over the introversion/extroversion, borrowed from Schelling guides Rosenzweig’s construction in Part I of The Star.” See Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 42, 46. See also Luca Bertolino, “Schöpfung aus Nichts in Franz Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlösung,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13 (2006): 247–64, especially 260–62, and Renate Schindler, Zeit, Geschichte, Ewigkeit in Franz Rosenzweigs ‘Stern der Erlösung,’ (Berlin: Parerga, 2007), 234–46. Curiously, Christoph Schulte interprets Rosenzweig’s account of divine “Verinnerung” in the “Urzelle” along the lines of the elemental God’s self-generation out of nothing in the first part of the Star, describing “Verinnerung” as “a primordial self-development of the ever-present God [carried out] within [nach innen] still in the stage of the Vorwelt” – an interesting suggestion! – but then claims that in the first part of the Star itself, “Zimzum as ‘interiorization of God’ plays no role.” See Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, 381–83. Although I am conflicted about whether it makes sense to understand the generation of the elements out of nothing itself on the model of tsimtsum, if read ontologically, Rosenzweig invites the reader to utilize the image of tsimtsum in his epistemological descriptions of what occurs in the Star’s first part. Thus Rosenzweig writes, in the opening of Star I.2 (45): “We ‘believe’ in the world, at least as firmly as we believe in God or in ourselves. For this reason, the nothing of these three can only be a hypothetical nothing; only a nothing of knowing from which we afford the something of knowing, which circumscribes the content of that belief. That we have that belief, from this we can only free ourselves hypothetically, in that we are building it from the ground up; thus ultimately we will attain the point, where we realize how the hypothetical must transform [umschlagen] in

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3) Becoming Promise. Elemental God, world, and self, rather than continuing to assert themselves, respectively, as the whole of truth, allow themselves to become promises which are to be fulfilled in the course of the actual: What then is the difference between promise and fulfillment? Just this, that the former remains final, unmoveable, but the latter happens, or better: steps in [eintritt]. Thus nothing more changes from promise to fulfillment; the content of the promise and the phases of fulfillment are one. Only that which is finished turns into beginning. With this, however, the pieces, which completed [fertig-stellen] the completed one in terms of content, are turned into predictions of the occurrence, which emerges out of it to become beginning again.31

With respect to their content, Rosenzweig asserts here, the elemental being of God, world, and self, and the unfolding of their respective actual being through relations in time are identical. But the elemental being of each is now to be grasped as an unmoveable point which has contracted within itself so that paths of relation may extend out of it.32 It is worth noting that all three of these formulations echo some of Schelling’s adaptations of the notion of tsimtsum from the Ages of the World. Note the intertwining of negation, contraction, anticipation, and the formation of a starting-point in the following example: For it is really only in negation that beginning lies. All beginning is, according to its nature, only a desire for the end or for that which leads to the end and thus negates itself as the end. It is only the first tension of the bow, not so much itself being, as rather the ground that something is. For a movement now to begin or become, it is not enough for it only not to be; it must expressly be posited as not being. Therewith a ground is given for it to be. The starting point (terminus a quo) of no movement is an empty, inactive point of departure [Ausgangspunkt], but rather a negation of the same; and the movement that actually comes into being is an overcoming of this negation. Were the movement not negated, so it could not have been expressly posited. Negation is therefore the necessary precedent/anticipator [Vorausgehende] (prius) of every movement. The beginning of the line is the geometrical point, not because it itself is extended but rather because it is the negation of all extension; the one, the beginning of all number, not because it is itself number, as rather because it is the negation of all number, of all multiplicity. That which should increase itself [sich steigern], must first pull itself together [zusammennehmen], to transfer [versetzen] itself into the a-hypothetical, absolute, unconditional-ness of that belief. Only this is what science can and should achieve for us.” 31 Stern, 124. 32 Elliot Wolfson likewise notes the affinity between Rosenzweig’s promise-fulfillment imagery and Lurianic kabbalah, “Creation can be regarded, therefore, as a prediction of revelation, or,, alternatively, revelation is the fulfillment of creation.” Wolfson suggests Rosenzweig’s language “reflects the influence of Schelling but is also strikingly close to Lurianic kabbalah.” See Wolfson, “Light Does not Talk but Shines,” 108.

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the condition of a root; that which wants to grow, must shorten itself. And so negation is everywhere the first transition from nothing into something.33

In this vivid passage, Schelling explores what it means for a beginning to be a beginning. To be a proper beginning, he notes, it must negate itself as end, i.e., as what has being completely – just like Rosenzweig claims his elements must do. And this act of self-negating is not simply a state of the absence of being, but rather it is a kind of intensification of that absence, and drawing in of nothingness into itself, which transforms it into the ground or root of what is to be. Thus, Schelling claims that it is wrong to conceive of the starting-point of a line as just a very small line of minimal extension. The line’s starting-point is rather the originary negation of the line, a contraction and intensification that, as it were, presses the line to extend out of it. In Schelling’s most helpful example, he notes that a bow’s string must be stretched back beyond the point of rest in order for the bow to collect potential energy which, when the string is released, will power the arrow through its extensive course towards its target. The bow example helps Schelling explain how negation is thus both a kind of intensification of nothing and a kind of anticipation – a promise, in Rosenzweig’s terms – of the movement that is to come.34

III That Rosenzweig has indeed changed his metaphysical position between the “Urzelle” and the Star  – that instead of grasping revelation to the individual human self as part of the interiorization of God into God’s own depths, Rosenzweig now conceives of God, world, and human being on equal footing with regard 33 FWJ Schelling, “Weltalter,” K.F.A. Schelling, ed., Sämmtliche Werke I.8 (Stuttgart: Cota, 1861), 224–25. 34 Jürgen Habermas’ account of how divine contraction, in Schelling’s thought, generates the beginning of time, could well describe Rosenzweig’s depiction of contraction of the elements, at the end of the first part of the Star, transforming their elemental condition into an absolute past, and making it possible for time to unfold through the relations between them. He writes, “That first decision of the enclosed God also consists in that It pulls itself as whole into the past: and indeed once again in an act of contraction, but now in the sense of Isaac Luria, who intends with the withdrawal of God into Himself not only the closing [Verschliessung], but rather the release of its own space for another. It is a contraction in the higher dimension of time, which overtakes the first, as it were spatial contraction, and as such once again restrains [zurückholt], in order – demoting the potencies – to set free the previously enclosed into actuality,” “Dialectischer Idealismus im Übergang zum Materialismus – Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee der Contraction Gottes,” 191.

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to the act of tsimtsum, each as creating itself out of its own respective nothings, and then as restricting itself to make room for reciprocal relations with its others – finds support in an obscure but important diary note Rosenzweig writes in June 21, 1922. Reflecting on the relation his thought has to the Kabbalah, Rosenzweig muses as follows: My problem has its genuine predecessor indeed in the Kabbalah. But I show how the Kabbalistic problem is no specifically theological one (but rather occurs just as much for M[an] and W[orld] as [for] En Sof); and the priority of the theological which the Kabbalah posits can be justified only through the thought of real (occurring, not “unfolding itself”) time, which contradicts the mere doctrine of potencies.35

Although Rosenzweig doesn’t specify here what “Kabbalistic problem” the grappling with which makes the Kabbalists his own predecessors,36 I gather he has in mind the problem of the possibility of God creating beings who are not God, i.e., the very problem we’ve seen regularly arises in the context of discussions of tsimtsum. F.H. Jacobi had suggested it was precisely this problem which the Kabbalists shared with Spinoza: How can infinite being ever create or pass over into that which is finite and subject to becoming, when infinite being leaves no place outside its bounds in which the finite can become?37 Or, to put the question in terms Rosenzweig highlighted as the “problem of all philosophy” at the center of Schelling’s lifelong work: “how can the Absolute go out of itself and set up a world over against itself?”38 It is of course tsimtsum which serves as answer to this question for the Lurianic Kabbalists: God restricts God’s infinite being, leaving space open for the 35 Diary entry, June 21, 1922, in Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften: Briefe und Tagebücher Bd. 2. 1918–1929 (Haag: M. Nujhoff, 1979), 800. 36 Rivka Horwitz suggests that “the major novelty of the fragment is his use of the term En Sof,” and the use of the term leads Horwitz to surmise that while Rosenzweig recognized Schelling’s influence on his thinking during the writing of the Star itself, “only later in 1922 he realized with joy that his predecessor in this dialectic construction is in Kabbalah,” “From Hegelianism to a Revolutionary Understanding of Judaism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Attitude toward Kabbala and Myth,” Modern Judaism 26, 1 (2006), 40. Wolfson views Horwitz’s conjecture as “possible but unnecessary,” suggesting alternatively that Rosenzweig “was probably aware of the kabbalistic resonance of his thought from an earlier period of his life, but for some reason, he chose to conceal that in the Star,” “Light does not Talk but Shines,” 115. 37 Cf., F.H. Jacobi, “Über die Lehre des Spinoza,” Werke 4.1 (Leipzig: Fleischer 1819): 37–253, p. 56; translated as “Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn,” by George di Giovanni in Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 1994): 173–251, pp. 187–88. 38 Franz Rosenzweig, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” Zweistromland, 12.

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existence of the finite world of creatures who become in time. But Rosenzweig now asserts that while he recognizes the Kabbalists as his predecessors, he has shown that the problem which the Kabbalists identify as theological is just as much a problem for human beings and for the world as it is for God, i.e., the “En-Sof.”39 Not only God, but the world and human beings as well must be able to explain how each can transition from an elemental state in which it has constructed itself completely out of its own nothing, into the actual course of reciprocal relations into which it enters with its others. And so, we might infer, not only God, but world and human being as well must undergo a process of selflimitation – of tsimtsum – in order to make such a transition possible. The theological takes priority, so Rosenzweig appears to suggest, only insofar as it is God who initiates the relations with the world and with the human being in creation and revelation, respectively, which together forge the course of real time.40 Rosenzweig’s proliferation of the subjects of tsimtsum here may be read as a rejection of what Jacobi had presented as the shared kabbalistic/Spinozistic explanation of the transition from infinite being to finitude, and thereby as a rejection of the position he himself had advocated (at least early on) in the “Urzelle.” Self and world cannot be conceived as independent, as standing on their own feet over against the divine, on the model of a single infinite subject of tsimtsum. On such a model the being of self and world, Rosenzweig implies here, remains divine. Thus for Rosenzweig to say that tsimtsum is not “specifically theological” is to say that a singular divine subject of tsimtsum doesn’t achieve what is was posited to achieve. It is insufficient to ground the possibility of the independent existence of the world. As his own answer to the “kabbalistic problem,” Rosenzweig instead suggests that all fundamental kinds of beings be grasped as independent subjects of tsimtsum. God, world, and human being must all be

39 The language of the diary entry is tricky, making it difficult to translate. I won’t raise here all the questions that come up in translating, but let me note that “But I show how the Kabbalistic problem is no specifically theological one (but rather occurs just as much for M[an] and W[orld] as [for] En Sof)” is my translation of “Ich zeige aber, wie das kabbalistische Problem kein spezifisch theologisches ist (sondern für M und W als ‫ אין סוף‬eintritt)” (Briefe und Tagebücher Bd. 2, 800). So, I take “kabbalistic problem” to be the subject that “occurs” “for M[an] and W[orld]” as well as for En Sof. But the absence of the preposition “for” before En Sof raises questions. Horwitz takes En Sof to be the subject of the parenthetical phrase, translating as follows: “However I show that the problem of Kabbala is not specifically theological (but En Sof appears in the same way with regard to M [man] and W [world]),” “From Hegelianism to a Revolutionary Understanding of Judaism,” 40. I don’t think Horwitz’s translation is accurate, but even if En Sof were the subject here, I would still draw the same implications from the entry: human being and world are to be characterized by the same infinity of the En Sof which characterizes the divine. 40 Compare Stern, 97–99.

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conceived as self-grounded beings who undergo acts of self-contraction, on the grounds of which alone the reciprocal relations among them may be grasped. Thus, taking the independence of world and human being seriously is to think them as just as equally self-grounded as God is, and as just as equally in need of undergoing tsimtsum. But now tsimtsum is necessary not in order to allow for the existence of others within one’s being, but rather alongside oneself in such a way that relations can be forged. Granted that even on the traditional model tsimtsum seems to conjure up different pictures to mind in its different iterations, note that the picture one has in one’s mind when thinking of tsimtsum has to undergo a change with Rosenzweig’s innovation. Being no longer fills in the whole of space, in the midst of which contraction and expansion take place (to be envisioned in circular form, according to the kabbalists, due to the perfection of that being). But rather tsimtsum is a contraction that makes possible the extension of relations among three points. In the Star, Rosenzweig refers to the “genuine notion of revelation” as the “going-out-of-self, belonging-to-each-other, and coming-toeach-other of the three ‘factual’ elements of the All.”41 tsimtsum, I would suggest, has to be part of this picture: three distinct nodes of being (if it is even proper to attribute a shared, generic “being” to all three), each of which restricts its own hold on space so as to be able to step out of itself and into relations with others through which it comes to “belong,” in part, to its others. The differences in the resulting pictures here may not quite be what Rosenzweig had in mind when he distinguished his triangular, or star-shaped picture of the unity of being from the spherical picture of being he claimed had ruled from Anaximander to Hegel, but it certainly mirrors that contrast.42 In the diary entry we’ve been examining, moreover, Rosenzweig seems to want to distinguish his account not only from his kabbalist predecessors, but from the author of the “doctrine of the potencies,” i.e., Schelling himself. As Rivka Horwitz suggested, Rosenzweig may be using the phrase “doctrine of the potencies” simply to refer to the kabbalistic account of the Sefirot.43 But if, as we’ve proposed, Rosenzweig is indeed remarking here on changes that his own thinking has undergone since the “Urzelle” and its Schellingian model of tsimtsum,

41 Stern, 127. 42 See Stern, 283–87. 43 “Kabbala has a theory of Sefirot, which Rosenzweig calls potencies. These he negates,” Horwitz writes. “And finally, Kabbala deals with unfolding time, and Rosenzweig demands real-time occurrences here and now,” “From Hegelianism to a Revolutionary Understanding of Judaism,” 40. Bischoff indeed uses the term “Potencies” for the Sefirot in his Elemente der Kabbala, e.g., 12, 30–32.

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a critique of Schelling would not be surprising here.44 Rosenzweig would thereby imply that Schelling’s account of God’s becoming through the dialectical unfolding of potencies (in the Ages of the World, for example), rather than through actual events occurring in real time, is one-dimensional.45 But however we understand Rosenzweig’s suggested difference from Schelling and/or the kabbalists here, he surely wants to highlight the way in which the Star is unique in awarding the same foundational character to each of the elements.

IV As the Star unfolds, the relations between God, world, and human being are shown to bring the elements together into a redemptive unity. This ultimate unity is an “All” which, because it is formed out of the relations between different foundational beings, articulates both the unity and the diversity of what is, and thereby avoids the tendencies to reductionism which Rosenzweig identified with the philosophical tradition that culminated in German Idealism. All three elements undergo parallel self-restrictions which allow for their gradual reciprocal interdependence in this process. Rosenzweig’s insistence on showing how this process is forged among three elementally fundamental beings rather than out of one, is what is supposed to ensure the non-reductive character of the ultimate All. 44 If Rosenzweig is distancing himself here from Schelling, this would be consistent with a comment of his in which he likewise distinguishes his own version of narrative philosophizing from Schelling’s. See Rosenzweig to Rudolf Ehrenberg, May 28, 1917, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften: Briefe und Tagebücher Bd. 1. 1900–1918 (Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1979), 410: “If he [Schelling] says in the Ages of the World that future philosophy is to be ‘narrating’ [erzälend], so this is right also for the subjective (not just the objective, as he meant it)”; and Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, undated 1916, Briefe und Tagebücher Bd. 1, 318: “Schelling’s wanting to narrate [Erzählendwollen] was meant differently [i.e., from the way I mean it – BP], namely not as an individualization of the form of philosophizing.” On Schelling’s doctrine of potencies, see Edward Beach, The Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). The differences between Rosenzweig’s construction of the elements – out of a single process of the coming together (And) of forces of affirmative substantiality (No) and negative activity (No) – in the first part of the Star, and Schelling’s description of the eternal cycle of God’s three primary potencies (prior to a divine decision that creates order), may likewise stand behind a critique of Schelling here. See Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, 163, n. 62. 45 CF., Stern, 56: “The Idealistic systems of 1800, most clearly that of Hegel, but according to outline, Fichte’s and Schelling’s as well, show a trait which we would have to describe as onedimensionality. … The flow of force of the system-whole flows as a one and universal through all single figures.”

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Yet, once redemption arrives, it is God alone who is this “All and One” which all beings have forged through relations. According to Rosenzweig, In the redemption of the world through the human being and of the human being by the world, God redeems Himself. Human being and world disappear in redemption; God, however, completes Himself. God first becomes in redemption that which the recklessness of human thinking sought everywhere and claimed everywhere, and yet found nowhere, because it was just still nowhere to be found, because it was not yet: All and One.46

God only becomes “All and One” in redemption. Until that point, human beings in the world have lots to do in order to actualize this “All and One” which God will be. Yet if God is the unity of the All in redemption, and God is also one of the elements who develops along with selves and the world through relations towards redemption, then the suspicion arises that Rosenzweig’s insistence on the elemental equality between God, world, and human being is just a ruse. It is as if, at the end of a pageant, one of the contestants is declared to have already been the winner before the contest began. The God who is “All and One” in redemption certainly makes us wonder, retrospectively, whether the whole course of relations between God, world, and selves, isn’t in truth a movement of divine interiorization and actualization from start to finish.

V In redemption, God becomes the One and All. But the course that leads through relations to redemption is carried out, in large part, between human beings in the world. Their redemptive work is advanced partly through interpersonal relations of love, and partly through the anticipation of redemption, that is, the pulling of the future redemption – in which God will be One and All – into view in the present. Now, the anticipated image of the redeemed God projects a future unity; but within it, Rosenzweig suggests, one is given a glimpse of the integration of world and self in that future redemption, as well. It is noteworthy that in order to depict this delicate balance within the anticipated divine unity of redemption, in the Star, Rosenzweig again makes use of the imagery of tsimtsum. In this case, most appropriately for The Star of Redemption, the anticipated image of the redeemed God is described in terms of stellar contraction and

46 Rosenzweig, Stern, 266.

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expansion.47 Together, these two processes mirror the ultimate redemptive unity of the divine, which Rosenzweig famously depicts in the form of a star.48 But separately, Rosenzweig has different ways of identifying these movements of contraction and expansion within the anticipated image of redemption. Contraction is the movement through which the world is afforded a guarantee in actual time that it will indeed be redeemed in the ultimate redemption; whereas expansion is the movement in which the self is afforded a guarantee in actual time that it will be redeemed in the ultimate redemption. But the designators we are most accustomed to using for these movements of contraction and expansion within Rosenzweig’s anticipated image of the redeemed God are none other than: “Jews” and “Christians.” The Jewish people are precisely the contracting force in which the world finds the guarantee for (and thereby is afforded a glimpse of) its ultimate redemption, just as Christianity is precisely the expanding force in which the human being finds the guarantee for (and thereby is afforded a glimpse of) her ultimate redemption.49 Rosenzweig in fact depicts the relation between the Jewish people and Christianity as the relation of contraction to expansion in a number of striking ways. Indeed, he regularly utilizes the imagery of tsimtsum in order to pinpoint the unique character of each of these forms of religious life in contradistinction to the other. Note how Rosenzweig toys with so many of the different aspects of tsimtsum which we have already encountered, in the following depictions of Judaism and Christianity. 1) Point of Contraction as a Guarantee of Reality. The Jewish people, carrying within its communal body and practices an anticipatory glimpse of the ultimate redemption, is the single point of “contraction” within the Christian world, which alone ensures the “reality” of that Christian world. Thus, in a letter to Eugen Rosenstock from November 30, 1916, Rosenzweig describes the current global religious situation as follows: “Christianity identifying itself with the empires [Kaisertümern] (the “World” of today), Judaism identifying itself with itself… So it (Judaism) is in this … desubstantialized 47 Note that in his Elemente der Kabbala, Bischoff makes use of a comparable stellar image – that of the nebular hypothesis for the origins of the solar system – in order to explain tsimtsum to his “modern” audience: “For us moderns, there lies perhaps closest at hand as a clarifying example the Kant-Laplace theory of the origination of the solar system through a contraction and densification of the original nebular cloud [Urnebul], out of which a central body forms itself, which then sets out of itself the other heavenly bodies [Weltkörper]” (19). 48 See, for example, Stern, 465. 49 Rosenzweig develops this idea that Judaism serves as a guarantee [Gewähr] that the world will be redeemed through its anticipation of redemption, just as Christianity serves as guarantee that the soul will be redeemed through its anticipation of redemption, in the “Schwelle” at the end of the second part of the Star. See Stern, 288–91.

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Christian world, the (only) point of contraction [Kontraktion], of limitation [Beschränkung], and therewith the guarantee of the reality of that Christian world.”50 2) Self-fueling Fire and Expansive Rays. The Jewish people, as it is described in the third part of the Star, is rooted entirely within itself, and this being rooted in itself allows the Jewish people to serve as the self-fueling core of the anticipated star: “The fire of the core must burn without cease. Its flame must eternally nourish itself out of itself.”51 Christianity, on the other hand, expands to the outside as the rays of that very same redemptive star, shining eternally as the way through the All. Rosenzweig does not tire of contrasting these two redemptive paths of the Jewish people and of Christianity in such terms of self-rootedness and expansion. “Rooting into the deepest self, this had been the secret of the eternity of the Volk. Expansion through everything outside – this is the secret of the eternity of the way,” Rosenzweig writes. “In the middle of the star, the fire burns. The rays only break forth out of the fire of the core, and flow unresisted into the outside.”52 3) Point and Line. Drawing on the geometric imagery we’ve seen Schelling utilize in the Ages of the World, Rosenzweig describes the complementary and contrasting forms of eternity which Jews and Christians live out in their respective religious communal lives in terms of the contrast between the infinity of a point and the infinity of a line: Eternal life and eternal way – they are as different as the infinity of a point and of a line. The infinity of a point can only consist in that it is never wiped out; so it preserves itself in the eternal self-preservation of the ever-generative blood. The infinity of a line, however, ceases when it is no longer possible to extend it; it consists in this possibility of unimpeded extension. Christianity as eternal way must expand itself ever further.53

4) Recollection and Experience. In contrast to the actual experiences Christians have, according to Rosenzweig the Jewish form of experience is recollection, that is, a kind of self-interiorization which we’ve seen characterize divine contraction in the “Urzelle.” Thus, Rosenzweig writes to Mawrik Kahn February 26, 1919: “Christian is the pulling of the past into today’s experience; Jewish is the entry into the past experience, the self-recollection [Sich-Erinnern].

50 Franz Rosenzweig to Eugen Rosenstock, Briefe und Tagebücher Bd. 1, 305. 51 Stern, 331. 52 Stern, 386, 331. 53 Stern, 379.

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From this follows what we have to do. Not wait for the experience to awaken in us, but to return to the already experienced experience in our blood.”54 5) Within and Without. Finally, according to Rosenzweig, the Jewish glimpse of truth is limited precisely in that Jews can only see what is within the star; whereas the Christian glimpse of truth is limited insofar as Christians can see only what the star illuminates beyond it with its rays. Thus, in the closing pages of the Star III 3, Rosenzweig contrasts Jewish and Christian relations to truth as follows: To us he gave eternal life, in that he kindled the fire of the star of his truth in our hearts. Them he set on the eternal way, in that he made them run after the rays of that star of his truth in all time up to the eternal end. We thus see in our hearts the true analogy [Gleichnis] of truth, yet we turn ourselves away thereby from temporal life and the life of time turns itself from us. They on the contrary run after the current of time, but they have the truth only at their back; they are well led by it, because they follow its rays, but they don’t see it with their eyes. The truth, the whole truth, thus belongs neither to them nor to us. Because we also carry it in us, but we must for that reason sink our glance only into our own Inner, if we want to see it, and there we well see the star, but not – the rays. And it would belong to the whole truth, that one saw not only its light, but rather also, what is illuminated by it. They however are anyway already determined in all time to see what is illuminated, not the light.55

I’d like to suggest that this impressive array of tsimtsum imagery sheds intriguing and, I think, new light on how Rosenzweig understands the relation between Jews and Christians. Firstly, the tsimtsum model of contraction and expansion gives us a way to think about why Rosenzweig may have been compelled to posit just two forms of religious life, with just these characteristics, as anticipating redemption. Perhaps more importantly, the long-standing discussion among scholars (and, indeed, among Rosenzweig’s own close friends) over whose anticipation is greater for Rosenzweig – Jews’ or Christians’ – appears quite silly once we recognize that Rosenzweig understands these two religious communities as two precisely complementary movements of interiorization and expansion that only together mirror the divine course of redemption. But precisely insofar as Jews and Christians are human forms of the anticipation of a redemption that is ultimately divine – “they are the light in which we see the light”56 – they return us to the questions with which we began. Are the processes which the world and the self undergo, according to the Star’s account,

54 Briefe und Tagebücher Bd. 2, 626. 55 Stern, 462. 56 Stern, 327.

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in fact independently rooted? Do we really have an elemental being all our own and do we really limit our own respective being in our relations with one another and with God? Or is Rosenzweig really saying: this is God’s world, and we’re just contracting or expanding in it.

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Huss, Boaz. “Genizat Ha-Or in Simeon Lavi’s ‘Ketem Paz’ and the Lurianic doctrine of Ẓimẓum,” [Hebrew] Jerusalem Studies on Jewish Thought 10 (1992), 341–61. Idel, Moshe. “Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Hanover/London: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988. _____. “On the Concept of Zimzum in Kabbalah and its Research,” [Hebrew] Jerusalem Studies on Jewish Thought 10 (1992), 59–112. Jacobi, F.H. “Über die Lehre des Spinoza,” Werke 4.1 (Leipzig: Fleischer 1819): 37–253. _____. “Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn,” by George di Giovanni in Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994, 173–251. Koren, Israel. “Martin Buber’s Dialogistic Interpretation of the Doctrine of ‘Tsimtsum,’” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 71 (2002), 225–247. Mosès, Stéphane. System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, trans. C. Tihanyi, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Matt, Daniel C. “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism,” The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy and Mysticism, edited by Robert Forman, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 121–159. Pollock, Benjamin. Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. _____. Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rosenzweig, Franz. Die “Gritli”-Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, edited by Inken Rühle and Reinhold Mayer, with a preface by Rafael Rosenzweig, Tübingen: Bilam Verlag 2002. _____. Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften I–IV. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976–1984. _____. Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed., trans., notes and commentary P. W. Franks and M. L. Morgan, Indianapolis: Hackett, Publishing, 2000 _____. Der Stern der Erlösung, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1996. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. “Die Philosophischen Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,” in K.F.A. Schelling, ed., Sämmtliche Werke I.7. Stuttgart: Cota, 1860, 331–416. _____. “Weltalter,” K.F.A. Schelling, ed., Sämmtliche Werke. I.8. Stuttgart: Cota, 1861, 195–344. Schindler, Renate. Zeit, Geschichte, Ewigkeit in Franz Rosenzweigs ‘Stern der Erlösung,’ Berlin: Parerga, 2007, pp. 234–46. Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah, New York: Penguin/Meridian, 1978 _____. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, 1974. _____. “On Franz Rosenzweig and his Familiarity with Kabbala Literature,” edited by Enrico Lucca. Naharaim 2, 1 (2012): 1–6. Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. Wolfson, Elliot. “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997), 39–81. _____. “Light Does not Talk but Shines: Apophasis and Vision in Rosenzweig’s Theopoetic Temporality,” New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, edited by A. Hughes and E. Wolfson. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010, 87–148. Zak, Bracha. “R. Moses Cordovero’s Doctrine of Zimzum,” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 58, 2(1989), 207–37.

Asaf Angermann

Tsimtsum as Eclipse: Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in Buber and Horkheimer Concepts and metaphors often have a life of their own, reaching beyond the initial intentions of their creators. They mostly receive their full meaning through a retroactive reflection on the historical context of their formation, by illuminating their relationship to contemporaneous debates and ideas. In this chapter, I consider two such developments of the Kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum, which seem to reappear in a somewhat concealed but elaborate form, while maintaining its original philosophical meaning, in the mid-twentieth-century writings of Martin Buber and Max Horkheimer. I argue that both respond, in a certain way, to Gershom Scholem’s re-introduction of the concept in his scholarship, but proceed to develop philosophical arguments that return to the concept’s core, employing it to address philosophical and theological questions that arose at the time of their writing with regard to ethical, social, and political matters. From its initial introduction in the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed in the sixteenth century, through its transcribed preservation by his disciples, to its latter-day rendering by Gershom Scholem, the concept’s meaning underwent modifications and shifts of emphasis that correspond to historical and social changes. The idea that “the existence of the universe is made possible by a process of shrinkage in God,”1 which Luria relayed to his listeners but did not commit to writing, soon created a dissent among his followers concerning its true meaning. A division arose between the mystical Kabbalists, who insisted that the concepts had to be taken literally, describing an actual cosmological principle, and “the more philosophically inclined,” as Scholem calls them, who maintained that it was “to be understood symbolically as an occurrence in the depths of the Divine, which the human mind could only describe in figurative language.”2 Although both factions address the same references in Kabbalistic sources, following Luria, the difference between their interpretations is fundamental and has substantial implications for any understanding of the concept. These differences correspond to epistemological, ethical, and political disparities. Scholem himself, in his reappropriation of the doctrine centuries later, was guided by similar motivations, rendering both the doctrine and its conceptual history pertinent and meaningful to mid-twentieth century settings. Scholem explained the doctrine of tsimtsum 1 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, [1941] 1995), 260. 2 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York and Scarborough: Meridian, 1978), 134. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-011

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as a symbolic representation of God’s exile into Himself, as corresponding to the historic events of the Jews’ exile from Spain, which, in light of the experiences of the 1930s, seemed to receive renewed relevance. While I do not seek to verify the accuracy of Scholem’s rendering, which was strongly contested by his own disciples, I would like to suggest a reading of two theories that followed Scholem’s interpretation, indirectly rather as directly, but that seem, in a closer analytic inspection, to touch upon intrinsically related arguments: Max Horkheimer’s notion of the eclipse of reason and Martin Buber’s notion of the eclipse of God, as mid-twentieth century manifestations, or reincarnations, of the ideas implied in the Lurianic concept as Scholem presented it. Beyond the figurative and symbolic resemblance, the epistemological, ethical, and political implications of the conceptual affinities and juxtaposition seem to me to be particularly meaningful in this context. In 1938, delivering the Hilda Stich Stroock Lectures at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, Scholem, for the first time, presented to an American audience his pioneering scholarship on Jewish mysticism. Based on these lectures, his seminal book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published in 1941, contained an extensive discussion of Lurianic Kabbalah, and – indeed, arguably, Scholem’s own – interpretation of the concept of tsimtsum in it. In a sense, the book re-introduced Lurianic Kabbalah and the concept of tsimtsum into Jewish thought and theology, from Scholem’s own perspective. In the years that followed, Max Horkheimer and Martin Buber, two German-Jewish colleagues  – simultaneously Scholem’s friends and foes – held series of lectures at American universities as well as lectures in which – I would like to suggest here – the ideas and metaphors implied in Scholem’s rendering of tsimtsum strongly reverberate. During his 1938 visit to New York, Scholem met with Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, a meeting which Walter Benjamin, a mutual friend, insistently pressed for from afar. Scholem discussed with Adorno and Horkheimer his recent work on Jewish mysticism, particularly on Lurianic Kabbalah and Sabbatianism. In a letter to Benjamin, Adorno reported on his and Horkheimer’s encounters with Scholem, in particular on Horkheimer’s reservations regarding Scholem’s work on Sabbatianism – the heretic, transgressive Jewish sect – and any prejudices it might strengthen or affirm, “that Max was seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print.”3 In any event, it suffices here to note that Horkheimer – no less than Adorno, who discussed 3 The full report can be found in Adorno’s letter to Benjamin from May 4, 1938 printed in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 248–249: Scholem “regaled us in detail with the most astonishing things in connection with Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism; a number of which, however, sounded so clearly reminiscent of some of Rosenberg’s

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the topic in his correspondence with Scholem – was indeed familiar with Scholem’s scholarship on Jewish mysticism and the Lurianic theory of tsimtsum. Scholem had also sent Adorno and Horkheimer a copy of his book as soon as it was published. In the spring of 1944, Horkheimer himself held a series of lectures at Columbia University, which were published three years later in book form under the title Eclipse of Reason.4 In these lectures and book, Horkheimer analyzed what he considered epistemological problems of humanity and their implications for ethical and political questions. The lectures and the book were conceived simultaneously with, and as a counterpart to, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer’s collaborative attempt at dismantling the fatal entanglement of progress and regression, myth and enlightenment.5 The notion of eclipse in Horkheimer’s solo effort, corresponding to the concept of enlightenment in the collaborative book, has – as I will show – more than an accidental affinity with tsimtsum. Just a few years later, in the winter of 1951, Martin Buber delivered a series of lectures at several American universities. Like Horkheimer, Buber’s concern was with the pressing issues of the day, epistemologically and ethically, and with questions of faith and reason; and like Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, Buber’s Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy, a book published in 1952, based on the author’s lectures from the previous year, seemed at first glance to be dealing with the philosophical aftermath of the Holocaust.6 Although not wholly unrelated to the topic, neither book directly discusses the events or seeks to develop a post-Holocaust theology or philosophy.7 The questions that lie at the core of both deliberations, and the arguments provided in each, concern rather an epistemological and ethical crisis – which both authors, coincidentally or not – associate with the concept or metaphor of eclipse, a concept or metaphor which, by a detailed examination, resonates with the Lurianic notion of tsimtsum and may, so I argue, be conceived of as a modern manifestation of the idea. As modern philosophies of tsimtsum as “eclipse,” both Buber’s and Horkheimer’s arguments concern the relation between anthropomorphism and transcendence, between reason and experience, and the capacity to conceive beyond the given here and now.

notions about our people, that Max was seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print.” 4 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947) (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 5 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 6 Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relations between Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1952] 2016). 7 See Leora Batnitzky, “Introduction to the 2016 Edition” in Martin Buber, Eclipse of God.

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I In Major Trends, Scholem famously defines tsimtsum as “originally meaning ‘concentration’ or ‘contraction’, but if used in Kabbalistic parlance it is best translated by ‘withdrawal’ or ‘retreat’.”8 A concept, hence, with diverse possible translations, and, accordingly, various possible interpretations. As Scholem argues, the development of the concept, and, more broadly, of the theoretical frame within which it was elaborated, correspond to the experience of a crisis; of multiple possible crises as reference points: the epistemological crisis of cosmological knowledge concerning the shape of the world, the crisis of faith at the end of the middle ages, and – most importantly for Scholem – the historical crisis of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. All these crises raised the question of God’s whereabouts and the place of evil in the world. The concept of tsimtsum and the theory of God’s ‘shrinkage’, ‘retreat’, or ‘contraction’ – the argument that God’s invisibility, ostensive disappearance, or unresponsiveness, is anything but a refutation of God’s existence – is meant to provide answers to all these ponderings: the epistemological, the theological, and the historical. Viewed from this perspective, it is anything but surprising that an interest in the concept and its connotations resurfaces in the middle of the twentieth century, in Scholem’s account and subsequently. The notion, or metaphor, of eclipse that both Horkheimer and Buber use in the following years addresses similar concerns. If tsimtsum in its original Lurianic conception meant a concealment of divine light, of the light by which God manifests Himself to human beings, then the affinity between tsimtsum and eclipse – both as metaphors and as concepts – may evidently come to light. In this sense, reconstructing the affinity between Buber’s and Horkheimer’s concepts of eclipse as modern manifestations of the meaning entailed in tsimtsum, addresses one of the first questions discussed with regard to Isaac Luria’s theory. As Scholem notes, disputes following Luria’s theory concerned the real status of the concept: “From the 17th century onward kabbalistic opinion was divided on the doctrine tsimtsum. Was it to be taken literally? Or was it to be understood symbolically as an occurrence in the depths of the Divine, which the human mind could only describe in figurative language?”9 While the main voices of Lurianic tradition such as Israel Sarug and his follower Abraham Herrera read the concept in a more abstract-philosophical manner and considered it to be rather a symbolic expression, the Sabbatian interpretation – most predominantly

8 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 260. 9 Scholem, Kabbalah, 134; the transliteration of tsimtsum appears here as Zimzum and has been modified in the quotation for consistency.

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of Nathan of Gaza and Nehemya Hayon – insisted that it should be read literally. Scholem, however, emphasized the anthropomorphic dimension of the Sabbatian interpretation: attributing human qualities to the mystery and the knowledge of the Godhead. These debates concerning tsimtsum’s symbolic, literal, and anthropomorphic interpretations reveal new dimensions when looked at from the perspectives that Buber’s and Horkheimer’s modern variations offer. Their arguments imply that tsimtsum, as God’s withdrawal, concealment, or eclipse, means both a symbolic expression in figurative language of an occurrence that cannot otherwise be expressed – and – literally, a factual historical event. Tsimtsum as eclipse means the impossibility to directly see and perceive something that conceals itself from human vision. It denotes an epistemological, cognitive difficulty that raises certain questions about the ontological status of that which is concealed. Understood this way, God’s tsimtsum, or eclipse, is an ontological and epistemological problem, the rather symbolic expression of the diagnosis of a vacuum, an absence; but it also carries utterly concrete historical, social, and ethical implications. In other words, the response to the ontological and epistemological problem must be, for them – very much in accordance with Luria’s concept of tikkun – a concrete historical, social, and ethical response. It requires human agency and practice. However, if Moshe Idel describes the history of tsimtsum – following Scholem – as a transition from theosophy to anthroposophy,10 then this may likewise apply to its later renderings in Buber’s and Horkheimer’s eclipses. Both emphasize the relevance of ethical practice and human agency for mending the eclipse. At the same time, they both problematize the aspect of anthropomorphism involved in any attempt to comprehend the matter; however, whereas Buber sees anthropomorphism as necessary for the experiential encounter with transcendence, for Horkheimer, anthropomorphism is part of the problem.

II “Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God – such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing.”11 This is Buber’s historical, epistemological, and ontological diagnosis in Eclipse of God. But, in fact, his argument concerns a theological problem  – the crisis of faith  – and it suggests an ethical solution. Buber diagnoses the growing incapacity to “see” God: 10 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). 11 Martin Buber, Eclipse of God, 23

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to experience divine transcendence. This incapability, a result of the increasing dominance of certain structures of rationality  – scientific, technological, national-political  – affect the human capacities that are vital for experiencing transcendence. Divine experience is, in this sense, the experience of that which transcends the mundane, practical, purposive orientation in reality. This deficiency, for Buber, causes humans to conclude that since no direct perception, no evident knowledge of God is possible, faith has been rendered irrelevant and obsolete. But, here, in a manner structurally similar to Luria’s theory of tsimtsum (as God’s withdrawal, contraction, or concealment, which explains God’s ostensible absence), Buber compares this to an “eclipse of the sun [as] something that occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself.”12 God’s eclipse is something that occurs not in God Himself, but in the relation between God and the world, between God and humans. Of course, Luria’s theory of tsimtsum indeed speaks of a transformation in God’s own appearance, as a shrinkage, contraction, but if we examine the exact meaning and context of the theory, tsimtsum addresses first and foremost the relation between God and humans: God’s appearance  – or lack thereof  – for humans. A solar eclipse does not mean an absence of the sun, but its concealment, its withdrawal from view. Similarly, Buber argues, God’s eclipse means God’s concealment, hiddenness, invisibility. But, like Luria’s theory, in which a man-made tikkun may restore God’s transcendental perceptibility that was diminished in the tsimtsum, Buber’s concept of eclipse aims to restore “the reality of the transcendence.”13 The theory of eclipse, like a theory of tsimtsum, is diagnostic and therapeutic. “One misses everything,” Buber maintains, “when one insists on discovering within earthly thought the power that unveils the mystery. He who refuses to submit himself to the effective reality of transcendence as such – our vis-à-vis – contributes to the human responsibility for the eclipse.”14 Buber formulates here ex-negativo the trajectory for restoring “the reality of transcendence”  – for mending the broken faithless world and recalling divine transcendence from its concealment. This trajectory, however, is not purely abstract, mystical, or metaphysical: it depends on human responsibility. What does such human responsibility mean – what can it do – for “the reality of transcendence,” for God’s “retrieval” from His concealment? In order to better understand Buber’s answer to this question in Eclipse of God, a brief excursion into his writings on Hasidism is helpful. Although in Eclipse of God Buber discusses problems of contemporary religion, philosophy,

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 24. 14 Ibid., 23–24.

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and society, his point of view remains, to some extent, deeply influenced by Hasidism, and such is the critical therapeutic solution he offers. In Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, published just a few years later in 1958, Buber discusses the same problem, but from a Hasidic mystical perspective. “Genuine religious movements do not want to offer man the solution of the world mystery, but to equip him to live from the strength of the mystery; they do not wish to instruct him about the nature of God, but to show him the path on which he can meet God.”15 According to Buber, “genuine religious movements” – referring particularly to the Hasidic movement – prioritize ethics over epistemology: human agency, practice, deeds are more essential in enabling a perception or experience of the divine than objective knowledge and rational explanations. The “path” to divine transcendence is not by explaining its nature, but by seeking an encounter with it. It is no coincidence, I believe, that Buber here addresses directly the concept of tsimtsum, with a direct reference to Scholem. He continues to describe the meaning of such an encounter by addressing the meaning of tsimtsum in the Hasidic context: “The Kabbalah” – he writes, noting that he only focuses on the basic content of Kabbalah “which was decisive for Hasidism” – “answers: God contracted Himself to world because He, nondual and relationless unity, wanted to allow relation to emerge; because He wanted to be known, loved, wanted; because He wanted to allow to arise from His primally one Being, in which thinking and thought are one, the otherness that strives to unity.”16 According to this interpretation, God’s “withdrawal” or “concealment” is not a disappearance into a hidden sphere, not even the metaphysical-cosmological Lurianic idea of making space for creation through emanations, but rather, allowing relation to emerge. Tsimtsum, God’s contraction, is hence a relational concept. “God contracted Himself to world. And it is answered. God wanted to be known, loved, wanted, that is: God willed a freely existing, in freedom knowing, in freedom loving, in freedom willing otherness; he set it free. This means the concept of tsimtsum.”17 By the act of tsimtsum, according to Buber’s Hasidic interpretation, God initiated a relation to otherness. Tsimtsum is here not a metaphysical-cosmological concept, but a relational one. It denotes God’s desire for reciprocity, for love, for dialogue with humans: God’s desire to be experienced by humans. With that in mind, Buber’s argument from Eclipse of God receives not just its theological but also its critical ethical dimension: Eclipse of God is, in a sense, a 15 Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. and ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 116. 16 Ibid., 119. 17 Ibid., 120; in the footnote Buber refers to Scholem’s elucidation of the concept of tsimtsum in Lurianic Kabbalah from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.

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critical theory of faith. In it, Buber seeks to re-establish  – or, more accurately, to examine the conditions for a re-establishment of  – such a relation of humans to God, to divine transcendence, as described by the Hasidic version of the concept of tsimtsum. Accordingly, the concealment, or the eclipse, which Buber diagnoses in his time, is essentially dependent on humans: it can be overcome by human activity, it is a human responsibility. In his critical theory of faith, then, Buber points to two main reasons for the eclipse, that is: two main causes that prevent a re-establishment of the relation. The first cause concerns divine reality and anthropomorphism: the effort to express divine transcendence – that is, the encounter with the divine – in human terms. The second cause is philosophy, namely in its particular form as subjective reason – or, as Buber calls it, “subjectivized reflection”:18 the effort to comprehend reality in purely rationalistic terms, to reduce it to reason and scientific knowledge, while excluding from it all else. Both causes for the eclipse are deficiencies in the relation to the divine; they diagnose God’s tsimtsum as a response to human practice, and the tikkun as dependent on human agency. Buber does not reject anthropomorphism, understood as the expression of divine transcendence in human shape and form, but he problematizes its meaning for the experience of God. Interested in formulating an experience of God’s reality – of the concreteness of the encounter with the divine – Buber sees, first, the problem of relating to God in purely abstract conceptual terms. He develops a critique of Spinoza, in whose philosophy he sees “the greatest anti-anthropomorphic effort ever essayed by the human spirit.”19 Spinoza’s concept of God is anti-anthropomorphic because it assigns God infinite attributes, making God as abstract as possible, therefore as intangible as possible. How can an experience of the divine – an encounter with the divine – be possible if God is “infinite attributes”? Such a concept of God contradicts, for him, God’s reality, concreteness, tangibility. “The more abstract the concept, the more does it need to be balanced by the evidence of living experience, with which it is intimately bound up rather than linked in an intellectual system.”20 The abstract concept of God must be complemented with concrete reality, “the evidence of living experience.” “The further removed a concept seems from anthropomorphism,” Buber writes, critically, “the more it must be organically completed by an expression of that immediacy and, as it were, bodily nearness which overwhelm man in his encounters with the divine, whether they fill him with awe, transport him with rapture, or merely give him guidance.”21 There seems to be a certain contradiction, a tension here: while Buber argues that an anthropomorphic perception 18 Buber, Eclipse of God, 126. 19 Ibid., 15. 20 Ibid., 14. 21 Ibid.

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of God is necessary in order to avoid a purely abstract-conceptual perception, that a “living experience” is necessary to avoid a purely formal conception, he does not intend to argue that God can only be perceived and experienced anthropomorphically, in human shape and form. Buber, in fact, walks here the very thin line between conceptual transcendence and concrete anthropomorphic perception: this thin line is the relation to God, the encounter. “Anthropomorphism always reflects our need to preserve the concrete quality evidenced in the encounter; yet even this need is not its true root: it is in the encounter itself that we are confronted with something compellingly anthropomorphic.”22 On the one hand, Buber does not endorse here a position that calls for a perception of divine transcendence in purely human, anthropomorphic terms, since such perception would contradict the very nature of transcendence; on the other hand, he stresses that only in such anthropomorphic terms can a direct, immediate encounter with God be at all possible. As Leora Batnitzky notes, “God is a presence whom the human encounters in specific places and times. These encounters, like the human beings who experience them, are different from one another. They cannot be captured under any unifying or abstract concept and in fact can only be described in anthropomorphic terms.”23 As opposed to abstract concepts and attributes, which actually unify, and therefore rigidify divine experience, anthropomorphism preserves the dynamic, vivid dimension of the encounter. Anthropomorphism, for Buber, is not an epistemological or ontological quality – he does not call for perceiving God in human shape and form; but it is an ethical, practical quality: it is necessary for allowing the encounter of a non-conceptual, non-rigidified reality of God. Therefore, in his critique of Spinoza’s conceptual anti-anthropomorphism, Buber emphasizes the basis of Spinoza’s abstract conceptualism, namely “the concrete fact […] that there are men who love God.”24 Without this “concrete fact” – the experiential fact of God’s love – the conceptual perception would have been impossible, he argues. “Thus God […] loves, and since His love becomes manifest in our love of Him the divine love must be of the same essence as human love. In this way the most extreme anti-anthropomorphism evolves into a sublime anthropomorphism.”25 The inevitable anthropomorphism that Buber advances here corresponds to the Hasidic interpretation of tsimtsum addressed above. God withdrew Himself from the world in order to be “wanted, loved, known.” Tsimtsum itself is, accordingly, not primarily a metaphysical, ontological, or cosmological concept, but an anthropological and ethical one: God clothed in 22 Ibid. 23 Batnitzky, “Introduction”, x. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Ibid.

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human attire – God disguised as human? – as a means for regaining human love: not just to regain faith, but through it to underscore human responsibility for the tikkun. The question arises, however, whether anthropomorphism as a condition for the reality of the encounter does not revert to a certain form of reification of God: turning divine transcendence into an earthly thing among things. This concern is addressed by Buber’s second critical diagnosis. His target here is philosophy as “subjectivized reflection.”26 It is the attempt to comprehend reality from the perspective of the perceiving subject: reality – that includes, most importantly, divine transcendence – is regarded as a reality for the subject, it becomes an object for the reflecting, analyzing subject. “The process begins with man’s no longer contenting himself […] with picturing the living God […] as a Something, a thing among things, a being among being, an It. The beginning of philosophizing means that this Something changes from an object of imagination, wishes, and feelings to one that is conceptually comprehensible, to an object of thought.”27 Here too Buber argues against the conceptualization of God, but his emphasis lies on the change of direction, a change of perspective from object to subject: in modernity, for Buber, God has become an object for the cognizing subject. Instead of developing a relation to the living God, modern philosophy’s relation to God is an objectifying rationalization, a reification of transcendence. Whereas religion, for Buber, is “the act of holding fast to God,” philosophy becomes “the intellectual letting go of God.”28 Precisely because of the objective rationalizing perspective on transcendence, it is lost for the cognizing subject. Buber indeed points to the dialectic of reason and power at the core of subjectivity and subjective cognition. The cognizing subject, by gaining mastery over reality – an intellectual, rationalizing mastery of divine transcendence – in fact loses the relation to it. “The subject, which appeared to be attached to being in order to perform for it the service of contemplation, asserts that it itself produced and produces being. Until, finally, all that is over against us, everything that accosts us and takes possession of us, all partnership of existence, is dissolved in free-floating subjectivity.”29 Buber warns against the subjectivation of reason that makes all reality, and in particular the reality of divine transcendence, appear as if it were a product of subjectivity itself, wholly dependent on it, contingent upon subjective cognition. By asserting its powers – the powers of “subjectivized reflection” on divine reality, the subject in fact loses it and “lets go of God.” “The human spirit, which adjudges to itself mastery over its work, annihilates conceptually the absoluteness 26 Ibid., 126. 27 Ibid., 123–124. 28 Ibid., 123. 29 Ibid., 124.

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of the absolute.”30 Precisely by seeking to rationally comprehend the divine, and therefore assuming a certain power – objectifying, reifying power – over it, the cognizing subject eradicates all relation – both cognitive and experiential – to it. Buber’s critique of philosophy’s tendency to subjectivize, to operate as subjective reason, aims to explain the relation to faith, and the way it becomes impossible; that is, the way the subject itself makes it impossible. “God is eclipsed in the modern world, argues Buber,” as Batnitzky explains, “by the predominance of instrumentality, the glorification of usefulness, which turns human beings into objects among objects.”31 But one should add here, too, that this process also turns divine transcendence, God Himself, into an object for the cognizing subject. Batnitzky rightly explains Buber’s diagnosis in the light of I and Thou: God’s eclipse – the intellectual letting go of God through a process of reification – turns God into an It. “Human beings,” she writes, “have lost the access to a more fundamental relationship  – the ‘I-Thou’ relationship, which is not one of instrumentality but of mutuality.”32 The argument must indeed, undoubtedly, be understood from the perspective of Buber’s I and Thou, to which he frequently refers in the book, but I believe that his reading of the Hasidic perspective on the eclipse, that is, on the practical-ethical meaning of tsimtsum, is even more relevant here (and is as relevant for understanding I and Thou as well). God’s withdrawal, contraction, or concealment from the world was meant to allow humans to develop – or redevelop – a relation to Him: to know, want, love. Like tsimtsum, God’s eclipse, hence, is both: the concealment or withdrawal from view due to cognitive processes of subjective reification that prevent an immediate relation and experience of the divine; and a call for action, for love and experience in a non-conceptual, non-objectifying, non-instrumental manner. This is, according to Buber, the religious-ethical meaning of tsimtsum as eclipse.

III Reading Buber from this perspective, the affinities with Horkheimer’s arguments become palpable, if not striking. I mentioned earlier the historical constellation and the affinities: both lectures were delivered at American universities in the years following the Second World War, both authors were familiar with Scholem’s earlier lectures and then with his subsequently published book on Jewish mys30 Ibid., 124. 31 Batnitzky, “Introduction”, ix–x. 32 Ibid., viii.

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ticism, and both chose similar titles for the books based on their lectures. But the more substantial affinities are to be found in the arguments themselves. Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason first appeared in English in 1947, but its German version, published a few years later, was entitled Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (Toward a Critique of Instrumental Reason). The title already hints at a certain argumentative resemblance, but a closer look at the argument itself, and at some of Horkheimer’s other  – related and unrelated  – writings, points at a substantial and meaningful resonance between Buber’s and Horkheimer’s philosophical positions. The conceptual affinity between tsimtsum and eclipse is remarkably pertinent here as well: the epistemological and cultural critique that Buber and Horkheimer suggest, almost simultaneously, point at an intrinsic relation between their “eclipses” – and, as I will show later, also between their distinct speculative notions of tsimtsum. Like Buber, Horkheimer pointedly operates in Eclipse of Reason with the concept of subjective reason. The book’s “aim is to inquire into the concept of rationality that underlies our contemporary industrial culture, in order to discover whether this concept does not contain defects that vitiate it essentially.”33 Like Buber, Horkheimer does not reject reason or human rationality altogether, but points at a deficiency in the predominant concept – and use – of reason in modern culture, in particular with regards to questions of transcendence and agency, and of the capacity to think and act beyond the immediately given and perceived. Unlike Buber, Horkheimer does not uphold anthropomorphism as an essential form of cognition and as a relation to the absolute, but rather warns against its reificatory and self-blinding tendencies. This is a main tenet of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno’s collaborative effort from the 1940s. There is, in any event, a correlation between Buber’s and Horkheimer’s discussion of anthropomorphism and transcendence, of reason’s – and philosophy’s – capability of thinking transcendence, of conceiving the beyond, understood either as God or as a reality beyond the given order of things. But before I turn to examining this correlation more closely, a few words should be said regarding Horkheimer’s concept of eclipse. Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason continues, in fact, the line of thought he began in the preceding decades with a collection of aphorisms, written between 1926 and 1931, and published in 1934 – under the pseudonym Heinrich Regius: a paraphrase on Henricus Regius (1598–1679), Descartes’s radically materialist student – as Dämmerung (which can be trans-

33 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947) (London and New York: Continuum 2004), v.

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lated as either “Dawn” or “Dusk”).34 Employing a similar metaphor of natural illumination, or rather the lack of it, Horkheimer sought to present an equally dim image for the perils of modern consciousness, affected by epistemological and material deficiencies. Dämmerung, like Eclipse of God and Eclipse of Reason, is an epistemological and material critique of a culture in which it has become impossible to see beyond the social and historical distortion of consciousness. While Horkheimer’s intention in the book is to provide a certain speculative interpretation of concrete, material, economical, and ideological phenomena, he addresses questions of religion in a similar manner. Religion, for Horkheimer, is not just an ideological illusion, as the materialist would claim, but also a powerful and effective “apparatus at the disposal of tortured men through which they can express their suffering and their hope.”35 Horkheimer adopts an anthropological and psychological approach to religion – an approach that will become ever more central in his later writings. “With the development of large-scale industry,” he contends in “Dusk” [“Dämmerung”], the programmatic aphorism that opens the book, “the intelligence of the European masses has grown so greatly that the most sacred possessions must be protected from it.”36 While not reverting to an anti-enlightenment, anti-rationalist position, Horkheimer wishes to warn against reason’s threat to “the most sacred possessions” of human kind. He wishes to protect them from it. What are these possessions? How can such a protection be achieved? In a sense, Horkheimer’s later Critical Theory is first and foremost concerned with such a protection. The metaphor of Dämmerung or Eclipse is therefore also a protective warning sign against the dark blindness that reason – the rational enlightenment itself – can bring to these “sacred possessions.” If Buber warned against the rising power – in epistemological, social, and historical terms – of instrumentality that negatively affects human relations and the relation to divine transcendence, then for Horkheimer this warning is an essential part of every social epistemology. Eclipse of Reason, accordingly, seeks to rescue reason from its entanglement in these destructive mechanisms. It explains the internal workings of the mechanism of instrumental reason. Horkheimer differentiates between what he calls subjective and objective reason. Subjective reason

34 In German, Dämmerung can mean both dawn and twilight. The English translation included, alongside Dämmerung, as in the later German edition, also Horkheimer’s aphorisms from the 1950s and 1960s, and titled the book Dawn and Decline, choosing Dawn as a translation for Dämmerung, but adding the negative, pessimistic dimension of Decline. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw, afterword by Eike Gebhardt (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978). 35 Horkheimer, “A Different Kind of Criticism,” in: Dawn and Decline, 58. 36 Horkheimer, “Dusk”, in: Dawn and Decline, 17.

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“is essentially concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory. It attaches little importance to the question whether the purposes as such are reasonable. If it concerns itself at all with ends, it takes for granted that they too are reasonable in the subjective sense, i.e. that they serve the subject’s interest in relation to self-preservation.”37 Subjective reason concerns the usefulness of its object, its instrumental value for the subject. In contrast, objective reason concerns a certain “universal rationality,”38 reconciling human interests with a more comprehensive perspective, focusing “on the idea of the greatest good, on the problem of human destiny, and on the way of realization of ultimate goals.”39 Historically, both subjective and objective reason had their place and legitimacy, but Horkheimer diagnoses, in late modernity, a deterioration of the capacity to conceive objectivity in such a sense, as objective reason; while reason has become predominantly subjective, it conceives reality in objective, practical, useful conceptual terms. “As reason is subjectivized, it also becomes formalized.”40 Horkheimer’s critique of “subjectivized, formalized reason” resonates with Buber’s critical concept of “subjectivized reflection”: it is a limited cognition, limited to the subject’s own intentions, wishes, and purposes, and at the same time blindness to that which transcends it. Such transcendence – for Buber, the reality of God; for Horkheimer, universal rationality – remains excluded from perception and experience. Horkheimer’s historical account of the progress from religious authorities to the autonomy of reason is dialectical. The autonomy of reason achieved in the enlightenment was not that of objective reason  – of the possibility to rationally conceive reality in a universally meaningful way  – but of subjective reason, self-oriented and self-sufficient. “The divorce of reason from religion,” he adds, “marked a further step in the weakening of its objective aspect and a higher degree of formalization, as became manifest later during the period of the Enlightenment.”41 To be sure, Horkheimer does not wish to idolize the preEnlightenment and the heteronomous authority of religion, but his emphasis on this historical trajectory points at the conditions that lead to such an Eclipse of Reason, which is also an Eclipse of God: the structural impossibility of thinking and experiencing universality, the absolute, the unconditioned. Subjective reason is instrumental reason. It is reason in the service of particular interests. It does not seek to understand and experience reality as it is, but only as it is for the 37 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 3–4. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 Ibid., 5. 40 Ibid., 7. 41 Ibid., 14.

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cognizing and experiencing subject. “If reason itself is instrumentalized, it takes on a kind of materiality and blindness, becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced.”42 What is at stake here is both reason itself, and any experience that transcends – reaches beyond – the limits of formalized instrumentality. While Buber, however, wishes to overcome the shortcomings of modern instrumental reason by advancing mutuality, a direct encounter with transcendence, which essentially entails anthropomorphism, Horkheimer sees such anthropomorphism as part of the problem. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, conceived with Adorno in the early 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the meaning of anthropomorphism in the historical process that leads from mythical thinking to the Enlightenment, but then relapses back into irrationality, as the regressive shadow of Enlightenment. They maintain that although the Enlightenment considered anthropomorphism as pertaining to obsolete, irrational, mythical thinking, the Enlightenment itself, by taking the absolute perspective of the cognizing subject, turns into a new form of anthropomorphism. “Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth. The supernatural, spirits and demons, are taken to be reflections of human beings who allow themselves to be frightened by natural phenomena. According to enlightened thinking, the multiplicity of mythical figures can be reduced to a single common denominator, the subject.”43 The Enlightenment, they argue, claims to have overcome mythical thinking: to replace mythical anthropomorphism with the cognizing subject, with reason, but reason itself, as subjective reason, has the inherent tendency to anthropomorphize: to cognize objective reality in subjective categories, to project – just as in mythical thinking – subjective categories onto objective nature, onto transcendence – and therefore to misrepresent it, misconceive it. As opposed to Buber, for Adorno and Horkheimer anthropomorphism is an epistemological deficiency, a categorical blindness related to instrumental rationality. Eclipse of Reason echoes the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s critique of anthropomorphism as subjective reason. Horkheimer further develops the diagnosis that perceiving nature – that is, anything that is not the subject itself – in human terms and concepts, leads to destructive outcomes. It means reducing perception and experience to the immediately given, which makes it impossible – for the subject itself, that is, for human beings – to perceive and experience transcendence, to relate to that which

42 Ibid., 23/16. 43 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 4.

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is beyond the mundane reality of usefulness and interests. Moreover, this also affects the relation to others, to fellow humans. “The human being,” Horkheimer writes, “in the process of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of his world. Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself.”44 The eclipse that Horkheimer has in mind here, and which structurally and conceptually resonates with the concept of tsimtsum, is a retreat, withdrawal, concealment of transcendence – not necessarily understood as God, but as the ability to perceive and experience beyond the immediately given, to perceive and experience the non-subjective, the sphere of reality which is beyond usefulness, instrumentality, and domination. The affinity between Horkheimer’s and Buber’s critical diagnoses is even stronger when we consider their concepts of philosophy. As I noted above with regard to Buber, both were highly suspicious of the concept in the particular historical context they referred to, and saw it as accountable for the damage being done to the human capacity for relating to the unconditioned. In Eclipse of Reason’s final chapter, entitled “On the Concept of Philosophy,” Horkheimer warns against the “formalization of reason.” His intent is, in fact, to liberate reason from itself, from its compulsive tendency to identity, compare, measure: to perform cognitive activities that ultimately adapt objective reality to human capacities, but precisely by doing so block the subject’s relation to this reality, because objective reality does not conform to formal-rationalistic rules. Such perception only leads to a reification of the perception and experience of reality. Hence the eclipse: the impossibility of seeing through the blinds of reason itself. The task of philosophy, Horkheimer argues in Eclipse of Reason, is to employ reason in order to develop such a critique of reason  – “denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render,” he concludes.45 Horkheimer develops a critique of a philosophy – from logical positivism to idealism and naturalism – which merely provides formal descriptions, accounts, explanations, but no alternatives, no strategies for finding a way out of the process of reification and blindness. In a sense, Horkheimer’s project of rescuing reason from itself is grounded in a certain idea of transcendence: the faith, even the utopian faith, in the power of liberation, in mending the evils of given reality, in a tikkun. Although Eclipse of Reason is first and foremost a sociological account of philosophical reason, it includes a certain metaphysical, even theological element. This element grew

44 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 93. 45 Ibid., 187.

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deeper in the following year, and Horkheimer’s work increasingly included theological dimensions in his later years. In 1967, in a text dedicated to the theologian Paul Tillich, Horkheimer’s friend and colleague who had died two years earlier, Horkheimer discusses the relationship between religion and philosophy. His critical argument in the text, entitled “Religion und Philosophie” (“Religion and Philosophy”), asserts that while philosophy has become a science, functional and instrumental, religion is assigned with the task of offering meaning and truth.46 In this sense, the moral, the ethical, and the political questions that a critique of contemporary philosophy asks for can no longer be expected from philosophy itself, as science, but from religion.47 As opposed to Buber, Horkheimer does not suggest a revitalization of religious experience, but rather claims that the only task left for philosophy is to give an expression to the eclipse, the vanishing, the contraction of transcendence – as the thinking of the unconditional. This brings us back to the idea of tsimtsum as eclipse: a metaphysical, epistemological concept, originally meant to describe the creation of the world, to provide an account of the origins of reality; but in Buber  – and in some ways, in Horkheimer  – it repositions to the realm of the ethical. Eclipse of Reason, like Eclipse of God, is a call for action: not to reestablish reason or to reanimate faith in God, but to liberate thought from the constraints imposed on it by instrumental rationality. While Horkheimer, although familiar with the Kabbalistic theory of tsimtsum, does not directly refer to it, we can find a remarkable reference in his work that addresses similar concerns: the concept of “concentration.” Curiously, the text was published in 1938, the time of Horkheimer’s first encounters with Scholem, who described Lurianic Kabbalah to him at length – though it is uncertain whether Horkheimer indeed wrote the text immediately following these conversations. Furthermore, the topic itself in no way relates to Kabbalah or to tsimtsum. But the relevance is still striking and should be addressed: “Die Philosophie der absoluten Konzentration” (“Philosophy of Absolute Concentration”) is, in fact, Horkheimer’s review essay of a book by the Jewish social philosopher Siegfried Marck (1889 Breslau – 1957 Chicago), entitled Der Neuhumanismus als politische Philosophie (Neo-Humanism as Political Philosophy). Although the book itself did not make it through the long history of political thought into our time, and the author seems to have descended into oblivion, Horkheimer’s essay  – published in the Institute’s own Journal of Social Research, and later included in

46 Horkheimer, “Religion und Philosophie,” Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1985), 187–196. 47 Ibid., 189.

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Horkheimer’s Collected Works (Gesammelte Schriften) – somewhat preserves it. It is, most importantly, Horkheimer’s own interpretation of the concept of concentration – conceptually but also thematically related to the idea of tsimtsum – that deserves particular attention in this context. Marck’s own intent was to create a concept of religion that is compatible with socialism. Although one could have expected Horkheimer to rather endorse such a concept, the review essay is highly critical of the project, and in particular of the concept of concentration – once again, in a sense remarkably close to the Lurianic tsimtsum, although not directly naming it. Horkheimer focuses on extracting the ethical and political implications of the concept, which can be extrapolated as his critical interpretation of tsimtsum from an ethical-political perspective. Marck’s idea of neo-humanism is a political and theological idea. It merges a concept of God with an idea of socialist politics. Horkheimer cites from the book: “Gott ist die eigentliche Mitte, zu der die Gegensätze, die Totalität, zu der die Teile konvergieren. Er ist die absolute Konzentration, dem alles Begrenzte und Dämonische als Exzentrizität gegenübersteht.” (“God is the true middle of things, into which the oppositions, the totality, the parts, converge. He is the absolute concentration, which confronts everything limited and demonic as eccentricity.”)48 God’s concentration is here not exactly a disappearance or concealment, but rather a concentrated absolute into which everything converges, and which excludes from its middle all otherness. But despite the differences from the Lurianic interpretation of tsimtsum, Marck’s idea of God is understood here as precisely such concentration. Divine transcendence absorbs into itself all aspects of reality, as in the Lurianic theory of emanation: God’s concentration is God’s absoluteness. What is remarkable in Marck’s theory is that he, like later interpretations of Lurianic Kabbalah, draws upon gnostic sources to formulate a modern political theology, or even theological politics. Religion is important to him, the socialist, because it provides the structures and categories according to which political life can be conceived. God’s concentration is thus a model for a political structure – which he curiously considers socialist humanism – in which all oppositions merge into one concentrated totality. Precisely such concentration outrages Horkheimer, who sees in it an exclusion and elimination of all “eccentricities”: “Konzentrationen, welche die ‘Ekzentrizitäten’ rechts und links als dämonisch austreiben, [müssen] sich in der Praxis entscheiden, mit welchem Teufel anzufangen sei.” (“Concentrations that cast out ‘eccentricities’ to their right and to their left as

48 Horkheimer, “Die Philosophie der absoluten Konzentration,” in: Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1988), 296.

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demonic, must decide in practice which devil to attack.”49 If we can indeed identify in Marck’s political theology of concentration a form of tsimtsum, as gnostic as the Lurianic, and arguably responding to it in one way or another, then Horkheimer offers here a radical critique of such a theory. Tsimtsum, as concentration understood this way, entails a certain exclusiveness that denounces otherness as “demonic.” Such interpretation – which, I admit, is utterly speculative – does present another form of deciphering tsimtsum in modernity, according to its relevance to the new pressing questions of the day. Horkheimer was outraged by the proximity he saw between Marck’s Jewish social humanism and certain aspects of National Socialism. If such concentration excludes certain modes of existence, or ways of life, then it means their real and material extermination. Tsimtsum as concentration – and if understood more radically: as eclipse – may then have far more radical implications.

IV Both Buber and Horkheimer not only present modern renderings of the Lurianic tsimtsum, with which they were utterly familiar, and reinterpret it in the context of the metaphor of eclipse, but they also reflect on the ethical and political meaning of the concept. Tsimtsum, eclipse, or concentration cannot and must not be understood merely as a cosmological or epistemological category, but it is, for both of them, a relational concept, addressing the relation between God, or transcendence, and human beings, or human agency. My suggestion that we read their different theories of eclipse as both resonating with a certain understanding of tsimtsum is not meant to denote, primarily, philological evidence for counterinfluence or to address any metaphysical or cosmological aspects of their theories, but rather to point to the significance of the affinity between their concepts and, most importantly, to the ethical and political diagnoses – and warnings – they both express. The meaning of tsimtsum as God’s or reason’s eclipse must be determined according to the ethical, social, and political implications of the interpretation. In this sense, these modern manifestations of tsimtsum take the concept from its mystical and cosmological backgrounds (to which the concept of eclipse equally belongs) into a concept that concerns human agency, ethical practice, and political transcendence.

49 Ibid.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Batnitzky, Leora. “Introduction to the 2016 Edition,” in Martin Buber: Eclipse of Reason: Studies in the Relations between Religion and Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016, vvii-xxii. Buber, Martin. Eclipse of Reason: Studies in the Relations between Religion and Philosophy (1952), Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016. _____. The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. and ed. Maurice Friedman, New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Horkheimer, Max. “A Different Kind of Criticism,” in Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw, afterword by Eike Gebhardt, The Seabury Press: New York, 1978, 58–60. _____. Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw, afterword by Eike Gebhardt, The Seabury Press: New York, 1978. _____. “Dusk”, in Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw, afterword by Eike Gebhardt, The Seabury Press: New York, 1978. _____. Eclipse of Reason (1947), London and New York: Continuum, 2004. _____. “Die Philosophie der absoluten Konzentration,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1988. _____. “Religion und Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1985, 187–196. Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. Scholem, Gershom, Kabbalah, New York and Scarborough: Meridian, 1978. _____. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

Part 3: Tsimtsum after the Holocaust

Przemysław Tacik

Tsimtsum as the Traumnabel of Modern Jewish Philosophy: Between History and Revelation In modern Jewish thought the concept of tsimtsum is notoriously ambiguous. Some reasons for this ambiguity are obvious. Not only does the term itself have a vast semantic field, but over the centuries it has been adapted to various intellectual and religious contexts, each time gaining a different hue. We can hardly refer to any original Lurianic understanding of tsimtsum, given that all we have are secondary sources.1 The beauty and, simultaneously, the malaise of this concept lie in its fairly simple but thought-provoking imagery that can be fruitfully re-adapted to convey radically divergent ideas. Yet apart from these somewhat self-evident reasons, tsimtsum conceals another problematic feature. At least in its Lurianic version, tsimtsum refers to an event that might be  – using hopelessly philosophical words  – described as cosmogonist or ontological. It is a stage in the process leading up to the Creation. As such, tsimtsum originally refers to an event that defies the sharp distinction between ontology, theology and history: as something which has already happened, it shapes the current status of the world directly. Even if its twentiethcentury interpretations (particularly Scholem’s) engender in us an acquired taste for more metaphorical (or even a-theological) interpretations of tsimtsum, there would seem to be little difficulty in reconciling this concept with a generally literal reading of the biblical narrative concerning the beginning of the world. This narrative links, through a meaningfully arranged sequence of events, the primordial ontological act of Creation with the ontological actuality of the world as it is now. Luria’s orthodox observance of halakha2 attests to the fact that there was no actual discrepancy between his kabbalistic speculations and acknowledging the validity of the Torah, both in its descriptive and normative dimensions. The advent of modernity, however, disturbs the relation between ontology and history, thereby exposing tsimtsum to a much more fundamental structural

1 Cf. Christoph Schulte, Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp, 2014), 10. 2 Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Dealer of the Cosmos. Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 188. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-012

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ambiguity. As Kant3 and Hegel4 rightly sensed, modernity irrevocably shattered the immediacy of metaphysical narratives (including the biblical one). This reconfiguration gave birth to a split between ideas and history of ideas, between active philosophising and history of philosophy, between theology and distanced analysis of theological categories. From this moment on, the Lurianic category of tsimtsum functioned in a twofold manner: either as a working philosophical concept within an original conceptual framework (for instance in Schelling’s Weltalter5), or as a subject of interest for intellectual history. In other words, since the advent of modernity, tsimtsum might either be played with as a philosophical idea (albeit with a grain of salt,6 since a literal reading would be too pre-modern) or be analysed with a distanced academic gaze as a recurrent motif of Jewish and Western thought. This split, taken in itself, does not seem to concern tsimtsum in particular. Any pre-modern philosophical idea becomes entrapped in the duality of direct (even if

3 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter (Leipzig: Reclam, 1913). 4 In his first Critique, Kant deduces the need for a new approach to philosophy from the insufficiency of hitherto practiced metaphysical systems. Their flaws are twofold: first, they arrogate to themselves nonexistent powers of reasoning beyond the empirical field; second, they do not extend to the structure of cognition that limits them. But apart from these reasons, Kant points out to a displacement in taste. “It is plainly not the effect of levity,” he claims, “but of the matured judgment of the age, which refuses to be any longer entertained with illusory knowledge” (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Pure Reason, tr. by J. D. Meiklejohn, (New York: Collier, 1901),  15). To put it differently, metaphysics lost its immediate power of “luring.” Beyond any reasoned argumentation by which it might be defended, its discourse can no longer convince as it had done before. 5 In Hegel’s thought the rift opened by modernity is a recurring topic. In The Phenomenology of Spirit he claims that “a thread of light” that had previously linked heaven with Earth was irrevocably lost: “Von allem, was ist, lag die Bedeutung in dem Lichtfaden, durch den es an den Himmel geknüpft war” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenologie des Geistes [Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009, 14]). Equally, in The Science of Logic, Hegel links the need of a new logic with the loss of taste for the old one (G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik [Nürnberg: Schrag, 1812], vol. I, iii–vi). 6 A good example of this ironic usage of tsimtsum is provided by Schelling. It is usually assumed that Schelling drew upon the concept of tsimtsum (as already adapted to Christian application), melding it into his own version of German Idealism. Yet, as Žižek displayed in his seminal book on Schelling’s philosophy, the tsimtsum-inspired mechanism of contraction and expansion was one of his many attempts to reconcile, within one system, the Absolute, finiteness and freedom (cf. Slavoj Žižek, Indivisible Remainder. On Schelling and Related Matters [London & New York: Verso, 2007], 54–62). Setting aside the complicated question of the exact degree of tsimtsuminspired imagery in Schelling’s thought, the difference from Lurianic version of tsimtsum is clearly visible. Schelling uses it as a handy conceptual tool for grappling with the overtly mythical story of the Creation. Contrariwise, for Luria tsimtsum appears to be a real event, perfectly compatible with the narrative of the Torah. In this sense, Schelling’s usage was ironic, because it deliberately suspended the immediacy of the tsimtsum narrative.

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ironic) usage and distanced historiographical gaze. But the true problem of such a split lies in the fact that both positions cannot be fully delineated. Obviously, even in the twentieth century there are still classic “ontologists,” such as Deleuze for instance, nearly as “good” as the old ones, and there are histories of philosophy which seem to abstract almost completely from taking any particular philosophical position. Yet between these clearly marked positions there is a blurred area, a zone of indistinguishability, where history becomes part and parcel of philosophical thinking. The obvious patron of such a way of thinking is Hegel, whose intellectual path fully intermingled philosophy and historical approach. In Hegel’s thought there is no philosophy without the history that was its backdrop of development and final self-recognition – and, symmetrically, there is no history without the philosophical insight that allows one to comprehend history at all. Starting with Hegel, nearly all major Western philosophers take history as both a subject of their thinking and a non-negligible overall context of any philosophising. Consequently, the split roughly described by the pairing of “philosophy” and “history” is, in fact, not a dissociation of terms into an opposition, but rather the opening of a new field in which philosophy and history are intertwined dimensions of thought. If we perceive modern thought in this way, tsimtsum will appear as a concept particularly prone to releasing the potential of play between philosophy and history. Why? Because tsimtsum happened to be conceived at the time that directly preceded the advent of modernity and, through its suggestive imagery, might very well refer to the murky origins of this epoch. Whether Luria indeed anticipated modernity or not is undecideable and, in fact, irrelevant; more importantly, the emergence of the concept of tsimtsum in its Lurianic version coincided with the turn of epochs. Once this idea shattered and split into a philosophical concept and a term for historiography, the link between ontology and history that it had previously concealed started to work surprisingly effectively in the new, modern context. Tsimtsum is so well suited to speculations on the nature and genesis of modernity, not only due to its connotations of God’s withdrawal (so well disseminated by Gershom Sholem7 that they have dominated the popular reception of tsimtsum) – which might go hand in hand with modern secularisation – but also because of its location in the zone of indistinguishability between ontology and history. Once the relative simplicity of the original tsimtsum is destabilised and the philosophical usage of this term becomes necessarily metaphorical, the path to linking its imagery with the nature and origins of modernity is laid open. It is for this reason that tsimtsum embodies structural paradoxes of modern Jewish philosophy, which are partly identical to the discontents of modern phi-

7 Cf. Christoph Schulte, Zimzum, 22, 30, 385–389.

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losophy as such, but which take a unique turn due to the position of Jewish philosophy at the crossroads of Jewish tradition, broadly understood, and Western thinking. As I attempt to demonstrate, the pervasive modern split between “philosophical” and “historical” approaches has a specific meaning for modern Jewish thought. And tsimtsum is the concept that epitomises the paradoxical position of this idea. Its unique role reaffirms itself even in the very composition of this volume. In principle, the volume is arranged according to chronological order. It begins with the origins of tsimtsum, passes through its re-adaptations eventually arrives at remarks on the relation between tsimtsum and poststructuralism. This order, whose self-evident character seems not to demand any explanation, works in the dimension of historical approach. In this sense, its overall methodology would be generally similar to one employed in, say, history of art. But here such a composition is, in fact, self-referential, given that not a few thinkers have assumed that tsimtsum might be perceived as a concept which not only develops in history, but also – in an unclear way – determines one of its epochs, namely modernity. Therefore any “historically objective” portrayal cannot prevent this self-reference that blurs boundaries between “history” and “philosophy.” To put it differently, the position of tsimtsum lies at the point of curiosity which destabilizes the very framework of history that we have. And perhaps it is precisely in poststructuralism – both “after” history and at its infrastructure (to quote Rodolphe Gasché’s reinterpretation of Derrida’s concept8) – that this mechanism of tsimtsum might be properly discerned.

Historical versus Philosophical Approach To grasp the indelible ambiguity that determines the position of modern Jewish thought, we need to look at the latter from two different perspectives. The first is the perspective of historical narrative. This is the approach that scholars usually adopt when they construct histories of Jewish philosophy. Numerous handbooks, guides or syntheses of Jewish philosophy or, speaking more broadly, of Jewish thought, have been published as objective  – as far as is possible – presentations of the development of ideas within Jewish thinking. This kind of narrative commonly refrains from constructing stories about essential affinities between the content of these ideas and the epochs in which they 8 Rodolphe Gasché, Le tain de miroir. Derrida et la philosophie de la réflexion, tr. par M. Froment-Maurice (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 147–149.

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originated. The objectivism of historical narrative consists in demonstrating that a given idea appeared in a particular epoch and was influenced by an earlier one or influenced a later one. In other words, with Weberian ideals of valuation-free scientific gaze, the historical approach finds it legitimate to track actual lines of influence, to elucidate the implicit content of ideas and to reconstruct their context. Yet if we want to be historians of philosophy, not philosophers, we should abstain from seeking essential affinities. We are only entitled to demonstrate that one philosophical idea resembles another in certain respects. The only explanation of resemblance accepted within the discourse of historical narrative uses the category of influence: thinker A read the works of thinker B, which resulted in similarities in their approaches. As far as tsimtsum is concerned, the works of Lawrence Fine and Christoph Schulte – among others – present a sober historical approach to the origins, content and development of this category. In the narratives described above, history becomes the definitive framework onto which the evolution of concepts is projected. In this respect, it works similarly to the concept of time in Kant’s Critique of the Pure Reason: as the “ultimate container” of all events, which allows them to be compared.9 This framework is abstract, almost technical. Its purpose is to provide a basic chronological order of events, which only subsequently might be linked substantially. Yet in itself, this framework cannot be meaningfully interpreted. If we look at the philosophical presuppositions of the historical approach, it appears to be built on simple, almost positivist premises: ultimately all ideas appear and are reworked in minds of human beings, whose position in time and space can be pinpointed. Accordingly, the concept of tsimtsum could be convincingly described as an idea stemming from Isaac Luria, who redefined the term previously used by Nahmanides and Moshe Cordovero.10 Likewise, the two or three years that Luria spent in Safed are conceivably the most precisely defined context of origin for our current understanding of tsimtsum.

9 “Time is a necessary representation, lying at the foundation of all our intuitions. With regard to phenomena in general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well represent to ourselves time void of phenomena. … Time is not a discursive, or as it is called, general conception, but a pure form of the sensuous intuition. Different times are merely parts of one and the same time. … The infinity of time signifies nothing more than that every determined quantity of time is possible only through limitations of one time lying at the foundation. Consequently, the original representation, time, must be given as unlimited. But as the determinate representation of the parts of time and of every quantity of an object can only be obtained by limitation, the complete representation of time must not be furnished by means of conceptions, for these contain only partial representations. Conceptions, on the contrary, must have immediate intuition for their basis” (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Pure Reason, 71–72). 10 Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, 129–130.

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The historical perspective seems to be a modest and sober approach, which ostensibly avoids traps of metaphysical constructions of history. Naturally, the selection of material and its arrangement always depend on more or less arbitrary choices, but the framework of history purports to provide an objective foothold for tracing the evolution of concepts. But if the historical approach were the only way of thinking about Jewish thought, this volume could never tackle the uneasy position of tsimtsum. The relation between tsimtsum and modernity that it explores does not refer only to a history of a particular concept in a particular epoch. Among the scholars and thinkers who dealt with modern Jewish thought, there have not only been pure historians of philosophy or historians of ideas. Their interest of many of them, even if so often concealed, concerned a more substantial link between tsimtsum and modernity. This is the second perspective, which I will call, for lack of a better word, philosophical. In this approach, modernity is not just an epoch, viewed as just one of the many objectively delimitable units of the neutral historical framework in which ideas are conceived and develop. On the contrary, in the philosophical approach, modernity is an epoch that has its own meaningful specificity that interferes with the material content of ideas which develop within it. Contrary to the historical approach, in which we take history for granted – as the ultimate framework for arranging our knowledge – the philosophical approach takes history as its object. In other words, the very existence of an epoch, its beginning, its meaning, the arrangement of possibilities and impossibilities that it creates, become pulled into thinking alongside the material content of particular concepts. It is in this sense that one might be tempted to ask: is there really a more substantial link between tsimtsum and modernity than the mere fact that Isaac Luria came up with this concept at the beginning of the modern era? Is tsimtsum somehow related to the crisis of metaphysics and the decline of revelation, which come to the fore as one of the most crucial traits of modernity? Naturally, this approach cannot lay claim to dry scientific objectivism and, to many historians of ideas, it will appear suspicious or even illegitimate. Their restraint is understandable, given that the philosophical perspective dangerously blurs the difference between philosophy and history of philosophy, which was drawn after Hegel in response to the problem of historicism. The historical perspective attempts to make the best use of the invention of universal continuous history that appeared in the nineteenth century. The philosophical perspective, on the contrary, seeks to investigate history not as a solution, not even as a tool, but as part of the problem itself. Yet, by doing so, it effectively enters into the realm of radical historicity, in which the description of the historical framework is indistinguishable from a position within it.

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Interplay of Philosophy and History The tension between the historical and philosophical approaches is particularly visible in modern Jewish thought. The principal reason for this specificity is the fact that up until the twentieth century Western thought – apart from few notable exceptions, such as Maimonides, Spinoza or Moses Mendelssohn – was quite hermetically sealed from engagement with Jewish thinking as such, which often had to appear under the guise of deforming adaptations in order to fit into the mainstream of Western philosophy. Such was also the fate of concept of tsimtsum, which had to transform itself significantly before it could be used by thinkers like Oetinger or Schelling.11 When in the twentieth century this boundary started to dissipate, so-called Western thinking had to learn about Jewish thinking for the first time. But the process of learning was inextricably intertwined with philosophical elaboration of the positive material, to quote Hegel’s expression, of Jewish religious and philosophical thought. The first intellectuals who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, smuggled elements of Jewish tradition into the mainstream of Western philosophy – for instance Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin  – carefully selected the ideas that matched their own philosophical interests. To these ideas they gave a distinctively modern flavour, developed on the substrate of Kantianism (Cohen), Hegelianism (Rosenzweig) or German Romanticism and, later, Marxism (Benjamin). Consequently, their broader audience, generally poorly informed about the intricacies of Jewish tradition, had little chance to disentangle the historico-philosophical complex and engage the sources of Jewish thought more directly. Consequently, what they read was already transformed through a strictly modern framework. But the greatest paradox came with the founder of modern kaballah studies, Gershom Scholem. Scholem tended to stage many of his narratives as neutrally historical, although they were, in fact, imbued with his unquenched personal thirst for theological answers (especially in his early works12), culminating in his fondness for tsimtsum as the metaphor of Selbstverschränkung Gottes in modernity.13 Nevertheless, for many of the intellectuals who appeared – for themselves

11 Christoph Schulte, Zimzum, 299–301. 12 Daniel Weidner, “Reading Gershom Scholem”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006): 204–215. 13 Scholem’s rewriting of history is clearly visible, for example, in the fourth thesis from his “Ten Unhistorical Theses on the Kabbalah,” where Scholem presents Lurianic tsimtsum with an explicit materialist twist, claiming that perception of kabbalists (implicitly – Lurianists) as “mystical materialists” of dialectical propensities might be ahistorical, but not senseless (Gershom

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and for us  – as contemporary Jewish thinkers par excellence, Scholem’s works were the major, if not the only, source of knowledge concerning Jewish mysticism. Consequently, the purportedly “objective” presentation of the history of Jewish mysticism was, for a long time, imbued with Scholem’s particular interest of a purely modern character. The cases of influential readers of Scholem such as Harold Bloom, Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, despite all the differences between them, demonstrate how easily one can join the purportedly seamless thread of Jewish tradition, which is effectively an already philosophical construction, under the cover of tacit references to the works of one author. Nevertheless, it needs to be emphasised that the unmatchable position of Scholem’s works was not a result of anyone’s ignorance or ill-will. Naturally, these texts were, for most of the twentieth century, the most available and accessible works on kaballah, so it can hardly be surprising that they functioned as the principal source of knowledge on Jewish mysticism. However, they would have never gained such popularity if their philosophical bias had not been disguised. In this sense, the elements of the historical approach, apart from disseminating more or less accurate knowledge of kaballah, contributed, in themselves, to the development of Jewish thinking in the 20th century, precisely as the framework in which philosophical approach could revive interest in past forms of religious speculation. The philosophical element of Scholem’s texts was disguised by the purportedly objective historical approach which was ascribed to these works. For this reason, the position of Scholem’s research sheds light on the fascinating entanglement of historical and philosophical approaches to Jewish thought. His works, clearly marked by the speculative interest of the author, were assumed to be transparent historical sources. Lacanians would speak about ascribing the role of sujet supposé savoir14 – not only to Scholem, but, predominantly, to the very historical framework in which Jewish thought was encased by his works. Perhaps it is the very displacement of gaze manifest in this assumption that might co-determine the structure of the modern history of Jewish thought. Scholem, “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala” in Judaica 2 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970], 266). Philosophico-theological motivations behind his historical research are also noticeable in his bitter views on contemporaneity, as an epoch ravaged by a profound spiritual crisis in which the flame of mysticism can hardly be rekindled; Scholem, “Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time,” in Avraham Shapira (ed.), On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, tr. by J. Chipman (Philadelphia & Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia & Jerusalem 5758–1997), 6–18. On Scholem’s relation to tsimtsum, see also: Christoph Schulte, Zimzum, pp. 383–389; Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors. On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 96–121. 14 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre XVI : De l’Autre à l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 88, 148, 280, 349.

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But the paradoxical enchainment of philosophy and history does not stop here: the works of Scholem, read as objective sources, were re-used for developing new Jewish thought. In other words, their content, viewed as established under the historical approach, was transposed, once again, to an overtly philosophical perspective. Therefore the historical approach or, perhaps, even the very possibility of a historical framework, acted as a mediating factor for the philosophical approach to Jewish thought. If so, it may perhaps be surmised that in modernity Jewish thinking communicates with Jewish thinking only through the mediation of historical projection. The figure of the stable historical framework might be merely an instance within thinking, an instance that supplements the abyss opened by the discontinuity of Jewish tradition. Naturally, the significance of historical thinking and of historism is not confined to Jewish thought. History – as a concept, problem and neither external nor internal element – haunts modern philosophy in general. But the unique position of Jewish thinking in modern Western thought, the position acquired after centuries of repression – in both a psychoanalytic and literal sense – makes the link between history and Jewish thinking particularly complex and overdetermined. Jewish thinking not only had to reconfigure itself after the rupture with its almost entirely religious pre-modern tradition, but it also had to reinvent itself in the language of Western philosophy. Therefore the continuity of Jewish thought which we attempt to recreate in the weakest of all forms, namely under the guise of historical framework, is not an illusion, not even an axiom; it is something much more overwhelming, and elusive into the bargain. Perhaps it is a stark residue, the last formal mark, which both covers and reveals the initial cut of modernity. Daring as it may sound, it is this double rupture which marked the tradition of Jewish thinking that privileges Jewish philosophy in its understanding of modernity. Not because of some secret affinities between Jewish thinking per se and the basic determinants of modernity, but because of the irreducible interplay between historical and philosophical approaches at the very heart of modern Jewish thought.

Blind Spots: The Historical Approach If this interplay is something more than a coincidence, as I am trying to demonstrate, it cannot be taken for the ultimate explanation of the position of Jewish thinking in modernity. Rather, it calls for examining it in greater detail, in all its complexity, with philosophical and historical elements mutually intertwined. In brief, it demands that we should perceive modern Jewish thinking as overdetermined, to use the old

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Freudian term readapted by Althusser.15 Overdetermination manifests itself in the existence of specific zones of insufficiency within both approaches – historical and philosophical – which are necessarily partial. These zones are like blind spots, generated in the process of removing of an additional element from a narrative. Let us then look more closely into both approaches, in search of such blind spots. Starting with the historical approach, it needs to be remarked that it seems less lacunae-ridden than the philosophical one. Nevertheless, there is a device at work within this kind of narrative that appears problematic – namely the category of influence, the very same one that accounts for its success in the field of objectivism. This seemingly neutral tool, so useful for seeking parallels between different ideas, seldom produces unequivocal results. We can establish that philosopher A influenced philosopher B on the basis of a at least a few premises: firstly, B might explicitly refer to A; secondly, we might know that B read A despite the lack of explicit references; or, thirdly, we might spot some resemblances between their narratives. From the point of view of historians of philosophy, the first premise gives more certain results; the last one – more doubtful. But even in the most fortunate cases, when the map of influences and resemblances is drawn in greatest detail, the historical narrative shows its limitations. By comparing two ideas developed by two thinkers, mapping their similarities or dissimilarities and tracing back the latter to more remote layers of the past, we neglect the crucial feature of modern thinking: reflexivity. Influence, at least in modern times, cannot be conceived of as picking up someone else’s concept, either verbatim or with modifications. Reflexivity functions as though it added a third dimension to the plain historical sequence of concepts, which cannot be fully grasped within the framework of picking-up and adapting. Consequently, there is an irreducibly philosophical element in the selfpositioning of a modern thinker within a certain tradition. Paradoxically, it is precisely the same mechanism which Harold Bloom wanted to elucidate with the reworked concept of tsimtsum. In his famous book Kabbalah and Criticism, simultaneously a piece of speculative post-mysticism and innovative literary studies, Bloom attempted to describe kabbalah as a theory of influence. In his view, what made this stream of Jewish mysticism lend itself so readily

15 Althusser borrowed this term from Freud in order to explain the specificity of Marxist (chiefly Marx’s and Lenin’s) contradiction in contrast to Hegel’s dialectics (cf. Louis Althusser, “Sur Marx et Freud,” in Écrits sur la psychanalyse. Freud et Lacan [Paris: STOCK/IMEC, 1993], 224–225). Apart from the accuracy of this portrayal of Hegel, the term “overdetermination” captures the excess-in-determination of phenomena, which–through too many cross-entangled particular determinations–acquire a kind of proper inertia, thus cutting through the otherwise onedimensional relation between cause and effect.

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to discerning the work of influence was its immanent belatedness.16 Early kabbalists found themselves in an unbearable situation of inheriting the overloaded and fairly closed tradition of Jewish law, its interpretations and commentaries, which needed to be opened up if the current concerns and suffering of Jews were to be included. Bloom sees the specificity of the kabbalists’ gesture in a mystic openingthrough-reinterpretation of the Jewish tradition: Their achievement was not just to restore Gnosis and mythology to a Judaism which had purged itself of such elements, but more crucially to provide the masses of suffering Jewry with a more immediate and experiential personal faith than the strength of orthodox tradition might have allowed… Kabbalah is a collective, psychic defense of the most imaginative medieval Jews against exile and persecution pressing on them inwardly.17

But in Bloom’s vision Luria becomes the first kabbalist who reached true originality, by rejecting the unidirectionality of the process of Creation, an idea of allegedly Gnostic-Neoplatonic origin.18 Lurianic Creation is a “startingly regressive process,”19 in which contraction (tsimtsum) and breaking apart (shevirat hakelim) throttle the hitherto smooth sequence of God’s acts. In terms of literary criticism, Luria might be viewed as a dialectic revisionist,20 who comes up with the idea of tsimtsum as “a loss-in-meaning, even an achieved dearth-of-meaning, a sense that representation cannot be achieved fully, or that representation cannot fill the void out of which the desire-for-poetry rises.”21 In a strange way Bloom links the concept of tsimtsum with a kind of glottal stop of representation, which breaks the smooth and perfect circle of a text. His reinterpretation might be surprisingly well adapted to the field of historiography of philosophy. Tsimtsum with a Bloomian twist demonstrates that the category of influence, allegedly a neutral tool for describing relations between ideas and intellectuals, conceals a philosophical riddle within itself. The pair influence / adaptation does not do justice to the discontinuity of real relations between ideas and intellectuals. The historical approach stumbles upon an irreducibly philosophical element of intrahistorical self-positing. If we confine ourselves only to the historical approach, we make a monochromatic picture in which all variations on given themes are duly noted, but without understanding how the historical component itself enters the

16 Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism. A Continuum Book (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 34. 17 Ibid., 34, 53. 18 Ibid., 39. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 71. 21 Ibid., 74.

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domain of reflexive thinking, deforms it and itself becomes deformed. The historical approach produces a narrative in which the conflation of streams of philosophical content becomes undecidable. Just as in Bloom’s reinterpretation of tsimtsum, the historical approach cannot properly grasp the inertia of each new rendering of the “same” idea, opened by the initial contraction against previous history. In brief, historical narratives join together that which its very nature fights historical continuity. Insofar as the history of the very concept of tsimtsum is concerned, the historical approach is not capable of assessing the extent to which all inspirations drawn from Lurianic thought are still tsimtsum – and to what extent they simply dress up, for instance, some modern topoi like negativity, the death of God and remainder. Are we really able to gauge, for example, how much of Schelling’s Kontraktion is influenced by Luria and how much it reworks the category of negativity in resistance to Hegel’s philosophy? And, perhaps more importantly, is it not conceivable than even the slightest admixture of modern negativity irremovably warps the continuity of the tsimtsum tradition, making all resemblances necessarily superficial? Alternatively, one might ask: is there really a secret current of tsimtsum fuelling philosophies of Benjamin, Bloch, Lévinas, Jabès and Derrida? Is it modern or Lurianic? Or both?22 The questions about the boundaries of “true” Jewish thinking, which are usually asked in the opening pages of almost every handbook of Jewish philosophy, reveal the inner insufficiency of the historical approach. The knowledge produced by the historical approach, despite its authority, appears as stunningly powerless in understanding the true life of a concept. It might be lured by superficial similarities or even by the usage of the name of the concept, which, in fact, might work with a completely different intellectual engine than the original one. If so, the historical approach would have a blind spot precisely in the place investigated by the philosophical approach.

Blind Spot: The Philosophical Approach Nonetheless, the blind spot of the philosophical perspective, its irremovable limitation, is even more noticeable. It lies in the place where this approach attempts to construct its own specific kind of narrative on history. Contrary to the historical

22 Habermas in his famous essay attempted to outline the field of contact between German Idealism and Jewish philosophy, but even for him the convergence between the two is “astonishing” (Jürgen Habermas, “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers”, tr. by F. G. Lawrence, in: Eduardo Mendieta (ed.), Religion and Rationality. Essays on Reason, God and Modernity [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002], 37).

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approach, which settles for modest juxtaposition of affinities and influences  – despite their above-mentioned flaws  – the philosophical approach demands a history that would no longer be a manifest construction, a technical framework, but which would be meaningful at its core. This kind of history can be called real – in all the post-Lacanian ambiguity of the term. Real history does not emerge from the projection of events onto an empty common grid, as did the historical approach. Contrariwise, it emerges as a meaningful order of events which conditions them in advance. The exact meaning of this “philosophical history” might not be known, but it is assumed to exist. The desire for real history, thus understood, is palpable in countless narratives which  – at least since the publication of Hermann Cohen’s Religion der Vernunft aus dem Quellen des Judentums23 – attempted first to rekindle Western philosophy with the spirit of Judaism and then, when it had already started to work, struggled to understand the nature of this surprising marriage. The true père fondateur in this field is no one else than Gershom Scholem, who in the ’20s and ’30s, and most explicitly in his famous memorial address for Franz Rosenzweig,24 posed a question stunning both for philosophers and historians: is modern history, developing under the sign of God’s absence, a new kind of revelation, revelation through withdrawal, so fittingly grasped through the concept of tsimtsum? The immediacy of this question (however murkily it was posed) is astonishing in comparison with, for instance, Cohen’s ostensibly anachronistic and metaphorical re-reading of Judaism in light of Kantian ethics.25 It is clear that the historic studies of the kabbalah for which Scholem – a “Gnostic Jew” 26 and metaphysician at heart27 in Moshe Idel’s portrayal – had to settle, did not quench his thirst for real history, that is, a kind of history in which a primordial link between the epoch and its content is assumed. This link is supposed to precede any arrangement of events within the objective historical framework. The real history constitutes a strange counterpart to the historical approach. It can never 23 Hermann Cohen, Religion des Vernunfts aus den Quellen des Judentums (Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag, 1978). 24 Gershom Scholem, “Gedenkrede von Gershom Scholem”, übersetzt von M. Brocke in: Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 532–534. 25 Whenever Cohen pronounces anachronistic statements – for instance that the revelation on Sinai was a creation of reason (Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft, 84) or that ethical socialism permeates Mosaic law (ibid., 303) – his Maimonidean-like fondness for metaphors and abstraction suspends the sharpness of the question of the real relations between modernity and Judaism. 26 Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections. Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002), xi. 27 Id., Old Worlds, New Mirrors, 29.

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reach its own goal, precisely for the very same reason that makes the artificial history of the historical approach possible and necessary – namely, the lack of the big Other of history, to use this Lacanian term. A similar kind of philosophical approach to the history of Jewish/Western thought is well traceable in Maurice Blanchot essay “Être juif.”28 Blanchot views Judaism as a tradition of intellectual nomadism, accustomed to constant change, discontinuity, plurality and lack of one truth.29 As such, it is akin to modern existence. Its strong anti-mythical propensities go hand in hand with modern secularism. Moreover, Jewish militant monotheism is supposed to have engendered sensibility for the contact with radically different Other; a contact with traces of infinity in necessarily fragmented speech.30 This particularity of Judaism, claims Blanchot, accounts for its stunning affinity with modernity. In this point the essay finds its true riddle: is such an affinity a mere coincidence, a contingent kinship between the “nomadic” tradition of Judaism and some particular views on the disowned and secular nature of modernity? Or, perhaps, is the (re)appearance of Judaism in modern thought a sign of a more substantial relation between them? Blanchot seems to at least consider a quite Scholemian possibility that modernity is an epoch of “reverse revelation” or revelation-through-withdrawal. In this regard, history becomes potentially meaningful in itself. But the demand for real history does not require Scholem’s, Blanchot’s or Hans Jonas’31 level of (a)theological speculation. It might equally flourish in apparently benign academic works, as soon as the successful entry of Jewish thought into the mainstream of Western philosophy in the twentieth century is examined. A perfect example in this field is provided by the influential book The Slayers of Moses by Susan A. Handelman.32 Handelman sought explanation of some affinities between Western post-metaphysical philosophy and Jewish thought. She portrays Judaism not necessarily as a religion, but rather as a tradition of perception and interpretation, whose principal assumptions have always been opposed to the post-Greek core of Western thinking. As expected, the whole problem gets pigeonholed into the opposition between

28 Maurice Blanchot, “Être juif” in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 180–190. 29 Ibid., 183–184. 30 Ibid., 187. 31 In his famous speech, later published as an essay, Hans Jonas suggested that the mystery of the Shoah may be understood as a sign of God’s ultimate withdrawal, which left the world to human beings, now responsible for themselves. See Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice”, The Journal of Religion, vol. 67, no. 1 (January 1987): 1–13. 32 Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses. The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).

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Athens and Jerusalem – with the usual attributes of the two. Athens stands for immobile logos: Greeks (and their Western heirs) are here assumed to believe in eternal truths, in which words only participate.33 For this reason Athens’ approach to interpretation seems to be inherently conservative and atemporal; it seeks what it already has. “For the Rabbis, however,” claims Handelman, “the primary reality was linguistic; true being was a God who speaks and creates texts, and imitatio deus was not silent suffering, but speaking and interpreting.”34 Jewish tradition is praised as one which truly understands the inner logic of textuality, the power of interpretation and contingence of the universe. Quite easily the argumentation produces two chains of equivalence: 1) Athens – logos – sight – abstraction – spirituality – … 2) Jerusalem – live speech – hearing – detail – corporeality – … But then Handelman notices a fundamental breakthrough in the intellectual tissue of Western tradition: with the advent of the Reformation, metaphorical interpretation, entrapped in the reigning figure of age-eternal logos, begins to give way to literal interpretation.35 It is not, however, a return to the interpretational pleroma of rabbinic tradition, given that the text is still subjugated to the privileged signifier (Jesus).36 Nevertheless, the Reformation enabled Protestant hermeneutics, which – through Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel and Nietzsche – seems to have opened the Western tradition to a sensibility for text and interpretation. As a result, quite surprisingly, the West found itself close to the repressed Jewish tradition. Moreover, the assimilation of Jews allowed for a more intensive flux between both traditions. Their interplay produced original combinations of Western thought and Jewish inspirations, epitomised, for example, by Freud.37 At this particular crossing of both traditions, Handelman locates not only self-evident names, such as Bloom’s (or even Derrida’s, although the latter’s relation to Judaism and Western tradition is much more complex), but also a name which hardly conjures up any Jewish links – Jacques Lacan. All these thinkers are deemed to represent this unique marriage between Judaism and Western tradition in the twentieth century. At this point Handelman’s argumentation trips up on a blind spot. What made Greek thinking finally give way to the seemingly revived Jewish thought? Was it contingent or necessary? Did Greek thinking finally collapse under the burden of its own fundamental errors and open into better-skilled Jewish tradition, which 33 Ibid., 4–15. 34 Ibid., 4. 35 Ibid., 110, 123–126. 36 Ibid., 131. 37 Ibid., 126.

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had silently awaited its ultimate triumph? Or, perhaps, was it merely a coincidence that a few thinkers who attempted to overcome Western metaphysics turned philosophy towards Jewish thought? And, finally, is it true that Athens and Jerusalem have contended throughout the entire history of philosophy, and that Jerusalem gained the upper hand in the second half of the twentieth century? Or, perhaps, has this opposition been artificially extended to all history, being in reality, by nature, purely modern? All these questions reveal that Handelman’s argumentation seeks a historical narrative that would be much more powerful than the common in handbooks of Jewish thought. What she seeks is a substantial link between modernity and Jewish thinking. This approach veers towards what I earlier called real history. The final example comes from a truly intriguing book by Marlène Zarader entitled The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage.38 The author argues as follows: Heidegger attempted to overcome or unwind metaphysics, which reigned over the history of the West for millennia.39 In his early works, after the Kehre, the tradition he opposed  – namely the tradition of onto-theology  – was Greek in its essence. It emerged in ancient Greece, after the forgotten preSocratic beginnings, and then, transformed into Christianity, became the governing framework of all Western thinking. In later works, however, such as Zeit und Sein, all history overlaps with metaphysics and even the pre-Socratics lose their privileged standpoint.40 Nonetheless, in both views the Jewish heritage was completely ignored and repressed by Heidegger, who treated it as a redundant substrate of Christianity, totally overwhelmed by Greek thinking. But if Western metaphysics is to be overcome, the Greek burden must be dismantled. This act opens up a chance for new thinking; thinking which arises from the hitherto unthought. And here, argues Zarader, Heidegger comes disconcertingly close to the Jewish heritage – particularly in his views on language and being.41 Isn’t the unthought which Heidegger attempted to bring to light  – asks Zarader  – the repressed Jewish thought which shaped Western thinking through Biblical sources?42 In other words, isn’t Heidegger’s philosophy, in a certain sense, the return of the repressed? Isn’t Heidegger, so profoundly anti-Semitic in the very structure of his mental habits, a gravedigger of the anti-Jewish Western thinking,

38 Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, tr. by Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 39 Ibid., 5–6. 40 Ibid., 19–27. 41 Ibid., 37–51. 42 Cf. ibid., 85–88.

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and thus, to our amazement, an unexpected ally of Jewish thought?43 Doesn’t he revive Jewish thinking at the core of Western tradition?44 Zarader’s argumentation is full of rhetorical gestures of self-assurance, which cover the dangerous and ambiguous sense of her speculation.45 Her conclusion, despite all the ostensibly marked circumspection, is nevertheless clear. Heidegger, regardless of all his predilection for early Greek thinking and in spite of his stereotypes concerning Jewish tradition (often conflated with Christianity),46 ended up as an unconscious supporter of Jewish thinking. What pushed him in this direction was not any inspiration from Jewish sources, but the itinerary of his own thinking. How is this stunning convergence explained? Zarader starts with establishing a network of resemblances between Heidegger’s post-metaphysical thinking and Jewish heritage. At this level, her argumentation might equally serve as the foundations of a historical narrative, in which history is a meaningless-in-itself framework of interaction between ideas and intellectuals. And indeed, Zarader seem to disguise her conclusions under the protective umbrella of the category of influence. She claims that Jewish heritage influenced Western thinking through the Bible and, to Heidegger’s ignorance, shaped his thinking as well. But the category of influence here becomes particularly feeble. It must be protected by the dubious usage of psychoanalytical categories: Heidegger is portrayed as unconsciously inspired by Jewish tradition (in an almost Jungian sense), which, through his persona, takes revenge upon the Greeks and overcomes its repression. But the category of influence thus becomes effectively mocked: even the most meticulous comparison between Heidegger’s thinking and some elements of Jewish tradition cannot lead to acknowledging “real influence.” What we could settle for at best would be a claim that affinities do exist, but that their meaning and origin is unknown.

43 Zarader’s conclusions are at the very least ironic given that at least part of Heidegger’s antiSemitism was structurally related to his method of “philosophical revolution” against neokantians, who were often Jewish (cf. Pierre Bourdieu, L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988], 71–75). Consequently, the very novelty that Zarader approves as opening Western thought for Judaism had, at least in its origins, a distinct anti-Semitic flavour. 44 Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt, 200–202. 45 Zarader’s path is here apparently not opposed to the line represented, for example, by Emil Fackenheim, who saw no possibility of reconciling Heidegger’s thinking with Judaism (Emil L. Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought [New York: Schocken Books, 1980], 223–226). Zarader may assume that “involuntary” effects of Heidegger’s philosophy open up the space for Judaism in Western thinking. Nevertheless, Fackenheim perceived Heidegger as an exemplary case of ethical blindness falling into neopaganism, which leaves hardly any space for fruitful philosophical revolution. 46 Cf. Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt, 52–56.

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Deconstructionist reading immediately reveals that repression serves here as a prop for the category of influence, which was unnaturally grafted from the historical approach, yet cannot fulfill the expectations of the philosophical approach. Personal pseudo-psychology disguises a question that oversteps the boundaries of the discourse of history of ideas: what kind of historical process caused Jewish tradition to return through the acts of a philosopher who was, at best, indifferent to it (not to enter into the thorny issue of his sometimes blatant anti-Semitism)? Zarader’s reasoning uses the tools of the historical approach in order to conceal the impossibility and monstrosity of the philosophical approach, which assumes that there might be a real affinity between Jewish tradition and modernity. Since the thought of writing The Cambridge Companion to Judeo-Heideggerian Philosophy would make us shudder, as only the Real can, the elements of historical narrative must be treated as a manifest supplement to Zarader’s argumentation. They cover a gaping hole in her musings. The hole that is not created by brave speculation, but by experiencing the Real of history, unexpected and traumatising affinities, which the historical approach pacifies, but which the philosophical approach experiences in all their horror. Meaningful history, sought by the philosophical perspective, is uncanny at its core, because it undermines all our imaginatings of continuity of traditions. Therefore the blind spot of the philosophical approach is nothing other than using shattered elements of historical narratives in order to supplement and disguise the gaping hole of Real history. And it is precisely this feeling of inexplicable, yet real (and Real) affinity that stands behind the famous theologian’s prosopopeia in one of the final paragraphs of Derrida’s De l’esprit: At this point, especially when you speak of God, of [withdrawal] retrait, of flame and flame-writing [écriture de feu] in the promise, in accord with the promise of return toward the land of the pre-archi-originarity, it is not certain that you would not receive a comparable reply and similar echo from my friend and coreligionary, the Messianic Jew.47

The whole book, devoted to dismantling Heidegger’s concept of Geist, ends with acknowledging a trace of a strange affinity. What can “the Messianic Jew” (who, parenthetically, is probably a Scholemian Lurianist, judging by his predilection for the vision of God’s withdrawal) have in common with late, post-metaphysical Western thinking? This question attacks the core of fascination that the philosophical approach seems to harbour; yet only echos circumscribe the Real of history, in which all historical narratives prove futile.

47 Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 181.

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Tsimtsum at the Heart of Modern History The mutual entanglement and partial blindness of both the philosophical and the historical approach shed light on the unique position of tsimtsum in modern Jewish thought. In the philosophical discourse, one can attribute to the Jewish tradition innumerable traits: from nomadism (Blanchot) to interpretative openness (Handelman). As an object of such attributions, the Jewish tradition remains a blatant and arbitrary construct, which excludes everything that does not match the idealised vision of a given thinker. It might be philosophically played with, either clumsily (as in the case of Sergio Quinzio48) or skillfully (the list of excellent players is well-known: Cohen, Rosenzweig, Levinas, etc.). But the very act of re-appropriation of previously neglected Jewish heritage, arbitrarily selected and interpreted, in the language of Western philosophy, creates a philosophical riddle: what is it that makes Judaism so close to contemporary currents of thought? Why it is that in the twentieth century that Jewish thinking proved so inspiring for Western philosophy? This riddle concerns, in fact, the very construction of knowledge in modernity. It arises in the middle of the split between the distanced historiographer’s gaze, who seeks out only provable links and affinities between ideas, and the vital philosopher’s interest in finding the sense of modernity as an epoch. The riddle in question is irresoluble due to its structure: either the answer is substantiated, but flat, or philosophically satisfying, yet speculative. The inner tension within modern Jewish thinking between treating history as a neutral framework and searching for its sense would then be a direct consequence of the conditions of possibility and impossibility of its discourse. No concept better attests to this structural riddle than tsimtsum. It fuels philosophical interest in the nature of modernity as tehiru, space-after-withdrawal. Yet tsimtsum is still just a concept, variously interpreted and re-adapted in the history of modern thinking. If there is any fortunate metaphor for its position, it would be Traumnabel, “the navel of a dream.” This term was coined by Freud in his Traumdeutung. It connotes a zone in every dream which is impenetrable to interpretation: There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by

48 Cf. Sergio Quinzio, Radici ebraiche del moderno (Milano: Adelphi, 1990).

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interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.49

This concept is strikingly pertinent to the role of tsimtsum in modern Jewish thought. Both of the perspectives that I depicted, historical and philosophical, are intertwined like dream-thoughts, at a point in which their blind spots correspond to one another. This point resists interpretation and makes it necessarily partial: for this reason both syntheses of modern Jewish thought and philosophical speculations on the link between modernity and Judaism are necessarily limited. They spring from the point that reaches down to the unknown, that is, as Nestor Braunstein adds in his commentary to Freud’s concept, to the Real.50 From this meshwork arises the wish to find real history, that is, history which would not only be meaningful in itself, but would fully overlap with its meaning. It would be a history whose meaning would not have to be guessed, assumed or surmised, but the one that would be transparent in its meaningfulness. Interpreting tsimtsum as “the navel of the dream” of modern Jewish thinking demonstrates the possibilities and impossibilities of historical and philosophical discourses on Judaism and modernity. If, psychoanalytically speaking, the Real is inaccessible directly, than the mystery that tsimtsum conceals is a structural riddle, stemming from a parallax displacement. Once Judaism becomes entangled in modernity, it becomes marked by a zone of indistinguishability between its history and its current meaning. Such a zone of indistinguishability is easily discernible in one of the most idiosyncratic adaptations of tsimtsum of the twentieth century, namely, in the works of Edmond Jabès. This self-trained half-poet, half-Kabbalist, heavily dependent on Western modernism51 but, simultaneously, a forerunner of postmodernity and deconstruction, never used the term tsimtsum explicitly.52 Yet all his mature writings (from Le Livre des Questions on) are pervaded by a sense of a total catastrophe

49 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. by J. Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 564. 50 Cf. Nestor A. Braunstein, La jouissance, un concept lacanien (Ramonville Saint-Agne: Éditions érès, 2005), 22. 51 An insightful book by Steven Jaron sheds light on the somewhat disguised sources of Jabèsian “Kabbalism”, which, apart from his own creativity, drew upon modern Western writers, such as J. G. Hamann (Steven Jaron, Edmond Jabès. The Hazard of Exile [Oxford: Legenda, 2003], 10). 52 Nevertheless, Jabès vision of a tsimtsum-like primordial catastrophe was noticed by commentators – see for example Rosemarie Waldrop, Lavish absence. Recalling and rereading Edmond Jabès (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 17.

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that has ravaged our universe. The nature of this catastrophe remains unclear. It concerns multiple dimensions: theological (withdrawal, absence, or even death of God53), linguistico-epistemological (shattering of all complete meanings and all truths, which are exposed to the destructive power of writing54; between composition of a text and its interpretation slips an irreducible rift55), ontological (no being is full and self-standing; whatever exists, resembles more debris than Aristotelian ousia56), temporal (time becomes radically discontinuous57), personal (stable identity is a lure58) and, finally, historical (the catastrophe seems to have taken place at a particular moment of history, although all our attempts to narrate its origins become enmeshed in myths59). Moreover, Jabèsian catastrophe often bears connotations of the Shoah, which irrevocably shattered ontotheological fantasies of a stable and inherently good universe.60 The catastrophe that Jabès obsessively ruminates over is a late and total radicalisation of the whole imagery of tsimtsum. It both has happened and keeps happening; there is nothing in the world that not only would not be marked by it, but would not be here and now destroyed by this repetitive, all-encompassing event. In fact, this catastrophe totally blurs the boundaries between substance and event, the past and the present: it both belongs to history and keeps happening. Its incessant throb pushes history and ontology into a zone of indistinguishability.

53 Cf. Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des Questions (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); • (El, ou le dernier livre) (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); see also Susan Handelman, ““Torments of an Ancient Word”: Edmond Jabès and the Rabbinic Tradition” in Eric Gould (ed.), The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 56. 54 Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des Ressemblances (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 121–122; Le Livre du Partage (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 28; Le Livre de l’Hospitalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 41; Benjamin Taylor, “The Question of Jewishness and The Question of Writing: An Exchange with Edmond Jabès”, The Threepenny Review 21 (Spring 1985): 17. 55 Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des Marges (Paris: Hachette, 1987), 132. 56 Ibid., 180. 57 Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des Ressemblances, 33–34, 97; Le Parcours (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 28. 58 Edmond Jabès, Le Soupçon le Désert (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 21. 59 Ibid., p. 30; Le Livre de l’Hospitalité, 21. 60 Philippe de Saint Cheron, “Entretien avec Edmond Jabès”, “La Nouvelle Revue Française”, no. 464 (septembre 1991): 68–69; cf. also Guy Walter, “La spiritualite du silence après la Choah dans «Le Livre des questions» in Richard Stamelman, Mary Ann Caws (eds.), Écrire le livre autour d’Edmond Jabès. Colloque de Cerisy (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989), 75. Parenthetically, Jabès was criticised for equivocating the Shoah with a universal, imprecise pancosmic catastrophe, which leads to disregarding the particularity of the mass death of Jews. Cf. Bruno Chaouat, “Forty Years of Suffering”, L’esprit créateur, vol. 45, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 50; Beth Hawkins, Reluctant theologians: Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 160.

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Naturally, Jabès’ vision is only his particular adaptation of the tsimtsum motif. Nevertheless, its origins shed light on the privileged position of this concept in modern Jewish thought. Jabès fused his Western modernist background, the experience of the Shoah and elements of Jewish tradition into one inseparable totality. His tsimtsum annuls divisions between ontology, epistemology and history, but, simultaneously, the division between the Jewish tradition and Western thinking. In this regard, it is the ultimate counterpart to the Lurianic coherence between ontology and history. In Jabès’ version, ontology and history are not coherent, but melded in a zone of indistinguishability. Perhaps, then, Jabès was the thinker who made the most headway towards the Traumnabel of tsimtsum. If so, his thought attests to the fact that at the point that he reached, the distinction between philosophical and historical approaches loses its sense.

Conclusion Scholem seemed to believe that tsimtsum was not only a historical term coined by Luria, but a concept that reflects the nature of modern history. This tsimtsum ha-acharon, the contraction at the beginning of modernity, which gave birth to an epoch of God’s absence, was his own metaphysical suspicion, so hard to present either in historical or in philosophical narrative. In our post-metaphysical times, we can no longer harbour such beliefs. What we can demonstrate, however, is that tsimtsum works as a node of overdetermination, a hole in our narratives that mysteriously linked modernity and Jewish thought to the point of their indistinguishability. The circumspection of this sober conclusion should not deceive us: perhaps we have never been closer to the real work of divinity than in this entanglement.

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_____. “Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time” in: Avraham Shapira, ed., On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, trans. J. Chipman, Philadelphia & Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997. _____. “Zehn unhistorische Satze uber Kabbala“ in Judaica 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp, 2014. Taylor, Benjamin. “The Question of Jewishness and The Question of Writing: An Exchange with Edmond Jabès”, The Threepenny Review, no. 21, Spring 1985. Waldrop, Rosemarie. Lavish Absence. Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Walter, Guy. “La spiritualité du silence apres la Choah dans Le Livre des questions,”  in Richard Stamelman, Mary Ann Caws, eds., Écrire le livre autour d’Edmond Jabès. Colloque de Cerisy, Champ Vallon: Seyssel, 1989. Weidner, Daniel. “Reading Gershom Scholem”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Spring 2006). Zarader, Marlène. The Unthought Debt. Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanfrd CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. Indivisible Remainder. On Schelling and Related Matters, London: Verso, 2007.

Martin Kavka

Tsimtsum and Political Theology in the Thought of Gershom Scholem In his recent book on Gershom Scholem, Amir Engel tries to solve what I take to be the singular problem that bedevils commentary on Scholem’s brilliant scholarship. It is easy to say a great deal about Scholem’s descriptions of Jewish texts and history, or about his disagreements with other scholars. On the other hand, it is very difficult to say much of anything about what Scholem himself endorsed as far as Jewish thinking goes. Engel claims that Scholem’s oeuvre is best described as an “ongoing quest for answers.”1 Indeed, he hints that it is this quality of searching that makes Scholem an exemplar for those of us in the twenty-first century who have lost faith in whatever answers in which we had invested, yet nonetheless retain hope that answers to our questions will appear at some later point in our quest. Whether or not readers find Scholem existentially compelling, for those of us who want answers about Scholem, such a quest is bound to be frustrating. Even the most basic questions  – for example, is he religious or secular? – do not seem to provide answers.2 As Scholem said in an interview with Muki Tzur published in the periodical Shdemot in 1975, “I don’t consider myself a secularist. My secularism is damaged at its foundation [be-yesodah], at its very core [be-nequdat ha-nequdot shelah], due to the fact that I am a religious person, because I am confident in my belief in God. My secularism is not secular.”3 But what kind of secularism results from this damage? What effected

1 Amir Engel, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 214. 2 Indeed, this seemed to frustrate no less an intellect than Jacob Taubes, who saw Scholem’s own Jewish identity to be hopelessly garbled, on account of his tendency toward essentialism. See “The Price of Messianism,” in From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3–9; “Walter Benjamin  – ein moderner Marcionit? Scholems BenjaminInterpretation religionsgeschichtlich überprüft,” in Antike und Moderne: zu Walter Benjamins “Passagen”, eds. Norbert W. Bolz and Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 138–47; “Walter Benjamin – A Modern Marcionite? Scholem’s Benjamin Interpretation Reconsidered,” trans. Ryan H. Wines in Walter Benjamin and Theology, eds. Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 164–78. 3 Gershom Scholem, “‘Im Gershom Scholem,” in Devarim be-go: pirqe morasha u-teḥiyah (Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975), 51; Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview,” trans. Moshe Kohn, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 46. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-013

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this damage? How does a non-secular secularism still deserve to be referred to as “my secularism”? What kind of belief in God undergirds Scholem’s secu-religiwhatever-majig? And what is the function of the Kabbalistic vocabulary of yesod and nequdah in these sentences? All this remains unclear. The hunch running through this essay is that going through a rough chronology of Scholem’s thoughts on tsimtsum – a term that, in the Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century, refers to the withdrawal or contraction of God that allows creatio ex nihilo to occur – makes the answers to these questions, and Scholem’s own theological orientation, a tad (but only a tad) clearer. Most of my remarks will focus on three essays in which Scholem deals with tsimtsum at length: his 1930 eulogy for Franz Rosenzweig, his 1948 essay on the history of the Star of David, and the 1974 essay “Reflections on Jewish Theology.” It is with some trepidation that I argue for a single Scholem that stretches across more than four decades of publications. People can and do change in that period of time, and scholars should allow the dead to have had the dynamic lives that they, being human, surely had. However, the consensus of scholarship is that there really was only one Scholem; Engel, for example, reads Scholem’s entire output out of “one vision of utopia, which he held throughout his life,” dating back to his time in Zionist youth movements.4 And so I will argue that attending to Scholem’s account of tsimtsum shows that Scholem thought that the healthiest Jewish politics requires the healthiest Jewish theology; a Zionism that could stand the test of time required tsimtsum. There are three broad steps in this argument. First, Scholem endorsed an account of creation that incorporates the Lurianic doctrine of tsimtsum. Second, as a result of this, Scholem also endorsed what, for lack of a more elegant phrase, I will call a dialectically incarnationalist account of the people of Israel. In other words, Scholem believed the people of Israel to be the expression of the divine. But because expression always others itself – the words that I express to you are other than I am, for they are only words and I am flesh and blood – the people of Israel also exists apart from the divine. It therefore ought to exist in both secular and nonsecular ways, at the same time, with each pole in this relationship limiting the other from taking control of the relationship. Existing as such, the people of Israel is constituted by its dynamism. This leads to the third point. Scholem thought that the proper site of dynamism was the political realm, and therefore he saw the people of Israel as having a political function: to fight for movement, and to fight against static essentialism either in accounts of Judaism (secular or theological), or in accounts of the good and right. Together, these three points

4 Engel, Gershom Scholem, 203.

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are central to Scholem’s Zionism and his theology. Each of these has the power to resist the hold that traditionalist stories (whether stories of Zionism, or of God) have on us. This power of resistance depends on tsimtsum. In January 1930, Scholem gave a eulogy for Franz Rosenzweig at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he later expanded for publication. About a third of the way in, there is a well-known passage that links tsimtsum to politics. I reproduce it here with slight alterations to Paul Mendes-Flohr’s translation: The divinity [ha-’el], banished from man by psychology and from the world by sociology, no longer wanting to reside in the heavens, has handed over the throne of justice to dialectical materialism and the seat of mercy to psychoanalysis, and has withdrawn [tzimtzem] to some hidden place and does not disclose Himself. Is He truly undisclosed? Is His revelation perhaps in this recent withdrawal of His [ve-’ulay be-tzimtzumo ha-aḥaron hazeh hitgaluto]? Perhaps God’s removal [histalqut] to the point of nothingness was a higher need, and He will reveal His kingship only to a world that has been emptied, in the sense of “I gave access to them that asked not, I was found by those that sought me not” (Isaiah 65:1)? That is the abandonment and the question from which the star of redemption appeared to Rosenzweig, and to him, as a Jew, it appeared in its Jewish figure [be-demuto ha-yehudit], in the image of a magen-David.5

It is perhaps easiest to start with the end of this passage, with Scholem’s description of Rosenzweig’s own vision of the star of redemption that Rosenzweig associated with the highest possibility of human religious experience. (Scholem may also be describing this vision as Rosenzweig’s vision of his own authorship of The Star of Redemption. Mendes-Flohr’s translation renders “the star of redemption” in italics, and with the nouns capitalized, in order to bring this ambiguity to the fore.) Scholem was keen to describe this vision as the vision of an image, following Rosenzweig’s brief description of the star as an image (Gestalt) at the beginning of the final “Gate” section of The Star of Redemption.6 On Scholem’s reading, the visionary does not see the divine itself, but only sees the fully divine in the image of a face (Rosenzweig saw the “life-points” of the face, and the connections between these points, as taking the shape of a star). This too does not necessarily depart from Rosenzweig; Rosenzweig analogized the star not to God but to God’s

5 Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig ve-sifro ‘Kokhav ha-Ge’ulah,’” in Devarim be-go, 414; Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book ‘The Star of Redemption,’” trans. Paul Mendes-Flohr, in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Mendes-Flohr (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988), 27–28. 6 Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 465; Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 418; Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 441.

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truth.7 God, in being revealed only through a figure, remains nonetheless hidden in this very act of self-revealing. This claim in Scholem’s eulogy that the star mediates the divine object of experience, that “access” is concomitant with withdrawal, is implicit in Scholem’s description of the star of redemption as “a Jewish figure,” the star of David. Here Scholem did depart from Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig described the final vision of God’s truth in The Star of Redemption as a vision of something that transcended both Judaism’s and Christianity’s limited determinations of divine truth. Scholem either refused to follow Rosenzweig in this direction, perhaps because the link of the divine face to the star of David – a symbol that does not transcend the Jewish tradition – made it impossible for him to endorse Rosenzweig’s claim. As a result, Scholem described Rosenzweig as offering his readers far less than Rosenzweig himself thought he was offering.8 For Scholem, nothing is revealed without something also being concealed. The star appears, and yet God is removed. God is disclosed, and yet withdraws. The world is from God, but the world is also empty of God. The consequence of the logic of Scholem’s reading Rosenzweig against the grain is its ability to open a space for secularity, one that Rosenzweig did not allow in the Star. If God is to reveal God’s self, it will be to a secularized world, as well as in a secularized world that remains secularized even after revelation, since God remains hidden behind the figures of God’s revelation. This aspect of Scholem’s thinking has been discussed in the secondary literature for some time. Agata Bielik-Robson, commenting on the religious possibilities within Scholem’s apparent nihilism, has pointed out that a world of “pure functionality, thoroughly disenchanted” is both most demonic and also most redemptive, because it is in such a nihilist world that we can see the negative effects of nihilism and thereby engage in a “metaphysical protest” of that world, asking the fundamental

7 For the claim about God’s truth, see ibid. For the star-face analogy, see Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, 470–71; Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Hallo, 422–23; Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Galli, 445–46. 8 There are persuasive readings of the final pages of the Star that show the limits of Scholem’s reading. In other words, while it is true that “God” and “God’s truth” are different at the close of the Star of Redemption, as Elliot R. Wolfson has noted, “in the experiential moment this conceptual distinction evaporates, insofar as god is disclosed in the configuration of the truth, [just] as for the kabbalists the Infinite is revealed through the imaginal form of the divine anthropos.” Taking another angle at the problem, Benjamin Pollock argues that in these pages, Rosenzweig articulates “a kind of vision that transcends … the living vision of the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities.” See Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997), 80; Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 305.

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question of meaning that will lead us back to God.9 Similarly, Zohar Maor has also recently turned to Scholem’s eulogy for Rosenzweig in order to show how Scholem saw secularization and revelation as twin sides of the same movement of “God’s Heilgeschichte.”10 What I want to add to this story is the claim that its contours are not arbitrarily chosen, but are necessitated by a worldview in which God engages in tsimtsum. (Or, one might say that it was the Kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum that allowed Scholem to take secularization as religiously significant.) It is tsimtsum that produced the abandonment felt by the modern diaspora of European Jewry, seeking renewal and rejuvenation. Indeed, for Scholem, God engages in tsimtsum repeatedly, throughout history, as is implied both by his use of the phrase “this recent tsimtsum” and his use of tsimtsum and histalqut as synonyms in this passage. This synonymy is admittedly somewhat strange. Scholem was here conflating an account of the self-contraction of God that occurs before creation begins – what in later accounts of the Lurianic system, Scholem would often refer to as “the tsimtsum”11 – with the account of emanation of energy from the unknowable divine (Ein Sof) that occurs in creation, after the tsimtsum has already taken place. This emanation has always accompanied by withdrawal. In the account of tsimtsum in his 1971–72 Encyclopedia Judaica article on Kabbalah, Scholem would describe this as the “double rhythm” of hitpashtut and histalqut, of egression and regression, emanation and limitation. The Ein Sof both gives and does not give. It descends into the void created by tsimtsum and ascends deeper into itself. It expresses itself and yet remains in harmony with itself (which requires not expressing itself, since expression introduces otherness). Such rhythm is required for creation to occur. Scholem appreciated something in the Lurianic story that might at first blush appear to be odd: its logical rigor. For there to be a difference between God and the world that God creates, God must both conceal and reveal God’s self. He

9 Agata Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (London: Routledge, 2014), 276. 10 Zohar Maor, “Death or Birth: Scholem and Secularization,” in Against The Grain: Jewish Intellectuals In Hard Times, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 64–85, quotation at 79. See also Maor, “Scholem and Rosenzweig: Redemption and (Anti-)Zionism,” Modern Judaism 37.1 (February 2017): 1–23. 11 See Scholem, “Mitzvah ha-ba’ah be-‘averah,” in Meḥqarim u-meqorot le-toledot ha-Shabbeta’ut ve-gilguleiha (Studies and Texts Concerning the History of Sabbetianism and Its Metamorphoses) (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1974), 31; Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin,” trans. Hillel Halkin, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 103; Scholem, “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes,” in Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 87; Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), 131, 132; Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1961), 265.

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expressed this most economically in a 1958 essay on the messianic idea in Kabbalah: “without limitation [histalqut] everything would revert to the divine, and without emanation [hitpashtut] nothing would come into being.”12 Scholem did not take tsimtsum and histalqut to be synonyms simply in this 1930 eulogy. Even as late as the Encyclopedia Judaica article, in his description of the “double beat” of hitpashtut and histalqut, Scholem claimed that “every movement of regression toward the source has something of a new tsimtsum about it.”13 And it is in the 1938 lectures that were published three years later as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism where Scholem most fully articulated histalqut as a repetition of tsimtsum, justifying his reading (in a footnote) on R. Ḥayyim Vital’s use of the phrase “first tsimtsum” (tzimtzum rishon) in his collection of Luria’s teaching, ‘Etz Ḥayyim. Every new act of emanation and manifestation is preceded by one of concentration and retraction. In other words, the cosmic process becomes two-fold. Every stage involves a double strain, i.e. the light which streams back into God and that which flows out from Him, and but for this perpetual tension, this ever repeated effort with which God holds Himself back, nothing in the world would exist. There is fascinating power and profundity in this doctrine.14

When history is taken to be determined by the logic of this double movement, secularity becomes a possible site for divine revelation, as the star of redemption (or The Star of Redemption) appeared to Rosenzweig in the abandonment of his secularized life. Yet (again, against Rosenzweig), since this tension is perpetual, revelation cannot put an end to abandonment once and for all. The profundity of this doctrine might be obvious, merely insofar as it is easy to say that difficult dialectical accounts of history and/or theology are profound. But the power of the doctrine, and the nature of its power, is less clear. One hint comes from the immediate context of Scholem’s presentation of tsimtsum in Major Trends, namely his famous claim that “one is tempted to interpret this withdrawal of God into his own Being in terms of Exile, of banishing Himself from 12 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 44. In a beautiful and wide-ranging article on Lurianic mythology, Elliot R. Wolfson has argued that Scholem’s account is too dialectical. The sources themselves signal that the two movements were identical: “extending forward is drawing back and drawing back extending forward.” Most notable in this regard is the sixteenth-century rabbi Solomon Alkabetz, who affirmed that “concealment is disclosure and disclosure concealment. The explanation of this is that on account of the abundance of luminosity and clarity within it the supernal light is not comprehended at all but it is hidden from every eye.” See Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, eds. Robert Gibbs and Wolfson (London: Routledge, 2002), 115, 111. 13 Scholem, Kabbalah, 131. 14 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 261. For the footnote to Vital, see 411.

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His totality into profound seclusion. Regarded this way, the idea of Tsimtsum is the deepest symbol of Exile that could be thought of.”15 As Amir Engel has noted, in diary entries from as early as 1914, Scholem “yearned for the transformation of exilic culture into a source from which social harmony, spiritual renewal, and political autonomy might spring.”16 The theological heritage of Kabbalah served a broadly social function of Jewish renewal. But Scholem’s own analogue to this would not be kabbalistic, or religious. In this respect it is curious that Scholem’s eulogy for Rosenzweig, which in its last half is a summary of the arguments of The Star of Redemption, fails to mention the book’s final pages, the “Gate” in which an experience of the divine face, with its life-points in the shape of a star, takes place. That notion of the star disappears from Scholem’s account of the Star. What Scholem did instead was use The Star of Redemption as a way to direct his own political vision of Zionism; the star of redemption is for Scholem, as it was not for Rosenzweig, not entirely different than the star that had been the symbol of Zionism since the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.17 If the Star is for Scholem evidence that a theology with some kind of transformative power can appear within secularity, then the narrative of tsimtsum to which Scholem attached Rosenzweig’s Star turned that book into evidence that such a theology also had to be secularized. In other words, it could only appear as a political theology. It is Zionism in which the most recent tsimtsum can bear historical fruit. This belief went somewhat against Rosenzweig’s own non-Zionism. In the letters to the Reform rabbi Benno Jacob from May 1927 that were published the following year in Der Jude as “Letters From A Non-Zionist To An Anti-Zionist,” Rosenzweig criticized the leaders of the large anti-Zionist organization Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuurger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) for their tenuous relationship to the Jewish tradition, their reduction of Jewish identity to a political stance. In response, Rosenzweig did not argue for a different Jewish politics. Instead, he emphasized the essential difference between religion and politics: “Understand me right: I wish that the work of such men, even in leading positions, were always premised on retaining the awareness that while Judaism [Judentum] certainly needs politics, it is not a politics.”18

15 Ibid. 16 Engel, Gershom Scholem, 54. For Engel’s commentary on the relevant passage on tsimtsum from Major Trends, see 71–72. 17 In other words, I want to emphasize Zohar Maor’s implication in his “Scholem and Rosenzweig” (11–12) that the 1930 eulogy already contains a critique of Rosenzweig, alongside all the praise for the Star. 18 Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. 1. Briefe und Tagebücher (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 1141.

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As a result, even though Scholem (unlike Rosenzweig) was a committed Zionist, we can read him as having learned from Rosenzweig that theology would always serve as a critique of any pretensions Zionism might have to resolve the dilemmas of Jewish alienation from Europe. As Scholem wrote in the eulogy: The creation of the doctrine of Zionism, the attempts to portray the new world we have entered – the world of the people and the land and the new riches we discovered in them – these have attracted and absorbed the best of our people’s spiritual forces. Theology stood, as it were, outside the bounds of this new world, and the poor man’s wisdom is despised [Eccl. 9:16]. Nobody needs it, and why should we, who in our new discovery of nationhood are making Judaism secular, who are taking the path of saecularisatio, have any need of all that? However, questions such as these – about the eternal life of the Eternal People before the eternal God – are not of the sort that can be forgotten. After the Zionist movement has set itself to the work of implementation, the question must arise with redoubled force and with the quaking vitality that is attached to every authentic question, that is, a question that time makes pressing, the old question that the Jewish people are not free to rid themselves of or ignore: where are we headed? And with it comes the old answer: toward the star of redemption.19

Coming only two paragraphs after the account of tsimtsum, and after a paragraph that served as a laundry list of all the problems besetting Western Jewish thought and the early Zionists, Scholem was here arguing that Jewish thought – whether religious or secular  – could improve itself if only it would claim to know less. This is what reading Rosenzweig in the light of tsimtsum could do, by opening up his reading of the star of redemption to another that sees the path to that star as proceeding down a Zionist path. It is also what reading Zionism in the light of tsimtsum, of the relationship between hitpashtut and histalqut, can do. Zionism’s secularity cannot be thought apart from the drama of divine creation that has let modern secularity – or any other area from which God appears to be absent – be. Yet making this claim is not equivalent to making a claim on behalf of religious Zionism. Scholem’s Zionism is still taking the path of secularization, but all the while remains haunted by what he had earlier described as the “eternal questions of love and will, wisdom and ability, judgment and mercy, justice and death, creation and redemption” that theology had abandoned, in Scholem’s estimation, until Rosenzweig published The Star of Redemption.20 The old answer can only have power if it expresses itself in new, secularized, garments. The logic of tsimtsum shows that there were good reasons to leave the old theological answer behind; it sought to represent God in theology. But the cosmic process initiated by

19 Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig ve-sifro,” 416; Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book,” 29–30, translation slightly altered. 20 Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig ve-sifro,” 413; Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book,” 26.

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Ein Sof is not one that can be represented; it can only be lived. As Scholem would later write in Major Trends, hitpashtut and histalqut “continue to act and react upon each other. Just as the human organism exists through the double process of inhaling and exhaling and the one cannot be conceived without the other, so also the whole of Creation constitutes a gigantic process of divine inhalation and exhalation.”21 Those who adhere to the new (secular/Zionist) answer can only find the fulfillment and redemption they seek if they acknowledge the processual nature of God’s relationship to the world, refusing to see their answer as a better representation of how life ought to be lived, and taking it instead as simply one aspect of this process – which being temporally extended, cannot be represented in any ideology. Only with a full awareness of the limits of any and every political theology can the Jewish people come near the star of redemption, and such an awareness could only be had via endorsing the truth of the myth of tsimtsum. This awareness of the limits of ideology, given the dialectical nature of history as it oscillates between hitpashtut and histalqut in the wake of the original tsimtsum, appears to the partisans of representation as heresy. (Those partisans do not realize that their account of truth nevertheless conceals truth.) Scholem therefore saw it as fitting that the star of redemption was not only a Jewish figure, but a heretical Jewish figure. In 2008, when Avraham Shapira published a new edition of Scholem’s essay on the history of the magen David (originally published in Hebrew in Luaḥ Ha’aretz in 1948 and in an expanded version fifteen years later in German), they placed as the essay’s epigram the passage from Scholem’s eulogy for Rosenzweig about the magen David as the Jewish figure of the star of redemption.22 The connection between these two essays is not merely thematic. Scholem mentioned Rosenzweig in passing in the 1948 essay, in pointing out that “the modern interpretation” of the magen David, “which still determined the title (and the title-page drawing) of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, owes its initial rise to the stammerings of the Sabbatians about the redemption.”23 But in telling a story of the magen David – from magical amulets in the early Middle Ages (some but not all hexagrams, some but not all associated with the shield of David), to its use in practical Kabbalah in the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, to its being associated with messianic redemption among Sabbatian circles, all alongside a general heraldic use of a hexagram among Jewish communities in Bohemia in the 21 Scholem, Major Trends, 263. 22 Scholem, Magen David: Toledotav shel semel, ed. Avraham Shapira with Galit Hasan-Rokem and Shlomo Zucker (Ein Harod: Mishkan le-Omanut, 2008). For an argument against Scholem’s reading of the star, see Galit Hasan-Rokem’s very important article “The Star of David and the Stars Outside: The Poetics and Semiotics of Jewish Folklore and of Zionism,” Images 11 (2017): 78–89. 23 Scholem, “The Star of David: History of a Symbol,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 273.

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sixteenth century that spread across Europe over the next two centuries – the essay implicitly reiterates the critique of Rosenzweig in the 1930 eulogy. For what that story (whether true or not24) teaches is that the magen David was never, before Rosenzweig, the symbol for some kind of vision of the completion of some esoteric philosophical system. Rather, it was a technique for gaining power against demons and illness, or expressing the power of a community (in its heraldic use), or even gaining political power. Scholem passed on a story from the seventeenth-century Alexandrian historian Yosef Sambaria about a political dreamer from the previous century, the mystic and pseudo-messiah David Ha-Reuveni.25 The great attraction of the magen David for the mystics is further indicated by the later legend which the Egyptian chronicler Joseph Sambari relates as late as 1676, concerning David Reubeni. Posing as the representative of independent Jewish tribes in Arabia, Reubeni around 1530 made such a great impression on the Jews of Italy because he sought to combine messianism with worldly, even military, exploits. [According to Sambaria], “he made flags and produced a shield on which holy names were written a declared it the shield of David, the king of Israel, which he had used to wage God’s wars.”26

As readers of this passage, we might protest Scholem’s assumption that messianism might ever be something opposed to “worldly exploits.” After all, given the “royal” ideology of the Messiah predominant in biblical texts, what else is messianism for?27 Yet Scholem in this paragraph clearly took messianic desire as a desire for something other than the world. Combining messianism with military exploits struck him as odd, as a secularizing combination (as it were), a combination that both expresses messianism’s this-worldly purpose and violates what Scholem took to be messianism’s properly apocalyptic nature. The magen David was for Scholem therefore both a vehicle of the dialectics of Jewish history and a symbol of it. As a symbol of the dialectics of Jewish history, it stands for the way in which a single symbol can assert the privilege of theology over ethnicity in some contexts, and the privilege of ethnicity over theology in others. As a vehicle for the dialectics of Jewish history, the desire to reclaim the star in the modern period is a desire to wrest it away from some other context for the power essential to that context. Scholem’s story of the star of David is a story

24 See Hasan-Rokem, “The Star of David and the Stars Outside.” 25 For more on Ha-Reuveni, especially on his having been influenced by the kabbalist Abraham Halevi, see Moti Benmelech, “History, Politics, and Messianism: David Ha-Reuveni’s Origin and Mission,” AJS Review 35.1 (April 2011): 35–60. 26 Scholem, “The Star of David,” 270. 27 See John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 22ff.

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of one damned heresy after another, a story of how power can be grabbed by those who manage to say with authority that an existing symbol has power that other authoritative symbols at the time do not have, or has a power that authoritative figures deny it. This was the case in the development of the hexagram (not natively Jewish) as a symbol for Jewish magic, in the transition from its magical use to its use as a symbol for redemption among Sabbatians, and most importantly, in its appropriation by early Zionists. Scholem ended his essay on the magen David with an account of the emptiness of this symbol in the nineteenth century, as a sign of “Israelite persuasion” taken on by communities merely in imitation of the Christian cross. “Then came the Zionists,” he wrote in the penultimate paragraph.28 (He decidedly did not write “Then came Rosenzweig.”) The Zionists were the ones who unwittingly harnessed the mythical and magical power of the star, and they were the ones who were able to adapt its function to a secular age, while only partially ignoring the reason for its appeal, namely that the star “addressed hopes for the future, for redemption.”29 Its secularity could never be fully secular. The this-worldly dreams that the Zionists placed in the star could never be simply this-worldly, just as the story of David Ha-Reuveni showed that the otherworldly investments the Sabbatians had made in it could never simply be otherworldly. The cycle of inhalation and exhalation continues. There could be no egression without regression, emanation without limitation, revealing without concealing, and in the modern period, there could be no divine manifestation without “secular” Zionism. The Jewish people, organizing themselves in Zionism according to a different kind of secularity – one that does not see itself as the opposed to the divine, but as one sign of the process of divine inhalation and exhalation – simply are a divine emanation, although their commitment to statecraft makes them other than the divine, a limitation of the divine that hides it from the historical sphere. I want to draw out this point more – the second I raised in the introduction to this essay – and also get to the third point about the political realm as Scholem’s privileged site for the dynamism of history, through a reading of Scholem’s 1974 essay on theology, which constitutes his most sustained grappling with the impact of secularization on the people of Israel. The essay really is a manifesto for a theology that moves, even in and out of theology; in its opening paragraph, Scholem proclaimed that he had “no positive theology of an inflexible Judaism.”30 Like the 1930 and 1948 essays, the 1974 essay also undoes Rosenzweig while thinking along 28 Scholem, “The Star of David,” 280. 29 Ibid., 281. 30 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” trans. Gabriela Shalit in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 261.

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with him. Following the taxonomy of the second (and central) book of Rosenzweig’s Star, it views theology through the categories of creation, revelation, and redemption. At the end of the day, creation – and specifically an account of creation that incorporates tsimtsum – is the only category that means anything. Robust accounts of revelation have been irrevocably harmed in the modern period by the rise of historical criticism. Even the account of revelation in Kabbalah in which Torah has no content, but “represents a mysterious unity, the purpose of which is not to convey a specific sense, to ‘mean’ something, but rather to give expression to that creative power which is concentrated in the name of God and which is present in all of creation” is too vague. It can only produce a model in which “the sign of true revelation is the infinite number of interpretations to which it is open,” an atomizing force that cannot sustain a community.31 Theologies that privilege redemption as that which is anticipated are also lifeless, since the modern messianic drive to create a liberated humanity could only have ever accomplished itself by fetishizing Jewish suffering and social inequality (as Scholem believed Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism to have done), or by treating this world as worth nothing (as he believed Ernst Bloch to have done). From the Rosenzweigian categories of creation, revelation and redemption, only creation remains valid. In part this is because diverse strands of Jewish theology endorse the claim that God created the world. But in part it is also because Scholem was now, late in his life, beginning to synthesize the theological asides of various historically oriented essays into a “theology in which the only revelation is the creation itself.” This theology starts from language: that the creative impetus is of a linguistic nature, that, therefore an infinite multitude of languages suffuses the world, that all the structures we discover in it have a tendency to language  – this may be regarded as an extravagant formulation of the common basis of creation and revelation, yet it is a thesis which even in this provocative form has not lost its meaning even for us.32

The radicality of this claim should by now be familiar. Scholem here argues that human speech expresses the creative power of divine speech, even though human speech is other than the divine, even though there is one divine language and a multitude of human languages, even though divine speech is infinitely interpretable and cannot be spoken by humans. It is this expressive potential that prevents the world from being worth nothing at all, while expression nonetheless maintains the difference between the world and its ground. To be sure,

31 Ibid., 268. 32 Ibid., 280.

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Scholem had already found a kind of evidence for this difference in the years of the first world war, in his writings on lament that took the incommunicativeness of lament (the inability of the mourner to reach an audience) as well as its uninterpretability (the inability for anyone else, including God, to access the interiority of the mourner) as only fulfillable by the lamenter’s annihilating her language in silence.33 But by this late stage in his career, Scholem had taken all language as signaling some positive possibility in and through our interpretation of others’ words that are handed down to us (and, by extension, others’ interpretation of our own words). As he had written in “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah,” expanded from a 1970 lecture, “what speaks to us in creation and revelation, the word of God, is infinitely interpretable and reflects itself in our language. Its rays or sounds, which we receive, are not so much communications as calls. That which has meaning, sense, and form is not this word itself but the tradition behind this word, its mediation and reflection in time.”34 Scholem’s focus on creation in “Reflections on Jewish Theology” (and also in “The Name of God”) and specifically linguistic creativity motors a theology in which history is radically open, because the likeness between the human and the divine (in terms of their creativity) can never amount to humans’ ability to reproduce the divine in history. Language is a call to something, but only to the creation of new content, not to any content that is fixed and handed down. This new content adapts the past, in response to a present need, for the sake of the future. The source of “revelation” – which, filtered through the authority structures that are present in any and every community, is binding until that time when it is heard differently – is not God, but representatives of communities from earlier moments in time. It is the people, and those who earn the right to speak on their behalf, who become callers

33 See Scholem, “Hiobs Klage,” Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923 (Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag 1995–2000), 2:544–47; Scholem, “Job’s Lament,” trans. Paula Schwebel and Lina Barouch, in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, eds. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 321–23. For clarifying commentary on Scholem’s difficult writings on lament, see the following four excellent essays in Ferber and Schwebel’s volume: Agata Bielik-Robson, “The Unfallen Silence: Kinah and the Other Origin of Language” (133–52); Bernd Witte, “Silence, Solitude, and Suicide: Gershom Scholem’s Paradoxical Theory of Lamentation” (173–81); Caroline Sauter, “The Ghost of the Poet: Lament in Walter Benjamin’s Early Poetry, Theory, and Translation” (205–20); Paula Schwebel, “The Tradition in Ruins: Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem on Language and Lament” (277–301). 34 Scholem, “Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie die Kabbala,” in Judaica (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973–2016), 3:69; Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (Part 2),” Diogenes 80 (December 1972), 194. The translation here is from Eric Jacobson’s masterful discussion of this essay in Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 123–53, translation at 152.

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to future generations by virtue of their own interpretations of prior calls. On such a thoroughly historicist (yet also religious!) account of meaning, static accounts of the secular are just as much to be rejected as static accounts of theology, for neither gets at how meaning is embedded in the time of language-use, the time that passes from speaker to hearer (to hearer, to hearer, ad infinitum). The political stakes of this theology are clearest at the end of “Reflections on Jewish Theology.” There are two kinds of enemies that Scholem names in its last pages. The first are the champions of the technologized secular world, who end up isolating persons and suggesting an overall “senselessness” to life.35 The second are the champions of robustly secular forms of Zionism, for if Jews really are to be like the other nations of the world, then “the realization of this slogan could only mean the transition to the decline or even disappearance of the Jewish people.”36 This would be the case not simply because secular Zionism was for Scholem a kind of assimilation,37 but also because it was simply impossible to perform Zionism as a form of Jewish identity – i.e., one that took up the Jewish past in some form – in a completely secular manner. (The story Scholem told in 1948 of the unwitting similarity between secular Zionists and Sabbatians is proof enough of that.) This is an odd political theology. It is one that barely talks about God in anything more than a vague way – as a certain kind of creator – yet it is enough to enchant the historical sphere, as if we could look at the world through a broadly historical lens and see a flare that signified something in the world which could only appear through the lens (and not appear as such, empirically). History is left open, neither in line with some kind of pre-existing divine plan nor of its own accord. In the 1974 essay, this openness of history is governed by tsimtsum. Creation is liberated from divine control only because God renounces God’s self and limits God’s self. Scholem repeated the argument for tsimtsum that he had made years earlier in the 1958 essay “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism”: Creation out of nothing, from the void, could be nothing other than creation of the void, that is, of the possibility of thinking of anything that was not God. Without such an act of self-limitation, after all, there would be only God  – and obviously nothing else. A being that is not God could only become possible and originate by virtue of such a contraction, such a paradoxical retreat of God into Himself By positing a negative factor in Himself, God liberates Creation.38

35 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” 290–91. 36 Ibid., 294. 37 David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 181; David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 104. 38 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” 283.

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At the same time, such an expression of histalqut is part of the divine process of breathing; it is a kind of hitpashtut, a kind of divine self-expression. God therefore does not only retreat, but also expresses God’s self by moving through the various shapes of history. Scholem describes tsimtsum (again!) as undoing the concept of an immutable God, and suggesting in its place a notion of “God’s absolute mobility”39 in which God expresses God’s self (and others God’s self) in the very created order that is not God, and specifically through the peoples who hear their traditional pasts as reflections of something ultimate, yet as mutable reflections because God has hidden God’s self behind the interpretability of those expressions. As in Scholem’s earlier writings, tsimtsum in the 1974 essay is not only a single event. Again amalgamating tsimtsum and the dialectic relationship between hitpashtut and histalqut as he had in the 1930 eulogy and other writings treated in this essay, Scholem insisted in 1974 that tsimtsum “must constantly repeat itself; again and again a stream streams into the void, a ‘something’ from God. This, to be sure, is the point at which the horrifying experience of God’s absence in our world collides irreconcilably and catastrophically with the doctrine of a creation that renews itself.”40 Yet if tsimtsum must constantly repeat itself, then we must extend Scholem’s thinking beyond its position in 1930: any hope to rejuvenate a people must fall prey to the histalqut to come, the hiding of which we are not even conscious, the historical environment that seems to be one of total despair, or even the historical environment that is so celebratory that it loses sight of the difference between this world and the redemption on the other side of the apocalypse. This language of constant collision makes it impossible to say that the Jewish people are headed toward the star of redemption. If there must always be a stream from the divine as well as a void, then the history of the Jewish people is just the ongoing voiding of some past values and the attempt to take hold of other past values in the stream of tradition.41 Indeed, this is where Scholem’s own theological path seems to end in the 1974 essay, on this note of constant experimentation. All that one can do in reclaiming some value from the past, in

39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 See the end of Scholem’s “Revelation and Tradition in Religious Categories in Judaism” (1962), where Scholem defines tradition as “the living contact in which man takes hold of ancient truth and is bound to it, across all generations, in the dialogue of giving and taking.” Scholem, “Offenbarung und Tradition als religiöse Kategorien im Judentum,” in Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, 120; Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” trans. Henry Schwarzschild and Michael A. Meyer, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 303.

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some way, is “pose questions for discussion”42 about whether the current form of dialoguing with the past is valid. At a time when the utopian dreams of the religious past have othered themselves into a purely secular technosphere, and when religious orthodoxy has failed to open itself to the plural possible meanings within history (allowed by tsimtsum, when rigorously thought), only something that “transcends the sphere of pure secularization” as well as transcends stale orthodoxy can serve as the bulwark against the collision of void and stream from turning into a catastrophe. In attending to tsimtsum, one sees that the void exists, here, now, and will exist no matter what plan of action is chosen. For that is how the divine breathes. This may seem all very abstract, as if it had nothing to do with real politics. But Scholem’s political theology, characterized by its utter and complete commitment to dynamic movement, remains attractive because it is something other than the fixed order of liberalism (or of standard theologies, or of Zionist systems), and is something other than the absoluteness of the sovereign found in the political theology of Carl Schmitt. That being said, it is also something other than democracy, if that is understood along the lines of citizens making the most reasonable decisions possible.43 It is tempting to narrate Scholem’s political theology in a Schmittian manner, since for Schmitt as for Scholem (both of whom were opposed to neo-Kantian ways of thinking about both politics and theology), the concept of the political is to be taken in its “concrete and existential” sense, and should not deal with “fictive abstractions [Fiktionen] or normative ideals.”44 Yet for Scholem, unlike Schmitt, the friends and enemies are not limited to people in my land or in other lands. They extend to concepts and narratives from the traditional past. What works? What makes a usable past? This is what Scholem thought was truly necessary in secularization: a kind of reality-testing, which would show which values were airy norms, and which values could gain historical shape for a period of time and “resist liquidation.”45 Only that kind of pragmatic testing, only that willingness to leave certain constellations of self-understanding behind, allows for mobility. Without that mobility and the notion of tsimtsum that authorizes it, it would be impossible to say that the Jewish people are heading anywhere at all, much less to the star of redemption.

42 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” 294. 43 See Charles Beitz, Political Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 44 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), 28; Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27, 28. 45 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” 295.

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Bibliography Beitz, Charles. Political Equality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Benmelech, Moti. “History, Politics, and Messianism: David Ha-Reuveni’s Origin and Mission.” AJS Review 35 (2011): 35–60. Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. 1st ed, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. _____. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. 2nd ed, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Bielik-Robson, Agata. Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos, London: Routledge, 2014. _____. “The Unfallen Silence: Kinah and the Other Origin of Language.” Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 133–52. Collins, John J. The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature, New York: Doubleday, 1995. Engel, Amir. Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Hasan-Rokem, Galit. “The Star of David and the Stars Outside: The Poetics and Semiotics of Jewish Folklore and of Zionism.” Images 11 (2017): 78–89. Jacobson, Eric. Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Maor, Zohar. “Death or Birth: Scholem and Secularization” in Against The Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen, New York: Berghahn, 2014. 64–85. _____. “Scholem and Rosenzweig: Redemption and (Anti-)Zionism.” Modern Judaism 37 (2017): 1–23. Pollock, Benjamin. Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rosenzweig, Franz. Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. 1. Briefe und Tagebücher, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. _____. Der Stern der Erlösung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988. _____. The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1970. _____. The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Sauter, Caroline. “The Ghost of the Poet: Lament in Walter Benjamin’s Early Poetry, Theory, and Translation” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 205–20. Schmitt, Carl. Der Begriff des Politischen, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991. _____. The Concept of the Political. Expanded edition, trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, 1961. _____. Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. _____. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York: Schocken, 1971.

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_____. “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (Part Two).” Diogenes 80 (1972): 164–94. _____. Judaica. 6 vols, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973–2016. _____. Meḥqarim u-meqorot le-toledot ha-Shabbeta’ut ve-gilguleiha. (Studies and Texts Concerning the History of Sabbetianism and Its Metamorphoses.) Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1974. _____. Kabbalah, Jerusalem: Keter, 1974. _____. Devarim be-go: pirqe morasha u-teḥiyah. (Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance.), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975. _____. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser. New York: Schocken, 1976. _____. “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988. 20–41. _____. Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen une Entwürfen bis 1923. 2 vols, Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000. _____. Magen David: Toledotav shel semel, ed. Avraham Shapira with Galit Hasan-Rokem and Shlomo Zucker. Ein Harod: Mishkan le-Omanut, 2008. _____. “Job’s Lament,” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 321–23. Schwebel, Paula. “The Tradition in Ruins: Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem on Language and Lament,” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 277–301. Taubes, Jacob. “Walter Benjamin – ein moderner Marcionit? Scholems Benjamin-Interpretation religionsgeschichtlich überpruft,” in Antike und Moderne: zu Walter Benjamins “Passagen,” ed. Norbert W. Bolz and Richard Faber. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986. 138–47. _____. From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Crtique of Historical Reason, eds. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. _____. “Walter Benjamin – A Modern Marcionite? Scholem’s Benjamin Interpretation Reconsidered,” in Walter Benjamin and Theology, ed. Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 164–78. Witte, Bernd. “Silence, Solitude, and Suicide: Gershom Scholem’s Paradoxical Theory of Lamentation,” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 173–81. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig.” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997): 39–81. _____. “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, ed. Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson, London: Routledge, 2002. 101–62.

Simon D. Podmore

‘Abyss Calls Unto Abyss’: Tsimtsum and Kenosis in the Rupture of God-forsakenness Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.      Psalm 42:7 (NRSV) In ancient days all paths led Somehow to God and His Name. We are not pious. We stay in the Profane And where God once stood, stands: Melancholy Gershom Scholem1

Kabbalah and Shoah: Between ‘Contraction’ and ‘Catastrophe’ A distinctive trend in Jewish (post-)holocaust theology (exemplified by Shapira, Jonas, Rubenstein, Cohen, Fackenheim, Raphael, Blumenthal, et alia) makes potent if also contentious appeal to the mystical notion of tsimtsum, elaborated by the Safed kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534–1572), and re-constructed, in underexamined parallel to the development of holocaust theology, by the eminent pioneer of kabbalah studies Gershom Scholem (1897–1982). Recent work by David Osborne Garner has done much to breach this lacuna between kabbalah and the Shoah, with Shapira, Fackenheim, Arthur Cohen, and Melissa Raphael providing enlightening case studies.2 Aside from Shapira, the Ḥasidic rabbi whose Esh Kodesh (Holy/Sacred Fire) emerged from within the Shoah itself, much of post-holocaust theology demonstrates a consistent uncritical, and underexplored, reliance on Scholem. This is especially true of appeals to the Lurianic notion of tsimtsum, which constantly revert to Scholem’s reading – with Rubenstein briefly noting that “most” post-holocaust theologians “leaned heavily”

1 Cited in Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 1. 2 David Osborne Garner, Antitheodicy, Atheodicy and Jewish Mysticism in Holocaust Theology: Atheodic Theologies After Auschwitz (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-014

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on Luria’s thought “as mediated by the scholarship of Gershom Scholem.”3 However, Scholem’s reading of tsimtsum as an exile (galut) of God, as Moshe Idel has argued, may itself be an ideological re-construction, re-envisioned via the modern prism of the Shoah.4 As such, according to Idel, Scholem’s Lurianic tsimtsum is read, “psychoanalytically,” as a symbolic projection of the 1492 Jewish expulsion from Spain. Furthermore, this ‘symbolic’ more than ‘historical’ reading is formed by Scholem’s contemporary sense of the “demonic” aspect of Jewish history – “forged,” Idel claims, “during the most sordid period of Jewish history, the holocaust.”5 Contra Scholem, Idel therefore contends that Luria’s tsimtsum does not emerge as a response to historic exilic trauma, and can be better understood “not as an innovation but as a continuation of much earlier kabbalistic traditions dealing with the contraction of the divinity.”6 The potential implication for post-holocaust theology is one of circularity: the notion of tsimtsum that is being imported, almost exclusively via Scholem, is itself already reconstructed in view of the Shoah itself. This does not invalidate its use but rather implies that the tsimtsum of Luria-Scholem, on which much post-holocaust theology depends, is actually an innovation, in part, of the ruptured modern world. This insight actually locates post-holocaust reflection on tsimtsum (contraction) on a similar grounding to modern and post-modern Christian thinking on kenosis (emptying), which often breaks from, and breaks new ground in relation to historical antecedents. As such, Christian theology has witnessed a vibrant (post-) modern revival of interest in the implications of a rather arcane and contracted biblical passage (Philippians 2:7: “Christ emptied Himself [auto ekénōsen], taking the form [morphē] of a servant”) for such issues as Christology, anthropology, spirituality, gender, social/political justice, ecology, evolutionary theory, and, of course, the problem of evil and suffering.7 In various and dynamic ways, Jewish and Christian thinkers have cultivated profound possibilities for contemplating suffering and evil arising from modern 3 Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 192. 4 Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 94–108. 5 Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors, 105. 6 Ibid., 285n78. See also Idel, ‘On Zimzum in Kabbalah and in Scholarship’, in Rachel Elior and Yehuda Liebes (eds.), Lurianic Kabbalah (Jerusalem: ‘Daf-Noy’ Press, 1992), 59–112. 7 Prominent voices include Thomas Altizer, Paul Fiddes, Sarah Coakley, Rowan Williams, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Kenosis has also been reimagined within recent continental philosophy: e.g. Derrida, Žižek, Levinas’s ethics, and Vattimo’s notion of kenosis as secularization.

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revivals of the mystical notion of a God who reduces Godself in relation to the world. Furthermore, Christian theologians have also identified significant resonances between the kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum and kenosis, epitomised by the elaborations of Jürgen Moltmann which provide the key focus for this essay. Such resonances highlight a shared concern with how the drama of divine self-limitation and God-forsakenness informs understandings of and responses to the mystery of evil. This search for resonance is, as I shall suggest, often negligent towards the irreducible differences which serve as unsettling reminders of Jewish-Christian estrangement past and present. Choosing the possibility of hope over the impossibility of despair, however, I suggest that while the specific and disparate conceptual intricacies of tsimtsum and kenosis may defy elision or assimilation, the (post-)modern fascination with these concepts nonetheless reveals important mutual ground in which Jewish and Christian traditions might struggle, perhaps together, with the mysteries and anguish of irremediable theodicy. This mutual ground offers a potential space of ‘abyss unto abyss’, not only for deepening awareness of often intertwined Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, but also for acknowledging the trauma, rage, and loss which mark modern relations between Jewish and Christian traditions. Nonetheless, I maintain that this mutual ground is a space between two abysses which should not be conflated. While the narratives of tsimtsum and kenosis intertwine, their irreducible differences must be retained and honoured. While resisting the temptations towards mystification offered by mystical theodicy, I suggest that the motifs of tsimtsum and kenosis continue to provide invaluable (de-/re-)constructive mystical and symbolic frameworks through which to struggle with the senses of God-forsakenness which haunt our shared and disparate human conditions. Key to this is a common ethical dimension of tsimtsum and kenosis which promotes an imperative of imitatio dei in the act of giving space for possibility: particularly the possibility of the alterity of the other. Furthermore, this divine pattern of self-giving and self-limiting offers a potentially subversive alternative to common human notions of power as ‘domination of the other.’ It might also serve, I suggest, as paradigmatic for the dialogue between tsimtsum and kenosis itself: a dialogue of ideas that does not seek to subsume, sublate, or assimilate but rather, even in sharing common ground, honour the difference of the call of ‘abyss unto abyss’ in the midst of God-forsakenness. This is not simply a question for the history of ideas, the eclecticism of philosophy of religion and theology, or the inter-twining of mystical tropes. After the Shoah and all that the Shoah gathers under the shadows of its wings, the abyssal call between tsimtsum and kenosis takes place in a space between these two wounds of absence: a ‘place’ of possibility between ‘contraction’ and ‘emptying’ which is inextricable from the genealogy of both. It must not be forgotten that within this God-forsaken ‘place,’

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this abyss between abysses, is found the real presence of ‘evil’ itself: an “annihilating Nothingness”, as Moltmann nominates it, manifesting the God-forsaken nihil that wills to be itself (as nothing) in its forsaking of God.

The Night of Tsimtsum and Kenosis: Fackenheim and Moltmann The three victims mounted together on to the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. […] the child was silent. ‘Where is God? Where is He?’ someone behind me asked. […] Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. […] For more than half an hour [the child] stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes […] Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here he is. He is hanging here on the gallows…’8

Elie Wiesel’s eminent literary vision of God-forsakenness, and perhaps even of forsaking God, assumes a place of near sanctity within Emil Fackenheim’s three essential contemporary Midrashim for post-Shoah Judaism.9 Four years prior to the publication of Fackenheim’s The Jewish Return Into History (1978), the Reformed Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann had offered his own controversial reading of this passage in The Crucified God (1974).10 Both critical interpreters of Hegel, Fackenheim and Moltmann offer divergent appreciations of the notion of ‘the death of God’ in Wiesel’s Night (1960). While Fackenheim identifies Wiesel’s passage as an exemplar of post-Shoah Midrash, he contends that it speaks at a deeper level than the metaphorical theodicies of earlier Midrashim. Whereas earlier Midrash speaks of God going into exile with His people, God is also depicted returning from exile with them. There was no such return after the 8 Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 76–77. 9 Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return Into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 24–25. Fackenheim had already dedicated his 1970 book God’s Presence in History to Wiesel. 10 On the interpretative reception of this passage see Isabel Wollaston, ‘“Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows”. An Exploration of the Child-hanging Scene in Elie Wiesel’s Night’, in Natalie K. Watson and Stephen Burns (eds.) Exchanges of Grace: Essays in Honour of Ann Loades (London: SCM Press, 2008),55–65.

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Shoah. For Fackenheim, while the earlier Midrash portrays God as seemingly powerless “as it were,” Wiesel actually sees God “in the face of a child hanging on the gallows.”11 In view of Wiesel’s “image of the death of God,”12 the notion of God’s powerlessness and suffering exile would need to be taken “both radically and literally,” such that God suffers “actual death; and any resurrected divine power will be manifest not so much within history as beyond it.” Consequently, Fackenheim claims, “A Jew, in short, would have to become a Christian”: that is, would need to abandon the belief in God’s affiliation with history and accept only an unacceptably transcendent solution.13 In seeking a response to the “rupture” of the Shoah that takes place within the world, Fackenheim moves away from metaphorical Midrash to the speculative kabbalistic notion of tikkun (‘restoration’). For Fackenheim, kabbalistic symbols of retreat, fracture, and exile, appear to speak beyond the idea of a “rupture in history” and to “a rupture of cosmic dimensions” that truly implicates the inner life of “Divinity itself.”14 Consequently, to what cosmic depths might tikkun therefore extend? Fackenheim refers back to a Midrash in which God sits and watches over the night. As God weeps, God “roars like a lion: ‘Woe unto Me that I have destroyed My house and burned My temple and sent my children into exile among nations.’”15 In the wake of this rupture, Fackenheim wonders should we not wake and weep with and for God? Would such a joining of lament, “a divine-human community of waking and weeping be a tikkun – a mending of what is broken?”16 Yet the rupture, like the image of a God who “roars like a lion,” is contained within a Midrash that “does not presume to penetrate the divine nature but is rather a human, metaphorical way of speaking”. Unlike the speculative, even potentially blasphemous imagery of kabbalah, the Midrash’s symbolism “does not claim to have an ontological reference”17 to a literal rupture within Godself. Yet, in speaking of an exile internal to the divine life itself, the “kabbalistic tikkun” still speaks to the real need for “human power” to “aid the divine.”18 However, Fackenheim’s reading of kabbalistic tikkun suggests that insofar as humanity shares in the cosmic condition of rupture, it too is in need of tikkun in order to participate in

11 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York: Harper Collins, 1970), 82. 12 Garner, Antitheodicy, Atheodicy and Jewish Mysticism in Holocaust Theology, 136. 13 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 77. 14 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 253. 15 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 3a. To Mend the World, 252. 16 To Mend the World, 252. 17 Ibid., 253. 18 Ibid., 253.

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the work of tikkun itself. It may therefore be “said without blasphemy” that “the human aid is itself aided by the Divine.”19 Importantly, therefore, it is only by being drawn from above that the below can begin to mend the world, even as it comprises God in exile.20 Fackenheim’s imperative towards realising tikkun therefore enables one to obey “the commanding Voice of Auschwitz,”21 and to fulfil his 614th commandment to resist despair and refuse posthumous victory to the presence behind the Shoah. Tikkun does not allow one to rest in the transcendent consolation of the kenotic crucified God, but demands action in the light and darkness of God’s tsimtsum. Although Fackenheim makes only one explicit reference to tsimtsum in To Mend the World, the idea itself establishes the necessity of the divine contraction for the “kabbalistic tikkun.”22 Fackenheim invokes tsimtsum (and also a debt to Scholem23) as a “rupture”: “God Himself is in a state of tsimtsum – a ‘retreat from the world’24 – without which the very being of the world would be impossible.”25 The use of the present tense is revealing insofar as it implies that tsimtsum is an ongoing process and that the crisis of God is an enduring condition. Fackenheim subsequently elides this statement with assertions about ‘the breaking of the vessels’ (Shevirat ha-Kelim) and the exile of the Shekinah. Tsimtsum as it appears in Fackenheim’s narrative, is almost immediately part of the catastrophic: of shattering and exile, rather than the loving self-restriction seen below in Moltmann’s kenotic reading. Concomitantly, Fackenheim acknowledges that “rupture” also makes “the very being of the world” possible. In Lurianic kabbalah, tsimtsum is not necessarily catastrophic in itself, but for Fackenheim it appears that the gift of ‘being’ is already a rupture, like that of the ‘breaking of the vessels’ and the exile of the Shekinah, to which the act of tikkun must attend. There is no marvelling at tsimtsum itself as a self-sacrificial act by which freedom is both gifted (to creation) and made manifest (in God’s free creative act of contraction). For Fackenheim, tsimtsum is “rupture”: a crisis within God and being.

19 Ibid., 253. 20 In this, Fackenheim moderates The Zohar’s theurgic claim that “the impulse below (itharuta diltata) calls forth that from above”. 21 To Mend the World, 25. 22 Ibid., 253. 23 Ibid., 253. 24 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schochen, 1965), pp. 26, pp. 260ff, p. 232ff. 25 To Mend the World, 253.

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Fackenheim’s melancholic account of tsimtsum establishes a revealing contrast to Moltmann’s more effusive reading of tsimtsum in relation to kenosis. The kenotic fixation of Moltmann’s theology also determines his contentious reading of Wiesel’s child-hanging scene, which is also more charged with optimistic intent than Fackenheim’s more desolately God-forsaken account. The heart of Moltmann’s account lies in the answer to the question ‘Where is God?’. The answer that arises internally to the narrator is “Here he is. He is hanging here on the gallows…” While the concluding ellipsis implies something less than a conclusive answer, for Moltmann the ambiguous identification of God with the dying youth captures the essence of the notion of the exilic presence of the suffering Shekinah which he translates into the unambiguously “Christian answer to the question of this torment.” In Moltmann’s cruciform reading of the narrator’s internal voice, God is present in Auschwitz as Auschwitz is present in God. Any other answer would denigrate God since: “To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn men to indifference.”26 In reading this horrifying scene of God-forsakenness via a hermeneutic lens of Christocentric hope, Moltmann becomes liable to accusations of reading deliberately against the grain of Wiesel’s narrative.27 In the vista of Wiesel’s Night, God-forsakenness is realised insofar as God too is forsaken by God: God has failed to fulfil what it means to be the covenantal God. Yet Moltmann’s reading of the passage from Night28 has elicited vigorous criticism, even among Christian theologians, for the Christo-centric lens of kenosis through which it is interpreted, and the reduction of the Shoah to a metaphor for voluntary and redemptive divine suffering.29 Furthermore, it remains unclear whether any affirmation of God’s hidden presence within suffering actually makes any redemptive difference

26 The Crucified God, 274. 27 See Murray Rae, ‘The Travail of God’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5:1, 2003, 47–61. 28 In The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: SCM Press 1974), 273–274. 29 See, for example, A. Roy Eckhardt, ‘Jürgen Moltmann, the Jewish People and the Holocaust’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1976), 675–691; Johann Baptist Metz, ‘Facing the Jews: Christian Theology After Auschwitz’, in Elizabeth Schlüssler Fiorenza and David tracy (eds.) The Holocaust as Interruption, Concilium: an International Roman Catholic Journal 175, 26–33; Marcel Sarot, ‘Auschwitz, Morality and the Suffering of God’, Modern Theology 7 (1991), 135–152; Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 120–140; John T. Pawlikowski, ‘Christology after the Holocaust’, Theology Digest, 47:1, Spring 2000.

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beyond offering the consolation of co-suffering? Further still, if tragic use of the gift of human freedom has a cosmogonic origin, does the resultant suffering legitimise or condemn the initial creative act of God’s kenotic tsimtsum?

The God-forsaken (God): Tsimtsum in Moltmann’s Kenotic Theology In contrast to Fackenheim’s deep sense of “rupture” inherent to the enduring state of God’s tsimtsum, Moltmann seeks to re-interpret tsimtsum within an unbroken horizon of kenotic love – a divine kenosis in which presence pervades absence, rendering human tikkun ancillary to God’s “almighty” consummation of creation. In less dramatic form, Moltmann’s kenotic assimilation of tsimtsum has itself received significant critical attention from Christian scholars, particularly suspicious towards its compatibility with ‘orthodox’ doctrinal theology.30 Irrespectively, I am less concerned by the Christian heterodoxy, or otherwise, of Moltmann’s theology. My focus attends instead to issues of attentiveness to differences, and their under-examined implications, between tsimtsum and kenosis. During his years in the abyss of his own ‘God-forsaken’ suffering as a prisoner of war, reading the psalms, as Moltmann recounts, “gave expression to my own despair and intensified my search for God.” Furthermore, in reading “Jesus’ death cry”, Moltmann “knew that in my God-forsakenness Jesus had found me.”31 Despite the vigorous hyperbole behind The Crucified God, in Moltmann’s subsequent work affirmation of a “Christian answer” and the need to go “past protest atheism” through the Godforsaken God32 gives way to a more restrained response to the problem of theodicy. In his 1984–85 Gifford Lectures, published as God in Creation, Moltmann’s response occurs within a compelling appeal to tsimtsum

30 See, for example, Ron Highfield, ‘Divine Self-Limitation in the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann: A Critical Appraisal’, Christian Scholar’s Review 32 (Fall 2002), 49–72; Alan J. Torrance, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo and the Spatio-Temporal Dimensions, with special reference to Jürgen Moltmann and D. C. Williams,’ in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1970), 91; Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (New York: Oxford University, 1988). 31 Moltmann, ‘The Blessing of Hope: The Theology of Hope and the Full Gospel of Life’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 13:2, 2005, 148–149. See also Moltmann’s ‘Wrestling with God’ in The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. M. Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 1–9. 32 The Crucified God, 227.

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as grounding for a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.33 As “the specific outcome of [God’s] decision of will,”34 the world is created “out of freedom,” which for Moltmann also means “out of love,” a love that “means the self-communication of the good.”35 Creatio ex nihilo therefore also entails “creatio ex amore Dei,”36 creation out of God’s love. Though rejecting “emanation,” Moltmann affirms the communication of God’s goodness as the sustaining of creation, showing God’s love to be “ecstatic love” which “leads him to go out of himself.” In going out of Godself (in-ekstasis), God creates “something which is different from himself but which none the less corresponds to him.”37 This ‘correspondence’ is manifest in the image of God in creation, meaning that “God finds, as it were, the mirror in which he recognizes his own countenance.”38 Moltmann’s imagery here is commensurate with kabbalistic notions of creation as the image of God in which God beholds Godself as if in a mirror. Nonetheless, Moltmann does not claim that God’s will in creation is to contemplate Godself – precluding any idea that God required creation in order to realise consummate self-knowing. Creation is rather the expression of God’s ecstatic love and, as such, remains utterly contingent upon God’s nature as love. God does not depend upon the world for self-becoming or restoration (tikkun). Creation is the expression of God’s “over-flowing rapture,”39 embraced in the flow (perichoresis-circumcessio: the ‘dance’ of the Trinity) of God’s relationality (an “analogia relationis”40). It is creation which is to find fulfilment as “the image of the invisible God” (cf. Colossians 1:15) through “the image of the Son of God incarnate.”41 This “messianic light” reveals the destiny of human fulfilment in the incarnation: the “creation of God’s image on earth” which therefore “implies an unheard of condescension, self-limitation and humiliation on the part of the God who is without compare.”42 In other words, God’s act of creative “self-distinction” is complemented, not by emanation or by the outpouring of light and sefirot, but by the

33 Moltmann, Gott in der Schöpfung: Ökologische Schöpfungslehre (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1985). God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985), 86–93. Moltmann is developing ideas presented in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (New York, 1981, pp. 109ff). 34 God in Creation, 72. 35 Ibid., 75. 36 Ibid., 76. 37 Ibid., 76. 38 Ibid., 77. 39 Ibid., 84. 40 Ibid., 77. 41 Ibid., 78. 42 Ibid.

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incarnation of the image of the invisible God in the image of the Son. This unheralded “self-humiliation” is expressed by Moltmann in the language of kenosis, understood as God’s act of salvific incarnation for a fallen creation, rather than as part of the initial tsimtsum of creation itself. Nonetheless, the echoes between kenosis and tsimtsum are sufficiently vivid for Moltmann to attempt to synthesise Lurianic tsimtsum into his kenotic discussion of creation out of nothing. Here Moltmann retreats from incarnation to consider God prior to the act of creation: “Before God issues creatively out of himself, he acts inwardly on himself, resolving for himself, committing himself, determining himself.” Here Moltmann offers to “go a little more deeply into this idea with the help of the Jewish kabbalistic doctrine of God’s ‘self-limitation’ (zimzum).” This “doctrine” is, however, avowedly interpreted “in the messianic light of faith in the crucified Son of God.”43 In addition to this caveat, it is clear that Moltmann’s main source for Luria is, once again, the scholarship of Scholem.44 Thinking with Luria-Scholem’s tsimtsum, Moltmann reasons that: In order to create a world ‘outside’ himself, the infinite God must have made room beforehand for a finitude in himself. It is only a withdrawal by God into himself that can free the space into which God can act creatively. The nihil for his creatio ex nihilo only comes into being because  – and in as far as  – the omnipotent and omnipresent God withdraws his presence and restricts his power.45

Moltmann therefore defines tsimtsum as Luria’s application of “the ancient Jewish doctrine of the Shekinah” as God’s contracted presence in the temple. Tsimtsum in creation is therefore “concentration and contraction [Scholem uses “Selbstverschränkung” – ‘self-restriction’], and signifies a withdrawing of oneself into oneself.”46 Without descending into a detailed genealogy, Moltmann suggests that “The kabbalistic doctrine of the self-limitation of God has also found a place in Christian theology,” invoking “Nicholas of Cusa, J. G. Hamann, Friedrich Oetinger, F. W, J. Schelling, A. von Oettingen, Emil Brunner and others.” In this appeal, tsimtsum is seen as a precursor for kenosis insofar as these thinkers “all saw that when God per-

43 Ibid., 86. 44 Specific reference is given to Scholem’s ‘Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes’, Eranos Jahrbuch 1956, pp. 87–119, at pp. 115f. There is also reference to the use of tsimtsum “in the Yiddish novels of Isaak Bashevis Singer, especially in The Slave, ET New York 1962, London 1963. He uses it in the form of the biblical metaphor: ‘God hides his face.’” God in Creation, 334n.25. 45 Ibid., 86–87. 46 Ibid., 87.

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mitted creation, this was the first act in the divine self-humiliation which reached its profoundest point in the cross of Christ.”47 The self-limitation and humiliation of God’s kenosis is hereby initiated in the act of tsimtsum, and stretched beyond the incarnation to the crucifixion, particularly to the God-forsakenness of the cross’s most haunting moment of dereliction. Retrieving the idiom of divine abandonment, Moltmann proceeds to identify “the space which comes into being and is set free by God’s self-limitation” as “a literally God-forsaken space.”48 Key to understanding this emotive terminology are the notions of “nihil” and “negation” Moltmann employs. When God withdraws God’s presence, a nihil “comes into being.” This nihil “represents the partial negation of the divine Being, inasmuch as God is not yet Creator.” In other words, the nihil (perhaps analogous to kabbalistic tehiru or chalal rather than ’Ayin, insofar as the Divine Nothingness of ’Ayin is within the Godhead49) represents the absence of God’s creative power, the absence (but not negation) of being. However, this nihil does not yet entail “the negation of creaturely being (since creation is not yet existent).”50 The nihil which “comes into being” and is “set free by God’s self-limitation” is only a partial negation of God and yet, as such, would be known to human beings as “Godforsakenness, hell, absolute death.” But this nihil is also the space “in which God creates his creation.” Therefore, “it is against the threat” of God-forsakenness in all its horror and absence that God “maintains his creation in life.”51 God’s self-limitation, therefore, permits the ‘coming into being’ of Godforsakenness – the primordial force of (partial) divine negation – which God then ‘negates’ by the loving ekstasis that sustains creation. Creation can be described accordingly as the overcoming of the God-forsakenness of the nihil. This space does not, for Moltmann, pose a genuine threat to God. It is only in relation to “created beings” in the “self-isolation” of “sin and godlessness,” not to God, that the nihil “acquires this menacing character” of God-forsakenness. Only creation is subject to being “threatened, not merely by its own non-being, but also by the non-being of God its Creator – that is to say, by Nothingness itself.”52 This Nothingness, or “the negative,” that threatens creation is a ‘negation’ that also exceeds creation: a transcendent overshadowing of creation itself which

47 Ibid., 87. 48 Ibid., 87. 49 See further Joseph Ben-Schlomo, ‘Gershom Scholem on Pantheism in the Kabbala’, in Paul Mendes-Flohr (ed.), Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994). 65. 50 God in Creation, 87. 51 Ibid., 87–88. 52 Ibid., 88.

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“constitutes [the] demonic power” of the Nothingness. When Moltmann moves to speak of “Nothingness,” he is invoking something other than the primordial nihil, insofar as the nihil is that which arises through the tsimtsum of God that makes the being of creation possible ‘outside’ of God. At this point, “the nihil does not yet have this annihilating character”53 which belongs to “Nothingness” since it is not a threat to God. The nihil might therefore be thought of initially as more of a neutral space (tehiru) which is only present due to God’s absence. However, such neutrality is compromised insofar as the nihil, as ‘outside’ God, “implies the possibility of the annihilating nothingness.”54 In other words, in relation to God, the nihil is ‘merely’ an absence of God. In relation to creation, the nihil assumes the hyperbolic characteristics of a God-forsaken hell of Nothingness. From this, Moltmann urges a distinction “in a doctrine of Nothingness” between “the non-being of a creature, the non-being of creation, and the non-being of the Creator.”55 Only in relation to the last of these is it possible to speak truly of “Nothingness”: the agonistic Anfechtung (spiritual trial/struggle) of God-forsakenness.56 Employing Scholem’s words, Moltmann reiterates that “God ‘withdraws himself from himself to himself’ in order to make creation possible” – meaning that God’s “creative activity outwards is preceded by this humble divine self-restriction.” Moving deeper into kenotic idiom, Moltmann affirms that “God’s self-humiliation” precedes the outward act of creation: God’s self-humiliation is “the presupposition that makes creation possible.”57 Yet might it not also be said that the tsimtsum of God’s self-humiliation is also that which makes “annihilating Nothingness” possible? Is the possibility of creation in the nihil not inextricable from the possibility of God-forsaken Nothingness? While Moltmann refers to the “demonic power” of Nothingness, he does not explicitly elaborate in his treatment of tsimtsum on the co-arising of the possibility of evil. Is the possibility of evil, or Nothingness, inherent to the possibility of creation within the nihil? Can creation be brought into being without the co-arising of the nihil into demonic Nothingness? If not, then is the possibility of God-forsakenness (evil) a necessary condition of creation itself (good)? Such questions might bring Moltmann’s account into closer dialogue with Jacob Boehme’s (1575–1624) vision of God’s primordial Anfechtung between hiddenness (God’s wrathful ‘No’ to creation; analogous to ’Ayin) and revealedness

53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Moltmann’s development of Hegel’s conception of God-forsakenness (Gottverlassenheit) becomes “a modern form of Anfechtung”. Eric J. Trozzo, Rupturing Eschatology: Divine Glory and the Silence of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 13; see further 66–82. 57 God in Creation, 88.

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(God’s gracious ‘Yes’ to being; analogous to Yesh)  – but Boehme is mentioned elsewhere only in passing.58 My sense is Moltmann diverts from such issues, electing to renovate tsimtsum in the likeness of kenosis without facing the more unnerving implications about the origins of evil to which tsimtsum potentially gives rise. Preferring to speak of love rather than evil, Moltmann affirms how “God’s creative love is grounded in his humble, self-humiliating love.” This note gives rise to the hymn of kenosis in its plenitude: This self-restricting love is the beginning of that self-emptying of God which Philippians 2 sees as the divine mystery of the Messiah. Even in order to create heaven and earth, God emptied himself of his all-plenishing omnipotence, and as Creator took upon himself the form of a servant.59

As the “beginning” of the messianic kenosis, Moltmann reads tsimtsum in similar terms of “self-emptying” and servitude. However, the Christological form of ‘God as servant’ surely differs from ‘God as Creator.’ Whereas tsimtsum shows a withdrawal preceding an ekstasis of love in creation, the kenosis of Christ involves a withdrawal from a state of transcendence in relation to creation to one of paradoxical immanence within creation: God becoming human, the Uncreated Creator becoming one with (a) created being. In other words, the divine-human alterity of tsimtsum operates as the foreground for the radical and paradoxical self-emptying of transcendence that kenosis represents. The “difference between Creator and creature” is vital for creation, but “this difference is embraced and comprehended by the greater truth”, namely “the truth that God is all in all.”60 The key difference here, however, is how exactly “the final form which creation is to find in God”61 is consummated. Is creation “transfigured,”62 in Moltmann’s terms, through the kabbalistic restoration of the image of God and the tikkun olam that also involves the restoration of the Godhead itself? Or, in the more traditional Christian idiom Moltmann exalts, through the redemptive work of Christ as the image of God in which creation alone requires redemption? In privileging Christological kenosis in his appropriation of tsimtsum, Moltmann’s God effectively retains omnipotence in God’s freedom to limit and de-limit

58 Ibid., 45 briefly mentions Ernst Bloch’s potential debt to Boehme. Endnotes make passing mention of Marx’s reference to Boehme (336n45), and the influence of the idea of Adam Kadmon on Boehme (357n8). 59 Ibid., 88. 60 Ibid., 89. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid.

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divine involvement for the sake of the beloved other. Therefore, Moltmann tarries with the negativity and God-forsakenness of tsimtsum only insofar as it appears commensurate with the eschatology of traditionally Christian kenosis. There is no room here for Boehme’s contemplation of the possibility of evil as a (negated) potentiality in God; neither is there any sense of catastrophe within the primordial process of creation itself (the shattering of the vessels), nor for its restoration – or the restoration of a God-forsaken God – through human righteousness (tikkun olam). What becomes lost in this silent disjuncture of Moltmann’s synthesis of tsimtsum and kenosis is an explicit sense of the origin of evil in trans-human terms. Consequently, there is little space for questioning or protesting the origins of God-forsakenness beyond the anthropocentric confines of human sin and guilt.63 Moltmann regards the labour and burden of the “works” of salvation as consummated in “Jesus’ last word on the cross: ‘It is finished’ (John 19.30)”64 – thereby rendering any subsequent theurgic works of humanity effectively unnecessary for the restoration of the world. From this point of Christ’s sufferings, the “new creation” emerges, beyond God-forsakenness. “The crucified one becomes the foundation and centre of the kingdom of glory which renews heaven and earth,”65 supplanting the “initial creation” of creatio ex nihilo with the “new creation,” the “eschatological creation of the kingdom of glory.” While the creation ex nihilo appears without conditions, the eschatological creation “proceeds from the vanquishing of sin and death,” the overcoming of “the annihilating Nothingness” of God-forsakenness.66 This “vanquishing” is accomplished through kenosis, made possible through the retention of divine power by which God “overcomes in his own eternal Being the Nothingness which lies heavy over sin and death.”67 Severed from the Lurianic cosmogony of the ‘shattering of the vessels’ and the ‘restoration of the world,’ tsimtsum, in Moltmann’s vista, becomes a foreshadowing of the salvific act of kenosis such that creatio ex nihilo “is the preparation and promise of the redeeming annihilatio nihili, from which the eternal being of creation proceeds.”68 This annihiliatio nihili is accomplished, “once for all” (1 Corinthians 6:20; 1 Peter 3:18), through the kenosis in which God “exposes” Godself to the annihilating Nothingness, “yielding up the Son to death in God-forsakenness on the cross, […] surrendering him to hell.” In doing so, “the eternal God enters the Nothingness out of which he created the world. God enters that ‘primordial space’ which he himself 63 Ibid., 89. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 90. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid.

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conceded through his initial self-limitation.”69 But what truly makes the ‘primordial space’ (nihil) the hell of God-forsakenness (Nothingness) is the sin of creation itself. Now this corrupted space is itself annihilated as God “pervades the space of Godforsakenness with […] the presence of his self-humiliating, self-suffering [yet omnipotent] love for his creation, in which he experiences death itself.”70 God’s Anfechtung on the cross means the presence of Anfechtung in God: death is assumed into God but overcome by the power of God’s love. No longer ‘contracted’ from Nothingness, “God becomes omnipresent. By entering into the God-forsakenness of sin and death (which is Nothingness).” As such, the tsimtsum of creation is ostensibly rescinded by the kenosis of God’s dwelling in God-forsakenness. Indwelling the Nothingness, “God overcomes it and makes it part of his eternal life.”71 Kenosis is thereby inscribed as almost a negation of tsimtsum, insofar as the death of the incarnate Son explodes God’s presence into the Nothingness of Godforsakenness which the primordial void has become. It is as if this primordial void, so essential to the act of creatio ex nihilo through tsimtsum, must itself be flooded by divine presence and annihilated – thereby raising unanswered questions about the extent to which the primordial distinction between Creator and creation is eschatologically transfigured.72 What is more, this negation has a character of sublation, insofar as the annihilation of the Nothingness is also an assumption of that Nothingness into the eternal Being of God. As such, evil, suffering, and God-forsakenness are not obliterated but redeemed, in that they too are brought into divine presence. While sustaining the vital critiques his claims evoke, I am inclined to think that Moltmann acknowledges them through his more nuanced approach in God in Creation, particularly when asking the question “Does the resurrection of the crucified Christ also bring the Nothingness of world history into the light of the resurrection?” This time his response refrains from offering a consummate answer. “Here the experiences of Auschwitz and Hiroshima raise questions for which no answers are endurable, because the questions are fundamentally protests.”73 I read this as a moderation of Moltmann’s earlier assertion of the “Christian answer” to the child-hanging in Night. The God-forsaken God may speak to the possibility of the consolation of divine suffering within the Shoah but it does not provide an “endurable” answer that brings the cry of protest (“Where is God?”) to the consummate silence of the final word (“It is accomplished!”). 69 Ibid., 91 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 See also Steven Bouma-Prediger, ‘Creation as the Home of God: The Doctrine of Creation in the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann’, Calvin Theological Journal 32 (1997), 80. 73 God in Creation, 91.

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Reinforcing this, Moltmann turns to Hegel and Bloch, admitting that not every “Negative” can be “turned to good” within “any dialectic.” Sometimes one can see nothing but “the hard, meaningless, annihilating Nothingness.”74 Christian faith in the resurrection, Moltmann concedes, cannot itself go any further than ‘dialectics’ in overcoming “the practical struggle against war and mass annihilation.” Yet the suggestion does arise that resurrection faith can go beyond this through “hope in the God who raises the dead”75: that is, a hope which, although born in the resurrection of Christ from the abyss, looks beyond this singular event to the eschatological hope of a God who can raise every human being from death. The God of such a hope is a God who makes the impossible possible. Resurrection hope therefore proceeds beyond the moment of despair “where humanly speaking [my italics: a verbatim caveat used persistently by Kierkegaard’s] there is nothing to hope for and nothing to be done.”76 Hope in the God who raises the dead does not negate the Nothingness; but it does resist it by “offer[ing] the strength to hold fast to what is dead, and to remain mindful of those who have died,” by bringing “the living and the dead into a single fellowship of hope.”77 Importantly, Moltmann claims that such unifying hope does not negate nor supress the cry of protest, but rather upholds it: “the protest against senseless murder, with which no one can come to terms, can only retain its staying power if it is borne up by a hope for the victims of that senseless murder.”78 In other words, hope in the ‘impossible possibility’ of resurrection actually sustains “protest against the annihilating Nothingness,” denying the “suppression and forgetfulness of the annihilated” and refusing to “come to terms with their annihilation.”79 I therefore read Moltmann’s notion of ‘hope’ as ‘sustaining protest’ on behalf of the living and the dead, against the annihilating Nothingness, as regulating his earlier sublation of a “Christian answer” to the Shoah. In this re-reading, the cry of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” does not necessarily offer an “endurable” answer but a response of hope in im/possibility which also sustains the protest inherent to the cry itself. More than this, rather than resorting to sublated dialectic, hope now sustains protest in unresolved dialogues with faith and despair, attending to the multitude of voices calling from ‘abyss unto abyss’. This constellation of voices from the depths represent a discordant protest against the “annihilating Nothingness” itself; but also, perhaps, even against God. 74 Ibid., 91–92. 75 Ibid., 92. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid.

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The Power and The Possibility of God Moltmann has returned to kenotic and cosmic hope more recently in his essay “God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World.” Opening with “an account of Christian and Jewish kenotic theology,”80 Moltmann once again frames his enquiry within an uncritical subsuming of tsimtsum to kenosis. Retaining his key notion of the relationship between kenosis and God-forsakenness,81 Moltmann reiterates, via Balthasar’s trinitarian theology, that kenosis is “not a self-limitation” nor “a self-renunciation on God’s part,” but rather “the selfrealization of the self-surrender of the Son to the Father in the trinitarian life of God.”82 Inner-trinitarian kenosis is therefore understood as integrated within the inner-trinitarian perichoresis, described in terms resonant with tsimtsum as the persons of the trinity “giving each other life-space for their mutual indwelling.” This idea is confirmed, not via an appeal to the Shekhinah as ‘dwelling,’ but through the image of the three persons of the trinity as three “broad rooms.” To this Moltmann adds that “It is not by chance [a claim left undeveloped] that one of the secret names of God according to the Jewish tradition is MAKOM, ‘broad place.’”83 The Shekinah does subsequently feature as “God’s ‘indwelling,’” in which Moltmann discerns “the Old Testament presupposition for the Christian idea of Christ’s kenosis, and its Jewish equivalent.”84 This “equivalent” is identified later in the essay as tsimtsum, entailing that kenosis and tsimtsum are granted equivalence insofar as both ideas are foreshadowed in earlier thought concerning the Shekhinah. Cultivating this quasi-syncretic approach, Moltmann develops his idea of the suffering exile of the Shekhinah via Heschel and Rosenzweig, culminating in the idea that “God will be finally redeemed and united when the One God becomes the All-One God, and is ‘all in all,’ as he [Rosenzweig] says with 1 Corinthians 15:28.”85 Moltmann also invokes “a Jewish midrash” which states: 80 Jürgen Moltmann, ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, John Polkinghorne (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 137–151, at 137. 81 ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, 138. 82 Ibid., 140. 83 Ibid., 141. 84 Ibid., 142. See also God in Creation, 15. Moltmann cites Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, Heidelberg 1954, Pt. III, Book 3, p. 192. He also refers to Scholem’s Von der mystichen Gestalt der Gottheit, Frankfurt 1973, pp. 135–92. God in Creation, 332n12. Moltmann later equates the presence and suffering of the Shekinah directly with the power of the Holy Spirit. God in Creation, 96–97. 85 ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, 144.

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“We do not know whether God is the space of his world, or whether his world is his space.”86 According to Moltmann’s response to this aporia: The Christian answer is to draw on the idea of perichoresis […] mutual interpenetration: just as the person ‘who abides in love abides in God and God in him’ (1 John 4:16), so in the consummation God will find space in the finite world in a divine way, and the finite world will find space in God in a ‘worldly’ way. That is a reciprocal interpenetration, in which the differences are not intermingled but where the distances are gathered up and ended.87

This resolution contains echoes of Moltmann’s notion of “God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God”88: a mutual indwelling in which, rather than in final mystical absorption, God and the world discover a ‘place’ within one another. Final consummation is determined by love, which overcomes estrangement and alienation, while retaining the inviolable difference between the Creator and created, the alterity of the other. This refusal to reduce difference to oneness, while making space for the other in relation of “reciprocal interpenetration,” offers a powerful paradigmatic vision for the relationality of ‘abyss calling unto abyss.’ This vision is ostensibly commensurate with the Ḥasidic idea of tsimtsum as God’s restriction of the divine light so as to allow the other to be, rather than be annihilated, in the union of cleaving (devekut) to God.89 Nonetheless, the extent to which Moltmann’s own ultimate assimilation of tsimtsum to kenosis fully honours such a vision of dialogical exchange remains questionable. A problematic ‘intermingling of difference’ is evident in Moltmann’s subsequent recapitulation of the relation between tsimtsum and kenosis. God’s creative act of the self-limitation of “infinity and omnipotence” is itself described as an expression of God’s omnipotence, for “Only God can limit God.”90 But to what extent does God still remain ‘God’ following this self-limitation? Moltmann’s vision of creation is credited as “Isaac Luria’s idea” of “zimzum,” but Moltmann promptly identifies the “empty space”91 of tsimtsum as “the space of God’s kenosis.”92 Such an elision is problematic insofar as the primal act of tsimtsum connotes contraction for the sake of absence (the withdrawal of light and concentration upon 86 “Quoted by Max Jammer in Concepts of Space (Cambridge, Mass., 1954; Oxford, 1955).” ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, 144. 87 Ibid. 88 The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993), 278. 89 See Arthur Green, ‘Introduction’, Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Upright Practices, The Light of the Eyes, trans. Arthur Green (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 15. 90 ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, 145. 91 Ibid. Again the reference is to Scholem’s ‘Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes’. 92 ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, 146.

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Godself) rather than the incarnational presence of self-gift implied by Christological kenosis. For Moltmann, however, it is in “self-humiliation” that tsimtsum assumes its similitude with kenosis. Pointing to the Christian image of “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 18:8), Moltmann proposes that “there was already a cross in the heart of God before the world was created and before Christ was crucified on Golgotha.”93 By invoking this cruciform symbol, reminiscent of his establishing of the cross at the heart of Auschwitz, Moltmann effectively seeks to resolve any ‘issue’ of the priority of tsimtsum over kenosis. Not only is kenosis prior to tsimtsum, kenosis, as “self-humiliation” proceeding from God’s love, becomes the motivating force behind tsimtsum. Thereby, tsimtsum is effectively assimilated to an act of kenosis moved by “A love that gives the beloved space.” And yet, by casting kenosis in the idiom of “self-limitation” as well as traditional “self-giving,” Moltmann’s reading of kenosis is itself formed by tsimtsum, even as it is located as prior to it. While Moltmann both integrates yet subordinates tsimtsum to kenosis, the circularity of his conceptualisation lends some credence to Moltmann’s desire to see tsimtsum and kenosis as two expressions of the same characteristic of God’s relation to creation. This relation is, I nonetheless suggest, pre-determined by a Christian vision of the love of a God who retains or restores power after the event of self-limitation, as beheld through the lens of trinitarian kenosis. What is lacking for this to operate as a genuine ‘dialogue’ between tsimtsum and kenosis is a more nuanced and explicit confession of the moves Moltmann is making, along with their implications, for a genuine ‘thinking-together’ between Jewish and Christian theology. Key to the possibility of an authentic call of ‘abyss unto abyss’ between tsimtsum and kenosis is this very issue of power or omnipotence. Like many Christian theologians, Moltmann appeals to Hans Jonas as the modern thinker who “took up the zimzum idea early on,” though Moltmann is also uncommonly aware of Jonas’s 1963 implementation of tsimtsum in relation to evolution before his more famous application of tsimtsum to Auschwitz in 1984.94 Power, as Jonas elaborates, is commonly understood in relation to an object: power is assumed to be power over something. God’s expression of power does not proceed in such

93 Ibid., 146–147. 94 Ibid., 147. See Hans Jonas, Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit: Zur Lehre vom Menschen (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 55–62 (this has not, to my knowledge, been translated into English); and Jonas’s ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice’, The Journal of Religion Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), pp. 1–13. Jonas presented his paper later in 1984 to the Munich Assembly of German Catholics, thereby ensuring a relatively higher profile for his thinking on tsimtsum among Christian theologians.

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terms but rather, through tsimtsum, God renounces providential intervention (problematic for incarnational kenosis) and commits to becoming co-dependent with the world. The radical extent of Jonas’s myth of tsimtsum, entailing God’s unconditional surrender of divine sovereignty, escapes Moltmann’s commentary due, one suspects, to its incompatibility with Moltmann’s Christian soteriology. If tsimtsum constitutes a total and irrevocable surrender to immanence then it precludes the possibility and power for subsequent salvific incarnational kenosis. What Moltmann takes from Jonas is revealed by his subsequent reference to Kierkegaard’s idea that “only almighty power can limit itself, can give itself and withdraw itself, in order to make the recipient independent; so than in the divine act of self-humiliation we also have to respect an act of God’s omnipotence.”95 For Kierkegaard, true divine omnipotence subverts typical human conceptions of power which relentlessly imagine power-relations in terms reminiscent of Hegelian Master-Slave dialectics. Moltmann encapsulates this Kierkegaardian subversion and empowers it further by saying that “God never appears mightier than in the act of his self-limitation, and never greater than in the act of his self-humiliation.”96 Half-echoing Kierkegaard, Moltmann adds that “It is not God’s power that is almighty. What is almighty is his love.”97 However, if divine power, as love, is truly subversive of human power, why must it be re-inscribed in terms of God’s power ‘over-powering’ human notions of power? Kierkegaard’s point is, after all, that by creating beings truly independent of Godself, God’s omnipotence operates in terms wholly incommensurate with human constructions of ever greater forms of comparable power. Is the quality of divine love most authentically elaborated in terms of ‘omnipotence,’ which is itself supposedly subordinate to love as “selflimitation”? Moltmann proceeds to apply the principle of “self-limitation” in love to other divine attributes, such as omniscience, even to the point of affirming that “God does not know everything in advance.”98 Such a self-limitation, even motivated by love, revives the question/protest of whether God’s ignorance concerning the subsequent ‘fall’ of creation renders God responsible for a creation ruptured by annihilating Nothingness? Abiding with the flow of a cosmogony of tsimtsum, Moltmann arrives at the question of whether a self-limited and co-suffering God “becomes dependent on

95 ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, 148. The first part of this sentence is an almost verbatim quotation from Kierkegaard, though not acknowledged as such. See Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 7 volumes, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978), volume 2, entry 1251. 96 ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, 148. 97 Ibid., 149. 98 Ibid., 148.

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the response of his beloved creatures.”99 Evidently uneasy with the more theurgic dimensions of Luria’s (and Fackenheim’s) tikkun olam, Moltmann refuses the more radical sense of God’s ‘dependence,’ affirming that “In Christian theology one would not go so far as to declare God ‘in need of redemption’ together with his people of Israel” – though God has given over to human beings to accomplish the divine will and ‘contribute’ to “the coming of the kingdom”.100 This impasse exposes a vital tension between Moltmann’s soteriology-eschatology of kenosis and tsimtsum – insofar as tsimtsum initiates a catastrophe within the Godhead and in creation which requires tikkun. Effectively, kenosis retains an empowered aspect of autonomous self-limitation, even within God’s exiled or incarnational presence in the world. Tsimtsum, by contrast, initiates a “rupture” in which God’s own capacity for ‘almighty’ self-limitation may itself be limited (as in Jonas’s myth). While the God of tsimtsum requires human restoration (tikkun), even if divinely enabled as Fackenheim suggests, Moltmann’s God of kenosis remains both “almighty” and autonomous in redemptive love. Though embedded within a Christological meta-narrative that subordinates kabbalistic cosmogony, Moltmann’s concluding turn in this essay might still offer fresh ground for further dialogue between tsimtsum and kenosis beyond the impasse of divine power and human tikkun. Paralleling his discussion in God in Creation, Moltmann turns finally to the question of hope. Here the notion of possibility becomes the explicit focus for hope – and also for thinking God. Appealing to the innovations of Kierkegaard and Heidegger against ‘onto-theology,’ Moltmann proposes an amendment of theological emphasis from the “metaphysics of reality” to “a metaphysics of possibility” – one that conceives of God as “the supreme possibility, as the source of possibilities, and the transcendental making-possible of the possible.”101 By bearing and enduring the suffering of creation, God “makes possible ever-new possibilities” in what is essentially “the gift of the future”: the space in which creation and Creator strive towards the goal of kenosis, the future of participation “in God’s indwelling fullness of possibility.”102 While Moltmann does not elaborate on Kierkegaard’s innovations, the implicit presence of his thinking is, I suspect, woven throughout this essay. Extracting Kierkegaard’s thought further, I think it feasible to elicit the hidden Kierkegaardian axiom at the heart of the work: “God is this – that everything is

99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 150. 102 Ibid., 151.

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possible.”103 This affirmation sounds highly abstract, but Kierkegaard’s context situates his assertion within a revealing vignette of a despairing “fatalist.” A fatalist is one who is caught in despair because a fatalistic person thinks that life, and even God, are driven by necessity. When the most “absolutely unbearable” “horror”104 occurs to the fatalist, they are brought down to dwell in the abyss of despair, where all are tempted to believe themselves forsaken by God. Within this abyss, “salvation is, humanly speaking, utterly impossible.” But the fatalist who lives in necessity has lost all sense of possibility. And yet, “for God everything is possible!”105 Possibility, recalling Moltmann’s terms, means hope in “the gift of the future.” The struggle against the gravity of the abyss is similarly in Kierkegaard’s terms, “the battle of faith, battling, madly, if you will, for possibility, because possibility is the only salvation.”106 The abyss of despair swallows the fatalist within an annihilating silence, in “muteness, a mute capitulation” meaning that “he is unable to pray.” To pray is to call out from the abyss, de profundis, for the possibility of God. “To pray is also to breathe,” as Kierkegaard puts it, “and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.”107 Struggling for breath in the abyss, the fatalist must call out, even if only to ask the question/protest “Where is God?”. Hope struggles for air, even when “salvation is, humanly speaking, utterly impossible”; or, in Moltmann’s Kierkegaardian echo, in the moment “where humanly speaking”, to quote Kierkegaard, “there is nothing to hope for and nothing to be done.”108 Hope in ‘impossible possibility,’ as noted above, even sustains “protest against the annihilating Nothingness.”109 As such, hope is not monological: hope makes possible the voice of protest as well as faith. Hope is dialogical, at the very least, insofar as it makes possible the space in which the calling of ‘abyss unto abyss’ might be authentically attended to. Moltmann, as evidenced above, privileges a Christian meta-narrative to the point that “Anyone who believes in the God who created being out of nothing, also believes in the God who gives life to the dead.”110 A commitment to belief in resurrection, however, is not necessarily the belief of all who commit to belief in kabbalistic tsimtsum. Likewise, Moltmann’s

103 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 40. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 38. 107 Ibid., 40. 108 God in Creation, 92. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 93.

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assertion that such a person’s “faith” makes them “prepared to withstand annihilation”111 does not seem representative of the wider spectrum of ‘faithful’ responses to the Shoah in which the fall into despair may become overwhelming, even for the those who long for ‘faith.’ Part of the issue is that the dialogic of the calling of ‘abyss unto abyss’ is inexorably complex and nuanced beyond simple binaries of “despair” and “faith.” For one, “faith” and “protest” are not mutually exclusive, though Moltmann’s response to “protest atheism” neglects the possibility of ‘protest theism’: the agonistic stance of protesting against God with the thought that for God all things might be possible. But such a stance, which struggles both with and against God, struggles also with “faith” and “despair,” to the point that becoming overwhelmed by either remains a living possibility. Fackenheim’s vision of post-holocaust tikkun falters somewhat here also. The “protest” Fackenheim endorses post-rupture is one that must ultimately strive towards tikkun.112 In the wake of the “rupture,” pre-Shoah tikkun is now “impossible,” and yet also “necessary, and hence possible.”113 The ‘impossible possibility’ of tikkun is what saves the Jew from despair, even though such tikkun remains merely fragmentary. Protest, for Fackenheim, is an expression of hope that must proceed from faith and conclude in faith. In other words, protest begins and ends within normative contours of faithful ‘possibility.’ It is, after all, possible that one who protests in faith may end in despair; or that one who protests in despair arrives, seemingly impossibly, at hope. An authentic hope is one that proceeds from a sense of ‘impossible possibility’: a notion that implies the possibility of despair as well as faith. To attend to this broader spectrum of wounded possibility is to attend more compassionately to the polyvalent calling of ‘abyss unto abyss.’

The Im/Possibility of Conclusion: Attending to the Call of Abyss Unto Abyss The inscription at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem rightly reminds us that Forgetfulness leads to exile, While remembrance is the secret of redemption.114

111 Ibid., 93. 112 Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History, 267. 113 To Mend the World, 254. 114 Moltmann, God in Creation, 132.

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Attending to the calling of abyss unto abyss requires attending to the shadows of the past and the possibilities of the future. It is this horizon which is essential to the kinetic commitment to being of both tsimtsum and kenosis. Here the ethical dimensions of both offer vital paradigms for attending to the calls of the abysses. Emerging from the past ruins of the Shoah, Shapira’s Esh Kodesh appeals to “the name of God, EHYE – ‘I will be’”: “the name of the God that is the future.”115 The traditional Christian translation of the divine name in the more eternally-present tense ‘I AM THAT I AM’ has been subjected to vital re-envisioning in recent theology.116 After centuries of reading Hebrew via the lens of Greek metaphysics, many Christian theologians, including Moltmann, now acknowledge the priority of ‘possibility’ over ‘being’ in nominating God. Both tsimtsum and kenosis point distinctively in this direction. Shapira’s reading of EHYE – ‘I will be’ can itself be elaborated through a reading of tsimtsum that is, I suggest, profoundly commensurate with kenosis. In this passage, Shapira states that one’s “self-doubting is itself a form of worship […] that illuminates the world”, taking on “the aspect of God’s name, EHYE – I will be”, and drawing out “a reciprocal promise of EHYE – I will be.”117 But the self-doubt Shapira is referring to is not just a doubt about the future (the future of the people of Israel under Moses’ leadership), it is about the self-doubt that ensues from self-judgment, from a sense of one’s unworthiness rooted in the past yet aspiring for a different future. Elsewhere, Shapira interprets selfjudgment as an overcoming of the Self analogous to God’s primordial act of tsimtsum. To create, God needed to “use the attribute of gevurah [judgment] against Himself” in order to constrict divine transcendence. This is a restriction of “the very Self of God” in which God had to “overwhelm and constrict His light,” to use Gevurah upon Godself, in order to relate Chesed [Mercy] to creation without overwhelming it. As such, Shapira observes, “the attribute of gevurah that arose in the original thought [of creation] was no less than the original revelation of Chesed.”118 Shapira advises one to learn from this to respond to divine judgment (Din) by likewise using “gevurah (judgment) upon ourselves: because the origin of gevurah was the overcoming of the Self, and it was from this that Chesed was revealed.”119 In other words, the ethical act of tsimtsum upon oneself is through a negation of the self, which “elevates the gevurah to its original source” of God’s

115 Sacred Fire, 261. 116 I discuss this further in my Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 28–31. 117 Sacred Fire, 261. 118 Ibid., 299. 119 Ibid.

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tsimtsum via “the gevurah of God over Himself”, thereby “reveal[ing] tremendous Chesed in this world”.120 Shapira speaks of the need for Gevurah to contract and “overcome” one’s “tendency to withhold” and “overwhelm” one’s “own resistance” to giving.121 This is a double contraction insofar as Gevurah contracts one’s tendency to withhold, to remain in contraction from the other, rather than to (self-)give towards the other. By using the attribute of Gevurah against oneself, Gevurah acts to “awaken and reveal” one’s “Chesed” enabling one to “bring himself to do any great act of giving.”122 The language of ‘bringing oneself’ is revealing insofar as it connotes the sense of kenotic self-gift inherent in giving to the other. Giving is an act of disempowered power in imitatio dei of the divine tsimtsum of creation: an overcoming of the desire to withhold and to serve the self for the sake of the other. It is a contraction of the self, a “becoming nothing” in the language of Jewish and Christian mystical thought, which allows the contracted and emptied self to be filled with Chesed which empowers the capacity for self-giving, for attending. A powerful analogous kenotic image is expressed by Meister Eckhart’s (1260– 1328) reading of Christ clearing the money-lenders from the temple (Matthew 21:12–17 and parallels). The temple is an analogy for the soul. Only once it has been cleansed and emptied of images and idols, become nothing, will God fill and overflow the temple of the soul.123 Eckhart’s kenotic mystical theology here elaborates the true spirit of kenosis in Philippians 2 where the context is not cosmogonic, but one of ethical humility, of imitatio Christi. It asks its readers to “regard others as better than yourselves” (2:3), “letting the same mind be in you that was  in Christ Jesus” (5). Although Christ was “in the form of God” (6) he “emptied himself” to the form of “a human,” even “a slave” (7). This selfsubjection meant that “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (8). This final point of crucifixion returns us to the cry of God-forsakenness which, I suggest, includes the possibility of protest and genuine human despair as well as the possibility of inner-trinitarian kenosis and Anfechtung. At this point, Chesed is in a state of “hester (Concealment),”124 as Shapira might put it. Referring to the God-forsaken cry of Psalm 22, Shapira speaks of suffering that can be “hidden” within oneself, and the suffering that “surrounds” one such that “wrapped in 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid., 298. 122 Ibid. 123 Meister Eckhart, Sermon Six, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad 2009), 66–71. 124 Sacred Fire, 298.

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distress and pain” one is “compelled to pour out his plaint before God. His whole self is poured out in prayer […] ‘God, my God, why have you forsaken me?... I am spilt like water…”125 Elsewhere Shapira writes that “Of course, we believe that you will save us, that you have not forsaken us completely, God forbid. But, in feeling ‘forsaken,’ we refer to our salvation that is so far away and the suffering that just goes on and on.”126 For Shapira, as for Fackenheim, despair means the death of faith. But I contend that the call from the abyss of God-forsakenness contains the possibility of despair as well as the ‘impossible possibility’ of hope. Otherwise it is no longer a question, no longer a “Why?”. If “the name of God is the future,” if “God is that all things are possible,” then all possibilities must be attended to, not foreclosed in the premature sublation of kenotic trinitarian mystifications. Attending to the calling of ‘abyss unto abyss’ means ‘self-contraction’ (tsimtsum) and ‘selfemptying’ (kenosis) of myths of power for the sake of the possibility of Chesed and self-giving in the work of tikkun (restoration). Perhaps what remains in this forsaken space of possibility between abysses is more akin to the irresolvable polyvalence of Blumenthal’s encounters between texts and counter-texts: “verses”, “con-verses,” “affections,” “words,” and “sparks.”127 This attending requires narratives of ‘faith’ and ‘despair’ co-existing in dialogues of possibility, because hope cannot truly realise itself without recognising the possibility of despair within itself. This is the ‘impossible possibility’ of a God who is named according to the proclamation ehyeh asher ehyeh (‘I will be that I will be’), which is perhaps the only hope for responding to the question of God-forsakenness, and of attending to the call of abyss unto abyss unto abyss…

Bibliography Ben-Schlomo, Joseph. “Gershom Scholem on Pantheism in the Kabbala,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., Gershom Scholem: The Man and His Work, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994. Bouma-Prediger, Steven. “Creation as the Home of God: The Doctrine of Creation in the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann,” Calvin Theological Journal 32 (1997), 72-90. Blumenthal, David R. Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1993.

125 Ibid., 302–303. 126 Ibid., 289. 127 David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 57–191.

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Eckhardt, A. Roy. “Jürgen Moltmann, the Jewish People and the Holocaust,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1976), 675–691. Fackenheim, Emil L. The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem, New York: Schocken Books, 1978. _____. To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Fiddes, Paul S. The Creative Suffering of God, New York: Oxford University, 1988. Garner, David Osborne. Antitheodicy, Atheodicy and Jewish Mysticism in Holocaust Theology: Atheodic Theologies After Auschwitz, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014. Green, Arthur, “Introduction,” Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Upright Practices, The Light of the Eyes, trans. Arthur Green, New York: Paulist Press, 1982. Haynes, Stephen R. Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, 120–140. Highfield, Ron. “Divine Self-Limitation in the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann: A Critical Appraisal,” Christian Scholar’s Review 32 (Fall 2002), 49–72. Idel, Moshe, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. _____. “On Zimzum in Kabbalah and in Scholarship,” in Rachel Elior and Yehuda Liebes, eds., Lurianic Kabbalah, Jerusalem: ‘Daf-Noy’ Press, 1992, 59–112. Jonas, Hans. “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” The Journal of Religion Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), 1–13. _____. Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit: Zur Lehre vom Menschen, Göttingen, 1963. Kierkegaard, Søren. Journals and Papers, 7 volumes, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978. _____. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe, New York: Crossroad 2009. Metz, Johann Baptist, “Facing the Jews: Christian Theology After Auschwitz,” in Elizabeth Schlüssler Fiorenza and David Tracy, eds., The Holocaust as Interruption, Concilium: An International Roman Catholic Journal 175, 26–33. Moltmann, Jürgen, “The Blessing of Hope: The Theology of Hope and the Full Gospel of Life,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 13:2, 2005, 148–149. _____. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden, London: SCM Press 1974. _____. God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl, London: SCM Press, 1985. _____. “God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World,” in John Polkinghorne, ed., The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001, 137–151. _____. Gott in der Schöpfung: Ökologische Schöpfungslehre, Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1985. _____. The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, New York, Harper & Row, 1981. _____. “Wrestling with God,” in The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. M. Kohl, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997, 1–9. Pawlikowski, John T. “Christology after the Holocaust,” Theology Digest, 47:1, Spring 2000.

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Pensky, Max. Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Podmore, Simon D. Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Rae, Murray. “The Travail of God,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5:1, 2003, 47–61. Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, Baltimore and London The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Sarot, Marcel. “Auschwitz, Morality and the Suffering of God,” Modern Theology 7 (1991), 135–152. Scholem, Gershom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, 1965. _____. “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes,” Eranos Jahrbuch 1956, 87–119. Shapira, Kalonymus Kalmish. Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury, 1939-1942, trans. J. Hershy Worch and ed. Deborah Miller, New York: Jason Aronson, 2000. Torrance, Alan J. “Creatio ex Nihilo and the Spatio-Temporal Dimensions, with Special Reference to Jürgen Moltmann and D. C. Williams,” in Colin E. Gunton, ed., The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1970. Trozzo, Eric J. Rupturing Eschatology: Divine Glory and the Silence of the Cross, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Wiesel, Elie. Night, trans. Stella Rodway, London: Penguin Books, 1981. Wollaston, Isabel, “’Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows.’ An Exploration of the Child-hanging Scene in Elie Wiesel’s Night,” in Natalie K. Watson and Stephen Burns, eds., Exchanges of Grace: Essays in Honour of Ann Loades, London: SCM Press, 2008, 55–65.

Michael L. Morgan

Traces of Tsimtsum: Berkovits, Fackenheim, Levinas At various moments in twentieth-century Jewish thought and philosophy, God or divinity or transcendence engages in a process of self-limitation. When such moments occur, in each case the thinker frames it in a particular way, describes it in distinctive terms, and calls upon traditional Jewish texts and vocabulary to express the self-withdrawal. Three such occurrences can be found in the work of Eliezer Berkovits, Emil Fackenheim, and Emmanuel Levinas. In this essay, I will look at each case and compare them, with the hope that they might tell us something about the appeal and influence of the notion of tsimtsum in twentiethcentury Jewish thought. I am especially interested in the roles played by the recovery of this expression and the purposes it serves.

Berkovits Let me begin with Eliezer Berkovits. I was introduced to Berkovits’s thought by his account of what role the Holocaust plays in his conception of a Jewish philosophy of history, and it is within that conception that divine self-limitation occurs. That philosophy of history requires understanding divine providence and creation. For Berkovits, creation is a two-stage process. First, God created the natural or “secular” world, which is imperfect on its own but which at the same time can be “sanctified” or “redeemed.” In Judaism, this secular or natural world is “notyet holy,” and it is the creation of the human being, the second stage of creation, whereby history is born and the temporal process of continuous redemption. “From the very beginning man has been placed into this world … that he may sanctify the secular, l’taken olam b’malkut Shaddai, and establish the city of man as the Kingdom of God …. Man, according to his own strength, continues the work of creation and becomes, urged on by God’s call, a humble associate of the Creator.”1 Only with the second stage of creation, then, does history arise, and hence “history is man’s responsibility …. Here, within the God-given task of sanctification, is the source of man’s freedom as well as of his responsibility. The God who calls man

1 Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1973), 60. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-015

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to responsibility is the guarantor of his freedom to act responsibly.”2 Berkovits points to a rabbinic text in which this “God-given” task or heritage, the law, study and observance of it, and this freedom are associated. As he says, “Freedom – on the Tablets.”3 That is, Berkovits cites the famous midrash from Pirke Avot 6:2 on Exodus 32:16, which tells us that the tablets were God’s work and the writing God’s writing, “carved (charut) on the tablets.” And the rabbis say, “do not read charut (engraved); read cherut (freedom).” For Berkovits, then, creation and redemption or sanctification are mediated by human responsibility and freedom, on the one hand, and the law, on the other. The law requires human freedom; moreover, human freedom is expressed through the law. Although he does not mention Kant here, Berkovits’s association of freedom with law is very Kantian in spirit; if freedom is a form of causality, it must be law-governed, which is why the freedom that is at the core of moral reason is autonomy, the law that reason makes for itself. But, he goes on to argue, the reality of that freedom requires a very precise divine action, a form of divine hiding, absence, or self-limitation. Berkovits puts this divine self-limitation this way: “The hiding God (El Mistater) is present; though man is unaware of him, He is present in his hiddenness. Therefore, God can only hide in this world. But if this world were altogether and radically profane, there would be no place in it for Him to hide. He can only hide in history…. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.”4 The hiding God, then, is also the saving God, but He saves in his hiddenness, in his presence in human freedom and responsibility.5 Moreover, Berkovits prefers to emphasize the seeming paradox of God’s presence as absence, of his hidden presence, or of his unconvincing absence. All of these formulations are intended, it would seem, to focus on a tension or even a dialectic, between a divine retreat or withdrawal and a divine presence or involvement.6 It is this tension or dialectic that is the centerpiece of what Berkovits calls a “Jewish philosophy of history” and an account of “divine providence.” Berkovits presents this account in Chapter IV of Faith after the Holocaust.7 The precise setting is the problem of theodicy and “undeserved suffering in history” and in the case of the Holocaust “injustice absolute.” In order to clarify

2 Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, 61. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 64. 5 Ibid., 65. That God both hides His face and yet is the savior of Israel, Berkovits derives from Isaiah 45:15. 6 Ibid., 99, where Berkovits takes the rabbis to have joined together God’s silence with His presence: “The one who is silent may be so called only because he is present.” 7 Ibid., 94–113.

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the Biblical and Talmudic ways of dealing with these phenomena, Berkovits turns once again to the notion of the God’s hiding His face, hester panim. The expression in the Bible has two meanings; one concerns “divine judgment and punishment,” while the other refers to human suffering that results, not from divine judgment, but rather from “the evil perpetrated by man.” The latter is the result, Berkovits notes, of “indifference – God seems to be unconcernedly asleep during the tribulations inflicted by man on his fellow.” Berkovits calls upon Psalm 44 and then turns to the Talmud for further confirmation of this second meaning, which is the one that we have seen him call upon in order to clarify the human role in creation, history, and redemption. There God’s hiding His face made possible human freedom and responsibility in the service of the law and sanctification of the natural world; here that same divine process of withdrawal makes possible injustice and suffering.8 Once again Berkovits turns to Isaiah 45:15 and the notion of a hiding God who is also a saving God, but he now exploits various Talmudic texts to show that this means that God creates humankind with the freedom to choose between good and evil, with the responsibility for becoming righteous and avoiding wickedness. These are options or possibilities that God Himself must respect, if he is to respect what is essential to human existence. Man cannot be bludgeoned into goodness. If God did not respect man’s freedom to choose his course in personal responsibility, not only would the moral good and evil be abolished from the earth, but man himself would go with them. For freedom and responsibility are of the very essence of man. Without them man is not human. If there is to be man, he must be allowed to make his choices in freedom. If he has such freedom, he will use it. Using it, he will often use it wrongly; he will decide for the wrong alternative. As he does so, there will be suffering for the innocent.9

What we have here, then, is a version of a synthesis of several strategies that have been used to justify divine omnipotence and goodness when confronted with innocent suffering. In particular, Berkovits here employs one version of the so-called “Free-Will Defense.” He draws on Talmudic texts in order to formulate it, and he concludes by calling it a “divine dilemma,” for it does not shrink from praising God for being “long-suffering” and “patient,” both with the righteous and the sinful, and for being a God who hides His face. God risks a great deal on man, but in creating him, God nonetheless cannot abandon him.

8 Ibid., 94–96. Berkovits cites Ps. 44:24–27; 13:2 9 Ibid., 105.

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But man left to his freedom is capable of greatness in both  – in creative goodness and destructive evil. Though man cannot be man without freedom, his performance in history gives little reassurance that he can survive in history…. If man is not to perish at the hand of man, if the ultimate destiny of man is not to be left to the chance that man will never make the fatal decision, God must not withdraw his providence from his creation. He must be present in history. That man may be, God must absent himself; that man may not perish in the tragic absurdity of his own making, God must remain present. The God of history must be absent and present concurrently. He hides his presence. He is present without being indubitably manifest; he is absent without being hopelessly inaccessible…. Because of the necessity of his absence, there is the “Hiding of the Face” and suffering of the innocent; because of the necessity of his presence, evil will not ultimately triumph; because of it, there is hope for man.10

Earlier, the dialectic or tension between God’s presence and absence seemed to focus on the reality of human freedom and the task of redemption, indeed in the conjunction of freedom with law. Here, the dialectic or what Berkovits calls a dilemma concerns God’s hiding of His face and His patience, which requires His providence. Exactly what this means is not clear, although it might mean that while God absents Himself in order to make freedom possible, He reserves the possibility of miraculous intervention when it is needed to save humankind from tragic self-destruction.11 For our purposes, however, we can ignore this qualification and pay exclusive attention to the central motif, that of the hiding of God’s face and the way in which it makes “room” for human freedom. Berkovits refers to this divine withdrawal or self-limitation in a variety of ways. As we have seen, the primary image he employs is that of God’s hiding His face (hester panim). He also speaks of this act as “God’s renunciation of his power on man,” “divine self-restraint,” and the “shackling of his omnipotence.”12 Nowhere in Faith after the Holocaust, however, does Berkovits so much as suggest that this motif of divine self-limitation should be associated with or interpreted in terms of the Kabbalistic or specifically Lurianic notion of tsimtsum. For such a hint, we need to turn to an earlier work of Berkovits’s, his more systematic and metaphysical work, God, Man and History, published first in 1959 and then in a second edition in 1965.

10 Ibid., 107. 11 Berkovits makes this distinction between divine agency via withdrawal and divine agency through miraculous intervention in Faith after the Holocaust (109), where he claims that the first occurs within history but the latter “outside of history.” His example is the Exodus, which is an expression of divine might and hence cannot be within history. 12 Ibid., 109.

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The argument of Faith after the Holocaust is a particular application of the conception of God and the Jewish philosophy of history articulated in this earlier work. In the later work, divine self-limitation or God’s hiding His face occurs as a structural feature of creation in general and in particular of the dimension of creation that involves humankind, freedom, and history. In the earlier work, in his discussion of creation, Berkovits identifies this same feature broadly as a “presupposition” of creation itself: God’s involvement with the realm of finite reality is imaginable only as an act of divine “self-limitation,” as it were. God, notwithstanding His transcendence, bends down to the world of finitude. He “humbles” Himself, as it were, in order to relate Himself. He “reduces” Himself so that He may enter into the narrow straits of a relationship with finite existence. But the fundamental act of divine involvement is creation itself; we shall, therefore, have to look at it as the basic deed of divine self-limitation. God creates the world of finite being by curbing the full manifestation of His essence and power. In order to create, He must restrain His infinite potency to such a degree that nothing may issue from the work of His hand which surpasses the boundaries of a finite universe. Creation is only conceivable as an act of divine “self-abnegation.” God is involved in the destiny of finite being as the result of an act of “self-denial.” This is, perhaps, the fuller meaning of the concept of the “hiding” God. God not only veils His presence, so that it may be endured by man; He “denies” His essence so that the world of finitude may come to be and He Himself remain[s] involved in it. An act of self-limitation is the premise of creation, as well as of God’s involvement in the destinies of the world of man.13

Fundamentally, then, divine self-limitation and the imagery of God’s hiding His face characterize creation itself. They also, however, apply to the account of evil and human responsibility that we saw formulated in Berkovits’s later book and is already developed in the more systematic, earlier one: … God, in creating the universe, has delegated a measure of responsibility for its own history to creation. We do not find ourselves in a universe of puppets, dangling from the strings of the Almighty and automatically obeying every one of His commands, but in a universe in which freedom makes the deed possible. No doubt, God took a risk with creation by granting it consciousness and free decision. The freedom may be misused at any time or it would not deserve its name.14

In a previous chapter Berkovits describes this creation of humankind as a matter of granting a measure of independence to a being who is largely dependent.

13 Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man and History: A Jewish Interpretation (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 1959), 64. 14 Ibid., 80.

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“He  is free to be himself because God cares for him. Without that freedom the relationship would become valueless, for man would cease being a person…. It is a moral necessity … that [God] should be ‘hiding,’ so as to preserve the personal identity of man …. Man may confront the Divine Presence only because God curbs and constrains – as it were – His transcendence. God ‘denies’ Himself in order to affirm man. By an act of divine self-denial man is made free to deny Him …. The act of divine self-denial is the precondition of the fundamental religious experience.”15 In short, then, what Berkovits calls “divine self-denial” or “God’s hiding His face” or divine self-limitation is a presupposition of both creation in general and the creation of human beings as free and responsible in particular. As he does later in Faith after the Holocaust, Berkovits cites as a proof-text for the Biblical provenance of the notion of the hiding God Isaiah 45:15: “Indeed, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.” But in God, Man and History the context differs, and Berkovits makes an important distinction. The context is the more general one of the very possibility of revelation or the divine-human encounter. In the moment of revelation, man is both threatened by God and His transcendence and also sustained by God. This is where Berkovits describes God’s self-denial as a precondition of the encounter between man and God, and he takes it to be a reading of Isaiah 45:15. In a helpful note, however, this reading leads Berkovits to distinguish between “God’s hiding Himself” and “God’s hiding His face.” In the encounter or in revelation, God does “face” man; “it is the divine essence which is veiled or hidden, so that man may ‘face’ God.” That is, in revelation, God’s essence is hidden, which is required for human freedom, but not His face. On the other hand, there can be a moment when God withdraws his concern altogether and hence when revelation does not occur at all. This is “God’s hiding His face.” It is a “breakdown in the relationship.” But if this distinction applies, then there are two forms of divine self-limitation. God can withhold His essence but not his manifestation, or He can withhold His face or His manifestation as well as His essence. In the latter case, there is no revelation at all; in the former, there is revelation but only because man is free to receive it. In short, there is a sense in which the hiding God is a precondition of human freedom, but there is another sense in which it is not.16 In a footnote to the account of creation and divine self-limitation, which we cited earlier, Berkovits provides his sole reference to the Lurianic notion of 15 Ibid., 34–35. 16 Ibid., 34–35 and especially n.9, 165. As we shall see, this distinction and especially the role of divine withdrawal and human freedom in revelation will be helpful when we turn to Fackenheim and his account of the dialectic of divine power and human freedom and the divine-human encounter.

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tsimtsum.17 Clearly, he is reticent about identifying his notion of the hiding God or of divine self-limitation with the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. What are his reasons? Basically, Berkovits takes his conception and that of the Kabbalists to involve a categorical difference. Citing Gershom Scholem’s discussion in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (260ff.), Berkovits argues that whereas his own conception of divine self-limitation is a “logical requirement for God’s involvement in a finite reality,” the Kabbalistic notion is “almost a ‘spatial’ concept” according to which “Tsimtsum applies to the withdrawal of divine substance into God, in order to make ‘room’ for creation,” i.e., “in preparation for creation.”18 That is, as he goes on to point out, the issue concerns the very concept of creation. For him, divine withdrawal is constitutive of creation – of its very essence, as he puts it. For the Kabbalists – especially Luria – tsimtsum is preparatory; creation follows. Berkovits takes this distinction to turn on the very logic of the notion of creation, as he puts it: “the act of creation demands self-limitation and self-abnegation; otherwise creation would not be finite. But if it were not finite, it could not be apart from God; in other words, it could not be creation.” That is, for Berkovits, creation and then humanity, freedom, and so forth – all must be finite and hence separate from God, which is Absolute and infinite. Creation is about dependency, and it requires a dualism of the finite and the infinite, the worldly and the transcendent. Berkovits never says that one could not reinterpret tsimtsum to fit such a dualism, but he does suggest that if Scholem is to be believed, that dualism is not found in Luria and the Kabbalah. What is found there is the need for room or a spatial location in which creation, itself a matter of divine presence, can take place. To use Platonic categories, for the Kabbalists, if the divine is pure form, then creation requires a material substrate, originally separate from form, on which form imposes itself or on which form is imposed by an independent divine agency. For Berkovits, the representative or delegate of the divine in the world and in history is free human agency; for the Kabbalists, as he reads them, one might surmise, the world is already divinely formed or organized. For Berkovits, redemption or sanctification, which he takes to be the rabbinic ideal, is the human task of transforming what is already formed but not completed or perfected. On his reading, redemption for the Kabbalist is freeing the divine form to reunite with the Godhead and hence to leave behind the material substrate. That is, Berkovits has a greater appreciation of the value of redeeming the world than the Kabbalists, whose ideal is redemption from and not of the world. And, if this 17 Ibid., 173–174, n.14. 18 See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941 and 1954), 260–264. For a later treatment by Scholem, see Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1974), 129–135 and passim, reprinted from the Encyclopedia Judaica.

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is right, he associates this difference with the difference between his own conception of divine self-limitation and the Kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum. At the end of the footnote we have just been discussing, Berkovits points to a view similar to his own – regarding rabbinic Judaism – to be found in the Gifford Lectures of the Cambridge philosopher, James Ward (1843–1925), a work published in 1920 and entitled The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism.19 Ward, who taught G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, is now a largely forgotten figure.20 Influenced by Lotze and then later by the tradition of British Idealism, Ward combined an Absolute Idealism with a critique of materialism and naturalism and a defense of a Leibnizian pluralism. He was very well-known in his own day; his books were widely reviewed by philosophers such as A.E. Taylor and C.D. Broad. The monadology, which he came to defend in later years, is of course indebted to Leibniz and forms the basis of his type of panpsychism.21 It has been argued that his greatest influence was on A.N. Whitehead, whose Process and Reality develops a view very much like Ward’s. In the work that Berkovits cites, where Ward defends his version of a Leibnizian pluralism of monads, he argues for a divine agency in order to guarantee the overall movement of the natural order to greater and greater perfection. For Ward, God is utterly transcendent, distinct from the monads that make up the cosmic order, and yet as the guarantor of the teleology of the world order, God must be somehow immanent as well. Creation is the concept that attempts to articulate this relationship of dependency and orientation, analogous to the relation of a work of art to a Cosmic Artist. Moreover, the internal teleology within the world of monads is the outcome of free creativity, and for this to occur, room must be made for such freedom, even under the auspices of divine direction. Hence, the central challenge of Ward’s system is to explain how a transcendent God is related to free human agency.

19 Ward delivered the Gifford Lectures in the University of St. Andrews in 1907–1910; they were the second of two sets of Gifford Lectures which Ward delivered. They were published by Cambridge University Press in 1920. The text Berkovits cites is from Lecture XI, “The Idea of Creation.” It is not surprising that Berkovits would have read Ward. After studying at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin and then taking a degree in philosophy at the University of Berlin, Berkovits served as a rabbi in Leeds and Sydney. His first book was Hume and Deism, published in Berlin in 1933, and his work shows the obvious influence of Kant and German philosophy. But the Platonism of British Idealism and those associated with it would have appealed to him as well. His familiarity with English philosophy was long-standing. 20 Ward was also the tutor of J.M.E. McTaggart, whom he may have influenced. See W.J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 372 n. 106. 21 For an informative overview of James Ward, see the article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Pierfrancesco Basile.

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This is familiar territory for us, in view of Berkovits’s own formulation of a rabbinic philosophy of history and his account of creation, especially the creation of human freedom. We have reviewed Berkovits’s conception of divine selflimitation and its relation to creation and to human freedom. Moreover, we have seen that Berkovits has reasons to doubt that his notion is the same as what in Lurianic Kabbalah is called tsimtsum. Ward forumulates his position this way: No theist again assumes that creation involves external limitation. But the point is that if creation is to have any meaning it implies internal limitation. It is from the reality of the world that we start: if this is denied, the divine transcendence becomes meaningless, nay, God, as the ideal of the pure reason, sinks to a mere illusion within an illusion. On the other hand, if the reality of the world be admitted, then this reality stands over against the reality of God. God indeed has not been limited from without but he has limited himself. But now new difficulties emerge. Self-limitation seems to imply a prior state in which it was absent, whereas a limitation held to be permanent – as we hold creation to be – suggests some ultimate dualism rather than an ultimate unity. Such an objection is in keeping with our ordinary experience confined as that is to temporal processes, but it is not applicable to the notion of an absolute ground …. We do not say that God comes into being with the world, but only that as ground of the world he limits himself: duality in unity is implied here as in all experience, but not dualism.

Thus far, Ward’s account, albeit more abstract and framed around pure metaphysical questions about internal and external limitation, unity and duality, seems similar to Berkovits’s textually based treatment. That is, Ward argues against dualism and in favor of a monism, in which there is nonetheless duality, the duality of the finite and the infinite, of grounded and ground, of a worldly cosmos and its absolute ground or foundation. For all his indebtedness to the Bible and rabbinic texts, Berkovits too seems to treat creation not as an action as much as a permanent condition of dependency, of a finite reality on the infinite ground which accounts for it. One might argue that at the root of both Berkovits and Ward is a kind of Platonism, one that for Berkovits at any rate one finds too in Hermann Cohen. At this point, however, Ward probes a step further. He asks how self-limitation can be involved in creation, if creation is pure activity and “original intuition, if God is all life and all light.”22 That is, pure activity is positive, while self-limitation is negation. Moreover, Ward asks, “how can God be omnipotent, as theism normally assumes, and yet be limited?”23 First, Ward replies, a God that was unable to limit itself would hardly be omnipotent, and yet, as he hints, it is still objec22 James Ward, The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 243–244. 23 Ibid., 244.

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tionable to think that an omnipotent God would have limitations such as the need for rest from His creative labors. This leads Ward to consider the concept of limitation more precisely. Following Spinoza, on Ward’s reading, “all determination is negation, that is limitation.” Ward then points out that “if God were what Hegel described Nature as being, ein bacchantischer Gott, der sich selbst nicht zügelt und fasst, then indeed we might regard him as an Absolute notwithstanding possible creational vagaries, but he would be the absolutely Indeterminate.”24 In short, the theistic God that Ward endorses “owns and respects” his cosmic world, “through which we may believe that one increasing purpose runs.” God, as Ward puts it, may be determined in His deeds but not in His dreams; the world as a cosmos is not a product of divine action; Ward starts with the world and asks how it is the way it is. Its purposiveness and order are a function of its being grounded in the Absolute, which is not limited by it, even by its multiplicity. Ward’s account is not at all clear, but let me suggest a way of reading it. Ward refers to Spinoza as a way of introducing the idea that God can be both limited and yet absolutely Indeterminate. This is similar, as Ward implies, to Hegel’s distinction between Spirit and Nature. Spinoza’s God or substance has infinite attributes, insofar as it cannot be lacking any attributes, but, at the same time, it is, when considered as a totality, an infinite number of finite modes. Hence, while there are no external limitations on Spinoza’s God in and of itself, there are infinite internal determinations, both of attributes and of modes, although in neither case do these internal determinations or limitations compromise God’s absoluteness and unity. The very same substance – God or Nature – is both infinitely determinate and in itself indeterminate. Of course, Ward’s God is unlike Spinoza’s substance in that it is transcendent, but, as he claims, it is both transcendent and immanent, and in its immanence it limits itself to accommodate finite, created entities and their purposive order. It is in this spirit that Ward quotes from Hegel’s account of the notion of Nature and his claim that Nature is the externalization of Spirit as a cosmos of finite objects. Moreover, as Hegel puts it, the idea of creation is the religious representation of this relation between Spirit and Nature. Whether Berkovits is indebted to Ward or whether his interpretation of Biblical and rabbinic texts is a legacy of his studies in the Seminary in Berlin with Yehiel Weinberg I cannot say. But it is intriguing to associate his account 24 Ward’s citation is from Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, The Notion of Nature, section 247, Zusatz, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 14: “Nature is Spirit estranged from itself; in Nature, Spirit lets itself go (ausgelassen), a Bacchic god unrestrained and unmindful of itself; in Nature, the unity of the Notion is concealed”. Emil Fackenheim discusses Nature as externalized Spirit in The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 102–103.

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of creation, of human freedom, and the hiding God with his reading of Ward’s Leibnizian variation on idealism and Ward’s sense of kinship with Spinoza and Hegel. What he finds in Ward explicitly is the idea of divine self-limitation, which might very well be Ward’s way of understanding what the externalization of Spirit in Nature of Hegel required when found within a religious doctrine of creation. What is still left unclear or indeterminate in Ward and in Berkovits is what divine self-limitation or self-denial or hiding involves, although the picturesque, almost graphic vocabulary of the Lurianic Kabbalah does seem somewhat distant from their more metaphysical and conceptual understanding of such withdrawal.

Fackenheim With Emil Fackenheim, we turn from the primacy of the notion of creation, which has little explicit interest to him, to the primacy of revelation, and in this respect Fackenheim’s account can be understood as a more Hegelian and dialectically nuanced account than we found in Berkovits’s God, Man and History. Like Berkovits, Fackenheim does not use the expression tsimtsum, but there are reasons to consider his understanding of revelation and in particular of the divine-human encounter and the notion of commandment (mitzvah) as invoking a notion of divine withdrawal or self-renunciation. In the first chapter of God’s Presence in History, Fackenheim gives an account of what he calls the “structure of Jewish experience.” Early in the chapter, he notices, among several difficulties with such experience, the problem, “How can divine Providence rule over history and yet allow human freedom within it?” This may not be the only problem with the “ancient Jewish faith in God’s presence in history,” but it is an enduring one. It is most pressing when the experience one confronts is that of a divine commanding Presence, and the faith is expressed in the reception, articulation, and obedience to the divine command, where the command must forever be divine and overwhelming while the reception and what follows must be human and the outcome of free interpretation and decision. The problem is unavoidable for any serious understanding of the divine-human encounter, and it is especially unavoidable if, in their conjunction, the divine is to remain divine and the human human. Fackenheim approaches this problem in two steps. First, he cites a midrash in which the “structure” of this Jewish experience, this divine-human encounter, is revealed. Second, he describes in philosophical terms the dialectical encounter itself. Both steps are instructive. The first shows that Fackenheim is attuned to a midrash that at times has been read as an expression of the rabbinic conception

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of revelation. The second exhibits how a Hegelian-style dialectical account of a relationship between God and the human identifies what occurs in the course of a process of divine withdrawal and return. Let me begin with the midrash, which Fackenheim cites from Midrash Rabbah, Song of Songs, V 16 section 3.25 The midrash is well-known; its theme is divine commandment and human reception, the weight of the former and the possibility of the latter. We might recall that Berkovits – and he is not alone in this – takes tsimtsum to be a presupposition of revelation or the divine-human relation. Fackenheim is developing this point, but whereas Berkovits had taken the idea from the notion of the hiding God of Isaiah 45:15, Fackenheim turns to this midrash on Deuteronomy 5:22 and Song of Songs for his proof-text. The midrash portrays a divine action that enables the children of Israel to receive the ten commandments without dying upon hearing their first word, the “I” that God speaks at their outset. Indeed, in the midrash, the word “I” [anochi] itself witnesses their souls leaving them and petitions God as a giver of life and not death. God’s response is to “sweeten” the word or “soften” it so that its weight can be born without overwhelming those who hear it. The point of the midrash, at least as Fackenheim reads it, is that God Himself must make possible the human freedom that can receive what is initially unlimited divine power, even when it is delivered by language or commandment, which after all is intended to be understood and obeyed. But what does “sweeten” or “soften” mean here? On one reading, it is to add something to the word to make it palatable, but another reading would be that something is removed from it to make it capable of being received, and what is removed can only be the weight or force or power of God that is present in it initially and is weakened or limited or diminished by God Himself. To weaken the word, on this reading, would be to remove something from it, which means to withdraw something of the divine power which originally is too heavy or too overwhelming to bear. On such a reading, then, the act of God would be an act of self-limitation or self-withdrawal, i.e., of tsimtsum of a kind. But is this the way that Fackenheim himself understands the midrash? This is my second point; his reading deserves to be quoted in full; it is subtly dialectical and, I would claim, Hegelian in spirit. The guiding terms of Fackenheim’s reading point to the power or impact of the commanding Presence of God, on the one hand, and the subjective or psychological responses of those who hear the 25 Fackenheim quotes this Midrash as early as 1951 in “Can There Be Judaism Without Revelation?” in Quest for Past and Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), Ch. 4, 80, reprinted from Commentary (December 1951). He discusses it again later in What Is Judaism? (New York: Summit Books, 1987), 134–136.

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command, on the other. These responses are astonishment or joy and terror.26 Fackenheim puts it this way: … because the divine Presence is here a commanding Presence, the astonishment has a different structure [from a saving Presence]. A commandment effected by a distant divine Cause would be divine only by virtue of its external sanction and inspire no abiding astonishment. If the astonishment abides, it is because divinity is present in the commandment. Because it is a commanding rather than a saving Presence, however, the abiding astonishment turns into deadly terror. Indeed, such a Presence is, in the first instance, nothing short of paradoxical. For, being commanding, it addresses human freedom. And being sole Power, it destroys that freedom because it is only human. Yet the freedom destroyed is also required. Hence the divine commanding Presence can be divine, commanding, and present only if it is doubly present; and the human astonishment must be a double astonishment. As sole Power, the divine commanding Presence destroys human freedom; as gracious Power, it restores that freedom, and indeed exalts it, for human freedom is made part of a covenant with Divinity itself. And the human astonishment, which is terror at a Presence at once divine and commanding, turns into a second astonishment, which is joy, at a Grace which restores and exalts human freedom by its commanding Presence.

In this elegant and nuanced account, Fackenheim recapitulates a motif that, in earlier essays from the early 1950s onward, he had appropriated from Rosenzweig, the idea that there is love in the divine command itself, and that the love expresses itself not only by singling out the recipient as worthy of command but also by first threatening and then restoring the freedom without which the human recipient cannot take on and act upon that commandment. Indeed, Fackenheim all along believes that “this belief in divine love manifest in the divine commandment is present in Judaism from its pristine beginnings and throughout its history,” as he puts it in “The Revealed Morality of Judaism and Modern Thought: A Confrontation with Kant,” republished in Quest for Past and Future.27 In fact Fackenheim in God’s Presence in History cites just this essay, originally published in 1965, but one can find a similar commitment expressed by him even fifteen years earlier. In short, as Fackenheim reads the midrash, the commanding Presence of an infinite God can only be received by a finite agent if God’s presence itself incorporates a dimension of divine withdrawal, but the withdrawal is only

26 Fackenheim draws the vocabulary of “sole Power” and “abiding astonishment” from a passage from Martin Buber’s Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (New York: Torchbooks, 1958), 75–77, which he uses to explore the phenomenology of the divine-human encounter; see God’s Presence in History, (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 12–14. 27 Emil L. Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 226 and 218–227.

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real and received in joy if it is preceded by the presence of a power that is received in terror. In the midrash cited above, the terror is expressed in the death of the children of Israel when they hear the “I” of God and the joy is expressed when the “sweetened” or “softened” word is heard and obeyed. Both the divine presence and the divine withdrawal are essential to the moment of revelation. During the 1960s, as this dialectical account of the divine-human relation was taking shape in Fackenheim’s Jewish essays, he was also completing his study of the religious dimension in Hegel’s thought.28 In 1973, he included an extraordinary examination of Hegel’s treatment of Judaism, its virtues and its limitations, in his book Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy; Chapter 3 is entitled “Moses and the Hegelians: Jewish Existence in the Modern World.” Here, as Fackenheim imagines a Jewish response to the limitations or deficiencies of Hegel’s treatment of Judaism in his mature writings, he provides evidence of the Hegelian provenance of his own account of revelation and the divine commanding Presence in Judaism. In the course of his “confrontation between the Hegelian philosophical comprehension of Judaism and the Jewish religious selfunderstanding” Fackenheim addresses the encounter between the living God and the Jewish people. As Fackenheim had pointed out in his Kant essay about the role of the law in Judaism, “Hegel himself (unlike Kant and similar critics of ‘Jewish legalism’) understands the law of Moses, its positivity notwithstanding, not as a bar between divine Giver and human recipient, but rather as a bridge.” Fackenheim notes, moreover, that Hegel realizes what is necessary for such a role for the law, the fact that the divine King can be infinite only if the finite recipients “renounced themselves radically in His presence.” But this leaves us with two “incommensurables” incapable of relationship unless, that is, “there were also, and at the same time, ‘renunciation of the renunciation’.” And as Fackenheim goes on to suggest, Rabbinic Judaism already sees how this double renunciation is so. “Hegel’s Jewish God is Lord only, worshipped in nothing but fear. The rabbinic God is Father as well as King, worshipped in love as well as fear.” As Fackenheim puts it, “in the rabbinic self-understanding, human freedom as well as divine Grace is involved in the Sinaitic event.”29 Hence, “the Biblical Jew accepts the divine law as freely as does his rabbinic descendant who is its interpreter; and acceptance is in either case in both fear and love.”30 And with this conjunction of both fear and love in the human or finite reception of the divine command or 28 Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967). 29 Emil L. Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (London: Basic Books, 1973), 96–97. 30 Fackenheim, Encounters, 99. See 89–101 passim.

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God’s infinite power, we find all the terms that in the text we cited from God’s Presence in History Fackenheim used to describe the dialectic of revelation. Is this dimension of revelation and command tsimtsum? Fackenheim never says so, nor, to my knowledge, does he ever use the concept.31 But this motif – of a divine presence that is also an act of divine withdrawal, where the love that is in the commandment is also manifest as a love that makes room for human freedom – is present throughout Fackenheim’s writings from the early 1950s through the early 1970s. Indeed, only in the “Introduction” to To Mend the World, in 1982, do we find Fackenheim acknowledging the inadequacy of such an account to explain the capacity to endure and to respond in a post-Holocaust world. “The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz that bids endurance also gives the power of it,” he claims, is a “radically inadequate answer,” whether one interprets it in a Kantian or a neo-Orthodox fashion. The latter is an allusion to the Rosenzweigian belief that “a Grace that gives commandments also gives the freedom to obey them.” It is also an allusion to the view I have been discussing thus far.32 In other words, if Fackenheim had for decades adhered to an account of revelation and commandment that has some kinship with the vocabulary of tsimtsum or divine self-limitation, it is an account and an affinity that do not survive the mid-1970s in his thought.

Levinas Berkovits was reluctant to associate God’s hiding of Himself with Kabbalistic, Lurianic tsimtsum, and Fackenheim never so much as acknowledges the expression even if his Hegelian, dialectical account seems akin to it. Levinas, on the other hand, does use the expression “contraction” and with every indication that he means to associate his conception of the face-to-face or the second-person encounter with the Lurianic idea.33 Levinas is aware that tsimtsum in Lurianic kabbalah concerns creation, but the term appeals to him for wider reasons. He introduces it when he discusses the relation between the infinite or transcendence 31 The passing reference to tsimtsum in To Mend the World (253) plays no special role for him. 32 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1982), 24. 33 See Jacob Meskin, “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,” Levinas Studies 2 (2007), 49–77. Meskin begins his paper by citing a comment by Levinas from a 1982 interview with Edith Wyschogrod, “There is even in Totality and Infinity, the evocation of tzimtzum … but I won’t venture into that.” The comment is from “Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” Philosophy and Theology 4,2 (Winter 1989), 105–118, with the citation at 107. The interview was conducted by Edith Wyschogrod in 1982. Meskin argues that the expression is a “working part of the engine” and not a mere “ornament” (54). We shall have to see if he is right.

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and the self or what he calls “separated being.” The crucial passage in his work comes from Totality and Infinity, so I will focus on it.34 Before we look at the crucial passage, it is worth noting that terminology aside, the most significant difference between our earlier discussions of Berkovits and Fackenheim and the current one of Levinas is the fact that Levinas’s primary interest is in what he calls “society” or the face-to-face encounter between the self and another self. Levinas’s interest lies in understanding something important about the second-person relation, about intersubjectivity or interpersonal relations. To be sure, Levinas’s account of the second-person and the notion of revelation in someone like Fackenheim are not unrelated, as we shall see. But they are not exactly the same. Divine self-limitation or withdrawal in the divine-human encounter and in human interpersonal relations are not exactly the same, but they are associated, as we shall see.35 But if, for Levinas, the formal relation between the self and transcendence in the end can be identified with an aspect of interpersonal relationships, what he calls the face-to-face or “society,” it does not begin that way, so to speak. This itinerary is the subject matter of subsection D of Section I of Totality and Infinity, entitled “Separation and Absoluteness.”36 In a sense, the subsection is a summary of the main points of Section I. Here Levinas uses the distinction between same and other to set out the relation between the self and the transcendent, using the terminology of need and desire, of the infinite and the idea of the infinite, of discourse and truth, and of freedom and its investiture, in order to prepare for Sections II and III, in which Levinas will go on to elaborate the character of the self’s 34 There are a number of issues that commentators have raised about the role of Levinas’s Jewish sources in his thought, but I will ignore these. I think that Levinas’s philosophical work is not unrelated to his reading of Jewish sources, but it is certainly not derived from those texts or the ideas represented in them. Roughly speaking, Levinas takes religious terminology and concepts to represent philosophical ideas but in an imaginative and literary way. My concern is how the features of tsimtsum as withdrawal or contraction or self-limitation are employed in Levinas and for what reasons and what purposes. I have prepared us by looking at Berkovits and Fackenheim; there are other twentieth century Jewish philosophers and theologians for whom a similar motif plays a role – Jonas, Buber, and Soloveitchik, in particular. As we have seen, sometimes the issue concerns the very possibility of creation and the independence of a natural order; sometimes it concerns the relation between divine power or omnipotence and human freedom; sometimes it concerns evil and innocent suffering. What is it for Levinas? A fuller treatment of tsimtsum in Levinas would have to discuss, in addition to this passage from Totality and Infinity, the last paragraph of the paper “In the Image of God” on the Nefesh Ha-haim of Chaim of Volozhin, first published in 1978 and reprinted, in an English translation, in Beyond the Verse. 35 Meskin claims that “rather than taking tzimtzum as bearing only or mostly on God’s life, Levinas will take tzimtzum as bearing as much on human life as it does on God’s (if not more)” (59). 36 Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 102–105.

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natural existence and then its social-ethical experience. The explicit central point of subsection D is to underscore the sense in which the separation of the self from the transcendent and their relation can be understood as a philosophical articulation of the religious idea of creation and what such an articulation means. Levinas’s central claim is the metaphysical one that there is an absolute separation or difference between being or substance and what is other than it. In the Western philosophical tradition, this separation occurs in a minority tradition from Plato and Plotinus to Descartes; in the Western religious traditions, it occurs as the relation between the natural cosmos and the divinity or transcendence on which that cosmos is grounded and to which humankind is related. But while Levinas does discuss in various places these two venues in which the separation in question arises, his real purpose in Totality and Infinity is to characterize it, to formulate the paradox that arises from it, and then to point ahead to the way in which this absolute or unconditional separation and this paradox of separation occur in human experience jointly as the ground of interpersonal, social relations. The terminology of “contraction” or tsimtsum provides Levinas with a Jewish way of clarifying how the absoluteness of the separation prepares for the relation that seems so paradoxical. The key point is that the relation of self to transcendence is similar in structure to the relation between God and the cosmos in creation, and tsimtsum is the expression for a central dimension of creation. One of Levinas’s goals in Sections I-III of Totality and Infinity is to show how interpersonal relations can only be understood on the basis of a metaphysical structure. In everyday experience, the self’s or subject’s relations to other beings and other persons can all be understood in terms of the relations of sameness and difference but only when the two relations are conceived relatively. That is, all objects and other persons are the same as the self in some respects and different from the self in some respects. All such relations are marked by degrees of similarity to and difference from the self and by various ways or modes of similarity and difference. But, as Levinas wants us to appreciate, while most Western philosophy and metaphysics claim that all relations of sameness and difference are relative in these ways, there is a minority tradition that is committed to both relative difference and absolute difference. He also believes, although this is less important for his purposes, that there are those who are committed to absolute sameness to the subject or spirit as well as relative sameness and difference. In short, there are three kinds of philosophical systems: those that take all sameness and difference to be relative; those that take there to be absolute sameness as well – absolute monisms or idealisms; and those that take there to be absolute difference as well. None of these positions is incoherent or impossible; all are possible. Levinas’s own purpose is to clarify the final or minority tradition and then to explore it as a social-ethical metaphysical way of understanding human existence. Levinas’s

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puts this by saying that “the idea of Infinity requires this separation. It was posited as the ultimate structure of being …. Society accomplishes it concretely.”37 As I indicated, one of Levinas’s predecessors in this minority tradition is Plato, who, he claims, took “the Good [to be] separate from the totality of essences” and in this way “caught sight of a structure such that the totality could admit of a beyond,” i.e. of what is “beyond being.” This is the Platonic insight that “transcendence surpasses the totality.” It is what I have called the formal structure of self and transcendence that is indicative of the minority tradition in Western philosophy. Moreover, as those familiar with Plato are aware – although Levinas does not mention this – the separation of Forms, the chorismos, which Levinas treats as distinctive of the Form of the Good – gives rise to the “paradox of participation,” as set out most vividly in the first part of the Parmenides. There Plato has Parmenides show the young Socrates that the Forms, once separated, seem to resist any coherent account of how they are related to worldly objects and properties. Some commentators read the results as a decisive refutation of the theory of Forms, while others treat the arguments of the early part of the Parmenides as flawed and hence as indicative of a deeper, more compelling understanding of how Forms and transcendence are related to the natural order. But such controversy notwithstanding, Levinas recovers and appropriates this insight for his own purposes, when he says that “the place of the Good above every essence is the most profound teaching, the definitive teaching, not of theology, but of philosophy. The paradox of an Infinity admitting a being outside of itself which it does not encompass, and accomplishing its very infinitude by virtue of this proximity of a separated being – in a word, the paradox of creation  – thenceforth loses something of its audacity.”38 The paradox to which Levinas calls attention has two prongs: the first concerns the very possibility of what exists outside the infinite, while the second concerns the actuality of a relation with that which is beyond all relation. In the passage we are looking at, the word “separation” for Levinas is not a relative term; it refers to the radical or unconditional difference between the self and transcendence, and the expression “separated being” here refers to the person or self as a natural and independent being.39 Hence, when Levinas says that “separation is the very constitution of thought and interiority,” what

37 Ibid., 102. 38 Ibid., 103. 39 This is a bit surprising. One might have expected that what is separated would be “the Infinite” or what is separate and different from all that is, from substance or being. But in fact, it is the self that Levinas refers to as “separated,” and for this reason, the world and the self in the world are the product of creation, as we shall see. Of course, Levinas is using “creation” and creatio ex nihilo as a figure or trope for the relation in question; he does not mean it literally.

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he means is that thought and subjective experience in general only occur within the self or subject insofar as that self is itself an individual being or, in Spinoza’s term, a mode of being, or what Aristotle would have called a “substance” or concrete particular person. It is against this background picture that Levinas refers explicitly to the notion of tsimtsum or contraction: Infinity is produced by withstanding the invasion of a totality, in a contraction that leaves a place for the separated being. Thus relationships that open up a way outside of being take form. And infinity that does not close in upon itself in a circle but withdraws from the ontological extension so as to leave a place for a separated being exists divinely. Over and beyond the totality[,] it inaugurates a society. The relations that are established between the separated being and Infinity redeem what diminution there was in the contraction creative of Infinity. Man redeems creation. Society with God is not an addition to God nor a disappearance of the interval that separates God from the creature. By contrast with totalization we have called it religion. Multiplicity and the limitation of the creative Infinite are compatible with the perfection of the Infinite; they articulate the meaning of this perfection.40

As we shall see shortly, from this beginning, Levinas turns to show how the relation of self to transcendence is figured or understood by means of creation and in this way can be understood as a precondition for human freedom. But before we move on to this account, we need to clarify the passage we have just cited. In the passage, Levinas describes a two-fold movement by the Infinite – first, its contraction and the appearance of the separated being, and second, the relationships with that separated being. The first is the withdrawal of the Infinity to make room for the world of reality or substance, including the self, and the second is then taken up with what Levinas calls in this passage “society with God” and “religion.” To my ear, “religion” has a wonderful ambiguity, for it refers both to the life of the divine-human encounter – as we’ve seen it discussed by Berkovits, for example, and Fackenheim – but it also refers to the state of being “bound” or “claimed” as the self is by the encounter with transcendence. And in that latter sense, the expression “religion” already points to the interpersonal or social relationship in which the self is subjected to the claim and plea of the other person. And of course it is in this sense of religion as ethics that the encounter with the transcendent is the legacy of Plato’s Form of the Good. Levinas’s full account of the face-to-face will have to wait until Section III of Totality and Infinity, but already in Section I, in a sense reiterated here in the passage we are looking at, he reminds us that this “order of Desire, the relationship between strangers who are not wanting to one another … is affirmed across the 40 Ibid., 104.

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idea of creation ex nihilo.”41 That is, the traditional notion of creation out of nothing carries within it this idea of absolute separation or difference and thereby a relation between the self and an other whose claim upon the self is unconditional and the result of which is ethics. Levinas describes it this way: … the idea of creation ex nihilo expresses a multiplicity not united into a totality; the creature is an existence which indeed does depend on an other, but not as a part that is separated from it. Creation ex nihilo breaks with system, posits a being outside of every system, that is, there where freedom is possible. Creation leaves to the creature a trace of dependence, but it is an unparalleled dependence: the dependent being draws from this exceptional dependence, from this relationship, its very independence, its exteriority to the system. What is essential to created existence is not the limited character of its being, and the concrete structure of the creature is not deducible from this finitude. What is essential to created existence is its separation with regard to the Infinite. Thought and freedom come to us from separation and from the consideration of the Other – this thesis is at the antipodes of Spinozism.42

In short, the traditional notion of creation expresses the radical difference between the self and the transcendent and their relation, the dependence of the self on the infinite, and, as we have seen, Levinas takes tsimtsum to be essential to such creation – and hence essential to thought, freedom, and responsibility.43 But, for Levinas, in what sense is “contraction” or tsimtsum essential? Not, of course, in any literal or metaphysical sense, i.e., as a divine process without which revelation and creation could not have taken place. Rather the Lurianic, Kabbalistic vocabulary is akin to the Biblical and rabbinic vocabulary; it is, from Levinas’s point of view, a religious expression of a philosophical truth. But this claim leaves us with a further question: does it apply to the self-transcendence relation in its concreteness, to the face-to-face as a social relation? Does tsimtsum apply to that dimension of our everyday interpersonal relations which grounds moral normativity? Or, to put it differently, is the face-to-face, as Levinas conceives of it, the ethically determinative dimension of all our interpersonal relations, dependent upon a prior process of self-withdrawal or self-limitation on the part of the other person? We might put this question somewhat differently. If we treat the second-person relation as a relation between the self and the transcendent, is it a relation between a dominant and a receptive participant? And is the relation possible only if the dominant participant initially withdraws and limits itself so that its presence to the receptive participant can be received? Is the reality of the finite party only possible and a relationship with between the two parties possible if the infinite party limits itself? 41 Ibid., 104. 42 Ibid., 104–105. 43 For Levinas’s elaboration of this structure into ethics, see Totality and Infinity, 194–201.

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In the passage we have looked at, the “contraction” is the self-withholding of transcendence to make room for “separated being” or the natural self. In one way, this direction of the withdrawal is what we would have expected. It is the legacy, in Levinas, of the tradition of divine creation and divine withdrawal. But in another way, this is not what we might have expected from Levinas. To be sure, the foundational dimension of our interpersonal, second-person relations involves the dominance of the other person; it is the other person who puts the self into question and who makes a claim against the self. But at the same time, in essence, the other is wholly and unconditionally dependent upon the self; in the second-person encounter, the self threatens to negate the other person completely, to dominate it and even nullify it. The dominance of the other person is the dominance of petition as well as the dominance of command, and because of that, there is a sense in which there can be a relationship between the two only if the self, as the agency of totality, to use his word, limits itself or does not “invade” or consume the other, the transcendent. This withholding, after all, is part of what Levinas comes to mean by “disinterestedness” and even “substitution.” In view of these two perspectives that one might take on the interpersonal relationship, then, we might propose that in Levinas tsimtsum has a two-dimensional or a bivalent character. It occurs from both directions, in different ways, and without both, the face-to-face structure of social existence is not possible. For Levinas, the possibility of the ethical is tied to this pair of “contractions.”44

Conclusion I conjecture that the Lurianic, Kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum came to the notice of these three figures as a result of their familiarity with Gershom Scholem’s classic work, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and other treatments by Scholem. None were devoted students of Kabbalistic works. Moreover, to the degree that each associates his thinking with that notion, they do so for their own systematic or philosophical reasons. This is hardly surprising, and it speaks both to their creativity and to the malleability of the notion itself, which is a hallmark of the relation between the finite and the infinite – in Judaism and in the traditions of Western philosophy and religious thought.

44 This suggestion is a result of an overall reading of Levinas that I have articulated and defended in Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Levinas’s Ethical Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).

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Bibliography Basile, Pierfrancesco. “James Ward,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on-line. Berkovits, Eliezer. Faith after the Holocaust, New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1973. _____. God, Man and History: A Jewish Interpretation, Middle Village NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 1959. Buber, Martin. Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant, New York: Torchbooks, 1958. Fackenheim, Emil L. Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, London: Basic Books, 1973. _____. God’s Presence in History, New York: New York University Press, 1970 (Harper Torchbooks, 1972). _____. Quest for Past and Future, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. _____. The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. _____. To Mend the World, New York: Schocken Books, 1982. _____. What Is Judaism?, Summit Books, 1987. Levinas, Emmanel. Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Mander, W.J. British Idealism: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Meskin, Jacob. “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.” Levinas Studies 2 (2007), 49–77. Miller, A.V., trans. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970 (2004). Morgan, Michael L. Discovering Levinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. _____. Levinas’s Ethical Politics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah, Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1974. _____. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, 1941 (1954). Ward, James. The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Wyschogrod, Edith. “Interview with Emmanuel Levinas.” Philosophy and Theology. 4,2 (Winter 1989), 105–118.

Michael Fagenblat

Transcendental Tsimtsum: Levinas’s mythology of meaning The source of Judgement, completely concealed according to the measure of the Infinite, is here simple mercy, and so it turns out that the purpose of this tsimtsum is for the sake of revealing and forming the vessels of ’Adam Qadmon. R. Hayim Vital1 Where there is a world there is, painfully, the lack of God.

Maurice Blanchot

The arche-myth of Totality and Infinity A passage in Emmanuel Levinas’s major philosophical work, Totality and Infinity, alludes to the Kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum. It reads as follows: Infinity is produced by renouncing the invasion of a totality, in a contraction that leaves a place for being separated. Thus take shape relationships that open a way outside of being. An infinity that does not close in upon itself in a circle but withdraws from the ontological extension so as to leave a place for being separated exists divinely. Above and beyond the totality it inaugurates a society. The relations that are established between being separated and Infinity redeem what diminution there was in the creative contraction of Infinity. Man redeems creation. Society with God is not an addition to God nor a disappearance of the interval that separates God from the creature. As opposed to totalization, we call it religion. The limitation of creative Infinity, and multiplicity, are compatible with the perfection of Infinity. They articulate the sense of this perfection.2

1 Hayyim Vital, Mavo She′arim (Jerusalem, 1987), 3. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 104. The French reads: “L’Infini se produit en renonçant à l’envahissement d’une totalité dans une contraction laissant une place à l’être séparé. Ainsi, se dessinent des relations qui se fraient une voie en dehors de l’être. Un infini qui ne se ferme pas circulairement sur lui-même, mais qui se retire de l’étendue ontologique pour laisser une place à un être séparé, existe divinement. Il inaugure au-dessus de la totalité une société. Les rapports qui s’établissent entre l’être séparé et l’Infini, rachètent ce qu’il y avait de diminution dans la contraction créatrice de l’Infini. L’homme rachète la création. La société avec Dieu n’est pas une addition à Dieu, ni un évanouissement de l’intervalle qui sépare Dieu de la créature. Par opposition à la totalisation, nous l’avons appelée religion. La limitation de l’Infini créateur, et la multiplicité – sont compatibles avec la perfection de l’Infini. Elles articulent le sens de cette perhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-016

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The passage is not self-evident and has often been misunderstood, even if its multiple allusions to tsimtsum are clear enough. The “creative contraction of Infinity,” the “contraction that leaves a place for being separated,” the “infinity that…withdraws from the ontological extension,” and the “limitation of the creative Infinite” all suggest that Levinas has ventured into Lurianic territory. The conjecture was confirmed in a late interview with Edith Wyschogrod in which Levinas acknowledged “an evocation of the tzimtzum” in Totality and Infinity, even if with Kabbalistic candor he refused to elaborate: “I won’t go into that,” was all he said.3 Hamevin yavin? Is it enough for someone already initiated into the Kabbalistic secrets to understand Levinas’s evocation of tsimtsum? I do not think so. Rather, indebted as it is both to its Jewish and German philosophical reception, Levinas’s deployment of tsimtsum yields an old-new concept of its own that expresses in nuce the specificity of his transcendental phenomenological project. Explicitly evoked at a pivotal location in Levinas’s master work, at the threshold between section I and section II, at the point where its most abstract, speculative and properly transcendental ideas are poised to find their concrete, phenomenological forms, the old-new concept of tsimtsum implicitly configures the essential argument of Totality and Infinity. The evocation of tsimtsum is thus not only a self-contained enigma worthy of interpretation in its own right; rather, it sounds forth the heartbeat of Levinas’s great work by concentrating in one figure the reiterative force, the pulse of the entire argument of Totality and Infinity. If this can be shown, and insofar as tsimtsum belongs to the order to myth, Levinas’s fection.” Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l‘extériorité (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 107. I have made several modifications to the English translation but will note only the major one. Lingis translates “l’être séparé” as “the separated being,” which is sometimes neater but can be misleading inasmuch as it refers the definite article to a nominative and can thereby imply that there is an entity bearing a determinate property of separatedness. Levinas’s locution is Heideggerian, however. Like Heidegger, Levinas is not describing an entity to which properties can be attributed but a way or mode of being that structures the space of meaning and the possibility of experience as such. In l’être séparé, ‘being’ is a verbal noun modified by the adverb ‘separated’ (cf. Levinas’s use of the word existant, a gerund form that connotes the verbal sense of being that one is). Being-separated, we might say, is an “existentiale,” the very way the activity of being separates so as to enable the experience of meaning in general. My translation therefore regularly removes the definite article in order avoid the misleading effect of nominalizing Levinas’s thought. All subsequent references to Totality and Infinity will be in the body of this chapter with pagination to the French edition appearing first. 3 Edith Wyschogrod, “Interview with Emmanuel Levinas: December 31, 1982,” Philosophy and Theology 4:2 (1989), 107. There are no other significant references to “contraction” in Totality and Infinity but on several occasions Levinas mentions “withdrawal” in a manner consistent with the interpretation here proposed; see Totality and Infinity, pp. 104, 109, 118, 153–155, 170, 276.

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old-new deployment of the concept serves as an arche-myth for what Levinas calls “ethics.” Tsimtsum thereby opens a way – one way among others – to read Totality and Infinity as a master work of western philosophical mythology. It does so by forging a link between Levinas’s three central claims concerning (1) the withdrawal of the Other, (2) the individuation of subjectivity, and (3) the opening of a space of meaning irreducible to the space of causes. Concentrating in one figure the three central substantive claims of his transcendental phenomenology, the concept of tsimtsum lends itself to a reading of Totality and Infinity as a philosophical mythology of meaning nurtured by a Kabbalism of the imagination, thus fulfilling the “oldest program” of German Idealism in the non-systematic form of transcendental phenomenology. The aim of this chapter is to provide a sonography, as it were, of the evocation of tsimtsum in Totality and Infinity: to map the reiterative pattern pulsing from this evocation with a view to charting the overarching argument of Totality and Infinity.4 After sketching a range of sources from which Levinas likely drew inspiration for his evocation of tsimtsum, I provide a way of interpreting Levinas’s construal of “ethics” in light of the idea of tsimtsum (section 2). I argue that “ethics” ought to be construed transcendentally, not empirically; that is, “ethics” accounts for the conditions of possibility for meaning or intelligibility. I then turn to consider the three principal aspects of the movement of the transcendental tsimtsum that is “ethics”. The first elucidates tsimtsum as the withdrawal of the Other (section 3). In the second aspect of the movement, tsimtsum consists of the creation of subjectivity, its individuation as a creature uniquely answerable to the countless claims of meaning that solicit it (section 4). The third movement, contraction, opens a space of meaning within being, that is, a normative space in which the experience of something as something becomes possible (section 5). Having outlined the substantive way in which Ethics produces the tsimtsum of Being through withdrawal, creation, and contraction I consider the “mythological overtones” of this transcendental phenomenology in order to advance an approach to Levinas’s thought as philosophical mythology (section 6). This approach emphasizes the continuity between Totality and Infinity and its German forebears from the Idealists to Heidegger, all of whom viewed the relationship between philosophy and mythology as productive rather than antithetical. It also allows us to place Levinas’s conception of tsimtsum within the great debate among its Jewish exponents, with Levinas clearly siding with those who understand tsimtsum kefshuto,

4 Significant themes and positions common to Lurianic and Levinasian tsimtsum, that I have not addressed in this study include those of evil, the trace, the relation between the infinity of possibility and the infinity of perfection, and a more detailed comparison to Schelling.

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literally, as voiding the world of God’s presence (section  7). On this basis it becomes possible to read some of Levinas’s most adventurous concepts as philosophical reiterations of his Kabbalistic forerunners. For example, Levinas and the Kabbalists both hold that tsimtsum produces the sacred geometry of circles and lines that introduce the primal orientation through which ordinary experience navigates its way through being (section 8). As for space, so too for time. For both Levinas and the Kabbalists, primordial temporality emerges from the tsimtsum of being (section 9). Transcendental ethics is not only philosophical mythology, it is also philosophical theurgy, for its tsimtsum forms and sustains the space-time horizon of being. This leads to an unlikely and perhaps wild conclusion (section 10): the “defense of subjectivity” that Levinas presents in Totality and Infinity can be rigorously understood as a philosophical defense of ‘Adam Qadmon, the primordial anthropos contracted from the divine plenum. The chapter thus attempts a maximalist reading of Levinas’s evocation of tsimtsum in Totality and Infinity in order to explore the possibility of a philosophically intriguing and even compelling reclamation of Kabbalistic mythology. Whether Levinas intended his evocation of tsimtsum in the maximalist sense pursued in this chapter is beside the point. Levinas was familiar with the concept from numerous sources. These include his studies with Shoushani, whose extensive familiarity with the Kabbalah included learning with Rav Kook in the 1920’s5; his familiarity with Nefesh ha-Hayim, where tsimtsum is discussed at length in the third chapter, and which he first wrote about in 19606; his longstanding and intimate knowledge of Rosenzweig’s work, where tsimtsum has an oblique but prominent place7; and the proximity and influence of German Idealists, notably Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, whose transcendental projects are closely related to the goals of Totality and Infinity and who, each in his own way, incorporated a conception of tsimtsum into the core of his thinking.8 Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, however, is perhaps the most conspicuous direct source through which 5 This is Jacob Meskin’s view; see Jacob Meskin, “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,” Levinas Studies 2 (2007), 56–57. 6 See Meskin, “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah,” 76–77. 7 See Benjamin Pollock’s contribution to this volume. 8 See Paul Franks, “Inner Anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism’s Relationship to Judaism,”, in Yearbook of German Idealism, VII, Faith and Reason, eds. F. Rush, J. Stolzenberg and P. Franks (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 269–275; idem, “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic realism: Jewish dimensions of Idealism and Idealist dimensions of Judaism,” in N. Boyle & L. Disley, eds., The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 219–245; idem, “Fichte’s Kabbalistic Realism: Summons as Ẓimẓum.” In Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide, edited by Gabriel Gottlieb, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 92–116;

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Levinas was familiar with the Kabbalistic concept. Levinas read the first, English version of Scholem’s groundbreaking book, published in 1946, and was particularly impressed by Scholem’s speculative historiography in which historical processes unfold the “spiritual meaning” of the secular events that set them forth.9 What Scholem sees in history, Levinas sees in philosophy: spiritual meaning, including connotations of the Kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum, is enfolded in secular concepts like “the Same” and “the Other”. Levinas is also likely to have also been familiar with the 1951 French translation of Scholem’s seminal book, in which Scholem’s English gloss on tsimtsum as “‘concentration’ or ‘contraction’” is peculiarly translated as “‘retreat’ or ‘solitude,’” – a bad translation, but one that fits Levinas’s philosophical intentions – and would certainly have read the interesting discussion of tsimtsum in Maurice Blanchot’s 1957 essays on Simone Weil.10

Transcendental Ethics: The Tsimtsum of Being The claim that tsimtsum is the heartbeat of “ethics” rests on interpreting Totality and Infinity as a work of transcendental phenomenology. Levinas’s project is to account for the conditions for possibility of the as-structure of meaning, the Jürgen Habermas, “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers (1961),” in PhilosophicalPolitical Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 21–43, and idem, “Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History,” in The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (London: Continuum, 2004), 43–89; Christoph Schulte, “Zimzum in the Works of Schelling,” Iyyun 41 (1992): 21–40; Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (Bew York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 99–105; idem., “Achronic Time, Messianic Expectation, and the Secret of the Leap in Habad,” in Habad Hasidism: History, Thought, Image, eds. Gadi Sagiv and Jonatan Meir (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2017), 57–72. 9 Levinas, “Being Jewish,” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007 [1947]), 206. 10 Blanchot’s essays were first published in 1957 in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française and then reissued in The Infinite Conversation, 106–122, cited here at 117. My thanks to Kevin Hart for the reference to Blanchot’s discussion of tsimtsum. Curiously, the key sentence in the English, according to which “Tsimtsum originally means ‘concentration’ or ‘contraction,’ but if used in the Kabbalistic parlance it is best translated by ‘withdrawal’ or ‘retreat’,” is rendered in the French translation as suggesting that « Tsimtsum il est mieux traduit par « retraite » ou « solitude ».”The peculiar selection of “solitude” to translate “withdrawal” or “retreat” may have supported Levinas’s deployment of tsimtum in Totality and Infinity to designate “a contraction that leaves a place for being separated”; see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1954 [1941]), 204; Scholem, Les Grands Courants de la mystique juive (Paris: Payot, 1950), 380 (emphasis added). Blanchot‘s discussion singles out these lines in Scholem, Les grands courants, 381.

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conditions in virtue of which something can appear as such-and-such.11 The Same and the Other are not entities but ways of being that make it possible to access entities as this or that. Capitalizing the words Same and Other, or Being, is only meant to recall that these are transcendental and not ontic terms; they refer to ways of being, not beings; Socratizing, not Socrates, for example. It is in virtue of the two meta-ways of being – Being-Same and Being-Other – that a space of meaning is opened and sustained, for these meta-ways of being produce the sense of separation that is necessary for the experience of something as something, the separation between subjectivity and the items it encounters in consciousness or comportment. “Ethics” is transcendental tsimtsum because it articulates how being opens to meaning. In this respect it can be compared to Kabbalistic accounts of the contraction of that which “filled all of existence [metzi’ut]” prior to the individuation of entities.12 Tsimtsum consists in the contraction of Being, not of a being, just as “ethics” is not a relation between two antecedently determined entities but the way a space of experience is “produced” within being such that it is possible to encounter something as something.13 As I read it, then, “the Other” is not as an already separated, already determinate entity – another person, man, woman, widow, orphan, stranger, or whoever – but 11 This way of explicating the argument of Totality and Infinity is greatly indebted to Steven Crowell’s elucidation of transcendental phenomenology in Steven G. Crowell, Normativity and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Crowell does not discuss Levinas in this volume but does so in another illuminating essay, though in terms that emphasize the Husserlian background of Levinas’s thought rather than the Heideggerian background which I find more decisive; see Steven G. Crowell, “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context,” European Journal of Philosophy 23:3, 564–88. 12 Hayyim Vital, Etz Hayyim (Warsaw: Y.Z. Unterhendler, 1891), 1:1. 13 Another reason for preferring a transcendental construal of Levinas’s argument is that it forestalls a common objection, namely, that Levinas locates the conditions for the possibility of meaning in a determined entity, “the other,” who has been determined in a moralizing, dogmatic fashion (as widow, orphan, stranger, and so forth). The objection suggests that Totality and Infinity presumes what it claims to explain, as if it were explaining the possibility of meaning in general by presuming a determinate, intelligible being, the other. The other would then be overburdened with the omnipotent task of making meaning possible, a paradox akin to the question of whether God can make a rock that He cannot carry. An ontic or empirical construal of Totality and Infinity inevitably runs aground at this point, for any determination of the other whatsoever – as a person, man, woman, widow, orphan, stranger, or whatever – is already located within the space of meaning in general. This is perhaps the main reason to prefer a transcendental construal of Totality and Infinity. For a discussion on whether Totality and Infinity is best read transcendentally or “empirically,” see Theodore de Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence: Studies in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Amsterdam: J.C. Geiben, 1997), 182–183; Roberto Bernasconi, “Rereading Totality and Infinity,” in The Question of the Other, eds. A. B. Dallery and C. E. Scott (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 23–34.

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a way of being: being by way of radical withdrawal, thus “Other.” Alterity is not a property of other people, nor is the Same to be identified with the self; they are two ways or modes of being which give rise to the possibility of being oneself and being identified as another person. “Infinity is produced,” our passage says, through the withdrawal of the Other from the Same, that is, when being separates by facing itself, thus as Other. This “production” is an enactment or perlocution of infinity, an “infinition” of sense that happens when being separates by facing itself as Other. Levinas makes this clear when he defines his terms, even if at other times his descriptions veer toward entities. “The idea of infinity is the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity. Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself” (26/12). And later: “separation would itself be necessary for infinity to be – for its infinitude is accomplished as the ‘facing’” (229/209). Accordingly, like the Kabbalistic concept, the ethical tsimtsum of being is not based on the antecedent separation of two entities, self and other; it produces that sense of separation. It is not entities that withdraw, separate and contract; Being itself withdraws (as Other) while remaining the Same (as beingseparate) and thereby contracting a space of meaning (within Being). The chapter in which our passage appears, “Séparation et absolu,”14 allows us to view Totality and Infinity within the longue durée – still not over – of the pantheistic controversy, where modern philosophical appropriations of tsimtsum traditionally belong. The chapter opens with the following claim: The Same and the Other at once maintain themselves in relation and absolve themselves from this relation, remaining absolutely separated. The idea of Infinity requires this separation. It was posited as the ultimate structure of being, as the production of its very infinitude. Society accomplishes it concretely. (102/104, trans. slightly modified)

The Same and the Other are not opposed as two separate entities, just as totality is not opposed to infinity, nor to the absolute. The idea of an absolute entity separated from the totality is a contradiction in terms. The Other is not an entity, however, but a mode or manner of being in virtue of which the totality of being separates into entities which are thereby intelligible as such-and-such. The absolute, then, is the totality of being in the mode of separation; creation, as Levinas calls it. Levinas does not deny that there is a totality of being or what German Idealism calls the Absolute but proposes that the Absolute, all of being, includes relations which, by ab-solving themselves from intelligibility create the separation necessary for the very possibility of meaning. Like tsimtsum, it is a matter of accounting for how the Absolute ab-solves from the Absolute, how 14 Lingis understandably had trouble with this locution, rendering it the Table of Contents as “Separation and the absolute” and in the body of the book as “Separation and absoluteness.”

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Being withdraws from Being, namely, by facing itself, since facing consists not in manifesting but in withdrawing presence.15 Levinas’s hostility to monism and pantheism is not based on an ontic (or theistic) affirmation of a separate higher being but in his denial of the possibility and value of overcoming the separation constitutive of the space of meaning as such. The space of meaning is not founded on the separation of a being but on the separation of being, a separation within being. One could thereby even read Levinas as a panentheist, if we take the en in panentheism as referring to the divine way totality separates into forms of intelligibility more valuable that the senselessness of being-whole or being-absolute. In any case, Levinas prefers the term creation to designate being in the mode of separation, Being opened by the withdrawal of the Other which creates subjectivity; or, as our passage puts it, “leaves a place for being separated”. The description of tsimtsum as giving shape to “relationships that open a way outside of being” should therefore not be understood as the positing of entities outside being but as an account of how being separates, how the absolute ab-solves. The tsimtsum of “ethics,” then, transforms the totality of being into creation; a transformation of Being (the Same) by a withdrawal of Being (as Other). “Ethics” is tsimtsum. “The fundamental fact of the ontological scission into Same and Other is a non-allergic relation of the Same with the Other (342/305). Desire, what the Kabbalists call Raṣon, does not belong to a subject the way a will belongs to a person. On the contrary, a person, as personality, belongs to Desire, for it is Desire for the Other that creates (individuates) subjectivity and the space of meaning within the totality of being. Desire is not a property or possession of the self but the way Being is separated into position, orientation and relation, creating me as a point through which Desire for the Other passes. The confusion arises because Desire is only accessed from a position, through an upsurge of positionality – what Levinas calls “hypostasis” and “egoism” – whereby facing takes place. Only in a position of facing is Desire for the Infinite aroused concretely, for it is in facing that the withdrawal of Being is concretely enacted. Desire, however, does not traverse a distance between entities that are already separated, the way the will reaches toward its object; Desire creates the relation that makes the experience of distance possible. It does so by separating Being into the Same and the Other through the withdrawal of Being as Other, that is, through ethics. “To posit being as Desire and as goodness is not to first isolate an I which would then 15 Though we cannot pursue the matter here, one could follow this line of thought in the direction of the Lurianic notion of nesirah, the separation of adam kadmon, the absolute anthropos, into man and woman facing each other. An impressive example can be found in the Hasidic work by Gershon Chanoch Henech Leiner of Radzyn, Sod Yesharim.

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tend toward a beyond. It is to affirm that to apprehend oneself from within – to produce oneself as I – is to apprehend oneself with the same gesture that already turns toward the exterior… – to respond for what it apprehends” (341/305). This ethical tsimtsum, like its Kabbalistic forebear, is not a one-time event of creation but a continuous contraction of being into creation, a recurring way of sustaining the open space of meaning – “like ocean waves that wash upon the shore and then retreat from the source from which they came in the first place. In Lurianic thinking…it is not a one-time event, but an endless process of divine inhalation and exhalation, replicated at every level of existence.” 16 The elaborate way the Absolute ab-solves such that beings become intelligible as individuated entities is the subject matter of “ethics” and tsimstum. As we will now see, the parallel extends to the point of convergence, despite the remarkable secularization of tsimtsum that ethics accomplishes. We will therefore speak of the tsimtsum of “ethics”. It consists of three aspects of the one movement in which (1) the withdrawal of Being as Other (2) creates or individuates subjectivity as “being-separated” and thereby (3) contracts Being into a space of meaning, that is, a space within which it is possible to experience something as something. A transcendental construal of Totality and Infinity thus gives the evocation of tsimstum purchase across Levinas’s entire argument, as a type of reiterative paradigm of the continuous creation that “ethics” effects within Being. Having sketched this three-way movement as a transcendental whole we can now consider each aspect in turn.

The Withdrawal of the Other The Other is not an entity but a way of being by withdrawing from signification. If the Other were a determined entity, some stranger, window or orphan, ethics would amount to empathy, feeling-in to the “transcendent” interiority of the other, as if the face were a mask behind which lay a hidden homunculus, 16 Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 133, which recalls Derrida’s account of Levinas’s argument, proceeding “with the infinite insistence of waves on the beach,”; Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 398. That “ethics,” like tsimtsum, is an argument for continuous creation could be further supported by Levinas discussion of the theory of continuous creation in Descartes and Malebranche toward the end of Existence and Existents. There it is “the instant” that requires continuous recreation, which Totality and Infinity will finally provide in the form of the “maintenance” of time delivered by answerability to the Other.

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another per-son.17 Levinas denies this. Whatever warrant there is for empathy and whatever justification it may (or may not) provide for first-order moral norms, Levinas’s philosophical claim concerns not the interiority but the exteriority of the Other. The story behind the eyes that look at me is, in the final analysis, no more important than the colour of those eyes. The face expresses a value that no description or narration can exhaust – an inexhaustible value that is expressed by the infinite withdrawal of presence. The privileged sense of the face consists not in its designating a person, as if a person were the grounds of meaning, but in its way of signaling the withdrawal of Being as Other. Another person is always someone, more or less the same as me, more or less understood, felt, imagined. The face does not stand for the other person but for the way signification withdraws from Being without losing value: “a nudity disengaged from every form, but having meaning [sens] by itself…as an always positive value” (75/72; emphasis added).18 The nudity of the face consists in being intelligible “not by reference to a system,” as a “signification without context,” as a value expressed in the very withdrawal itself, there where nothing can be said. This is why the face consists not in its observable features, not the colour of the eyes, not the endearing contours of the smile, not even the distress of the story or the feeling it evokes, but only in the void expressed in the black pupils through which “the face speaks.” In this withdrawal of signification an infinition of sense is produced; a way of dis-appearing without reducing to nothingness or nonsense, dis-appearing into the pure sense of value. Our passage makes the point by denying that the totality of possible ways of being through which a face is understood exhaust the sense of value it expresses: “Infinity is produced by renouncing the invasion of a totality.” The face produces a withdrawal from Being. “It is neither seen nor touched” (194/211). It expresses value through its withdrawal from signification, in its “nudity,” by renouncing the totality of significations through which the other is understood while affirming the very value expressed in this withdrawal. What value remains in the withdrawal from being? The value of being-separated, which opens the very possibility of meaning 17 Emmanuel Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. N. Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 39: “Coming from elsewhere is not a symbolic reference to that elsewhere as to a term. The face presents itself in its nudity; it is neither a form concealing, but thereby indicating, a ground nor a phenomenon that hides, but thereby betrays, a thing itself. Otherwise, the face would be one with a mask, but a mask presupposes a face.” 18 Note that in this passage Levinas clearly distinguishes the “always positive value” of the Other from “the ambivalence of values” such as “good or evil, beauty or ugliness.” It is not the goodness of the other that invests her with value but her otherness, the capacity to withdraw from the horizon of expectation and understanding so as to create the sense of being-separated necessary for the very possibility of meaning.

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in being. The Other, then, is not the interiority of another person, with descriptions and properties beyond my reach; the Other is a way of Being as withdrawal, of separating by facing, without being seen or touched, producing an “infinity that does not close in upon itself in a circle but withdraws from the ontological extension.”

The Creation of Subjectivity Like other phenomenologists, Levinas thinks that access to claims of meaning requires an irreducibly first-person approach that cannot be eliminated by redescription into agent-neutral terms. Without subjectivity there is no possibility of meaning; information processing and responsiveness to stimuli are not sufficient conditions for something to count as intelligible; the intelligibility of a thing requires someone who can avow the thing as such-and-such in its context. Levinas’s contention is that the withdrawal of the Other individuates subjectivity as being answerable in the first-person singular to claims of meaning. At issue is not the instantiation of a transcendental subject, as if the first-person condition on meaning could be satisfied by a formal unity of apperception (Kant), a moment in the historical actualization of reason (Hegel), or self-presence of transcendental consciousness (Husserl). At issue, rather, is a concrete first-person condition on meaning with which my empirical self identifies and ought to identify. This is why Levinas’s most proximate rivals in construing transcendental subjectivity are not Kant, Hegel or Husserl but Kierkegaard and Heidegger. “This book,” he says in the Preface to Totality and Infinity, “does present itself as a defense of subjectivity, but it will apprehend the subjectivity not at the level of its purely egoist protestation against totality [as did Kierkegaard], nor in its anguish before death [as did Heidegger], but as founded in the idea of infinity” (TI 11/26). The tsimtsum of withdrawal creates subjectivity as concretely answerable to the claims of meaning. In our passage, Levinas describes the creation of subjectivity in terms “a contraction that leaves a place for being separated.” Subjectivity is being-separated; being oneself and identifying as oneself without depending for example on one’s possessions, one’s social roles, one’s memories, even one’s affects. Heidegger located subjectivity in the awareness of one’s own finitude, for in such moments all other ways of identifying as oneself break down and one is left with the sheer openness that one is to the concrete situation in which one finds oneself. Against this conception of finite subjectivity, Levinas argues that subjectivity is “founded” or “created” through the withdrawal of the Other. In the conclusion of the brief chapter in which our passage is found he writes: “What is essential to created existence is not the limited character of its being, and the con-

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crete structure of the creature is not deducible from this finitude. What is essential to created existence is its separation with regard to the Infinite” (108/105). Separation creates subjectivity by giving the sense of being-answerable – not answerable to this or that, not answerable for this or that, but as answerable in one’s very being, as one is. Separation attests to one’s sense of being-answerable in face of the withdrawal of the Other, in face of a sense of value – the Desirable – amid the disappearance of signification. The withdrawal of the Other calls subjectivity to be accountable to the desirable, a sense of value, no matter the context. The “nudity” of the face “appeals to my responsibility and consecrates my freedom as responsibility and gift of self” (208/228). The withdrawal of the Other gives me myself, creates me, as the “Desire for the Other” that I am in “being-separated.” It creates me as “Desire for the Infinite”  – not my empirical-psychological self but this way of being answerable to normativity as such. For this reason, just as being-answerable obtrudes according to the infinite withdrawal of signification, so Levinas argues that it is attested in the face of a Judgement that approaches a zero degree of content. A pure sense of being-judged, subjected to standards that constitute the very possibility of being-oneself, not the banal judgements of everyday life and psychological existence, is constitutive of subjectivity as being-answerable as such.19 “The person is thus confirmed in objective judgment and no longer reduced to his place within a totality. But this confirmation does not consist in flattering his subjective tendencies and consoling him for his death, but in existing for the Other… The truth of the will lies in its coming under judgment; but its coming under judgment lies in a new orientation of the inner life, called to infinite responsibilities” (246/276). Tsimtsum is an act of din, as the Kabbalists call it, pure Judgement, a withdrawal that creates subjectivity in its separation as being-answerable, judged as it is and precisely not in relation to what it has done or failed to do, thus also an act of rachamim or mercy, since from this pure possibility of Judgement the space of meaning as a whole is contracted, the space within which it is possible to experience something as something. By withdrawing from signification and being-answerable to the pure possibility of Judgement  – concretely, when facing the Other  – subjectivity is created. Tsimtsum designates the withdrawal that creates, the din that is rachamim, the pure Judgement that is divine Mercy, for it “leaves a space for being separated.”

19 Hence the positive contribution of shame to ontology. Whereas popular psychological approaches seek to protect the ego from the afflictions of shame produced by the judgements of other people or internalized social norms, a transcendental phenomenological approach to shame affords access to the sheer fact of being-answerable at the very grounds of intelligibility.

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The Contraction of the Space of Meaning within Being The tsimtsum of transcendental ethics contracts a space of meaning within being.20 The space of meaning is the normative domain within which it is possible to experience something as something. It is only in light of standards (flexible, changing, contextual, probabilistic) and the possibility of being wrong (or right, at least provisionally and for certain purposes) that one can be oriented toward something as such-and-such. Only in light of normative standards can a thing present itself as itself, as what it is, even if its as-structure of intelligibility remains provisional and probabilistic. Levinas adapts this basic feature of transcendental phenomenology by tracing “all this realism of meaning” back to the Other (95/96). The necessity of semantic and epistemic norms  – norms in light of which something can possibly mean or be anything  – undergoes a “phenomenological reduction” to the primal scene of being answerable to the Other. “The knowing whose essence is critique cannot be reduced to objective cognition; it leads to the Other” (85/84). Even the knowledge I have of my own mental content ultimately “reduces” or leads back to the Other, for all thought and talk, all propositions whereby one entertains the meaning of something as such-and-such and can therefore talk “about” it – revisit and reidentify it, translate it, confirm or disconfirm it, and so on – imply the pure, non-psychological judgement given by the Other (92/92). The “diminution” that happens when the Other withdraws to the zero point of signification thus becomes “creative”. “Man redeems creation,” our passage says, because the face is the sole way for being to withdraw concretely – not abstractly like a deus absonditus nor by disclosing being as nothingness or nonsense – but by the sense of a value without signification. The withdrawal of signification thus becomes a “creative contraction of Infinity,” for it creates subjectivity as beinganswerable to claims of meaning in general.

20 The space of meaning is a phrase borrowed from Steven Crowell which transposes into phenomenological terms the influential Kantian concept of “the space of reasons” developed first by Wilfrid Sellars in 1956. See Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind: Introduction by Richard Rorty, Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 76.

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“Mythological Overtones” Tsimtsum, as “ethics,” contracts a space of meaning within being. The Heideggerian background to Levinas’s thought, however, risks obscuring a decisive point. Whereas Being and Time tightly pairs Sein and Sinn, being and meaning, by approaching being in the intelligibility of being-in-the-world, for Levinas being is not ‘always already’ opened meaningfully but on the contrary requires opening. We are thrown not only into the world but into “existence without a world.” “To take up existence is not to enter into the world…Inscription in existence is not inscription in the world.”21 Levinas thus revises Heidegger’s account of thrownness. “One must understand Geworfenheit as the ‘fact-of-being-thrown-in’ ... existence,” he says, deliberately modifying Heidegger’s construal of Geworfenheit as “thrown possibility” into the world.22 This revision provides the crucial background to Levinas’s account of tsimtsum, for in his view we are immersed not only in being-in-the-world but in the darkness of existence without a world, the absurdity and meaninglessness of sheer being – “before the light comes,” as he says, “before creation.”23 Tsimtsum is aroused from the darkness of an existing that precedes the intelligibility of being-in-the-world.24 The account we have been following of “ethics” as the tsimtsum of being is thus based on a counter-Heideggerian ontology of “existence without a world,” “existence without existents,” or, in our terms, being without the as-structure of meaning. “There is no determined being, anything can count for anything else. In this ambiguity the menace of pure and simple presence, of the there is, takes form. Before this obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to 21 Emmanuel Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris : Fontaine, 1947), 173; Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 100. 22 Levinas, Le Temps et l’Autre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), 25; Levinas, Time and the Other and additional Essays, trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 45; emphasis added. 23 Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 99; Existence and Existents, 61. 24 Heidegger‘s analysis explicitly bars this speculative regress: “The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity. If we are to understand the problem of Being, our first philosophical step consists in not muthon tina diḗgeisthai [Plato, Sophist 242C], in not ‘telling a story’ – that is to say, in not defining entities as entities by tracing them back in their origin to some other entities, as if Being had the character of some possible entity. Hence Being, as that which is asked about, must be exhibited in a way of its own, essentially different from the way in which entities are discovered” (Being and Time, 6). Does Levinas‘s muthon trace beings back to some other being? The transcendental approach in this chapter attempts to provide a different way of understanding Levinas‘s mythology of meaning. For an insightful analysis of Heidegger’s text see Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 17–41.

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withdraw into one’s shell. … Instead of serving as our means of access to being, nocturnal space abandons us to being.”25 The word “invasion,” appearing here and in our passage, as it does elsewhere in Totality and Infinity, conjures the undifferentiated and thus unrepresentable plenitude of il y a existence (190/207). In our passage, the possibility of an invasion of being that overwhelms the space of meaning is “renounced” by the withdrawal of the Other that creates subjectivity. In his 1963 “Signature” Levinas gives a “linear” construal to this way of renouncing the invasion of indeterminate being: every existent, and even the cogito that thinks it, is invaded by the chaotic roaring of an anonymous existing which is an existence without existent and which no negation can overcome. It is impersonal – there is like “it is raining” or “it is night.” Light and meaning (sens) are born with the emergence and positing of existents in this horrible neutrality of‘ the there is. They are on the road that leads from existence to the existent and from the existent to others – a route that delineates time itself.26

Levinas’s argument is here relayed in a coded narrative form, as a road leading from il y a existence, sheer being, to a space of “light and meaning,” a clearing within being, in short, a world. A later passage in Totality and Infinity revisits this primal scene in which space reverts to unopenedness, to a “plentitude” that is not nothing but, since it is not an object, is not something. “The negation of every qualifiable thing allows the impersonal there is to arise again, returning intact behind every negation, whatever be the degree of negation. The silence of infinite spaces is terrifying. The invasion of this there is does not correspond to any representation” (190/206). Once again there is a presentiment of existence without a world described as an “invasion” which threatens to overwhelm the as-structure of meaning, erasing the very horizon that constitutes the worldhood of the world. Even if one cannot experience existence without a world directly, Levinas insists that it “does not exist by virtue of a play on words” (190/206).27 Life touches on the specter of elemental meaningless and is informed by it from moment to moment. In the preparatory studies he composed after the War, Levinas proposed that the il ya could be “stripped of mythological overtones [réminiscence]” in order to express “a moment of human destiny…the moment of a limit,” for which

25 Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 96; Existence and Existents, 59 (emphasis added). 26 Emmanuel Levinas, “Signature,” Research in Phenomenology 8:1 (1978), 31, which translates the original version, “Signature,” in Les Philosophes Francais d’aujourd’hui par eux-mêmes: Autobiographie de la philosophie française conternporaine (n.p., 1963), 325–28 and differs somewhat from the version Levinas published in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand (London: Athlone, 1990), 292. 27 Cf. Levinas, Time and the Other, 46.

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reason it is “singularly instructive.”28 This limit appears in the extremities of apocalypse and catastrophic destruction, but also more mundanely in our everyday acquaintance with the elements, “earth, sea, light, city” (131/138); “wind..., sky, air” (132/139). Elements are ways of existing that attach to no determinate object and are essentially “nobody’s,” unpossessable, impersonal, disindividuated, yet whose very indetermination presents qualities that cannot be denied, even as they come from nowhere. Elemental existence thus affords access to the pre-phenomenological, as it were; to the quality  – “horror,” Levinas says  – of existence disindividuated of existents, thus “at the frontier of a night,” – a night in which all cows are black – that can be enjoyed, since the elements are enjoyable, but “without security,” “faceless,” intimating “the itinerary by which each thing loses its identity.” “The element extends to the there is,” he says, and is thus characterized as a “mythical format,” the “mythical facelessness” of being without beings.29 Interpreting “ethics” as the tsimtsum of being thus opens a path from phenomenology to philosophical mythology. Both in content and scope, Levinas’s thought recalls Schelling’s, who likewise located the reality of evil in the irrational grounds of reason and so too developed an elaborate philosophical mythology in which tsimtsum is deployed as the contraction of Existence and its Ground from the Unground of “complete indifference and indistinguishability.”30 More generally, Totality and Infinity recalls the young German Idealists’ programmatic call for “a new mythology” that can sensuously express a new concept of “religion.” To be sure, Levinas adjusts this old program in German philosophical mythmaking. His is not “a mythology of reason” but a mythology of meaning; its symbols are designed not to make people rational while making philosophers sensuous but to awaken people, the rationally enlightened as much as the unenlightened, to the dawn of ethics at the first glimmer of meaning, prior to the light of reason. Moreover, if the German Idealists sought a philosophical mythmaking that gives form to a monistic monotheism of the Absolute, Levinas’s monotheism of meaning stands “at the antipodes of Sponizism,” as he says in the continuation of our passage (105/108).31 For Levinas, access to “the Absolute” of monotheism consists not in an

28 Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 25–26; Existence and Existents, 21. 29 See “The Mythical Format of the Element” in Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 140–143/149–152. 30 F. W. J. Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars”, in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. T. Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 203, cited by Drew Dalton, “The Pains of Contraction: Understanding Creation in Levinas through Schelling,” Studia Phaenomenologica 6 (2006): 228. See also the works cited in note 11 above. 31 Levinas’s regard of the Star of Redemption as “too often present in this work to be cited” (28/14) can be understood from this perspective, since the Star is deeply indebted to the young

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intuition of the “One and All” but in the separation of Being into the Same and the Other through which the unique sense of ethics is ab-solved from, rather than dissolved into, the “eternal unity” of Idealist thought. Despite such important differences, Totality and Infinity is a worthy heir to the Idealist program in philosophical mythmaking. It cultivates a new sense of religion as an “ethics” that transcends the state, as the young German Idealists likewise proposed. And precisely because Levinas’s account of tsimtsum resorts to a mythology of elemental existence, prior to the openness of the world, one can say that the “higher spirit, sent from heaven,” which the young German philosophers sought to render in philosophical symbols, finally finds its place, exactly as they sought, on earth.32 The tsimtsum of ethics transforms the mythic existence of the elements into a space of meaning.

The Divine Void Levinas’s understanding of tsimtsum shares little of the optimism of the young German Idealists, however. His position is aligned squarely with those who read tsimtsum “kefshuto,” plainly or literally, as suggesting that the world, even all possible worlds, is void of divine presence, for Being is opened to meaning only by the withdrawal of the Infinite.33 This interpretation of tsimtsum kefshuto is Idealist’s conception of philosophical mythology, Rosenzweig of course having discovered the famous fragment in the first place. In contrast to the monistic “monotheism of reason” espoused by the young German Idealists, Levinas’s mythopoesis articulates a monotheism of meaning – an explication of the unique sens as orienting the order of signification. On Rosenzweig’s relationship to the philosophical mythology of German Idealism see Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48–54; Moshe Schwarz, From Myth to Revelation (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad, 1978) [Hebrew], 211–213. Schwarz’s emphasis on Schelling’s life-long project of developing a “new mythology” as having deeply influenced Rosenzweig may be more relevant than has hitherto been noted, since Levinas and Schwarz were friends; see Levinas, Outside the Subject, translated by Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 21. 32 “The ‘Oldest System‐Programme of German Idealism’,” trans. Taylor Carman, European Journal of Philosophy 3:2 (1995), 199–200. 33 It therefore becomes necessary to think the trace as the happening of the divine withdrawal in the world. The trace is not a thing in the world, not a mere mark, but the shadow of an always receding presence beyond the grasp of even the most opened, attuned and attentive mind. Nor is the trace a sign of the whole; it is a fragment of God knows what whole, and one should perhaps therefore stop speaking of being “as a whole.” In the Kabbalistic tradition, the trace results from the breaking of the vessels. Is there an analog to the breaking of the vessels in Levinas’s thought? Everyday life is the breaking of the vessels in Levinas’s philosophy. Everyday life is a mobile constellation of un-owned norms, norms that are constituted by no one in particular, what Heidegger

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consistent with Levinas’s view of atheism as a “separation so complete that the separated being maintains itself in existence all by itself, without participating in the Being from which it is separated – eventually capable of adhering to it by belief” (58/52). Atheism is “natural” and even a “great glory” because the space of meaning only opens up in virtue of a withdrawal of the Other that “produces” the sense of being oneself answerable to the as-structure of beings. Interpreting Levinas’s evocation of the Kabbalistic concept as a philosophical mythology of tsimtsum kefshuto enables us to place it within the conflict of interpretations called Judaism. Levinas’s account of tsimtsum opposes Hasidic interpretations developed by the Maggid of Mezericz and then his disciplines, most notably Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Habad Hasidism.34 In Hasidic teachings, tsimtsum is usually interpreted “lo kefshuto,” not literally, implying an acosmism according to which the contraction of the ein sof is only an illusion that allows the world to seem to be independent of the plenitude of divine existence. It was Solomon Maimon, reflecting on his sojourn in the court of the Maggid of Mezericz, who contrived this irony of Jewish intellectual history by describing the Hassidic gloss on tsimtsum lo-kefshuto as “nothing but an expanded Spinozism” insofar as it is an “acosmic system” that denies the reality of the world in face of the absolute reality of God that is veiled by the manifest forms of ordinary experience.35 The expansion of this Spinozistic acosmism by post-Kantian idealists, first Herder then Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, has been called “idealist acosmism.”36 Levinas’s deployment of tsimtsum kefshuto opposes acosmism in all such varieties, be they Idealist, Hasidic or Spinozistic. For Levinas, tsimtsum is not an illusion to be overcome, whether through speculative reason or unitive enthusiasm, but the indispensable and insurmountable condition for the very possibility of meaning. To deny the unsurpassable horizon of tsimtsum kefshuto, he thinks, is to conflate desire for the Infinite with total senselessness, the total lack of an

calls das Man. The breaking of the undifferentiated norms of das Man leaves a trace of someone in particular. The trace is an orientation to someone in particular whose sense, as pure value, breaks through the vessels of everyday life in which signification is stored. 34 Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Likutei Amarim Tanya: Bi-Lingual Edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1984), 301–321; for an overview see Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany: SUNY, 1993), “The Doctrine of Tzimtzum,” pp. 79–91. 35 Solomon Maimon, Autobiography, trans. J. C. Murray (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 105. Maimon was reflecting on the position of the Maggid of Mezeritch, in whose court he sojourned before arriving in Berlin. The Maggid was the teacher of Reb Shneur Zalman of Lyadi whose acosmic interpretation of tsimtsum, like those of other Hasidic teachers, extends his legacy. 36 Michael N. Forster, “Herder and Spinoza,” in Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. E. Förster, Y. Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 80.

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orientation to something as something, which is not the free play of ‘nothingness’ but a crushing immanence in which the space of experience collapses into elemental incoherence, indistinguishable from radical evil.37 This is the charge – justified or not – that he levels at Hasidic “enthusiasm.” In the continuation of our passage he states the point against its philosophical founder. “Thought and freedom come to us from separation and from the consideration of the Other – this thesis is at the antipodes of Spinozism” (105/108). The withdrawal of the infinite “redeems creation,” as our passage puts it, by prizing the halal panui, the void in Absolute Being, which opens the space in which it is possible to direct oneself at something as something. The condition for the possibility of intelligibility as such bars access to, forbids, Being itself. Blanchot’s gloss on Scholem, which Levinas undoubtedly read, puts it starkly: “It is as though the creation of the world, or its existence, would have evacuated God from himself, posed God as a lack of God and therefore had as its corollary a sort of ontological atheism that could only be abolished along with the world itself. Where there is a world there is, painfully, the lack of God.”38 By the same token, Levinas’s account of tsimtsum kefshuto is consistent with the Lithuanian tradition exemplified by Hayyim Volozhin’s Nefesh Hahayim, another likely source of his familiarity with the concept, though perhaps postdating the composition of Totality and Infinity. Nefesh Hahayim cautions against the temptation to regard the truth of the world as veiling divine reality; tsimtsum consists in “a tremendous concealment” of God that can in no wise be surpassed “from our perspective”.39 Levinas’s view that only “an infinity that … withdraws from the ontological extension so as to leave a place for being separated exists divinely” thus reiterates the Volozhiner’s view of tsimtsum kefshuto and his opposition to acosmism.

37 Levinas’s philosophical mythology here as elsewhere draws close to Schelling’s, see note 30 above. Schelling, however, embraces the acosmism that Levinas resolutely opposes. On Schelling’s acosmism and its similarity to that of Hadab Hasidism see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Achronic Time, Messianic Expectation, and the Secret of the Leap in Habad,” in Habad Hasidism: History, Thought, Image, eds. Jonatan Meir and Gadi Sagiv (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2018), 45–86. 38 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 117; Blanchot, L‘entretien Infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 169. 39 Hayyim of Volozhyn, Nefesh Hahayim (Vilna, 1872), 516–519.

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The Tsimtsum of Space: Circles and Lines On all accounts of tsimtsum the very dimensionality within which the normative structure of experience is possible is created through the withdrawal of the Infinite. Tsimtsum opens the time-space horizon by localizing a position in being through which orientation becomes possible. In both Levinas’s and Kabbalistic conceptions of tsimtsum the localization of a position in being is tantamount to an essentially ethical orientation. The idea appears at the very outset of the Lurianic tradition, for example in Hayyim Vital’s various accounts of Luria’s teachings. Mevoh sh’arim, for example, begins by suggesting that prior to tsimtsum there is neither emptiness nor orientation, neither high or low, up or down, and therefore no names or appellations, for names individuate something as something, differentiating one aspect of the divine from another, one sefira from another.40 Prior to tsimtsum: il y a, night in which all sefirot are black, for which names are lacking – “it cannot be called King or Compassionate or Merciful or Judge and so forth until after the creation of the world” – , in which no analogy (dimyon) and no image (t’munah) take form, where differences between one letter (’ot) or mark (nekudah) and another do not belong, are not appropriate (lo sh’ayach). In Nefesh Hahayim, for example, the withdrawal of God is the condition for halakhic experience and the spatial metaphors of positive theology. Only the concealment of the dark essence of God gives rise to distinctions such as those between pure and impure, permitted and forbidden, good and evil. Only because tsimtsum is kefshuto, neither illusory nor provisional, do halakhic distinctions retain their validity throughout the course of history. So too our positive conceptions of God stem from the concealment of the divine essence. We say “God, the Most High,” “Who dwells in the Heavens,” only because orientation has been created through the tsimtsum of the absolute darkness of God, giving rise to the primary orientation toward the Most High. Ets Hayyim and Sha’ar Ha-Haqdamot are the tractates where the contraction of the Infinite into the shape of a circle is discussed. “We have learned from geometry [hokhmat ha-shi’ur] that there is no form of equality [shve] like that of a circle,” Vital writes, presumably not because of the anthropocentric conviction that we stand at the center of a perfect existence but because of the theocentric conviction that no part of the divine void of creation is farther removed from the ein sof than any other.41 The contracted circle is then penetrated by a line from the primeval plenitude which establishes dimensionality within the void. “For if

40 Hayyim Vital, Mevoh sh’arim 1–2. 41 Hayyim Vital, Etz Hayyim, 11b.

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the primeval light entered the space from every point of the circle,” Vital says, “it would not be possible to distinguish between up and down, front and back, not east nor west, north or south. But since the light of the ein-sof draws down only in one line and one thin channel there is established in it upwards and downwards, frontwards and backwards, east and west.”42 In Vital’s account, the process of tsimtsum is reiterated, producing the ten sefirot as ten concentric circles which are then aligned in the form of ′Adam Qadmon, the Primordial Human constituted in the form of three straight lines of circles – four along the central axis, three on the right hand side and three on the left hand size. Mordechai Pachter showed how this Lurianic account of tsimtsum forming circles and lines that in turn constitute the Primordial Human was developed by subsequent Kabbalists “into the basis for a system of ethics.”43 The circles and lines that form the Primordial Human consist of two modes of existence that determine its two natures and, on this basis, the two natures of mortal human beings, the natural or ontological, represented by the circle, and the free or moral, represented by the line of straightness (kav ha′yosher). The Kabbalistic tradition of circles and lines, representing natural and moral dispositions, is echoed in Levinas’s account of droiture, uprightness, as Jacob Meskin already noted.44 I doubt that this results from a direct influence of the Kabbalistic texts on Levinas’s thought, as Meskin suggests, but this only makes the convergence all the more remarkable. It was, rather, Levinas’s early interest in phenomenological method that provided him independent access to a similar thought. Returning from Freiburg in 1929, Levinas commended the phenomenological movement for its “a rehabilitation of concrete space” by returning the abstractions of post-Newtonian geometry to their source in intuition.45 In phenomenology, the abstraction of extension is traced back to “our possibilities of motility, of distancing ourselves or approaching, therefore a nonhomogeneous space with a top and a bottom, a right and a left.”46 Totality and Infinity, 42 Hayyim Vital, Etz Hayyim, 11b. 43 Mordechai Pachter, Roots of Faith and Devequt: Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Ideas (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004), 167. 44 Meskin, “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah,” 75–77. 45 Emmanuel Levinas, “Freiburg, Husserl and Phenomenology,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. R. A. Cohen, M. B. Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 33. 46 Ibid. The background to this concern with the transcendental origins of geometrical concepts is Kant’s famous essay on “orientation in thinking” which, not incidentally, constitutes Kant’s intervention into the pantheistic controversy. Kant’s claim against pantheism and Spinozism is that mathematical conceptions of space are insufficient for our basic sense of orientation toward objects, a claim which resembles the Volozhiner’s. The approach is extended by Husserl, for example Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, edited and translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht:

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influenced also by Merleau-Ponty’s work, puts forth the novel proposal that the primary geometrical senses trace back to the concrete “ethical” intuitions that give rise to them. Without the primary sense of ethical Height expressed by the withdrawal of the Other, subjectivity would fail to enter the space of meaning. “The very dimension of height is opened up by metaphysical Desire” (34-35/23); “The dimension of height in which the Other is placed is as it were the primary curvature of being from which the privilege of the Other results, the gradient [denivellement] of transcendence” (86-87/86); the “curvature of intersubjective space inflects distance into elevation,” he says in the Conclusions, adding that this curvature “is, perhaps, the very presence of God” (291/323). The space of meaning in which I am answerable to the normative as-structure of entities is founded on the ethical Height of the Other, whose sense orients me by its withdrawal from signification toward that pure contentless Judgement the Kabbalists call din. Without this Height from which subjectivity is created the distinction between what I experience and what I ought to experience would reduce to a purely causal reaction (77/75) for which I could not be answerable. The “uprightness” of the face, the pure sense of normativity from On High, opens the normative space of meaning in which one is answerable not only to how things are caused to appear but to the sense of how they ought to appear. At the risk of moving from exegetical peshat to drash, one could extend the point further. The Kabbalists maintain that the circle is chronologically prior to the line of straightness yet ontologically dependent on it, for only the line connects the circle to the exterior plenitude of divine presence. This emanating line is called ’aṣylut, from the preposition ’aṣel, towards. The emanating line extends from the exteriority of divine plenitude towards the space of created existence. Levinas’s critique of Heidegger corresponds to a similar distinction. For Heidegger, the space of meaning takes the form of a “circle of understanding,” since intelligibility is always already holistically structured, ultimately as being-in-theworld as a whole. Levinas concedes that intelligibility is always holistic, from a sociological and chronological point of view. Against Heidegger, however, he argues for the ontological priority of uprightness, of the direct line from subjectivity to the withdrawal of Infinity. Even if, chronologically, one is “always already” in a circle of understanding, at any given moment one commits oneself to the sense of something as something. This commitment is an uprightness of orientation toward the Other, whose withdrawal creates subjectivity as answerable to the intelligibility of something as something. The line of orientation toward the Other

Springer, 1997) and Heidegger, for example Being and Time, 109/143–44. Cf. Totality and Infinity (190/206).

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cannot bisect the circle, as if it could reach the Other by common understanding. The point, rather, is to avow oneself as answerable to the normativity of meaning, an avowal that is founded not by understanding the other but by a sense of value that remains through the withdrawal of signification. For Levinas, the circle of understanding is chronologically prior, but the upright line of orientation toward the Other is ontologically prior. The moral geometry of Ethics thus affords a phenomenological retrieval of the sacred geometry of Lurianic Kabbalah.

The Tsimtsum of Time: Being-toward-zeir-anpin Just as Totality and Infinity attempts to rehabilitate the primary orientation to the intelligibility of space on the basis of the ethical sense of Height, so too it seeks to “deformalize” time by a phenomenological reduction of the concrete sense given by the withdrawal of the Other. The deformalization of time provides another illustration of the tsimtsum-like structure of Levinas’s argument. This happens at the end of Section III when Levinas identifies a problem with this defense of subjectivity that propels him “to go back to the primary phenomenon of time” (247/277). The problem, in short, is that subjectivity is created as being answerable in a mere instant, in the blink of an eye in which the Other withdraws from the circle of understanding by appearing as Stranger. In other words, the confirmation of oneself under “Judgement,” as the being-answerable that one is, is fleeting, instantaneous; it remains “clandestine,” Levinas says. Not only does it take place in a mode that cannot be seen from a third-person point of view, since it is only from the first-person point of view that the Other withdraws, but since the withdrawal approaches the zero point of a Judgement without content it renders me answerable without instructing me on how to be thus answerable. I do not understand the Judgement, I merely experience myself as answerable. The clandestine character of subjectivity at best reveals that one is answerable in the instant of the Judgement in which the Other withdraws signification by facing me; it is not enough to maintain oneself as answerable across time.47 “Yet this inner life cannot renounce all visibility,” Levinas avers, it must “refer to a 47 “Maintenance” is a semi-technical term in Totality and Infinity that contrasts with “the instant.” It designates a diachronous temporality, le maintenant, in which the instant of my being holds fast (main-tenir) to the being of the Other that is still to come. It does the philosophical work of what Heidegger describes as the “self-constancy” of subjectivity (Selbstständigkeit) that is necessary for its resolution. Hence Conclusion 9 of Totality and Infinity, “The Maintenance of Subjectivity.” For an elaboration see Michael Fagenblat, “Maintaining and Grounding Answerability,” Levinas and Analytic Philosophy, eds. M. Fagenblat and M. Erdur (London: Routledge, 2019).

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reality” (247/277). To be answerable requires diachronous commitment, beyond the instantaneous interruption created by the withdrawal of the Other. Section IV of Totality and Infinity therefore turns “beyond the face” – beyond the ways of being Stranger (widowing, orphaning) that express the nudity of signification in a fleeting instant – in order to maintain the creation of subjectivity across time, in the visible realm of history. Subjectivity is responsible not only for judging history but also for changing it. Section IV therefore introduces new ways of being-Other, not only as the Stranger who creates subjectivity in the instant of a look but as a way of beingOther that maintains subjectivity across time. One such way of being-Other takes form as “the beloved,” as sexual difference. But this way remains “ambiguous,” for if love touches on the otherness of sexual difference it nevertheless reverts, through eros, to being-Same. “Love does not transcend unequivocally – … it is pleasure and dual egoism” (266/298). The ambiguous transcendence of love, however, is generative; it harbors a way of being-Other that transcends the egoism en deux of lovers. Concretely this happens by engendering a child, fecundity, an “ontological category” having no essential ontic connection to biological reproduction. The Child, as a way of being-Other, renders one answerable not only in the instant of the epiphany, as is the case with the Stranger, but as answerable to the way being-Other will be. The Child is “my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other, of the Beloved” (267/299). Like the Stranger, the Child creates subjectivity as being answerable, but the Child demands that one is answerable across the discontinuity of instants, for the sake of someone, a world, still to come, l’a-venir. The continuous creation of subjectivity is thus not a series of disjunctive instants but the maintenance of oneself across time. The ontological way of the Child at once creates and sustains Desire for the Other: he does not stop the movement of Desire. The other that Desire desires is again Desire… Fecundity engendering fecundity accomplishes goodness…Here the Desire …that is the independence of the separated being and its transcendence, is accomplished – not in being satisfied and in thus acknowledging that it was a need, but in transcending itself, in engendering Desire. (269/302)

Here again the plain philosophical sense we have been pursuing converges with a Kabbalistic secret. Raṣon, the infinition of Desire, is accomplished when the union or zivug of Abba and Imma engenders the son, zeir anpin, the small face. The repeated act of Abba and Imma facing each Other regenerates Desire by producing zier anpin; the moḥin or flow of spiritual intelligibility is maintained through the small face of the son. The curious reference in these pages to Schelling’s Weltalter, which Franks describes as an attempt to find “an adequate

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narrative form for this primordial event” of tsimtsum,48 suggests that an interpretation of fecundity as the temporalization of tsimtsum is not without warrant. The contrast Levinas makes between his (“Jewish”?) account of paternity and the transcendental Christology of Hegel and Schelling, both of whom are deemed to have identified the son with the father (267/300), produces a transcendental tsimtsum in which Desire for the Other orients subjectivity not only beyond the world but also through it, to the world to come, the world of the Child. Just as the Kabbalists’ account of the primordial orientation through space is concretely rehabilitated by Levinas’s transcendental construal of ethics, so too tsimtsum engenders primordial temporality.

A Defense of ’Adam Qadmon The Kabbalists call the space of all possible worlds ’Adam Qadmon, the macrocosmic Primordial Human formed of circles and lines in the space vacated by tsimtsum. ’Adam Qadmon is the source from whence all concrete possibilities emanate. It is the totality of all possible ways of being intelligible, all possible ways for a world to be opened, a space where and when any entity, including the psychological entities identified as self and other, can manifest as it is or might possibly be. This opening of the space of meaning, the creation of ’Adam Qadmon, takes place through the reiterative movement of tsimtsum. The three aspects of Levinas’s transcendental tsimtsum – withdrawal of signification by being-Other, creation of subjectivity as being answerable, contraction of the Absolute into the normative as-structure of meaning – thus provide not only a “defense of subjectivity” but a transcendental-phenomenological defense of ’Adam Qadmon, as it were, that is, of the space of all possible ways of being intelligible. Such a space is formed by circles of understanding contracting within the Absolute and oriented by lines of uprightness that create the sense of being answerable. There is nothing more banal than the as-structure of intelligibility to which one is answerable at each moment of one’s life. How this as-structure is opened and sustained is a great mystery, however. Ethics, as transcendental tsimtsum provides a proposal in the form of a philosophical mythology nurtured by a Kabbalism of the imagination in which the withdrawal of the Other continuously creates subjectivity and contracts a space of meaning from with the Absolute.

48 Franks, “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic realism,” 238.

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Bibliography Bernasconi, Roberto. “Rereading Totality and Infinity,” in The Question of the Other, ed. A. B. Dallery and C. E. Scott, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Blanchot, Maurice. L’entretien Infini, Paris: Gallimard, 1969. _____. The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Crowell, Steven G. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. _____. “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context,” European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 23, nr 3/2015, 564–88. de Boer, Theodore. The Rationality of Transcendence: Studies in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Amsterdam: J.C. Geiben, 1997. Dalton, Drew. “The Pains of Contraction: Understanding Creation in Levinas through Schelling,” Studia Phaenomenologica, vol. 6, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. _____. Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Elior, Rachel. “The Doctrine of Tzimtzum,” in The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 79–91. Fagenblat, Michael, “Maintaining and Grounding Answerability,” in Levinas and Analytic Philosophy, ed. M. Fagenblat and M. Erdur, London: Routledge, 2019, 55–79. Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Forster, Michael N. “Herder and Spinoza,” in Spinoza and German Idealism, eds. E. Förster and Y. Melamed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Franks, Paul, “Inner Anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism’s Relationship to Judaism,”, in Yearbook of German Idealism, VII, Faith and Reason, eds. F. Rush, J. Stolzenberg and P. Franks, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010, 269–275. _____. “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, eds. N. Boyle and L. Disley, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 219–245. _____. “Fichte’s Kabbalistic Realism: Summons as Ẓimẓum,” in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide, ed. Gabriel Gottlieb, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 92–116. Habermas, Jürgen, “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers (1961),” in PhilosophicalPolitical Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983, 21–43. _____. “Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History,” in The New Schelling, eds. Judith. Norman and Alistair Welchman, London: Continuum, 2004, 43–89. Hayyim of Volozhyn. Nefesh Hahayim, Vilna, 1872. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, ed. and trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Dordrecht: Springer, 1997.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. De l’existence à l’existant, Paris: Fontaine, 1947. _____. Le Temps et l’Autre, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947. _____. “Signature,” Les Philosophes Francais d’aujourd’hui par eux-mêmes: Autobiographie de la philosophie française conternporaine. n.p., 1963, 325–28. _____. Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971 [1961]. _____. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. _____. “Signature,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 8, nr 1/1978. _____. Time and the Other and additional Essays, trans. R. A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987. _____. Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988. _____. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand, London: Athlone, 1990. _____. Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. _____. “Freiburg, Husserl and Phenomenology,” in Discovering Existence with  Husserl. Translated by R. A. Cohen, M. B. Smith. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998. _____. “Signification and Sense,” in Humanism of the Other. trans. by N. Poller, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. _____. “Being Jewish,” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007). Maimon, Solomon. Autobiography, trans. J. C. Murra, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Meskin, Jacob. “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,” Levinas Studies, vol. 2, 2007. Pachter, Mordechai. Roots of Faith and Devequt: Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Ideas, Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004. Pollock, Benjamin. Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Schelling, F. W. J. “Stuttgart Seminars”, in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. T. Pfau, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken, 1954 [1941]. Scholem, Gershom. Les Grands Courants de la mystique juive, Paris: Payot, 1950. Schulte, Christoph, “Zimzum in the Works of Schelling,” Iyyun vol. 41, 1992, 21–40. Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Introduction by Richard Rorty, Study Guide by Robert Brandom. Cambridge M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Schwarz, Moshe. From Myth to Revelation, Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad, 1978. Hebrew. Vital, Hayyim. Etz Hayyim, Warsaw: Y.Z. Unterhendler, 1891. _____. Mavo She’arim, Jerusalem, 1987. Hebrew. Wolfson, Elliot R. Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. _____. “Achronic Time, Messianic Expectation, and the Secret of the Leap in Habad,” in Habad Hasidism: History, Thought, Image, ed. Gadi Sagiv and Jonatan Meir, Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2018. Wyschogrod, Edith, “Interview with Emmanuel Levinas: December 31, 1982,” Philosophy and Theology, vol. 4, nr 2/1989. Zalman of Liadi, Schneur, Likutei Amarim Tanya: Bi-Lingual Edition, Brooklyn: Kehot, 1984. “The ‘Oldest System‐Programme of German Idealism’,” trans. Taylor Carman, European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 3, nr 2/1995. 199–200.

Agata Bielik-Robson

Derrida Denudata: Tsimtsum and the Derridean Metaphysics of Non-Presence … The disappearance of the good-father-capital-sun is thus the precondition of discourse […] The disappearance of truth as presence, the withdrawal of the present origin of presence, is the condition of all (manifestation of) truth. Nontruth is the truth. Nonpresence is presence. Differance, the disappearance of any originary presence, is at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of truth. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”1 The attempt to think Kabbalah without the use of the emanationist teaching (and thus think it to the end) would be an expiation of the sin, which a true pupil of Cordovero – if there ever were going to be one – should have endeavoured… To approach the kabbalists as mystical materialists with dialectical tendency would be thoroughly unhistorical, yet not at all absurd. Gershom Scholem, Zehn Unhistorische Sätze über Kabbalah2

In this essay, I want to offer a cryptotheological interpretation of Jacques Derrida as the thinker of tsimtsum – ‘The disappearance of the good-father-capital-sun’ – who more or less secretly practiced a hidden theology of a God-in-retreat. Such a reading goes against the common post-structuralist reception of Derrida as the ‘hammer on metaphysics’ who administered the final blow into the very heart of the phantasm of presence. I am not going to give into the cliché according to which Derrida is the paradigmatically post-metaphysical thinker who, by taking away the sweetness and light of all things present, severly forbids us to engage into any speculation on the nature of being. To the contrary, I want to interpret Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence not as a ban on metaphysics as such, but as an oblique expression of his own highly speculative metaphysics of non-presence, for whom the thesis – il n’y a pas de hors-texte – has nothing prohibitive about it; rather it formulates an invitation to think being as writing, a potentially infinite narrative, story, récit, which has its roots in Lurianic kabbalah.3 “In

1 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 165–66. Subsequently in the text as D. 2 Gershom Scholem, Judaica 3. Studien zur jüdischen Mystik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), 270; 273 (in my translation). 3 Derrida formulates his famous thesis in Of Grammatology “as regards the absence of the transcendental signified”: “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de horstexte]”: Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. Later on in the text as G. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-017

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the beginning was not the Logos, but the Fable”,4 says Derrida in one of his last seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign, and although he never states it openly, we have every reason to suspect that this ‘fable,’ to which Derrida felt secretly attached all his life, is nothing other than Isaac Luria’s story of divine tsimtsum. There is only one explicit mention of the Lurianic heritage in Derrida’s oueuvre, which demonstrates that Derrida at least knew something (in fact, quite a lot) about tsimtsum. Rumor has it that, while on his deathbed, Emmanuel Levinas urged Derrida to confess that he had been ‘the last representative of Lurianic kabbalah’ all along. I tend to believe Levinas’ intuition and will try to prove that once we apply the Lurianic scheme to all of Derrida’s seemingly dispersed writings, they will come together into one coherent Gestalt and display in their fully intended dissemination the one secret thread which Derrida wished to reveal – and conceal at the same time – precisely as his Marrano secret.5 This secrecy may explain why the very name ‘Luria’ appears in Derrida’s corpus only once, in his close reading of Philip Sollers’ Numbers, which forms the last chapter of his Dissemination – and here also only in inverted commas.6

4 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 190. This sentence is a paraphrasis of Paul Valery who, in his essay On Myth and Mythology, writes: “Universe, then, is only a mythological expression […] In the begnining was the Fable. It always will be […] Myths are the very soul of our actions and our loves. We can act only in pursuit of a phantom. We can love only what we create”; Paul Valery, Selected Writings (New York: New Directions Books, 1950), 201. Derrida often commented on this passage; the list of all such places is given in Peggy Kamuf, To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 48. 5 On the Marrano identification of Derrida, which made him use Jewish motifs mostly implicitly and under disguises, see my Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (London: Routledge, 2014), esp. the Introduction, as well as “Burn After Reading: Derrida, the Philosophical Marrano,” in Divisible Derridas, eds. Victor E. Taylor & Stephen Nichols (Aurora: Noesis Press, 2017). 6 What I am trying to do here has many precedents that have already pointed to Derrida’s relation to the kabbalah. The idea that Derrida’s deconstruction of presence can be also interpreted as a foray into a new metaphysics of non-presence follows the intuition of Steven Shakespeare who, in his very lucid and instructive book on Derrida’s engagement with theology, says: “His work does open possibilities for the theological imagination that are not shut down by his suspicion of the God of pure presence”; Steven Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology (New York: Continuum, 2009), 77. According to Shakespeare, Derrida is not an advocate of a traditional ‘negative theology,’ but rather of a kabbalah-inspired new vision of God who is him(her)self decentred: “it is in God’s difference from himself that creation comes to be” (ibid., 99) and, moreover, this creation proceeds as the “writing that wanders away from any gathered centre” (ibid., 96). Shakespeare, similarly to Thomas Altizer, whose “History and Apocalypse” he quotes (Deconstruction and Theology [New York: Crossroad, 1982], 149), bases his intuitions on Derrida’s essay on Edmond Jabes’ Book of Questions from Writing and Difference (which he signs, half-jokingly, with the name of

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Tsimtsum: The Invention of the Difference Phillip Sollers’ Nombres, published in the revolutionary year of 1968, is an experimental serial novel.7 It contains elements of a metaphysical treatise which offers an esoteric account of the beginnings, combining kabbalah, Chinese hieroglyphs, Orphic cosmogenic mythology, and Neoplatonic renaissance hermetic speculations concerning numbers and their creative permutations. In Dissemination, the last essay of the book published under the same title in 1972, Derrida conducts one of Jabes’ rabbinic heroes: Reb Rida), whereas I focus here on “Dissemination,” a slightly later text of Derrida offering a close reading of Sollers’ novel. The kabbalistic inspiration of La dissemination was first spotted by Moshe Idel who, however, does not locate it in the Lurianic line, but in the influence of Abraham Abulafia and his “science of the combination of letters”; Moshe Idel, “Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah,” in Midrash and Literature, eds. G. H. Hartman and S. Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 149. Gideon Ofrat, on the other hand, sees Luria’s importance for Derrida, but he also perceives it as a danger which makes him deviate from the more orthodox vision of God that can be found in Levinas: “To Levinas, God is the infinite Other, whereas the negation within the Kabbalist formula of ‘reduction’ (tsimtsum – God’s withdrawal inward) is, in Derrida’s writings, a cleavage within the Divinity. In other words: to Derrida, God’s withdrawal and self-concealment are the cornerstone for the aspects of pretense and deceit acting at all levels of existence and consciousness, as divine deceit”; Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 135. God’s difference with himself or his inner ‘secret’ is thus interpreted here as a hazardously heterodox notion of ‘divine deceit,’ which has a parallel in the riskiest developments of Christian nominalist theology and its concept of deus fallax, the ‘devious God.’ This topos of the mistrustful reading of Derrida’s ‘kabbalistic heresy’ has its classical locus in Susan A. Handelman’s, The Slayers of Moses. The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982), 340. It also continues in the two most ambitious attempts to capture Derrida’s use of the kabbalistic imagery: Sanford L. Drob, Kabbalah and Postmodernism. A Dialogue (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), especially the chapter “Derrida and Jewish Mysticism,” 48–63, and the section that directly concerns my subject here: “Scholem and Sollers” – as well as Elliot R. Wolfson, “Assaulting the Border: Kabbalistic Traces in the Margins of Derrida,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 70, nr 3 (Sept. 2002): 475–514, and the chapter on Derrida in Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 154–200. Both, Drob and Wolfson, accurately spot all the structural affinities between Derrida’s concept of dissemination and the Lurianic notion of cosmic exile, but they have a tendency to underrate the seriousness of the Derridean play. For them, this play is merely deceitful and as such only parodies the catastrophe of galut, robbing it of all its solemnly grave metaphysical context. In Wolfson’s words: “for the kabbalists, the sense of exile for both God and human is still determined from the Archimedean point of the Infinite. In the postmodern sensibility and in Derridean deconstruction, there is no such point, and the homelessness of the human situation in the world can never be rectified”; Wolfson, Giving, 404–05. I, on the other hand, will try to show that dissemination as creation is indeed a very ‘serious play’: not a deceit or parody, but a real invention of the other, which, as Derrida shows, can proceed only in this and no other way. 7 Philippe Sollers, Nombres, Collection Tel Quel (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968).

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a close reading of Numbers, which in its method resembles the midrashic style. Having already described the pulsation of the origin in Sollers, alternating between breathing out and breathing in, expansion and contraction, Derrida writes: The Kabbalah is not only summoned up here under the rubric of arithmosophy or the science of literal permutations […] Interestingly, through the importance it gives to the dot, the air, etc., this Orphic explanation also describes an analogue of the pleroma, which is a sort of original space, a pneumatic layer [tehiru] in which the tsimtsum, the crisis within God, the ‘drama of God’ through which God goes out of himself and determines himself, takes place. This contraction into a dot, this withdrawal and then this exit out of self located within the original ether, is of course linked to the mythology of ‘Louria,’ but it can also arise by way of ‘Hegel,’ ‘Boehme’ etc. (2.54. … He produced a simple dot that was transformed into thought, and within that thought, he executed innumerable sketches and engraved innumerable engravings. And then he engraved the spark, and the spark was the origin of the work, which existed and did not exist, and which was very deeply buried, unknowable by name…) (D, 344) 8

“At the start, everything is present, but nothing exists”: writes Sollers in another novel of a similar sort, called very appropriately Drama.9 Both Sollers and Derrida know that this dramatic description echoes very exactly the Lurianic Urschrift dealing with the Or Ein Sof, the primordial infinite light, which was offered by Hayim Vital in the first written testimony of Luria’s teaching, Ets Hayim: “the simple highest life which filled all that was present.” As Christoph Schulte notes, this presence is named by Vital with the Hebrew substantive meziut which derives from maza, the verb meaning ‘to be simply there,’ ‘to take place’: “There was no beginning and no end, just the one simple light equal to itself.”10 A pure, resting and idle, undifferentiated presence. The crisis of tsimtsum is the sudden turn within this primordial pleromatic space, which revolutionizes its mode of being: from a merely indifferent beingthere into a more demanding project called ‘existence’ (and for Sollers  – but perhaps for Derrida also – this would still be the original subversion underlying 8 Elliot Wolfson, usually rather ambivalent about Derrida’s application of Jewish motives, also selects Dissemination as the most kabbalistic of Derrida’s works: “… in various places in his copious writings, Derrida utilizes kabbalistic themes. Here I will note three such occurrences in the section called ‘The Column’ in the collection of essays published as Dissemination: (1) the zoharic motif of the ungraspable column of air, which is related to the demarcation of the ten sefirotic emanations as a column of numerations; (2) the Lurianic symbol of the ‘pneumatic layer’ (ṭehiru) in which the contraction (tsimtsum) – the dramatic crisis of self-determination within God – occurs; and (3) the messianic Torah of invisible letters written in white fire in the blank spaces encompassing the visible letters written in black fire, which is associated especially with the Hasidic master, Levi Isaac of Berditchev”; Wolfson, Giving, 168. 9 Philippe Sollers, Drame: Roman, Collection Tel Quel (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965), 3. 10 Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014), 64.

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all social revolutions). In the act of tsimtsum, God, so far coextensive with indifferent and undifferentiated presence, delimits himself and thus introduces the first difference: by differentiating himself from the rest of presence, he also withdraws from presence. He withdraws away from presence into himself, but not in the sense of what we could call the ontological contraction; the dot is not the point of the extreme concentration of being, but a kind of a non-place which marks the emergence of a new mode of non/being which from now on will not find a place in the realm of ontology: a spectral negativity of ‘otherwise than being’ which twenty years later, in The Specters of Marx, Derrida will call hauntological.11 He thus withdraws to the point, in the sense of the act of self-determination, but also, as Scholem maintained, ‘away from the point,’ which marks the contrast with anything simply ontological, meziut, Vorhandenheit, just present. Previously a substance, now God becomes a subject: a pure thought that maintains itself only in the difference and distance from everything that just-is, but also a will and desire which, by definition, must be the desire of the other. This difference and this distance – the self-differentiating withdrawal into the negativity of inwardness and away from the indifferent presence that now presents itself as God’s other – is, for Derrida, also the first act of dissemination, the first manoeuvre of ‘spacing’: “it uncovers the space of play or the play of space in which transformations are set off and sequences strung out. It is air. L’air blanc. Air: the ether in which, from the ‘beginning,’ the ‘One…’ is caught or raised” (D, 345). The dissemination, therefore, is not just the negative by-product or an unintended consequence of the second stage of the divine drama called ‘the breaking of the vessels.’ It is the original moment of tsimtsum itself, which inagurates the stormy passage of all things coming out of their sleepy presence, through absence, into the more dynamic and dramatic mode of existence.12 Withdrawal into absence, difference, distance, which breaks the eternity of indifferent presence and introduces at once space and time – spacing of the dissemination and temporality of the deferral  – is the original negative factor posited within God himself. And it is God who, by committing the act of tsimtsum, sets an example for

11 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), 10. 12 Comp. David Biale’s comment on Scholem’s Zehn Sätze: “If one can legitimately call those Kabbalists who understood the Lurianic theory of creation literally as ‘materialists,’ then it would be necessary to extend such unhistorical language and call them additionally ‘dialectical materialists.’ If God literally absented Himself from the empty space He had created, creation would have a dialectical logic: the Becoming of the world would be the result of a movement of Being through Nothing”; David Biale, “Scholem’s ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah.’ Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism, vol. 5, nr 1 (1985): 77; my emphasis.

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the rest of that which merely is, but not yet exists. As Scholem says, “by positing a negative factor in himself, God liberates creation”13 – but this liberation has truly revolutionary consequences. It begins to spread negativity through the realm of die Indifferenz, by haunting its sleepy and general mode of being, oblivious to any particularity, with the spectre of ‘otherwise than being’ which traumatises presence and shakes it into existence: a spaced and timed multitude of singularities which gain self-determination in the process of disseminating, i.e., differing and distancing from one another. “In the beginning God created nothing” (ibid.)  – and that indeed was his only and proper creation. He did not bring being into presence: it had always been there in the static indifference of the Infinite. What he did was the revolutionary creation of himself as negativity – or what Derrida calls ‘the invention of the other.’14 What he did was to turn the Indifference inside out and force it to ex-ist, that is, “to go out of itself and determine itself.” The rhythm of the ‘time of the world’ (olam), which also constitutes the course of history, is thus nothing but the continuous repetition – or, better, commemoration by repetition, as in the Freudian Wiederholungszwang – of this original trauma that introduced the crisis, the fiery factor of negativity, into the sleepy and stagnant pool of simple presence. But it is not something to be deplored. Lurianic kabbalah teems with the traumatic images of birth: breaking of the barrier, pushing to the other side, expelling from the inside, crossing the boundary of oneness, which resembles the prenatal stage of primary narcissism. The trauma of tsimtsum could thus be precisely what Otto Rank identified as the ‘trauma of birth’: the trauma of breaking out of the monistic indifference of the primordial Infinite into the multitude of fragmented and separated singularities, inescapably marked by difference and dissemination.15 God in tsimtsum acts as the midwife forcing the world of presence to be born into existence. And although for Sollers, alongside whom Derrida writes his kabbalistic midrash, this notion of creation would necessarily entail revolutionary consequences, it need not be so. It is sufficient to recollect Levinas’ famous claim in Totality and Infinity that it goes to God’s credit that he could have created a being

13 Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 283. 14 Revolutionary  – meaning also ‘illegal’: “An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts disorder into the peaceful ordring of things, it disregards the proprieties”: Jacques Derrida, Psyche. Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rosenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1. This thread of illegality and illicity will continue throughout this essay – up to Derrida’s metaphor of being as ‘counterfeit money’ and creatures as ‘rogues’ (voyous). 15 Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2010), 5.

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capable of being properly born, standing on its own feet and, in the end, forgetting about his Maker altogether and becoming an atheist.16 Derrida, deeply influenced by Levinas, will develop this motif of forgetting and atheism in his own right, yet always in accordance with his reading of Luria: Indeed, reduced to its textuality, to its numerous plurivocality, absolutely disseminated, the Kabbalah, for example, evinces a kind of atheism, which, read in a certain way – or just simply read – it has doubtless always carried with it.17 (D, 344)

Tsimtsum as the creative act of negativity introduces difference, distance and decentration: the world disseminates, that is, disperses further and further away from the centre, which is not so much abandoned by beings as rather abandons itself; not so much forgotten and pushed into oblivion by the world, as self-decentred, itself giving up on constituting a foundation. This anti-arche is thus even more selfeffasive than the Levinasian an-arche, but it may also be seen as an intensification of Levinas’ original concept of the anarchic no-grounding.18 The ray of emanation that cuts into the vacated being is compared here to the column of fire that moves through the presence and spreads the sheer negativity of difference and distance. This is not, as in Vital’s traditional Neoplatonic image, a chanel of light distributing being in the previously emptied space, but the lightening which introduces the negative factor of subjective self-determination into the simple positivity of presence: The column is nothing, has no meaning in itself. A hollow phallus, cut off from itself, decapitated, it guarantees the innumerable passage of dissemination and the playful displacement of the margins. It is never itself, only a writing that endlessly substitutes it for itself, doubling it as of its very surrection. (D, 342; my emphasis)

Although the center seems hollow and empty, there is no mention of catastrophe here, either at the stage of God’s contraction or at the later stage of the breaking of

16 For Levinas, a certain form of atheistic self-assertion of creatures constitutes the very essence of Judaism: “… the idea of Infinity, the metaphysical relation, is the dawn of humanity without myths. But faith purged of myths, the monotheist faith, itself implies metaphysical atheism […] Atheism conditions a veritable relationship with the true God kat exochen”; Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991), 77. 17 Years later Derrida will repeat this diagnosis in Specters of Marx: “One may also take the quasi-atheistic dryness of the messianic to be the condition of the religions of the Book […]; one may always recognize there the arid soil in which grew, and passed away, the living figures of all the messiahs, whether they were announced, recognized, or still-awaited”; Derrida, Specters, 211. 18 See Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dodrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 135.

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the vessels, which Derrida sees as merely forwarding and intensifying the first move of différance.19 And since there is no catastrophe, there is also no need for redemption understood as restitutio ad integrum, i.e., the undoing of the crisis: “pure spacing goes on forever and not in the expectation of any Messianic fulfillment” (D, 345). It would be, however, too hasty to say that in this affirmative rewriting of Luria’s narrative, there is no room for the messianic dimension: to the contrary, from the middle of the ’90s, Derrida will adopt the concept of messianicity, yet not understood in terms of completion: tikkun as restoration and return.20 Rather, it will be the messianicity of midwifery, vigilantly assisting, attending, and affirming the continuous birth of the world: “It is a spacing that is merely attended” (D, 345). Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – but this is precisely the way it should be, or the way it is “assisted by the discourse” (ibid.): the passage from infinite presence to finite existence, in which one indifferent body begins to unfold in space and time into the infinite series of finite beings, cannot occur except through dissemination, or ‘a movement of Being through Nothing.’21 In Glas, the book devoted to Hegel (but with a constant tacit reference to Luria), Derrida will borrow Hegelian terminology and call this passage a transition from play into work: “the false appearance of the presence” (D, 345), a mere Schein of undifferentiated being has to disintegrate and, by ‘tarrying with the negative,’ acquire a ‘serious’ existence.22 19 Derrida finds here an important precursor in Rosenzweig for whom the creation proper is also the singularizing fragmentation of the initial body of presence, which he expresses with a telling pun of shevirat ha-kolim, the affirmative ‘breaking of the wholes’ instead of the catastrophic ‘breaking of the vessels.’ Just as in some versions of Lurianic kabbalah, Rosenzweig pictures the act of creation as the gradual emergence of dots – the self-asserted centers of singularization starting with the phenomenon of life – within the plastic undifferentiated phenomenal flow of the world (as we shall yet see, this is also a vision of creation in Hegel). In The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig refers to what kabbalah depicts as the simple presence (meziut) as ‘mere existence’: “But what does this being-alive mean, then, as opposed to mere existence? […] the figure that is its very own, forming itself and coming out from within and hence necessarily lasting […] It is this that distinguishes it from mere existence, which is only object, simply there in front of me, and especially for knowledge. Through this we already see what life adds to existence. […] Life and existence do not overlap – yet”; Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Galli (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 239–40; my emphasis. 20 Derrida’s reading of the Lurianic kabbalah goes thus in the opposite direction to the one proposed by Shaul Magid for whom the redemptive aspect of the kabbalistic meditation consists precisely in the attempt to restore God to his lost infinity: Shaul Magid, “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope of Reading in Post-Lurianic Kabbala,” in Beginning/Again. Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, eds. Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002), 165. 21 See again Biale’s comments in footnote 12. 22 See most of all the fragment in which Derrida describes the simple presence of the original ‘light being’ (Lichtwesen), the first godhead in Hegel’s version of the history of world religions;

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The emptied centre, therefore, is finally compared by Derrida to the Tower of Babel which inverts the phallic symbol of insemination and paternal control into a phallogocentric emblem of dissemination and free letting-go: It is a Tower of Babel in which multiple languages and forms of writing bump into each other or mingle with each other, constantly being transformed and engendered through their most unreconcilable otherness to each other, an otherness which is strongly affirmed, too, for plurality here is bottomless and is not lived as negativity, with any nostalgia for lost unity. (D, 341)

Here, as in Benjamin’s Theological-Political Fragment, but with a different intention, “the order of the profane, through being profane, assists coming of the Messianic Kingdom.”23 For Benjamin, this assistance was a matter of a non-relation or arelation, where no development in the course of profane history could ever determine the advent of the messianic order. For Derrida, however, it is a matter of a secret identity between the profane and the messianic, where dissemination embarks on a secret mission, which must be partly forgotten and partly remembered, as is the case with all secrets which, as Derrida claims, eventually become opaque even for their bearers.24 While the différance, spaces, temporalizes and thus writes-out (or writes asunder) – Celan’s word ausschreiben suits Derrida’s purposes perfectly well25 – the Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1986), 238; my emphasis (cited subsequently as Gl). 23 Walter Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, trans. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 306. The positivity of dissemination as the one-way street of creation which should not look back at any seemingly lost unity is also very strongly emphasized in Derrida’s later essay, “Tours de Babel”: “The ‘tower of Babel’ does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architechtonics”; in Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York & London: Routledge, 2002), 104. 24 See Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denegations,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward (Albany: SUNY, 1992), 95. The perseverance of this secret identity between the messianic and the profane is precisely what differentiates Derrida’s position from Agamben who, referring to the same Benjamin text, reduces the messianic to the profane and then openly reveals this message as the ultimate self-sublation of all religions. See Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Thus, while for Derrida, the profane has a messianic function to fulfill – for Agamben, the final lesson of the messianic dissolving into the profane is that there is no messianic mission or task to be undertaken. 25 See Paul Celan, Engführung: “Gras, auseinandergeschrieben. Die Steine, weiss,/ mit den Schatten der Halme:/ Lies nicht mehr – schau!/ Schau nicht mehr: geh!” In Michael Hamburger’s translation as The Straitening: “grass, written asunder. The stones, white,/ with the shadows of grassblades: / Do not read any more – look!/ Do not look anymore – go!” in Paul Celan, Selected Poems (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), 57.

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infinite, indifferent, and static presence into the infinite dynamic series of finite beings, the dissemination realizes the messianic project of ex-sistere, where the prefix ex works exactly the same way as aus in ausschreiben and out in spacing-out. It indicates an existence as ex-position, manifesting a singular difference towards the undifferentiated totality and the effort to withstand, resist the dedifferentiating tendency, which Derrida calls living-on, survie.26 Out and on, on and out, infinitely – such is the directive of the disseminating difference, the only lesson of the ‘fable.’ Dissemination is thus ausschreiben, the process of writing-out or writingasunder, and as such is opposed to insemination and all the vitalistic-organic-phallic symbolic usually associated with kabbalah, which Derrida  – following Scholem, who often professed his disinterest in the erotic aspect of kabbalistic theurgy – stubbornly downplays in his take on the Lurianic myth. The metaphor of writing allows him to exit the universe of the vitalistic categories of ‘the unscathed,’ on the one hand, and ‘the weak,’ on the other, forming precisely a reversal of the Neoplatonic metaphors of light, life, and power.27 The tsimtsem God of writing is neither the phallic origin of the sovereign life-power which sustains the world in existence, nor the humbled and weakened, kenotic paradigm of self-sacrifice, which encumbers the created world with the sense of guilt and debt. There is something ‘mechanical’ about this process of ausschreiben, but only in so far as it transcends the seemingly self-evident vitalistic vocabulary which Derrida would always vehemently reject when applied to the sphere of the religious. It is indeed a ‘writing machine’ which repeats the act of spacing with a precision of a quasi-mechanical force, not an intentional power: it is repetition inscribed into the mechanism of existence, its mechanical vis activa, which has nothing to do with the capricious, arbitrary, and ‘miraculous’ divine power concerning which Kierkegaard famously said that if God did not want the world to exist, he would not have given us the favour of repetition.28 The fact that the repetitive move of writing-out is mechanical rather than intentional is not meant by Derrida as an aggressive manoeuvre of atheization – killing God and his ‘miracles’ by an intervention of techne – but rather as a necessary means of protection of finite beings which, thanks to this mechanicity, can escape the numinous

26 See Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Continuum, 1979), 104. 27 On the critique of the vitalist concept of the sacred as ‘the unscathed’ (l’indemne), see most of all Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge. The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, 87. 28 Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. M. G. Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20. On the interweaving of the miraculous and the mechanical in Derrida’s concept of religion, see also Michael Naas Miracle and Machine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

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shadow of the divine arbitrary will. Daniel Boyarin described the body of the talmudic text as a ‘fatherless logos.’29 By analogy, the texture of the written-out Derridean world could be compared to the ‘fatherless fable.’

The Fatherless Fable or the Perfect Gift According to the ‘fable,’ God is the ‘all-consuming fire’ (Gl, 238), and writing, made possible by the divine retreat, is fire too, the column/stylus of fire, black fire on white fire, separated dots of existence against the background of continuous presence – but, even if this écriture throws fire into the stagnant pool of presence, it is a creation, not an apocalyptic destruction. “Each time, writing appears as disappearance, recoil, erasure, retreat, curling-up, consumption” (D, 339) – yes, all that, but not in the service of annihilation, but for the sake of differentiation, which takes the form of ausschreiben, of writing-out of the original simple presence of Ein-Sof. Tsimtsum is indeed the ‘root of finitude’ of all beings emerging out of the continuous self-limitation of the Infinite,30 but it should not be imagined in apocalyptic terms as a ball of fire storming through the world and annihilating everything the moment it springs into existence. This way of reading Spinoza, where individual modifications of substance are coming into and going out of being at the speed of light, is not Gilles Deleuze’s invention: the same interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophical failure to establish and properly assert the existence of particulars appears originally in Hegel under the heading of the ‘Oriental metaphysics,’ sporting the figure of Lichtwesen, the all-consuming ‘light-being’ which also bears uncanny similarity to the Lurianic Or Ein Sof.31 According to Hegel, Spinoza fails in 29 While commenting on the Lacanian elevation of the Father to the transcendental signifier which functions as a pivot in the symbolic sphere of Logos, Boyarin states that “the father simply does not have that transcendental status in early Jewish culture.” Hence, all the patriarchal logocentric imagery does not apply to the body of rabbinic writings: “No Logos, no Phallus, no father”; Daniel Boyarin, Sparks of the Logos. Essays in Rabbinic Hermeneutics (Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2003), 141. See also Peggy Kamuf’s commentary on Derrida’s concept of the ‘fatherless witnessing’ as necessarily connected with an originary belief; “To testify, to bear witness is to write in the absence of the father witness-for-the-witness; without, therefore, the full presence of the truth itself to the intuition of one’s hearers and judges. In the absence of the father of logos – the condition of writing – there can be no certainty, no proof as to the truthfulness of the testimony. Rather, there is only belief”; Peggy Kamuf, To Follow, 145. 30 See Kenneth Seeskin’s essay on Spinoza also in this volume. 31 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822), Hegel identifies ‘Oriental metaphysics’ with the essentially tragic Weltanschauung, relying on the eternal cycle of ‘alteration and decline,’ which keeps the balance of the Absolute Substance immutable and static: “… new life aris-

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his intentions to create a convincing metaphysics of finitude, because he lacks the proper mechanism of the determination-negation of the Infinite; in the end, and despite all the efforts to the contrary, the unstoppable light and fire of the primordial Lichtwesen engulfs all finite modifications which are ohne Dauer, without a lasting effect. Beings simply have no time to assert their finite mode of existence.32 While reading Hegel’s Phenomenology in Glas, Derrida creates a useful metaphor which allows him to solve this conundrum of creative destruction – a ‘frozen fire’  – which he immediately associates with the motif of tsimtsum: the divine retreat and restraint, ‘cooling down’ of the fire and ‘setting down’ of the sun. In the beginning, there is nothing, only light, the ‘all-consuming fire’: light engaged in the ceaseless ‘holocaust’ which burns all; an apocalyptic fury of destruction, the pure death-drive which leaves no room for anything else, because it leaves no traces, by constantly annihilating all being and itself: Pure and figurless, this light burns all. It burns itself in the all-burning it is, leaves, of itself or anything, no trace, no mark, no sign of passage. Pure consuming destruction, pure effusion of light without shadow, noon without contrary, without resistance, without obstacle, waves, showers, streams ablaze with light: ‘The movements of its own externalization, its

es out of death. This is the radical ideal of Oriental metahypsics”: G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822), trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 203. Hegel attributes this view – ‘the Oriental theory of absolute identity’ – to Spinoza in his lectures on the history of philosophy: “So we can say that with Spinozism everything goes into the abyss but nothing emerges from it. In Spinoza the particular is adopted from representation without being justified. For it to be justified he would have to deduce or derive it from his substance, but this is not what happens. What differentiates and forms the particular is said to be just a modification of the absolute substance and nothing actual in its own self […] The operation upon it is just the stripping away of its determination or particularity, so that it can be thrown back into the one absolute substance. This is what is unsatisfying in Spinoza”; G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. Robert F. Brown (Berkeley: Unversity of Califonia Press, 1990), 155; my emphasis. The short cycle of the apparent emergence of particularity out of the undifferentiated abyss of one substance is also adopted by Deleuze who accelarates it to the infinitisemal oscillation of singularities rapidly coming in and out of existence. For Deleuze, the original substance of full life is a pure unbound flux of becoming and perishing, where “everything springs up only to disappear immediately”: Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 44. 32 Hegel might have known more about the kabbalistic imagery of the primordial light than we usually assume, for what he ascribes to the ‘Oriental metaphysics’ of Spinoza is also the feature of Sarug’s metaphorical interpretation of tsimtsum, which passed onto Sarug’s pupil, Abraham Herrera, who was read and admired by Spinoza: here, as Schulte nicely puts it, Zimzum is nicht von Dauer: “Tsimtsum does not last”; Schulte, Zimzum, 96. On the use of kabbalah and Spinozism in Hegel, see also Paul Franks, “Nothing Comes from Nothing: Judaism, the Orient, and Kabbalah in Hegel’s Reception of Spinoza,” in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael della Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 512–539.

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creations in the element without obstacle of its otherness, are effusions of light (Lichtgüsse); in their simplicity, they are at the same time its becoming-for-itself and the return from its being-there, torrents of fire destructive of figuration.’ By very reason of this indifference – or rather of this absence of opposition – the pure content of this being is without essence. The all-burning is ‘an essenceless by-play’ (Beiherspielen), pure accessory of the substances that rises without ever setting, without becoming a subject. And without consolidating through the self its differences… this play does not yet work. (Gl, 238; my emphasis)

It is only in the next – inexplicable – move that this fiery substance withdraws from itself into itself, thus creating a new ontological dimension of inwardness, Innerlichkeit: the substance becomes ‘also subject.’ And although later, in the Science of Logic, Hegel will call this move by the purely philosophical name of ‘negation of negation,’ in which the first light retreats from all-consuming annihilation and lets beings be, Derrida insists on presenting it in a series of theosophic images in order to remind us about its Oriental/Lurianic origin. It is, therefore, not an abstract ‘negation of negation’ but a concrete act of tsimtsum which ends ‘the play of pure light’ and inagurates the proper work which is the work of the negative: The light envelops itself in darkness even before becoming subject. In order to become subject, in effect the sun must go down [decline]. Subjectivity always produces itself in a movement of occidentalization […] That is the origin of history, the beginning of the going down, the setting of the sun, the passage to occidental subjectivity. Fire becomes for (it)self and is lost. (Gl, 239–40)

Fire, as it were, freezes under the gaze of this absolute negativity which is the divine subject: the abyssal darkness of the inwardness into which God had withdrawn away from all presence. The emptied substance cools down and congeals, which allows the finite beings to come to the fore and to last: to stay in existence, remain, survive, live-on. They are finally ‘given time,’ which means that they are not immediately consumed the moment they come into being; the ‘gift of time’ protects their precarious finitude and asserts them in their right to exist, to live-on, survivre. The idea of the creation as the perfect gift of time, disseminated as if it were a new currency thrown into circulation, becomes the main subject of Derrida’s essay from the ’90s: Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, which again plays more or less openly with the Lurianic ‘fatherless fable,’ by calling it simply a ‘narrative,’ le récit. For, where there is a true gift, which is necessarily ‘without reason,’ there must also be a story, the only form able to grasp the ‘tukhe of the gift’33: The gift would be that which does not obey the principle of reason: It is, it ought to be, it owes itself to be without reason, without wherefore, and without foundation. (GT, 156) 33 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125. Cited subsequently as GT.

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For Derrida, to give being means most of all to give time: to create an incalculable dimension of futurity in which the story can develop – write itself out – without preempting its finale (if this is ever to come). The given time is the time of the world: a kind of Galgenfriest, a ‘time of respite’ with no term, no Urteil hanging over it, no final judgment or verdict – and as such the very opposite of the Hegelian understanding of history as the delayed apocalypse, comprised in the Schillerian aphorism: Die Weltgeschichte ist der Weltgericht.34 This interminably given time with no eschatological ‘end of the world’ in sight is also the proper element of ‘living-on,’ as we will learn from the Death Penalty seminar, given in Derrida’s last years of life: not knowing when one will die is precisely the necessary ‘respite’ which allows the finite being to live, live-on properly, and not just anticipate its inevitable death.35 Suspense, delay, deferment, postponement – all the tricks of Sheharazade are deployed here too, in the Derridean ‘fable’ which prolongs the ‘given time’ and infinitely delays the apocalyptic finale of redemptive pay-back, secretly hoping that such postponement will annul it altogether. Yet, it must be stated again, such position does not mean a complete annulment of the mesianic dimension. To the contrary: the messianic is very much there, but in decidedly anti-apocalyptic and anti-eschatological form. It is present as the horizon of Rahamim: the absolute absolution, the ultimate forgiveness of all guilt and debt, the infinite respite  – and as such the opposite of the apocalyptic ‘fulfillment’ in which the tikkun can easily take on the dark colours of metaphysical revenge and violent ‘undoing’ of the evil of creaturely existence. Thus, when Derrida claims, seemingly counterintuitively, that only counterfeit money can actually create a proper gift, he indicates that mercy, Rahamim, will release the recipients from the harshness of the final judgment in which the true value of the currency would have to be established. “Mercy seasons justice,” as he repeates after Shakespeare, meaning that mercy postpones the moment of the ultimate verdict – potentially and hopefully, indefinitely (ibid, 105). The sephirot of Din and Rahamim, therefore, cooperate in the Derridean logic of the creaturely gift: judgment dissects, separates, and differentiates – while mercy gives time of infinite postponement, which lets finite creatures off the hook, by letting them be in the realm of undecidability between being and nothingness, subsistence and mere existence, genuine reality and mere Schein. We will never know if we  ‘really-really’ – truly, genuinely – exist, but this lack of certainty is not to be deplored: the release from this form of metaphysical concern, which traditionally 34 “The history of the world is the trial of the world”: this phrase, later borrowed by Hegel, appears originally in Friedrich Schiller’s poem, Resignation. 35 See Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 256.

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sought the justification and sufficient reason for contingent existence, constitutes the highest act of mercy. This is also Derrida’s understanding of Gelassenheit, the universal and merciful letting-go reiterated and repeated in all forms and variations, forming, as it were, a healing rhythm for the material finite universe.36 The infinite gift is the gift of in/de/finite time, and in/de/finite given time is the infinite reprieve; this is the only mode in which Infinity survives in the dimension of finitude, as the infinite series of finite beings for which there is no end in sight, or the endless Ausschreiben of the original simple presence. Derrida writes: The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time. What it gives, the gift, is time, but this gift of time is also a demand of time […] The gift gives, demands, and takes time. The thing gives, demands, or takes time. That is one of the reasons this thing of the gift will be linked to the – internal – necessity of a certain narrative [récit] or of a certain poetics of narrative […] The thing as given thing, the given of the gift arrives, if it arrives, only in narrative. (GT, 41: emphasis original)

Here Derrida repeats the Schellingian definition of ‘narrative philosophy’: there is no history without story; only narrative can capture the element of time which, in order to be a real temporality, has to be incalculable, open-ended, free from systematic closure.37 Again, to give beings means to give time: to pass from the timeless metaphysical structure, which offers a return in the form of reversio, onto the path of denouement in which what happens next cannot be reducible to what happened before, the proleptic route with no return. The donor/author, therefore, can no longer be conceived as the ‘ground’ or the First Cause; Derrida will once and for all reject all attempts to reduce time to the eternal hierarchical structure of metaphysical analogy and thus to cancel the ‘gift of time’ which is the only proper gift. He is not interested in ‘grounding,’ but, as Elliot Wolfson calls it aptly, in ‘giving beyond gift,’ i.e., a process which implies the necessary ‘tukhe of the gift’ (GT, 125): a different initiation, completely occluding the origin and inaugurating an irreversible and univocal leap into temporality without any analogical safety nets – into what Hans Jonas, also in his Lurianic variations, calls the ‘hazard of time.’38 It is only in this narrative/scriptural sequence that, as the

36 See Jacques Derrida, On The Name, Thomas Dutoit, ed., trans. John P. Leavey (Sauf le nom) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 73 37 See F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 94. 38 Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality. A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, trans. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 134.

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Talmud says, the second deed can be truly greater than the first one.39 In other words, there is no way to tell/write – what happens next. The Author has let go of the story, the Father has left the edifice of being. And we don’t miss him. This future-oriented messianicity has a very different view of the redemption than the messianism of the Grand Return, wishing to go back to the undisturbed origin. If Derrida constantly urges us to rethink another possibility of a récit, a literary form of narrative capable of writing a different, more freely disseminating story, it is precisely because he wants to distance himself from the phonocentric scheme which he still sees as operative in the Hegelian-Lacanian idea of language as the ‘sphere of the symbolic restitution.’ For Derrida, the ‘passion of narration’ (GT, 23) is not driven by the nostalgic desire of restitutio ad integrum: it is proleptic and disseminating, happy to embrace the Babelian condition of dispersion and meandering – toward the unknown finale, no longer describable by the Hegelian vocabulary of return and dealienation. No longer the symbolic sphere, bound by the Phallus of the Dead Father, language will be as liberated as being itself, now also understood as the ongoing story which writes itself on and out, freed by the gift from authorial intention. But this also means: no authenticity, no myth of the sacred origin, nothing to return to and nothing to restitute. No more ‘fathering’ to language, no more heeding the enigmatic Anspruch des Vaters, the ‘call of the Father,’ the privileged original Voice: This great transcendentalist tradition can inscribe the transcendental given in general (the present appearing of that which appears in the light, or else created being, the originary given in a gift which comes down to and comes back to Nature, Being, God, the Father – or the Mother) as well as in the phallus in general (transcendental signifier sealing, according to Lacan, a ‘symbolic order’ that guards the gift against its dissemination, which is perhaps to say, against itself) […] For in the end, it must always be the Thing, the same thing that gives itself, even if it does so by dividing itself or by partitioning itself into partial objects. But the Thing is not a partial object, which is why Lacan, for example, insists on the fact that the phallus, the signifier of all signifiers, condition of every gift and every exchange, cannot be a partial object. (GT, 53)

But what if there is no transcendental Thing, and merely partial objects, but then, without the contrast, also no longer ‘partial’ – fragmentary, incomplete, broken, deficient – but, in their finitude, amounting to all that exists? What if there is no Father to guard this ‘disseminatiom without return,’ ‘the without-return of the gift’ (GT, 48)? The premonition of this most fundamental sense of freedom is comprised in the notion of ‘counterfeit money’ which lends itself to speculation – simultaneously economical and metaphysical  – precisely as in the short story written by Baudelaire and commented on by Derrida, in which a rich Parisian bourgeois 39 See Ta’anit, 24a.

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enacts a practical joke and offers a beggar a large sum of false banknotes. The ‘literary secret’ which initiates the story and keeps it alive, potentially forever, is that the beggar will never know if the coin given to him was genuine or false, unless, obviously, he is caught by the police. It is this very secret which Derrida associates with the gift proper: only ‘counterfeit money’ can truly be given in its ‘pure phenomenality,’ i.e., without the context which traditionally occupied metaphysics, always trying to test the currency of appearances and verify its ontological validity. The speculative/narrative secret of the ‘counterfeit money’ is the ultimate Seinlassen, the ‘letting-be’ and ‘letting-go’ of the realm of appearances, freedom from the phallic ground of the unscathed, genuine, authentic. Fake or not – who cares – this is the world of the ‘living-on,’ in which life itself – life given to the beggar, which he will be able to prolong thanks to these dubious means – proves to be the only truth, the only reality. More than that: the only possible reality. Let’s speculate further: perhaps, in the background of Derrida’s rendering of Baudelaire, there is yet another narrative – The Six Beggars of Nachman of Bratslav, the Hasidic master of story-telling, who strongly influenced Franz Kafka. In Nachman’s allegory, the wandering beggars restlessly pace the orbit of the whole world and tell stories to anybody willing to listen: story-telling – the more fantastic, the better – is the currency on which their livelihood depends. Once we conflate Baudelaire’s beggar with Nachman’s beggar, the peculiarly Lurianic foil of Derrida’s speculation will immediately come to the fore. The Marrano interference allowing him to read the French early modernist through the lenses of his East-European Jewish contemporary produces here the most comical effect of a truly divine comedy: the ‘counterfeit money’ of the ‘given time’ is paid back by ‘counterfeit stories’ of creatures telling about themselves and their possible ‘donor/sponsor’ the most unheard of ‘fables.’ The Nachmanian beggar, being the emblem of creaturely life, receives a mysterious coin of which he cannot know whether it is true or false, but he nonetheless must make out of it his living, and this is all he cares about. Perhaps, there is also an echo of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise here, with the story of the three rings, one of which may be authentic, but, alternatively, all three may also be false – yet the recipient has no choice but to go on living as if what he received was ‘true.’ This make-believe aspect of living-on – of going on as if the gift were genuine and good and thus making it genuine and good – is, for Derrida, the self-asserting, selfnarrating and self-formatting aspect of survivre which turns nothing into something; it rises from the Ungrund of secrecy and uncertainty in order to detach itself from its dark beginnings (precisly as in Schelling’s conception of the narrative) to form a solid ‘middle’ in which it is only ‘living-on’ that counts.40 That counts: 40 Comp. the fragment from “Living-On” on survie as secured precisely by the means of recit: “… narrative as reaffirmation (yes, yes) of life, in which the yes, which says nothing, describes

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precisely. It may be the currency of appearance only, merely a ‘sign’ of a ‘true’ coin, but as a self-narrated and self-confirmed  – literally: self-underwritten  – appearance, it is no longer in the sphere of vague epiphenomenality, endangered by some true money minted by Being itself. All that counts is the here and now, so uniquely focused on the hard task of ‘living-on’ that it has no time or mind to go back and consider the issue of its legitimacy. This is what Derrida calls – ironically but nonetheless truly  – a perfect gift: the gift of life no longer concerned with its origin; life capable of the lekh lekha, no longer obsessed with its justification, ‘without whence,’ ohne warum.41 But to say that all that counts is the currency concerning which we don’t know and never will know where it came from; that all we have is the weight of ‘pure phenomenality’ which, taken in absolute terms, might be as heavy as the ‘thing in itself’, but also as light as the foam of a ‘mere appearance,’ this means, precisely, to give up forever on the absolutist perspective. More than that: to give up on the absolutist perspective as abandoned and dissolved by this very absolutist perspective, the ‘donor agency’ which agrees to retreat – and, by withdrawing, erases itself in a much more efficient manner than the kenotic death of God, which insists on the persistent ‘memory of the Passion.’42 It means to deactivate the whole traditional metaphysical dualism of genuine and false being with one stroke of the gift: we will never know whether it brought, as Baudelaire puts it, “universal ruin or universal progress – for the name little matters” (GT, 131). Precisely, the name does not matter any more. If counterfeit money is all that counts,

nothing but itself, the performance of its own event of affirmation, repeats itself, quotes, cites itself, says yes-to itself as (to an-) other, in accordance with the ring, requotes and recites a commitment that would not take place outside this repetition of a performace without presence. This strange ring says yes to life only in the overdetermining ambiguity of the triumph de (of, over) life, sur (over, on) life, the triumph marked in the ‘on’ of ‘living on’ [le sur d’un survivre]”; Derrida, “Living-On,” 104; my emphasis. 41 See Derrida’s commentary on Angelus Silesius’ “Rose Without Why” in On the Name, 84. It is worth stating that, in pursuing the idea of the anonymous gift which will be used by the recipient to stand on her own feet and make her living, Derrida is not far from rabbinic orthodoxy, since he chimes in perfect harmony with Maimonides. In Hilkhot Matanot Aniyim (Laws about Giving to Poor People), Chapter 10:7–14 of his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides lists his famous Eight Levels of Giving, where the most preferable form of tsedakah is: “Giving tzedakah anonymously to an unknown recipient. Giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need; so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others.” It could thus be that not just Nachman’s story, but also Maimonides’ detailed financial account of charity lurks behind Derrida’s ‘Jewish’ take on Baudelaire. 42 See Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 50.

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then there is no need to stick to the negative terminology of the Fall and Ab-Fall, finite being envisaged as a cosmic ruin of Infinity; we now truly enter the realm of the new affirmative metaphysics of finitude, which presents itself consciously as a récit, a scriptural narrative – “In the beginning was not […] the Logos, but the Fable,” or ‘desire to create an event’: It [story] integrates the possible, aleatory, incalculable consequences of counterfeit money. We were saying that one can give only in the measure of the incalculable; therefore, only an hypothesis of counterfeit money would make the gift possible […] This opposition between true and counterfeit money loses here all its pertinence – which would be one of the things demonstrated by this literary experiment […]The desire to ‘create an event’ by the offering of counterfeit money can only excuse, can only render a criminal enjoyment excusable if there we desire to create an event. In itself, this desire would be good, it would be the desire to give that on which to live, very simply, to give more to live [donner plus à vivre], indeed to give life… (GT, 157; my emphasis)

Derrida is not the first to perceive the metaphysical enigma of creation as belonging to the genre of criminal novel: Siegfried Krakauer and Ernst Bloch were there first in their rendition of the Lurianic narrative that focused on the issue of the ‘illicity’ – or the antinomian aspect of incalculability – of the creative crime, and compared the metaphysician’s origin-obsessed question of whodunit with the restless search of the private detective.43 Derrida’s innovation lies in giving up on the search for the perpetrator and concentrating on whatever happens next in the essentially illegal world beyond the very possibility of legitimisation, but not necessarily dark and ruinous because of it (after all, the desire itself to ‘invent the other,’ or ‘create the event,’ even if illicit, “would be good”). This incipient impossibility of ultimate justification opens an as yet uncharted territory of free speculation in all possible senses of the word, ultimately liberated from all the ‘Hegelian axioms’ (G, 242) of sacrifice, debt, and the redemptive-apocalyptic return, with its well-calculated pay-back to the donor. Thus also: speculation as the financial operation involving throwing into circulation an ‘experimental’ currency, the effects of which cannot be calculated: it may end up in catastrophe, but it can also bring more than ever expected. Speculation trying to follow what happens next, in the open future of unintended consequences. And speculation as the narrative self-mirroring in which the story, bestowed with divine attributes, weaves itself as if ex nihilo and causa sui, out of nothing and uncaused

43 See Ernst Bloch, “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

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by anything. By  speculating, it gives being without having it in the first place. It lends itself to a ‘serious work’ of time, itself being initially nothing but a ‘play,’ a ludus of the speculative spectacle, a Zuspiel. How is that possible? While alluding to Lacan’s definition of love as ‘giving without having,’ Derrida replies: The very paradox of ‘giving what one does not have’ […] has the value of paradox only because of what links, in common sense, giving with having. (GT, 48–9)

The story gives without having, by giving time: it creates an incalculable dimension of futurity in which the story develops without preempting its finale. Suspense, delay, and deferment prolong the ‘given time’ and infinitely delay the apocalyptic finale in the hope that it will be annulled altogether. Hopefully, the time of judgment concerning the ‘counterfeit money’ will never come: no superior agency will call our bluff and bid the dubious currency of being to show its ‘true’ value – The gift, if there is any, must go against nature or occur without nature; it must break off at the same blow, at the same instant with all originarity, with all originary authenticity. And, therefore, also with its contrary: artifice, and so on. (GT, 162; my emphasis)

It is, therefore, the gift which constitutes the positive reverse of ‘disappearance of any originary presence,’ this absolute nontruth which is “at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of truth” (D, 156). We can gnaw the coin of the given/gifted currency of being in our teeth as long as we wish, but we will never know if it is true gold, because, in this metaphysics of non-presence, there’s no such thing. Being either comes out of the nontruth of the ‘fable’ – or does not come at all. Perhaps this is the ultimate meaning of Hegel’s enigmatic diagnosis according to which being is ‘the illusory being in essence,’ i.e., an essential appearance behind which there is nothing deeper or more real to discover.44 Carrying the ‘white metaphor’ of counterfeit money even further,45 we may therefore say, after Derrida, that the realm of disseminating being can only be compared to a turbo-capitalist economy of vertiginous speculative spiralling, which goes against nature, i.e., irreversibly exits the house of natural value. Against Marx, Derrida gives up on any nostalgia for the economical calculability of the

44 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1989), 398. 45 See Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1, On Metaphor (Autumn, 1974): 5–74, where he approaches the role of the metaphor in philosophical language: partly ‘bleached’ and ‘whitened,’ i.e., not as colourful as in the openly poetic use of language, but nonetheless a figure of speech resorting to an image, i.e., what Hegel reluctantly calls Vorstellungsdenken, ‘picture-thinking.’

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‘household,’ where the two sides of ought and has must always equal one another; his turbo-capitalist vision of the disseminating world is outside oikos and any family business, be it ‘Mother-Nature,’ the Heideggerian ‘House of Being,’ or the Hegelian ‘Holy Family’ (GT, 158). We are indeed in the open domain of financial speculation or chrematistics, which Aristotle already associated with free-trading, free accumulation of wealth and the freedom of the sea, as opposed to the claustrophobic enclosure of economics, concerned only with securing natural means of survival: It is, like counterfeit money, the chance for the gift itself. The chance for the event. Nothing can happen without the family and without economy, to be sure, but neither can anything happen in the family: in the family, that is, in the sealed enclosure […] of the restricted, absolutely restricted economy, without the least chrematistic vertigo. (GT, 158–9; my emphasis)

This vertigo can come only from beyond the oikos and its family ties: “nothing can happen in the family” (ibid.), where the ties oblige, restrict, and demand a quick exchange of do ut des, an instant bartering of goods and services; nothing because the nihil novi sub sole nature of familial relations precludes anything truly new or experimental.46 The ‘desire to create an event,’ therefore, cannot be based on the oikotic metaphors – the House of Nature, the House of Being, the House of God – where everything is bound to stay within family/nature, close to the roots and origins. The ‘counterfeit money’ business is definitely voyou and does not belong to a respectable household.47 It rather sails through the infinite spaces of the cosmic sea, disseminating in all directions, and bringing either infinite ruin or infinite riches…who can tell?

46 It is here where Derrida’s version of the ‘fatherless fable’ and Boyarin’s rendering of the rabbinic texts as ‘no father, no phallus, no logos’ definitely part ways. While Boyarin leans towards the Marxist rejection of modern speculative economy and extolls the ‘bartered word’ of rabbinic hermeneutics, Derrida praises the ‘chrematistic vertigo,’ which can also be read as a veiled critique of Marx’s insistence on natural value as the true source of any value. Boyarin writes: “For the Rabbis, the coin indeed does stink, pecunia olet. We would say that the truth is the truth whatever its source, separating between the meaning of the utterance and its material origin, just as the value of the coin has nothing to do with where it came from. For the Rabbis, the material of the coin and the matter of the language itself are crucial and meaning/value is not abstracted from either”; Boyarin, The Sparks of Logos, 129. So, no father, no phallus, no logos – but nonetheless some nature. 47 The term voyou [rogue] which applies to members of the half-criminal demi-monde is used by Derrida to describe everything that managed to escape the paradigm of sovereignty and thus enjoys the risky ‘freedom of the sea’ – the perfect gift included; see Jacques Derrida, Rogues. Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). The metaphors of hazard, play, stakes, risk, and gamble also often appear in Hans Jonas’ rendering of the Lurianic myth, where the godhead makes the decision for “the blind, the planless, the accidental, the incalculable, the extremely precarious in the adventure of the world – in a word,

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This vertiginous turn is indeed a matter of conversion: the speculative conversion of counterfeit money into a valid currency or the Hegelian conversion of ‘nothing into something.’48 The pre-affirmation, which Derrida sees as the necessary ingredient of every belief, la foi originaire, would thus simply be the first choice of putting faith in being, a credit given to the enterprise of becoming about which we can never be sure that it is worth anything – until we try it. Ultimately, therefore, the question – Is tsimtsum a catastrophe or a beginning of creation proper? Is it an accident or a purposeful act? Does the world truly exist or is it merely an illusion? – cannot be answered metaphysically.49 It seems that the answer simply does not exist and can only be stipulated in the act of subjective free choice. Yet, at the same time, it is not just any old question. It is the question which defines the very possibility of subjective freedom: the very first choice to be made.

for the enormous gamble that the first ground, if mind was present then, wagered with creation”; Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality. A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, trans. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 189. Jonas also depicts the emerging life-forms as “an experiment with mounting stakes and risks which in the fateful freedom of man may end in disaster as well as in success”; Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life. Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1966), xxiv. 48 Comp. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 19: “This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.” 49 In Glas, Derrida says: “If God is (probably) a man in speculative dialectics, the godness of God – the irony that divides him and makes him come off his hinges – the infinite disquiet of his essence is (if possibly) woman(ly)” (Gl, 188). But that also means that the secret belongs to God him(her) self: it is not just to admit, as Gideon Ofrat does, that on this view, “simultaneously monotheistic and radical, the source is unattainable” (ibid., 54): “the eternal verting of divine countenance, or, as the Kabbalah puts it, reisha delo yada (the unattainable head)” (ibid., 55) is also unattainable for itself. The most radical vista imaginable in the domain of negative theology, therefore, is to delegate the non-knowledge to the source itself and make the secret the inherent enigma of sod (the highest mystery in the pardes, i.e., the talmudic/kabbalistic gradation of secrets): not an external ignorance but the essential unknowability of God to himself, his eternal – eternally unanswerable – Elohi-mi?, “who is God?” This is precisely what Derrida is doing: he is projecting the lack of the answer into the divine itself. It is, therefore, not that God is a deus fallax who deceives us and hides from sight: there is no ‘deceit,’ there is only a dark beginning of God hidden from himself, the original negativity. This is also what Žižek means by saying that Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge (in Derrida’s notation, SA, Savoir Absolue) is not about knowing everything but rather about knowing the limits beyond which there is simply nothing to know: Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 321. The Derridean sod is definitely such a limit: it is an empty secret insofar as there is nothing to be known. As Elliot Wolfson writes in his contribution to this volume: for Derrida, “the ultimate secret is the open secret, the secret that there is no secret, and hence the watchword of the secret of secrecy (secret du secret) is that ‘no more secrecy means more secrecy’ (plus de secret, plus de secret)” (150). The quote derives from Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 100.

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Kabbalah’s ‘True’ Pupil? The medium of the story is writing: the series of signs. The concept of the original writing constitutes the main theme of Derrida’s Of Grammatology which constantly challenges the metaphysical image of God creating the world with his living Word  – the sacred phone  – with no mediation (and thus distortion) involved in the perfect creative act. If, in the kabbalistic tradition, the Torah is the original scripture, there is no voice which it would represent or express: no authorial intention, and no referent primordial to the writing. It does not ‘want to say’ anything – in French, to signify, i.e., to be a sign of something or a derivative representation of something prior to the sign, is precisely voluoir-dire, ‘wantingto-say’  – and in that sense it is without meaning or denotation; the derivation following the intention of the author is here radically absent. The contraction of the divine living presence, therefore, is implied in the very originality of the creative text which then constitutes, as it were – and according to Derrida’s own metaphor – a kind of a DNA programming for the worldly reality, which in itself remains a ‘meaningless’ techne. Derrida’s treatise on the new science of writing  – grammatology  – should indeed be read in the lights of Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,” where the kabbalistic ‘transforming view’ is equated with the intuition that, in David Biale’s translation, “all worlds are nothing more than ‘names recorded’ on the scroll of God’s essence” (the original German is even more striking in the use of the scriptural metaphor: “Namen, die auf dem Papier von Gottes Wesen aufgezeichnet werden”).50 According to Scholem, “Der Name Gottes ist ansprechbar, aber nicht aussprechbar… Die ‘wahre’ Sprache kann hicht gesprochen werden” (ibid., 86). “The ‘true’ language cannot be spoken,” Biale translates and adds: “As Scholem puts it elsewhere, the name of God is ‘absolute, meaning-bestowing, but itself meaningless’” (ibid., 87). The reason for this is that the ‘true’ speech is not speech at all (hence the inverted commas); it is rather the primordial ecriture which cannot be ‘spoken’ by definition and, as such, has no meaning in itself: “something which was never spoken and which is nothing other than writing itself as the origin of language” (G, 44). It is the beginning of all speech as a meaningful practice, but – as the conditioning beginning – itself remains a code programming the transcendental possibility of language. God’s name, therefore, can be ‘mentioned’ or ‘referred-to’ (angesprochen), but it cannot be ‘expressed’ in our meaning-oriented language (ausgesprochen).

50 David Biale, “Scholem’s ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah.’ Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism, vol. 5, nr 1 (1985): 85.

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In this volume’s introductory chapter, I mentioned Scholem’s enigmatic reference to Cordovero who “probably would have fared better if he were a phenomenologist,” subsequently followed by the remark that I placed as the epigraph to this essay, which expresses hope that one day in the future a true pupil of Cordovero will emerge, who will finally find an adequate language to explain the kabbalistic teaching. Scholem himself felt that he failed in this respect: although he insisted on Lurianic kabbalah’s break with Neoplatonism and its ‘symbolism of light,’ he nonetheless did not propose a new positive idiom which would make the kabbalistic doctrine ‘denuded,’ ‘unveiled,’ or ‘not mysterious’ (or, at least, less so). He suggested in passing a phenomenological model, but did not stick to it either – for, wouldn’t it be a yet another version of the ‘symbolism of light,’ as misleading in the elucidation of the mystery of tsimtsum as was the previous Neoplatonic conceptuality? In his critique of phenomenology, Derrida states clearly that grammatology, which occupies itself with the ‘arche-writing’ as the ‘archetrace,’ can never be understood within the metaphysics of presence to which phenomenology belongs, together with the Neoplatonic paradigm: Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological experience of a presence. It marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is why, once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the former may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. As the phenomenology of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible. (G, 68; my emphasis)

The original writing is not just the ‘dead time’ – the time of the past which never was present; it is also a space, equally ‘dead’ in the way it allows the supposed living subject to fall away from itself, expand and self-alienate, yet not in the manner of what Scholem calls the misleading Lichtsymbolik of Neoplatonism (as nolens volens applied by the kabbalists), where the light spreading through the kenoma weakens, but never cuts the umbilical cord linking it to the central fons vitae: Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject […] That becoming – or that drift/derivation – does not befall the subject which would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the subject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organization, that is to say, of the economy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or the referent. (G, 69; my emphasis)

Neither phenomenology, therefore, nor the Neoplatonic ‘symbolism of light’ are adequate discourses to capture the specificity of the arche-writing: the only idiom capable to describe the effect of tsimtsum – “the original absence of the subject of

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writing [which] is also the absence of the thing or the referent” (ibid.) – is grammatology, a science far more radical than any theology of the death of God, which, on the one hand, wishes to challenge the Neoplatonic living fullness of creatio continua, yet, on the other, still remains within the onto-theological paradigm: That the logos is first imprinted and that that imprint is the writing-resource of language, signifies, to be sure, that the logos is not a creative activity, the continuous full element of the divine word, etc. But it would not mean a single step outside of metaphysics if nothing more than a new motif of ‘return to finitude,’ of ‘God’s death,’ etc., were the result of this move. It is that conceptuality and that problematics that must be deconstructed. They belong to the onto-theology they fight against. (G, 68)

Approached in the grammatological perspective, therefore, tsimtsum is not a ‘death of God’: a willing sacrifice of the Absolute who would wish to make a room for creation.51 The hypothesis of the arche-writing already implies the divine retreat into “a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence” (G, 70), or a God-always-already-withdrawn. The grammatological deconstruction of the theosophic metaphor leaves us with the radical beginning in the form of the original trace: “the signified is originarily and essentially (and not only for a finite and created spirit) trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier” (G, 73; my emphasis). In the immemorial alephbeginning, therefore, God created a sign – a sign of himself, or, as the Zohar puts it: a ‘point [nekuda] of the imprint [reshima].’52 But the only bereshit we can think of, the beth-beginning, commences with the play of signifiers, where no God, the Master Signified, is present any longer. It is precisely this abrupt transformation – the Gestalt-switch from the interior of the ‘simple presence’ of Ein-Sof to the exterior of the scriptural mode of the selfimprint – which makes it possible for anything to emerge, marked with individual difference in time and space. Once the ‘simple presence’ begins to ‘write itself out’ in the series of the ‘signs engraved into the heavenly sphere’ (forming, as it were, the event horizon for the world to take place), creation commences. Without 51 See again Derrida’s critique of the ‘Hegelian axiom’ of ‘kenosis in creation’ in the Introductory Chapter. 52 Comp. the opening sentences from the Zohar, which Derrida also quotes in Dissemination in Soller’s rendering: “In the beginning – when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the heavenly sphere that surrounded him […] The well broke through and yet did not break through the ether. It could not be recognized at all until a hidden, supernal point shone forth under the impact of the final breaking through (Hokhmah). Beyond this point nothing can be known. Therefore it is called reshit, beginning – the first word (out of ten) by means of which the universe has been created”; Zohar, The Book of Splendor. Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, ed. and trans. Gershom Scholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 3.

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writing, there would be no being other than undifferentiated meziut: no time, no space, no difference, no exteriority, and no movement, and no ‘nominalism’ (mystical or not53) of things achieving their material singularity – Arche-writing, at first the possibility of the spoken word, then of the ‘graphie’ in the narrow sense, the birthplace of ‘usurpation,’ denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, ‘spatial’ and ‘objective’ exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the gramme, without differance as temporalization, without the nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present […] All dualisms, all theories of the immortality of the soul or of the spirit, as well as all monisms, spiritualist or materialist, dialectical or vulgar, are the unique theme of a metaphysics whose entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduction of the trace. The subordination of the trace to the full presence summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by an onto-theology determining the archeological and eschatological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without différance: another name for death, historical metonymy where God’s name holds death in check. That is why, if this movement begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics. Only infinite being can reduce the difference in presence. In that sense, the name of God, at least as it is pronounced within classical rationalism, is the name of indifference itself. Only a positive infinity can lift the trace, ‘sublimate’ it […] We must not therefore speak of a ‘theological prejudice,’ functioning sporadically when it is a question of the plenitude of the logos; the logos as the sublimation of the trace is theological. Infinitist theologies are always logocentrisms, whether they are creationisms or not. (G, 70–71; my emphasis)

Could this be the new idiom of kabbalah, which Scholem was looking for? Could Derrida be, as the inventor of grammatology, the ‘true pupil’ of Cordovero and Luria? Indeed, if to go against the grain of logocentric infinitist theology was their ‘most significant intention,’54 the kabbalists simply had no linguistic means at their disposal to articulate it, so they encrypted their highest mystery, in order for future generations to come and ‘denude’ it: to uncover and make it ‘no longer mysterious.’ The intuition that created finite being is writing, due to which the infinite simple presence ex-scribes itself in the blank space of nothingness, is so completely at odds with any ‘symbolism of light’ that any cross between them could have produced only confusing results. But in Derrida’s grammatological nachträglich version, the wisdom of the kabbala denudata quite simply states that: 53 See Biale, “Scholem’s ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah.’,” 83, as well as my commentary on ‘mystical nominalism’ in the opening paragraph of this volume’s Introductory chapter. 54 Biale, “Scholem’s ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah.’,” 83.

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… there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the ‘real’ supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, God, that which words like ‘real father’ name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of divine presence. (G, 159; my emphasis)55

“In the beginning God created nothing” – and this creation of the void in the act of the divine tsimtsum turns out to be the greatest possible gift. Contrary to the vitalist intuitions of infinitist onto-theology, it is neither the plenitude of the ‘fountain of life’ nor the full ontological presence of self-identical highest being which constitute the creatory Donum Dei. In his deconstructive inversion of the ‘theological prejudice’ that spontaneously privileges fullness, presence, nature, voice, and life, Derrida – following the traces of the kabbalistic counter-imagination – demonstrates that it is actually the very opposite that truly lets beings be, breathe, and live: absence, detachment, fragmentation, space, finite time, counterfeit currency of signs/appearances, and the techne of ‘writing-out’ the indifferent pleroma of meziut, where no being or life is yet possible. The true gift of creation, therefore, is the freedom of the written sign, constantly falling from the grace of the divine presence.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2007. Altizer, Thomas. Deconstruction and Theology, New York: Crossroad, 1982. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. 3, trans. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Biale, David. “Scholem’s ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah.’ Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism, vol. 5, nr 1/ 1985, 67–93. Bielik-Robson. Agata, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos, London: Routledge, 2014. _____. “Burn After Reading: Derrida, the Philosophical Marrano,” in Divisible Derridas, eds. Victor E. Taylor & Stephen Nichols, Davies Publication Group (Emergence), 2017.

55 This quote, which originally refers to Rousseau’s Confessions, is slightly – and deliberately – manipulated in order to enhance its implicit theological context: I substituted ‘father’ for ‘mother’ and ‘divine’ for ‘maternal.’ Just as Rousseau’s writing can only proceed in the absence of his mother, so does the scriptural enterprise of creation can take place only within the empty space made possible by tsimtsum as the ‘disappearance of the divine presence.’

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Bloch, Ernst. “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Boyarin, Daniel. Sparks of the Logos. Essays in Rabbinic Hermeneutics, Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2003. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972. de Leon, Moses. Zohar. The Book of Splendor. Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, ed. and trans. Gershom Scholem, New York: Schocken Books, 1963 Deleuze, Gilles, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1, On Metaphor (Autumn, 1974), pp. 5–74. _____. “Living On: Borderlines,” Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Continuum, 1979. _____. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. _____. Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1986. _____. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. _____. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denegations,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward, Albany: SUNY, 1992. _____. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. _____. Specters of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York & London: Routledge, 1994. _____. On The Name, Thomas Dutoit, ed., trans. John P. Leavey (Sauf le nom), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. _____. The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. _____. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. _____. Acts of Religion, Gil Anidjar ed., New York and London: Routledge, 2002. _____. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. _____. Psyche. Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rosenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. _____. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. _____. The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Drob, Sanford L. Kabbalah and Postmodernism. A Dialogue, New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Franks, Paul. “Nothing Comes from Nothing: Judaism, the Orient, and Kabbalah in Hegel’s Reception of Spinoza,” in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael della Rocca, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 512–539. Handelman, Susan A. The Slayers of Moses. The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, Albany: SUNY Press, 1982.

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Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. _____. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822), trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: –––. Cambridge University Press, 1981. _____. Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1989. _____. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. Robert F. Brown, Berkeley: Unversity of Califonia Press, 1990. Idel, Moshe. “Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah,” in Midrash and Literature, eds. G. H. Hartman and S. Budick, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality. A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, trans. Lawrence Vogel, Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996. _____. The Phenomenon of Life. Toward a Philosophical Biology, Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1966. Kamuf, Peggy. To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida, Edinborough: Edinborough University Press, 2010. Kierkegaard, Søren. Repetition, trans. M. G. Piety, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991. _____. “Humanism and An-Archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dodrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986. Magid, Shaul. “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope of Reading in Post-Lurianic Kabbala,” in Beginning/Again. Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, eds. Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid, New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002, 163–214. Naas, Michael. Miracle and Machine, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Ofrat, Gideon. The Jewish Derrida, Ney York: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Rank, Otto. The Trauma of Birth, Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2010. Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Galli, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Shakespeare, Steven. Derrida and Theology, New York: Continuum, 2009. Schelling, F. W. J. The Ages of the World, trans. Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr, New York: Columbia University Press, 1942. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken Books, 1961. _____. “Zehn Unhistorische Sätze über Kabbalah,” in Judaica 3. Studien zur jüdischen Mystik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973. _____. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser, New York: Schocken Books, 1976. _____. Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1976. _____. The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. Sollers, Philippe. Drame: Roman, Collection Tel Quel, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965. _____. Nombres, Collection Tel Quel, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968. Valery, Paul. Selected Writings, New York: New Directions Books, 1950. Vital, Hayyim ben Joseph. The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria – The Palace of Adam Kadmon, trans. Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padeh, Northvale, N.J. and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 1999.

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Wolfson, Elliot R. “Assaulting the Border: Kabbalistic Traces in the Margins of Derrida,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sept. 2002, 475–514. _____. Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Žižek, Slavoj, Less than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2012.

Christoph Schulte

Tsimtsum: Media and Arts When travelling to Paris in December 2012 for a défense de thèse at the Sorbonne, I was standing in front of one of those huge, oversized film advertisement posters used in the Paris Métro. Looking up, I saw the bow of a lifeboat, manned by a young man and a tiger in the midst of an ocean. On the bow was written: Tsimtsum. Since I was just about to finish the last chapters of the manuscript of my voluminous book on Zimzum,1 I considered this advertisement with a life boat called Tsimtsum (Fig. 1) to be a hallucination that might overcome even a philosophy professor who is completely overworked and numbed after writing for years on the history of the kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum and its diffusion in the modern world from the late sixteenth century until the twenty-first.

Fig. 1: Film Poster: Life of Pi (2012).

But a few weeks later, I saw this film by Ang Lee in the cinema, and I read the novel by Yann Martel, upon which the film is based, entitled Life of Pi and first published in 2002. There I learned that Tsimtsum is the name of a cargo ship bringing whole zoological garden from India to the U.S., but which sinks in a

1 Christoph Schulte, Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-018

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tropical storm. Only the boy and the tiger survive the shipwreck in the lifeboat of the Tsimtsum. The film and the book are full of allusions to Lurianic Kabbalah, and the book even explicitly states, that its protagonist studied the kabbalah of Isaac Luria years after the shipwreck. Tsimtsum, a Hebrew word for contraction or concentration, can be considered a leitmotiv of the book and the film.2 The ship Tsimtsum in some scenes of the film looks and functions like Noah’s ark, carrying the concentration of zoological life on earth over the ocean, concentrated in one spot and one limited space, the dark cargo hold or womb of the ship. After the ship sinks, the lifeboat of the Tsimtsum is the contracted, extremely limited space of most of the action in the film and the book. It is the spot of the legendary conflict of the boy and the tiger, man and animal, humanity and biology, mind and nature in the midst of infinity, of an endless ocean. Although Yann Martel’s novel and Ang Lee’s film allude only artistically and aesthetically to the kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum, namely, withdrawal, limitation, concentration into one spot in the middle of the Unlimited, of the Ein Sof, as the kabbalists call God – a lifeboat in an endless ocean – they somehow mingle and hide this allusion to the Lurianic tsimtsum among a number of other allusions to religious names and rituals in Hinduism, Catholicism, Islam and, last but not least, to the Hebrew Bible and Judaism, as well as to literary sources like Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (the boy and the tiger), Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Melville’s Moby Dick. In this postmodern literary puzzle, Tsimtsum is alluded to as the “Japanese” name of a ship. Still, the 3D-film Life of Pi of 2012 is the climax and the most recent stage in what one could call the semiotic history of tsimtsum in occidental culture and religion in the more than 400 years since the cosmological kabbalistic idea of tsimtsum was coined by Isaac Luria (1536–1572) and his kabbalistic disciples in the little town of Safed in the Galilean hills: The eternal, unlimited Godhead, Ein Sof in kabbalistic terms, withdraws from a place within himself, thus originating an empty place of nothingness, into which he can create the cosmos, the world, time, man and life different from God.3 In my book entitled Zimzum, which I was just about to finish when I saw Ang Lee’s film, I tell the story of the diffusion of the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum in the Jewish and Christian worlds since the beginning of the seventeenth century, i.e., over 400 years (Fig. 2). 2 Cf. Klaus Davidowicz, Film als Midrasch – Der Golem, Dybbuks und andere kabbalistische Elemente im populären Kino (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). 3 In numerous books, essays and articles in German, Hebrew and English, Gershom Scholem has dealt with the concept of tsimtsum and Isaac Luria. In English, the most precise and available texts are Scholem’s entries on “zimzum,” “Luria” and “Vital” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem 1970), assembled in his book: Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1988), 128–135; 420–428; 443–448.

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Fig. 2: Zimzum: 400 years of diffusion among Jews and Christians. Graphics: Etty Lassmann and Elisabeth Schulte.

In this diffusion and reception story of four centuries different media and modes of transmission were used. I shall report here on the different though often times parallel stages and modes in the semiotic history of tsimtsum in different media and in the arts, leading up to the 3D movie of Ang Lee. Tsimtsum has a semiotic history in 8 stages: 1) Oral transmission (Luria and his disciples; late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century) 2) Manuscripts by Luria’s disciples (late sixteenth until late eighteenth century) 3) Printed texts (early seventeenth century until present) 4) Visualisation by pictures in manuscripts and printed books (early seventeenth century until today; pictorial turn) 5) Visualisation by engravings or paintings without text (late seventeenth until twentieth century) 6) 3D-Representation by sculptures, architecture and installations (twentieth century; spatial turn) 7) Music (twenty-first century) 8) Film with sound and music (twenty-first century)

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The first stage in the semiotic history is the oral transmission of the kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum from Isaac Luria to his disciples. Luria taught his disciples in Safed only from 1570 until his premature death in 1572. He forbid his disciples, who were organized in four chavurot (learning groups), from writing down his shiurim and teachings.4 Thus, originally, oral transmission was the only means of learning about tsimtsum. After Luria’s death, however, and perhaps even before, his disciple Chayim Vital (1542–1620) started to write down the teachings of Luria from memory, thereby structuring and systematizing them. Other disciples like Moshe Jona, Josef ibn Tabul and later Isaac Sarug also subsequently wrote manuscripts. Before the end of the sixteenth century, the concept of tsimtsum appears in manuscripts and passes from oral to written transmission, even though Luria’s disciples used manuscripts only as a means alongside their continued oral teaching. In this second stage of the semiotic history of tsimtsum, the most successful writer of manuscripts was the graphomaniac Chayim Vital. He produced dozens of manuscripts with Luria’s teachings, thus fixing and supplanting the oral transmission of his master’s teachings on tsimtsum. Vital wanted to use his manuscripts only in his own courses, and he did not want his manuscripts to be used by others, to be copied or even printed. Still, when Vital fell almost mortally ill, his disciples bribed his brother, took his manuscripts, copied them in only a few days, and subsequently distributed those manuscripts, which were copied over and over again. After his recovery, Vital had lost control over his manuscripts. More manuscripts by Vital were found in a Jerusalem geniza, then copied and published in manuscript form, probably after Vital’s death in 1620, as Sefer HaDrushim. This text contains a long and crucial description of tsimtsum. But although the Sefer HaDrushim or the Sefer Etz HaChayyim, another, even more important collection of Vital’s writings with extended treatment of tsimtsum, are called books, “Sefer,” they were written and copied by hand, and not printed. The copying and diffusion of Vital’s manuscript books went on until the end of the eighteenth century in all parts of the Jewish world, from Morocco to Eastern Europe. The first time we find those manuscript books of Vital’s – and the tsimtsum therein  – in print, and no longer handwritten, is the edition by the maskil Isaac Satanov in the Chassidic shtetl of Koretz in Galicia in 1782. The printed book sold so well that it was reprinted by Satanov in 1784 and 1785. After this event, printing becomes the normal way of diffusion. The works of other disciples of Luria, e.g., Josef ibn Tabul or Israel Sarug, were printed only at the

4 Cf. Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Gerold Necker, Einführung in die Lurianische Kabbala (Frankfurt/M.: Insel Verlag, 2008).

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end of the nineteenth or in the early twentieth century. Previously, those texts dealing with tsimtsum were transmitted only as manuscripts, often anonymously or under pseudonyms. But the revolutionary step from handwritten to printed texts on tsimtsum took place three centuries earlier. The third stage in our semiotic history of the tsimtsum was reached in 1612, only forty years after Luria’s death. Sabbatai Sheftel Horowitz (1566–1619), a kabbalist and medical doctor in Prague, published in a Jewish printing press in Hanau a large book entitled Shefa Tal with a Jewish printing house in Hanau. In this volume, the description of the primeval tsimtsum of the Ein Sof appears in print for the first time. Print is a major step in our semiotic history: it not only ignores Luria’s ban on written transmission, but also constitutes a shift from esoteric to exoteric teaching of kabbala. Manual copies were rare and expensive, copied by kabbalists for kabbalists. The transmission remained esoteric. A printed book like Shefa Tal, however, was cheaper and circulated among more readers. It could be sold by a printer or a dealer to non-kabbalists, even to Christians. And that is precisely what happened: tsimtsum became, via print, an exoteric doctrine, known by Christian kabbalists and scholars. Moreover, Shefa Tal also constituted a pictorial turn in the semiotic history of tsimtsum. It is the first printed text in which a description of the process of tsimtsum, told according to the narrative of Israel Sarug, is accompanied by an illustration of tsimtsum (Fig.3). The main focus is still on the text, with illustration serving the text and explaining and supporting the text visually. The graphic elements in the illustration are Hebrew letters, abbreviations and words from the text, filling and explaining the illustration materially, as well as geometrical elements such as circles and lines, all printed in black on white paper. The same mode of illustration is used in the next printed book of early modern Lurianic kabbalah, the Emek HaMelekh of Naftali Herz Bacharach, printed in Amsterdam in 1648. The illustration shows a circle in the center, and ten lines, with the names of the ten sefirot attached to these lines (Fig. 4). This illustration, like many other illustrations in Emek HaMelekh, is included in the mainly two-column Hebrew text of the book, a bestseller among printed Hebrew books of the eighteenth century, mainly dealing with practical kabbalah. Shefa Tal and Emek HaMelekh represent the fourth stage and indeed a pictorial turn in our semiotic history of tsimtsum: printed texts enriched with illustrations of tsimtsum. A major change in the semiotic history of tsimtsum occurs with Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–1689), the first Christian kabbalist and scholar to know and to write about Luria and his disciples. Knorr’s most important book, the Kabbala Denudata, printed in several volumes between 1677 and 1684, is

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Fig. 3: Sabbatai Sheftel Horowitz: Shefa Tal (1612), fol. 29.

the first scholarly work on Lurianic kabbalah in a foreign scholarly language, namely,in Latin, containing translations from Lurianic books, commentaries, letters and a 700-page lexicon of all the major kabbalistic terms and concepts, including tsimtsum. This volume, comprising more than 2400 pages, opened the door for kabbalah and especially tsimtsum in the Christian world. The Cambridge platonists and Isaac Newton knew about tsimtsum through Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata. The book was well known to all Christian kabbalists, pietists and scholars throughout the eighteenth century, up to German Romanticism. Even a young Gershom Scholem, before beginning his academic study of kabbalah, bought a cheap copy of the almost-forgotten book in a Berlin bookshop in 1915.5 The decisive semiotic step taken in Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata is not the change of language and characters, namely, from Hebrew to Latin. Rather, it is the

5 Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher 1913–1917 (Frankfurt/M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995), 189.

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Fig. 4: Naftali Herz Bacharach: Emek haMelekh (1648), fol. 14.

change in the visual representation of tsimtsum. As we see (Fig. 5) on the famous title copper plate of first volume of 1677, kabbalah enters the realm of Baroque allegory. Never has kabbalah, the female figure in the center of the copper plate, been presented in so unveiled and half-naked a manner, superseded only when Madonna, the pop singer, unveiled herself in her kabbalah-driven YouTube clips and song videos. Apart from this title copper plate, Knorr adds a number of illustrations of tsimtsum to his book, independently of the text. These graphic illustrations are no longer incorporated into a page of text, which they illustrate. Rather, they are printed on separate pages without textual explanations and included collectively at the end of the volume. They are no longer a means for explaining a narrative visually, as accompaniments to a textual narrative. Instead, they become an end in themselves and stand for themselves. Some of them are almost like geometrical figures in mathematical books, thus exuding the rationalistic spirit of the early

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Fig. 5: Christian Knorr von Rosenroth: Kabbala Denudata (1677), title copper plate.

Enlightenment (Fig. 6). These independent illustrations of tsimtsum without attachment to a textual narrative (but with short Hebrew explanations, appended to a mainly Latin scholarly book) are the fifth stage in the semiotic history of the tsimtsum. Here, the illustration does not serve to explain a text; rather, the text serves the illustration.

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Fig. 6: Christian Knorr von Rosenroth: Kabbala Denudata (1678), p. 278.

Other Christian kabbalists followed Knorr’s example: Johann Georg Wachter (1663–1757) adds a separately printed engraving of tsimtsum (Fig. 7) in middle of his book Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (1699), where puts forth the first identification of the thought of Spinoza with Lurianic Kabbalah (and thus implicitly makes tsimtsum a move of the natura naturans). Wachter is the first author to translate the description of the tsimtsum from Sefer HaDrushim into German. In his five-volume Historia critica philosophiae, which is the first critical history of philosophy, Johann Jacob Brucker (1696–1770) includes about one hundred pages on the tsimtsum in the second volume of 1742, accompanied by illustrations in Baroque style. Particularly interesting is the figural representation of Adam Kadmon (Fig. 8) as some kind of Turkish / Ottoman man wearing a turban and with the Latin names of the sefirot written around his head and on his limbs. From the middle of the eighteenth century and the times of Brucker until the middle of the twentieth century, no major steps or changes in the semiotic history

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Fig. 7: Johann Georg Wachter: Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (1699), p. 86.

of tsimtsum occur. The representations of tsimtsum remain two-dimensional; it is entirely a matter of books printed on paper. This holds true for both Jewish and Christian authors and illustrators who engaged tsimtsum. Kabbalah for two centuries was almost entirely ignored, if not openly despised, among the Christian and the Western-European Jewish public. A major change in our semiotic history becomes manifest only after the Second World War. It is due to Gershom Scholem, whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism of 1942 made him famous beyond academic circles and Jewish Studies scholars. It is Scholem’s book, with its chapter on Lurianic Kabbalah, that was read by artists in the American original and in the authorized German translation. In their art, these artists lifted tsimtsum to a new semiotic stage: tsimtsum passes into art and becomes three-dimensional in the sculptures of Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Christoph Loos (born 1959) and Anselm Kiefer (born

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Fig. 8: Johann Jakob Brucker: Historia critica philosophiae (1742), vol. 2.

1945). This is a spatial turn and the sixth stage in the semiotic history of tsimtsum. Their sculptures open a three-dimensional space of representation, where tsimtsum is not only visualized in three dimensions, but also becomes touchable. With all three artists, tsimtsum is represented in abstract sculptures; it comes with a name, but without text, narrative or interpretation. The most famous ‘kabbalistic’ piece of art by Barnett Newman is a gigantic iron sculpture named Zimzum II. It is made of two separate, parallel, leporello-like folded iron plates which are more than four meters high and more than six meters

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long each, erected in parallel to one another and therefore leaving empty space in between (Fig. 9). The two iron plates cut and limit the space around the sculpture, the space in between the plates; they determine the inside and the outside, and cut the infinite sky above. The apprehension of space comes into being via two gigantic vertical iron plates, which give the space limits and a direction. Spectators can walk around in between them, enter the space and leave it; they can touch the plates and apprehend their limits visually and corporally. Zimzum II is a work of art about limits and the apprehension of differences, the sacred and the profane, havdala in Hebrew, as the artist himself declares in a catalogue.6

Fig. 9: Barnett Newman: Zimzum II (1985); Steel plates 360 x 260 x 610 cm.

The second example of the sculptural turn in the semiotic history of tsimtsum is an installation called Zimzum by Christoph Loos, exhibited in 1999/2000. Three cone-like vessels – the kabbalists would call them kelim – hang down from a ceiling (Fig. 10). Visually, they are connected to and nonetheless separated from the ceiling by lights between the cones and the ceiling. Light connects and separates the upper and the lower worlds, the sacred and the material. The installation plays with the role of light in connecting the upper and the lower, bridging but not dissolving the gap between them.

6 Barnett Newman: Zimzum II (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1992).

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Fig. 10: Christoph Loos: Zimzum (1999); wood, steel, gauze; 400 x 250 x 250 cm.

The third example of the sculptural representation of tsimtsum is a mix of painting and sculpture: Anselm Kiefer’s Zim-Zum (1990) in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., measuring 3.8 m x 5.6 m. It comes without a word of interpretation, with just the name Zim-Zum written above, making an impression upon the spectator by its sheer size and measurements, colors, power and energy somehow emanating or emerging under a metallic, shining, bow-like round shape in the middle, which pushes and crushes the white-grey crusty surface to the sides (Fig. 11). This is not the place for an interpretation, but there seem to be ancient, dynamic, elementary forces at work in Kiefer’s overpowering sculpture Zim-Zum.

Fig. 11: Anselm Kiefer: Zim-Zum (1990); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; acrylic, chalk, lead, ashes; 380 x 560 cm.

The seventh of eight stages in the semiotic history of tsimtsum is also contemporary. It is music. Influenced by John Cage, Dieter Schnebel and Walter Zimmermann discussed the Lurianic tsimtsum, and Schnebel started to write an atonal

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composition on tsimtsum for string trio in the 1990s, which he never finished.7 After this, the first “Zimzum-Musik” ever composed was presented in Cologne and Amsterdam in 2010 by Steffen Krebber (born 1976). The composition is part of a cycle called “Nichtsattrapen” (“dummies of nothingness”) and was publicly played by a computer-animated microtonal organ.8 The eighth and final stage in the semiotic history of tsimtsum, as mentioned above, is the 3D movie Life of Pi by Ang Lee. It combines film and sound. As with the tsimtsum sculptures and music, the film is no longer an illustration or reification or interpretation of the process of tsimtsum known from kabbalistic narratives. The appropriation of tsimtsum via abstract sculptures and installations, via music and film, is and remains symbolic and allusive. Today, all eight stages of the semiotic history of tsimtsum coexist and are enacted and reenacted. Oral transmission of tsimtsum is still practiced among kabbalists, and university professors also discuss tsimtsum with their students. Lurianic books in different languages and translations are printed and reprinted, along with scholarly books about tsimtsum, with and without illustrations. Works of art and music on tsimtsum can be enjoyed and readily reproduced using contemporary media. Almost all the stages of our semiotic history of tsimtsum coexist today on the internet. As a result of the internet, what was once an esoteric kabbalistic idea has become known throughout the world.

Bibliography Bacharach, Naftali Herz. Emek haMelekh, Amsterdam, 1648. Brucker, Johann Jakob. Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 2, Leipzig 1742. Davidowicz, Klaus. Film als Midrasch - Der Golem, Dybbuks und andere kabbalistische Elemente im populären Kino, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. Fine, Lawrence: Physician of the Soul. Healer of the Cosmos. Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Horowitz, Sabbatai Sheftel. Shefa Tal, Offenbach 1612. Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian. Kabbala Denudata, Sulzbach 1677. Krebber, Steffen. http://steffenkrebber.de/works/zimzum/ Loos, Christoph. ZimZum. Skulpturen Zeichnungen Holzschnitte, ed. Karin Stempel, Köln 2000. Martel, Yann. Life of Pi, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002. Necker, Gerold. Einführung in die Lurianische Kabbala, Frankfurt/M: Insel Verlag, 2008. Newman, Barnett. Zimzum II, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1992.

7 Cf. Walter Zimmermann: http://home.snafu.de/walterz/biblio/zimzum.pdf 8 To listen to it on Steffen Krebber’s homepage: http://steffenkrebber.de/works/zimzum/

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Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Jerusalem: Shocken, 1941 _____. Kabbalah, Jerusalem: Keter, 1988 _____. Tagebucher 1913–1917, Frankfurt/M.: Jüdischer Verlag 1995 Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. Vital, Chajim. Sefer Ez Chajim, Koretz 1782 Wachter Johann Georg. Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, Amsterdam 1699 Zimmermann, Walter. http://home.snafu.de/walterz/biblio/zimzum.pdf

Notes on the Contributors Agata Bielik-Robson is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and a Professor of Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her publications include The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (Northwestern University Press, May 2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought. Traces and Influence (coedited with Adam Lipszyc, Routledge 2014), Philosophical Marranos. Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (Routledge 2014) and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy, Bloomsbury, 2019. Daniel H. Weiss is Polonsky-Coexist Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2016) and of Interpreting Interreligious Relations with Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies (Brill, 2019). Paul Franks is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in Judaic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the Yale University. He is the author and editor of All or Nothing: Skepticism, Transcendental Arguments and Systematicity in German Idealism (Harvard University Press, 2005) and Franz Rosenzweig: Theological and Philosophical Writings, translated, edited, annotated and commented upon, with Michael L. Morgan (Hackett Publishing, 2000). Reuven Leigh is the director of the Chabad House at the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in modern rabbinic philosophy from the University of Cambridge and rabbinic ordination from Yeshivat Tomkhei Tmimim Lubavitch. Kenneth Seeskin is Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of Maimonides on the Origin of the World (Cambridge UP, 2005), Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2001), Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides (Oxford UP, 2000), Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age (SUNY Press) and Maimonides: A Guide for Today′s Perplexed (Behrman House). Rabbi Alex Ozar is the co-director of the OU-JLIC program at Yale University, where he is also pursuing a dual PhD in Philosophy and Religious Studies. He holds a BA in philosophy, MA in Jewish philosophy, and rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University. His writing has appeared in Tradition, Torah U-Madda Journal, Harvard Theological Review, Journal of Religious Ethics, First Things, and Torah Musings. Elliot Wolfson is Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His recent publications include Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (Fordham University Press, 2014); A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (Zone Books, 2011); Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-019

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Mendel Schneerson (Columbia University Press, 2009); New Studies in Jewish Philosophy, edited with A. Hughes (Indiana University Press, 2009); Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings From Zoharic Literature (Oneworld Publications, 2007). Adam Lipszyc is a Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He is an author of many articles published in Polish, English, and German in the area of modern Jewish philosophy, with special interest paid to Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. He is a co-editor (together with Agata Bielik-Robson) of Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (Routledge, 2014). Eli Friedlander is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tel Aviv. He is the author of Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Harvard University Press, 2012) and Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” (Harvard University Press, 2014). Benjamin Pollock is the Sol Rosenbloom Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University, where he has taught in the Department of Jewish Thought since 2015, and a director of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Center since 2017. He is the author of Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption (Indiana University Press, 2014). Asaf Angermann is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of Beschädigte Ironie: Kierkegaard, Adorno und die negative Dialektik kritischer Subjektivität (de Gruyter, 2013), the editor of Theodor W. Adorno/Gershom Scholem: Correspondence 1939–1969 (Suhrkamp, 2015 and Polity, 2021), and the editor and Hebrew translator of Theodor W. Adorno: Education to Autonomous Thinking (HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 2017). Przemysław Tacik is Assistant Professor at the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He holds a PhD in philosophy (2014) and law (2016). He is the author of Liberty of Lights. Edmond Jabès and Jewish Philosophy of Modernity (Peter Lang, 2019). Martin Kavka is Professor of Religion at Florida State University. He is the author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is also the co-editor of four books, including Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (2014), as well as the co-editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics. Simon Podmore is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology, Philosophy and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University. He is the author of Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Indiana University Press, 2011) and Struggling with God: Kierkegaard & the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (James Clarke & co., 2013). Michael L. Morgan is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Indiana University and the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Visiting Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of On Shame (Routledge, 2008),

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An Epitaph of German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007) and Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy (with Emil Fackenheim, Indiana University Press, 1996). Michael Fagenblat is a Senior Lecturer in Jewish Philosophy at the Open University of Israel. He is the author of A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas‘s Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford University Press, 2010) and the editor of Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, (Indiana University Press, 2017). Christoph Schulte is Professor of Jewish Studies and Philosophy at the Institut für Jüdische Studies und Religionswissenschaften at the University of Potsdam. He is the editor of Leibniz und das Judentum (Stuttgart, 2008), Moses Mendelssohn. Ausgewählte Werke. Studienausgabe, 2 Bde (Darmstadt, 2009), and Isaac Euchel. Der Kulturrevolutionär der jüdischen Aufklärung (Hannover, 2010). He is also the author of Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin 2014).

Index Absence xviii, 7, 8, 11, 20, 32, 34, 56, 73–8, 83, 85, 89, 92–3, 101, 145, 149, 153, 169, 174, 198, 201, 203, 235, 237, 251, 252, 281, 288–9, 290, 307, 313, 318, 321–22, 328, 340, 342, 389, 393, 399, 401, 412–15 Absolute xiii–vii, 7, 18–23, 28, 47, 65, 69, 77, 110, 112, 121, 123–26, 147–48, 221, 227–28, 236, 257, 258, 260, 270, 317, 345, 348, 354, 367–69, 378–80, 385, 399, 410, 411, 413 – theological absolutism vii, xiii, xvi, 20 Abyss, abyssal 8, 44, 147, 152–54, 165, 176–78, 193, 277, 313–18, 326, 328–29, 332–34, 336, 400–01 (see also ‘abyssal ground’) Acosmism, acosmic 26, 112, 148, 378–79 Actuality 125–26, 210, 213, 225, 228, 232, 235, 269, 356 Adam Kadmon (Adam Qadmon) 15–16, 41, 46, 323, 361, 364, 368, 381, 385, 427 Adorno, Theodor W. vii, 194, 248–49, 258, 261 Altizer, Thomas xii, 20, 312, 390 Anthropomorphism 155, 249, 251, 254, 255–57, 261 Anthroposophy 251 Anxiety xviii, 197, 199–204 Apophaticism, apophatic 143, 155, 170–71 Arche-trace 25, 156 Arche-writing 156, 412–14 Atheism, atheistic xii, xx, 8, 10, 16, 20, 30, 32, 44, 116, 154, 193, 318, 333, 378–79, 395 Auschwitz xix, 25, 26, 282, 311–17, 325, 328–29, 353, 403, 410 Azriel of Gerona 172 Baader, Franz von 121 Bacharach, Naftali Herz 43, 94, 423, 425 Basilides 12, 17 Batnitzky, Leora 249, 255, 257 Baudelaire, Charles 404–06 Benjamin, Walter vii, xvii, 8, 22, 28, 91, 204, 207–18, 275, 280, 293, 305, 311, 397 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353-020

Berkovits, Eliezer xx, 10, 339–50, 353, 354, 357, Bestowal xvii, 141, 147, 151, 157–58, 163, 167, 176 Beyng (Seyn) 28, 144–46, 148, 152–57, 161, 164–69, 176–78, 181 Birth xix, xxi, 7, 10, 19, 23, 32, 199–200, 227, 232, 297, 394, 396 Bliss 12, 161, 212–13 Bloch, Ernst xii, 1, 20, 22, 24, 280, 304, 323, 326, 407 Bloom, Harold vii, ix, 12, 156, 276–80, 283, 398 Boehme (Böhme), Jacob vii, x, xiii, xv, 10, 15, 18–19, 121, 142–45, 147, 161, 233, 322–24, 392 Breaking of the vessels (Shevirat ha– kelim) xiv–xv, xxi, 7–10, 22, 24, 193–94, 279, 316, 324, 377, 378, 393, 396 Brucker, Johann Jacob 19, 427, 429 Brunner, Emil 320 Buber, Martin xix, 10, 224, 247–65, 351, 354 Cage, John 431 Catastrophe x, xii, xiv, 7, 22, 25, 32, 75, 79, 193, 196–98, 288–89, 308, 311, 324, 331, 391, 395–96, 407, 410 Christianity, Christian ix, xii, xv, xx, 5, 11, 16, 20–23, 27–32, 63, 80, 81,143, 144, 150, 222, 241–43, 270, 284, 285, 296, 303, 312–35, 391, 420, 423 – Christian Kabbalah vii, xiii, 10, 13, 15, 19, 55–56, 86, 142, 161, 423, 427–28 Concealment xii–iv, xx, 5–7, 41, 91, 94, 97, 144–54, 158, 162–67, 171–73, 176–77, 182, 233, 250–54, 257, 262, 264, 298, 355, 379, 380, 391 Concentration 11, 18, 40–44, 51, 107, 107, 131, 165, 210, 217, 221, 226, 250, 263–65, 298, 320, 326, 365, 393, 420 Contraction vii, xii–xiii, xvi, xviii, xix–xxi, 4, 6–7, 12, 13–14, 17–19, 39–41, 51–52, 54, 56–57, 65–66, 68, 70, 80, 87, 98, 99, 107, 119, 121, 132, 134–35, 142, 144–45,

440 

 Index

147, 150–51, 159, 161, 164–65, 169, 171, 173–75, 180, 193, 221, 225–26, 232–35, 238, 240–43, 250, 252–53, 257, 260, 273, 279–80, 294, 297, 306, 311–13, 316, 320, 328, 335–36, 353–55, 35–59, 361–66, 369, 373, 376, 380, 385, 392–95, 411, 420 Cordovero, Moses xii–xiv, 2–3, 5, 21, 44, 47, 52–53, 145, 160, 221, 226, 233, 273, 389, 412, 414 Cosmogony 66, 97, 324, 330–31 Cosmology, cosmological 6, 145, 148, 247, 250, 253, 255, 265, 420 Creation x–xv, xvii, xx–xxi, 1, 4–16, 18–19, 23–32, 42, 44–46, 51, 53, 56, 65–81, 89, 93–94, 98–99, 107, 110, 115, 119, 123–26, 130, 132, 137, 141, 147, 151, 154, 160, 170–71, 179, 188, 191 –95, 207, 220, 222–24, 231–34, 237, 263, 269–70, 279–81, 294, 297, 300–01, 304–07, 316–35, 339–49, 353–59, 361, 363, 367–69, 371, 373–74, 376, 379, 380, 384–85, 390, 391, 393–94, 396–97, 399, 401, 407, 410, 413–15 – Creatio continua xiv, 4, 7, 16, 22, 24, 413 – Creatio ex nihilo 5, 99, 191–92, 195, 294, 318–20, 324–25, 356–57 Creator 18, 30, 68–69, 72, 75, 78–79, 89, 164, 196, 202, 218, 224, 231, 306, 321–23, 325, 328, 331, 339 Creature, creaturely xiii, xviii, 6–9, 15–16, 22, 28, 66, 71, 77, 79, 80, 85, 114, 124–25, 197, 207, 229, 237, 321–23, 331, 357–58, 361, 363, 372, 394–95, 402, 405, 413 Crucifixion 314–29, 335 Death 13, 19, 30, 73, 78, 150, 159, 199, 213–17, 297, 300, 314, 231, 324–26, 332, 335–36, 350, 352, 372, – death drive 203–04, 400, 402, 410, 412, 414 – death of God xi–xii, xx, 10, 16, 20, 23, 28–29, 31, 280, 289, 314–15, 318, 406, 413 – being-toward–death 181 Decreation 31–32 De Herrera, Abraham Cohen ix, 43, 86, 159–61, 250, 400

Deleuze, Gilles xii, 25, 271, 399, 400 Demiurge 107, 195, 223 Derrida, Jacques vii, x, xii, xviii, xxi, 13, 21–24, 27–29, 84, 86, 150, 156, 157, 169, 178, 194–96, 202, 272, 280, 283, 286, 312, 369, 374, 389–414 Desire xv, xviii, xxi, 68, 93, 121, 182, 197, 201–04, 234, 253, 279, 281, 302, 335, 354, 357, 368, 372, 378, 382, 384–5, 393, 404, 407, 409, Dessler, Eliyahu 40, 89, 91 Destiny 26, 42, 119, 150, 210–11, 216, 260, 319, 342–43, 375 Dialectic, dialectical 7, 14–15, 16–17, 31, 121–22, 131, 134–36, 141–42, 149, 151, 194, 199–200, 203–04, 230, 236, 239, 249, 256, 260–61, 275, 278–79, 294–95, 301–02, 307, 311, 326, 330, 340, 342, 344, 349–53, 365, 389, 393, 410, 414 Differentiation xviii, 4, 66, 69, 74, 111, 125, 127, 128, 132–34, 136–37, 229, 399, 400, 402, 415 – undifferentiation, non–differentiation 6, 65, 69, 108, 181, 375, 378, 380, 392–93, 396, 398, 414 Diminution of light 15–16, 18, 98–99, 175, 357, 361, 373 Eckhart, Meister 143, 145, 162, 335 Eclipse xix, 10, 247 – eclipse of God xix, 10–11, 248–65 – eclipse of reason 248–65 Ehrenberg, Rudolph 87, 119, 224, 239 Ein Sof vii, xiv–xv, 4–6, 16, 18, 22, 41–42, 46, 52–54, 65, 80, 84, 93–94, 97–101, 108, 121, 124,132, 135–36, 145, 147–48, 150, 152–55, 159–61, 164, 170–80, 192–95, 226, 233, 236–37, 243, 297, 301, 378, 380–81, 392, 399, 413, 420, 423 Eliashiv, Solomon ben Ḥayyim 40, 151, 161, 165, 171–75, 179–80 Elijah ben Solomon, the Gaon of Vilna 89–91, 170–71 Emanation 2–5, 7, 9, 12, 16, 22, 25, 45, 46, 52, 65–69, 72, 75, 78, 107–08, 115, 120–21, 124, 154, 160, 170–73, 179, 180, 192–93, 195, 202, 225, 233, 253,

Index 

264, 297–98, 303, 319, 382, 385, 392, 395, 431, – emanationism 2, 66, 69, 71, 78, 120–21, 389 Enlightenment 95, 121, 249, 258–61, 426 Ereignis 145–46, 148, 152, 166 Eschatology, eschatological xii, 232, 296, 322, 324–26, 331, 402, 414 Esotericism, esoteric vii, xix, xxii, 18, 90, 142–43, 147, 150, 158, 178, 302, 391, 423, 432 Eternity 10, 111, 123–24, 127, 165, 180, 198, 242, 393 Ethics xix, xxi, 24, 110–16, 203, 253, 281, 312, 357–58, 363–69, 373–74, 377, 381, 383, 385 Event 6–7, 12, 20, 22, 25, 44, 88, 98, 111–12, 132, 145–46, 148, 152, 154, 157, 163, 165–66, 171–72, 176–78, 210, 251, 269, 270, 273, 281, 289, 307, 326, 329, 352, 369, 385, 406–07, 409, 413 Evil xviii, xx, xxi, 4, 8, 11, 18, 32, 66, 74, 79, 120, 222–24, 229–30, 250, 262, 312–14, 322–25, 341–43, 354, 363, 370, 376, 379–80, 402 Exile 4, 9, 11, 22, 30, 42, 78–79, 147, 194, 197, 248, 279, 288, 298–99, 312–16, 327, 331, 333, 391 Expansion 7, 25, 51, 131, 148, 151, 167, 174, 221, 232, 238, 241–43, 270, Externalization xii, 20, 225, 348–49, 400 Fackenheim, Emil xx, 10, 285, 311, 314–18, 331, 333, 336, 339, 344, 348–54, 357 Faith xii, 9, 24, 39, 72, 88, 89, 144, 196, 249–57, 262–63, 279, 293, 299, 320, 326, 332–33, 336, 339–44, 349, 364, 381, 395, 398, 406, 410 Fall xiv–xv, 8, 10–11, 17–18, 25, 67–70, 79, 99, 142, 147, 169, 200–02, 216, 219, 305, 320, 330, 396, 407, 412, 415 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 55, 224, 239, 364, 378 Finitude, finite x–xiv, xvii–xviii, 4, 7, 10, 19, 21–25, 29, 47, 51–53, 66, 68, 78–79, 84, 89, 97, 99, 107, 109–16, 121, 124–25, 127, 133–34, 142, 147, 155, 166, 171, 209, 211, 216, 221, 236–37, 270, 320, 328, 343, 345, 347–48, 352, 358–59, 371–72, 396–404, 407, 413–15

 441

Freedom xi, xx, 10, 11, 18, 119–30, 134, 136, 148, 150, 181, 210, 219, 222, 224–31, 253, 270, 316–19, 323, 339–58, 372, 375, 379, 404–05, 409–10, 415 Garment (malbush) 2, 24, 52, 57, 145, 162, 164, 174, 179, 300 Genesis (bereshit) 17, 6, 13, 41, 61–63, 72–81, 157, 179, 413 German Idealism vii, x, xvii, 3–4, 25, 28, 39, 55, 63, 107, 119–20, 142, 239, 270, 280, 363–65, 367, 377–78 Gift 27–28, 31, 86, 143, 150, 152, 163, 212, 316, 318, 329–32, 335, 372, 391, 399–410, 415 Gnosticism, Gnostic ix, 4, 8, 12, 16–17, 24–25, 29, 31–32, 67, 142–43, 170, 222–23, 264–65, 279, 281, – Jewish Gnosticism ix, 8 God–forsakenness 311, 313–27, 335–56 Godhead vii, xiii–xv, 6–7, 12, 18, 22, 28, 162, 221, 227, 230, 251, 321, 323, 331, 345, 396, 409, 420 Good xvii, xviii, xix, 8, 11, 14, 15, 25–26, 27, 31, 71, 75, 79, 85, 221, 224, 229–30, 260, 289, 294, 319, 322, 326, 341–42, 356–57, 368, 370, 380, 384, 389, 403, 405, 407, 410 Grammatology xxi, 156, 389, 411–14 Green, André 203 Ground 25–26, 56, 61, 65, 121, 123, 128–33, 135, 138, 162–65, 169, 181, 208–10, 214, 222, 229–38, 304, 355, 376 – absolute ground 224, 347–48 – abyssal ground (Ab–grund, Unground)  147, 152–54, 176–77, 376 , 395, 403, 405, 410 – dark ground 17, 131, 225–28 Habad 40, 53, 84, 87, 89–94, 96, 99, 365, 378–79 Habermas, Jürgen xvii, 40, 119, 121, 142, 156, 225, 235, 280, 365 ḥalal (void) 51–52, 156, 321, 379 – ḥalal panui 379 See also Void Hamann, J. G. 121, 288, 320

442 

 Index

Hasidism xvi–xvii, 8, 14, 31, 39–40, 83, 89–92, 98, 252–57, 311, 328, 365, 368, 378–79, 392, 405 Hayon, Nehemya 251 Hayyim of Volozhyn 91, 98, 354, 379 Hegel, G. W. F. vii, x–xii, xvii, 3–4, 8, 13–15, 18–32, 39, 64, 66, 70, 112–13, 123, 138, 141–42, 159, 236–39, 270–71, 274–75, 278, 280, 283, 314, 322, 326, 330, 348–53, 364, 371, 378, 385, 392, 396, 399–402, 404, 407, 408, 410, 413 Heidegger, Martin vii, x, xii, xvii–xviii, xxi, 4, 11, 28, 84, 129, 141–82, 284–86, 331, 362–63, 366, 371, 374, 377, 382–83, 409 Heraclitus 166, 213 Heresy, heretic, heretical 14, 90, 248, 301, 303 Hermeticism, hermetic, viii–ix, 15, 18, 275, 391 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 76, 327 Hiding of the divine 5, 21, 24, 307, 340–45, 349, 350, 353 – hidden God xiii, 4, 17–18, 25, 145, 148, 154, 162, 164, 166–67, 176, 252–53, 295–96, 298, 307, 317, 322, 340, 344, 410, 413 – hester panim xiii, xx, 10, 335, 341–42 Histalkut 7, 44, 50–53, 56, 295, 232, 297–98, 300–01, 307, History xiv, xix–xx, 7, 10–11, 18019, 25, 28, 56, 122, 138, 142, 154, 161, 176, 269–90, 297–98, 301–08, 314–15, 325, 339–347, 349, 351, 353, 365, 374, 384, 394, 398, 401–03, 408, 410 – historicity x, 63, 274 – historiosophy 4, 161 Hitpashtut 51, 56, 232, 297–301, 307 Hölderlin, Friedrich xviii, 8, 28, 166, 207–17 Holocaust xvi, xix, xx, 249, 311–17, 333, 339–44, 353, 400 – Holocaust theology xx, 249, 311–12, 315, 317 Hope xii, xv, 8, 10, 24, 123, 138, 259, 303, 307, 313, 317–18, 326–27, 331–33, 336, 342, 402, 408, 412 Horkheimer, Max vii, xvi, xix, 10, 247–65

Horowitz, Sabbatai Sheftel 39, 43, 45, 135–36, 196, 423–24 Idel, Moshe viii–x, 4, 12, 51, 62, 68–69, 84, 87, 159, 220, 221, 225, 226, 251, 276, 281, 312, 391 Immanence 7, 12, 20–26, 44, 51, 89, 90, 113, 127, 153–55, 165, 194, 202–04, 279, 323, 330, 346, 348, 379 Incarnation xii, 56, 175, 294, 319–21, 329–31 Indifference xviii, 29, 123, 126, 133, 137, 142, 317, 341, 376, 394, 401, 414 Infinity, infinite vi, xiv, xvii–xxii, 4–7, 12–17, 21–23, 29–30, 46–47, 51–56, 61–62, 64–66, 70, 77–79, 84, 93–94, 98–101, 107–16, 124, 133, 144–51, 153–55, 159–62, 165–82, 193, 196, 200, 209, 211, 214, 216, 219–21, 230, 236–37, 242, 254, 273, 282, 296, 304–06, 320, 328, 343–48, 351–59, 361–84, 389, 391–92, 395–403, 407–10, 414–15, 420, 430 – infinition 367, 370, 384 Instrumental reason xix, 258–60 Interiorization 159, 178, 221, 225–30, 233, 235, 240, 242–43 Irgas, Joseph 88 Isaiah 13, 18, 75, 90, 108, 295, 340, 341, 344, 350 Israel 13, 50, 72, 78–80, 91, 294, 302–03, 331, 334, 340, 344, 350, 352 Jabes, Edmond 141, 194, 276, 280, 288–90, 390–91 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 39, 55, 121, 236–37 Jesus 283, 318, 324, 335 Jona, Moshe 422 Jonas, Hans vii, xix, xx, 11, 22, 24–27, 32, 40, 143, 282, 311, 329–31, 354, 403, 409–10 Josef ibn Tabul 45, 422 Kenoma 8, 412 Kenosis, kenotic xii, xv, xx, 11, 14–19, 23, 27–32, 145, 311–35, 396, 406, 413 Khora xviii, 8, 170, 191, 194–204 Kiefer, Anselm vii, 428, 431 Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian ix, 15–16, 24, 43, 47, 86, 120, 161, 423, 426–27

Index 

Kook, Abraham Isaac 364 Krebber, Steffen 432 Lacan, Jacques 201–03, 276, 278, 281–83, 288, 399, 404, 408 Law 19, 32, 80, 111–12, 126–29, 174, 202–04, 208, 211, 279, 281, 340–42, 352, 406 Lee, Ang 432 Lefebvre, Henri 196 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm vii, 16, 39, 86, 111–12, 346, 349 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim xvii, 39, 55, 121, 405 Levenson, Jon D. 74 Levinas, Emmanuel  vii, xi, xvii, xx–xi, 1011, 24, 40, 61–81, 84–86, 98–101, 150, 157, 233, 280, 287, 312, 353–59, 361–85, 390, 391, 394–95 Lichtung xvii, 141, 145, 152–53, 157, 166 Life xviii, 5, 6–9, 19–20, 30, 56, 67, 73, 76, 78, 109, 124, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137–38, 194, 199, 202, 208, 211–17, 219, 229, 231, 233, 241, 242–43, 262, 295, 298, 300, 301, 306, 314–15, 318, 321, 325, 327, 332, 347, 350, 354, 357, 372, 375, 377–78, 380, 385, 392, 396, 399–407, 410, 412, 414–15, 420 Limitation 6, 11, 18, 22, 25, 30–31, 53, 89, 94, 99, 109, 112, 115, 119, 145, 151, 222–24, 226–27, 230–32, 237, 242, 273, 297–98, 303, 306, 313, 318–21, 325–31, 339–54, 357–58, 361–62, 399, 420 Loos, Christoph 428 Loss 29, 64–65, 78–79, 197–201, 204, 270, 279, 313 Love 17–20, 30, 50, 116, 202, 204, 223, 227–30, 240, 253, 255–57, 300, 318–19, 323–31, 351–53, 384, 390, Luther, Martin xii, 17, 21–22, 27 Magen David 295, 301–03 Maggid of Mezericz 378 Maimonides, Moses 115, 171, 275, 406 Maimon, Solomon xvii, 55, 107, 112, 376 Maqom (makom) 22, 84, 94, 98, 156, 173–74, 327 Marcion, Marcionism, Marcionite 17–18, 30, 293

 443

Marck, Siegfried 263 Marrano 390 Materialism, materialist xviii, 1, 10, 14, 16, 23, 31, 142, 194–97, 225, 235, 258–59, 275, 295, 346, 365, 389, 393, 410, 414 Messiah, messianic, messianism viii, xv, xviii, xx, 5, 7–9, 15–16, 25–26, 53, 84, 88, 164, 203–04, 204, 286, 293, 297, 298, 301–02, 304, 306, 319–20, 323, 365, 379, 392, 395–98, 402, 404 – messianism 302 Metaphysics xii, xvi, xxi, 1–4, 7, 17, 21, 24, 26, 28, 46, 64, 66, 109, 111–12, 115, 142, 144, 157, 160, 167–68, 194, 225, 270, 274, 284, 305, 331, 334, 355, 369, 389–90, 399–400, 405, 407–08, 412–14 Miller, Jacques–Alain 201–03 Mitzvah 297, 349 Modena, Leon viii, x, 43 Molitor, Franz 86, 120 Moltmann, Jürgen xii, xx, 313–36 Monism 71, 111, 222, 347, 355, 368, 414 Monotheism, monotheistic 107, 115, 154, 170, 195, 217, 222, 282, 376–77, 395, 410 Moore, G.E. 346 Mourning 197–99, 311, 393 Mystery xiii, xx, 3, 11, 28, 30, 31, 46, 48, 107, 109, 115–16, 135–36, 149, 154, 162–67, 251–53, 282, 288, 313, 323, 385, 410, 412, 414 Myth, mythic, mythological viii, x, xx, 4, 6, 12, 20–29, 46, 65, 70, 80, 81, 121. 143, 145, 152, 155–56, 160–63, 169, 207–08, 212, 215, 217, 231, 236, 239, 249, 261, 270, 279, 282, 289, 298, 301, 303, 330–31, 361–65, 374–79, 385, 390–92, 395, 398, 404, 408–09 Nachman of Bretslav 31, 193, 405–406, Nancy, Jean-Luc ix, xii, 20, 23, 169 Narcissism 27–28, 160, 203–204, 394 Nathan of Gaza 251 Nature xiv, 16, 18, 47, 56, 110, 112–116, 130, 135, 148, 166, 171, 227, 229, 261, 262, 339, 341, 346–349, 354–356, 381, 404, 408, 409, 415, 420 naturalism 194, 196, 262, 346

444 

 Index

Nefesh Hahayim 91, 354, 364, 379, 380 Negation, negativity vii, xiii, xv, xix, 4–9, 14, 19, 20, 23, 24, 29, 45, 53, 65, 75, 79, 99, 146, 152, 166, 170, 171, 178, 192, 193, 204, 212, 219, 228, 233–235, 238, 239, 259, 280, 306, 321, 324–326, 334, 347, 348, 359, 375, 390–396, 401, 410 Neoplatonism, Neoplatonic x, xvi, xix, xxi, 1–5, 7, 10, 12, 14–16, 22, 24–25, 46, 61–81, 170, 195, 198, 391, 395, 398, 412,  413 Newman, Barnett 428–430 Newton, Isaac x Nicholas of Cusa 7, 46, 320 Nietzsche, Friedrich xii, 9, 29, 283 Nihilism 44, 143, 146, 168, 296 Nominalism 1, 2, 7, 9, 21, 28, 391, 414 Nothingness xviii, xix, 4–7, 11, 12, 30, 31, 144, 145, 149, 152, 153, 155, 164, 166, 168, 170, 175, 177, 182, 193, 195, 219, 220, 224, 232, 235, 295, 314, 317, 321, 322–326, 330, 332, 370, 373, 379, 402, 414, 420, 432 Oblivion of being 144, 157 Oettingen, A. von 320 Oetinger, Friedrich 15, 86, 120, 147, 275, 320 Omnipotence 28, 31, 93, 320, 323, 325, 328–330, 341, 342, 347, 348, 354, 366 Onto-theology 23, 153, 170, 284, 331, 413, 414, 415 Otherness xiii, xviii, xxi, 13, 19, 20, 61–81, 101, 253, 264, 265, 297, 370, 384, 397,  401 Overdetermination 277–278, 290, 406 Panpsychism 346 Pantheism 5, 26, 55, 72, 108–109, 115–116,  127–128, 154, 192, 195, 223, 229, 367–368, 381 Paradox x, xviii, 6, 7, 9, 21, 28, 44, 77, 99, 143, 145, 146, 148, 151, 154, 155, 158, 162, 163, 165, 169, 179, 180, 197–199, 204, 228, 271, 272, 275, 277, 278, 306, 323, 340, 351, 355, 356, 366, 408 Participation, participatory xviii, xxi, 5, 47, 64, 65, 67, 69, 75, 77, 78, 331, 356

Plasticity 212–214, 217 Plato, Platonism 16, 22, 23, 46, 47, 86, 95, 96, 107, 194–196, 202, 345–347, 355–357, 374, 389, 414, 424 Pleroma xv, xviii, 8, 20, 31, 32, 165, 201, 202, 283, 392, 415 Plotinus 2, 3, 46, 67, 70, 71, 74, 355 Pluralism 346 Political theology xx, 264, 265, 293, 299, 305, 306, 308 Potential space 198, 199, 313 Providence 10, 25, 26, 32, 90, 155, 171, 330, 339, 340, 342, 349 Rabbinic vii, ix, xvi, xvii, 13, 45, 46, 49, 53, 63, 80, 81, 83–92, 97, 101, 120, 160, 177, 283, 340, 345–349, 352, 358, 391, 399, 406, 409 Rank, Otto 199, 304 Riki, Raphael Immanuel Hai 89–90 Redemption xiv, xx, 6, 8, 219, 222, 228, 231, 239–243, 295–304, 307, 308, 317, 323, 331, 333, 339–342, 345, 396, 402, 404, 407 Reflexivity 278, 280 Regius, Heinrich 258 Reshimu 52, 53, 77, 78, 94, 97, 99–101, 108, 133, 136, 150, 156, 167 Responsibility 107, 252, 254, 256, 282, 330, 339–344, 358, 372, 384 Restoration 23, 27, 42, 67, 68, 173, 174, 252, 315, 319, 323, 324, 329, 331, 336, 351, 396 Restraint 13, 176, 235, 343, 400 Resurrection 315, 325, 326, 332 Retreat xi, xix, xxi, 6, 8, 11, 14, 18, 21, 29–32, 41, 44, 108, 163, 169, 178, 207, 211–218, 226, 250, 262, 306, 307, 315, 316, 340, 365, 369, 399, 400, 401, 406, 413 Revelation xiv, xix, 5, 11, 18, 30, 44, 46, 48, 51–53, 56, 95, 146, 182, 191, 211, 222, 223, 224, 227–238, 274, 281, 282, 295–298, 304, 305, 319, 334, 344, 349–354, 358, 383, 397 Ricoeur, Paul 144 Romanticism 208, 275, 424

Index 

Rosenzweig, Franz xi, xv, xix, 4, 40, 54, 85, 87, 119, 219–244, 275, 281, 287, 294–304, 327, 351, 353, 364, 377, 396 Rosicrucians x Rupture 67, 162, 163, 277, 312, 315, 316, 318, 330, 331, 333 Russell, Bertrand 346 Sabbath 75, 76, 78 Sabbatianism 26, 44, 192, 248, 250, 251, 301, 303, 306 Salvation 31, 227, 320, 324, 330, 332, 336 Sanctification 50, 339, 340, 341, 345 Sarug, Israel viii, xiii, xvii, 12, 14–16, 18, 24, 42–44, 52, 53, 56, 57, 66, 94, 159, 160–162, 250, 400, 422, 423 Satanov, Isaac 422 Schelling, Friedrich vii, xiii, xvii, xviii, 3, 4, 7, 17, 18, 19, 25, 28, 40, 54, 55, 56, 57, 84, 87, 91, 119–138, 142, 146–148, 161, 162, 169, 181, 208, 221, 225, 228–230, 233, 234–236, 238, 239, 242, 270, 275, 280, 320, 363–365, 376–379, 384, 385, 403, 405 Schiller, Friedrich 23, 218, 402 Schmitt, Carl 308 Schnebel, Dieter 431 Schneerson, Menahem Mendel 91 Schneersohn, Shalom Dovber 84–86, 92–101 Scholem, Gershom vii–xxii, 1–31, 39–45, 51–57, 62–72, 77, 80, 87, 91, 108, 119, 121, 133, 137, 151, 154, 159, 160, 162, 165, 179, 191–199, 204, 220, 221, 226, 247–253, 257, 263, 269, 275–277, 281, 282, 286, 290, 293–308, 311, 312, 316, 320–322, 327, 328, 345, 359, 364, 365, 379, 389, 391, 393, 394, 398, 411–414, 420, 424, 428 Schwarzschild, Steven 61, 88 Scotus, Duns xii, 1, 21 Second Commandment 193, 194 Secret vii, xii, 5, 13, 24, 27, 30, 32, 55, 149, 150, 162, 167, 171, 218, 232, 242, 277, 280, 327, 333, 362, 384, 389, 390, 391, 397, 402, 405, 410

 445

Secularism, Secular xii, xx, 20, 22, 271, 282, 293, 294, 296–303, 306, 308, 312, 339, 365, 369 Seinlassen 28, 29, 167, 405 Self-limitation 6, 18, 25, 31, 55, 115, 145, 222–227, 230, 231, 306, 313, 318–321, 325–331, 339–350, 353, 354, 358, 399 Self-negation 166, 221, 235 Self-sacrifice xv, 14, 27, 29, 316, 398 Self-withdrawal 19, 147, 153, 155, 164, 165, 339, 350, 358 Separation xiv, xv, xviii–xxi, 4–11, 56, 61, 64–81, 97–101, 115, 120, 129, 134, 136, 137, 154, 169, 176, 181, 191–204, 214, 215, 354, 355–359, 361, 362, 365–372, 377–379, 384, 394, 399, 402, 409, 430 Shekhinah 5, 11, 16, 19, 45, 50, 108, 316, 317, 320, 327 Shneur Zalman of Liadi 40, 89–95, 378 Shoah xx, 282, 289, 290, 311–317, 325, 326, 333, 334 Shoushani 364 Silesius, Angelus 143, 406 Socrates 356, 366 Soloveitchik, Joseph 354 Soteriology 330 Space xiii, xviii, 5, 8, 11–16, 26, 28, 30, 41, 42, 49, 51, 52, 65, 66, 68, 73–78, 84, 89, 94, 107–110, 114, 121, 124, 128, 132, 133, 135, 144, 148, 150, 156, 163–165, 169, 174–180, 191, 193, 196–204, 207–211, 214–217, 221–226, 228, 230, 235, 236, 238, 253, 273, 285, 296, 313, 320–332, 336, 362–385, 392–396, 412–415, 420, 429, 430 Spinoza, Baruch x, xii, xvi, xvii, 24, 25, 39, 55, 64, 70, 86, 107–116, 120, 160, 236, 237, 254, 255, 275, 348, 349, 357, 358, 378, 379, 381, 399, 400, 427, 428 Star of David 294, 296, 301–303 Subjectivity xviii, xx, xxi, 14, 49, 125, 129–136, 176, 210, 223, 232, 239, 254–261, 350, 357, 363–375, 382–385, 395, 401, 410, 412 Substance 12, 14, 16, 20, 21, 23, 109, 113, 115, 116, 129, 170, 172, 175, 194, 195, 228, 232, 289, 345, 348, 355–357, 393, 399, 400, 401

446 

 Index

Suffering 20, 28, 51, 145, 147, 151, 180, 216, 259, 279, 283, 289, 298, 304, 312, 315, 317, 318, 324, 325, 327, 331, 335, 336, 340, 341, 342, 354

Tsimtsum kipshuto 16, 88, 89, 91, 93, 156, 173, 363, 377–380 Tsimtsum lo kipshuto 12, 93, 94, 97, 378 Tsimtzum rishon 46, 298

Taubes, Jacob 17, 22, 24, 293 Taylor, A.E., 346 Tehiru xviii, 8, 135, 196–204, 287, 321, 322, 392 Teleology xv, 174, 346 Temple 5, 45–50, 74–78, 315, 320, 335 Temporality vii, xiii, xiv, 3, 10, 11, 13, 21, 26, 30, 32, 51, 75–78, 111–115, 123, 124, 127, 147, 148, 152, 154, 165, 174–182, 199, 209–215, 231–243, 255, 273, 289, 301, 305–308, 347, 364, 369, 375, 380, 383–385, 393, 394, 396, 397, 400–408, 412–415, 420 Textuality 283 Theism 72, 93, 116, 154, 155, 164, 333, 346–348, 368 Theodicy xix, xx, 313, 314, 318, 340 Theosophy ix, x, xvi, xxi, 2, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 27, 142, 147, 148, 154, 155, 168, 233, 251, 401, 413 Tikkun xiv, 7, 173, 251, 252, 254, 256, 262, 315, 316, 318, 319, 323, 324, 331, 333, 336, 396, 402 Tillich, Paul 263 Time see Temporality Torah ix, 155, 160, 161, 162, 179, 269, 270, 304, 391, 392, 411 Totality xviii, 11, 42, 65, 66, 98, 99, 101, 134, 173, 264, 290, 299, 348, 356–361, 367–372, 385, 397, 398 Trace 7, 14, 21, 23, 25, 52, 53, 77, 78, 84, 85, 94, 97–101, 108, 109, 150, 155–157, 165, 167, 179, 180, 181, 203, 282, 358, 363, 374, 377, 378, 400, 412–415 Transcendence xix, 7, 12, 20, 22, 25, 44, 51, 79, 85, 100, 101, 153–155, 165, 192, 199, 202–204, 249–265, 315, 316, 321, 323, 334, 339, 343–348, 353–359, 369, 382, 384 Transcendental 122, 178, 252, 331, 362–374, 381, 385, 389, 399, 404, 411 Trauma 198, 199, 286, 312, 313, 394

Unconcealment 28, 146, 148, 149, 153, 162, 163 Univocity of being xi–xiii, 16–18, 21–23, 29, 403 Unlimited 94, 172, 200, 273, 350, 420 Vacuum see Void Vital, Hayyim xiii, 11, 12, 14, 18, 41–45, 52, 53, 66, 115, 120, 122, 124–127, 132–134, 298, 361, 366, 380, 381, 392, 420, 422 Void vii, xiv, xviii, 6–8, 12, 15, 23, 41–44, 51–56, 66, 93, 107–110, 114, 124, 132, 133, 144, 152, 156, 157, 169, 171, 177, 191, 193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 251, 273, 279, 297, 306–308, 325, 370, 377, 379, 380, 415 Wachter, Johann Georg 15, 16, 39, 427, 428 Weinberg, Yehiel 348 Whitehead, A.N. 346 Withdrawal vii, ix, xiii, xiv, xviii–xxi, 5–16, 18, 21, 23, 28, 30, 32, 40–45, 48, 50–54, 66, 75–77, 93, 94, 107–110, 114, 115, 130, 144–147, 151, 152, 156, 159, 161, 163–165, 172, 174, 177–181, 198, 202, 221, 226, 233, 235, 250–253, 255, 257, 262, 271, 281, 282, 286, 289, 294–298, 320–323, 328, 330, 340–345, 349–354, 357, 358, 359, 361–389, 391, 392, 393, 401, 406, 420 World, worldly vii, xi–xv, xix–xxi, 5–32, 43–47, 51, 52, 54, 56, 61, 64–80, 83–90, 93, 97, 98, 101, 107–116, 120–131, 136, 138, 145–148, 154, 155, 160, 161, 164–166, 171, 173, 175, 178, 179, 191, 193–197, 204, 207, 208, 212–218, 219–244, 250–255, 257, 262, 263, 269, 276, 281, 282, 288, 289, 295–307, 312–335, 339–348, 352, 353, 356, 357, 361, 364, 374–380, 384, 385, 391–414, 419, 420, 422, 424, 430, 432 Wyschogrod, Edith 157, 353, 362 Wyschogrod, Michael 72

Index 

Zarader, Marlene 143, 144, 284–286 Zimmermann, Walter 431 Zionism, Zionist xx, 294, 295, 297, 299, 300, 301, 303, 306, 308

 447

Žižek, Slavoj xii, 20, 138, 270, 312, 410 Zohar 47, 51, 52, 55, 62, 68, 69, 72, 160, 162, 164, 166, 167, 179, 225, 316, 392, 413