Making Room

On the withdrawal of the Infinite and the space that love leaves behind

When you set a compass on a sheet of paper, the sharp point goes in first. The circle comes later. Yet the whole measure of the circle, all of its order, comes out of that one small puncture. There is no center on a blank page. A center is not found, it is placed. Wherever the point presses down, that is where the center will be. And even after the circle is drawn and the compass lifted away, the tiny mark stays on the paper, quieter and deeper than the line itself.

For a long time now I have been turning over a question. How can something with no beginning, no end and no edge have a center? Where is the middle of the infinite? A center belongs to a shape with known borders. In the infinite there is no difference to set the center apart from what surrounds it. Every point is equally far from every other, which is another way of saying that nothing is far from anything.

Rabbi Chaim Vital, who set down the teachings of the Ari, describes a scene in the very first gate of Etz Chaim that seems to come from inside this question. In the beginning everything was infinite light, and there was no empty place at all. Then, at a single point in the very middle of its light, the Infinite drew itself back. Where the light pulled away, an empty space remained. According to Etz Chaim that space was round, because the Infinite stood at an equal distance in every direction and the withdrawal happened evenly on all sides. Kabbalah calls this withdrawal tzimtzum. It also says that when the light withdrew, something of it lingered in the emptiness, a trace, a memory, a reshimu. Sometimes we come to know the truth of a thing not while it is present, but from the shape it leaves behind when it steps away.

Then a single line of light descends from the Infinite into that round space. The kav. Its upper end remains joined to the source, while its lower end never touches the bottom of the circle. And for the first time there is direction. Up and down, nearer the source and farther from it. In the circle every point had been equally distant from the center. The line brings order, a path. When I read this I realized something. The first question of creation is not matter but difference. First a difference opens, then a direction, then a relationship. Because a relationship can only form between things that can be told apart.

But why would the Infinite do such a thing? The answer in Etz Chaim is strikingly simple. When it arose in His simple will to create the worlds, it was in order to bring to light the perfection of His deeds, His names and His attributes. Elsewhere in the same work the thought opens into a question. If there is no one in the world to receive His mercy, how could He be called merciful? That question always brings me back to people. Who is a king without a people? Where does love flow if there is no one to love? A name does not live without someone to call it. The withdrawal of the Infinite is the making of room for an otherness in which its names can appear.

Whenever I read this scene, I find myself thinking about human relationships. Murray Bowen, one of the founders of family therapy, describes something he calls differentiation of self. By this he means the capacity to stay emotionally connected to the people we love while remaining ourselves. Its opposite he calls fusion. Two people become so entangled that it is no longer clear whose feeling belongs to whom. When one grows angry the other grows angry too, when one is afraid the other cannot step back, no one can hold their own place, and what looks like closeness slowly turns into suffocation. A differentiated person can hold a loved one’s feeling close without dissolving into it. Bowen, of course, is not talking about Kabbalah. He is describing families and couples. But when I set the two accounts side by side I see the same intuition. A relationship becomes possible where one person is able to leave room for the other. Esther Perel says that desire needs a little space in order to burn, and Rilke describes love as two solitudes that protect and greet each other. I used to think that closeness meant closing the gap. Yet the deepest closeness begins where the other is allowed to remain other.

There is a paradox here that will not let me go. The Torah says there is none besides Him, ein od milvado. If the Infinite fills everything, can there truly be any being other than Him? The Tanya answers from two directions. Seen from above, no. The world is like a ray of light inside the sun, and inside the sun the ray has no separate existence. Seen from below, however, the created being truly feels itself to exist, truly feels itself to be separate. The Tanya explains this as the Infinite concealing its own power. Without that concealment nothing could ever experience itself as a separate being. I see that feeling as a gift. In Iggeret HaKodesh the Alter Rebbe writes that only the One whose being is His own can bring something into existence out of nothing. If I try to put this in my own words through an image, the miracle is not that light shines. Shining is simply what light does. The miracle is that light can allow something other than itself to exist. A being real enough to experience itself as separate, yet never, for a moment, existing outside Him.

I think love is something like this. If love were a need, it would swallow the other. It would take the other in to fill its own emptiness. But when love is a choice, the one who loves draws back a little so that the other can exist as well. Erich Fromm describes mature love as a union in which each person keeps their own integrity. To be one and still remain two.

And what if we could see the source completely? God tells Moses that no one can see Him and live. The Talmud recounts that at Sinai, with every word God spoke, the souls of the people left their bodies. To see the source completely is to dissolve. No separate self remains, and without a self there is no one left to love. The veil is not the enemy of love but its condition. The living creatures in Ezekiel’s vision run and return, ratzo va’shov. Chassidic thought reads this as the movement of the soul. The soul runs toward its source and longs to dissolve into it. Then it returns, to its own place, its own body, its own name. Love moves between these two motions like a breath. Neither wholly dissolving nor wholly apart.

This made me think about freedom differently too. I did not choose the source of my being. I did not speak the first word. Rabbi Tarfon teaches that it is not ours to finish the work, which means the last word is not ours either. But the word in the middle is ours. When the Torah speaks of the writing on the tablets given at Sinai, it calls it charut, engraved. In Pirkei Avot the sages say, do not read it charut but cherut, freedom. Something in that reading stops me. A letter written in ink adds something to a surface. It is separate from the paper and it can be erased. An engraved letter comes into being when something is taken away from the surface. It is not separate from the stone, it is the stone itself. What brings the letter out is the removal of a piece of the stone. Doesn’t something similar happen in tzimtzum? The light of the Infinite withdraws from a point, and in the space left by that absence a form appears. The sages do not draw this parallel between engraving and tzimtzum. I am the one drawing it. But it tells me something about what freedom is. Perhaps freedom is not being our own source, but being able to answer from within an existence that was engraved into us.

The Torah holds a few moments of that answer. They appear in very different places, but when I set them side by side they seem to say the same thing. The first question God asks a human being is not a question of information. Ayeka. Where are you? Adam hid. Generations later Abraham answered a call with a single word. Hineni. Here I am. And at Sinai the people did not first understand and then agree. They said na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and we will understand. They answered something they did not yet know.

In the story of creation God looks at what He has made and sees that it is good. Then, for the first time, something is called not good. It is not good for the human being to be alone. Light, water and trees were good. The first thing that was not good was loneliness. And God says He will make for the human a helper who stands opposite him. Ezer kenegdo. Not the same as him and not far from him. Opposite.

Then comes the mistake. The words are spoken. And after them, a verse full of tenderness. God made garments of skin for Adam and Eve and clothed them. Before sending them out of the garden, what He does is cover them. Whenever I come to this verse I remember a question I once asked my mother as a child. When I die and go to another planet, what will I wear there? I was five or six. My mother cried. I didn’t understand why. For me it was not a question about fear. If you are going somewhere, you wear something there. The Midrash adds a small detail to this verse. In the Torah scroll of Rabbi Meir, it says, kotnot or, garments of skin, was found written not with an ayin but with an aleph, garments of light. Or, skin. Or, light. The same sound, only the first letter is different. To the five year old girl, it sounds like an answer. Skin here, light there. Ezekiel, too, describes God’s love as someone who finds an infant abandoned in an open field, washes it and clothes it. I bathed you in water, I clothed you in embroidered garments. Someone who loves washes, clothes, and in the morning everything begins again.

But a covering and a fence are not the same thing. A covering is placed over someone else by one who loves. A fence is something we usually build around ourselves, out of our own fear. The garden has an example of this too, and it comes just before the covering. When Eve answers the serpent, she adds something God never said. Do not touch it. According to Avot deRabbi Natan it was Adam who put up this fence, and Eve took it to be God’s own word. The serpent slipped in through exactly that gap, pushed her against the tree, and showed her that nothing happened. When a fence falls it is very easy to believe that the whole truth has fallen with it. What psychology calls defenses work in much the same way. For a while they protect us, and then, without our noticing, they begin to speak in our place. We take the boundaries built from our own fears to be the truth itself. The word spoken to Cain leaves the door open. Sin crouches at the door, its desire is toward you, but you can rule over it. Ve’atah timshol bo. Steinbeck built East of Eden around this one word and read it not as a command but as a possibility. Thou mayest.

Yet having no boundary at all is a disaster of another kind. Too many fences smother the truth. No fence at all smothers the world. The Torah describes the generation before the flood as one that filled the earth with violence and corrupted its way. Rashi, drawing on the Talmud, explains this corruption as the crossing of boundaries. In the flood all the fountains of the great deep burst open, the windows of heaven open, and the waters that were separated on the second day of creation flow back together. This is where Rashi’s words end. What follows is my own reading. In tzimtzum the Infinite withdrew and opened a place where the other could exist. In the flood the opposite happens. Boundaries collapse, everything runs into everything else, and nothing can hold its own place. Making room is not only stepping back. It also means protecting the boundary that lets each one remain distinct. When the flood is over a bow is set in the sky. One light, many colors.

A few generations later the same question appears again, this time among human beings. The story of the tower opens with a single sentence. The whole earth had one language and the same words. The Midrash says that as the tower rose, if a brick fell they wept, and if a person fell no one turned to look. At the end of the story the city takes its name from confusion. It is called Bavel, because there God confounded the languages. Hannah Arendt describes the human condition as plurality, the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth. Arendt wrote this while thinking about politics, but I carry it over into love. To make room for someone is not to want them to speak like me, think like me, live like me. The tower wants to gather everyone into a single language. Love lets the other speak in their own. That echad, one, and ahavah, love, share the same numerical value reminds me of this.

I come back to the small mark the compass left behind. Sometimes I ask myself. Whom have I made room for in my life? Can I love without swallowing the one I love, or do I want them to fill my own emptiness? Which of my fences have I mistaken for the truth? When I am asked where are you, do I hide, or can I say here I am? Perhaps you can ask too. Where is your center, and who placed it there? And when you withdraw, what kind of mark do you leave behind?

The Infinite drew back so that we could be. Perhaps that is exactly what loving is. Drawing back a little, leaving a space where the other can breathe, and calling them by name from within that space.

Sources

1. Rabbi Chaim Vital, Etz Chaim, Gate 1, Branch 2, on tzimtzum, the central point, the round empty space and the kav. In the same work, the purpose of creation and the question of how He could be called merciful if there were no one to receive His mercy. https://he.wikisource.org/wiki/עץ_חיים/שער_א/ענף_ב
2. Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (1978), differentiation of self and fusion. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity (2006).
3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, letter of May 14, 1904.
4. Deuteronomy 4:35, ein od milvado. Tanya, Shaar HaYichud VeHaEmunah, chapter 3, the image of the sun and its ray. Tanya, Iggeret HaKodesh 20, creation out of nothing.
5. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956).
6. Exodus 33:20. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 88b, the souls departing at Sinai. Ezekiel 1:14, ratzo va’shov.
7. Pirkei Avot 2:16, Rabbi Tarfon. Exodus 32:16 and Pirkei Avot 6:2, charut and cherut. https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.6.2
8. Genesis 3:9 and 22:1, Ayeka and Hineni. Exodus 24:7 and Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 88a, na’aseh v’nishma.
9. Genesis 2:18, ezer kenegdo. Genesis 3:21 and Bereishit Rabbah 20:12, kotnot or. Ezekiel 16:9 to 16:10. https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.20.12
10. Genesis 3:1 to 3:3 and Avot deRabbi Natan, version A, chapter 1, the fence Adam made. Genesis 4:7. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952).
11. Genesis 1:6 to 1:8, 6:11 to 6:13, 7:11 and 9:13. Rashi on Genesis 6:11 and 6:12. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 108a.
12. Genesis 11:1 to 11:9, one language and the explanation of the name Bavel through the word balal. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.11.9 Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 24. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), plurality.