Personalizing: Tzimtzum, Tikun Olam, and Tefillah

Tzimtzum – meaning “contraction” or “withdrawal” – is a kabbalah–hashkafa concept – typically used for portraying a pre-primordial act of withdrawing G?D? infinite-light to create a (somewhat) “vacant space” for this (somewhat) finite world to exist.

⇒ (Alternately!) Tzimtzum can be appreciated as a (somewhat) Personal Experience; according to the following very-slow to implement contemplation, meditation, self-evaluation ‘exercise’; …which is presented here in Regression order: from your now – to your younger self, and then to your even earlier ‘versions’ -and- finally to intimate ‘primal’ times – which you may (sort of) ‘remember’ -or- you may (somewhat) accept – even if only by extrapolation → Ready? ⇒ here goes! … 

FIRST – Considering all that you NOW know -and- All your memories, (Question) what portion of all that is about YOU? (Answer) YOU are ‘just’ a part of your world – that is much (MUCH) bigger than you are. -PAUSE- 

NEXT – The same ‘you in your world’ Relational Quantification (Question) for when YOU were half your current age; (Answer) even though you were less mature than you are now (but felt much more mature than you feel now), your world understanding & experience (felt bigger – even though it) was actually much smaller than it is today → so the You (of then) took up a larger part of your world (of then) [than the You of now – takes up in Your world of now]. -Pause- 

AGAIN (?) for when you were half that age; —pause— then once more for any infant – even You – … and again as a New Born: whose Self is Absolutely Everything – their entire world – even as light, sound, smell, taste, temperature, and tactile textures are all suddenly New -and- Changing too; …-Long Pause-… 

…and NOW still deeper → close your eyes … relax … imagine … [or recall] … your environmental quiesced prenatal months; when your nascent sensory system was first experiencing ⇒ the newness of your sequestered space’s constant darkness, its organic omnidirectional Quasi-Anechoic silence (serenaded by mother’s ‘visceral’ sounds → with her passionate libretto – ‘whispering’ sweet nothings), your slowly-shifting ultra-low frequency variations of smell & taste, and your tactile somatic Null – all within a microgravity aqueous expanse → which was then when YOU -and- All Your Memories were absolutely ONE, identical, Equal, the same … 

-and- FURTHER! ⇒ into your six post-conception cellular differentiation weeks – (?) when your life-to-be was evolving [“ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny” (YOUR embryo’s development repeating our species’ evolution) → to become an ‘Adam the First’ ⇒ whose ‘Garden of Eden’ center-line descending discovery started atop ‘the’ Tree of Knowledge (your neshamah: suture-jointed 1mm-cranium’s ‘eupnea’ respiration; brain/mind) – with your self-sensory Revelation Adventure branching downward – ‘observing’ four rivers – nourishing, sustaining, and refreshing your ‘upper world’ sensory organs – Specifically your ‘four rivers’ (tears, earwax, sinus-mucus, and saliva) — exploring deeper downward into your infrastructure ‘body’ – and finding a surprise thorax asymmetry – between right & left – thus Concept-Idealized as (if?) ‘male’ & ‘female’ — continuing – encountering the most subtle ‘creature’ in All ‘the garden’ – your umbilical cord – whereat everyone must learn the first ‘LIFE instinct’ – specifically, to keep it under foot – rather than letting it wrap around one’s neck (ending the life) — and then – at the other end of the Gan Eden center is planted ‘the’ Tree of Life – immortality – the genitals – awaiting post-birth – post-puberty ‘co-actualization’ as אנוכי – the singular-plural Hebrew pronoun used to evoke the love-mated couple as ONE ‘person’!]

⇒ THUS, even as both ‘you’ -and- all Your ‘memory’ are expanding – as you continue to grow, self actualize, experience, learn — that is: at every life maturation stage – from conception to gestation to birthing to puberty to adulthood (to The End) – you are continuously Invoking Tzimtzum – by ‘Contracting & Withdrawing’ your ego-self awareness vastness into the expanding neuro-universe perspective of your knowledge integrations, your experience accumulations, and your memory-refined expectations. 

Simply stated, Tzimtzum (the concept) is YOUR ongoing extrapolated psychological regression – from the conception life-inception moment Totality – to your instant NOW; and thereafter >>> BEHOLD: since every person is a World > ‘Tikun Olam’ [fixing ‘the’ world] is the individual’s ongoing developmental struggles to RECTIFY their own accumulated (accidental, induced, and imposed) personality perturbations → The Process of fixing BOTH their own innate nature and their own emerging nurture. 

YOU are the example that is being ‘fixed’ to approach wholeness -and- (please recognize that) Your internal Affirmative Strivings can sometimes be more socially ‘contagious’ than your projected interpersonal ‘toxicity’; manifesting & sharing sincere EXEMPLARY happiness, optimism, enthusiasm, calm, patience, modesty, and the like → are infinitely preferable influences upon those in your immediate surroundings than Contagious anger, sadness, nervousness, [exposures to ‘Competitions for Attention’ between entertainment’s psychotic episodes, fantasy romances, and ‘news’ Edited actuality-mismatched video images & sound bites], etc. ⇒ THUS, only an improving You will influence the Quality of your external environment-world (nature & nurture) → to repair, upgrade, and enhance – by inductive propagation; seeding & reseeding a sort of epidemic of betterness. 

Of course, your emanations – as a world (in stages of progressive consciousness & external transactional repair) – include your ‘words & deeds’: interactions with members of your household (parents, siblings, spouse & progeny), co-workers, neighbors, friends, fellows, distant family, AND those ‘students’ (of your words, deeds, and circumstances) who are influenced by You ⇒ during your lifetime, and thereafter. Then again, every real teacher appreciates how much they have learned from their students; just as every grandparent celebrates sustained enlightenment moments – ‘seeing’ how latent personal paradoxes resolve when comparing residual inherited knowledge-instincts with new-life perpetuating exploration, innovation, and renewal.

Also, a most effective Personal Tikun Olam development stimulus is Tefillah – including your instant spontaneous awareness recognition, your heartfelt expressions of acceptance & gratitude, -and- your regular or irregular – daily, Shabbat, and seasonal event participation in structured intimate-text formalism compilations.

More specifically, Tefillah (a.k.a. ‘Prayer’ – equivalently Personal Significance: Calibration, Normalization, and Unification) is part therapeutic – since every person is carrying inherited trauma, experienced injury, ongoing stress, and anticipated dilemma involvements; and part maturation conducive – since these texts trigger internalized references to many different life stages; including you in your instant now, your antecedent now, and your many finite potential nows. 

[http-links: BEST ‘explored’ AFTER reading this essay.]

Preferably, Tefillah is communal – especially! for men (→ so kindly appreciate that-conclusion in https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/shabbat-starts-when/), since being in the presence of other (men) – who are aspiring to ‘therapeutic peacefulness’ & ‘maturation actualization’ – relieves the individual’s burden – believing that these needs are reflexively unique; whereas (of course) everyone’s G?D? ideations, concepts, and emotions quantum leap with responsibility quandaries (life stage ‘tests’); and cumulative aging. [see the 40 instances of “G?D?” in my earlier blogs – including G?D? ‘word’ spectrum definitions in https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mishnah-tehillim-gd-and-our-now/ –AND– all 26 explicit references to ‘Women’ in my earlier blogs too]

[Note: Acknowledging asymmetries between Women & Men reflects significant differences in their respective life-path trajectories of Maturation, Socialization, and Self-Actualization; thus, my advocacy for “Egalitarian Sustainability” is firstly: based upon my gender-stereoscopic reading of Torat Moshe -and- secondly: since ignoring complementary gender differential aspects historically leads to selective Jewish communal decay.]

Operationally, Tefillah includes some acknowledgement reminders of life acceptance & respective thankfulness; -just- for being alive. Whereas Formal Tefillah (minamally) is a well-considered anthology – integrating: (a) small se​​lect​​ions of Tehillim (Psalms) – providing emotional reference experience considerations – which function as a coordinate system where one can locate one’s own current circumstances, (b) a few Biblical passages – which serve as progressive life-longitudinal empathetic psychodrama metrics -and- which restore-renew-revitalize living prehistoric (only written long after the events) ancestral memories, (c) a concise condensed self-actualization orientations protocol (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/simplified-jewishness-a-shema-anthology-diary/), and (d) a silent internalizing ‘interactive’ meditation (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/silent-mind-inner-voice/) matrix-review of collective membership within​​ the transgenerational fabric of Amm Yisroel (technically being both a Goy: ‘a genetically diversified cohesive-population group’ –and– an Amm: ‘a nation’ – albeit 71st of the 70 proto-nations: having quasi-unique respective indigenous-perspective ‘primeval’ oral-tradition memories, language, etc.).

Functionally, Tefillah, as a life improvement protocol, includes two different Tzimtzum conducive aspects; each promoting Tikun Olam repair. On the one hand, every Tefilliah – both those authentic spontaneous moments of visceral or cognitive awareness -and- ‘many’ of the structured-text proactivating understanding opportunities – cause the individual to perform a thought experiment → Tzimtzum ⇒ to nominally shrink their own self image with respect to all memories, experiences, and realistic instant expectations → to contextualize themselves into the Big Picture – without negating, nullifying, or cancelling their own significance. On the other hand, each formal Tefilliah presents a different perspective concerning (and nominally perturbing) where The You is with respect​​ to The ‘center’ of your accumulating world-awareness mode; thus, your occasional psycho-therapeutic revisions – which often comprise your most profound innermost wisdom micro-enlightments.  

Of course (!), Tzimtzum, Tikun Olam, and Tefillah are all part of the larger Mitzvot Life, Mind, and Time scalable-technology of ‘Best Life Practices Advice’ (https://www.derondareview.org/TorahTechnology.pdf) → by many revered -and- considered as G?D? Commandments (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mitzvah-the-concept/) which are stratified into Torat Moshe status, Rabbinical status, and those Personal awareness status opportunities which – in​​ the heart & mind of the individual – are consistent with their own appreciating those having Torat Moshe & Rabbinical status. More specifically, (do NOT do) Prohibition Mitzvot involve two kinds of personal physical, cognitive, and/or emotional risks: potential reflexive damage to the limit violating participant -and- detrimental biasing the person’s judgement criteria regarding future risk taking possibilities. (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-matan-torah-prequel-noahide-mental-health/)

Likewise, the (Yes – try to do) affirmative Mitzvot involve improved ‘circumstantial’ awareness – which may be conducive to performing any specific mitzvah -and- expanded analytical capacities to assess, strategize, and resolve (real & hypothetical) protocol complexities occurring when simultaneous mitzvot opportunities present; including innumerable concurrent negative & positive mitzvot intersections.

(Question) Why ‘most’ (Yes – try to do) affirmative Mitzvot are specifically for men; while typically not specifically for women? (short-Answer) Men are comparatively particularly sensory challenged – and presumptively empirically lesser perfection motivated than most same-age women: who are biologically endowed with a dual-purpose Ultra-Sensory Organ – quasi-periodically ‘renewed’ by a fifth ‘river’] 

Now, there is no substantial cognitive dissonance between individuals who appreciate mitzvot as spiritually elevating, those who recognise mitzvot as innately actualizing, and those subscribing to assorted aspects of both ideational polarities; [https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hannukah/] except for exemplary events that are considered to have been ‘super-natural’ occurrences → and that is a misleading conclusion. Natural events mean: apparently according to the direct causality laws of Nature – that we understand enough for reasonable predictability, while Super-Natural just relates to exemplary events (of direct causality laws) that we do not yet understand enough for reasonable predictability; and then there are ‘dynamic’ systems – having so many contributing causal factors & multiparametric interactions that neither Natural nor Super-Natural are satisfying descriptors. 

‘Basic’ complexity systems Examples include Predicting?: weather & climate, earthquake & volcano, cosmology & biology (which is massively descriptive – not a ‘science’ – having no ‘significant’ Quantitative ‘Global’ theoretical models), and LIFE – more specifically your life, my life, etc. → such that the awesome Hebrew G?D? ‘word’ – traditionally characterized as exemplifying the most infinite aspects of Rachamim [for definition, understanding, and appreciation – see: ‘Recursive’ & ‘Mom’ & ‘Switching’ in https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/simplified-jewishness-the-shema-2-with-instructions/] – best ‘explains’ the Open Miracle: how we seem to navigate our respective life-paths ‘blindly’ – that is without even ‘knowing’ what aspects of Super-natural (complexity beyond our current capacity to understand) causality laws – we are encountering; without more than the vaguest idea about which of the quasi-stable complexity states to prefer, elect, choose. Thus, by virtue of the enormity of our individual & collective ignorance, WE prefer to rely upon the accumulated scholarly Life-Appreciation consensus of our many-millennia ancestry → inclusive of the oral tradition (Torah Sheba’al Peh) portions of which long predate both Matan Torah at Sinai, and our Avot. 

While local-now examples of a more than ‘Basic’ complexity system include: Amm Yisroel’s ongoing survival, our return from prolonged abusive exile, the revival of Hebrew (both Biblical & post-modern dialects) as a living language for transactions & ideations, our indigenous territory’s environmental climate-revival, our heroic neshamot energizing with the meritorious-forces of our ancestral ‘roots’, and our primordial memories’ ongoing awakening; just to begin to name a few!