The Lesser Contains the Greater

On Monday, at Yom Kippur services at the vulnerable-feeling, police-car-protected entrance to the Jewish Community Center gym in downtown Toronto, our community’s wise and kind Rabbi, Ed Elkin, during a 25-hour fast, between leading services from 9 a.m. and giving an incredibly moving, very personal Yom Kippur sermon about surviving trauma, loss and grief at noon, and four hours before concluding the “Closing of the Gates” neilah service at 8 p.m., at 4 p.m., our rabbi led a shiur, a public learning session, studying some ancient text and interpreting it in the light of our present reality.

The Yom Kippur Afternoon Shiur 5787/2026 was entitled “Pressed Together While Being Spaced Apart: The Individual and the Community in Jewish Thought.” And its text source is not the Talmud but a midrash – something between a text-based fable and a liberal interpretation of a line of sacred verse.

In this midrash was a discussion about how, in Jerusalem’s holy Temple, the people of Israel “would stand, crowded, but prostrate themselves, spaced.” And at the centre court of the JCC gym, the rabbi led a vigorous session, with much input from Narayever community members who had come to learn, ranging from a political scientist’s understanding of “the individual” and “community” to journalistic observation about living in our technological and increasingly virtual world, to more sociological observations about the difficulty, in a free society, of creating (without coercion) a congregation that is bounded and yet allows each individual his or her perspective, belief or political positions.

Rabbi Ed’s teaching about the individual and the community in Jewish thought, and the various comments and questions, provided a lot of food for thought.

But I want to go back to the earlier paragraph in that same midrash (Vayikra Rabba 10:9), where, in the Sinai desert, God commands Moses to “Assemble the entire congregation at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.” (Leviticus 8:3) And Rabbi Elazar rightly asks, in disbelief: “ALL of Israel? All 600,000? And you say, ‘at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting’? How can that possibly be?” And then Elazar, answering his own question, explains: It’s because the entrance of the Tent of Meeting is one of those places where “the lesser contains the greater.”

And I want to focus on that phrase used to explain how, in a small physical space, so vast an amount of people could be gathered.

The simple pshat explanation uses a mathematical model of a three-dimensional graph with a horizontal X axis and a vertical Y axis, and it is familiar to the world of real estate development. If the “entrance of the Tent of Meeting” was not in the Sinai desert, three and a half millennia ago, but at the intersection of two downtown streets in the heart of a great metropolis – for example, King and Bay in downtown Toronto – then, on the bounded area of a piece of land on which, spreading out horizontally, at most only a few hundred people could “stand, crowded, but prostrate themselves, spaced,” commercial value could mean builders would build a building on each of the four corners, going up 70 stories. Then not hundreds but tens of thousands could gather at “the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.” And rising on the Y axis, 70 stories from that limited horizontal space, the relatively small footprint of the four corner buildings could be said to be “the lesser that contained the greater.”

A modern journalistic reading of that same midrashic phrase would say: See how the tiny screen of our cell phone, through the astounding powers of human technology, can allow millions of us simultaneously to be “present,” together at the same time—say, watching a World Cup soccer match. In the virtual world, each of us in front of our own personal screen has private space to “spread ourselves out”.

In a similar way, it is said: “On Yom Kippur, Jews gather in the synagogue.” And when I ask, how could the 14 million Jewish people—7 million in Israel, 7 million in the Diaspora—fit into the physical space of a single synagogue? I answer my own question by explaining that “the synagogue” is a community of synagogues, of thousands of synagogues, and in each of them there is enough room for individual Jews to prostrate themselves. So, in that virtual sense, millions of fellow Jews were standing beside each other on September 21, 2026, as the gates closed on Yom Kippur 5787.

As the sun set the day before, on Sunday, September 20, and we were gathered in the JCC gym for Kol Nidre, the opening evening service of Yom Kippur, we were asked to turn off our cell phones for 25 hours. This was to make Judaism’s fast day a fast not only from food and water, but also a digital fast from one’s ever-present cell phone. As a result, those of us who did disconnect from the outside world only found out a day later that on Kol Nidre, in Belleville, an Ontario town about 150 km east of Toronto, while members of the Sons of Jacob synagogue were inside, a man shot at the stained-glass windows into the sanctuary.

The only one hurt was the policeman sitting in a car in front of the synagogue, who fired back, mortally wounding the attacker, who later died in a Belleville hospital. The police officer is still in that same hospital, seriously wounded. And yet, hard as it is to escape politics these days, all the antisemitism and antizionism – the hate for the Jews and hate for the Jewish state – I must set aside the persecution.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating to call bullets fired through the stained-glass windows of a synagogue sanctuary on Kol Nidre night, while congregants are inside, persecution. Especially when it is aided and abetted by the political elite of the country in which I live: the Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, publicly accused the Jews of genocide, stating it not as an allegation but as if “genocide” were a fact, when it is a falsehood. The mayor of Toronto – and that very Kol Nidre night, Avi Lewis, the head of the NDP, Canada’s national left-wing “progressive” party, publicly accusing the Jews of genocide – gives permission, even justification, for somebody to shoot at so heinous an enemy.

And yet, for now, I must set that aside.

For one of the lessons taught to me by October 7th, and by October 8th, and all that those two dates encompass, and everything that has happened since, is that if I, as a liberal Zionist, am going to be persecuted for being a Jew, I might as well get all the benefits of deep engagement with Jewish life: deep learning and ancient wisdom literature, not to mention a celebrated history over thousands of continuous years, with the influence of living among many different lands and peoples and religions while dispersed in Exile.

So I want to focus on just the underlying phrase “where the lesser contains the greater,” and I want to apply to it a Kabbalistic gloss.

Kabbalah teaches that we all live in a world sustained by 10 “channels” of Divine energy: Kabbalah’s 10 S’phirot. This mystical model of a world made of Energy and of Information is not inconsistent with a quantum-physics model.

S’phirot are variously defined as channels; powers; lights; gates; emanations; essential elements. S’phirot could be seen as parallel to Hindu gods and goddesses, or to the Olympian gods: the imagined fundamental aspects of both the entire world and of each individual human soul.

The Tree of Life chart of the 10 S’phirot looks a bit like DNA’s interconnected double helix, with opposing pairs winding around a central column. The Tree of Life starts at the top with Keter, the Crown of eternal light. Then, going down, from right to left: Wisdom. Understanding. And then, arising from their union: Knowing. Then, going down, from right to left: Loving Kindness opposite Restrained Strength. And their union is Balanced Truth. Then, going down, from right to left: Eternity counterposed to Persistence. And then, arising from their union, a Bridge down to the sphere of human experience, the realm of manifested creation: Malchut, the Kingdom, identified with the Shechinah, God’s feminine indwelling presence.

And the interactions between all these emanations, in all different directions and combinations, exemplify the mysterious complexity of existence.

But the mystery is even deeper.

According to Kabbalah, within each sphere or emanation – for example, within Chesed, Loving Kindness – there are the same 10 S’phirot. And so you have, within the sphere of Loving Kindness, also the sphere of Wisdom – “the Wisdom of Loving Kindness” – the sphere of Understanding – “the Understanding of Loving Kindness” – the sphere of Eternity – “the Eternity of Loving Kindness” – the sphere of Persistence – “the Persistence of Loving Kindness” – and so on, for all 10 S’phirot.

And then within each of THOSE 10 S’phirot are all 10 S’phirot, and this continues ad infinitum.

My late uncle Harry Rubin, a brilliant mathematician who was obsessed with String Theory, Martin Buber and Kabbalistic cosmology, would often tell me his favourite joke.

A mathematician explains that the world as we know it rests on the back of a turtle. And when he is asked, “Oh yeah? Then on what does that turtle rest?” he answers: “That’s easy. The back of another turtle.” “OK,” replies the skeptic, “but then, on what does THAT turtle rest?” And the mathematician pauses and says: “I guess it’s turtles all the way down.”

And so I have a Kabbalistic understanding of the midrashic phrase “the lesser contains the greater.” The world is sustained by 10 Information channels of divine Energy. And within EACH of those 10 S’phirot are all 10 S’phirot, and this continues ad infinitum.

And this continues in recursive deepening, emanations within emanations within emanations. And like the joke goes, it’s pretty well emanations all the way down.