The Space Between the Wings
On desire, distance and tzimtzum
In the innermost room of the Mishkan, on the golden cover of the Ark, stand two cherubim. Their faces turn toward each other, their wings spread upward, and between them a space is left open. The Torah says the Voice will come from there. From between them, from the small space under those wings. At the very center of the holiest place on earth, a gap is left open. The image settles something inside a person, because the gap may be exactly what we fear most in love.
The fear has its root in desire. In Hebrew, wanting and running circle around the same two letters, resh and tzadi. Rotzeh is the one who wants, ratz the one who runs. Ratzon, will, is the name of a running that never quite stops inside a person. Kabbalah and Chassidut often identify Keter, the highest of the sefirot, above wisdom and understanding, with ratzon. In the Arizal’s telling the world does not begin with a thought. It begins when a desire to create stirs within Ein Sof. Long before desire becomes our weakness, it is the first breath of existence. That is why we run, toward the people we love, toward meaning, toward God, and sometimes simply toward someone who might see us.
Yet when Yechezkel describes the living creatures of his vision, one verb is not enough. Ratzo vashov, they run and they return. Psychology found those two verbs in the movements of a small child. The securely attached child Mary Ainsworth observed runs off toward the toys while the mother is in the room, explores, turns back to look at her, takes refuge in her lap when needed, and then sets off again. Ainsworth and John Bowlby called this the secure base. What makes the child brave is the existence of a place to return to. A running that never learns to return, however joyfully it begins, wears a person down in the end. Pirkei Avot names the turn that makes the difference. Make His will your will, so that He will make your will His. The speed of the running matters far less than its direction.
In adult love the place of return often blurs. Couples know one dance especially well, and its steps rarely change. One partner pursues and the other withdraws, and the faster one runs toward, the further the other steps away. Both believe they are protecting the relationship. Beneath it lie two old fears, the fear of being abandoned and the fear of being swallowed, and most of us carry both. Zygmunt Bauman was describing this doubleness when he wrote of modern intimacy as suspended between the wish for security and the wish for freedom. Perhaps the heart’s most naked sentence is this one. Don’t leave me, and leave me room. To want both in a single breath looks like a contradiction, yet the whole difficulty of love lives inside that sentence.
Sociology reminds us that this fear is not only a private wound. Anthony Giddens describes modern intimacy through what he calls the pure relationship. Lineage, property and custom no longer hold couples together, and a bond lasts only as long as both people find enough in it. That is a freedom, and also a constant fragility, because a tie that must be chosen anew every day can be lost on any day. Eva Illouz goes further and traces part of the pain of modern love to social structure itself. In a world of abundant options, where a person’s worth is measured through the recognition of others, commitment starts to look like risk and distance like protection. In the dance of the one who pursues and the one who withdraws, a whole era is moving its feet alongside the two people.
Kabbalah answers it with creation itself. When Ein Sof fills everything, there is room for nothing else. The world becomes possible through tzimtzum, the Infinite’s withdrawal of itself. But in the Arizal’s account the emptied space is not abandoned. A trace of the light remains, the reshimu, and then a thin line of light reaches into the void, the kav. It does not fill the space or occupy it. It only reaches it. This is the divine answer to don’t leave me and leave me room. A love that withdraws enough to make room, leaves its trace in the place it has emptied, and keeps reaching with a light as thin as a line.
The Arizal tells something more. When the light first descends into the vessels, they cannot hold its intensity and they break. Shevirat HaKelim looks like a catastrophe, and yet the whole story of tikkun begins among the shards. People are often like this. A person’s capacity to receive love widens at the very place where it once broke. Across a lifetime a vessel can deepen. But its deepening has a condition. When we hand our broken places to someone else to repair, two vessels are pressed into becoming one, and both overflow.
Murray Bowen called what prevents that overflow differentiation of self, the capacity to stay emotionally close to someone without fusing with them, to remain yourself in the presence of their anxiety or longing. Science has shown that this closeness lives in the body too. In a brain imaging study by James Coan, women waiting for an electric shock showed calmer activity in threat related regions of the brain when they held their husband’s hand, and the effect was strongest in the strongest marriages. The hands join, the bodies stay two, and perhaps that is exactly what calms, two separate nervous systems able to steady each other.
Sacrifice has its own measure. The word korban comes from karov, near. In the language of the Torah, the measure of an offering is how much nearer it brings. Some sacrifices overflow from fullness and are forgotten the moment they are made. Others are made in order to be loved. They quietly open a ledger, record each thing given, and one day return as resentment. Some people stay with good intentions and narrow the other’s room to breathe. Others withdraw out of fear and call it respect. From the outside the two look alike. The difference lies in the place the act comes from. Even the Akedah, the most demanding offering in our tradition, ends with a knife that is raised and does not fall. A devotion that erases oneself or the other is not what is asked. Kadosh means set apart. Holiness is born from the meeting of two beings who do not disappear into each other.
When, then, should we stay, and when should we step back? The sefirot offer no formula, only a balance. Chesed says stay and Gevurah says step back. Chesed left alone floods everything, Gevurah left alone freezes it. The decision belongs to Tiferet, which stands between them and is also called emet, truth. So what has to be asked is what is true right now. And the simplest way to find out, the one most often neglected, is to ask. What do you need from me now?
Georg Simmel wrote that the dyad, the bond of two, is the most fragile of social forms. A relationship made of two people disappears the moment either one withdraws. When a third joins, the relationship acquires an existence beyond the two of them. The Talmud finds that third somewhere else. Rabbi Akiva observed that ish, man, and ishah, woman, are almost the same word. One carries an extra yud, the other an extra heh, and together those two letters spell Yah, one of the names of God. If they are worthy, the Shechinah dwells between them. If not, the letters that remain spell esh, fire, and it consumes them. The space between the cherubim may be exactly the place of that third.
The Talmud tells one more thing about the cherubim. On the pilgrimage festivals the curtain was drawn back and the people were shown the cherubim intertwined. See, they were told, your love before God is like this. Even in the holiest room love was pictured as an embrace, and still the two cherubim remained two. The space between them did not close. It only grew warm. Perhaps love is something like that, a gap we run toward and return from, one that does not vanish as we come closer but slowly becomes holy. And as at the very beginning, the voice comes from there, from between two people.
