The Vessel of Good Intentions

On gifts, debts, and tzimtzum

Not long ago, I told a friend about something that had hurt me. She listened quietly and then reminded me of a sentence she had always liked, and believed came from Dante. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. She was trying to help. After a while she said something else, more directly. Perhaps I had to stop handing my good intentions to everyone and find some balance.

I didn’t correct her about Dante. The sentence isn’t in the Divine Comedy, and its history is older and messier than the quotation suggests. Versions of it appear in a much longer proverbial tradition, associated at different times with Bernard of Clairvaux, Samuel Johnson, and others. But correcting the attribution seemed beside the point that evening. Her intention was good. And that, in a strange way, was exactly what we were talking about.

We usually use the proverb to warn about the harm caused by people who mean well. There is another experience that is harder to admit. Sometimes goodness itself comes back as a wound. When that happens, the first questions are usually directed inward. Was I naive? Did I give too much? Did I misread the person? Did I imagine a closeness that wasn’t really there?

I have asked myself these questions too. But over time I have come to think that they don’t quite reach the heart of the matter. Sometimes the difficulty lies in giving something good without leaving enough room for the other person to remain fully separate from us. That problem has a surprisingly long history.

Marcel Mauss, in The Gift, argued that what appears to be a free gift is rarely free in the social sense. Giving, receiving, and returning are bound together by obligations. A gift creates a relationship, and relationships carry expectations, whether we name them or not. Mauss even wrote a short piece about the German word Gift, which means both “gift” and “poison.” He did not treat this double meaning as an accident, and I have never been able to forget it. The same word holding both meanings says something about giving itself.

Simmel takes the problem further through his reflections on gratitude. The first gift creates an asymmetry precisely because it is the first. Something has been given before the other person has had the opportunity to answer it. However generous the response, the balance is never quite restored. Bourdieu shows another side of the same problem. Generosity can create symbolic power without the giver ever consciously intending to exercise power. A person may give out of genuine affection and still leave the other person feeling indebted, smaller, or unable to say no.

I see versions of this in relationship counseling. The drama triangle described by Stephen Karpman in 1968 is useful here. Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor. I don’t use the model to suggest that people are secretly manipulating one another. Often the opposite is true. The person in the Rescuer position may genuinely believe, and may genuinely be, helpful. The difficulty begins when help becomes a position inside the relationship.

The person being helped may gradually come to see themselves as someone who needs saving. That feeling can become unbearable. And then something shifts. The person who was rescued may suddenly become angry with the rescuer. The rescuer, who thought they were giving, may experience themselves as the injured one. The roles can change very quickly. None of this makes the hurtful behavior acceptable. It does, however, make the pattern easier to see. Sometimes what looks like betrayal is also an attempt, however clumsy, to recover a sense of separateness.

This is where I find myself thinking about tzimtzum. In Lurianic Kabbalah, creation begins with a paradox. If the light of Ein Sof fills everything without limit, there is no room for anything separate to exist. Tzimtzum describes the withdrawal or contraction of that infinite light, creating a space in which something other than the infinite can appear. I don’t take this as a psychological equation. Kabbalah is not a therapy manual, and Winnicott was not secretly explaining Lurianic cosmology. But sometimes two very different traditions illuminate the same human problem.

Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough” mother is one of those places. A mother who responds perfectly to every need leaves no space for the infant to discover an existence of its own. The gradual failures, the delays, the moments in which the mother cannot anticipate everything, are part of the child’s movement toward separateness. The parallel I find useful is simple. Love cannot mean occupying all the available space. Sometimes loving someone means making room for them to become someone you did not create.

The same question appears, in a completely different register, in the Lurianic account of Tohu. The vessels encounter an intensity of light they cannot contain, and they break. The resulting shattering gives rise to the familiar Kabbalistic imagery of the holy sparks, the nitzotzot, becoming trapped within the kelipot. There is something psychologically recognizable in the image.

A person can give so much that the other person’s own capacity to receive, choose, refuse, or contribute becomes smaller. The giver may experience this as love. The receiver may experience it as pressure. And sometimes the receiver has to push very hard to recover a sense of self. That is one reason I have become more cautious about the language of unconditional giving. There are forms of generosity that are liberating, and there are forms that quietly remove the other’s freedom.

Kohelet Rabbah expresses another version of this tension in its well known teaching about being merciful toward the cruel and, as a consequence, becoming cruel toward the merciful. The original context concerns Saul and Amalek. I hear something in it about the danger of mercy without discernment. Especially mercy toward ourselves.

In the counseling room, people often imagine boundaries as walls. They fear that if they say no, withdraw, or stop rescuing, they will become cold. But within the language of the sefirot, Chesed does not stand alone. Gevurah gives form and limit. Without some capacity for restriction, generosity has nowhere to settle. A boundary is not necessarily the opposite of love. Sometimes it is what allows love to remain love.

This has changed the way I think about tikkun as well. There is something comforting in the Kabbalistic idea of birur hanitzotzot, the sorting or clarification of the sparks. The task is to recognize where the spark has become entangled and to return it, carefully, toward its proper source, without condemning the light for where it ended up. That distinction matters to me.

I don’t want to regret having good intentions. I don’t want to become suspicious of generosity simply because generosity can sometimes go wrong. What I want to learn is something more difficult. How to give without taking away the other’s space, how to love without confusing closeness with possession.

Perhaps that is what my friend was trying to tell me when she said, “Find some balance.” She was using an ordinary word. In Kabbalah it would be called tzimtzum, and I suspect Winnicott would have recognized it as being good enough. Perhaps both point toward the same discipline of love, knowing when to let the light step back, so that another person can become visible.

I haven’t told my friend this yet. Perhaps this piece is partly for her.

References

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. London, 1791. Entries for April 1775.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990. Originally published as Le sens pratique. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos. Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003.

Karpman, Stephen B. “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis.” Transactional Analysis Bulletin 7, no. 26 (1968), pp. 39 to 43.

Kohelet Rabbah on Ecclesiastes 7, 16 (numbered 7, 1 in some editions). Compare Midrash Tanhuma, Metzora 1.

Mauss, Marcel. “Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” L’Année sociologique, new series, vol. 1 (1923 to 1924), published 1925. English translation The Gift, translated by W. D. Halls. London, Routledge, 1990.

Mauss, Marcel. “Gift, gift.” In Mélanges offerts à Charles Andler par ses amis et ses élèves. Strasbourg, Istra, 1924, pp. 243 to 247.

Ray, John. A Collection of English Proverbs. Cambridge, 1670.

Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Jerusalem, Schocken, 1941. Revised edition New York, Schocken Books, 1946. Seventh lecture, on Isaac Luria and his school.

Simmel, Georg. Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot, 1908. The excursus on faithfulness and gratitude appears in English in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, Free Press, 1950.

Vital, Hayyim. Etz Hayyim. Sha’ar HaIggulim VeHaYosher, on tzimtzum, and Sha’ar Shevirat HaKelim, on the breaking of the vessels.

Winnicott, Donald W. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953), pp. 89 to 97. See also Playing and Reality. London, Tavistock, 1971.