An Angel-Satyr Walks These Hills

[nellybeeatch]

The Lurianic Cabalists were vexed by the question of how God could have created anything, since He was already everywhere & hence there could have been no room anywhere for His creation. In order to approach this mystery, they conceived the notion of tzimtzum, which means a sort of holding in of breath. Luria suggested that at the moment of creation God, in effect, breathed in -- He absented Himself; or rather, He enterered into Himself-- so as to make room for His creation. This tzimtzum has extraordinary implications... In a certain sense, the tzimtzum helps account for the distance we feel from God in this fallen world. Indeed in one version, at the moment of creation something went disastrously wrong, & the Fall was a fall for God as well as for man: God Himself is wounded; He can no longer put everything back together by Himself: He needs man. The process of salvation, of restitution--the tikkun, as Luria called it-- is thus played out in the human sphere, becomes at least in part the work of men in this world. hence years & years later we get Kafka's remarkable & mysterious assertion that "The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed; he will come on the day after his arrival; he will come not on the last day but on the very last."

-- Lawrence Weschler.