Excerpted from The Long Shorter Way,
According to the sages, the purpose of Creation is to establish a place for G-d to live in the world. As a certain folk story described it: Whatever for? Why should the Almighty ever want to dwell in this nether world? And the answer is that like so many other desires and cravings, it should not be inquired into. True, the philosophers have not added much to this half-joking explanation, but it may be appropriate to investigate a little further.
First, there is a certain technical difficulty to be overcome. If we say that G-d wishes to live here on earth, it may imply that He is actually somewhere else. Thus, we are confronted with the paradox of above and below, because for the Infinite there can be no such thing—neither place nor time nor difference in dimension. Even though there is a matter of levels in relation to Divine essence, higher and lower levels, we are still baffled by the fact that He occupies all places and levels equally.
Before He created the world, only G-d may be said to have existed, without limits or distinct forms, and there was nothing else. But nothing actually changed in this respect by virtue of Creation. He is still everywhere. And the relationship with His creatures is a one- way relationship. Even the person who claims to have seen the Divine essence can be said to be looking into a dark glass that does not transmit light; the only possible exception is Moses, who is said to have seen G-d in a “luminous (transparent) glass.” Nevertheless, the general truth holds fast that no man may see G-d and live. For the “luminous glass” is also a transparent window through which one “looks” and is looked at by oneself. Thus the prophets, in peering into this “glass,” were able to see only as much as the dazzling luminosity permitted—the less light there was, the more they could see. In any event, this is a most complex matter in itself. For our purposes, suffice it to say that those who receive anything of the Divine essence are invariably caught in the paradox of seeing and not seeing, of being confronted with a one-way concealment in which they are themselves made transparent and yet are unable to penetrate beyond a certain depth.
Even the angels may not see G-d; no one and nothing can pierce the veil of Divine hiddenness. What can be observed is an unfolding of worlds, a process of descent, or generation, which creates that which we call a lower world, a world of levels that are ever more dense, more wrapped in the Divine hiddenness and less exposed to G-d. Even in individuals on earth one may detect such differences of destiny or “concealment.”
The lower world, created by the process of Divine emanation, is physical and of substance, and, in certain respects, it is also an end product of the Divine will. That is to say, it is a world that can be measured, and it has distinctiveness and form; it can be touched. Man, too, is a part of this world of matter, and no small part of man’s struggle in life consists of the effort to gain release from the physical limitations of his being. It is not only a question of making contact with genuine holiness; it is also a question of freeing oneself from images and pictures, from the sense of touch and the bondage that comes from the attachment to that which is of substance.
Moreover, there is still another part of this world, even lower than all the rest, containing shells of imagined independence; that is to say, they are so far removed from G-d that they can even deny Him. Just as at the highest level of this lower world of ours there are those with minimal wrappings separating them from G-d, so too, at the lowest level of this lower world there are those who claim individual independence; that is, they do not acknowledge their own creatureliness, their status as a product of Creation. This lowest level is the source of evil as opposed to good and is recognized when a person says: “I and none else.” There are, thus, two poles of being. One admits that there is G-d in the world and that alongside Him, throughout the whole world, nothing else can exist. And there is the other, which does not only fail to see G-d everywhere, but which sees itself as the basis for everything, the beginning and the end of all existence. In other worlds, the shell, as a category, is merely a matter of level of existence between these two poles. Anyone, whether man or angel, who says “I and G-d” or “G-d and I” includes the shell in his being.
The question here is: What nourishes the shell and sustains its existence? And the answer is: G-d Himself, even at the extremity of the shell’s impudence, when the shell is allowed to repudiate G-d. The greater the gap, the harder it is to see the direct connection between Creation and the world; one sees only the links. As the Rambam said, all idolatry is a degeneration of one’s faith in the unity of the linked system of Creation. The first step in this degeneration of faith is to consider the desirability of establishing some relation with these links, channels, or instruments of Divine power, in order to ensure their proper functioning for one’s own benefit. And as happens whenever one learns to deal with the lesser officials of government and forgets that there is a sovereign power who is really in charge, one begins to depend of oneself. The slogan of “I and none other” steals its way into the soul.
All of this explains what is meant by above and below, upper and lower—the “lower” being not what is further removed from G-d, but what is less open to the knowledge of the fact that G-d is present within it. The upper worlds are open to divine influence and transmit everything easily, without taking or gaining anything for themselves. The ultimate purpose seems to be the worlds below, the lower levels of being. If this is true, then this world of ours has two essences built into its very structure. It is the lowest of the low. It is also charged with purpose—to each a certain level of consciousness, so that it is deficiently able to receive the Infinite light. When this is achieved, the very depths of darkness and the Sitra Achra will shine and radiate more powerfully and brightly than the upper worlds. For the light of the upper worlds is still clothed and hidden somewhat—being, of necessity, separate from the Divine and not altogether nullified in Him. The point is that G-d and the world are, in essence, opposites; they are contradictions in terms of being. They can exist together only when there is a state of ignorance, when the world does not know the Divine essence and cannot even recognize its presence. Because as soon as the world feels G-d, it cannot continue to be anything, much less itself. That is to say, all the world lives on the basis of the fiction that it has some sort of independent being. Where there is a knowledge of the truth, the world ceases to exist.
Our world is no more than a variety of such false relations and although hit may feel the absurdity of its position, it does not suffer unduly from the urge to nullify itself before the absolute Divine light. To be sure, there have been instances of men who experienced the rapture of the kiss of death, uniting with the Divine essence. It is told of Rabbi Moshe Zechut (HaRamaz) for instance, that in a state of religious ecstasy, he crumpled to earth and ceased to breathe. The fact is that, throughout histroy, there have been many more such instances than are known, even until fairly recent times.
All of this readiness for self-nullification does not, however, characterize the World of Action as it does the higher worlds. In fact, our world is characterized by grossness and evil, and is, therefore, very different from the many thousands of spiritual worlds. Nevertheless, this becomes an advantage in that in enables one to reach Divine consciousness by following a certain path in life without the risk of self-nullification in the Infinite light. The very fact that it is so structured, based on gross matter, which is relatively impervious to the Divine, makes it possible to become a vessel to contain the Divine light. The spiritual worlds have no such covering or protection; they remain one-dimensional. Nevertheless, we may well wonder why we have to struggle against grossness, cruelty, and insensitivity. As Rabbi Nachman said “People maintain that this world exists, and I am quite willing to believe it; but from what we can all see, it looks more like Hell.” The point is that we somehow manage to live in this world because, notwithstanding all its horrors, it has the capacity to absorb what the higher worlds cannot assimilate.
Our world is, therefore, the place where the ultimate Divine revelation will occur, precisely because of its limitations and restrictions. Without delving into the matter deeply, we may say that the theory behind this is the process of generation or involution (as opposed to evolution). Among other things, it explains the descent of G-d in terms of levels, and further explains His withdrawal as whatever makes it possible for something that is not G-d (Divine absence) to exist. It does not explain the development of matter .and ultimately, the whole process of physical creation seems to point to a lower frontier, the edge of existence. Only the infinite power of the Divine can create matter which is finite, which puts a limit to G-d, and this contrast as its emotional implications. We tend to relate to matter and spirit as two levels or degrees of the same thing with matter, since it is more dense, being of lower value. But the truth is that matter is simply what is more hidden or concealed from Divine light; it is not necessarily of lesser of lower value.
Furthermore, matter can be a vessel to contain the Infinite, which the spirit, with its greater vulnerability, cannot be. That is to say, the physical Torah is a way to achieve a certain Divine love and unity, while pure love of G-d and ecstatic experiences are not able to contain the Infinite because of their human personal limitations. In other words, the Divine hiddenness is not seriously affected by the presence of G-d in matter, whereas in the realm of the spiritual, it is difficult, if not impossible, for Divine hiddenness to be maintained. It is only at the end of days that the revelation of G-d will eliminate all the barriers marking His hiddenness in the world. It will be at the end of the Divine experiment that began with Creation—could a world exist in the light of G-d without the protection afforded by His hiddenness.
This brings us to the problem of the resurrection of the dead. In contrast to the Rambam, the Baal HaTanya maintains that it is impossible to achieve a complete spiritual union of the human with the Divine; thus, the ultimate revelation cannot take place in Paradise; it has to be realized through and within the physical world. Therefore, there has to be a physical body, because the body can undergo all sorts of modifications. We cannot conceive of all the possible transmutations that can occur in the body as a result of the mutual relations between body and soul. The existence of the body, or of matter, is apart, not only of reward and punishment, but also of that which makes it possible to experience a true revelation and to see G-d in spite of the fact that “no man shall see Me and live.” Moreover, it is said: “Eye to eye will they see G-d.” all of this is perhaps, to be interpreted to mean that G-d cannot be seen now, when man has to divest himself of his outer (physical) garments in order to approach G-d, a state in which there is no desire for life and no possibility for life to continue. On the other hand, in the time of G-d’s revelation, there will be a transformation in all the world—the change toward which we aspire.
All our efforts to serve and worship Him are intended to bring about the upheaval involved in Divine revelation, beyond anything that was or could be in the past. Indeed the whole world was created for that purpose. And life after that, the life of immortality, is thus the aim of this life. It is appropriate to mention that the ultimate reward will be given in the seventh millennium, within the reality of this world, and not in Paradise. That is to say, Paradise and Hell are no more than stations along the way. A person lives a certain span, doing his share of good and evil. If the evil predominates, his soul is corrupted, and he needs purification and correction. He is therefore sent for a while to some such place where this can be done for him. Another person, who does not require such a transition period and special corrective conditions for the purification of the soul, is sent somewhere else, according to his level of being. Such a one, According to the Baal HaTanya, is not yet seated with the righteous and the saintly in blissful enjoyment of Heaven: he simply waits for the end of days, which is a real time in the concrete history of man; during this period, his entire being has to pass through a great modification.
A precedent for this may be seen in the experience of the giving of the Torah (Matan Torah), which was a revelation of G-d, a breaking of all the barriers and concealments, while at the same time sustaining the world intact. The Almighty said, “I am that I am,” and added, “and the world may also be,” the people who were brought into contact with the reality of Divine existence; it was not a matter of intellectual proof or even signs and miracles; their very senses apprehended G-d. His voice filled all of one’s being. The Revelation at Sinai left no part of a p[person separate from the utterance “I am.” There could be no such thing as hesitation or doubt.
The Revelation at Sinai was thus a manifestation of the innermost light, and for this reason, it was said: “We, the people, were nullified and then, by G-d, revived.” It was a momentary bursting of all normal bounds, an intimation of the sublime reality of the end of days, yet, what is being described is speech, the words of the Ten Commandments, hewn in the stone of the tablets; and the Hebrew word for “hewn” is similar to the root of the word for freedom, cherut, freedom from the Angel of Death. As it is said of the end of days, “And death shall be swallowed forever” (Isaiah 25:8). At a certain moment in history, the end of history came and went, and this was the flash of revelation.
However—and this seems to be the point of the dissertation—this was in part necessary only because the people did not yet have the Torah; they did not possess the means of protecting themselves from the Divine light and were, therefore, unable to know G-d in any other way than by the miracle of His descent. The Torah, among other things, provides man with the tools to experience the Divine, even if, at times, in a very rudimentary fashion. As some Chasidim used to say: “We study the secret lore, learn about the existence of other worlds, angels, seraphs, and heavenly beings; but I don’t see any angels or heavenly beings, and I don’t believe that anyone who studies more is able to see more. Nevertheless, the difference between the one who studies and the one who does not study is that, in the future, when these things are made manifest, the one who studies will be able to recognize them better, to relate them to what he has learned.”
This hints at a concept of what is to be expected in the ultimate time. It will not be a total nullification of matter, but a purification of matter, a metamorphosis of all physical density making it transparent. Matter is now the densest and heaviest of all the forms of existence. At the end of days it will become purified and luminous; the reality of the world will become transparent, completely receptive to the Divine light.
It is written in Isaiah 60:2: “For though darkness covers the earth and dark night the nations, the L-rd shall shine upon you and over you shall His glory appear; and the nations shall march toward your light and their kings to your sunrise.” This is possible because the Torah is a structure that the soul can aspire to and attain; it is a code of the spirit, a many-layered message concerning the manner of relating to the highest holiness. This relation is something we build up for generations, constructing and tearing down and continually striving to form something lasting. When we do reach some kind of closeness with G-d, when we begin to make proper use of the code—in Torah, in mitzvot, or in deeds—much of what had been secret wisdom and hidden lore become something that reveals Him. As Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav saw it: The whole of Torah and mitzvot may be apprehended as a new arrangement of the world, making the world into a means of communication between G-d and man; and it is one’s task in the world to make the necessary changes that are integral to this new arrangement, changes that transform a disorderly world into an orderly one.
This can be illustrated in various other realms of existence where human intervention is crucial, like in the magnetization of iron. All man does is place a particular substance in certain positions and thereby he induces movement; and the innate force in the substance, the atoms and the molecular structure of its reality, arrange themselves in a new order, augmenting the nature of the substance and transforming it. It is a process of creating some order out of the ordinary lack of order which is chance. As it is described by the modern science of communications: The world is full of sounds and all we have to do is put these sounds together in some coherent fashion. What does G-d say? What does the Divine want to communicate by this or that “noise?” When we sort out the sounds, we can begin to understand and eventually to respond. The basic element of experience, which is made up of matter and the combinations of matter, is not a fundamental creation; it only points to something else that is not apparent to us, which, with the proper grasp, can become and instrument for our own use. It is like a problem to be solved, a puzzle to be clearly worked out; the change one introduces makes it into a vessel for something that is needed. In this respect, Torah can be conceived of as that which changes the world by means of wisdom, speech, and actions; it enables life to achieve a higher level of communication, thereby allowing light to enter. “For My mouth has spoken.”
Republished with permission of Koren Publishers Jerusalem.
