The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

who had been born in Jerusalem and had spent years pondering such matters with the help of the Bahir and the Zohar on an island in the Nile, ended up in Safed in 1569, sitting at the feet of Moses Cordovero and eventually replacing him as the fount of a new metaphysical knowledge. According to reports by his pupil Hayim Vital (the master himself being averse to setting them down), Luria took the older idea of tzimtzum, the post-creation withdrawal of the Ein Sof (the Without End), into a zone of ever more contracting space: an entropic black hole, a primal void, into which all light and matter collapsed. And from that not-space, creative force could be generated. That process itself, however, was not a gradual evolution but a series of explosive eruptions of light and vapour, shafts which could splinter and shatter. Only through a slow process of tiqqun or repair (which we might translate as cooling) could earthly matter become constituted. Does all this make the Kabbalists of Safed Big Bangers, uncanny anticipators of modern astrophysics? No, but it certainly makes them more than simply deluded mystics, hyperventilating beneath the Galilean stars until the heavenly chariot appeared. Though historians debate the impulse given to the new Kabbalism by the traumatic expulsions from Spain and Portgual, and the persecutions of the Inquisition, Luria’s genius was to make tzimtzum into a godly exile or estrangement; to be repaired by some sort of tshuva, a return, a reconstitutio...