Luca Miele
When God held his breath
When God held his breath
(Osservatore Romano, January 16, 2010)
"As God produced the world as he created, how a man holding his breath, and contracts itself, so that may contain very little, so also God against his view of a span, and the world was as darkness. " This passage of the thirteenth century, contains an idea that will be crucial in the entire history of Jewish mysticism, that of contraction or shrinkage (Tzimtzum) of God, a movement within the Godhead - like a rhythmic breathing - that would be more original of creation itself. Before examining the Tzimtzum - and it is an articulation of the doctrine - we must wonder about the role played by the mystic. This is a phenomenon somewhat ahistorical and only residual, such as to remain essentially foreign to the body of Jewish tradition? Or, conversely, is tightly intertwined? note is the position of Gershom Scholem, who is credited with having explained the Kabbalah: the mystic is "a legitimate form in which the Jews have used to understand themselves and the outside world, a form expressing their religious experience and its historical transformation, but also its fatal crisis or the bearers of life. "
These responses in some way illuminate the meaning of Exile and Redemption, by locating the unique historical situation of Israel in a broader context, even cosmic, that of creation. " One point, however, remains irrevocably away: "While religions or near the front, say a pantheistic unity between God, the cosmos and man, Judaism has made a separation between the three spheres" (Pierre Bouretz). Monotheism greek breaks the sacredness of the cosmos, his eternal repeat the same, to inaugurate the story, the place of risk and time. Then the twist that Kabbalah is internal to produce a more fundamental paradigm of Judaism. "The messianism - writes Scholem - is in its origins and nature of the theory of a disaster. This theory focuses on the element in the transition from revolutionary and cataclysmic every historical present to the future messianic." Kabbalah mitigates the catastrophic element with the idea of \u200b\u200breparation, which introduces the possibility of a restoration (tikkun) of the initial fracture: it takes the body a view of redemption in some way "progressive" for later grades. It was Isaac Luria (1534-1572), to introduce, or rather to systematize, the Tzimtzum as part of a very complex theory. Luria complicates the scheme "emanationist," which had dominated until then in respect of which the Kabbalists "The abundance of his being, from the treasury contained in Him, God has" adopted "the Seriot" is through "these lights in Him" \u200b\u200band "He manifested himself on the outside." Luria instead precede this event - to something other than the deity can come into being - a movement of withdrawal in the divinity of God himself is "sticking" as this "spasm" of exile, voluntary restraint. As written by David Banon, "the Lurianic doctrine is an extremely complex: we can bring it to four key moments, moments that are embedded in its key concepts: the Tzimtzum, retraction, concentration, and the shevirà, the breaking of the vessels, the Tikkun, repair or restoration of the Worlds, and ghilgùl, metempsychosis or transmigration of souls. "In Luria's theory there is no concept of being issued. The first step is the retraction (Tzimtzum) Eni Sof, the Infinite. The En Sof withdrew into himself. It is therefore an internalization, a withdrawal or retraction of being in his being that is the starting point of creation. The ability to retract that allows the process of appearance-emergence of the world. Tzimtzum there is no creation since God, by definition, fills "whole" space. The creation is a kind of exile as God withdraws from his being, to be contained in his "mystery." "It's only after you the En Sof Tzimtzum that turns out sending a "pro" or a "cast" of light - a line, a ray (qav) - of his being into space called primordial tehirù Tzimtzum produced by and is so that form the sefirot. This radius, which belongs to the mode of mercy, plays a cathartic function penetrating and focusing forces that remain in the penalty area with the remnant of primordial infinite light (the reshimù). "This doctrine, that" trucks "God immobility, which gives movement and dynamism to its being, is somehow united with the living God of the Bible. As documented by self-proclamation of the name in Exodus (3, 14) - declined in the original Jewish future with a double - the living God "expresses its solidarity with the human experience of time, on the backdrop of unpredictability of the future" (Pierre Bouretz). The words "I am who I am" not in fact have the meaning "to be abstract, nor a pure existence, but of an event, a becoming, a being, and above all, of being present" ( Salvatore Natoli). If this is the anatomy of the concept of Tzimtzum - the idea of \u200b\u200ban exile, a contraction of God to allow to happen in the world - this doctrine emerges individually in some of the most significant figures of twentieth-century Jewish thought. The most transparent example of this coincidence is found in the work of Simone Weil, in particular when the French thinker dell'abdicazione traces the theme of God in the notebooks Weil writes: "The creation itself is a contradiction. It is absurd that God who is infinite, that is all that nothing is missing, do something that is outside of Him, is not He, though proceeding from Him. " From this contradiction, suffer from this, Weil draws "constitutively aporetic the concept of" decreazione "a presence that is proposed in the mode of absence, a" yes "to the other expressed by the negation of itself, an act which coincides with his retirement "(Robert Edwards). Similarly, Hans Jonas draws, in The Concept of God after Auschwitz, the image of God "suffering" from the moment of creation of the world, and even more after the creation of man: a God who is eternally "in becoming" a God "concerned" only "self-restraint "divine principle of" open space for the existence and autonomy of a world. " A trace of Tzimtzum is also present in the work of Andre Neher, The Exile of the word: the history of the world and of humanity - it reads - "is marked by the radical sign of insecurity." Neher's God is the God of silence, rather than the Word, "because if God is the God's Word to blind us with his light. God is the God of silence, because only the silence of God is the condition of risk and freedom. "One God, eternally becoming, always open to the report, is also the God that emerges from the pages of The Sabbath by Abraham J. Heschel," The Sabbath is not a substance but the presence of God, His relationship with man. The Sabbath is God's presence in the world, open to the soul of man. "
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