convey that all thoughts necessarily fail to grasp God’s own essence and selfhood, which remains hidden beyond the reach of any idea. In the holy books this conception is referred to as “the Light that is unknowable.”
Even those heavenly creatures who bear the divine Throne (referring to the vision in Ezek 1) and who hallow Him each day as they declare, “The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!” (Isa 6:3), still find it necessary to ask, “Where is the place of His Presence?” (Ezek 3:12). His Oneness, which fills all the worlds, is not subject to any limit or qualification, and His very Self cannot be likened to any image. When the thought to create the world arose within Him, God contracted His infinite Divinity and prepared an empty space (vacuum, ḥalal panui) for the worlds, and that contraction (Tzimtzum) then allowed for the appearance of the worlds.
This is what the tanna [generic name for the rabbinic sages of the period culminating with the editing of the Mishna, around 220 C.E.] Shmu’el bar Nahman said, “The blessed Holy One clad Himself with light and created the world.”10 Of course, due to the vast brightness of the Divine, within the very course of this contraction the vessels containing the Light lacked the sufficient strength to bear that Light, and so the vessels themselves could not endure but were shattered due to the infinitely greater brightness of the Primordial Light. [In this homily, the preacher refers not to the Primordial Light which, according to a midrashic interpretation, was later removed from the world as a result of the sin the First Man, but rather to the intrinsic Light of God’s infinite state itself.]11
Consequently the world was left formless, leaving it without any possibility to endure, and so the Emanator (the Divine in its infinite state) had further to contract its Divinity so that the vessels might then be able to bear that Light. And through the second Contraction, they were able, in some small measure, to contain the Primordial Light, and the World of Repair (ʿolam ha-tikkun) came into being in which the vessels, holding that Light, might endure.
And from this conception, we are able to grasp those first three words of the Torah, which Onkelos had translated as “In the beginning / created / God,” in terms of the contraction that occurred so that there might be an empty space for the worlds. The very name ʾElohim (“God”), as is known, connotes limitation and infers such contraction of the Light. [Hence, the name became associated with judgment.]12
But unable to bear that Light due to its intense and powerful brightness, the initial existence of the vessels was annulled by the Light’s very presence, and the world turned to chaos (“The earth being unformed and void,” Gen 1: 2). And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen 1:3), signifying that following that chaos, the World of Repair emerged. The words, “Let there be light, and there was light,” refer to that second contraction.
As a consequence, the much more limited Light was such that the vessels were able to contain it [and it came at least within the periphery of what the mind and language can attempt to express], though in a higher respect that Light itself remains on a level of “darkness,” as that which is utterly beyond the reach of mind and language is referred to as “darkness,” as is written, “He made darkness His screen . . .” (Ps 18:12). This is conveyed in the words, ”And God separated the light from the darkness” (Gen 1:4)—the blessed Holy One made a division between the Light which came into being through the second contraction, that Light which is attainable to some degree, and between the Primordial Light, which is called “darkness” in that it remained utterly beyond reach. . . .
Comment: This opening discussion in Maʾor va-shemesh makes the case that the account of creation found at the very beginning of the Torah is both not to be understood literally and unable to be understood literally and, furthermore, that the biblical text itself clearly indicates that such is not its purpose.
Drawing from the legacy of kabbalistic teaching upon which his worldview was rooted, the biblical text was read in quite a metaphorical sense, and virtually every word or element of that text came to be interpreted symbolically. Kalonymus Kalman clearly understood various verses and elements in the account of creation, which opens the Torah, as allusions to the worldview of Lurianic Kabbalah, the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572), which revolutionized the earlier body of kabbalistic thought, and in large measure he viewed the biblical creation-text as a kind of code for the much more complex Lurianic explanation of how the world or worlds came into existence. That pattern, based upon Lurianic teaching, centers largely around the basic principles of Contraction (Tzimtzum), the Shattering of the Vessels (Sh’virah) and Repair (Tikkun). Reference to the building-blocks of Lurianic cosmology recurs at various places within the homilies of Maʾor va-shemesh and of kindred Hasidic homily-texts. In this homily on the very opening verse of the Torah (Pentateuch), the preacher fused his very brief synopsis of the Lurianic cosmology with the much earlier motif of the Primordial Light, subject of the following passage, perhaps causing some confusion in the process.
In his discourse on various passages from the Torah, the preacher’s ruling out a literal reading creates an enlarged space for his homiletical interpretation which, by its very nature, goes beyond the simpler, surface meaning of the biblical text.
The Hidden Light13
The Sages said that with that Light (of the six days of creation) man could see from one end of the world to the other, but, seeing that the world is not worthy of utilizing that Light, God removed it and hid it for the righteous (tzaddikim) of a future time. The righteous of our time have taught that the Light is hidden within the Torah, and the righteous who purify themselves and study Torah for its own sake (not for any personal benefit) succeed in finding that Light.
Comment: The theme of the Primordial Light that was later hidden has its source in that the creation-account that opens the Torah speaks of light as created on the First Day of creation (Gen 1:3), while further on in that same account, the sun and the moon and stars are all said to have been created on the Fourth Day (Gen 1:16). This apparent discrepancy gave birth to the aggadic motif that the much greater original Light created on the First Day was later hidden by God when He realized that man (created on the Sixth Day) would gravely disappoint Him. The Primordial Light was looked upon as being spiritual rather than physical or solely physical in nature. Rabbinic statements of that theme express the idea that the Primordial Light was removed and hidden for the righteous in the World-to-Come (ʿolam ha-ba), where, following their death, the righteous would bask in its light.14
The above excerpt from Maʾor va-shemesh represents a transmutation in that it speaks of that Light as being hidden for the righteous (tzaddikim), not necessarily in the World-to-Come, but rather throughout the generations, in the sense that they would be able to draw upon that greater spiritual Light and understanding in their own respective times. That general re-interpretation of the older agada is heard already in Degel maḥaneh ʾEfrayim (B’reiʾshit) and also in Noʿam ʾElimelekh (B’reiʾshit), which consists of homiletical notes of Kalonymus Kalman’s own teacher, Elimelekh of Lyzhansk.
The theme that God hid the Light within the Torah is attributed to the Baal Shem Tov, the central figure of early Hasidism.15 In this way, the Light came to be associated not with its being hidden, but rather with its presence and availability, as it is accessible to those who make the effort to seek it by going beyond the surface-level of the Torah’s text to its richer, experiential nature. The more pessimistic nuance of the hidden Light was transposed in the process to the much more positive possibility of being able to pierce its hiddenness and to discover it within the Torah as well as within all of existence. The Light, in that sense, has become virtually synonymous with the Divine, which, though hidden, is yet paradoxically
