Tiqqun Olam

Some time after I’d written the last post, which happened a while back, it suddenly occurred to me that the idea that I had sketched there (namely that the cosmos is a wasteland, a detritus) was not all that outlandish. It has been proposed before in the sixteenth century by the Kabbalistic master, Isaac Luria (1534-1572). In Luria’s account of the Creation, Ein Sof, the Ultimate, first created a vacuum in the divine plenitude to make room for the creation. Ein Sof placed vessels into that void. The rest of the account I quote from Daniel C. Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, p. 15:

Into the vacuum Ein Sof emanated a ray of light, channeled through vessels. At first, everything went smoothly; but as the emanation proceeded, some of the vessels could not withstand the power of the light, and they shattered. Most of the light returned to its infinite source, but the rest fell as sparks, along with the shards of the vessels. Eventually, these sparks became trapped in material existence. The human task is to liberate, or raise, these sparks, to restore them to divinity. This process of tiqqun (repair or mending) is accomplished through living a life of holiness. All human actions either promote or impede tiqqun, thus hastening or delaying the arrival of the Messiah.

Repairing the world (tiqqun olam) thus becomes the Kabbalist goal in personal and collective life. My own notion of the cosmos as a residue of something, like accumulated dust and chips from a sculptor’s work, were based entirely on pondering the differences (and incommensurability) between life on the one hand and the cosmic surround on the other, Luria’s vision is poetic and derived from the concept of a divine creative act—which, in an interesting way, if we think about it, went awry. Some of the vessels intended to hold the light shattered. That is, you might say, a rather “naturalistic” conception of Creation.

I thought I’d note this here lest someone think that my “outlandish” claim was a disguised claim to originality…