Part Three: Effacement

Intertextuality and Innovation in the Reconceptualization of Hokhmah

The above characterization of binah, and its association with the joy of the Jewish festivals, paves the way for a juxtapositional rethinking of hokhmah. The latter is associated with Shabbat, which is celebrated with far less exuberance than the festivals. On the festivals we are commanded to “be joyful.”1 With regard to Shabbat, by contrast, we are commanded to “guard” and “remember” its sacredness.2

In the teachings of R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi hokhmah is predominantly described as a revelatory conduit that at once transcends the rational process and initiates it. In Torah Ohr, for example, we find the following formulation: “Supernal wisdom (hokhmah ila’ah) is nothing more than a drop and a point… a lightning flash in the mind that has not yet developed graspable dimensions [by which] to understand and comprehend all its implications…”3 In Likutei Amarim—Tanya he similarly explains that, “hokhmah transcends understanding and comprehension and is their source…” It is “that which is not yet … coherently grasped, and therefore revealed therein is [G‑d’s] infinite light (ohr ain sof barukh hu), which no thought can grasp at all.”4 Hokhmah, in other words, is the medium through which the transcendent infinitude of G‑d illuminates the finite realms of the creative process, including the human mind.

A key segment in Vekakhah Ha-gadol is a discourse in which R. Shmuel appropriates and reshapes a text by his grandfather, the Mitteler Rebbe, in order to expose the fundamental difficulty with the conventional conception of hokhmah. The purpose of any revelation, he asserts, is that it should be grasped by its recipients. Accordingly, hokhmah can only be deemed “the beginning of revelation” if it can be received and grasped in some meaningful and significant way. This raises the question of how ungraspable infinitude can be said to be revealed within the finite realm at all. In this discourse, R. Shmuel repeats the Mitteler Rebbe’s words almost verbatim, but also deletes key clauses, and—more importantly—adds sharply formulated explications and addenda of his own.

Here is the opening passage as penned by the Mitteler Rebbe:

It is written “and hokhmah is found from nothing,”5 from nothing to something it is found, and, as is known, hokhmah is called the beginning of the revelation of light in the chain of creation. For beyond hokhmah the revelation of light is not yet in existence at all, and it is the point of the letter yod that yet also remains beyond dissemination in the comprehension and grasp of binah.6

The first sentence of this passage equates hokhmah with the “something” (yesh) that is found, or created from “nothing” (ayin). The second sentence somewhat revises that interpretation by casting hokhmah as an intermediate “point,” suspended between the nothingness “which is not existence at all,” on the one hand, and the fully developed expansiveness of binah, on the other. We are left with a simple hierarchy: From nothing (ayin) a point (hokhmah) emerges and is subsequently disseminated, acquiring dimension and form that may be comprehended and grasped (binah).

R. Shmuel’s rewriting of this passage excises the initial association of hokhmah with the yesh, and deliberately problematizes the manner and function of hokhmah’s emergence from the transcendent ayin. The following overlays the Mitteler Rebbe’s original text with R. Shmuel’s rewrite. Strikethroughs indicate deletions; additions are in bold:

It is written “and hokhmah is found from nothing,” from nothing to something it is found, and, as it is known,the meaning of “nothing” (ayin) is that it refers to that which is not grasped at all, and it [i.e. hokhmah] far transcends the comprehension of binah; and it is that the infinite light reveals itself (shemitgaleh bechinat ohr ain sof baruch hu), which no thought can grasp it at all; and permission is not granted to reap benefit from it for there is no grasp or comprehension etc. And apparently this requires explanation: Since permission is not granted to reap benefit from it, what is the achievement gained from this revelation? Further explanation is required, for is it not so that hokhmah is called the beginning of the revelation of light in the chain of creation. For, the import of which is that it comes in the form of revelation that can be benefited from? However the explanation of the matter is that beyond hokhmah the revelation of light is not yet in existence at all, and hokhmah is the beginning of the revelation, that itis, the point of the letter yod that yet also remains beyond dissemination in the comprehension and grasp of binah.7

Excising the Mitteler Rebbe’s equation of hokhmah with “something,” R. Shmuel continues to unambiguously equate hokhmah with the “nothing” from which it is found. R. Shmuel depicts hokhmah as a revelation that is no revelation, as a revelation that reaps no benefit, and whose revelatory function is precisely to disclose the undisclosable. Reading R. Shmuel against the passage cited above from Tanya, we are forced to acknowledge the implicit paradox at the heart of the classical conception: Hokhmah is said to be “the source of intellection and understanding” precisely because “therein is revealed [G‑d’s] infinite light, which no thought can grasp at all.” If hokhmah is equated with the disclosure of ungraspable infinitude, R. Shmuel asks, how can it meaningfully function as “the beginning of revelation” or as the “source” of comprehensible understanding? The hierarchical procession from ayin to the intermediate point of hokhmah, and on to the broad somethingness of binah, depends on a placid logic that R. Shmuel boldly deconstructs.

Having significantly altered and reconstructed the opening passage, almost the entirety of the next section is a close duplication of the Mitteler Rebbe’s text. R. Shmuel’s only significant change is the addition of a clause that explicitly reinforces the association of hokhmah with the transcendent nothingness (ayin) of the infinite, rather than with the graspable somethingness (yesh) of divine understanding. As above, the bold text marks R. Shmuel’s interpolation: “‘The world-to-come was created with a yod,’8 and every creation is something from nothing. If so the yod [equated with hokhmah], with which the world-to-come was created, remains ayin…”9

This is one of several hermeneutical devices used by R. Shmuel to crystallize the notion that hokhmah has a continuous relationship with the transcendent nothingness of divine infinitude. Hokhmah, on this reading, is not a product of creation but rather the medium through which creation occurs. Creation is inherently a discontinuous event—a leap from a state of utter nothingness to created existence, precipitated by an act of the omnipotent G‑d. Hokhmah is conventionally thought of as the beginning of revelation within creation, emerging in the aftermath of the leap. But R. Shmuel is consciously repositioning hokhmah on the other side of the leap, or perhaps as the leap itself.10

Preserving the rest of the paragraph intact, R. Shmuel inserts an addendum at its conclusion, and thereby transforms the import of its argument. In the Mitteler Rebbe’s original text hokhmah is distanced from both binah and ayin, and suspended between them as an ambiguous intermediary. In this vein he invokes the Zoharic phrase, “even pure light, doubly purified light, is black before the cause of all causes.”11 “Pure light,” he explains, refers to “the point of light that is hokhmah,” while “doubly purified light” refers to hokhmah as it concealed in the transcendent nothingness of its source (keter). Drawing a stark contrast between the blackness of hokhmah and what he later describes as “the utterly simple light” of the cause of all causes, the Mitteler Rebbe emphasizes that even the higher dimension of hokhmah is “black, without any revealed light in existence at all, in comparison (legabe) to the cause of all causes itself.”12

R. Shmuel’s addendum, however, recasts this Zoharic passage to highlight the intimate association between hokhmah and its source, rather than the distinction that divides them. He achieves this by invoking another Zoharic phrase, “the beginning is not known and does not know itself,”13 explaining that “the same might be said regarding the ayin of hokhmah … as mentioned above, permission is not granted to reap benefit from it … for it is black before (legabe) the cause of all causes … In truth both of them are ayin.”

Having emphasized the fundamental nothingness of both hokhmah and its transcendent source (variously referred to as keter, “the cause of all causes,” and “the beginning that is not known”), R. Shmuel now draws a far more subtle distinction between them: “In truth the darkness of black [i.e. hokhmah] is not comparable to [the beginning that is] not known [keter] …” The latter, “due to its intense subtlety, even in its own self has no sentience at all. But the concept of black refers only to the quality ofeffacement (bitul), that it [hokhmah] effaces itself before (lifnei) the cause of all causes, whereas [the beginning that is] not known is not known at all.”14

In R. Shmuel’s reconstruction of the Mitteler Rebbe’s discourse hokhmah is no longer black “in comparison to” (legabe) its source, but rather makes itself black “before” (lifnei) its source. This nuance also crystallizes the distinction between the ayin of hokhmah and the ayin of keter: The latter is utterly unarticulated, so intimately singular that even the most elemental consciousness of its own being remains unexpressed. In contrast, hokhmah is a particular function of divine expression, a discrete articulation of the true ineffability of G‑d. Yet the form taken by this function, the medium through which the ineffable is first communicated, is an utter effacement of form. In R. Shmuel’s pithy encapsulation: “This explains what the nature of hokhmah’s revelation is, despite [the fact] that permission is not granted to reap benefit. For nevertheless, through the quality of this negation, this station is reached—to grasp at least that there is something that one does not grasp.”15

Hokhmah, in other words,is not a conduit of revelation in the conventional sense. Hokhmah does not extend a direct sense of divine infinitude into the finite realm. Hokhmah does not capture or mediate any positive conception of the cause of causes. Instead, Hokhmah grasps the utter impossibility of grasping the infinite, for to grasp the infinite is to efface the bounds of all conception.16

Hokhmah and Tzimtzum as Ascent, Receptivity and the Face of Effacement

Another crucial passage interpolated in the Mitteler Rebbe’s text by R. Shmuel invokes the Zoharic bifurcation of the word hokhmah to form the two words ko’ah mah.17 Ko’ah means force or capacity, while mah (literally “what”)—as in the verse “and [of] what [significance] are we?”18— expresses a sense of absence and ethereality. Sharpening and further developing a reading of this illusion by the influential 16th century kabbalist Rabbi Moshe of Córdoba (Ramak), R. Shmuel explains that these two words refer to two different aspects encompassed within hokhmah: “The aspect of ko’ah in hokhmah is its expansion towards understanding (hitpashtutah el ha-binah), and the aspect of mah in hokhmah is its cleaving onto the transcendent (hitdabkutah el ha-keter), and likewise its receptivity.”19

This pithy formulation—which is returned to and elaborated on at several subsequent points in the hemshekh—indexes the central shift in emphasis that lies at the heart of R. Shmuel’s project. No longer should we think of hokhmah purely in terms of its relationship to binah. No longer should we think of hokhmah simply as the lightening flash of creative inspiration, as the revelatory experience from which understanding flows. Instead we should realize that the primal function of hokhmah is receptivity and effacement in the presence of ungraspable transcendence. Insofar as it does relate to binah, its function is to expand its fundamental sense of effacement into the circle of cognition and communication.20

Later in the hemshekh R. Shmuel explores hokhmah’s receptive cleaving to keter, through the prism of the corresponding faculty in the process of human intellection: “The main element of hokhmah’s [power of] conception does not require that it should be before someone to communicate to, through which greater hokhmah is added. Rather, the contrary is so! In order to receive from the source of hokhmah, it is [best] when you are alone specifically.”21 Though an audience often inspires eloquence, solitude more conducively cultivates the receptive effacement that is requisite for transcendent insight. Returning to the analogue in the divine chain of being, the lonesomeness of hokhmah translates directly into a teaching imparted by Rabbi DovBer of Mezritch and transcribed by R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi, which equates hokhmah with the essential lonesomeness of the infinite, “the true singularity … He alone is, and there is nothing beside Him.”22 Thus construed, lonesomeness is transmuted into the ultimate form of union.

R. Shmuel takes this theme and runs with it, explaining that “hokhmah … is the literal embodiment of effacement, to the degree that it has absolutely no sense of its own self at all. Therefore it does not [subjectively] grasp even the infinite. But on the part of the infinite it shines within it [i.e. hokhmah] with utter intimacy.”23 In cleaving to its source, hokhmah loses all sense of self. As nothing, hokhmah grasps nothing, and thereby becomes a transparent conduit for the ultimate nothing, the transcendent nothingness of G‑d’s true being. G‑d is not nothing in the sense that we usually understand the term, but in the sense that divine being utterly transcends any contingent conception of being.24 As R. Shmuel puts it later: “From the essential being of the true being shines the radiance of the light, the luminosity of the nothingness of hokhmah.”25

This conception of hokhmah’sdisclosure as a black point of luminous effacement is further strengthened through a development of the Mitteler Rebbe’s association of hokhmah with the Lurianic narrative of the primal tzimtzum. Initially R. Shmuel simply repeats his forerunner’s description of tzimtzum as the cause that precipitates hokhmah.26 But later in the hemshekh he sharpens this association so that the veil of tzimtzum is now seen to be fundamentally equivalent to the unveiling of hokhmah, which—as we have seen above—is symbolized by the point that forms the letter yod.

“The point is distinct from all the other letters, for all the letters have dimension and form … whereas the yod is one minute point without any form at all … and it gestures at the nature of tzimtzum (hu moreh al bechinat ha-tzimtzum) … Hokhmah itself is also a yod, a singular point … the raising up of your cognitive faculties to receive from the source of conception… Such ascent is tzimtzum, a deficit of expansion… a receptacle empty of all content… or the effacement of hokhmah, as explained above regarding [the phrase] ‘[hokhmah] is black before the cause-of-all-causes’ … ”27

The central point of Arizal’s tzimtzum narrative is that the contraction and concealment of divine infinitude provides the fundamental basis for finite revelation and creation. Mirroring this binary, a new conception emerges according to which hokhmah is a conduit of divine illumination precisely because it embodies contraction and concealment.

According to the conventional understanding of tzimtzum, it should be emphasized, contraction and concealment precede revelation. In contrast, R. Shmuel fundamentally conflates hokhmah’s revelatory face with its retiring effacement. In doing so he reaffirms and recasts the radical reinterpretation of tzimtzum espoused by his great-grandfather, R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi. In a famous passage in Torah Ohr, the latter declared the veiling of the infinite light to be synonymous with the unveiling of the luminous source that transcends revelation and concealment alike.28 Tzimtzum is not only a process of externalization and creation, but also an inward movement, a return to the essential luminary. Here, R. Shmuel identifies the fundamental function of hokhmah as the mechanism by which this dialectical disclosure occurs.

Hokhmah is not simply an intermediate point, suspended between nothing and something, and thus able to grasp the former and communicate it to the latter. What Hokhmah grasps is that the core of divine being cannot be revealed unless entirely obscured in the fundamental emptiness of tzimtzum. The true substance of G‑d’s infinite revelation is only grasped when collapsed in a dimensionless point of utter effacement. All that remains is the brute impossibility of comprehension, and the even greater impossibility of communication. This point, the point of the yod, is the beginning of hokhmah. It is this point, the face of effacement, that hokhmah extends into the creative process and expands into the sphere of binah.

At another point in this hemshekh R. Shmuel sharpens this conception of hokhmah with a hermeneutical gloss on a passage from Psalms: “Night shall be luminous like day; as dark [shall be] as light” ke-hasheikhah ke-orah).29 R. Shmuel specifically notes the dialectical resonance invoked by the double use of the comparative “as.” Not only can darkness be like light, it is implied, but light too can sometimes have the quality of darkness. Such is the inky luminosity of hokhmah.30

Shabbat, Hokhmah, and the Spiritual Work of No-Work

As we have seen, R. Shmuel begins his discussion of hokhmah by elevating it to the transcendent station of ineffable nothingness that is usually associated with keter. But the thrust of his argument arcs towards the immanent disclosure of hokhmah’s nothingness within creation. In the terrestrial arc of time this disclosure is embodied by Shabbat. Each week, on Shabbat, we ascend to apprehend and draw forth the unveiled face of effacement. The ultimate nothing is disclosed through nothing, through the Sabbatical work of no-work.

Shabbat is described as a day of rest, for both G‑d and man.31 It is a day dedicated to G‑d,32 and distinguished from the mundane days of the week by the prohibition of “all work.”33 As enumerated by the Talmudic sages, this prohibition extends to thirty-nine general categories of forbidden activity.34 Shabbat, in other words, is principally marked not by the activities that we positively engage in, but rather by the negation of activity, by a withdrawal from work. Having explained that hokhmah is not a conduit of revelation in the conventional sense, but that it embodies the utter effacement attained when the infinite is grasped, R. Shmuel interprets the fundamentally “negative” nature of Shabbat observance through this lens:

Indeed, on Shabbat, when the consciousness of hokhmah radiates, it may be suggested that [this is] because there are so many negative precepts. It is even more compelling to suggest that the consciousness of hokhmah inheres even in the positive commandments observed on Shabbat … which cannot be apprehended except through the negative commandments.35

Shabbat is not simply marked by a withdrawal from active engagement with the mundane world. Shabbat is marked by a withdrawal from the kind of assertive, or “positive,” activity that cultivates any proud sense of personal accomplishment and satisfaction. This is a cognitive and experiential withdrawal that inheres in all Shabbat activities, whether intellectual, spiritual or physical. Shabbat is entirely endowed with the sacred consciousness of hokhmah’s effacement, a retreat into the receptive nothingness that enables union with ineffable transcendence.

Here R. Shmuel draws on a Lurianic reading of Zoharic texts that describe Shabbat as a time of union, when the lower worlds ascend to be encompassed within the divine. In one instance the Zohar explicitly declares that such union is only possible in a time illuminated by the sacred radiance of hokhmah (indexed as “aba” in the Zoharic lexicon), and that it is not possible in a time only illuminated by binah (indexed in the Zoharic lexicon as “ima”). R. Shmuel applies this cosmic paradigm to the spiritual work that Shabbat is designed to cultivate:

The nature of this union and coupling in the work of man in service of G‑d, is that the Holy One—meaning that which is sacred and transcendent, that [which states] “I, G‑d, have not changed at all”—should be drawn forth and disclosed within creation, in the point of the physical heart within man … so that you shall be effaced to Him “with all your heart,” meaning that the disclosure of G‑d’s divinity should be within your heart … your will being effaced before G‑d’s will.”36

The union of Shabbat is achieved through a personal sense of effacement—a facing of G‑d’s eternal transcendence as it is immanently drawn into the intimacy of your own heart.

Another facet of the pervasive hokhmah consciousness of Shabbat is the transformative quality of its sacred disclosure. The weekday work engages the material world and subjugates the mundane to the supernal will of G‑d. But subjugation (itkafyah) is not the same as transformation (ithapkhah). The former preserves a hierarchical distinction—indeed, a fundamental opposition—between the sacred and the mundane. The work of man is to struggle with the mundane world and subjugate it, so that it may become a vehicle of divine revelation. But on Shabbat there is no struggle. The mundane too is entirely effaced and encompassed in the sacred infinitude disclosed by hokhmah. There is no opposition and no subjugation, only transformation.

In the lexicon of Lurianic metaphysics, R. Shmuel marks the bifurcation of the sacred and mundane as orot and keilim, lights and containers. These represent the cosmic building blocks of revelation and concealment, the cosmic dialectic that shapes the spectrum of divine emanation and creation. Crucially, however, this a dialectic that only emerges in the wake of the primal tzimtzum. Earlier in the hemshekh, R. Shmuel described hokhmah as a cognitive act that grasps why the core of divine being can only be revealed when entirely obscured in the fundamental emptiness of tzimtzum. Hokhmah, in other words, is the cognitive capacity to transcend the concealment of tzimtzum, and by extension to transcend the bifurcated dialectic of orot and keilim. “In hokhmah there was no fragmentation (shevirah).”37 Illuminated by the Sabbatical consciousness of hokhmah, the mundane is transformed; darkness becomes equivalent to light.38