The Zohar implies a passage in meditative prayer. The first hint of this we find in the line, “through contemplation the concealed one is perceived.” As the accompanying footnote tells us (fn 236, p. 138), the text specifically intends contemplation of Shekhinah through whom the concealed sefirot (all of the rest), or at least that unity expressed in Yesod, becomes palpable. This thread is taken up again in the reference (from Ezekiel 1:28) to the “surrounding radiance” that shimmers like a “[rain]bow in the cloud on a rainy day.” In prayer we perceive a “surrounding radiance” that hints at the awesome/awful fiery light that emanates directly from God. And this glimpse offers a “measure” of God, a “plumb of dark brilliance”–brilliant because it is a reflection of the divine; dark because it remains only the barest of glimpses even as it risks surpassing our miniscule capacity to tolerate, much less understand.

The Zoharian perspective, which is representative of the greater part of Judaism as a whole, sees evil as a property of the universe and humans as perpetually vulnerable to its seductions. Infinitism, on the other hand, rejects the category of evil altogether–particularly in reference to the cosmos as a whole. Outside of humankind (and perhaps some other species but this is debatable) no evil whatsoever can be detected in the universe. It just goes; it functions exactly as it does. It is purely divine in that specifically Infinitistic sense. The theodical problem becomes not how to reconcile God with evil in the universe but how humans could have become evil in a world otherwise entirely free of it. In our reading, the serpent we will soon encounter in the Garden of Eden does not represent evil at all. And the actions of Eve and Adam therefore cannot be evil either. The story plainly reads more like naive children being confused by conflicting information from figures much smarter than they, largely unaware of the real consequences of their actions. Indeed, how could they have been expected to make mature moral judgments fresh out of the gate, with no experience whatsoever with choices and their sometimes painful consequences?

In his book Reality Is Not What It Seems (2017), Carlo Rovelli argues that, for “any object” in quantum mechanics, “Its position and velocity, its angular momentum and its electrical potential only acquire reality when it collides—interacts—with another object. It is not just its position that is undefined, as Heisenberg had recognized: no variable of the object is defined between one interaction and the next” (p. 122). These observations intriguingly suggest that physical reality really does flash strobically in the moments of interaction, then going dark in the absence of direct interaction. How fascinating to consider that physicists can pinpoint the moment of occurring (the “light” in the Zohar’s metaphor) and also the abyss, or nothingness, of the in-between–moments pregnant with the implicit alone (the “aura,” or "concealed radiance”).

Chapter 4 of Be-reshit in the Zohar extends the account of the emanation of God at the moment of creation into the midsection, or torso, of the sefirotic structure (covering the sefirot Khesed, Gevurah, Tif’eret, Netsakh, Hod, and Yesod). In this phase, chaos (תֹ֙הוּ֙, tohu) mutates complexly into the void (בֹ֔הוּ, vohu or bohu), which then mutates into the material world. But then upon this alchemy is superimposed a progression through the four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. If that were not enough, the origins of evil are wound into this process (informed by a specifically Gnostic and Neoplatonist equation of matter with evil). But wait, there’s more! The various names of God get assigned to the unfolding sequence (namely, Shaddai, Tseva’ot (Hosts), Elohim, and YHVH, respectively). All these layers not only produce a rather convoluted narrative but also leans on a number of improbable symbols, like “dark fire,” which is, according to Maimonides, “not luminous but only transparent”; and “slimy stones sunk into the abyss from which water issues”; and “the sound of sheer silence,” which seems to be an idiosyncratic translation of ר֣וּחַ, ruach, usually rendered as the “wind” or “spirit,” or sometimes the “still small voice,” or precisely the “sound” of God–although another possible translation, apparently, is the “mind” of God which might indeed be silent. As I will suggest shortly, this unusual translation might be a very useful clue, in fact, to a deeper level of meaning here–as so often happens in this maddeningly cryptic text.

Since Chapter 2, there have been references to the “enlightened” (הַמַּשְׂכִּילִים, ha-maskilim). The Pritzker edition explains (footnote 14, p. 109) that this term can refer to “philosophers and kabbalists” but is here used to refer to “the letters [consonants] and vowels, as well as to the sefirot.” In this metaphorical usage, then, as the concealed radiance of Ein Sof and Hokhmah moves into the lower sefirot it becomes revealed, “enlightening” the sefirot as a whole. Okay. But always a second meaning is implied: the kabbalists themselves or, more generally, the spiritual adepts–teachers and gurus of the highest order–”those who lead many to righteousness.” This sets up a three-way parallel between the event of creation itself (which, as we saw, is eternally renewing and recurrent); the movement of truth into the world, ultimately in the form of the “letters and vowels” that appear in Torah; and the teaching of Torah as its gurus “enlighten” their students. We might symbolize this as the truth itself; the written Torah; and the oral Torah. All parallel processes, all mutually interaffecting, all one and at the same time infinitely various and ever exquisitely attuned to the ceaselessly dynamic flux of the cosmos. Indeed, these intertwined processes constitute the flux of the universe.

In these opening lines, the Zohar seeks to answer the greatest mystery of all, the original mystery: how is it that there is something rather than nothing? This is the mystery of “in the beginning” (בראשית, be-reshit). But as the Zohar asks this question it already includes what Infinitists regard as an erroneous assumption (or if not erroneous at least suspect): that first there was nothing (the void) and then creation began. This way, the question is: how did something emerge from nothing? Preferably, on the other hand, we might instead assume that the ‘something’ is unbegun and eternal. There never was a time of nothing. Then the question becomes: why is there something rather than nothing? In answer, one might reply: why is this any more mysterious (i.e., in need of a theory or a story) than the notion that originally there was nothing? But ultimately the answer must be: we can never begin to understand this. The human mind was not designed (evolved) to grok such a thing. It will always be an impenetrable mystery.