Genesis 1:1a

Genesis 1:1 בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ Be-reshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim v'et ha-erets. In the beginning God created heaven and earth.

I:15a-b, Chapter 1-2, pp. 107-114

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.

Indeed, even the assumption that originally there was nothing is already highly problematic within Judaic thought! For it raises the question: if there was originally nothing, how did God come to exist? And if the answer is that God always existed–is truly eternal–then in fact there was never only nothing, for there was always God. That said, with Ein Sof the Kabbalah manages to split the difference, having it both ways: God is eternal and yet also emerged out of nothingness…except that this nothingness was not strictly empty for it somehow contained in its very nothingness Ein Sof. A wonderful paradox! In the end, the problem of origins involves such infinities and infinitessimals that it eludes human understanding altogether. It seems to me that all roads lead here.

The second task of this origin story is to establish the kabbalistic system, the sefirot, as the fundamental structure of the universe. It emerges as the emanation of God from the very moment of creation and rehearses this movement of emanation continually for eternity. On its own terms, part of the value of the system depends on its ability to portray the peak human experiences of prayer or meditation, indeed of revelation. And for the Infinitist, these models and narratives illuminate aspects of human consciousness that ordinary discourses, including theological and philosophical ones, rarely address.

Presumably, the appeal of the system of sefirot, which is here derived from the account of creation offered by the opening line of Torah, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” lies specifically in its congruence with mystical experience during prayer. The movement from Ein Sof, or Keter, to Hokhmah to Bimah is experienced, perhaps, as beginning in true emptiness (as the Buddhists would call it), to some still inchoate inkling of wisdom, to a “palace” of meaning not yet explicit but still only implied. This further emanates out in various stages, presumably reflected in the so-called “lower sefirot,” culminating in Shekhinah, the explicitly present God and ruler of the “lower worlds” (namely, the phenomenal plane you and I inhabit). The Kabbalistic rabbis steeped in deep prayer might have known this passage well and passed down knowledge of it from generation to generation until the sefirot were unquestionably accepted as concretely accurate, empirically verified by all the masters since of old.

Thus established, the task of the Zohar (presumably among many other mystical texts in this tradition) was to marry this mystical truth with Torah, not only with its meaning but through the very strokes on paper by which the Hebrew letters were inscribed, as if “engraved in the crown” by God himself. So, R. Shim’on constructs an acrostic of the opening line of Torah–בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ (be-reshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-arets), “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”–with God’s name as announced to Moses on the occasion of the burning bush (Exodus 3:14)–אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה (Ehyeh asher Ehyeh), “I am that I am.” Both phrases, independently and cross-referentially, are explicated as symbolizing the emanation of the world (“heaven and earth”) from the primordial (implicit) emptiness of Ein Sof to the phenomenal (explicit) abundance of Shekhinah.

Whether or not we affirm such a mystical unfolding in the actual experience of deep prayer, the Infinitist must agree in a general way with the movement from the implicit to the explicit, as the occurring (creation) occurs into the implying (everything immanent and imminent) in the moment just before. Indeed, as the Kabbalists would likely agree, every moment can be seen as a new emanation. This is exactly the meaning of the evev and captures quite aptly the principle of fresh formation. The universe is freshly created–and newly created, not in any sense merely re-created–continually. Every moment is a new “In the beginning,” a completely fresh and novel expression and affirmation of “I am what I am”–which, though I hate to admit it, is the genuine truth underlying the tired phrase, “It is what it is.” But it also means: God is what God is, even in its relentless fresh formation. Every fresh formation paradoxically affirms this anew.

But what structures this string of fresh formation, the miracle underlying the cosmos as we find it (as we find ourselves in it), is the principle of coherence that runs through all space-time, through the implicit and, therefore, the explicit. The Zohar’s word for this throughline, this constancy of creative power, is precisely the word zohar (זֹהַר, radiance or brightness). Beginning as the concealed light of Ein Sof, it gradually emanates out into phenomenal form as a great radiance that dazzles the human eye and explodes the human mind. This radiance always illuminates the phenomenal world, endowing all things with divine power. But even as it does so it refers back to, it implies, the implicit–the true source that is prior to all knowing, intangible, ineffable but no less real for all that. And indeed, this source is, as Gendlin might put it, profoundly intricate and intricately ordered, highly differentiated and coordinated, all mutually interaffecting, as it would have to be to provide coherence across the whole cosmos across all eternity without surcease.