Genesis 1:2

Chapter 4, pp. 118-121

This chapter of 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.

All of this to say: the Zohar freights this verse with a dizzying and disorienting load of symbolism, indeed!

Nothing could be further from the cultural ambience of the Zohar, produced in the Jewish mystical milieu of Castilian Spain in the late 13th century, than the theology of William of Ockham (c.1287-1347), born a generation later than Moses de León in the cold mists of Catholic England. Ockham’s Razor–the principle of parsimony whereby the best solution is always the simplest one–would shred the Zohar to pieces, especially passages like this, needless to say. Infinitism, alas, owes some debt to Ockham and his razor. It is, after all, a key antecedent to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment without which Infinitism (at least as here conceived) would be unthinkable. And it is probably due to these cultural sources that I feel compelled to clean up the chaotic profusion of symbolic interconnections in this bit of text. But then I am struck by the implicit totalism of that compunction. Is it not the very essence of infinitism to invite such profusions? To admit the messiness and complexity of a universe that is both as stubbornly unpredictable and simultaneously as over-determined as ours?

Infinitism, at least my version of it, carries a paradoxical mix of simplicity and complexity–a very different mix, to be sure, from that found in the Zohar. My version telegraphs the western lineage from which I emerged, a lineage deeply informed by the Near East (through the spread of Christianity, whose Jewish roots were certainly retained but largely obscured) but perhaps more profoundly shaped by Greek thought, eventually specifically Aristotelian thought. Speculating wildly, I might add that these cultural elements met the cold air sweeping across northern Europe and, relatedly, the militarism of a predominant Viking (or Viking-adjacent) culture, to produce a milieu from which a Puritanism unimaginable to Mediterranean peoples would later flourish. William of Ockham represents one point along that cultural line. I represent another. This is part of what makes the marriage in this commentary on Jewish and Zoharian thought so odd and, I like to think, so productive of interesting insights. This kind of “crossing,” to use Gendlin’s word, knits disparate cultural worldviews into a larger coherence–not one that forces the others into submission but that enriches all of them by the sheer daring of mutual radical inclusion. Arguably, it is only through efforts of this type that humankind can rescue itself from a devolving tribalism that can only end in extinction.

To return to the passage from the Zohar, let us spend a moment thinking the experiential meaning here. If we use the lens that sees this text as a description of prayer as experienced in the first person–or, as the lived experience of approaching God with intention–we can follow the Zohar’s arc more easily. As we settle into prayer (which often takes the form of shikantaza for me) we begin only with the chaos of the “monkey mind,” as they say in Zen. For the adept, this chaos is not the kind of distracted state of mind we encounter in daily life so much as a kind of murmur of a thousand voices all at once that combines to create a quiet, even hypnotic, internal confusion–a kind of chaos, in a word. This chaos gradually falls away as we approach a deep stillness, a “void” in the sense that there is nothing drawing our attention away from what explicitly arises from moment to moment. We experience directly the depth and darkness of the now, the silence in which all sounds are timelessly wrapped–perhaps the very experience suggested by the Zohar’s phrase, “the sound of sheer silence.” Here too we can anticipate the next verse of Genesis in which a blinding light appears. Some have described such experiences in their meditation (sometimes named literally as “enlightenment,” sometimes as “union with God”). I have not had such an experience (give or take small bursts of unexpected power that quickly evaporate), but I can attest to a much more gradual kind of sharpening or vivifying of the light. In these times, everything whatsoever shimmers with meaning in a subtle but unmistakable way which affords me both great joy and gratitude. In these experiences I feel quite literally closer to God.

This, of course, is only my own experience. But I wonder if it parallels in a meaningful way the mystical experience suggested by this passage of the Zohar. I, for one, do not relate much to the references to evil, nor do I tend to find much footing in the four elements (fire, water, earth, and wind), and so on–but these differences can likely be wholly attributed to cultural influences. If there is a universal pathway (or perhaps some number of them) to closeness to God, constructed as it inevitably must be by the unique and various cultural affordances we have each inherited, then it is possible the Zohar’s account and mine just given, along with all the others offered across all mystical literatures, may share some deep structural similarities. Perhaps we can see into one another’s descriptions both mirrors of our own and windows into the beautiful and inspiring diversity of humankind–the divine all around.