The Back Turned Until the Son Cried Out for Light

Most people picture the divine as a parent who turns toward the child the moment the child cries. Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, the Polish-born kabbalist who wrote his Sulam Commentary on the Zohar in the 1940s while living in Jerusalem, says the opposite. The supernal parents stand with their backs to wisdom on purpose. The light cannot move until something far below them learns how to yearn.

A father who refuses the light

Ashlag begins from a phrase the prophet Micah drops in passing: ki chafetz chesed hu, He delights in mercy (Micah 7:18). For most readers it sounds like comfort. For Ashlag it is a cosmic mechanic. The highest configurations of Bina (בינה), Understanding, which the kabbalists call Abba and Imma Ila'in, the Supernal Father and Mother, are so hungry to give that they cannot bear to receive. They keep their faces turned away from Chochma (חכמה), Wisdom, the way a parent refuses to eat at a famine table where the children have not been served.

The image is unsettling. Wisdom is offering itself. Light is pouring out. And the first beings high enough to drink it deep refuse. They stand with their backs to the radiance because drinking it would feel, to them, like theft.

The children who cannot drink alone

Beneath them stand Yisrael Sabba, Old Israel, and Tevuna, Discernment. These are the lower partzufim of Bina, the configurations that handle the actual transmission of light into the worlds. Ashlag spells out the catch in Yisrael Sabba and the Mysteries: these lower configurations do need to receive Chochma. Without it they cannot animate anything. Without it the worlds below them go dark.

The architecture has a problem. The only road into Yisrael Sabba and Tevuna runs through Abba and Imma. And Abba and Imma have their backs turned. The mercy of the supernal parents has become the bottleneck of creation. Every soul further down the chain is waiting on a kindness that looks, from where they are standing, exactly like silence.

How does the supernal parent ever turn?

This is the hinge Ashlag drives toward, and he names the answer plainly. The shift does not come from above. It does not come from Abba deciding to relent. It does not come from Imma growing tired of facing away. It comes from a much smaller configuration, Ze'er Anpin (זעיר אנפין), the Small Face, which Ashlag describes in Face and Back in the Relationship of Chochma and Bina as the son who has been left thirsty.

Ze'er Anpin raises mayin nukvin (מיין נוקבין), feminine waters. Ashlag uses the phrase technically, but the human meaning is clear. A lower being arouses desire upward. A child in the dark begins to ache toward the light. That ache rises. It enters the parents. And only then, Ashlag writes in section 83 of the introduction, do Abba and Imma turn. They turn not because they finally want the light for themselves. They turn because somebody below them needed it badly enough to call.

The secret Abba was hiding

Ashlag is careful in section 50, in Abba and the Secret Teaching, to describe what Abba was actually holding. The supernal father had the light of Chochma the whole time. He simply would not let it pass through him until the call came from below. The withholding was not cruelty. It was a teaching. Ashlag, working in 1940s Jerusalem while Europe burned, wanted his students to understand that the heavens are not a vending machine. The flow has conditions. The supernal parents are waiting for a kind of cry only the world below can produce.

The same idea lands in the language of the Zohar on Genesis, section 276, which Ashlag invokes throughout the introduction. Three come out of one. One stands in three. Chochma, transmitted through Bina, lands in Ze'er Anpin. But the order of operations runs in the other direction first. Ze'er Anpin asks. Bina turns. Chochma flows. The hierarchy is real, and the reversal of the hierarchy is also real.

Why Ashlag built a whole system on this

Ashlag spent his last decades translating the Zohar into Hebrew and writing the Sulam, the Ladder, so that ordinary Jews could climb. He did not want kabbalah to remain a closed circle of initiates trading hints. His kabbalistic writings return again and again to this back-turned father, because Ashlag believed it described the human predicament. The blessings you cannot feel are not absent. They are dammed at the level above you, waiting for a request you have not yet learned how to make.

His students remember him teaching that the great spiritual labor is not begging God for things. It is becoming the kind of vessel that can ask correctly, with enough hunger and enough clarity that the parents above finally turn their faces and let the light through.

The image Ashlag leaves you with

Picture the room. Wisdom shines. The parents stand with their backs to it. Far below, a smaller face is beginning to cry. The cry climbs. It reaches the mother first. She turns her head. The father turns. The light, held back for what must have felt like forever, finally moves. Not because the parents decided. Because the child below them remembered how to want.