The Divine Child Who Grew From a Small Mind to a Great One

They call him the Small Face, and when he was first drawn out of the womb his skull held only a splinter of mind. Not the wide, settled knowing of his parents. A flicker. Enough to breathe by, not enough to reason. The Kabbalists gave the condition a name, katnut, the small mind, and they meant it the way anyone would say it of an infant left blinking in a room built too large for him.

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His full name is Zeir Anpin, and he is no small thing. He is the six feeling-powers of the living God, love and restraint and beauty and endurance and splendor and the foundation that gathers them, bound into one persona and set to grow up like a boy.

A Child Assembled From a Broken World

Before he could be born he had to be built, and he was built out of wreckage. In an age before this one, vessels had stood ready to hold the divine overflow, and they had shattered. The breakage, shevirah. Sparks scattered. The husks of the broken vessels rained down through the worlds.

From that debris the child was assembled on three levels. First the lights, the Orot, the radiance that had fled and now had to be coaxed home. Then the sparks, the Nitzotzot, the glittering fragments caught in the ruins. Last the vessels, the Kelim, the structure that would give him a shape to stand in. The lights came back through the foundation of the Mother's Understanding. The sparks were mended, strangely, through the very seam where the vessels had first torn apart. The place of the wound became the place of the healing.

Three Days in the Hands of Father and Mother

Abba, the Father, went to work on the first day and arranged the child's right side, the whole flank of mercy. On the second day Imma, the Mother, took the left side into her hands and set its severities in order. On the third day the Father handed everything he had shaped over to the Mother, and the boy and the bride beside him were bound together as one.

Then came the counting of sparks, and the counting had the shape of a pregnancy. Six sparks entered him on the first day, six on the second, and on the third day seven, one more than the rest, because on that day the lights of Father and Mother had joined. Thirty-seven sparks came in across thirty-seven days, forty days from the start, and this was the count spoken over every human embryo in the womb, formed, the old teaching says, by the light of the Mother. Forty-six sparks over forty-six days carried him to nearly three months, the span after which a hidden thing in a woman can be confirmed to exist at all.

The Years at the Breast

Born, he still could not think. He could only take in. For twenty-four months the child nursed, and the milk did quiet work, scouring the three lowest powers in him, splendor and foundation and kingship, clean of the husks that still clung. His small mind grew a shade wider. Where an infant's flicker had been only the barest vital breath, now a spirit stirred in him, a fuller soul settling into the half-built vessels. Still not the great mind. Still not the parents' steady calm.

The Head That Waited to Be Filled

A grown God's persona sat with a child's brain, and had to wait. The adult intelligences, the mochin, the brains of wisdom and understanding, were not his by birth. They had to descend into him from above, from the Father and the Mother, and fill the empty upper chambers of his skull.

The descent was slow past all mortal patience. Eleven years and a day, the reckoning ran. Seven strands of the Mother's Understanding entered him across seven years, one region of the mind opening in each, and on the final day, the last, the crown of that Understanding came down and locked into place. The feelings he had been born with rose upward and hardened into thought. New foundations grew beneath them. The boy's own emotions became, at last, a mind.

When the Great Mind Came Down

With the brains came a flood. Loving-kindnesses, Hassadim, spilled down from the level of his chest, pooled in his foundation, and climbed again through all six of his limbs until the whole body of him ran with mercy. Behind them came five severities, Gevurot, descending to be sweetened in that same foundation, judgment folded into kindness so it would not scorch. The kindnesses swelled the child himself. The severities passed to the bride at his side and grew her instead, so that neither stood complete without the other.

The small mind was gone. In its place stood gadlut, the great mind, the wide and settled knowing he had reached toward since he was a splinter of thought in a shattered world. The child had grown up. God's own face had come of age.