The Seed of Light That Grew Into the Tree of All Souls

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Before Anything, Only the Endless

There was a time, if time is even the word, when nothing had a shape. No heaven above, no earth below, no angel to look up and no morning for it to look toward. There was only Ein Sof, the Endless, and Ein Sof held everything folded inside itself, hidden so deep that not even the hidden knew it was there. Nothing had a name, because there was no one standing outside to give a name. The Endless did not speak. It did not move. It kept the All pressed against its own secret heart and waited, though nothing yet existed that could count the waiting.

Then, in the deepest recess of that concealment, something began to glow.

A Spark Escapes the Hidden Depths

It was a single point, a spark of light no wider than a thought, and as it caught fire it threw off colors that had never been seen, because no eye had yet opened to see them. The spark did not scatter outward into the dark. It bored inward, down into the most secret chamber of the Endless, the way a silkworm spins its own tomb and hides inside it, building a palace out of the very thread it will vanish into. There, sealed in a hidden hall of its own making, the spark was sown like a seed.

Before that seed, there is nothing anyone can tell. Its name is Beginning, because everything that has a story starts on the far side of it.

And the seed swelled. Out of it broke seven powers, one after another, folded together like days that had not yet been counted, each one a root for something that would later stand up and be called a world. They were the first mornings, before there was a sky for a morning to break in.

The First to Say I Came First

In that swelling silence a voice rose that had waited longer than anything.

"I came first," it said. "I am the head of the world."

It was the Torah, though no scroll had been rolled and no letter yet inked. She had been set in place from everlasting, before the mountains were sunk, before the deep was poured, before the earth was hung on anything at all. And when she said from everlasting, she meant something sharper than merely old. She meant hidden. She meant that she had been concealed from all the world, folded into the concealment the way the Endless had folded the All, held back so that nothing could ever point and boast that it had watched her being made.

Something might have risen to ask whether the earth came before her. It did not. Scripture had not yet been written, and already it answered its own question: before the earth was. First the Torah, the head. Then the shaping of every need that every made thing would one day have. Only after that the heavens, and only after that the earth.

The Tree Whose Name Was All

And the Holy One planted.

He did it alone. No angel stood at His shoulder. This is why the powers were not raised up on the first day, so that no one could ever say afterward that Michael had stretched out the southern sky while Gabriel pulled the northern edge and the Holy One merely arranged the middle. He stretched the heavens by Himself. He spread the earth out of His own being, with no witness beside Him. "Who was with Me," He said, "when I planted this, and to whom did I reveal the secret of it?"

What He planted was a Tree.

Its powers rose one above the other, rung over rung, and together they stood like a tree so vast that its crown was lost in the light it had climbed out of and its roots ran down through the earth He had just unrolled. He spread the whole All inside it. He gave it that very name. He called it All, because everything leaned upon it and everything issued out of it, because every made thing would turn its face toward the Tree and wait, and from the Tree, when the waiting broke, joy would come pouring down. "Let no power lift itself over this," He said, "to tell it, I came before you."

The Souls Fly Forth From the Branches

The Tree was thirsty, and He watered it.

The water He poured was wisdom, and the water was also souls, the souls of the righteous, and they were the same water. They rose from a spring hidden at the root. They ran up through a single great channel into the trunk. They climbed until they broke into the branches and clung there, trembling, alive. And from the tips of the branches they took flight. Soul after soul lifted off in joy and dropped toward the worlds waiting underneath, and every one of them had grown upon that Tree before it ever drew a single breath below.

The flight had a hinge. The souls did not simply fall. They flew forth by the hand of Israel, for when the people below are righteous and good, the Presence comes down and settles among them and rests upon the work of their hands, and the Holy One gathers them into His own bosom and makes them fruitful and many. So the water goes up and the souls come down. The Tree feeds the worlds, and the worlds, when they are worthy, feed the Tree, and the whole green weight of creation hangs from a seed that once glowed alone in the dark.