The answer, as they see it, lies in light.
Not just any light, mind you. We're talking about the primordial light, the very essence of God's presence. But how does that translate into… us?
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, a remarkable scholar who lived in Warsaw and tragically perished in the Holocaust, offered a powerful image in his work, Hovat ha-Talmidim. He reinterprets the Kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum (צמצום), a concept central to understanding creation. Tzimtzum literally means "contraction" or "self-limitation."
Now, traditionally, tzimtzum refers to God contracting himself, creating a "space" for the world to exist. Rabbi Shapira takes a different angle. He suggests that it wasn’t God contracting Himself, but rather God contracting His light.
Think of it like this: imagine an infinitely bright light. To create a shadow, you don't diminish the source, but you block parts of the light, creating areas of less intensity. Through repeated "contractions" of this divine light, the physical world, with all its limitations and boundaries, becomes manifest.
Beautiful, isn't it?
This idea also connects to the sefirot (סְפִירוֹת), the ten emanations or attributes through which God reveals Himself and continuously creates the world. According to Rabbi Shapira's myth, each subsequent contraction of God's light leads to the unfolding of the next sefirah. It’s a layered process, each step bringing the divine closer to our tangible reality.
So, according to this perspective, everything around us – from the smallest grain of sand to the most distant star – is ultimately an emanation of that divine light. God's kingdom truly has dominion over all, because all of creation is, in essence, a reflection of His essence.
What I find so compelling is that this myth, created in the 20th century amidst unimaginable horror, demonstrates the enduring power of Jewish myth-making. Even in the darkest times, the human spirit seeks to understand its place in the cosmos, and finds new ways to express the relationship between the divine and the mundane.
It reminds us that the story of creation isn't a closed book. It's a living, breathing narrative that continues to unfold with each generation. And perhaps, by contemplating the contractions of light, we can better understand the boundless nature of the source from which it all began.