Ein Sof and Ayin

The Tree of Life, which the second essay in this series described, is a map of God as God turns towards the world: ten powers arranged in three pillars, a crown at the top and a kingdom at the base, each receiving from above and giving below. It is a bold map, and the Kabbalists drew it in great detail. But they insisted, from the beginning, that it is not a map of God as God is. Above the Crown, or rather beyond it altogether, is something the Tree does not show, because it cannot be shown.

They called it Ein Sof, “without end”. This essay is about that name, and about a second, stranger name that the Kabbalists gave to the point where the hidden God first turns towards manifestation: Ayin, “nothing”. Together they make Kabbalah one of the great apophatic traditions, those that approach the ultimate by saying what it is not. And they lead to one of its most demanding teachings: that the one who would know this God must also, in some sense, become nothing.

Without end§

The phrase ein sof is ordinary Hebrew. It means “there is no end”, and the medieval philosophers used it as an adverb, of something that goes on without limit. In the circle of Isaac the Blind in twelfth-century Provence it became a noun, and a name: the Infinite, the Endless, God before and beyond every attribute. Ginsburg, in his 1865 essay in the Library’s reader, explains that as Ein Sof God “cannot be comprehended by the intellect, nor described in words, for there is nothing which can grasp and depict him to us” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.7).

The Kabbalists drew the consequence strictly. Ein Sof has no attributes at all. It does not will, or think, or speak, or act, for Ginsburg says it has “neither will, intention, desire, thought, language, nor action, as these properties imply limit and belong to finite beings” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.7). It is not even, strictly speaking, the creator: the world comes forth through the sefirot, not directly from the Infinite. Azriel of Gerona, in the commentary analysed in our second essay, adds that Ein Sof is within all things as well as beyond them, since nothing can exist outside the infinite.¹1 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 2.84: “(c) Proof.—As the primary cause of the world is infinite, nothing can exist without (EXTRA) him; hence he is immanent. (Ibid.)” Read in context

This is not the God of the Bible as most of its readers have imagined Him: a person who speaks, commands, loves and grows angry. The Kabbalists knew this, and it was part of their purpose. They held both at once. The biblical God who speaks and loves is God as revealed in the sefirot, real and true. But behind and above the revelation is a depth that no revelation exhausts, and that the Bible itself, they thought, points to when it says that no one can see God’s face and live.

What the philosophers had said§

The Kabbalists did not invent the negative way. Jewish philosophy had already walked it, most rigorously in Maimonides, whose Guide of the Perplexed was completed around 1190, at almost the same moment the Bahir appeared in Provence. Maimonides argued that nothing positive can be truly said of God. Every attribute we name implies composition or limitation, and God is simple and unlimited. The most we can do is to deny of God what is unworthy, and each true negation brings us a little nearer, as one who learns what a thing is not comes closer to knowing what it is (Maimonides 1904, I.58–60). He was fond of a verse of the Psalms that he read as saying that, for God, silence is praise.

The Kabbalists took this up and turned it. They agreed with Maimonides that the Infinite in itself is beyond every positive name. But where the philosopher left the mind with a series of denials, the Kabbalist found in the sefirot a positive revelation of God’s inner life, given by God himself, through which the hidden God may be known, loved and approached in prayer. The negative way led to Ein Sof; the sefirot were the way back. Some Kabbalists, indeed, sharply criticised the philosophers for offering only negations, a God about whom one could say nothing and to whom one could not pray.

Who and These§

The Zohar, which the fourth essay in this series will read, gives the doctrine one of its most memorable forms, in a reading of a verse of Isaiah: lift up your eyes on high and see who created these. In Hebrew, “who” is mi and “these” is elleh. The Zohar notices that the two words together spell Elohim, the name of God that opens the book of Genesis. Ginsburg summarises its teaching that “God in his absolute nature is unknown and incomprehensible, and hence, in a certain sense, non-existent”, and that God becomes known only through “these”, the works of creation (Ginsburg 1865, 1.15).

The reading is playful, and it is profound. The highest thing that can be said of God is a question: Who? Not an answer, not a name, but the open form of asking. “These”, the things that can be pointed to, are the world and the sefirot, the God who can be named. Only together do the unknown Who and the visible These make the name of God. Remove the question and you have only things; remove the things and you have a question with nothing to ask about. The divine name holds both: the hidden and the revealed, the One no one can see and the many in which it shows itself.

In another passage Ginsburg translates, the Zohar describes God before creation: “Before he gave any shape to this world, before he produced any form, he was alone, without a form and resemblance to anything else.” It goes on to explain why God nonetheless takes the names of the attributes, of mercy, justice and might, so that he can be known through them, and then warns: “Woe be to him who compares him with his own attributes!” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.16) The attributes are true, but they are not God’s essence. To mistake the revelation for the hidden God is the subtlest idolatry.

The Nothing§

Here the Kabbalists took a further step, and a startling one. If Ein Sof is beyond all being that we can conceive, then from our side it is not anything at all. Ginsburg says that as Ein Sof God is “in a certain sense, not existent”, because what is wholly beyond the mind’s grasp does not exist for the mind (Ginsburg 1865, 1.7). The Kabbalists gave this a name. They called the first stirring of the hidden God, the highest point of the Tree where Ein Sof begins to turn towards manifestation, Ayin: Nothing.

This is not nothing as mere absence. It is the nothing that is more than every something: a fullness so complete that no thing can name it. The Kabbalists found it in a verse of Job, which asks where wisdom is to be found. In Hebrew the question can also be read as a statement: wisdom comes from ayin, from nothing. So Ḥokhmah, Wisdom, the second sefirah, the first flash of divine thought, comes forth from Keter, the Crown, which is Ayin.

And the Kabbalists reread the doctrine of creation in the same light. The rabbis and philosophers taught that God created the world out of nothing, ex nihilo, to say that God used no pre-existing matter. The Kabbalists kept the formula and changed its meaning. The world was indeed made from nothing: from the divine Nothing, the Ayin of the Crown. Creation out of nothing became creation out of God, out of the depth of God that is no thing.

The root of faith and unbelief§

Azriel of Gerona makes a remark about Ein Sof that is easy to pass over and worth stopping at. Because the Infinite is invisible and exalted, he says, it is the root of both faith and unbelief.²2 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 2.85: “Scholion.—As the En Soph is invisible and exalted, it is the root of both faith and unbelief. (Ibid.)” Read in context The same hiddenness that draws the believer draws the denier. The one who says there is no God is not entirely wrong: there is no thing that is God, no object among objects. The one who believes is not entirely right if he imagines God as such an object. Both stand before the same hidden depth, and both are tested by it.

This is a generous teaching, and an honest one. It does not treat doubt as the opposite of faith, but as its shadow, cast by the same light. The person who cannot find God among the things of the world has found something true: that God is not one of them. What remains is to find the God who is not a thing.

Other traditions, other silences§

The other great contemplative traditions speak of the ultimate in much the same way, and it is worth hearing them side by side, without pretending they say exactly the same thing. The Tao Te Ching opens by saying that the Tao that can be spoken of is not the enduring Tao, and the name that can be named is not the enduring name.³3 Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 1.1, translated by James Legge: “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.” Read in context The Kena Upanishad says of Brahman that the eye does not go there, nor speech, nor mind, and that it is other than the known and beyond the unknown.⁴4 The Upanishads, The Upanishads, verse First part, III, translated by Swami Paramananda: “There the eye does not go, nor speech, nor mind. We do not know That; we do not understand how It can be taught. It is distinct from the known and also It is beyond the unknown. Thus we have heard from the ancient (teachers) who told us about It. These physical eyes are unable to perceive that subtle essence. …” Read in context And Meister Eckhart, preaching in Germany a few decades after the Zohar was written in Castile, begins a sermon by saying that God is nameless, and that if he says God is good, it is not true.⁵5 The German mystics, selected by W. R. Inge, Light, Life, and Love, paragraph eckhart.1: “GOD is nameless, for no man can either say or understand aught about Him. If I say, God is good, it is not true; nay more; I am good, God is not good. I may even say, I am better than God; for whatever is good, may become better, and whatever may become better, may become best. Now God is …” Read in context

The likeness is striking: in each, the highest is reached by unsaying. The differences matter as much. The Tao is not a God who gives commandments; Brahman, for the Upanishads, is also the Self of the one who seeks it; Eckhart’s Godhead beyond God is approached within the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Ein Sof is the hidden depth of the God who spoke at Sinai, and for the Kabbalists it is never separated from the Torah, the commandments and the life of a people. Their negative theology does not float free of a tradition. It is the inner silence of a very particular speech.

Praying to the Endless§

A teaching that puts God beyond every attribute raises a practical question, and the Kabbalists faced it directly: to whom does one pray? The prayers of the synagogue address a God who hears, remembers, forgives and saves. If Ein Sof has no will and no thought, it cannot hear, and a prayer addressed to it would be addressed to no one.

Their answer was that prayer is directed through the sefirot, and never to them as if they were separate gods. Each blessing and petition of the liturgy is aimed, by the intention of the one who prays, at the power of God to which it belongs: a prayer for mercy towards Ḥesed, a prayer for justice towards Din, a prayer for the restoration of Israel towards the Shekhinah. But the sefirot are only the ways in which the one God turns towards the world, and the prayer passes through them to the hidden source from which they flow. The Kabbalists debated exactly how this should be understood. Some insisted that the intention of prayer must rise to Ein Sof itself, others that it can reach only as far as the sefirot, since the Infinite is beyond even intention.

What all agreed on was that prayer is not a matter of informing God of what God does not know. It is a movement of the one who prays, upward through the powers towards their root, and a drawing down of blessing from the root into the world. The words of the prayer book are the same for the simplest worshipper and the most learned Kabbalist. What differs is how far the intention goes, and how much of the self is left behind on the way.

Room for a world§

One more question rises from the doctrine of Ein Sof, and the Kabbalists of the thirteenth century did not fully answer it. If the Infinite is everything, without end and without outside, where is there room for anything else? A world that is not God requires a place where God is not, and the Infinite admits no such place. Either the world is an illusion, swallowed in the Endless, or the Endless has somehow made room.

Three centuries later, in the hill town of Safed in Galilee, Isaac Luria gave the most famous answer in the history of Kabbalah. Before creation, he taught, Ein Sof withdrew into itself, contracting to leave an empty space in which a world could come to be: the tzimtzum. The first act of the Infinite towards creation was not an outpouring but a withdrawal, a making room. The fifth essay in this series is about that teaching and what followed from it, the shattering of the vessels and the repair of the world. It belongs here as a reminder that the doctrine of Ein Sof is not only a statement about God’s greatness. It is the beginning of a question about how anything other than God can exist at all, and what such a thing is for.

Becoming nothing§

If God at the root is Ayin, what does it mean for a human being to draw near? Here the doctrine turns from God to the soul, and becomes a practice. The Kabbalists taught that the soul, too, has its root in the divine Nothing. A person is a something, a yesh, full of opinions, desires and self-regard. To draw near to the Ayin of God, the something must become nothing: not destroyed, but emptied of its claim to stand on its own.

The Hasidic masters of the eighteenth century made this the centre of their teaching. Dov Ber of Mezritch, the successor of the Baal Shem Tov, taught that one must turn the yesh into ayin, the something into nothing, through humility, through prayer said without thought of oneself, through the awareness that every power one has is God’s. Only one who becomes nothing, he is reported to have said in many forms, can become a vessel for what flows from the Nothing above. The sixth essay in this series will follow this teaching further, as part of devekut, cleaving to God.

It would be easy to hear this as self-hatred, and the Hasidim did not mean it so. The nothingness asked of the soul is the same nothingness that is the highest name of God: not lack, but openness; not a wound, but a door. The one who becomes nothing does not lose the self. He loses the self’s pretence of being its own source, and finds that the self, rightly understood, was always a channel. The Tree of Life, in which each power receives and gives and holds nothing back, is a picture of what the soul becomes.

The silence at the top of the Tree§

Kabbalah is often thought of as a tradition of elaborate maps: sefirot, worlds, letters, divine names, correspondences without end. All of that is real, and the following essays will go further into it. But at the top of every map the Kabbalists wrote a word that undoes the map. Ein Sof: there is no end. Ayin: nothing. Above the Crown is not another crown but a silence, and the whole Tree grows down from it.

The fourth essay turns from the hidden God to the most revealed: the Zohar, the great book of thirteenth-century Castile, and its teaching of the Shekhinah, the divine presence in the world, imagined as the bride of God, in exile with her people and longing for reunion. If Ein Sof is God beyond all that can be said, the Shekhinah is God as near as the next breath. The Kabbalah holds both, and that is its genius.