Where is Eyn Sof?
Monday, August 14th, 2023Shalom! In the first of his 1992 Germantown, PA lectures on Kabbalah, I asked the following question. Reb Zalman’s answer follows:
Seth: Dear Reb Zalman, in this lecture, I hear you mapping the tradition onto modern cosmology and coming up with very rich imagery. But where is Eyn Sof in space time as we imagine it? Before the Copernican revolution, or at some such time when we felt ourselves locked here on the earth and looking in the sky, we saw a kind of ceiling. Reading Bereishit, we could think that creation was light and water up there. Was the concept of Eyn Sof tied to the Copernican revolution? Did Eyn Od come in with the Kabbalists? Given our current model for the universe, Space/Time and Quantum physics, etc., as one sends one’s imagination to the ends of the universe, where is Eyn Sof?
Reb Zalman: Let me say this. I’m excited about the challenge of the update. I see in Kabbalah a software for god-ing, (if I were to use those terms).
I want to have some connection with God. If I treat if as the picture of the old guy sitting in the sky saying all those no-nos and punishing all the bad guys, etc., that’s shattered for us; Auschwitz shattered this once and for all.
So then the question is: “All right, then how do we continue to be Jews?” So, it is like needing an update on the software.