There are so very many aspects to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. We have touched lightly on the Ten Sefirot and the Twenty-Two Pathways. The Tree of Life represents, symbolically, all of Creation. Where, one might be prone to ask, is God in all this? This was answered by Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572 C.E.), who taught us about the “Big Bang” long before it was “discovered” by Twentieth Century Scientists.
Luria's Doctrines taught about exactly where and when God enters the Creation. In Kabbalah, above the Tree is something referred to as “Ayin”, which means “Nothingness”, “Ayin” is where God "comes from". “Ayin Sof”, which means “Endlessness” is God, who performs an action known as “Tzimtzum” (“contraction”), contracting into a single, infinitesimal point, then exploding and creating “Ayin Sof Or” (“Endless Light”), which in turn, enters the Universe at Keter and flows through the tree of Life. Ayin, Ayin Sof, and Ayin Sof Or are often referred to as the “Three Negative Veils”.
There were apparently multiple previous Creations, taught by the Doctrine of Sheviret HaKelim, ("Shattering of the Vessels”), according to which Teaching, the earlier versions could not contain the Divine Illumination, and were destroyed, becoming “waste and void”.
Now the earth was waste and void (“tohu va-bohu”), and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water.
"Tohu va-Bohu" literally means "Chaos and Emptiness". Apparently, the Tzimtum must have been repeated, perhaps many Times, before achieving the current Universe. The broken fragments of the original Vessels became the "Qlippot" ("husks"), which can be mistaken as "demonic" forces, but are merely unfocussed Energies.
From the explosion, "Holy Sparks" flew off in all directions. This was best described by the Baal Shem Tov, a Jewish Sage who lived in the Eighteenth Century wrote,
"In all that is in the world dwell Holy Sparks, no things is empty of them; in the actions of Man, also, indeed even in the sins he does, dwell Holy Sparks of God."
Thus, according to “Tikkun Olam”, (“Repair of the World") all things and actions in the world, no matter how seemingly trivial, are saturated with Holy Sparks. Here we have once again, the idea that God is everywhere, not at all distant from the Creation. This is almost identical to the New Age Doctrine of “No Separation”.
Comments