God and the world: is the world part of God?

The question, and why it matters

The first question to clarify is the relationship between God and the world. Is God “inside” the world, identical with it? Or is he separate from it, above it? In philosophical language this is called immanence (God within everything) versus transcendence (God beyond everything). In kabbalistic language it is called “tzimtzum” (contraction). This is not an abstract question: almost all of practical theology, providence, choice, prayer, depends on it.

The idea of tzimtzum appears in the writings of the Arizal, and its aim is to answer a philosophical question: if before creation there was only God, and he is infinite, where was there room for the world? The Arizal’s answer: God “contracted” himself, and left an “empty space” in which the world was created. And then a dispute arose. Some said the tzimtzum is “literal”: God really withdrew, and the world exists separately from him. And some said the tzimtzum is “not literal”: it is only “from our perspective.” From his side, he fills everything, there is nothing apart from him, and the world is a kind of illusion in which we live.

This difference has great consequences. Hasidism adopted the “non-literal tzimtzum,” and from it the idea that divinity is found in every place and in every person, and that one can serve God even in eating, drinking and working. The Mitnagdim saw a danger in this.

Why the tzimtzum is literal

The position here is that the tzimtzum is literal, and that the opposite position is not “mistaken” but simply devoid of content. Think about it: if the world really exists, it is not God. And if it does not really exist, if it is an illusion, who exactly is experiencing the illusion? After all, we too, the ones experiencing it, do not exist. To say that “from his perspective there is no world and from ours there is” is a combination of words that cannot be given any meaning. Think of it this way: for there to be an “our perspective,” we must exist, because only one who exists can look from any perspective. And if we exist, the world exists, and it is not God. And if we do not exist, there is no “our perspective” at all. In other words, the very talk of “our perspective” already admits that we exist, and in doing so contradicts the claim that the world is only an illusion.

Some say “where philosophy ends, Kabbalah begins,” meaning that Kabbalah solves what philosophy cannot. But a kabbalistic discussion too must be understandable and logical. Kabbalah is mainly a different language for the same questions, and if a sentence is not understandable in any language, it has no content. Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, the great disciple of the Vilna Gaon, devoted an entire section of his book “Nefesh HaChaim” to the tzimtzum, and there the expressions “from his perspective” and “from our perspective” appear again and again. At first glance it seems that he too holds that the tzimtzum is only from our perspective, and most of his interpreters indeed concluded that here he departed from his master, the Gaon, who held the tzimtzum is literal, and leaned toward the Hasidic position. That is also how the Lubavitcher Rebbe understood it, who wrote a special letter on the tzimtzum: in his words, Rabbi Chaim did not follow his master’s path, but did not go as far as the position of the author of the Tanya either, and took an intermediate position.

But this reading is not plausible. Rabbi Chaim revered his master, and it is hard to believe he would have departed from his view on so fundamental a matter, without even remarking on it, and in a book entirely devoted to the struggle against Hasidism. So a different reading is proposed here. Throughout the section, Rabbi Chaim is careful not to say that one of the pictures is real and the other an illusion. He says that there is a picture “from his side” and a picture “from our side.” And if we ourselves are an illusion, from whose perspective are we an illusion? Who is the other side? So it seems his meaning is two real points of view: God “fills” the world in a certain sense, and the world also truly exists facing him. He calls this “sovev” (surrounding) and “memaleh” (filling). One can illustrate this with an analogy from dimensions: a line, which has no area, simply “does not exist” from the perspective of a two-dimensional world in which existence is measured in area. So too, from God’s perspective, the world does not count, and yet it exists on its own plane. So on a careful reading, Rabbi Chaim did not adopt the position that the world is an illusion, but a complex position in which the world truly exists.

This question also has a practical side, and it is worth seeing it through an example: teshuvah (repentance). In a world without free choice, there is no room at all for sin and repentance. But even in a world with choice, repentance raises a puzzle that is not simple.

A person who sins sins in one of two ways: either he was forced, and then it is compulsion and not sin, and no repentance is needed. Or he chose. And if he chose, the act expresses what he wanted at that moment. Think of someone who desecrated Shabbat, or ate a cake after deciding to keep a diet. If no one forced him, he did what he wanted: the momentary pleasure mattered more to him at that moment than serving God, or than the diet. In other words, an act done by choice reveals a person’s scale of values.

And now he wants to repent. Repentance means changing the scale of values: that the pleasure will no longer outweigh serving God. But who exactly wants to change? If he himself wants the change, then the scale has already changed, and there is nothing to change. And if the scale has not changed, why would he want to change it? And if someone from outside changes it, that is not repentance but “programming”: repentance must be an act of the person himself. Nor can he be persuaded from outside: suppose Yossi keeps the commandments only for the reward. To persuade him to serve “for its own sake,” one has to speak his language, the language of reward: “If you serve for its own sake, you will get more reward.” But then he remains in exactly the same framework. In other words, repentance seems impossible, and not just psychologically difficult, but logically impossible.

Perhaps the only way out of this dead end is to give up the sharp division “either the person himself or someone from outside.” Perhaps there is a factor that is both outside the person and part of him: a divine spark within him. Then the change happens both from within and from without, and the puzzle cannot be formulated. This is not a full solution, but it points to a possible path. And if so, the relationship between the human being and God is not only “one facing the other,” nor identity, but something in between: God is both facing us (“sovev”) and within us (“memaleh”). And this corresponds exactly to the intermediate position we saw in Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin. That is, even the literal tzimtzum does not mean there is no inner connection between a human being and his God.

Two lessons emerge from this. The first, on the substance: we exist. God may “fill” reality, but he is not identical with it. We are not him, and he is not us. And the second, on method: the debate about tzimtzum shows how undefined concepts create debates without content. Before sorting “positions,” one must ask what has actually been said.

The thirteen principles: what can be said about God?

Maimonides formulated thirteen principles of faith, and the first four concern God himself: that he exists, that he is one, that he is not a body, and that he is eternal. It is worth examining them in the same way.

Take, for example, Maimonides’ doctrine of “negative attributes” (Guide, Part I). Maimonides claims that we have no way to describe God with positive attributes, such as “merciful,” “wise” or “great,” because every such description is taken from the human world, and God resembles nothing in the world. So when the Torah says God is “merciful,” this must be understood by way of negation: he “is not cruel.”

And immediately the question arises: what is the difference, really? “Not cruel” sounds exactly like “merciful.” Maimonides himself raises the question, and answers as follows. When we speak of human beings, there is one axis, from very cruel to very merciful, and every person is at some point on it. When we say of a person “he is not cruel,” we do not say he is merciful, but we do say something: that he is not at the cruel end of the axis. But God, says Maimonides, is not on this axis at all. And so for him, “not cruel” means something else: that the whole axis does not apply to him. He is outside the world of human concepts.

But here a serious problem arises. If “merciful” means “the merciful–cruel axis does not apply to him,” then “cruel” means exactly the same thing. Of it too one can say “the axis does not apply to him.” And so “merciful” and “cruel” say exactly the same thing about God. And even “tall” or “Olympic running champion” would say the same: that he does not belong to the human game. And if so, why did the Torah choose “merciful” and not “cruel”? The negative doctrine cannot explain this. What is more, Maimonides claims that negation too teaches something, because each negation narrows down what the thing is not, and from this it becomes clear what it is. But that is true only of a negation that moves along the axis, and not of a negation that takes the thing off the axis entirely.

And there is a deeper point here. When we see a black table, the black color is really our sensation, not a property of the table itself. We always describe things according to how they appear to us, and never “as they are in themselves.” There is nothing special to God in this. In other words, the rationale of the negative doctrine, that we cannot describe God as he is, is true of everything, not only of God.

So why are people so occupied with this? The answer proposed here is that many of these discussions are really “ideological statements”: they are meant to influence, not to describe. A modern example: feminist theology, which proposes speaking of God in the feminine. The question asked there is not “what is true,” but “what is useful.” But a statement about God that is measured by its usefulness is propaganda, not theology.

And yet perhaps the negative doctrine has some meaning. Rabbi David Cohen, “the Nazir,” gives an example: the attribute “holy.” The Torah says “you shall be holy,” and the Sages interpret: “you shall be separate.” That is, holiness is defined negatively, by distancing: Rashi says it is separation from forbidden relations, and Nachmanides says it is separation even from what is permitted, “not to be a degenerate within the bounds of the Torah.” But holiness itself is a positive concept. It is just hard to define directly, and the negative way, what one must keep away from, is what gives us a notion of what it is. And perhaps so too with “merciful”: the negation “he is not non-merciful” gives us some notion of the meaning, however strange that may sound. This is a possible meaning of the negative doctrine, though it is not certain that this is what Maimonides intended.1

Another example is pantheism, the view that “everything is God.” This view was developed by the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, about 350 years ago. According to him, God is not a being outside the world, but the world itself: not the chair, not the tree and not the cloud, but the totality of everything that exists. His reasoning was simple: God is infinite, and an infinite thing leaves no room for anything else beside it. So the world and God must be the same thing.

Spinoza was attacked from both directions. Atheists claimed he gave a religious coating to matter. Believers claimed he made God “disappear,” or turned him material. But if you think about it for a moment, what is actually being said? If we call the totality of nature “God,” what has changed? Is there a claim here about the world, which one can agree or disagree with? No. It is giving a name, nothing more. An atheist who says “there is only nature” and a pantheist who says “nature is God” describe exactly the same world. The difference between them is in words, not in content.

And there is a sensitive point here. Since Spinoza, every believing Jew shudders at the word “pantheism.” But Hasidism, at least in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s interpretation, also identifies God with reality, because “there is nothing besides him,” and the world is an illusion. How is that different from pantheism? It is hard to find a difference. Scholars and rabbis have written much about fine distinctions between different kinds of pantheism, but it seems that much of this was meant only to avoid Hasidism appearing to hold the view held by “Spinoza the heretic.” In fact, Spinoza was not considered a heretic because he was a pantheist. Pantheism was considered heresy because Spinoza, who was excommunicated from the Jewish community because of his way of life and his views, held it. All of this is a matter of names, not of content.

“Soft positivism”

What lies behind all these rejections? There is a philosophical approach called logical positivism, which says that a sentence that cannot be tested by experiment is meaningless. It is an extreme approach, and we reject it: “there is a God” cannot be tested by experiment, and yet it is a meaningful claim, as we saw in the previous article. But there is a “soft” version of the same idea, which is worth adopting: a sentence must be defined, so that one can understand what it says and what the difference is between it and its opposite. “The tzimtzum is only from our perspective” does not pass this test. “Everything is God” does not pass it. Many discussions in Jewish thought do not pass it.

“So what do you believe in at all?”

Here the question arises: if all the descriptions of God are empty, what do we believe in? The answer: we also describe an electron by what it does, not by “what it is in itself.” An electron is “the thing that causes electrical phenomena.” And when I say of a person that he is “kind-hearted,” I mean that there is something in him that causes him to do good, without knowing what that “something” is. So too with God: he is the one who created the world, gave it laws, obligates morality, revealed himself and commanded. That is a great deal, and it is enough to believe in him. There is no need to know “what he is in himself,” and we have no way to know it either.

And one more word about principles whose source is in biblical verses. Take, for example, the coming of the Messiah, Maimonides’ twelfth principle. Maimonides writes that whoever doubts it “denies the Torah,” because the Torah promised it explicitly, in the section of Balaam and in the section of Nitzavim. That is, in his view the source is verses, not a tradition handed down from Sinai. But verses can be interpreted in different ways. The Gemara (Sanhedrin 99a) tells of a sage named Rabbi Hillel who said: “Israel has no Messiah, for they already consumed him in the days of Hezekiah,” that is, the prophecies about the Messiah were already fulfilled in King Hezekiah. The Sages disagreed with him, but notice how: they did not say “there is a tradition from Sinai,” but brought a verse from Zechariah, said after the days of Hezekiah. That is, in their view he simply erred in interpreting the verses, and did not commit heresy. And so they continued to treat him with respect, as a sage. And indeed, the Sefer HaIkkarim (by Rabbi Yosef Albo) concluded from this that the coming of the Messiah is not a fundamental principle of the Torah, although he himself believed in it. And Maimonides himself wrote (Laws of Kings 12:2) that regarding the details of the messianic era, “the sages too have no tradition about these things, but only according to what the verses indicate, and therefore they disagree.” The conclusion: even when a principle is learned from verses, it depends on their interpretation, and interpretation is not a binding tradition.