#tzimtzum

[themirrorofsienna]

The Broken Whole: From Sparks to Communion

The question of division has followed humanity from the beginning. Some saw it as punishment, others as fracture, others as exile. Still, within different traditions, runs a deeper recognition: the soul belongs to a greater root, a body or tree from which it cannot be separated. Encounters that seem accidental are in fact echoes of ancient unity. The memory of what was broken still circulates, and philosophy, mysticism and myth have given it different names. Plato spoke of a lost whole, Luria of shattered vessels, Paul of the body of Christ. Three languages for one truth.

More at The Mirror of Sienna.

[conscienciacoletiva]

O significa Tzimtzum na Kabbalah?

[freegameplanet]

Tzimtzum is a surreal atmospheric horror game set in an office with impossible spaces and a weird worm monster!

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows)

[apenitentialprayer]

Almighty / Omnipotentem / Pantocrator

(I'm just reposting basically this whole chapter, because I thought it was really good. Bolded emphases added)

"Power" is no longer a nice word. It has a decidedly sinister ring to it. When we speak of power we tend to think of dangerous relationships or of wider systems of domination and control. But that is not how "might" or "power" is understood in Christian teaching. The early Christians often compared God to a breastfeeding mother: it is a favorite image in numerous sermons and writings from the ancient church. We relate to God not like loyal subjects submitting to a powerful ruler, but like infants drawing nourishment from a mother. God's power is not only above us but also alongside us, beneath us, and within us. It is not the power of subjection and control but a power that frees and enables. Augustine described the divine power as "maternal love, expressing itself as weakness" [First Exposition on Psalm 58, §10]. This is not like the power of the pagan gods who intervene in the world from time to time. God's might is everywhere present in creation. It is the underlying mystery of everything that exists. It is not just a solution to problems in this world. It is the reason there is a world at all. [...] That is the problem with trying to place any limitations on God's power. If God's power were just one power among others —if God were "mighty" but not "almighty"— then divine power would end up being another form of manipulation and control. Only a God who is totally free and totally sovereign can relate to the world in total love, patience and generosity. There is power elsewhere in creation: each living thing has its own unique power and energy. But God does not have to compete with these other powers. God's power is their source, the reason they exist at all. God's power is what sustains and nourishes the power of creatures. True power is not the ability to control. Controlling behavior is a sign of weakness and insecurity. True power is the ability to love and enable without reserve. God's power, like the power of a good parent or teacher, is the capacity other agents and to help their freedom to grow. Without the "sovereignty" of a good parent, children have a diminished sense of their own worth and their own agency. In the same way, God's sovereignty is what secures human freedom, not what threatens it. In the creed we confess three great movements of God's power: God lovingly brought the world into being; God lovingly entered the womb and became part of the world in Jesus Christ; and God the Holy Spirit is lovingly transfiguring the world in the lives of the saints. At every point, God's power is hidden. It is a "gentle omnipotence," as the British theologian Sarah Coakley has said. God is invisibly almighty in the act of creation, invisibly almighty in the womb of the Virgin, invisibly almighty in the darkness of the tomb, invisibly almighty in the company of believers and in the communal life they share. The world lives because of this gentle but all-embracing power, and we are free because of it.

Benjamin Myers (The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, pages 25-26, 26-27)

[the-weird-poet]

There is a philosophical idea I have always liked called tzimtzum, which is as tricky to say out loud as it is to think about. Tzimtzum proposes that the world did come from nothing, but that the nothing was made by something, so something made nothing in order for something to come from the nothing, and this may be why we spend most of our lives drifting between nothing and something. Perhaps you find this confusing and might need to pause for a second to read that sentence again, and that is an important part of tzimtzum too. To think about something, you often need to pause first - to make nothing in your mind, just for a second, so there is room for you to think about what it is that has grabbed your attention. To think about something, you need nothing, just like whoever or whatever created the world, or, as one of my favorite writers once put it, “God made everything out of nothing , but the nothingness shows through”.

— Lemony Snicket, Poison for breakfast (chapter 6)

[ouroboros8ontology]

It means briefly that the existence of the universe is made possible by a process of shrinkage in God. Luria begins by putting a question which gives the appearance of being naturalistic and, if you like, somewhat crude. How can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is ‘all in all,’ how can there be things which are not God? How can God create the world out of nothing if there is no nothing? This is the question. The solution became, in spite of the crude form which he gave it, of the highest importance in the history of later Kabbalistic thought. According to Luria, God was compelled to make room for the world by, as it were, abandoning a region within [Themself], a kind of mystical primordial space from which [They] withdrew in order to return to it in the act of creation and revelation. The first act of En-Sof, the Infinite Being, is therefore not a step outside but a step inside, a movement of recoil, of falling back upon oneself, of withdrawing into oneself. Instead of emanation we have the opposite, contraction. The God who revealed [Themself] in firm contours was superseded by one who descended deeper into the recesses of [Their] own Being, who concentrated [Themself] into [Themself], and had done so from the very beginning of creation.

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Seventh Lecture: Isaac Luria and his School

[gebo4482]

Tzimtzum (Demo)

[progressivejudaism]

This week we read Parshat Berisheet- the creation story.

As Jews, we are partners with God in creation-- the creation of goodness, wholeness, love, justice, and peace in our world.

What will you do to help create this year?