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Judaism


Nahmanides

I have seen the measure of the height of the Lord, without dimension and without shape, which has no end. (p. 17)


Cordovero's Book Elimah

If God stands apart from the world He is also within it ("He is outside as much as He is inside"), and that He "fills all and causes all" without this immanence precluding a personalistic and theistic view of Him. (p. 148)


The Kabbalah

In the beginning Ein-Sof took pleasure in its own autarkic self-sufficiency, and the "pleasure" produced a kind of "shaking" (ni'anu'a) which was the movement of Ein-Sof within itself.

Next the movement "from itself to itself" aroused the root of Din (i.e. "judgment"), which was still indistinguishably combined with Rahamim (i.e. "overflowing mercy).

As a result of this "shaking", "primordial points" were engraved. As light of Ein-Sof outside this "engraving" acted upon the points within it, the latter were activated from their potential state and the primordial Torah, the ideal world woven in the substance of Ein-Sof itself, came into being. (p. 132)


The Teachings of Rabbi Schneur Zalman

Everyone who has insight into the matter will understand clearly that everything created and having being is as absolute naught with regard to the Activating Force, which is in all created being. This force constitutes it's reality and draws it forth from absolute nothingness to being.

The fact that all ceated things seem to have existence and being in their own right is because we can neither conceive nor see, with our physical eyes, the Force of God which is in the created world.

Were the eye able to see and conceive the vitality and spirituality in each created thing, which flows through it from it's divine source, then the physicality, materiality, and substantiality of the created world would not be seen at all; because apart from the spiritual dimension, it is absolute nothingness. There is really nothing in existence besides God.


The Slavonic Book of Enoch (13:8)

Ein-Sof is the absolute perfection in which there are no distinctions and no differentiations, and according to some even no volition. It does not reveal itself in a way that makes knowledge of its nature possible, and it is not accessible even to the innermost thought ... of the contemplative. (p. 89)

More daring is the concept of the first step in the manifestation of Ein-Sof as ayin or afisah ("nothing," "nothingness"). Essentially, this nothingness is the barrier confronting the human intellectual faculty when it reaches the limts of its capacity. In other words, it is a subjective statement affirming that there is a realm which no created being can intellectually comprehend, and which, therefore, can only be defined as "nothingness." (p. 94)

The God who manifests Himself in His Sefirot is the very same God of traditional religious belief, and consequently, despite all the complexities such an idea involves, the emanation of the Sefirot is a process within God Himself. The hidden God in the aspect of Ein-Sof and the God manifested in the emanation of the Sefirot are one and the same, viewed from two different angles. (p. 98)

God who expresses Himself in the emanation of the Sefirot is greater than the totality of the Sefirot through which He works and by means of which He passes from unity to plurality. (p. 102)


Sarug in his book, Limmudei Azilut

The true meaning of the text (creatio ex nihilo) is the emergence of all things from the absolute nothingness of God. (p. 95)


Moses de Leon - in his book Sefer ha-Rimmon

The Sefirot, both individually and collectively, subsume the archetype of every created thing outside the world of emanation. Just as they are contained within the Godhead, so they impregnate every being outside it. (p. 105)

Every being has a secondary existence of its own apart from the Godhead but this disappears before the penetrating gaze of the mystic which uncovers the unity of essence behind it. (p. 147)


Zohar (Ra'aya Meheimna and the Tikkunim)

God's true essence is "above and below, in heaven and on earth, and there is no existence besides Him." (p. 147)

At opposite poles, both man and God encompass within their being the entire cosmos. However, whereas God contains all by virtue of being its Creator and Initiator in whom everything is rooted and all potency is hidden, man's role is to complete this process by being the agent through whom all the powers of creation are fully activated and made manifest. What exists seminally in God unfolds and develops in man. If the forces of the Sefirot are reflected in him, he is also the "transformer" who through his own life and deeds amplifies these forces to their highest level of manifestation and redirects them to their original source. (p. 152)


Adapted from Rabbi Akiba - Midrash Temura, ch 3

A house testifies that there was a builder, a dress that there was a tailor; so our World by it's existence proclaims it's Creator, God.

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