Sublime

this act of enclothing (hitlabbeshut), epitomized in the zoharic sentiment that God and Torah are one, is the kabbalistic way of articulating the theopoetic mystery of incarnation, the paradox of the delimitation of the limitless, the ideational underpinning of the hal-akhic basis for the mystical ideal of devequt, communion with and conjunction to

the conjunction of the Jew to the light of Ein Sof, a monopsychic state that summons the eradication of ontic difference, biṭṭul ha-yesh, a blurring of the boundary between finite and infinite.91

Only when one sees from the vantage point of this double extinction—the nothing becoming something that is nothing—does one comprehend the far-reaching monopsychic (as opposed to the conventional monotheistic) meaning of the verse from Deuteronomy proclaiming that apart from God there is no other, that is, appearances notwithstanding, there appears

The negativity that doubly binds God and world yields what we may also call acosmic naturalism. The adjective acosmic connotes that there is no world that is not enfolded in the essence that is the light of the Infinite, whereas the noun naturalism indicates that there is no unfolding without the enfolded, no manifestation but in the occlusion that

The mythopoeic axiom that God and Torah are identical—so central to the kabbalistic imaginary—presupposes that disparate matters are juxtaposed in the (dis)semblance of the name incarnate. In that respect, the Torah as primordial parable points to the inherent metaphoricity of language, the convergence of the literal and the figurative.

the study of Ḥabad requires a hermeneutic based on a notion of time at odds with the linear conception under-girding this comment.

The lack of any chronological order in the sefirotic pleroma—in the language of Sefer Yeṣirah, which is frequently cited by kabbalists, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end like a flame bound to the coal”115—is the ontological underpinning of the inability to impose a linear template onto the scriptural narrative.