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Beastly Boy

(11,777 posts)
1. Thank you. I very much appreciate this contribution to the Jewish Group forum.
Thu Feb 13, 2025, 01:05 PM
Feb 13

To add two cents to the subject on the subject from another non-observant Jew, which may clarify the question raised in the citation: at the foundation of the Kabbalistic understanding of God and creation, there is a conception of two aspects of God: one is an all encompassing and unchanging in perpetuity state of God called "Ein Sof", meaning "never ending" and indescribable in any other way and is beyond human understanding, and the other one as Creator of the universe we inhabit, which is the extent of human understanding of God. The universe is but a tiny part of Ein Sof as God's perpetual state of being, a ripple in it that and, by implication, it has an end. It also has a beginning, as in "bereshit" which marks the beginning of the universe and the Torah, both, reflected in the reverence for Torah by virtually every sage, are one and the same, Thus, the study of Torah is essentially the study of the universe, a notion which is reflected in the words of Moses Maymonides in the passage you cited. This first word of the Torah is full of Kabbalistic mysteries, the notable one being that creation of the universe started before God gave Himself a name.

So, in an attempt to answer the question of this morning: since the Ein Sof aspect of God extends beyond our universe, the universe is God's creation and does not begin to fully define God.

And the common idea of the God being the dude up in the sky pulling the strings is utterly and totally obliterated by the first word in the Genesis. Possibly, as another pre-eminent sage, the legendary founder of the study of Kaballah Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai once stated, the first letter of the the word. He suggested that the dot in the Hebrew "beit" that starts the Torah is a signifier of the presence of God in the entire act of Creation, and even precedes it, way before any dudes, or the sky, or any physical or virtual strings, ever came into being.

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