In the previous section we saw that Hashem's knowledge of every single detail is itself what brings that detail into being and keeps it alive. Now we turn to the fundamental difference between divine thought and human thought, to why tzimtzumim (contractions of the divine light) are needed in order for a limited world to come into existence, and to the closing words of the chapter, which are taken from the Rambam.
Our thought bears no resemblance whatsoever to divine thought, as the verse says, «כי לא מחשבותי מחשבותיכם», «For My thoughts are not your thoughts.» Divine thought: the moment Hashem thinks of something, that very thought creates it. Human thought is the opposite: when a person thinks about something, an image of that thing exists in his mind and nowhere else, and his thought has no effect at all on the thing itself. This is precisely where the mashal (the analogy of human thought) falls short of the nimshal (the divine reality it is meant to illustrate).
When we say that Hashem thinks of every single detail, and that every detail is present within His thought, we do not mean only spiritual worlds, angels and lofty divine matters. We mean even this physical globe on which we live: «למשל כדור הארץ הלזו הרי ידיעתו יתברך מקיפה את כל עובי כדור הארץ וכל אשר בתוכו ותוך תוכו עד תחתיתו הכל בפועל ממש», «For example, this earthly globe: His blessed knowledge encompasses the entire thickness of the globe, and everything within it, and within the within of it, down to its very lowest point, all of it in actual fact.» It reaches the most physical layers of all.
For this world contains different strata: domem (inanimate), tzomeach (vegetative), chai (animal) and medaber (the speaking creature, man). Medaber is the highest of the creatures that move about in the world; chai is below it, yet still an elevated level; lower down is tzomeach, and lowest of all is domem. And the novelty here is that even every single detail within the inanimate exists in the divine awareness in actual fact, and within each and every detail there is the Ein Sof, the infinity of the Creator.
A precision in the wording is in place here. When one says «the universe», that term includes creatures far loftier and more exalted than ourselves, and it is obvious that the Creator knows them, brings them into being, acts within them and supervises every detail of them. But here the emphasis is specifically on «this earthly globe», on the lowest, coarsest, most material portion of all, and even that is present in actual fact within the divine awareness.
And from the perspective of the Ein Sof, the light that is sovev kol almin (encompassing all worlds, equally present everywhere), it is all the same: «שהרי ידיעה זו היא חיות כל עובי כדור הארץ כולו והתהוותו מאין ליש», «For this knowledge is the very life force of the entire thickness of the globe, and its coming into being from nothing into something.» The Creator's very knowledge of each and every detail is the vitality and the energy of creation, and the thing comes into being yesh me'ayin, something from nothing, precisely because the infinite awareness of the Creator is present within it.
If so, why is the created being limited?
If that infinite awareness were present within the creature in a way that it could feel, the creature itself would be infinite. On this the Alter Rebbe continues: «רק שלא היה מתהווה כמות שהוא עתה בעל גבול ותכלית וחיות מועטת מאוד כדי בחינת דומם וצומח, אם לא על ידי צמצומים רבים ועצומים שצמצמו האור והחיות שנתלבש בכדור הארץ - להחיותו ולקיימו בבחינת גבול ותכלית», «Except that it would not have come into being as it is now, bounded and finite, with a very scant vitality, only enough for the level of inanimate and vegetative, were it not for many and mighty tzimtzumim which contracted the light and the vitality that clothed itself in the earth, so as to enliven it and sustain it in a bounded and finite manner.»
In other words: Hashem is present here with infinite intensity, but He made many and mighty tzimtzumim so that the Ein Sof should not be felt by the creature and should not be grasped by it. Were the creature to feel the Ein Sof, it would not be limited at all, and there would never have been a contracted, limited world of the kind we know, a world that conceals the divine truth.
[How could a limited creature possibly absorb infinity? Think of an electrical appliance built for one hundred and ten volts: run two hundred and twenty through it and the appliance burns out. How much more so can a creature not contain the Ein Sof and remain what it is.]
The degree of tzimtzum, however, is not the same in all creatures. There are creatures, such as angels, in which the contraction is not so severe, and there are coarser, more material creatures in which the contraction is enormous. This is the order of hishtalshelus, the chain of descending worlds, each level with its own measure of tzimtzum. And nonetheless, even the very highest creature exists only after tzimtzum, and even the world of Atzilus exists only after tzimtzum, for without tzimtzum it would have no definition whatsoever: it would not be called Atzilus, and it would not contain chochmah and binah, since no attribute and no definition can exist without tzimtzum.
«ובבחינת דומם וצומח בלבד», «and only on the level of inanimate and vegetative»: the multitude of tzimtzumim is what makes the vitality appear as nothing more than domem and tzomeach. The inanimate simply exists and does not move, even though the Ein Sof is present within it exactly as it is in the world of Atzilus; the difference is only the absolute concealment of the Creator within it. And man's task is to be higher than domem, and that depends on his own choice, on where he wants to stand.
In our frame of reference, when a person knows something he must focus his thought on the thing he knows. One who thinks about a table is concentrating his thought on the table; one who hears news of something happening far away must direct his mind to that matter in order to take it in. It emerges that thinking about an object means focusing, and focusing is itself a form of contraction. If so, when we say that the Creator knows in His thought, at every single moment, all the details and the details of the details of all the worlds, down to the smallest, most limited and most inanimate detail, the very concept of «knowledge» would seem to demand tzimtzum. Yet in His own right He knows in an infinite manner and not through contraction, and the tzimtzum exists only relative to us, so that we should not sense His infinite knowledge. How do these two things fit together?
The close of the chapter answers this question: «אך ידיעתו יתברך המיוחדת במהותו ועצמותו», «But His blessed knowledge, which is one with His essence and being.» The Creator's knowledge is not something added on to Him; it is He Himself.
With a human being, knowledge means acquiring new information that he did not possess until that moment, and in order to acquire it he has to concentrate on the subject and take his mind off everything else. That is because the person and the concept he is studying are two separate entities, and the focusing is what joins them. Indeed, by us there are three distinct things:
The mada, the intellect we use.
The yodea, the knower, the person using that intellect.
The yadua, the known, the object on which he focuses and about which he thinks.
Each of the three can be pictured on its own, without the others. There is the person himself, who is free not to use his intellect at all; once he has decided to use it, the intellect is something additional to him; and when he thinks about a particular matter, that is a third thing. Our entire world of concepts is assembled out of parts, and we are constantly making combinations and connections among them. And since we are dealing with separate components that join together, limitation follows automatically: focusing on one thing prevents us from occupying ourselves with another at the same moment, and it also produces a change in the person himself.
With the Creator this is not the case, and in the language of the Rambam in the opening chapters of Sefer HaMada: «כי הוא המדע והוא היודע והוא הידוע», «For He is the knowledge, and He is the knower, and He is the known.» It is simply not applicable to speak of a separate reality by Him, as though in order to know what is happening in a certain place He would need the assistance of an instrument called «knowledge» and would know through it. Rather, He is the knower, He is the knowledge and He is the known, and all of it is He Himself. Therefore His knowledge involves no focusing and no tzimtzum at all.
In summary: in this section we learned that a person's thought accomplishes nothing in the object he is thinking about, whereas Hashem's thought creates and brings into being. His knowledge encompasses the entire thickness of this earthly globe and everything within it and within the within of it, down to the inanimate within it, and that knowledge is itself the globe's vitality and its coming into being from nothing into something. Given that, the world would never have come into being bounded and finite, with a scant vitality sufficient only for the level of domem and tzomeach, were it not for the many and mighty tzimtzumim that contracted the light and the vitality in order to enliven it and sustain it in a bounded and finite manner. And every creature, even the loftiest of them, and even the world of Atzilus, exists only after the tzimtzum. Finally we explained that divine knowledge is not like human knowledge, which requires focus and contraction, because His blessed knowledge is one with His essence and being, in the words of the Rambam: «He is the knowledge, and He is the knower, and He is the known.»
In the next section we will continue, with Hashem's help, to explain these matters further.