In the previous section we looked at the words of the Rambam, that the Holy One "הוא היודע והוא המדע והוא הידוע" (He is the Knower, He is the Knowledge, and He is the Known). Now let us complete the explanation. The Rambam continues that the Holy One "ובידיעת עצמו כביכול יודע כל הנבראים כולם, ולא בידיעה שחוץ ממנו כידיעת האדם" (and by knowing Himself, as it were, He knows all created beings, and not with a knowledge that is outside of Him, as human knowledge is). His knowledge of them is nothing other than Himself.
Here is the difference between human knowing and the Creator's knowing. With a human being, he and the thing he knows are two separate entities, and in order to know something he has to step outside himself, as it were, and take hold of it. With the Creator, the knowledge is not something outside of Him. It is He Himself. And once that is so, the question we raised has no place to begin with.
This settles the difficulty we opened with. Knowledge, we said, is a tzimtzum, a contraction and a focusing. So how can we say that the Creator knows everything and nevertheless remains in the state of Ein Sof, without limit? The answer is simple: where is knowledge a contraction? By us, because for us knowledge is something external to the knower. But by the Creator, who is the Knower and the Knowledge and the Known, the concept simply does not apply, since in knowing Himself He knows everything, and all creatures exist from His true being and are not, Heaven forbid, something apart from Him. It follows that the knowledge with which the Creator knows, at every given moment, every detail of creation, is His own Ein Sof: it is neither narrowed nor contracted. The Ein Sof remains Ein Sof, and knows everything.
The Rambam concludes: "ודבר זה אין ביכולת האדם להשיגו על בוריו וכו'" (and this matter is not within a human being's power to grasp clearly, etc.). A person cannot grasp how such a thing is possible, because our entire world of concepts is built out of separate things, and we have no instrument of perception with which to take hold of such a unity.
(We will skip the gloss for now.) In the Alter Rebbe's own words: "והרי ידיעה זו, מאחר שהיא בבחינת אין סוף, אינה נקראת בשם מתלבשת בכדור הארץ שהוא בעל גבול ותכלית, אלא מקפת וסובבת" (and since this knowledge is on the level of Ein Sof, it is not called clothed within the sphere of the earth, which is bounded and finite, but rather encompassing and surrounding). The meaning of hislabshus, clothing, is that the created being feels the light, grasps it, takes hold of it. What becomes clothed within a creature is the contracted light, as it were. But Ein Sof does not become clothed in a limited vessel, just as you cannot take something infinite and dress it inside a small garment. And since clothing means limitation, and the sphere of the earth is bounded and finite, it is impossible for the Ein Sof to be clothed within that limitation.
It is worth emphasizing: this does not mean that He is not here. He is here. It is only that the limited creature cannot grasp Him, and so He is not present in its awareness. That is the whole matter of tzimtzum, that the Creator contracted Himself, as it were. This is why the knowledge is called "מקפת וסובבת", encompassing and surrounding: not sovev in the sense that He is not here, but sovev in the sense that He is here and is not felt.
There are things that are called sovev umakif, surrounding and encompassing, which genuinely are not inside the thing. Take, for example, the power of ratzon, will, in the soul. The will affects everything, and "אין דבר העומד בפני הרצון", nothing stands in the way of the will. If a person wants to learn, then "לעולם ילמד אדם במה שליבו חפץ", a person should always study what his heart desires, and his learning will have more life and more understanding in it. If he wants to go somewhere, the will moves his legs, and so on. But the will is not present in each and every detail. It pushed the mind toward learning in a general way, yet not every single line of reasoning he produces is connected to that will. It pushed the power of motion to walk, yet not every detail of the walking is shaped by it. This is an encompassing power that influences, but in truth remains outside the thing.
Here, however, when we say that the Ein Sof surrounds and encompasses the creation, it is not that He is outside the creation. He is present within the innermost core of every single detail. Then why is it called sovev umakif? Because it is not felt by us, not because it is genuinely surrounding from the outside.
And this is how the passage ends: "אף שידיעה זו כוללת כל עוביו ותוכו בפועל ממש" (even though this knowledge includes its whole thickness and its interior in actual fact). The knowledge with which the Creator knows every single detail includes all the thickness and inwardness of creation, and not in some imaginary way, like a person who knows a house he saw a few days ago and remembers all its details, where all he has in his knowledge is an image of the house. Here it is literally in actual fact. And this is not merely knowledge for its own sake; through it "ומהווה אותו מאין ליש" (and it brings it into being from nothing into something) at every single moment, "וכמו שכתוב במקום אחר" (as is explained elsewhere). The very existence of the creature does not come from the contracted light present here, but precisely from the Ein Sof within it, that same Ein Sof which the creature does not feel and cannot grasp, and which remains in the state of Ein Sof. The reason is that the passage from nothing to something is not a transition that can be perceived or reasoned out, something a person could feel. It is above human grasp altogether, and therefore it can only come from the infinite power within, as is explained elsewhere.
This is the sum of the lengthy discussion in this chapter. On the one hand, the divine power is sovev umakif in an infinite way, and for that very reason there had to be a tzimtzum, for without the tzimtzum no limited creation could exist as it is.
The gloss in the margin: calling the Holy One "Knower"
The gloss relates to the quotation brought in the body of the chapter from the Rambam: "He is the Knower, He is the Knowledge, and He is the Known." To understand it we need some background. The Rambam described the Creator with a description borrowed from the human world of concepts. He took the concept of intellect and applied it to the Creator, calling Him "the Knower." An exalted and wondrous description, certainly, but still a description.
Against this the Maharal of Prague came out forcefully and very sharply, in the second introduction to his sefer Gevuros Hashem. These are his words: "ואתה ראה, ראה שהם אומרים עליו שעצמותו שכל מופשט" (and you, see, see that they say of Him that His essence is abstract intellect); "ויאמרו שהשכל והמשכיל והמושכל דבר אחד, אז ודאי היודע הוא המדע והידוע" (and they say that the intellect, the one who comprehends and the thing comprehended are one, so that surely the Knower is the Knowledge and the Known). He does not even mention the Rambam by name. "הדברים אשר אמרו... בטל ומבוטל" (the things they said are null and void). And his reasoning: "כי השכל הוא מיוחד בדבר" (for intellect is something particular and defined), intellect is a description and therefore a limit, "ואין אל השם יתברך גדר כלל שיוגדר" (and there is no definition at all by which Hashem could be defined). And further on: "סכלו האומרים שעצמותו שכל" (those who say His essence is intellect have acted foolishly), for nothing particular can be said of Him. Just as one cannot say of the Creator that He is a stone or a plant or fire, so too one cannot say of Him that He is intellect, and indeed nothing at all can be said of Him. For this reason, the Maharal elaborates, He is called "הקדוש ברוך הוא", the Holy One, holy meaning set apart from every description; whereas according to the Rambam's approach He would have to be called "the Intellect, blessed be He."
Now, did the Rambam not know this simple point with which the Maharal attacks him? Rather, the hidden Torah came and made peace between them. Both are right, and everything depends on which level and which situation one is speaking about: before the tzimtzum or after it.
The Rambam is describing the Creator after the tzimtzum. After He contracted His light and revealed ten sefiros and bound Himself up with them and became one with them, they reveal Him; and when He reveals the sefirah of chochmah, one can call Him "wise."
The Maharal is speaking of the Creator's Essence as it is above the tzimtzum, and there no description has any place at all.
So there is no dispute here whatsoever. Each one is speaking on a different level.
And this is the content of the gloss itself: "כמו שכתב הרמב"ם ז"ל והסכימו עמו חכמי הקבלה, כמו שכתוב בפרדס מהרמ"ק ז"ל, וכן הוא לפי קבלת האר"י ז"ל בסוד הצמצום והתלבשות אורות בכלים, כמו שכתוב לעיל פרק ב'" (as the Rambam wrote, and the masters of Kabbalah agreed with him, as is written in the Pardes of the Ramak, and so it is according to the Kabbalah of the Arizal in the secret of the tzimtzum and the clothing of lights within vessels, as explained above in chapter two). It is precisely the masters of Kabbalah, the ones who revealed the whole matter of tzimtzum, who agreed with the Rambam, even though at first glance the Maharal seems to be right, for how can one place a limit on the utterly abstract Creator. This is how it appears in the sefer Pardes Rimonim of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero.
And more than that. The Arizal introduced a concept of tzimtzum that had not been spoken of before him, and he raised up the Essence of the Creator and dealt with its abstraction on far deeper levels than the kabbalists before him had. On the face of it, that only sharpens the question on the Rambam, for the more one elevates and refines our appreciation of the Creator, the harder it becomes to describe Him with an intellectual description. And nevertheless, even according to the Kabbalah of the Arizal the Rambam's words sit perfectly well, in the secret of the tzimtzum and the clothing of lights within vessels. Once the Creator clothes Himself and contracts Himself within the sefiros, He has, as it were, become one with them, in the sense of "איהו וחיוהי וגרמוהי חד" (He and His life-force and His organs are one), to the point that He can be called by their names, for they are not something foreign to Him. That is why the Rambam calls the Creator "Knower": he means after the tzimtzum. This subject was already brought in the gloss to chapter two, where it is explained at much greater length.
In summary: in this chapter we learned that the Holy One knows all creatures by knowing Himself, and not with a knowledge outside of Himself, and therefore His knowledge is in no way a tzimtzum but is on the level of Ein Sof, and "this matter is not within a human being's power to grasp clearly." For this reason the knowledge is not called "clothed" within the sphere of the earth, which is bounded and finite, but rather "encompassing and surrounding": present within the innermost core of every single detail yet not felt, and bringing the creature into being from nothing into something at every moment. In the gloss we learned how the Rambam's words, describing the Creator as "the Knower," fit together with the Maharal's sharp attack: the Rambam speaks after the tzimtzum and after the union with the sefiros, while the Maharal speaks of the Essence that is above the tzimtzum. And out of all this tremendous abstraction comes the conclusion that the flow of these chapters is driving at: how is there a limited creation at all? By the power of the tzimtzum.
In the next section, chapter 49, we will learn from the great tzimtzum that the Creator made, as it were, so that we could exist, just how much we are called upon to contract ourselves.