To receive suddenly the surprising diagnosis of metastatic cancer is not easy. One falls into the well-known abyss, wrestles with life, with people, with everything and with G’d. The sense of injustice becomes immeasurable. One had lived modestly, given donations and helped wherever possible, and endeavoured to keep every prayer, every berakhah and every Shabbat. Yes, sometimes one gave no tzedakah, sometimes too little kavvanah, sometimes… one chose the lesser sin. Just a small Jewish, contradictory, struggling life. And then: cancer. Why? Why, G’d? The accusation was great.
The first radiation treatment approached. The day before, I was proofreading my book “Die Kabbalah Formeln”. 1,300 pages. I read a passage I had written about the ARI, which runs as follows:
“Tikkun Olam, the ordering of the world. Everything begins with a transmitted story that is told in various versions and embellishments. An anonymously composed version reads: ‘In the beginning there was God. And besides God there was nothing else. God, however, desired to create the world—yet there was no place for the world, for everywhere was God. So God began to contract into Himself, and thereby a hollow space arose—a place where the world could be created! God sent rays of the holy light into this hollow space. This light was kept in ten vessels. Yet the light was exceedingly strong and intense. The vessels shattered under the pressure. The holy light scattered into every corner of the universe. Thus the original unity vanished from the world. Since that day human beings have sought to find the rays of light that are enveloped by the shards (qlipot, also written klipot) of the burst vessels, to liberate and gather them together—so as to restore the original unity and to bring tikkun into the world.’
This contraction of G’d into a hollow space is called, according to the ARI (Isaac Luria), *tzimtzum*—the self-limitation of the primordial light, the Ein Sof, G’d beyond G’d—and creates a complete emptiness, that is, a vacuum, so that room for creation may exist. Good and evil entered the world. G’d descends into the nothingness He Himself has made, a nine-dimensional hollowness. This movement is the Big Bang. Beyond this beginning, *bereshit*, nothing is known. One may conjecture that infinity and nothingness are identical, just as one may conjecture that green penguins hop over pink skipping-ropes there. Probably ‘dreydes’ (sic!): infinity, nothingness, and green penguins. The Zohar interprets Genesis 1:1 as ‘With the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.,’ and not ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’
The lost light from the shattered vessels (sefirot) fell into the nothingness, into the void, imprisoned in the shards of the broken vessels (qlipot or klipot) and manifested itself in every form of matter in the universe, which is compounded of good and evil, life and death. The universe was broken. Evil entered the world.
The universe therefore requires repair, healing: Tikkun Olam. This is the task of the human being. For this purpose the human was set into the arena of free will. He is to choose freely. G’d needs the human for His own healing, just as the human needs Him.
Everything and everyone in the world therefore also bears a higher meaning. G’d and the universe form a vast tree in which all that is becoming, all that is, and all that has been are connected. Simultaneous. Block universe. Arc of light. Anderswo.
In this, first the wandering souls (ibbur) and the reincarnated souls (gilgul), second kavvanah as meditative concentration in prayer and in the performance of a mitzvah, third humility, and finally the mitzvot—the 613 commandments of the observant Jew—possess a distinguished significance for the achievement of Tikkun Olam. The phrase ‘chosen people’ means to bear the yoke, not to be free of it, nor to lead others, nor to stand above them.
‘All human beings are the dwelling-places of wandering souls. In many beings they abide and strive from form to form toward completion. Those, however, who cannot purify themselves are seized by the “world of confusion” and dwell in puddles of water, in stones, in plants, in animals, awaiting the hour of redemption. Yet not only souls are locked everywhere: soul-sparks as well. This is no empty thing. They live in all that is. Every form is their prison. And this is the meaning and the purpose of kavvanah: that it is given to the human being to raise the fallen and to free the imprisoned. Not merely to wait, not merely to gaze: the human being can work upon the redemption of the world.’ (Martin Buber, *The Legend of the Baal Shem*, 1908, pp. 24–25).” (end of quote from my book)
And then came the first radiation, and with it the intuitive insight: I have cancer. The tumours are klipot that HaShem, in His wisdom, has placed within my body so that, with the aid of modern medicine, I may destroy these tumours, these klipot, and thereby liberate sparks of the divine Shekhinah. I am happy, for I perceive a meaning in G’d’s doing. I recite the Shema, and the liberation, the healing of the world, begins.
Learn more in the soon coming book ‘Die Kabbalah Formeln’ and read the complete proof of OTS-22, Negative Entropy, Gödel Gap, SpaceTimeLife Continuum, Quantum Entanglement and more. Are you interested in a copy of this book? The book ‘Die Kabbalah Formeln’ (1,300 pages) published as PDF. Make me an offer for your personal edition/copy (limited edition: 120 copies available). Write to me at: kabbalahphilosophyscience@proton.me
Tools used for research, translation, proof reading, verification of codes/equations, pic generation etc.: LLMs / SE / BusinessSoftware / Parsers / DB/ Websites etc. All articles: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) hold by Dr. Naftali Hirschl.