Ein Sof

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Ein Sof — Hebrew for “without end” — is the Kabbalah’s name for God as God is: the Infinite prior to every act of manifestation, beyond attribute, image, number, and name. The term is a negation pressed into service as a noun, and the tradition that coined it understood the cost of the arrangement. A passage of the Zoharic corpus states the rule at full strictness: “Before He gave any shape to the world, before He produced any form, He was alone, without form and without resemblance to anything else. Who then can comprehend how He was before the Creation? Hence it is forbidden to lend Him any form or similitude, or even to call Him by His sacred name, or to indicate Him by a single letter or a single point” (Zohar II, 42b). Even the Tetragrammaton, on this teaching, names only the God who has already turned toward a world; what stands before that turning can be indicated only by saying what it is not. Every sentence written about Ein Sof trespasses on its subject — and the kabbalists, far from suppressing the trespass, made it doctrine, building their entire account of God on a word that asserts nothing except that nothing can be asserted.

A name made of negation

The word entered theology in the circles that produced Kabbalah itself: the schools of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Provence around Isaac the Blind, and the Gerona circle in Catalonia that received and systematized their teaching. The first writer to fix Ein Sof as a technical term was Azriel of Gerona, active in the first half of the thirteenth century, and his formulations set the concept’s grammar for everything that followed. God, Azriel taught, can have no desire, thought, word, or action ascribed to him; the term Ein Sof exists to enforce that denial. The Infinite can be comprehended, he held, “only as the negation of all negation” — a phrase in which the apophatic method eats its own tail and is meant to. From this austerity Azriel drew consequences: the world with all its manifold appearances was contained potentially within Ein Sof, and its becoming actual was a free act that nonetheless cannot be called creation, since nothing exists outside of God from which a world could be made. God does not create, in Azriel’s idiom; God irradiates, as the sun gives warmth and light without diminution of itself — the language of emanation in its Kabbalistic key.

The term had a prehistory. The Jewish Encyclopedia’s “En Sof” entry derives it, probably, from Solomon ibn Gabirol’s epithet for God, she-en lo tiklah, “the Endless One” — a Neoplatonic poet-philosopher’s coinage adopted by mystics — and even Maimonides, rationalism’s great medieval representative, prepared its ground: his doctrine that no positive attribute may be ascribed to God gave the kabbalists their starting point, though the Gerona masters worked in the shadow of the controversies his philosophy ignited. The fifteenth-century commentator Judah Hayyat completed the grammar: no name of God found in the Bible can apply to the Deity before creation, because the letters of those names were themselves produced only after the emanation — and besides, “a name implies a limitation in its bearer,” which is impossible of the Infinite. Ein Sof, the encyclopedia concludes, signifies the nameless being.

The Infinite and the ten

What the kabbalists said next is what separates them from every other apophatic school: from the unsayable Godhead they unfolded a structured divine life. The ten sefirot — stages, vessels, lights, garments woven so the worlds can bear the King’s radiance — are how Ein Sof becomes active, knowable, and capable of relation. The doctrine of the ten sefirot maps that architecture; what belongs here is the seam itself, the most contested boundary in Kabbalistic theology. Are the sefirot God’s own essence, or instruments through which the Infinite acts? The early sources wavered between calling them powers and calling them tools; the Sefer ha-Temunah answered that they are powers inhering in God as limbs inhere in a body, organically one with him and sharing one common will — which is why no separate act of willing need pass from Ein Sof to its emanations, any more than a man instructs his arm before moving it. The dispute ran for centuries, until Moses Cordovero, in his Pardes Rimmonim (1548) — the great systematic treatise on Ein Sof and the sefirot — resolved it for much of the tradition with a both-and: the sefirot are vessels in which all change occurs, and within them the divine light, the or ein sof, remains unchanged. God’s essence transcends all expression; existence is nonetheless a manifestation of God’s being. Centuries later the Jewish Encyclopedia could observe that Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negatio was phrased “in harmony with the Cabala” — the kinship with monism noticed from both sides.

A second boundary dispute concerned the top of the ladder. Keter, the Crown, first of the sefirot, is differentiated from Ein Sof only as first effect from first cause — so slight a difference that many kabbalists declined to count Keter among the ten at all, holding it no actual emanation, while most placed it at their head. Where the Infinite ends and its first stirring begins is a line the tradition drew and redrew without ever agreeing on its position.

The concealed of all concealments

The Zohar itself, the tradition’s central book, uses the term with telling restraint. Its apophatically densest strata — the Sifra di-Tzeniutha and the Idrot, the assemblies on the hidden countenances — do not use the word Ein Sof at all, a marker by which scholars distinguish the corpus’s layers. The book prefers its own signs: the Holy Ancient One, the concealed of all concealments. One passage goes further and contracts the negation to a single syllable, calling the Ancient One Ayin, Nothing, because what so transcends comprehension is, for human thought, as if it were not (Zohar III, 288b). That divine Nothing had a long career: Daniel Matt’s essay “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism” (1990) traces it from the Gerona circle through the Zohar and into Hasidic prayer, the negative concept doing affirmative work at every stage.

The Infinite contracted

Lurianic Kabbalah gave Ein Sof its boldest moment. In the system taught at Safed by Isaac Luria (1534–1572) and recorded by Hayyim Vital, the Infinite’s first act is not an outpouring but a withdrawal: tsimtsum, the contraction by which Ein Sof retires into itself to vacate a space — the halal panui — in which something other than God can stand. Even the vacated space is not empty of the Infinite: a residue of divine light, the reshimu, remains as a trace, and a thin ray, the kav, re-enters to build the worlds. The drama that follows — the vessels, their breaking, the repair — belongs to the Lurianic system’s own entry; what matters here is the apophatic inversion, the most radical in the tradition: the Infinite makes room for the finite by an act of self-limitation, a willed concealment with no parallel in the Greek metaphysics of emanation. Whether the contraction happened literally or is a figure for a concealment within the divine became, among Luria’s heirs, a dispute as durable as the older one over essence and instruments. The doctrine’s primary texts traveled slowly: Vital’s Etz Hayyim reached print only at Korzec in 1782, and no English translation of any Lurianic primary text existed before 1929, so the tsimtsum reached English readers for generations only in digest — through Ginsburg, Franck, and Waite.

Neighbors in negation

Ein Sof keeps company with the other great negations, and the company clarifies it. Maimonides’s via negativa — the Guide of the Perplexed I.50–60 admits only negative attributes and attributes of action — denies predicates of a God who is absolutely simple, without internal articulation; he would have judged the sefirot a relapse into multiplicity. Apophatic theology in the line of Pseudo-Dionysius negates its way toward a silence in which nothing further is generated. The Neoplatonic One is, like Ein Sof, beyond being and the source of all procession — but its emanation is necessary, impersonal, and eternal, where the Lurianic Infinite contracts itself by will. Each parallel holds at the point of negation and parts company at the next step, for only Kabbalah houses its unknowable God within a positive theosophy of ten sefirot — and only Kabbalah, in consequence, generated the internal disputes over what the knowable structure is to the unknowable ground. The genealogical question is a separate one, and scholarly: Gershom Scholem, in Origins of the Kabbalah, traced the Gerona vocabulary — Ein Sof included — to Neoplatonism reaching Languedoc and Catalonia through Jewish and Arabic intermediaries, Ibn Gabirol among them; Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) pressed back, arguing continuity with much older Jewish materials against derivation from the philosophers. The argument over where the Infinite’s name came from is conducted today on Scholem’s documentary terrain, with Idel’s questions pressed against it.

Re-readings

Hasidism turned the doctrine inward and made it intimate. In the teaching descending from the Baal Shem Tov and Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch — whose mysticism of ayin made the divine Nothing a station on the soul’s way — the tsimtsum is read as concealment rather than departure: God hides the animating force within created things so that they can stand as things instead of dissolving back into their source. The result is a panentheism in which the world is, from the divine side, no interruption of the Infinite at all — acosmic from above, real from its own vantage — and the annihilation of selfhood, bittul ha-yesh, is the practice that crosses from the one view to the other. Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s Tanya (1796) gave this re-reading its most systematic form.

Christian Europe, meanwhile, had taken the concept captive. Pico della Mirandola’s Kabbalistic theses of 1486 opened the Christian Kabbalah; Johann Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabalistica (1517) set the sefirot as emanations from Ein Sof; Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54) flatly identified Ein Sof with the Hermetic monad and the Dionysian God beyond being — the conflation the parallels invite, performed as interpretation. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677–84), which read the upper three sefirot as the Trinity and Adam Kadmon as Christ, became the Latin conduit through which Ein Sof entered the discourse of Henry More, Leibniz, van Helmont, and Oetinger — and, two centuries on, English occultism: S. L. MacGregor Mathers translated Knorr’s Zoharic tracts as The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), and his introduction recast the concept as three “veils of negative existence” — “the primal AIN, Ain, the negatively existent One, and the AIN SVP, Ain Soph, the limitless Expansion; while of even the AIN SVP AVR, Ain Soph Aur, the illimitable Light, only a dim conception can be formed.” That triad above the Tree became standard equipment in the Hermetic Qabalah, whose Golden Dawn system is treated in its own entry; the Absolute of the occultists is Ein Sof at the far end of a long chain of translation.

Modern scholarship recovered the Jewish concept from beneath these layers. Adolphe Franck’s La Kabbale (1843) and Christian D. Ginsburg’s The Kabbalah (1865) gave the nineteenth century its accounts — Franck supplying the “Cause of causes” formulation the Jewish Encyclopedia would lean on, Ginsburg writing through a Christianizing filter of his own — before Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), Idel’s revisions, Matt’s pursuit of the divine Nothing, and Elliot Wolfson’s Through a Speculum That Shines (Princeton, 1994) rebuilt the field. The scholars inherit the same difficulty the Gerona masters faced, and the tradition would say it is no accident: a subject defined as what thought cannot reach disciplines everyone who writes about it, and the most exact thing that has ever been said of Ein Sof remains Azriel’s — that it is grasped only as the negation of all negation, the no-thing on which everything rests.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · The Zohar (Nurho de Manhar, partial — 1914)

→ Related: Kabbalah · Doctrine Of The Ten Sefirot · Apophatic Theology · Emanation · The One · Neoplatonism · Early Kabbalah · Provencal Kabbalah · Azriel Of Gerona · Jewish Mysticism Zohar · Lurianic Kabbalah · Moses Cordovero · Hasidism · Christian Kabbalah · Hermetic Qabalah · Gershom Scholem · Monism · Absolute