Q&A: Tzimtzum
Tzimtzum
Question
Sorry for the worn-out question
- I understand that there is a discussion about whether tzimtzum is literal or not, but I don't understand the initial question. The wording of the question always begins: how can there be a world if God is present everywhere, and then they answer: He contracted Himself. But the point is that God is spiritual and the world is material, so what is the problem with His creating a world without contracting Himself? And even the spiritual parts of the world are not a contradiction to God, just as angels are not a contradiction to God, because something spiritual does not take up space.
Answer
The main problem is not how there can be a world if God is everywhere, but how there can be something that is not divinity. Your answer does not help with that.
As for me, I completely agree with you. Tzimtzum is of course literal, and there is no difficulty with that. Rabbi Shem Tov Gפן compared this to the relation between different dimensions, but this is not the place to elaborate.
Discussion on Answer
From Saadia Gaon's answer:
[Third view: creation from the Creator's essence]
And the third view is the view of those who say that the Creator of bodies created them from His own essence.
And I found that these people were unable to deny the Maker, yet at the same time the coming-into-being of something from nothing was not acceptable to their minds, according to their imagination. And since there is nothing apart from the Creator, they concluded that He created all things from His own essence.
[Refutation of the third view]
And these, may God have mercy on you, are more foolish than the former ones. And I have seen fit to expose their foolishness in thirteen ways, etc.
(The Selected Passages from Beliefs and Opinions, First Treatise, Chapter 3)
http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/mahshevt/kapah/1a-2.htm#3
Uri, I didn't understand your suggestion. If it is a product of the totality called God, then it is God. So what have you gained? But discussions within the approach that tzimtzum is not literal should be directed to the proponents of that bizarre approach. I (as part of the divinity) do not usually discuss the meanings of nonsense claims.
Only someone who denies one God can think of literal tzimtzum and remain coherent.
There is no problem at all with non-literal tzimtzum when one understands what belongs to reality and what belongs to the illusion of the perception of reality.
Uri, regarding consciousness: if it exists, then there is another entity besides God, and then God is not one. So the only remaining option is that it does not exist.
But it is meaningless to speak about this beyond philosophical theory, since every person knows that he exists. And this knowledge precedes every other knowledge, including knowledge and conjectures about the existence of God. Therefore every person, in his essence, is a denier. And the question is what one does with that.
Can those who maintain that tzimtzum is not literal argue that our consciousness arises on the basis of the principle materialists claim—except that instead of emergence from physical matter, it emerges from “spiritual matter”?