Ein Sof — The Infinite Without End

Kabbalah's name for God as utterly boundless and beyond any description, prior to and beyond the ten Sefirot through which the divine becomes knowable.

Ein Sof means literally 'without end' — not a being with infinite attributes but the negation of all limit, including the limit of having attributes at all. The term is associated with the circle of early Provençal and Geronese kabbalists around Isaac the Blind (c. 1160–1235), among the first teachers to systematize what earlier esoteric fragments had only gestured toward. Because Ein Sof has no qualities language can grasp, later kabbalists insisted it cannot be addressed in prayer directly; prayer instead moves through the Sefirot, the graduated 'garments' by which the infinite makes itself relatable to the finite. This is why Kabbalah treats theology as a problem of mediation rather than description — the entire structure of the Sefirot exists to answer how the unlimited can relate to the limited at all.

Isaac the Blind left almost no writings of his own — most of what is attributed to him survives through his students' notes, making his exact formulation of Ein Sof a matter of ongoing scholarly reconstruction.