Ratzo VaShov — Running and Returning
A single phrase from a prophetic vision, that heavenly beings ran and returned, became the Kabbalistic term for an oscillation the soul is thought to experience between dissolving into God and remaining functional in the body.
The phrase originates in Ezekiel's description of the chayot, the living creatures beneath the divine chariot, who ran and returned like a flash of lightning. Kabbalistic and later Hasidic meditative teaching lifts this image out of its chariot-vision context and applies it to the soul's own rhythm in prayer: a surge, ratzo, toward self-negating union with the divine, followed by a necessary pull back, shov, into embodied awareness, since a soul that only ran and never returned would, like the lightning simile suggests, be gone as quickly as it flashed. The oscillation is treated as structurally necessary rather than a failure of concentration, since a mystic locked in permanent ratzo could not survive in the body or fulfill any commandment. The teaching builds in a safeguard to ecstatic practice; intensity is meant to be episodic and cyclical, mirrored by the lightning-flash quality of the original verse.
And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning.
The ratzo-vashov pattern became especially important in later Chabad Hasidic teaching on the structure of contemplative prayer.
Book of Ezekiel
Written about in
- What Kabbalah says about longing and exile
Ezekiel's living creatures ran and returned like lightning. Later teachers lifted the phrase out of the chariot vision and used it for the soul's rhythm in prayer: a surge towards dissolving, then a return to a body that still has to function.
- What Kabbalah says about rest
Ezekiel's creatures ran and returned like a flash of lightning. Kabbalistic and Hasidic teaching made that the soul's own rhythm — a surge toward union, then a necessary pull back into embodied awareness — and insisted the return is structural, not a lapse of concentration. A soul locked in the running could not keep a body or a commandment.