Kabbalah

The Ultimate Redemption as the Healing of Ein Sof's Contraction

Lurianic Kabbalah treats the very first act of creation, God's self-limiting withdrawal to make room for a world, as a kind of concealment that final redemption is meant to undo without erasing the world that concealment made possible.

Tzimtzum, the contraction Isaac Luria places at the start of his cosmology, describes Ein Sof withdrawing its infinite light to open an empty conceptual space, chalal, in which a finite, differentiated world could exist at all. This withdrawal is necessary and creative — without it, infinite light would simply overwhelm any possibility of distinct, finite existence — but it is also, in a real sense, a concealment, a self-limitation of what had previously been unlimited. Lurianic eschatology envisions the ultimate redemption as the point at which this original concealment is finally overcome: not undone, in the sense of erasing the created world tzimtzum made possible, but completed and healed, so that the light originally withdrawn can be fully present again without destroying the distinct, structured reality that grew inside the space it vacated. This gives Lurianic messianism an unusually cosmic scope — final redemption is not simply history reaching a happy ending, but the resolution of a tension built into the literal first move of creation itself.

Gershom Scholem, the twentieth-century scholar most responsible for bringing Lurianic Kabbalah to academic attention, argued that this tension within tzimtzum gave Lurianic messianism a distinctively cosmic, rather than purely national, character compared to earlier Jewish eschatology.