In the Beginning Was the End — The Circle of Return to the Infinite
Kabbalistic cosmology pictures creation and redemption as a single circular movement, so that the final restoration of unity is understood as the actual fulfillment of what was already present, in potential, at the very start.
The Zohar and the broader kabbalistic tradition it anchors describe emanation as a movement outward from Ein Sof, through the sefirot, into the multiplicity of the created world — and describe the messianic goal as the reverse motion, a gathering of that scattered multiplicity back into its original unity. This cyclical picture found one of its most famous popular expressions not in the Zohar's own dense prose but in a much later Safed composition, the Friday-evening hymn Lecha Dodi, written by the kabbalist Shlomo Alkabetz, which contains the line "sof ma'aseh b'machshavah techilah" — the end of the deed was first in thought. Applied cosmically, the phrase means that the final state of full unity was already present, as intention, at creation's very beginning, so that the entire unfolding of exile and history is not a detour from an original plan but the working-out of a single continuous thought reaching its own conclusion. This is why kabbalistic eschatology so often describes redemption not as arrival somewhere new but as return — the circle closing exactly where it started, only now fully realized rather than merely intended.
the end of the deed was first in thought
The line from Lecha Dodi is a liturgical crystallization of a cyclical cosmology found throughout the Zohar itself, rather than a direct Zohar quotation, though the two are closely linked in Safed-era kabbalistic culture.
Zohar
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- What Kabbalah says about longing and exile
Emanation moves outward from the Infinite and redemption moves back along the same line. On this picture the end was already intended at the start, which is why the word used is return rather than arrival.