In the beginning, there was Light with No End, and it was One.
In some unspeakable way, Oneness wanted what one could not have: a relationship with another.
That yearning led the Light to contract. The first act of creation was the appearance of lack. Like a womb in eternity, a fertile Void was conceived, a location from which one might perceive separation.
So now we have the first binary: light and darkness, no end and end, the eternal and the temporary.
But the nature of Light doesn’t hold back. It gives and gives again. As the next wave of Light emanated, it overwhelmed the nascent architecture of the Void. The radiance shattered the vessels of this inchoate creation, and now Light mixed with its absence, trapping sparks in their shards. The resulting jumble plummeted into the material realm we call the world.
Light roots ache for their fallen sparks, and sparks yearn to be reunited with their roots. This longing is embodied in flesh and is the unconsciously conscious drive of all life.
Kabbalah is an esoteric path in the Jewish system of symbolic resonances for completing a heart. The heart is an organ of paradox: it empties and fills simultaneously. It is this concurrent inness and outness that pumps and makes us alive. A paradox sets us in motion due to discomfort, like how friction between two tinders sparks a flame.
Two contradictory truths cause uncertainty that is intolerable to the immature mind. Immature minds cannot hold paradox. The child's mind is a beginner's, maybe not in the Zen sense. The child sees “this” versus “that” and bifurcates the world into two camps. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein would call this the paranoid/schizoid position: you are with me or against me. From a Kleinian perspective, the depressive position is the more mature one. Depressive does not mean depressed; it means a roosting in a consciousness robust enough to accept limitations, mourn one’s losses, land in reality, and see what can be made from it. It is a duet with what is, the depressive position is a dance.
The Buddhist principle of the dharmakaya is that of a bright, essential emptiness that underlies all things. Kabbalistically, that would be the ayin (the nothing) of the yesh (the something). In either case, as soon as there is a binary (a form to the formless, a something to the nothing), there is cause for suffering. The “this” seems too distant from, or even oppositional to, the “that.” The questions feel too big for the answers.
As I come upon the first anniversary of my father’s suicide, there are questions I really, really want answers to… What happened? Where do we go when we die? How does consciousness fit into the whole spacetime continuum? What happened before the big bang? … As I bear his death, I attend my childlike, urgent desire to know. It has always seemed unreasonable to me that we are brought into existence and do not, will not, cannot know WHY.
Paradox triggers questions. And questions lie at the beating heart of the Haggadah ("telling"), a text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder. The seder (literally, “order”) is a sequence of acts involving ritualized eating, drinking, questioning, and answering. The Haggadah is a rare liturgical work in two ways: 1) as a guidebook for families to conduct a labyrinthine, abstruse religious ritual, and 2) as the only sacred Jewish book that encourages open retelling and personal intervention. The soul is fluent in symbols, and the human body is one of mixed metaphors.
Gershon Chanokh Leiner of Radzin, known as the Sod Yesharim (after his book: The Secret of the Righteous), posits that it is the very experience of impermanence that provokes questions. The central ask of seder night is:
WHAT?
The Hebrew word is מה (mah), an interrogative simply meaning: what?, and it is also one of the many names of God. Mah begins every line of the Mah Nishtanahs, a section of the fifth stage in the seder. This stage is called magid (literally, “telling”) and contains the narrative therapy portion of the proceedings: reciting stories and talking the whole thing out.
This sequence refers to the four children who correspond with the four questions, the four exiles, etc. Kabbalistically, these children correspond to four different worlds and levels of soul. Additionally, these aspects resonate with the concomitant self-states and various aspects of our being that we bring to the table. We contain multitudes n'est-ce pas? We can imagine these kiddos as aspects of our immature minds.
They are:
The wise/ chacham
The wicked/ rasha
The simple/ tam
The one who doesn’t know how to ask/ she’ano yodea lishol
The wise one is kind of a smart ass, the cynic- they think they already know what the answers are to everything. This aspect corresponds with the kabbalistic world of Asiyah- the physical world of action and effect we stomp around wearing our skin suits. The soul level it resonates with is that of nefesh, the blood soul we share with all beings who bleed.
The clever one's counterpoint (or tikkun, rectification) is the wicked one. The rebel has passion and goes against—they express antipathy, which shows an emotional connection. The rebel makes noise and corresponds to the emotional soul called ruach (also breath) and the world of Yetzirah, or formation.
Wicked and wise go together. That’s the first pair. The second, higher coupling joins the simpleton and the child who doesn't know what to ask.
The simple one asks questions to seek an answer—they really, urgently need to know something. This curiosity drives creativity and is connected to the world of Beria, creation. Its soul level is called neshama—intellect—and corresponds to the Torah itself.
The one who doesn’t know how to ask is even higher, even deeper. This aspect is a fertile void calling, “Fill me up! I am totally open, receptive!” This is the highest possibility of learning and is therefore connected to Atzilus: the first emanation, closest to the undivided divine, and resonates with the soul called chaya, the living.
Hence, we have two sets of kids/aspects. That’s another pair that harmonizes lights with vessels. However, we do not live in a rectified world. A pair does not provoke paradox. Only an excess can do that. Once a question is answered, the mind still knows no peace. It will keep finding loose ends—it snags and scrambles, asking better questions, jumping to higher and deeper truths.
The Fifth Child
There is the fifth child, the fifth aspect, who not only doesn’t know how to ask but is not even attending the seder (literally, the order). Such aspects of aliveness cannot be fed at the four-cornered table of order; they are beyond that. From the perspective of the four, this guy is checked out, dissociated, alienated, and numb.
But the fifth node is voluminous- makes a square a star, reconciles the dialectic of being a creature with both a mouth and an asshole. The seeming structure of the seder is all about pairs: tit for tat, this for that, actions have reactions. Even what we call “the Torah” begins with the letter Beis, the number two. It's too much twoness! - parent and child, question and answer, exile and redemption: even fours are binarized- two twos.
In this time of lunacy, goonery, and phallomanic fuckery, pat binaries will not suffice. There are real aspects of ourselves that the logic of pairs cannot nourish. Questions are vowels that open; they are vessels; answers are consonants that close; they are lights. Without both, nothing can be said. And yet… that silky thing before and beyond the words, that bright darkness of the un-articulated, the lights that cannot, do not yet fit into this world. They are expressed beyond order, glimpsed in the silence all words emerge from and dissolve back into.
These holy lights wear the face of paradox. Paradox awakens questions. Questions create movement. This dance becomes its own kind of answer. Dancing generates heartiness. The wise heart, the evolved mind, the measure of maturity is this: bear paradox and live.
My thinking is deeply informed by the scholarship and mentorship of R. Dovber Pinson and R. Sarah Yehudit Schneider. The merit is theirs, the mistakes are mine.
Welcome paradox, creator of song - dance - poetry - art and love
Just In time - as the flowers begin to bud!