Let My People Know

"The process of Creation is a continual manifestation"

 

The original source of all is Infinite Light, and the process of Creation is a continual manifestation by means of both Chochmah and BinahWritten Torah and Oral Torah, characterized by a breaking down into ever more specific detail. 

The original Creation had to provide the basic design as well as the raw material. 

Substance had to be given form, and the individual forms could be separated and identified. 

Indeed, much of ancient and medieval philosophy was devoted to the problem of primordial substance and form. 

The Golem, in its amorphous and human aspect, represented the incomplete, the still inchoate state of matter before Creation. 

Divine "interference" was the act of giving form completeness, to this primordial substance, as exemplified by Man or by the Written Torah. 

This inchoate substance, the still formless primordial matter, cannot be grasped at all. 

Only when it is given form can it be apprehended. 

Before that it is still potential—the darkness from which all things emerge, the not yet existent.

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
 
From “Elixir of Life and Death” in In the Beginning: Discourses on Chasidic Thought by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz