A … question … is whether a letter is defined by the black of the letter itself or by the white that surrounds it.
… In general, we experience the world as the foreground and divinity as its background.
But on the level where “everything is no reality whatever in His presence,” we attempt to see the world differently.
Rather than perceiving the divine in the background, filling all spaces between things, we look at the things of the world as spaces in the midst of divine Being. …
We consider that the existence of the world is composed of the shadows of the divine reality.
—Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz