​Chapter 14. The Ascent

The reading so far has taken the Tree as an object to be looked at, a blueprint laid out for description. The Kabbalist does not primarily look at the Tree. He climbs it. The map is for traveling; the ten Sephiroth are stations on a route, and the path runs upward, from the bottom where the soul begins to the top where it came from. To study the Tree without ascending it would have seemed, to those who drew it, like memorizing a road one never walks.

The first road appears here as integration. What the climber takes for the freest motion of his heart is a being-drawn, the soul pulled along a single vector toward the one point above and feeling the pull as its longing.

The soul begins at the bottom, in Malkuth, the world of the made. To be in Malkuth is to be at the farthest remove from the source, sunk in multiplicity, scattered among things. The condition is one of separation, the spark divided from the fire it fell from, and the religious task set by this picture is return. Up the Tree is homeward. Each station climbed is a degree of exile undone, a step back toward the undivided light, and the practice that does the climbing is the substance of the Kabbalist's life.

The motion that defines the ascent is devekut, cleaving. The word means to cling, to adhere; the soul cleaves to God, presses toward the source until the distance between them thins. Devekut is the goal of prayer and of commandments performed with the right intention; all of it bends toward closing the gap between the soul and what it rose from. At its height devekut passes from cleaving into union. To cleave perfectly would mean being within the Source.

The work has its instruments. Tikkun, repair, gathers the scattered sparks and lifts them home, and the soul that performs it ascends with what it lifts, mending the world in the same motion. Kavvanah aims the prayer, fixing the intention on the Sephirotic heights so that the words rise along the channels toward the source and draw the worshipper up behind them. The contemplative disciplines share this upward bent. The practitioner visualizes the Tree and its Sephiroth, building the structure before the inner eye and moving attention up its stations, tracing the ladder in the mind as he climbs. He meditates on the divine names, and Abulafia's ecstatic Kabbalah took the letters of those names and chanted their permutations, driving the mind past image and concept by the sheer turning of the letters until it broke loose from the world of forms and cleaved to the divine intellect. Hitbodedut secludes him, stripping away the world and the company of others until nothing remains between the solitary soul and the One it seeks. Gerushin sends the mind wandering over the sacred verses until they yield their light and lift it. The techniques differ in form and agree in their pull. Each is a rung, and the ladder is one. The Kabbalist ascends by every means his tradition gives him until nearness passes into merging.

And as the soul rises, the distance it climbs is measured in what it gives up. Devekut in its ordinary form is nearness pressed to its limit, and most who sought it stopped short of saying that soul and God become one thing. The creature stayed a creature, adhering to the source without being taken up into it, and the reticence was deliberate. To cleave is not yet to be dissolved, and the tradition mostly left the last distance uncrossed.

At its far pole the reticence falls away. Bittul ha-yesh, the annulment of the somethingness, sets the separate self before the infinite and undoes it, and the Hasidic masters made becoming ayin, nothing, the height of the work, the "I" annulled until only the divine remains. Yet even this is often a passage and not a grave. The self annulled cleaves to the Ayin and comes back from it as yesh again, the same person returned to the world, their somethingness restored and deepened, the annulment a strait the will is drawn through rather than a place it is left.

Across the whole range the doctrine marks no station as a loss, presenting cleaving and annulment alike as homecoming, the soul brought nearer what it fell from, and the nearer it comes the less of its own heading it keeps.

Set it beside the reason the tradition gives for there being a world at all. Creation was an act of love, the story runs, the infinite making a beloved who remains apart and can be loved, and love wants the other to remain other. Yet every rung of the ascent wears the apartness down: cleaving preserves the distance while thinning it, whereas annulment closes it outright; the height of the work is where the least of it remains. The consummation crowned as the summit of love works against the separateness that made love possible, whether by dissolving the separate person or by pressing it so near the source that nothing of its own is left to be loved.

Beneath the picture lies a claim about separateness, that it is not real. The soul was never truly apart; its bounded selfhood is a veil, and the climb lifts the veil to show what was always the case, that there is only the One and never was another.

This dissolution has its own pantheistic metaphysics. Its bolder speculation holds that God is all that exists, that everything is comprehended in the One and nothing lies outside Ain Soph, so the separate being of a creature is a secondary existence, a surface that thins before the mystic's gaze as it uncovers the single essence behind it. The individual was never quite real on this reading. Its apartness is a garment, and the supreme happiness the contemplative can reach in life is the undressing, the moment the garments fall and the one substance lies bare beneath them. The ascent's summit completes the undressing, the last difference between the soul and its source undone. The boldest strain gives this a metaphysic. Moses de Leon took the human soul for a part of God above, not by figure but in the letter, something in it of one substance with the source, and drew from it that the damned cannot burn forever, since God would then be torturing himself. Cordovero pressed the immanence as far as anyone, holding that no rung of the descent falls where Ain Soph is not present within it, the one substance clothed in garment under garment down to the lowest. Here the metaphor has its ground: if the source is immanent in all its garments, to strip them is to bare the single substance the individual only seemed to veil.

Yet the panentheism draws its own limit. Cordovero holds in the same breath that what descends is diminished in relation to its cause and shares no substance with it, that what returns to Ain Soph is the spirituality and not the caused beings themselves, that what has once been sundered from the Godhead cannot be redeified. The immanence that would dissolve the creature stops at the creature, and the formula that carries the strain, "God is all that exists, but not all that exists is God," keeps a reservation it never lifts.

In some Vedantic and Buddhist formulations, the separate self is treated as an appearance to be seen through, and release as the ending of attachment to it. The traditions differ in how plainly they say it. The Eastern schools name dissolution the goal outright, release as the separate self seen through and either let go into Brahman or extinguished in nirvana. Monotheism flinches from the word. It seldom says the creature becomes God, and puts in dissolution's place a nearness that stops just short, or an alignment of the creature's will with the divine will, the soul kept as a soul that wills only what God wills. The reticence changes the telling and not the structure. The nearness is the gap held open only to the summit, and the aligned will is a will that draws nothing of its own, so what the East declares monotheism performs under milder names.

The Right-Hand Path carries this signature wherever it appears: the individual is unreal and the apartness is to be surrendered, and the fear of losing oneself is scolded as the last clinging of the illusion. The Left-Hand Path reads the same separateness as real and as the one value worth keeping. The cut that made the soul a distinct will is an act, and the difference it holds is the primordial difference the tradition names its enemy. Where the Right-Hand Path dissolves the self into the source and calls the vanishing freedom, the Left-Hand currents drive toward the isolation of a will that will not melt, the godhood of a self become sovereign. The ascent is the purest Right-Hand motion the Kabbalah performs, and it ends at the disappearance of the one who walked it.

Read in the terms used for the descent, union at every grade names something other than union. Dissolving into the One would be possible if the summit were a true infinite, a boundlessness with room to absorb a will and leave no edge. The foregoing took that infinite apart. What is at the top is a will, finite and determinate, a single cut frozen into Ratzon and enthroned as the source. A finite will is nothing to dissolve into, and a will cannot shed its cuts to reach it, as a will is its cutting and keeps no existence underneath what it draws. What the ascent works on is the heading of the will.

The climb bends the will rather than unmakes it. It takes a will that cuts in different directions and combs all lines toward the one above, until the will has no desire of its own and runs completely along the heading the summit sets. Azriel of Gerona and Baḥya ibn Paquda define the cleaving as the effacement of the human will in the divine, the two wills brought into conformity, and behind them stands the old maxim of the Fathers, "make his will yours and annul your will before his." The bittul the tradition crowns, the vanishing of the "I," is this bending: a will so fully turned toward the One that it draws nothing the One did not set, its cutting fallen silent under a borrowed heading. The ascetic who spent decades in the desert only to fall upon entering a brothel is the proof read backward. Nothing in him was dissolved. His will was bent hard toward the height and held there by the discipline, and the moment the grip slipped, the will was still entire and cut the other way. A dissolved will has nowhere to return from; the self returns from the Ayin because it was bent, never destroyed.

The summit gathers rather than frees. The will that surrenders to ascent does not end at its groundlessness; it arrives at the frozen cut enthroned above and takes it for its law. What the tradition calls union is the capture of a will by Ratzon.