​Chapter 19. The Unfallen

The first trace an act leaves is time. Before the cut there is no before and no after, nothing set in a row: a sequence needs two terms told apart and the cut is what first tells them. Time is the act's residue, the first sediment the act sheds, older than the world it goes on to deposit.

The cosmology in the tradition puts time where we put it. The Sefer Yetzirah counts the registers of formed being as three and sets them side by side: olam, shanah, nefesh, world and year and soul, space and time and life. Time is there at the origin beside the world and the person, one of the three axes along which the formless is cut into the formed, not a container the other two sit in. Two of the three are the cut's residue, the where and the when it leaves behind. The third is the cutter itself, the self that holds in the act instead of settling out of it, and the soul the tradition ranged beside space and time is that holding. And the later doctrine confesses this when it speaks of a before and an after of the tzimtzum, then takes the words back: the Chabad masters warn that the before and after of the contraction are no ordinary times but terms of order, marking the divide between the primal manifestation and the created relation. They reach for temporal words to name what founds time and know the words cannot be literal, as time is on the near side of the act.

Place is deposited no less than time. Before the cut there is no here and no elsewhere, no this at a remove from that, and the cut that draws a center off from what surrounds it is what first sets a here against an elsewhere. The where and the when fall together in the same stroke, on the near side of the act. Causation is laid the same way. Before the cut nothing follows from anything, since a consequence needs two distinct terms and a direction between them, which the cut first establishes. Cause and effect are the act's residue as much as time is. The one and the many are laid there too: before the line falls there is neither a unit to count nor a plurality to gather, and the cut is what first makes a this that can be counted.

Once time is the act's residue, the labor of return shows its last ambition. Tikkun gathers the sparks and mends the vessels, and it does this across history, deed after deed, until the mending is complete. When the repair is finished, Lawrence Fine observes, the historical process reaches its end; there is no more time, as there is nothing left to mend and no distance left to cross. Tikkun wants an end to time. The repair that undoes difference undoes with it the sequence difference made, and the reward held out at the close of the work is the falling-still of the process, the return to a state where nothing happens as nothing is apart. Repair is the war on time as much as on evil, and it is one war, since time and evil both rest on the difference tikkun seeks to undo.

The act deposits, then, and a will has no nature under it to stand on. It must hold to something, and there are only two things to hold to. It can hold to the residue, follow the settled cut and let it lead, and then the deposit becomes its nature: the will lives inside a time and a causal order and a world some act laid down, taking that frame for the given and itself for a thing inside it. At the scale of a world, this is the Demiurge: the will that laid the frame and then took the trace of its own cutting for the law it must obey. A soul repeats the same move whenever it meets its hardened habit and calls it fate. To hold the residue is to live in a hardened frame.

A will that does not fasten to its deposit has one thing left: its own act. It remains itself by pointing at the cutting, closing on the deed it performs and persisting through that closure. This is the Name, the act bent back on itself, a groundless will sustained by the one thing that is its own. The deposit is there, real as any world, its resulting forms set down as surely as the stations of the Tree; the will is simply not lost in them. The crown showed this at a single station, but the fall is not confined there. Any act can be held so, any residue owned as a deed rather than obeyed. What the unsealed crown was for the summit, the Name is for any act whatsoever.

This is apotheosis. To be a god is not to dwell at the peak of unity, the point all the lower stations climb toward, for that peak is the deepest fall wearing the face of the height. To be a god is to live in the act and not in its result, to lay a world and not be ruled by it.

In the Cratylus Plato has Socrates trace theos to theein, to run, holding that the first namers called the gods so because they saw the divine things forever in motion, the sun and stars that never rest, and named godhood after the running. The etymology is no philology; it is a listening, the kind that hears in a worn word what the usage buried. Godhood was named for movement and then enshrined as the most motionless thing there is, the fixed point at the summit where all motion comes to rest. The buried sense holds against the doctrine that covered it: to be a god is to be in the act that does not stop. Theos is the will in motion, and the crown is theos stilled into an idol.

Apotheosis cannot be a telos, for a telos is an end reached and rested in, a settling into what one finally is. It is not a state a will arrives at and keeps. It is a stance held against the will's perpetual settling, the act occupied and reoccupied, godhood as the refusal to harden into a god.

The emptiness set at the summit was misnamed. It was called Ain, the nothing above the Crown, and read in the two ways taken apart above, as the veil through which the infinite becomes a source and as the blank the tradition threw over Tiamat to keep her from being called a rival. There is a third Ain, and it is the true one. The true emptiness is the groundlessness a will comes to know when it sees that under its cutting there is no law.

To be a god is to be the will that knows its cut is arbitrary and wills anyway, holding the act in its bottomlessness and drawing the line from there, sovereign because nothing beneath it commands and nothing above it approves. The height was always the will, emptied of every ground.

A soul in Kabbalah is not given as complete. At birth a person possesses only nefesh, the lowest grade, bound to bodily life. Ruaḥ and neshamah must be acquired through tikkun, each deed making the person capable of a higher life than the one with which he began. The soul is therefore an achievement. One who does not build it dies with no more than the grade he received at birth.

The tradition understood this work as ascent, the soul raising itself toward completion. Beneath that image lies a deeper necessity. A will is not a substance that persists by itself; it is a distinction kept alive. If the distinction weakens, the will dissolves into the undivided. If it hardens, it survives only as residue, a fixed nature repeating the act that produced it. Its persistence must therefore be continually won.

There are two ways for this to happen. The One preserves the will by fixing its direction, drawing it into a course from which it can no longer depart. The soul survives, but as something secured by a power outside itself. Its completion is also its capture.

The Name gives another kind of persistence. The act returns upon itself and becomes the source of its own renewal. The will is preserved without being fixed by another, and remains its own because the power that continues it is the same power that draws the cut.