The God Beyond God

Photo by Miriam Espacio

The following is an excerpt from
God and the Big Bang by Daniel C. Matt.
Professor Matt is a renowned scholar of Kabbalah and the Zohar.
During an 18-year project, he translated and annotated
the entire Zohar for the Zohar: Pritzker Edition,
including the Zohar’s main commentary on the Torah.

How can you name the Oneness, the Unnamable? The Jewish mystical tradition, Kabbalah, offers a number of possibilities. One is Ein Sof, which translates literally as, “there is no end.” Ein Sof is the Infinite, the God beyond God. This name sounds so different from the personal divine names that populate the texts of the tradition: YHVH, Elohim, Shaddai, the Holy One, blessed be He. As an anonymous kabbalist observed, neither the Bible nor the Talmud even hints of Ein Sof. This remark is both obvious and revealing, an acknowledgment of the radical originality of this mystical formula.

By calling God “Ein Sof,” Jewish mystics imply that everything is divine. The kabbalist Moses Cordovero, writing in the sixteenth century, put it this way: “The essence of divinity is found in every single thing—nothing but It exists. Since It causes every thing to be, no thing can live by anything else. It enlivens them. Ein Sof exists in each existent. Do not say, ‘This is a stone and not God.’ God forbid! Rather, all existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity.”

There is nothing but Ein Sof. Even a stone in a field, even a slab of concrete in a downtown parking lot, is an expression of divine energy. The entire world is God in myriad forms and disguises.”¹

Waves of the Ocean

[1] Daniel C. Matt, God and the Big Bang (Jewish Lights Publishing, 1996), p. 38-39
See also Daniel Matt, PhD: The Big Bang & Kabbalah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iDTrei78_k • 01.22.2023