Questions for today:
One expression of ‘holiness’ and respect is exclusion. We express the holiness of eg. a Torah scroll by not ever bringing it into a place of impurity. This premise has led to centuries of debate. Does this principal also apply to the Creator? Is the Creator found in a place of idol worship, or in a restroom?
We learned that the creator is a completely single entity without any division whatsoever, even the Creator's own knowledge is one with the Creator.
With this in mind, we can close a debate that's been going on for centuries. When the holy Arizal explained how a finite world can be created, he used the term ’tzimtzum’, which means ‘contraction’.
There are those that translate this literally, that there are places in the world where the Creator is absent, and He is just looking at those locations from far.
However, this explanation is impossible because the Creator is one with the Creator’s knowledge. It is impossible for there to be something that the Creator ‘knows’, but is absent from. Therefore, the concept must be explained only metaphorically.
In fact, the Zohar says that the Creator fills the entire world in a similar way to how the soul fills the body.
The difference is that when the soul fills the body, it becomes assimilated in a contracted way, so that if the body is in pain, the soul suffers. The Creator fills the entire world and assimilates with every part, but without being affected or changed.
182 20 Tanya Sivan 23 ~ m207 m20 Sivan 24
Tanya book 2, Ch 7, Pt 5
...and since the Creator, and the Creator's knowledge, are one, it would be impossible to speak of any place "empty" of the Creator, which the Creator is only "aware" of.
And that is aside from the fact that such a description of something with a void would only fit a physical entity.
Like the soul to the body, the Creator fills the entire world. But unlike with the soul, the Creator is not affected [changed by] the world at all.
Study today’s Tanya in full:
https://www.chabadmed.com/dailystudy/tanya.asp?tdate=6/23/2022
See today’s video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSgI4IX2FSs&list=PLFZQPK6u-zSC7FvXJfcTF6vOd_JEAABrJ&index=20
Additional thoughts
The debate regarding whether the Creator ‘contracts’ literally or metaphorically is a long standing one. This concept is foundational and leads to many fundamental perspective variances in Jewish thought found across many schools of thought.
Today’s lesson is one of many that clarify with certainty that the only understanding that stands consistently with all Jewish principals is that the Creator is not actually ‘contracted’.
That being said, there are many righteous, learned, scholars who understood differently.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe -while strongly teaching the lesson taught here- defended their perspective. The Rebbe explained that although this and the many other lessons are intuitive, they maintained their perspective.
This was an act of intellectual self-sacrifice per say.
They understood that it was inappropriate to attribute the Creator’s presence into eg. the restroom. Therefore, they maintained this approach even against volumes of teaching and intuitive logic all pointing in the opposite direction.