the plot was: will the tree make it to the supernova on time?
The tree of crucifixion served to cancel out or overcome the tree of the fall. But for Christians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it did something more than simply annul an earlier Old Testament typology; it helped to create a sense of shared being. The tree of crucifixion not only freed the world from sin, it guaranteed a world in which humans could be mirror-reflections of God. First, God gave us ourselves in creation, then gave us God’s self in incarnation, and, finally, gave us ourselves again, our true restored selves, in crucifixion. This was the reality imagined in the branches of the tree of crucifixion—the reality of a shared flesh.
——Sara Ritchey. “Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination.” Spiritus 8.1 (2008): 64–82.
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We owe more to God for redeeming us than for making us. His word made us; but when it came to redeem us, that word must be made flesh, and that flesh must suffer. In our creation, He gave us ourselves; but, in our redemption, He gave us himself; and, by giving himself for us, gave us ourselves again that were lost; so that we owe ourselves, and all that we have, twice told: and now, what shall we give unto thee, O thou Preserver of men, for ourselves thus given and restored?
——Joseph Henshaw, Horae Succisivae; or, Spare Hours of Meditations, upon Our Duty to God, to Others, and to Ourselves, ed. William Turnbull (London: printed by T. Payne for Ralph Mabbe, 1640; reprint, London: James Darling, 1839), 82–83.
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For the philosophers of materialism tell us, and this they say is verifiable, that we are but albumen and a little phosphorus with much water and some salines, derived by automatic evolution from the star-dust. Through almost countless processes of intermolecular change and development, yet by a single chain of natural, consecutive, necessary causation, WE come from IT! Trace the chain upwards, so they affirm, and you will find it was the slumbering potency of life in the primitive molecules of the nebulae, which gave us ourselves!
§ 37. I desire not to be misunderstood: let me then remark that nothing is here said in derogation of the theory of evolution and continuity of law under the creating hand of God, what is spoken of is spontaneous self-evolution of self-existent matter through molecular potency. Now this philosophy, so long as it remained in the region of speculation and spoke only in camerâ, need not have troubled us; but when it trenches upon faith and morals, and presumes to ridicule what it calls “the traditional beliefs,” it at once challenges our observation and elicits our denial. For dare we, at the beck and call of such crude speculations, abandon not only our faith in God but our very SELF, as a fragment of a once mighty vessel that has gone to pieces on the rocks?
——Richard Tudor, The Philosophy of Church Life; or, The Church of Christ, Viewed as the Means whereby God Manifests Himself to Mankind (London: Parker & Co., 1887), 510–511.
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[Luria] taught that God, in order to make room for the world, yielded space which his own presence had filled. . . . His attributes, or emanations, or potencies, continued to fill the shapes, the vessels, of worldly appearances. But the vessels proved unable to contain the divine light. They broke. The sparks fell and scattered and were mixed with the dross of earthly existence.
——Chaim Potok, quoted in Will Soll, “Chaim Potok’s ‘Book of Lights’: Reappropriating Kabbalah in the Nuclear Age,” Religion & Literature 21, no. 1 (1989): 111-35.
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Further, war casts a longer shadow over The Book of Lights than over any other of Potok’s novels. The shadow comes both from the past (World War II and Korea) and the future (fear of nuclear war); in the meantime, as Gershon reflects in Korea, “there was no war, but people kept crashing into shards of the world that broke their lives” (60).
The sadness that Potok feels is so strong that he even proposes, through Gershon, that it be added to the canonical list of the ten sefirot: “a deep and fearful sadness, a palpable realm, a sefirah, as real an emanation of the Divine Being as were royalty, wisdom, understanding, power, grace, and the others” (124).
——Soll, “Chaim Potoks’s ‘Book of Lights,’” 117.
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Listen, listen, came the seductive whisper from the darkness. I journey from the other side with a burden of chill truths. Why are you so afraid? Is it possible that illusion is more welcome to you than truth? Listen, listen.
——Potok via Soll, 120.
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But the most profound applications of the Zohar‘s doctrine of evil as an excess of judgment untempered by mercy are made in connection with the atomic bomb, a “measureless, hypertrophical outbreak” of wrath if ever there was one. The process of the creation of the bomb parallels the origin of evil. Rationality and judgment, operating independently of other factors, have taken “the light of creation . . . and returned the light of death” (307).
——Soll, 121
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How does one live in a world thus haunted by the stains of one’s forebears, by the shadow of the abyss of annihilation?
——Soll, 123
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seneh—sinai—etz chayim—tree of life—unquenchable fire
I lost my faith last week. It broke over the tenth of the big laws, the last of the aseret had’varim: “Thou shalt not covet.”
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