When neither praise nor insult can sway you.

- Kabbalah and Lacan - 

There is something the Kabbalah seems to whisper: the Crown is empty.

At the summit of the Tree of Life, that structure through which medieval Kabbalah began to contemplate the manifestation of the divine, the movement of light, the dynamics of the soul and the path of return toward the source, stands Keter, the Crown. The name already contains a mystery: a crown seems to announce a king, yet nowhere on the Tree does the king appear. That highest position might have been called King, Lord or God. The Kabbalists chose instead Crown, something that points toward sovereignty without revealing the one who possesses it, suspended above the rest of a structure made entirely of attributes.

And as we try to understand those crystalline leaves, something strange occurs: the higher we ascend toward what the tradition places beyond all form, the less confidently we can say that anyone is there at all. If we ascend from below, the names of the other leaves of the Tree are equally abstract:

Kingdom • Foundation • Splendour • Victory • Beauty • Strength
Kindness • Understanding • Wisdom
Crown

All of them attributes of a King, while the King himself remains absent.

Aware of this absence, the Kabbalists placed beyond Keter the Ein Sof, literally the “without end”: not the King, but that which no crown, no attribute and no name can contain. The God whom the Tree never succeeds in showing us has no boundary, face, image or form adequate to thought. Even to call it nothingness would already be too much, because nothingness is still something we can turn into a concept. Instead, the Kabbalists chose an expression that resists delimiting what it names. It does not tell us what it is. It denies that we can ever find its limit. As though the great mystery emerged precisely where language begins to fail.

Centuries later, this mystical architecture seems to encounter one of the most radical propositions of psychoanalysis: we inevitably live in the field of the Other, among its words, its laws, its desires and its demands, yet that Other does not possess the ultimate knowledge we attribute to it. For Lacan, there is no hidden authority somewhere that possesses the absolute answer to who we are, what we ought to desire, what is truly right or wrong, or what the ultimate meaning of our existence might be. Nor is there an Other behind the Other capable of having the final word.

Kabbalah and Lacan, beginning from entirely different worlds, seem to meet in the same image:

The throne is empty, and the hall is filled with voices laying claim to the Crown, yet none of them has the final word. After every certainty, another voice always appears.

Our fantasy seats an imaginary king upon the empty throne. Again and again we place someone there, only to discover that they too are imperfect, and then we search for another: the father, the lover, the master, the priest, the analyst, the boss, the idea of God, a religion, even the self. In this way we lighten the burden of deciding, surrendering to someone else the authority to tell us what reality is, what we should do and what place we occupy within it.

To traverse the fantasy, in Lacanian terms, means encountering something profoundly uncomfortable: the knowledge we attributed to the Other is not there. The Other continues to exist in language, in law, in the Bible, in desire and in the demands that pass through us, but it ceases to be the one whom we imagined to possess a definitive answer. Its words may guide us, question us or transform us, but none can close forever the question of who we are or what we should do. And if God exists, God escapes every word and image through which we attempt to define Him.

Perhaps this is why the Kabbalists eventually came to whisper, among scribbles, letters, diagrams, permutations and endless arguments, something far more unsettling: the final truth belongs to no one.

But all of this could remain no more than a beautiful speculation. How can we tell, in everyday life, whether we are still seating someone upon the Crown? How can we know how much power the Other still holds over us?

Some time ago I heard a phrase I have never managed to forget. I am beginning to understand why:

When neither praise nor insult can sway you.

It does not seem to belong to any single tradition, but rather to condense a teaching that reappears with remarkable persistence.

Dhammapada

It expresses the idea through the image of a rock unmoved by the wind: the wise are not shaken by praise or blame.

Bhagavad Gita

In a similar spirit, it describes one who regards praise and reproach alike.

Epictetus

From an entirely different world, he goes so far as to say that one who is progressing philosophically, when praised, laughs inwardly, and when criticised, does not rush to defend himself.

Kabbalah

It poses almost the same test under the name hishtavut, a form of inner equanimity in the face of praise and contempt.

In a story preserved by the Kabbalistic tradition, a master asks a student whether the one who honours him and the one who insults him are equal in his eyes. When the student replies that praise still gives him pleasure and insult still causes him pain, the master concludes that he is not yet ready for spiritual ascent.

The wise person is not a stone. An insult may hurt, and praise may bring joy. What changes is that neither is able to carry him away.

The point is not to become immune, but to distinguish between two very different things:

being affected and being defined.

We may lose our centre for a moment. What matters is being able to find it again.

We are not what we receive, yet neither do we remain untouched after receiving it. Every experience, every word, every judgement passes through our crystal. Something remains, and something returns to the world, reflected or refracted. Yet one question still remains: who ultimately decides what that crystal is?

Praise and criticism offer two easy answers. Praise may tell me who I would like to believe I am. Criticism may threaten to tell me who I fear I am. Hishtavut opens another possibility: to listen to both without surrendering the Crown to either.

And the same applies to the judgement I pass upon myself. It is not enough to remove the father, the lover, the master, the wife or the idea of God from the Crown, only to seat myself upon it instead. My own interpretation of who I am cannot claim the final word either. The crystal cannot gaze at one of its own refractions and declare that it has finally discovered its definitive form.

Every light that passes through us reveals something more about the way we are made. To know ourselves is not to discover a definitive form, but to keep learning how we receive, refract and return what reaches us.

The test, then, is not to remain unshaken, but to learn how to respond. Serenity does not tell us what to do. It simply creates the space from which we can decide. Sometimes wisdom will mean admitting that we were wrong and apologising. At other times it will mean repairing the damage, changing course or accepting a criticism that is true. It may also mean refusing to defend an image, refusing to chase praise or refusing to preserve someone else's recognition. And there will be times when, after listening and looking carefully, the wisest response will be to do nothing.

Here the emptiness of the Crown acquires a concrete consequence. It is not a matter of believing that no one can judge me, but of ceasing to organise every movement around an imaginary tribunal.

 Meister Eckhart carried this renunciation even further. In one of his sermons, he arrives at a startling petition: “Ich bitte Gott, dass er mich Gottes ledig mache”, “I ask God to free me from God.” He is not asking to be freed from the sacred, but from the God we can turn into an image, a concept, an authority, or a final answer. If what we call God truly exceeds our words, then even our idea of God can end up sitting on the Crown. Perhaps drawing closer to the divine also requires leaving that place empty.

Even then, one final trap remains. I might think that I have understood, that I no longer need recognition, that I have finally attained serenity. I might turn hishtavut itself into a new identity and begin admiring myself for having ceased to need admiration.

Then someone has seated himself upon the Crown once again.

Myself.

This is why the empty Crown is neither an achievement nor a state one finally reaches. It is a place that must remain available, a vacancy that must be opened again each time someone attempts to occupy it.

Perhaps wisdom consists precisely in this: learning to live without a King, without ceasing to decide.

If this text resonated with you, leave a like.