The Entanglement of Pain
Anyone who has gone through the Dark Night of the Soul has felt the crushing weight of existence. The long nights filled with memories of another life. The tired eyes staring back at you every morning, struggling to accept reality. Whatever tragedy happened to you cannot be undone. But beyond acceptance, something else becomes clear: the weight of suffering does not come entirely from the apparent cause of pain, but from something else, the invisible pull of a dark force.
The question that persists:
“Why me? Why now? Why this?”
If God exists, perhaps it is only in silence that God can manifest. Elijah did not find God in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, but in a thin silence.
And it is in that same silence, shared by tragedy, loss, betrayal, and death, that the answer capable of bringing peace to the mind is missing. There, the entanglement of pain takes place: unrelated events, once they cross a certain threshold, lose their individual meanings and become simply pain. A lost relationship, a failure at work, a shame, an unanswered message, the memory of someone who may not return. Without realizing it, we begin to knot signifiers that have nothing to do with one another to a single one: the existential question, which in turn points toward the void and its divine silence.
Kabbalah and Lacan both tell us, in different ways and for different reasons, of a darkness that cannot be fully understood. On the Tree of Life, it can be drawn as an abyss; Lacan speaks of the lack in the Other, the question that has no answer, and the fantasme, the fantasy we build to cover it. These are different ways of approaching something shared: the discontent at the heart of human experience.
Only those who have gone through the sea of despair and returned to tell the tale know what lies on the other side. It is not an answer, but a discovery. One day you wake up and realize that the burning, the smell of your own scorched skin in the endless fire of failure, hurts so much not because of its apparent cause, but because of something else: the darkness of the abyss, which has swallowed every unrelated pain and magnified it, until even the lightest touch burns.
It hurts so much because it is not one pain but two, activated at once: the pain of what was lost, and the pain of existing without an answer.
We will do almost anything to avoid looking into the void. Camus understood this, and he still challenges us from his grave to face it: not to betray ourselves by seeking comfort in religion, possessions, sexuality, names, titles, orgasms or relationships that promise an answer they cannot give. For him, the absurd is born precisely there, where our demand for meaning meets the silence of the world. The universe will keep its mysteries long after humanity is gone. We are here, thrown into the emptiness of space, and we do not know why or what for. The mere thought of that unspoken question is enough to make us tremble. So we search for reasons, invent explanations, construct narratives, and return again and again to the same place, unsure. In the end, even the worst belief we adopt as true about ourselves, about them, about the world, however painful, is preferable to having no answer at all.
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Behind that unanswered question, the abyss beckons.
The abyss is dark, but not with the darkness of matter: it is the darkness of too much light. Kabbalah does not think of darkness as the mere opposite of light, and this may be what makes the abyss so powerful, and why we fear it so much: it is not the absence of the divine, but its overflowing. Jacob dreamed of a ladder with angels going up and down. When he woke, he understood that God had been in that place without his knowing it, and he was afraid: “How terrifying is this place! This is the gate of heaven.” He was not afraid because it was empty, but because it was too full. Hebrew has a word for this fear of what overflows: nora. And what overflows does not only frighten; it also calls. This is why the abyss draws us, and why its attraction holds a promise of rest.
But the abyss is not the only darkness in the Tree. There is another one, the darkness of matter: lower, less fearsome, closer to the body, and for that reason we all fall into it.
When Joseph’s brothers threw him into the pit, it was empty; there was no water in it. The rabbis read that sentence closely: no water, but snakes and scorpions. In Kabbalah, Joseph is associated with Yesod, the sefirah of relationships and sex, located between Tiferet and Malkhut. The image is precise. A pit with nothing to drink, and yet full of something that bites, paralyzes, and holds.
I find here an intriguing correspondence with Lacan’s theory of jouissance. Beyond ordinary pleasure, jouissance produces repetition even when repetition brings not only simple pleasures but pain and suffering. In my reading of the Tree of Life, the three jouissances Lacan proposed, phallic jouissance, the jouissance of meaning, and the Other jouissance, are located in the lower triad (Netzach, Hod, and Yesod), because all three press toward discharge through the body, and what is never fully discharged keeps returning. This is the pit. The subject keeps seeking recognition, possession, pleasure, or meaning, even when none of them fully satisfies. The repetition brings something that continues to blind and bind the subject. The abyss is crossed or not crossed, but the pit is not crossed: one falls into it and goes to the bottom.
The loss itself is real; it happens in the world, in Malkhut. But we do not stay with the loss. We circle around it in the pit, and from the pit we glimpse the abyss. When tragedy strikes, and it inevitably does, it forces us to confront the existential question, the abyss that has no bottom. To avoid looking at it, we fall back into the pit, which has solid ground.
Imagine someone, any of us, all of us, whose life has been built around something external: recognition, money, possessions, titles, jobs, or the desire to be someone in the eyes of the Other. Then tragedy strikes, one of those pillars collapses, and the world collapses with it like a house of cards. The pain is no longer confined to what was lost. It begins to answer questions the loss itself never raised.
Long ago I heard from someone I once trusted that a failure does not define you. It is true, but it is hard to believe when a whole galaxy of signifiers points to the same question. So no, it is not enough to think it to stop the pain that lingers beneath the words.
Here, Lacan’s fantasy offers a possible explanation. The fantasy ties the pit and the abyss into a single loop, and the current runs both ways. Each particular loss no longer stays in the pit; it is pulled up toward the existential question and magnified. And the terror of the abyss, in turn, flows down into the pit, because the pit at least has a floor. The fantasy gives the question a face, a story, an apparent explanation. I was abandoned. I am worthless. I deserved what happened. He deserves it. It was my fault. None of it is the whole truth. These interpretations hurt, sometimes terribly, but they offer something the existential void refuses to give: an answer, any answer. And so the loop closes. As soon as we are pulled toward the abyss, we fall into the pit, and we become subject to both: the pain of the question without an answer, and the false calm of the answer we give ourselves, which also hurts, because it turns what happened into a verdict on who we are.
In this image, Tiferet becomes the place where the “I” struggles to hold itself together, caught between the abyss above and the pit below. Like a boat held by two short anchor chains as the tide rises, it cannot rise with the water, and the sea pulls it under. It is there that suffering changes its nature. The loss is no longer merely the loss of a house, a partner, a car, or a job. It carries the unbearable weight of existence.
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But what happens if the pit and the abyss are disentangled?
Not by denying the loss. Not by persuading ourselves that the suffering was imaginary, or that the existential question has finally been answered. The loss remains real. The childhood wound may still hurt. The person who left may never return. Only by accepting that there is a pain that belongs to existence itself, and letting the universe remain as silent as ever. The pit is not filled, and the abyss does not close. Only the loop that binds them is undone. And once their pulls are separated, something changes within us. The soul becomes lighter.
We stop experiencing all these pains as one. The end of a relationship is no longer proof that we are unworthy of love. Another person’s silence is no longer an accusation. A failure is no longer a verdict on existence.
But the loop is not undone by understanding it. One can climb out of the pit by balancing repetition and the need for recognition without being consumed by them. Yet as long as the loop holds, the next loss will be drawn straight into it. We may understand the mechanism perfectly and keep repeating it. The fantasy is not balanced; it has to be traversed. Only then does it lose its hold on experience, so that each pain can recover its own meaning and limits, and no new loss becomes the confirmation of an old verdict about ourselves. What happened yesterday need not carry the weight of everything that happened before, nor answer the question of why we are alive.
Disentanglement does not eliminate pain; it reduces its weight. It makes our souls lighter.
This is the gift of the Dark Night of the Soul: to discover that the abyss does not need to disappear, that questions may remain unanswered, that the other who hurt us is not responsible for all the pain we suffered, and that we can live without turning every loss into a verdict on existence.
Joseph did not fill the pit; he came out of it. And he fell again: his Egyptian prison, curiously, bears the same name, bor, the pit. The second time he came out as an interpreter of dreams, someone who could give meaning without being captured by it. And he did not simply escape: Pharaoh placed him over all of Egypt, and the one who had lain at the bottom of the pit ended up distributing the bread of an entire country, even to the brothers who had thrown him there.
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But coming out of the pit is not yet joy. Disentanglement lightens the soul but does not yet set it free. Something remains beyond: crossing the abyss itself.
Crossing does not mean that the question is answered; it means that we no longer need the fantasy’s answer. This is not the leap Camus warned against, because nothing is promised on the other side. What lies there has a name: Da’at, the eleventh sefirah, the uncounted one. Many readings of the Tree place it just beyond the abyss. It is there, but it is not one more thing to possess. Da’at is knowledge in the biblical sense, as when Adam knew Eve. Not knowledge about life, but intimacy with it. John of the Cross knew that his night did not end in an answer, but in union.
But no one lives there permanently; we cross it, fall back, and cross it again, because life is mainly material. Each time we live from our own desire rather than from the demand of the Other, each time we act without waiting for the universe to explain itself first, we are living, for a moment, in Da’at. And perhaps this is all we can do with the suspended question: not answer it, but cross the abyss and return transformed. Not to remain on either side, but to go up and down, like the angels on Jacob’s ladder, and bring that light into the darkness of matter: to houses, to jobs, and to people, even if they later leave, and to live here without asking each loss to answer for existence.
The sea may continue to rise. A boat tied with two anchors will sink; with one, it may float; but only a boat that lifts its anchors can sail... and reach the other side.
Biblical passages: 1 Kings 19:12; Genesis 4:1, 28:17, 37:24, 41:14.
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