The Meaning of Being Alive
- Kabbalah -
The Meaning of Being Alive
וְאַחַר הָאֵשׁ קוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה
“And after the fire, a voice of thin silence.”
The Hollow
The Kabbalah tells that, before the world was, the Infinite, the Ein Sof, filled all things. There was no room for anything else. And so, for something other than itself to exist, it had to withdraw into itself and leave a kind of hollow. The Kabbalists called this gesture tzimtzum: contraction. In that space, creation took place.
Perhaps something similar happens with us. We spend a great part of our lives trying to occupy the centre: to be seen, recognised, heard; to be right; to defend what we believe ourselves to be, or to accuse those who do wrong by the dictates of our own ego. But so long as everything revolves around the I, whether or not we admit it as the centre, there is scarcely room for anything other than ourselves to appear. Only when we step a little aside from there can something else appear. Call it God, creation, inspiration, art, love, the other, or simply life itself.
In the Kabbalistic tradition there is another word that may help us understand this movement: bitul (nullification). It does not mean vanishing, despising oneself or ceasing to exist, but renouncing the claim to be the centre of existence. The self is still there, but it no longer claims the whole stage for itself.
One of life's great illusions is the belief that we exist... apart. We call ourselves individuals, as though we were closed units, independent of all the rest. Since Descartes we have repeated “I think, therefore I am”: I exist before the other, or worse, I exist, and of the other I cannot say whether it exists, for I have no proof that it thinks. Thus we turn the certainty that I think into the illusion that we are self-sufficient beings.
Yet no one thinks, loves or exists in isolation. The words with which we say “I” were already here before we were born. We are made of encounters, words, experiences, the untold stories of our parents and, above all, of absences, of broken hopes, of missed encounters, which are what form the cracks of the soul; without them we would have no character. Our lives are so entwined with the lives of others that some say free will does not exist, since our decisions spring from that web of signifiers which does not belong to us: language and stories, triumphs and defeats. A weave that reaches far further, and far deeper, than we can imagine.
We did not choose the words that preceded us, nor the first stories that gave shape to our desires. But we are not condemned to repeat them. Freedom does not lie in being the origin of our acts, but in transforming our relation to what determines us.
The exercise is simple to state and hard to practise:
to step out of the centre again and again, until it becomes a way of life.
To be the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer, the citizen, the student, yet without wholly mistaking oneself for any of these characters. To fulfil each role, shoulder each responsibility, take full part in a life we live but do not own, and to remain, somehow, one step behind what we believe ourselves to be. Like a shadow that keeps us company without claiming the stage.
To be able to be and, at the same time, not to be. Not as an excuse to evade our responsibilities, but as the recognition that no identity can wholly contain us. It is true that I am the one who acts, though I do not always know why. I am the consequence of my decisions, my learning, my experiences. I am the one who gathers arguments to build a thought, but I am not the master of all I think, for I do not know whence came the formulas with which I dissect the world, nor the fantasies and hopes with which I behold it. I am the one who lives, but this life is not wholly mine: only a small part of it, a very small part.
The question is not to be or not to be. There is no question. There is an affirmation: to be and not to be.
An ancient text, the Sayings of the Fathers, puts it as a litany:
Against your will you were formed, against your will you were born, against your will you live, against your will you shall die…
And perhaps it is precisely there that a certain freedom begins to be felt: when we stop endlessly defending the image of ourselves, because so much escapes our will and we are masters of nothing. When we set aside the thing that matters to us so much, appearing coherent, and acknowledge that in truth we are made of fragments. Then we may begin to answer the question:
“what is the meaning of all this?”:
we stand neither before creation as spectators, nor above it as owners, nor beneath it as victims, but within it, taking part as co-creators.
The self we imagine as a separate unit, autonomous and master of itself, does not exist. What exists is this weave of relations of which we are a part. And there, in that narrow margin of action, lies our free will. In some things we can choose, and in others we cannot. Something we are, and something we are not.
Moses Cordovero, the sixteenth-century Kabbalist, thought this weave through to its root. He held that the divine essence is present in all things and that nothing exists of itself. To imagine that the Infinite ends at some point, and that beyond it begins something foreign to it, would be to divide the indivisible. Hence his warning: “Do not say, this is a stone and not God.” The stone is a stone, but it is shot through with the divine. It is and is not, at once: it exists as something distinct, yet it does not exist apart from what sustains it. God is all that exists, Cordovero said, but not all that exists is God.
So it is with the flesh. It exists, it tires, it is wounded, it suffers, it decides. But it does not hold itself up: what moves it passes through it, as light passes through crystal. That does not take my acts from me. They come forth in my shape, and I answer for them.
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What For
Not long ago I heard a Kabbalist say that the meaning of life is to find what sets the soul vibrating: each soul, he said, comes bearing a mission it must discover. It struck me as true, but incomplete.
Nothing vibrates alone. A string does not sound of itself: it is woken by a hand that brushes it, or by the distant sound of another string that calls it by name across the air, without touching it. So too does what moves the soul reach us: sometimes as an impulse rising from within, sometimes as an echo from afar. And though we keep it stored away in the unconscious, it was never ours: there too, other voices speak, phrases we once heard, comparisons once made of us. What sets me vibrating is not mine, but the way I vibrate is.
But there is another way of sounding: that of the microphone held too close to its own speaker, the sound that goes in, comes out and goes in again, louder each time, until it becomes a shriek. Psychoanalysis calls this intensity jouissance, but not all jouissance is alike. There are jouissances that expand: research, writing, playing an instrument even when one is tired, because something has not yet sounded. And there are jouissances that hold fast, that delight in not letting go: the loops of the mind, remorse, the long wait for someone to come and save us one day. These are the ones that wear the soul away, until they leave us alone and naked, sitting on the ashes of what was.
The difference does not lie in the activity. One may write to find something, or so that others will confirm who we believe we are; research out of curiosity, or to be proved right; seek God, or seek oneself in the mirror of the sacred. The difference lies in whether something truly other than oneself can still be heard. The story tells that Elijah found God neither in the wind nor in the fire, but in what came after: a voice of thin silence, when the noise, the world's and his own, ceased to fill everything.
Each of us has a cave: isolation, the silence in which, at times, at last, something can be heard. But that voice does not ask us to stay there. It sent Elijah back to the road and to others. The cave is a circumstance and a season, not a place to remain. The sparks of each of us, says the Kabbalah, are scattered throughout the world, in others too. We see ourselves in them and they see themselves in us: thus the self is formed, always before a mirror, as a construction made of images. But the mirror is not enough. The other transforms us when it does more than reflect us: when it shows us something we did not expect to see, or tells us something we did not expect to hear.
So then, what is one alive for? Not to fulfil a mission written beforehand: if it is written, we can only read it backwards, when the life already lived seems to have led us there, and never forwards, since nothing guarantees that we will arrive. Nor to reach a goal once and for all: whoever reaches it with no other ahead is left without direction. Meaning is not exhausted by what we accomplish. I believe the answer lies in that thin silence: to let through the light that traverses us and to give it, again and again, our own shape, like a crystal that opens it into colours it held concealed. The same light passes through each of us, but each reveals it through their own fractures and imperfections. It always emerges different.
These cracks are not a flaw. They are my signature.
To receive the light and return it to the world in the colours it held concealed: that is tikkun, repair. And in doing so, something more takes place. Whoever writes while weary and keeps on writing is no longer at the centre: there is the sentence, the problem, the form asking to come forth. The self does not vanish, but it ceases to claim the centre. That too is bitul, and not merely as renunciation: it is the human gesture that echoes the divine one. Like the author who withdraws from his work, the Infinite withdrew in order to create. We withdraw by creating.
It should be said plainly: no activity, whether pleasurable or beyond pleasure, closes the lack. It almost closes it, but it always opens again. The Kabbalists said that one must empty oneself again and again, for only by emptying can one be filled anew: one fills and one empties, in constant oscillation, like a pulse of life. Peace does not lie in having found meaning once and for all, like one who crosses the finishing line of a race, but in accepting that rhythm and living it.
Nor does finding what makes one vibrate settle everything. There remains the matter of how to live by it. Sometimes one lives by one thing and vibrates in another: one is the lawyer, the engineer, the citizen, from behind. Meaning does not demand that what makes us vibrate should pay the rent. It demands that it not go out.
Lacan said it without circumlocution: the only thing of which one can be guilty is having given ground relative to one's desire, having renounced it.
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I Came Here To
We dream of being special. Of existing for someone. To say “I came here to” is a great step towards inner peace. But it carries a risk: that purpose turns into a debt. That “I came here to” becomes a judge who asks me every night whether I measured up. The same can happen with bitul, and even with desire. Then we no longer torment ourselves for not being important enough, but for not being humble enough. The self goes on occupying the whole stage, even as it tries to disappear.
Against your will you were born, said the litany. No one chose to be born. And a debt we never incurred is not ours to pay. Purpose may be sought; existence is owed to no one.
The litany ends thus: “and against your will you shall give account before the King of kings.” If there is a tribunal, it comes at the end, not every night. And it will judge what we did, not that we were born. Even that one comes against our will. The only one we summon ourselves is the one that convenes every night.
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A Crown Without a King
They say that in the beginning Adam and Eve were not naked. They were clothed in a skin of light, smooth and lustrous as a fingernail. When they left the garden, that light went out over almost all the body, save at the tips of the fingers. Since then, now and again, someone holds their hands to a candle and watches their nails gleam: a faint gleam, that of a part of us we scarcely recognise. In that gleam one does not see paradise. One sees a remnant. And in that remnant, no larger than a fingernail, we imagine everything else: what is not there, what might have been.
Being alive asks for the same gesture as the Infinite's, in reverse. To step a little aside. To cease being the centre of my own night: the king, the accused and the judge, the one who waits and the one who never comes. Not so that another may take my place, but so that the place may remain vacant.
For at that centre there is no one. There is no image, for nothing we imagine can represent it. To imagine is not to set an image at that centre. It is to leave it open.
In Hebrew, “I” (ani, אני) and “nothing” (ayin, אין) are written with the same letters, arranged in a different order. The I is not the opposite of nothing: it is nothing ordered in a singular way. There is no need to destroy the one in order to find the other: the work lies in changing the order. To withdraw from the centre is just this: that the I, without disappearing, makes room for the nothing from which all things come.
There is a crown without a king.
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And the crown shines, as fingernails shine by candlelight.
Not in paradise, but in the remnant.
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