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that were lacking in God as “One of Ones” or “Primordial Nothing.”39 These represent the divine energy source in process, the stages of the flow that leads from abstraction to the constant reinvigorating of this world by the emanation of divine blessing (shefa’). Once the sefirot are in place, the strategy of the Kabbalist becomes the very antithesis of that of the philosopher, though leading to the same ultimate goal. If the Maimonidean seeks to purify one's thinking about God by questioning and progressively removing all anthropomorphic and anthropopathic images, the Kabbalist seeks to mentally flood the reader with an overwhelming excess of images, leading to the conclusion that the divine reality must ultimately transcend them all. Virtually everything, almost any noun encountered in Scripture and any object within the natural realm, becomes an image term that leads back to contemplation of some aspect of God. If the same element or stage of self-revelation within the Godhead may be called by a diverse set of names (the third sefirah, for example, is “mother,” “womb,” “jubilee,” “fountain,” “repentance,” “upper Eden,” “heart,” “understanding,” “palace,” and a host more), it becomes clear that all of these are somehow pointing beyond themselves and that no single name, image, or symbol fully expresses just what this sefirah (or symbol cluster) is. “You are the One who fills all names,” as the Tiqquney Zohar famously expresses it, “but You Yourself have no specific name.”40

In Kabbalah too we find an interesting mix of vertical and internal religious language. Being medieval in its original formulations, the notion of hierarchy within the divine process is fully accepted, as indicated by the well-known Kabbalistic charts. The first of the ten sefirot is known as keter ‘elyon, “uppermost crown,”41 and is placed at the head of what appears to be a descending order. It is also referred to as ‘atiqa, “the ancient one,” indicating that the flow of emanation, itself beyond both time and space, can be translated into either the spatial or the temporal order. But the sefirot are also depicted as circles within circles. Sometimes eyn sof is presented as the innermost reality, and the journey toward this abstract deity beyond Nothingness is a trek inward, toward the core of Being. Other charts show the divine surrounding all beings, with eyn sof on the “outside” of reality, the sefirot “descending” inward toward earth. Indeed, the original source of the term sefirot, Sefer Yetzirah, presents them as “their end linked to their beginning and their beginning to their end,” most likely a series of interlocking circles. Later Kabbalists returned to this picture when claiming (adapting a well-known philosophic adage) that the final sefirah, shekhinah, was directly joined to the highest, “last in deed but first in thought.”42

This is not the place to offer a full accounting of the sefirot and their many meanings in Kabbalistic symbolism.43 For our purpose, some brief highlights will do. Keter or ‘atiqa stands at the head of the process, the first emanation out of the unknowable reservoir of Being called only eyn sof, “the Endless.” From the viewpoint of human experience, it is the most recondite realm imaginable, the deepest Self of the cosmos, far beyond personality or relationship. Keter reflects only the desire of Being to become manifest, not yet bearing any specific or concrete content. Out of keter emerge the first primal pair, hokhmah and binah, “wisdom” and “contemplation.” These conceive (in both senses of the term) the first point of reality, thus beginning the flow of energy that will devolve into all of existence. Their first offspring is the sixfold divine person known as the blessed Holy One, the male deity of biblical/rabbinic tradition. “God,” in other words, is born out of the deeper, more mysterious realms within the Godhead. In the Zohar's radical reconstruction of the opening verse of Genesis, elohim (“God”) is the object rather than the subject of the sentence.44 This personified deity, while made up of six elements,