The Profound Nothing of the Cosmic Apple
Tech Tribe Dispatch 166
💡 Think:
This vignette is based on a monograph in Hillel Zeitlin’s “Introduction to Chasidus and the path of Chabad1”
Zeitlin was a Yiddish and Hebrew writer, a leading thinker in pre-war Europe and a poet. Born into a Chabad family in Belarus, he explored chasidus, kabbalah, the Enlightenment and the many competing philosophies of the time. Rooting himself more thoroughly in the religion of his youth in his old age, he was killed by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, while holding a book of the Zohar and wrapped in a Tallis and Tefillin.
Said the Magid of Mezritch:
‘Divine energy can be found in everything - there is no taste, smell, sight, love or other expression that, if stripped of its dross physicality and appreciated for its spiritual core, that G-d can not be found. If then, we can extract that inner core, it is no longer appreciated for its physical body, but its spiritual source.’
Think for a moment of an apple. The glint of the light of its glowing flesh, the smoothness of its skin and its weight in your hands… Truly a joy to behold.
Think for a moment that this apple is merely a physical expression - a fruit to appreciated with the senses - and you are mistaken.
For if you think about that apple, perhaps after you’ve consumed it or left the room, then what sits in your mind is not a physical fruit, but rather a spiritual one. The physical shell has been stripped and left with a conceptual one.
But this apple is still a raw, unrefined recreation of something physical - a mere imagined copy of the original.
But analyze it further, its cultivar, the process needed to grow such a fruit, the mere tweaks of its genetic code needed to change it from red to green, to yellow, more resistant to drought, more resistant to cold, the complex supply chain to bring it your door. Its quality, the smell of its juices when sliced open, the sweet taste and slight pucker from its first bite… These experiences begin to transcend the physical. No longer merely recreating something physical, this unpacked apple, pulled into dozens of different strands of understanding and experience, is far beyond the image of the fruit. Together it gives a higher, more transcendent fruit - suddenly this apple can now be appreciated as everything and yet remains nothing at once. Its the spiritual core of the apple, its soul, its G-dly vivifying spark.
In other words, you’ve touched the Ain - the ineffable unknowable at the core of reality. The Ain begins where the mind with its senses can no longer process, and the soul, with its profound appreciation begins.
The Ain is the core of all Creation, it is the profound splendor of wonder, the totality of a spiritual moment that so completely transcends you, so that no name can be given. That profundity can thus only be called Ain - ineffable.
You can not bring that moment into your perception. You can not grasp that moment, and bring it into the boundaries of time or space. Rather, it is the space where the contradictions of reality do not apply, all unpacked from its physical form, is absolutely and profoundly one with its source.
🏃 DO:
🧬 Join us Friday, September 9th for First Friday: Crispr, Designer Babies and Judaism - a Shabbat meal and curated conversation!
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🎧 Listen:
I was interviewed by the Podcast Against Antisemitism… have a listen!
🎬 Watch:
💬 Saying:
When a person has reason to cry, and he wants to cry, but is not able to cry—that’s the greatest cry of all.
—Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk
🎉 Mazel:
👶A big mazel tov Tech Tribe member Jacob and Yael Loewenstein on the birth of their son Lev Yechezkel!
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📚 Read:
🚩 The Exiled Rabbi and the Executed Poet: A Soviet Jewish Story.
📙 23 maps and charts on language
⛰️ The Prophet of the Andes’ Review: Journey of the Inca Jews
🔥 Lit:
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