To Light Up the Night

There can be no stability to a house that does not have a firm foundation. Our home-world is really our world as a home. Lest we think that this world is merely something exterior to ourselves, we must be reminded that it is also something that takes place within us and is co-founded in our consciousness. We straddle inner and outer realities by taking up residence in the world at large and by allowing the world long-term occupancy in our minds. As a result, the search for foundations of this duplex condition  takes on a special urgency: Upon what bases will I put together my thoughts and define the horizons of my perceptions of the bio-sphere all around me? Likewise, what does the world stand on? While we might suspect that the contract to build the world was given over to the world (that it should be self-constituting and self-standing as it pulls itself into existence by its own boot straps), upon inspection we uncover only circumstantial (another encircling Samech) evidence of this. The hard proof is missing. Persistent study may in the end conclude that so such evidence exists because no such documentation is possible. We ‘knowers’ enter in the mix, not in order to contaminate a world sufficient in its own right, but to assume the role (along with God) of its founders.

The counter claim to a self-sufficient world–a world that can get along without us–is evidenced in Proverbs 10:25 where we shoulder a co-creative, co-determining role as “…the righteous one [who] is the foundation of the world.” The weight of the world is upon us quite literally and when we act out of a sense of such a profound responsibility, our upstanding performance grants us the function of making fundamental determinations of our reality. We are the foundation of the house we live in. To a very large degree, whether it endures or collapses, suffers poverty or enjoys unimaginable success, rests on our hands. In Chassidic philosophy, we find extensive articulations of this position which privileges our uniquely human ability to work towards our own self-determination and perhaps even more powerfully, the re-programing of nature and the sculpting of reality as a whole. We are supporting the world (Samech once again means ‘support’) like the figure of a person holding the globe upon his or her back.

Of all celebrity tzaddikim (righteous ones), the one who stands out as being emblematic of this foundational role, whose life was the defining performance of the characteristic known in Kabbalah as the soul power of yesod (which meaning ‘foundation’), was Yosef/Joseph. Most often he is even referred to as Yosef ha’tzaddik (Joseph the righteous) on account of his uncanny ability to make everything ‘right’ by transforming reality. This transformation specifically hinges on his sense of the as-of-yet fluidity of the Real–the malleability of the dream-world whose meaning will comply with his interpretation of it.

Given that the inner experience of yesod or ‘foundation’ is emet or ‘truth,’ we can then say that Yosef/Joseph founds the truth of the world. At times, ‘truth’ in this context is used more to connote ‘verification‘ which he accomplishes be probing reality with the greatest of sensitivity. Symbolically this is depicted in Kabbalah by assigning an anatomical image as a qualifier for the soul power of yesod (foundation) which in this case is the male reproductive organ. Besides reproduction itself (reproduction can also literally and abstractly reflect ‘re-production’ in the sense of copying–mimetic or re-presentational acts), the commandment in the Torah specific to this ‘limb‘ of the male body is circumcision. Generally speaking, circumcision ‘marks‘ the sensitivity that extends out into the external reality (probing) and also exchanges information (dissemination/insemination) that fertilizes that external reality.

Seeding the world with semantic instructions (think bio-informatics) triggers a replication process whereby the world starts to build based on this new information (of course combined with the existing ‘feminine’ information that was already out there in the world). Since yesod (foundation) also represents the mouth in Kabbalah, it carries the analogy even further in terms of sexualized speech (intercourse/discourse etc…). Our speech acts are re-productive extensions of ourselves that revolutionize (Samech-circle) the world whose meaning prior to interpretation remains ambiguous (note that in Kabbalah the sexual symbolism is relative and thus applies to any speaker/interpreter regardless of biological sex–a topic to be explored more fully another time).

Thus, Yosef/Joseph may be considered as the paradigm for a ‘catalytic converter’ of the chemical elements of our reality-as-dream, processing them and recombining their elements alchemically into a desired substance. The Samech-circle of yesod is therefore all about the transformative ‘re-cycle’ and ‘spin’ that comes from our injecting of ourselves into the world to modify and order the world’s primal chaos. Transcending reality, which grants the tzaddik (righteous one) the ability to transform reality and provide it with a foundation, is described in the Zohar (I 4a) as “transforming darkness into light and bitterness into sweetness.” In the darkest of times, in the heart of exile (of which the long nights of the month of Kislev ‘make light of’) the world can undergo such an enlightening change (notably with the festival of lights–Chanukah). All of the uncertainty of the world which gets snared in our unconscious can be ‘talked down’ and addressed in the conscious mind by the power of the dream interpreter. All of the perceived negativity can also be sweetened by filling in the missing information from the picture (just like the yesod habrit or ‘foundation of the covenant’ of circumcision establishes the missing connections and uplinks between the human subject and the surrounding world).

As a procreative gesture, this filling of the gaps in the information of and about the world figures as the unification of masculine and feminine aspects of reality. Only with the marriage of the two do we have a complete and sustainable portrait of the world and ourselves. By adding in the ‘supporting foundation’ (Samech-circle at the level of yesod/foundation) can our world become our home. The conditions of its hospitality begin with us–with our kernel of inspiration–and they end with the sweetening of the outer world.

For Part 20 we will close the circle with the one last loop that comes from the feminine fertility of external reality.

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