from an article on the Chabad magazine site, concerning the concept of tikkun olam ('repairing the world') comes this summary of the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria -
Ari means “lion.” That’s the title universally granted to Rabbi Yitzchak Luria. He taught for less than three years in Tzfat, in the Galilean hills of northern Israel, before his early passing in 1572. Few people have had such impact in such a brief time.
The Ari taught in esoteric terms, employing rich metaphor in complex detail. But if we distill it down, through many distillations, we can tell a story something like this:
In the beginning there shone an infinite light. But within an infinite light there can be no finite world.
So the light receded, remaining infinite, but creating a vacuum. Absolute darkness.
And then, from the infinite light beyond and into the darkness within, burst a fine, measured beam of light. A ray of conscious thought. An idea. A ray which held everything—
—all of time and all of space, all wisdom and all understanding of that wisdom, all greatness and might, beauty and glory, wonder and creativity—
—every voice that would ever be heard, every daydream that would ever fleet through a distracted mind, every furious wave of every stormy sea, every galaxy that would ever erupt into being,
every gravitational field of every mass, every charge of every electron, the frantic ant running across the pavement beneath your feet, the basket some kid scored in a park somewhere just now—everything that ever would be and could be—
—all cocooned within a single, deliberate and conscious thought.
And then that thought exploded.
Now there was a world.
You’ve heard of a primal explosion before—the Big Bang. But here we are talking about more than matter and energy.
The universe contains conscious beings, such as ourselves. From where does that consciousness emerge, if not from the very fabric of the universe itself?
So Think of a primal, singular, deliberate and conscious thought, too intense to contain itself. What happens when such an idea explodes?think of a primal, singular, deliberate and conscious thought, too intense to contain itself. What happens when such an idea, rather than gradually developing and expanding, chaotically explodes?
Imagine taking a book and casting the words and letters into the air.
Imagine an orchestra where none of the musicians can hear one another, and the conductor is nowhere to be found.
Imagine a movie set without a director, each actor speaking lines without a clue of their meaning.
That is our world. A book in search of its meaning, an orchestra in search of its score, actors in search of their playwright and director.
Awaiting us to rediscover that meaning. To put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
The fragments of that shattered origin are called sparks. They are the divine meaning of each thing—their place and particular voice in the great symphony.
Each spark is trapped within a shell. They are the noise and dissonance that shrouds those sparks when they are thrown violently from their place.
Our job is to see past the shell and discover the spark within. And then to reconnect that spark to its place in that grand original vision.
We call that purification. And the result is called geulah—liberation.
The liberation of humankind is intimately tied to the liberation of those sparks of meaning. Your personal liberation is tied to the particular sparks assigned to your soul.
Once a critical mass of sparks has been reconnected, the entire world is liberated. It becomes a different world. The one it was meant to be.
This was all very counterintuitive for a lot of people.
Both religion and philosophy had allotted human beings a passive role in their world’s destiny. The Creator had made a beautiful world, we had messed it up. It was up to Him to judge, reward, punish and take care of our mess.
And now that was reversed. The Creator was the one who had handed us a mess—so that we could complete the job of perfecting it from within. It is a good world, a very good world—because we are empowered to make it good.It is a good world, a very good world—essentially because we are empowered to make it good.
Effectively, the Ari gave center stage to the actions of human beings.
The idea of tikkun seeped rapidly into every facet of Jewish thought and affected every Jewish movement, directly or indirectly. Jews no longer saw themselves as passive servants of G‑d’s judgment, but as active players, whose redemption, and the redemption of the entire world—indeed, the entire cosmos—lay in their hands.
Every mitzvah they did gained new meaning. Every prayer, every word of Torah study—each was now not just a good deed to be rewarded, but another step towards the ultimate geulah of the entire world.
The Ari was a halachist—an expert and authority in Jewish law—and he saw all of Jewish practice as a crystallization of Kabbalah. Tikkun in action.
The idea of tikkun also spread to the intelligentsia of 17th-century Europe, who were fascinated with all things Hebrew, and especially the Kabbalah. It was at that time that people first began to speak in terms of human progress, of building a better world through social action and advances in the natural sciences.
As historians have pointed out, it is difficult to identify any source for these notions—certainly not in Greco-Roman philosophy, nor in the doctrines of the Reformation—nowhere other than the Kabbalah, and specifically the teachings of the Ari.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
