The notion of zimzum

 I’m not a theological thinker. My knowledge of zimzum comes not from a theologian but from a short-story writer, albeit an extraordinary one.  

Here’s Isaac Bashevis Singer: 

I availed myself of the doctrine of zimzum, that wonderful notion which is so important in the Cabala of Rabbi Isaac Luria. God, Isaac Luria says, is omnipotent but had to diminish himself and his light so that he could create. Such shrinking is the source of creation, not only in man but also in the Godhead. The evil host makes creation possible. God could not have his infinite works without the devil. Out of suffering, creativity is born. The existence of pain in the world can be compared to a writer’s suffering as he describes some dreadful scene that he lives through in his imagination. As he writes, the author knows that his work is only fiction produced for his and his reader’s enjoyment. Each man, each animal exists only as clay in the hands of a creator and is itself creative. We ourselves are the writer, the book, and the hero. The medieval philosophers expressed a similar idea when they said that God is Himself the knower, the known, and the knowledge. …

God is not static perfection, as Spinoza thought, but a limited and unsatiated will for perfection.

We are here to do creative things, including creating comedy, music and literature out of suffering. Singer said that, in his case, the trick was learning to create out of inhibition.

• Source: Isaac Bashevis Singer, an untitled essay in Voices for Life: Reflections on the Human Condition, ed. by Dom Moraes; New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975, pp. 79-80. The book is a collection of essays with a couple of interviews. Moraes asked 25 people, “What do you see as the quality of life, and what do you think it will become in the future?”