“In fitting the space around her, a woman does not necessarily fill it the way a solid plugs up a hole. Instead, what happens for her is apt to be a circular stretching, such that she touches all the edges without filling up the center, thus still allowing the interior its essential emptiness.”

This quote is from a book called The Sacred and the Feminine: toward a theology of housework by Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi.

(Okay, I should probably pause here and explain that, no, the title is not a joke, though it comes perilously close to sounding like one. And no, Rabuzzi is not a friend - I don’t even know her; and no, I am not cozying up to her so she will take my cat. I am reading her book as part of the research for my book on home that I am hoping to work on when Avram and I go on sabbatical in January. No doubt there will be much on home, and new discoveries of place written here over the next few months. And rest assured, there is no wood-burning stove in our temporary apartment. No woods, no scavenged logs, no sawing to write about. Lucky you.)

The quote precisely captures the differing, indeed gendered, senses of tzimtzum (personal contraction) I have mused about before.

Tzimtzum, of course, is the kabbalistic term for God’s contraction, withdrawal, from the expanse of the universe to leave room for the creation of matter, the world and us.

Know, that before the emanations were emitted and the creatures were created, a supernal light was extended, filling the entire universe. There was no unoccupied place, that is, empty air or space; rather, all was filled by that extended light…. But then, the Infinite contracted Itself into a central point which is truly in the center of the light, and that light was contracted and withdrew to sides around the central point. Then an empty place remained with air and empty space. The Infinite then extended one straight line from the light, and in the empty space It emanated, created, formed, and made all of the worlds in their entireties (Etz Hayyim, Part 1, Chapter 1).

As I always understood it, the kabbalists imagined God retracting into one very small space, and leaving the whole expanse of the universe empty, ready to be filled with life. The supernal light then surrounded “the Infinite” like shrink-wrap, and shot out, re-entering and forming the world as we know it.

But this always felt a bit severe, lonely, and masculine. It seemed like God was not just retracting but retreating, moving away when moving aside would have been enough.

I thought about this as I imagined all the women who make room in their bodies for the children they bear, moving aside to create that “essential [life-giving] emptiness” that surrounds the child within. I thought about this when I imagined how we hold a newborn, not by pulling back and away but opening up and around, re-arranging our arms to create new, emptied, bounded space in which the child will be coddled, protected and loved; or how parents make room for their children on sofas and chairs, moving their arms and opening laps and creating space that is waiting to be entered.

Why, I thought, couldn’t that be the way God contracted in the story?

This translation gives us an opening to read it that way. Perhaps the sides to which the supernal light “contracted and withdrew”  were not those of the Infinite but the outer sides of the universe. Perhaps the Infinite was in the middle and the light occupied the surround, edging the universe, bounding the empty space into which life would now be poured.

Perhaps the classic but harsher emptying-out and moving-over vision of the world’s creation can give way to this opening-up, enlarging self, embracing arms vision of the world’s birth. It makes the world a softer place to be.

(Photo: Me, holding my granddaughter at her baby naming in October, 2010)