Rabbi Ḥayyim of Volozhin (1749-1821) was among the most prominent disciples of the famed talmudist known as the Vilna Gaon, and founded a yeshiva in his hometown that became the model for all later such institutions. Three years after his death, his mystical-theological treatise, Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim (“The Soul of Life”), appeared in print; it aims to present an alternative exegesis of a core kabbalistic concept to that of the Ḥasidim, although it mentions neither them nor their works by name. Avinoam Fraenkel has now produced an annotated English translation of Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim, along with a companion volume analyzing it. Calling the two books “a work of both real piety and ingenious scholarship,” Yitzhak Melamed writes:

For both Rabbi Ḥayyim and his ḥasidic opponents, the mystery of how an infinite divine being created a finite physical world is answered by the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria’s doctrine of tsimtsum, or divine self-limitation. As Fraenkel writes near the beginning of his 757-page second volume, . . . the concept of tsimtsum “explains how it can be that the existence of an all-permeating and infinite God is totally concealed from us in the physical world.”

In the celebrated formulation of Luria’s student Ḥayyim Vital, before the creation of the world “the sublime and simple [divine] light filled all of reality, [but] then [God] contracted Himself at the very central point . . . and left an empty place . . . in which all the worlds . . . were formed.”

The precise meaning of this striking description was the subject of learned and subtle controversy among early-modern kabbalists. Some conceived it as a more or less literal description, affirming that the creation of a space truly vacant of God, a kind of spiritual vacuum, was a necessary condition for the creation of the world. Among this school of literal interpretation of the doctrine one finds . . . Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz, Rabbi Jacob Emden, and, according to some, even . . . the Vilna Gaon. In contrast to this school, . . . virtually every ḥasidic master adopted a nonliteral reading of the doctrine, arguing that the divine contraction before creation was only apparent and that truly God never withdrew from reality.

In situating Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim within the [framework of contemporary debates among kabbalists], Fraenkel has already done his primary audience—who are likely to be, like him, members of the modern-day, English-speaking yeshiva world—a great service. For . . . these readers and others have tended to read [this] treatise so selectively and with so little understanding of its kabbalistic terms of art that they have generally taken it to be a work of pious exhortations to study more Talmud, rather than a subtle work of mystical theology.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”