Christopher Schulte’s Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World is a study of the fundamental and elusive kabbalistic concept of the title. In his review, Eli Rubin turns to the interpretation offered by the late-17th-century English Christian philosopher Anne Conway:

For Conway, the most crucial kabbalistic idea was that creation depends on the diminishment of God. As “the chiefest Good,” she explained, God desired to “make Creatures to whom he might Communicate himself: But these could in no wise bear the exceeding greatness of his Light. . . . He diminished therefore . . . the highest Degree of his most intense Light, that there might be room for his Creatures.” Although the original Hebrew term is not transliterated here, Conway’s book was the first to introduce the doctrine of zimzum (also spelled tzimtzum, tsimtsum, or imum) to the English reading public.

Of course, “diminishment” is just one of many options available to translators and interpreters of zimzum. The choices listed by Christoph Schulte in the opening sentence of his recent book . . . are “contraction,” “retraction,” “demarcation,” “restraint,” and “concentration.” The futility of reducing the meaning of zimzum to any one of these words attests to the conceptual ambiguity that envelops this doctrine in a veil of tantalizing mystery, much as zimzum itself simultaneously conceals and reveals the divine.

The underlying concept seems to have originated with the Jerusalem-born mystic and sage Isaac Luria (1534–1572) in his interpretations of earlier kabbalistic doctrines—but even that supposition is the subject of controversy. Schulte traces its evolution since then through hasidic thought, Christian kabbalists, and such unlikely figures as the literary critic Harold Bloom.

Strangely enough, Schulte doesn’t seem interested in why these writers find this kabbalistic relic such an irresistible symbol of modernity. Even when cultural processes of disenchantment, materialism, and secularization empty zimzum of theological meaning, it somehow maintains its compelling power as a literary motif whose very emptiness gestures ironically, or perhaps mournfully, at the lost poetry of religion.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.