On the subject of Horizontal Axis in Religious Worship. One of the greatest creative achievements of the Kabbalists following Moshe De Leon was the multidimensional vision of the universe. Even the word sefira implied a sphere, a circle and gematria is of course geometría. Kabbalists poetically imagined the geometric structure where the smallest part contains biggest and hiskollelus or inclusion and interconnection form the kabbalistic cosmos. After the eruption of the vision, it was inevitable that just few centuries later the science would articulate the same idea. Compare the kabbalistic cosmos and the discovery by Galileo Galilei.
Sefirot in Kabbalah, Moshe De Leon 1250 – 1305
The phases of Venus, observed by Galileo in 1610
The catholic apparatchiks couldn’t care less if the earth was a flat rock or a ball. But the spherical cosmos deprived them of the earthly hierarchy, of the top and down, the low and high. This was a management problem. The Pope needs to be on top at all times and that requires the flattened subjects.
Chassidim, especially Chabad, did their best to downplay the complex multidimensional cosmology of Kabbalah and substitute it instead with a pure vertical axis. The geometric metaphor repeatedly evoked in Chabad (and especially during the communist/fascist era) is up and down, high and low. For the same reason that the Catholic apparatchiks preferred a flat earth, Chabad commissars saw the world divided into high, low and not low enough (bittul). “And yet it moves!”- Galileo.
- Further Reading:
- Horizontal Axis in Religious Worship
- 10 Similarities between a Chabad House and a Las Vegas Casino
- The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson
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