The Wound That Gives The Pain of Self-Contraction in Creation, Revelation, and the Therapeutic Encounter: Research Article

Julian Ungar-Sargon

doi:10.58372/2835-6276.1402

Authors

Julian Ungar-Sargon

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58372/2835-6276.1402

Keywords:

tzimtzum, divine suffering, revelation, Sinai, Wolfson, Schelling, Eybeschütz, Va-avo ha-Yom el ha-ʿAyin hermeneutic medicine, therapeutic tzimtzum, décréation, Simone Weil, attention, affliction (malheur), divine concealment, the dark ground, ayin doctor-patient relationship, therapeutic presence, self-effacement, sacred brokenness, tikkun, self-limitation

Abstract

This essay extends the hermeneutic framework by pressing a single claim that Elliot R. Wolfson’s analysis of Lurianic mythology makes available but does not itself develop: that the pain of tzimtzum—the primordial self-contraction by which the Infinite makes room for a world—and the pain of revelation at Sinai are not two pains but one. Both are the suffering of self-limitation undertaken for the sake of an other; both are instances of a revealing that is simultaneously a concealing. I argue further that this pain is located with precision: not in Ein-Sof as undifferentiated plenitude, the One that has not yet thought, and not in the emptied ayin achieved by contraction, but at the threshold between them—the moment thought first arises in the Infinite and the One becomes capable, in a single act, of an other and of suffering. Drawing on Wolfson’s reading of simsum as the othering of Ein-Sof, on Schelling’s account of self-revelation as the expulsion of a dark remainder, and decisively on Simone Weil’s doctrine of décréation and attention, I argue that the doctor-patient relationship is structured by this same ache. The physician becomes present not by adding more of himself but by a decreation of the clinical “I”—a self-effacement that, turned as attention toward the patient’s affliction, reveals rather than conceals: in effacing himself the physician discloses his pain, and that revealed pain is the presence. The clinical encounter is thus not merely analogous to creation and revelation but a third instance of the same gesture: a wound that gives. An addendum explores a possible connection between Schelling and the kabbalist Jonathan Eybeschütz.

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