AN ARTICLE ON AIN SOF

Aryeh Kaplan said "one of the basic axioms of the Kabbalah is that nothing can be said about God Himself.

It is for this reason that God is called Ain Sof, which means literally, the One without end or limit.

God is infinite and therefore undefineable and uncharacterizable.

He is limitless Being and Existence before the act of creation as well as subsequent to it.

Even conceptually, there is no category in existence which can define God.

This is what the Tikuney Zohar means when it says 'No thought can grasp Him.'

On the level of Ain Sof, therefore, nothing else exists.

Every concept and category associated with existence must be created from nothing.

The primordial will to create is the first of these categories.

Since no quality can be ascribed to Ain Sof, it follows that if God has or uses 'Will,' He must have created it.

The Zohar explicitly states that God does not have 'will' in any anthropomorphic sense.

Rather, to the extent that we can express it, in order to create the world, God had to will
the concept of creation into existence.

In order to do this, He had to create the concept of 'will.'

This, of course, leads to an ultimate paradox, for if God is going to create 'will,' this in itself presupposes an act of will.

This means that going back to Ain Sof, to God Himself, involves an infinite regression.

There is no deficiency in the Ain, only fullness beyond the capacity of any created being to experience directly.

Rather, it is nothingness because of the lack of a category in the mind in which to place
it.
Ain is therefore only 'nothingness' relative to us.

It is the nothingness of ineffability and hiddenness.

It is no-thing because it is so much more rarified than the some-thing of creation.

In this sense, like God Himself, it is ultimately unfathomable and beyond our ability to comprehend.

On the other hand God's Will permeates the entire system of creation.

The continued existence of creation, in fact, depends entirely on God's
willing it.

Since only God exists in an absolute sense, everything else exists because God will its existence continually.

A human architect can design and construct a building and then forget about it.

But God's creation is more than that.

Nothing can exist without God constantly willing it to exist.

Without this, it would utterly cease to exist.

From Jacobus Swart (kabbalist)