God is One and All: There is Nothing Else

This passage, by Moses de León, a key member of the Castilian kabbalistic circle of the Zohar, is a powerful, vivid, and clear articulation of the deep monism (i.e., the view that reality is made of a single substance), indeed pantheism, that underpins kabbalistic theology. As de León states unequivocally, all of reality is one and inseparable, bound together like links in the great chain of being. As he evocatively puts it, “everything from the highest to the lowest, extending from the upper pool to the edge of the universe” is fastened together. From the most exalted and most transcendent to the lowest link in the chain in the mundane realm, all is One. The kabbalist’s concluding statement drives home the radical and forceful nature of this theological principle: “There is nothing else.”