Water, Light, and Colors: God is Entirely One

The great master of sixteenth-century kabbalah, Moses Cordovero, developed an artistically rich discourse of mythic poetry, a poetics of theology. In this text, he expounds the difference between human knowledge of God (the “epistemic” perspective), as experienced through the seemingly distinct ten divine dimensions, or sefirot, and the “ontological” essence or deep truth of reality, of divine Being. As Cordovero frames it, the emanational flow, the life-force of divinity, is the indivisible oneness of En Sof—of the divine endless. Beneath all appearances, within the apparently separate colors of the different sefirot, all is One: a single river of transcendent energy, an unchanging and undivided force of the All. And yet, to the mystic, to the meditator, this fundamental unity so often manifests as being composed of different colors, aspects, and qualities. This is an illusion, a trick of the mind, Cordovero teaches. Just as water passes through containers of different colors, seemingly taking on those colors, so too the ultimate ground of divine Oneness, of En Sof, passes through the ten sefirot. As Cordovero puts it, articulating the tension between true reality and its prescription by the human mind: “The change in color does not affect the water itself, just our perception of the water.” This classic text is a textured example of the mystic principle of theology that all is One, and that oneness is the flowing being of God. We may perceive, or think we perceive, fragmentation and difference, but it is only the illusion of our finite human perception.