Neshamah – the dimension of self who abides in Beriah, the World of Creation – is the self who hears the still, quiet voice of revelation through the thunderous noise of objective spectacle.

Neshamah receives gifts of overwhelming meaning – both of creation and of revelation – ex nihilo.

Ex nihilo – from Nothing.

Nothingness is precisely the aperture through which incomprehensible meaning floods into the world from Beriah.

A gift of Beriah, once received, annihilates our naive misconception of nothingness.

Never again can we take nothingness at face value and confuse it with mere absence.

Never again can we experience nothingness without anticipation and hope.

Nothingness is Ayin, the divine naught who protects our eyes from the divine light of infinite intensity.

Ayin is the blessed blindness who shields us from what we are unprepared to witness.

We are oblivious to such realities, and to us they are nothing, until they become givens – gifts.

Meaning enters the world through Ayin.

Once we know this from the heart, in faith, we are exnihilists – we can no longer see nothingness without knowing how it conceals, and how it may, at any moment, reveal.

Shema, Neshamah Yisrael.