Lightning Flash
In addition to the Tree of Life, another diagram some Kabbalists use to depict the emanation of the sefirot is the Lightning Flash. The Sefer Yetzirah (the oldest known Hebrew text on cosmology) says of the sefirot, “Their countenance is like the scintillating flame flashing in lightning, invisible and boundless.”[1] This has also been translated as: “The ten ineffable sefirot have the appearance of the Lightning Flash.”
Some Kabbalists take this description to mean the sefirot are luminescent or that they can only be seen for an instant, like a flash of lightning. Others believe that the Lightning Flash depicts the continual descent of divine forces through the Tree of Life in a zigzag pattern like lightning.
The pattern of the Tree of Life, writes author Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi,
is the model on which everything that is to come into manifestation is based.... The relationships set forth in the Tree underlie the whole of existence; and so the properties of the sefirot may be seen in terms of any branch of knowledge.[2] The sefirot on the Tree might be regarded as a system of functions in a circuit through which flows a divine current.[3]
The divine flash continuously travels from a sefirah on the expansive Pillar of Mercy to a sefirah on the constrictive Pillar of Judgment then to a sefirah on the harmonizing Pillar of Compassion. The flash begins at Keter, flows to Hokhmah and Binah and then to Da’at. Next it travels to the expansive sefirah Hesed, then its constrictive opposite, Gevurah, then the balancing force of Tiferet. From there it moves to Netzah, Hod, Yesod and Malkhut.
See also
Sources
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Kabbalah: Key to Your Inner Power, chapter 3.
- ↑ Sefer Yetzirah 1.6, translation by W. Wynn Westcott, Sepher Yetzirah: The Book of Formation, 3d ed., rev. (1893; reprint, New York: Samuel Weiser, 1980), p. 16.
- ↑ Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), pp. 5, 6.
- ↑ Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, An Introduction to the Cabala: Tree of Life (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972), p. 32.