תפיסת "גניזת האור" בספר כתם פז לר' שמעון לביא בהשוואה לתורות הצמצום הלוריאניות

In 1571, the year in which Isaac Luria taught his esoteric doctrine in Safed, Simeon Lavi (RaShal) wrote his commentary on the Zohar, Sefer Ketem Paz, in Tripoli, North Africa. A central topic of this work is a description of the process of emanation as a process of sequestration of the divine light (genizat ha-or). This concept bears a certain similarity to the kabbalistic doctrines describing ẓimẓum within the Divine which appear in kabbalistic writings prior to the 16th century as well as in the works of Moshe Cordovero, and, as is well known, play a central role in Lurianic Kabbalah. This article discusses the points of similarity between the concept of genizat ha-or as it appears in Sefer Ketem Paz, and the kabbalistic doctrine of ẓimẓum, in particular as it appears in the writings of Luria's disciples. The major similarities are: the view that emanation involves God's voluntary self-limitation; the principle that the emanator defines a place for the emanated beings, and the view that the emanated beings cannot bear the strength of the unbounded flow of divine light. Another point of contact is the view that the source of evil is related to the divine self-limitation. However, many differences between RaShal's doctrine and that of ẓimẓum are evident as well. A major dissimilarity is that RaShal's system does not depict a crisis in the divine world. Another difference is the absence of the term ẓimẓum in RaShal's thought. The Safedian concepts of ẓimẓum and RaShal's view of the withdrawal of the divine light were developed in approximately the same period. Both RaShal's concept of genizat ha-or and the descriptions of ẓimẓum in the writings of Cordovero and Luria's disciples are based upon interpretations of Zoharic passages. The points of similarity between Lurianic ẓimẓum and RaShal's genizat ha-or, which developed independently, demonstrate that at least some of the central ideas of the doctrine of ẓimẓum existed in kabbalistic thought without reference to the term ẓimẓum. The contemporaneous emergence of these views illustrates two major characteristics of Kabbalah in this period: the attempt to create systematic, encompassing systems of thought which unite different and often contradictory views in a new and innovative structure, and the use of Zoharic exegesis in building these systems.