The Way of the Great Dragon

The Left Side Path of Hebrew Tantra

The Way of the Great Dragon: Light from Darkness
 


One night, a mystic comes upon a man intensely searching the ground under a street lamp. “Did you lose something?” inquires the mystic. “Yes, my keys,” responds the man frantically. So the mystic bends down to help the man search. After much time, he finally asks, “Where exactly did you lose them?” The man responds: “Over there, in that dark field.” Confused, the mystic says, “Then why are you looking for them over here beneath the light?” 

The man explains: “I can’t look there—it’s too dark!” 



Light is the primary image of the spirit. As Proverbs says, “The candle of God is the Soul of Man.” The Zohar, the foundational work of all Jewish mysticism, is literally translated as illumination. Indeed being enlightened is what Reb Tzadok HaCohen, one of the greatest mystical writers of the nineteenth century, calls he-arah—the ultimate goal of all spiritual work. 



Conventional wisdom teaches that light is the force that stands against the darkness. And ultimately we inherited the belief that in the long run, good triumphs over bad and light dispels darkness. However, the Kabbalists novel approach taught that the most potent light comes from darkness itself.

As the wise King Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, “Wisdom is more powerful than folly, as light is more powerful than darkness.” The ancient Kabbalists radically interpret this text. In Hebrew the word “than” can also be read “from.” Thus, they replaced each “than” in the sentence with a “from” and came up with the following axiom: “More powerful is wisdom that comes from folly and most powerful is the light that comes from the darkness.” According to the Kabbalists, the highest source of light is darkness. 


For nearly two thousand years, people ignored, denied, or labeled as evil the darker crevices of their soul. It was considered a deficit that was best left unexplored.


Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi—the founder of the Chabad Movement, goes one step further when he asserts that this is not only true about light in the universe, it is true about ourselves. Our highest light comes from our darkness, from the black holes of our soul. 
The primary source of this idea comes from a graphic description in the writings of 16th century Safed Kabbalist, Isaac Luria, on the Midrashic Creationist account of shevirat hakaylim the shattering of the vessels.

Now the terms “light” and “vessels” are used symbolically here to describe how an Infinite G–d created a finite world. As R. Isaac Luria describes it, G–d created a chasm where He concealed all of His spiritual energy, allegorically referred to as light. Then He channeled these lights into worlds—described as “vessels.” Each successive world had coarser and less refined vessels so that they could eventually channel light into a material world where one cannot automatically see G-dliness by observing nature.

According to this schema, G-d had first created primordial worlds where the spiritual lights were so powerful and intense that some of the lower worlds couldn’t contain these lights, and they imploded. 

Then G-d reconstructed these worlds by successively concealing the amount of light into the worlds and assimilating parts of the shattered worlds into this new world order. Some of the light folded back into its source and some of it remained trapped in the shards of the shattered vessels, scattered across creation. The shards of the shattered vessels encapsulated these G-dly sparks within their resistant capsules and are the source of evil in our world. 



In the language of the Kabbalah, the challenge of emotional, spiritual and psychological growth is to elevate the sparks— that is, to free the sparks from their darkened prisons and let them shine again. In this graphic image the world is understood to be a place of broken vessels, broken hearts, broken promises and broken lives. 

But what, really, is meant by revealing the light, or the sparks from the darkness of our souls? What is this darkness, and how do we approach it to achieve this essential and primordial fixing, referred to as tikkun, or rectification? 

The biblical image for darkness is “tzel,” the Hebrew word for shadow—the dark and non-integrated aspects of one’s soul.

The verse beloved by the Baal Shem Tov, “G-d is your shadow,” (Psalms 121:5) paints a picture of a G-d, who, like a shadow, responds to our every movement. But according to the mystical interpretation, this verse suggests that in fact, divinity, particularly in the form of the unique Tzelem Elokim—the Divine image in whose likeness we were created, is reached through embracing one’s shadow.

 Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, one of the authors of the Zohar, pioneered the human being’s service of G-d through darkness. The third section of the Zohar (pages 25 to 48) tells of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai inviting ten men of exalted spiritual status to the Great Gathering. In the beginning of the gathering he taught that the essence of his mystical path is the “Way of the Great Dragon.”

The way of the Great Dragon, sometimes called the “way of the left column,” is understood by Kabbalists to mean the way of the shadow. Following this path requires serving G-d by releasing the light and energy from the darkness.
 

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Marc Gafni

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