Preface to the English Edition

Nine years lie between the original German publication of my book Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung, which appeared in 2014 under the auspices of Suhrkamp's Jüdischer Verlag (Jewish Press), and Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World.The original edition of the book was widely received and reviewed.In it, I pre sent the more than four-hundred-year, rather paradoxical history of the originally esoteric, orally transmitted kabbalistic doctrine of zimzum, beginning in the sixteenth century and culminat