‘The Divine Light: Ohr Ein Sof, the Infinite Light’

By Aaron Mandel

You know the moment, even if you have never had a name for it. You are sitting in a dark room — the literal dark of a sleepless three a.m., or the inner dark of a grief gone on too long — and without warning something brightens. Not a feeling you summoned. A light that arrived. This is what the mystics call the divine light, and the oldest Jewish tradition has a careful vocabulary for it: Ohr Ein Sof, the light of the Boundless, the infinite light that has no edge and no end. Long before you reached for it, the Psalmist had turned it into a prayer: “Many there are that say: ‘Oh that we could see some good!’ LORD, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.” (Psalms 4:7) That ache — let us see some good, lift the light — is where this whole subject begins. Not with theory. With longing.

What Ohr Ein Sof Means

Ein Sof means, almost untranslatably, “without end.” It is the name the Kabbalists give to God as He is in Himself, before any name we could fasten to Him. And Ohr Ein Sof — the infinite light — is how that boundlessness is spoken of when it turns toward us: not God’s essence, which no mind can touch, but the radiance of His presence reaching outward into being.

This is the first thing to hold carefully. The light is a metaphor. It is the way Scripture and the mystics gesture at the nearness of the One who cannot be seen, the way “the light of Thy countenance” gestures at a face we will never look upon directly. When the tradition praises Him, it reaches for the very word infinite: “Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite.” (Psalms 147:5) Ein Sof takes that single word — infinite — and lets it stand for the whole of who He is.

So when you read of the divine light, do not picture an energy to be harnessed or a force drawn down by technique. Picture instead a presence so full that the only honest image left to us is light — and even that image, the mystics insist, falls short of the One it points to.

The Light That Descends to Make Room

Here is the beautiful turn that Kabbalah makes. If the Ohr Ein Sof is truly infinite, filling everything, then there is no room left for a world. A world needs a somewhere to be — and an infinite light leaves no somewhere empty. So the tradition speaks, with great reverence, of a contraction: the Boundless withdraws, as it were, makes room, and into that cleared space lets a measured beam of light descend. Creation happens not by addition but by restraint — the infinite light dimming itself, on purpose, so that something other than God can exist and be loved.

You do not have to follow every thread of that mystery to feel its tenderness. The God of Ein Sof makes room. He limits the blaze of His own presence so that you, small and finite, will not be consumed but can stand before Him and live. The contraction is not distance. It is the love that turns down the lamp so the child can sleep — and keeps the lamp lit.

The Flash of Lightning

How does that descending light actually move? The Sefer Yetzirah, the ancient Book of Formation, reaches for one of the most arresting images in all of Jewish thought. Describing the sefirot — the ten facets through which the hidden God is said to act in the world — it says: “The appearance of the ten spheres out of nothing is like a flash of lightning, being without an end; His word is in them when they go and return.” (Sefer Yetzirah 6)

Read that slowly. Out of nothing — the light comes from no material source. Like a flash of lightning — it is sudden, total, gone almost before the eye can fix it. His word is in them when they go and return — the light is not still. It pulses. It comes and withdraws and comes again, the way lightning splits the dark and is swallowed back into it.

This is the rhythm the prophet Ezekiel saw at the foundation of his vision of the divine chariot: “And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning.” (Ezekiel 1:14) Ran and returned. The nearest beings to the throne do not rest in the light; they dart toward it and fall back, because no creature can hold the full blaze and remain. The lightning is the truest picture of the divine light precisely because you cannot stare at it. You catch it. It catches you. And then the dark returns — not as abandonment, but as the natural breathing of a light too great to be possessed.

This is why your own glimpses of the divine light come the way they do. A flash in the dark room. A moment of clarity in prayer you cannot reproduce on command tomorrow. You were not failing when it faded. You were standing in the oldest pattern there is: the light that runs and returns.

When the Darkness Is Not Dark

And now the consolation the sources press most insistently, the one meant for the three-a.m. version of you. If the light only ever flashed and left, we would be people of the dark who are sometimes startled. But the Psalmist says something bolder: the darkness itself is no obstacle to the One who is light. “Even the darkness is not too dark for Thee, But the night shineth as the day; The darkness is even as the light.” (Psalms 139:12)

To Ein Sof there is no place the light has not already reached. The dark room where you sit is not outside His seeing. It only feels dark to you. To Him, “the night shineth as the day.” That is not a denial of your darkness — Scripture never pretends the night is not real — but it refuses to let the darkness have the last word about where God is.

So the promise is not that you will be spared the dark. It is that the light finds you in it: “Unto the upright He shineth as a light in the darkness, Gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous.” (Psalms 112:4) The shining happens in the darkness, not after it has lifted. The Ohr Ein Sof does not wait for your night to end before it draws near. It arrives while the night is still black.

The Light That Grows

There is one more thing the sources will not let us forget. The divine light is not only the sudden flash. Over a life, it is also a slow dawning: “But the path of the righteous is as the light of dawn, That shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” (Proverbs 4:18)

Hold the two images together and you have the whole of it. Lightning — the unbidden glimpse, the moment that breaks in and breaks off. Dawn — the patient, almost imperceptible brightening of a soul that keeps turning toward the light over years. The flash is grace; you cannot schedule it. The dawn is the fruit of a thousand small returnings that no single day reveals but a decade quietly proves. You will not see the perfect day arrive. You will only notice, looking back, that the room is no longer as dark as it was.

This is why the infinite light is finally a matter of attention, not of attainment. You cannot manufacture the flash or rush the dawn. But you can keep facing the place the light comes from — and the keeping is itself the path that “shineth more and more.”

That keeping is something the page can help with. When the light flashes — a line of Tehillim that suddenly opens, an unexpected brightness in a hard hour — write it down before it runs and returns to the dark. One honest sentence: here is where the light reached me today. Do that across the seasons and you will have what no single glimpse can give you: a record of the dawn, slowly proving itself. A meditation journal is simply that record, kept faithfully — the place where the lightning is remembered long enough to become the dawn.