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Chapter 8
Now, what Maimonides, of blessed memory, wrote, that the Holy One, blessed be He, His essence and His very self and His knowledge are all truly one, a simple unity and not composite at all, so the matter truly is with all the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, and with all His holy names and the designations by which the prophets and our sages, of blessed memory, designated Him, such as Gracious and Merciful and Kind, and the like. And likewise that He is called wise, as it is written (Isaiah 31:2), “And He too is wise,” and so on. And likewise His will, for Hashem (God) desires those who fear Him, and He is desirous of kindness, and He desires the repentance of the wicked, and He does not desire their death and their wickedness, and He is pure of eyes from seeing evil. His will and His wisdom and His attribute of kindness and His compassion and the rest of His attributes do not add in Him plurality and composition, God spare us, in His essence and His very self. Rather, His very self and His essence and His will and His wisdom and His understanding and His knowledge and His attribute of kindness and His might and His compassion, and His beauty, which is comprised of His kindness and His might, and likewise the rest of His holy attributes, are all truly a simple unity, which is itself His very self and His essence. And as Maimonides, of blessed memory, wrote, of this matter there is no power in the mouth to say it, nor in the ear to hear it, nor in the heart of a person to know it in its clarity. For a person pictures in his intellect all the things of the mind that he wishes to grasp and to understand, all of them as they are in him. For example, when he wishes to picture in his intellect the essence of will, or the essence of wisdom or of understanding or of knowledge, or the essence of the attribute of kindness and of mercy, and the like, he pictures all of them as they are in him. But in truth the Holy One, blessed be He, is high and lifted up, and holy is His name. That is to say, He is holy and set apart by myriads of myriads, without end or limit, of degrees of separation, higher and higher, above the measure and the class and the kind of all the praises and the excellences that created beings could grasp and picture in their intellect.
For the first excellence and degree among the created beings is wisdom, and therefore it is called “beginning,” for in truth it is the beginning and the source of all the life force in the created beings. For from wisdom are drawn understanding and knowledge, and from them are drawn all the attributes in the intellectual nefesh (the lowest level of the soul), such as love and kindness and mercy, and the like. And as is apparent to the senses, the child in whom there is no knowledge is always in anger and is cruel, and his love too is for small things that are not fit to be loved, because there is in him no knowledge to love things that are fit to be loved, for the love is according to the knowledge. And from the attributes in the nefesh, words and letters of thought are drawn in it, for the nefesh thinks of the thing that it loves, or how to carry out the kindness and the mercy, and so with the rest of the attributes. And in every thought in the world some attribute is clothed in it, which brings one to think this thought, and this attribute is the life force of this thought. And from the letters of thought are drawn the letters of speech, and they are truly their life force. And speech brings one to the deed of charity and kindness, such as a king who commands his servants to give.
And also when a person does some thing by himself, behold, the power of the nefesh and its life force that is clothed in this action is as truly nothing beside the power of the nefesh and its life force that is clothed in a person’s speech, and as the relation and the likeness of the body to the soul. And so is the relation of the letters of speech to the letters of thought, and so is the relation of the letters of thought to the essence of the attribute that is clothed in it and gives it life. And so is the relation of the essence and the life force of the attribute beside wisdom and understanding and knowledge, whose whole is the intellect, from which this attribute was drawn. And all this is in the nefesh of a person and the nefesh of all the creatures in all the worlds, upper and lower, for in all of them wisdom is the beginning and the source of the life force.
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