Kabbalists on originary time-space.

With this agenda in mind, I will extract from kabbalistic sources a conception of time that involves the expansion of duration into place, a temporal extension that is not constituted either by simultaneity or succession, as Husserl argued, but rather an extension with greater affinity to the monad described by Iamblichus in the Theologumena arithmeticae; that is, the nonpositional, zero-dimensional mathematical point that exists prior to the point demarcated by the spatial coordinates of length, width, and breadth or the temporal coordinates of past, present, and future. Time and space are not to be cognized primarily as material substances nor are they conceived respectively as the measure of bodies in motion or as the three-dimensional container in which all bodies are positioned. These commonplace philosophical understandings were undoubtedly known to kabbalists, and even occasionally affirmed by some explicitly, but on the whole they proffered a different conception related to the incarnational investiture of the light of Ein Sof, which corresponds to Heidegger's contention that space and time are "the opening [Ausbruch] and upsurge [Anbruch] of being."⁹ Or, as he put in the Beiträge, commenting on the relation of time-space and the facticity of Dasein: "Time-space [Zeit-Raum] as arising out of, and belonging to, the essence oftruth and as the thereby grounded structure (joining) of the 'there' a structure Of transport-captivation [Entrückungs-Berückungsgefüge]. (Not yet a 'schema' for the representation of things, not yet mere flowing-by in the order of succession)."¹⁰

9 Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, p. 14; Uberlegungen II-VI (GA 94), p. 18.

10 Heidegger, Contributions, S 238, pp. 293; Beitrage (GA 65), p. 371.

From Elliot R. Wolfson's Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis.