The Yechida as Higher Power
This essay articulates a distinction between my formal theological work—which engages the scholarly apparatus of Elliot Wolfson's phenomenology, Jonathan Eybeschütz's radical mysticism, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe's teachings on divine concealment—and my personal, experiential understanding of 'higher power' as it functions in spiritual practice. While my academic writing explores the objective metaphysics of tzimtzum, the dialectic of being and non-being (yesh and ayin), and the theological implications of divine contraction for post-Holocaust thought, my lived spirituality locates the 'higher power' not in the transcendent Ein Sof but within the innermost dimension of my own soul: the yechida. This essay explores how these two registers—the theological and the personal—relate without collapsing into identity, arguing that the yechida represents both the divine spark within and the authentic locus of spiritual contact that recovery and contemplative practice require.