The Location of the Unexplained
David Deutsch holds that all knowledge is created by conjecture and criticism, that every problem is in principle soluble, and that a rational mind resolves its inner conflicts without coercion. Hasidic and Kabbalistic thought holds that knowledge arises from a prior nothingness (ayin), that the flash of chokhmah precedes and exceeds its articulation in binah, and that some questions belong to a vacated space (ḥalal ha-panui) where explanation cannot follow. This essay sets the two systems side by side, identifies four convergences and four divergences, and then turns Deutsch's own criterion of a good explanation on Kabbalah: as cosmology, tzimtzum fails it; as a clinical conjecture, parts of it pass. Elliot Wolfson's apophatic reading of Kabbalah is brought in as a third voice that corrects both sides, and the Izbica doctrine of the will is set against Deutsch's theory of the self. The essay then asks what all of this contributes to the clinician who meets a patient's non-rational thinking: the premonition before the test result, the conviction that illness is punishment, the refusal of a recommended treatment, the lament that asks "why me?" Deutsch supplies a test of form (is this belief open to criticism?); the Hasidic tradition supplies a test of location (is this a question explanation can answer, or one only presence can hold?); Izbica adds that the patient's choices may be discovered rather than authored. Reason does not abolish the patient's mystery but changes where that mystery is found.