The Migration of the Image
This essay traces a single theological trajectory across nineteen centuries: the migration of the divine image (zelem) from a location to a dimension, from a dimension to a psyche, from a psyche to a linguistic veil, and finally to a marginal disturbance in an infinity that does not know it happened. The rabbis, on Alon Goshen Gottstein's reading, meant by zelem the body — a luminous body, but a body, occupying a place and susceptible to injury. The first kabbalists, on Sandra Valabregue-Perry's reading, dissolved that location into an infinite vertical axis by two conceptual moves: the deification of the sefirot and the collapse of Sefer Yetsirah's multidirectional expansion into a single ascending line. Erich Neumann interiorized the axis, mapping Eyn-sof onto the creative unconscious and tzimtzum onto the contraction of the ego. Elliot R. Wolfson stripped the image of ontological standing altogether, reading the anthropomorphic configuration as an imaginal veil woven of letters and demanding its iconoclastic erasure. The treatise Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayin, transmitted under the name of Jonathan Eybeschütz, terminates the sequence by positing an infinity without thought — a Godhead in which the cosmos figures as an involuntary ripple at the periphery of an unminding abyss. I argue that this is not a story of refinement but a sequence of four relocations, each purchasing explanatory power at the same price: the loss of an addressee. I then argue, from my own published work, that the trajectory can be answered only by a return to where it began — not to rabbinic corporeal realism, which is unrecoverable, but to an embodied theology in which the image is again something that can be wounded, and therefore again something that can be addressed. The last word of the essay is the first: the heel that outshone the sun.