Nitzutzot: Sparks (Buber)

itzutzot-S ark The sparks teaching of the later Kabbala became an ethical teaching in the hands of the Baal-Shem-Tov and expanded to a task that embraced the whole of life. In the primordial time of being, in the time when God built worlds and tore them down . . . Sphere extended itself out of sphere, wolrd climbed away over world, shell joined itself to shell, unto the limit of transformations. Here in the realm of matter that is extended in space, that endures in time, on the rim of what has become, in the uttermost borderland of sense things, God's wave breaks.. . (II The wave that breaks here is God's. As the light from the highest plunged into the lower spheres and shattered them, light-sparks from the primordial being in the immediate presence of God ... have fallen into the imprisonment of the things. God's Shekina descends from sphere to sphere, wanders from world to world, banishes itself in shell after shell until it reaches its furthest exile ... . . . sparks have fallen into all things of the world. In a material shell, in a mineral, in a plant, in an animal is hidden, a complete figure like that of a human, doubled up, head on thighs without being able to move hands and feet, like an embryo. Only through human (interaction) is there a redemption . . . If you accomplish this it is as if you had liberated the king's child from captivity.