A Simple Practice That Could Unleash the Energy in Your Marriage
Read an excerpt from The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage, Rob and Kristen Bell’s meditation on lifelong companionship.
We're for marriage, and we want to give you a new way of understanding marriage.
We call this way the zimzum of love.
Which of course raises the question:
What's a zimzum?
Zimzum (originally tzimtzum) is a Hebrew word used in the rabbinic tradition to talk about the creation of the world—not in a scientific way but more like something somewhere between poetry and metaphysical speculation. Followers of this tradition began with the assumption that before there was anything, there was only God. The divine, they believed, was all that was. For something to exist other than God, then, God had to create space that wasn't God. A bit esoteric, but stay with me. Their contention was that for something to exist that wasn't God, God had to contract or withdraw from a certain space so that something else, something other than God, could exist and thrive in that space. And the word they used for this divine contraction is zimzum. God zimzums, so that everything we know to be everything can exist and thrive.
We loved this word zimzum, and we were struck with how well it describes what happens when you're married. The more we talked about it, the more we found ourselves bending and stretching this word, making it our own. You meet this person, you fall in love, and you zimzu—creating space for them to thrive while they're doing the same for you. This zimzuming unleashes energy and creates space that didn't exist before, generating the flow that is the lifeblood of marriage.
We call this way the zimzum of love.
Which of course raises the question:
What's a zimzum?
Zimzum (originally tzimtzum) is a Hebrew word used in the rabbinic tradition to talk about the creation of the world—not in a scientific way but more like something somewhere between poetry and metaphysical speculation. Followers of this tradition began with the assumption that before there was anything, there was only God. The divine, they believed, was all that was. For something to exist other than God, then, God had to create space that wasn't God. A bit esoteric, but stay with me. Their contention was that for something to exist that wasn't God, God had to contract or withdraw from a certain space so that something else, something other than God, could exist and thrive in that space. And the word they used for this divine contraction is zimzum. God zimzums, so that everything we know to be everything can exist and thrive.
We loved this word zimzum, and we were struck with how well it describes what happens when you're married. The more we talked about it, the more we found ourselves bending and stretching this word, making it our own. You meet this person, you fall in love, and you zimzu—creating space for them to thrive while they're doing the same for you. This zimzuming unleashes energy and creates space that didn't exist before, generating the flow that is the lifeblood of marriage.
