ספר בראשית

This was portrayed in the passage at the beginning of Tikkuney Hazohar (based on ‎‎Zohar chadash 59, column 3) where the prophet Elijah ‎appeared to Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai and his son Eleazar in the cave where they were in hiding ‎from the Romans and Elijah planted a carob tree and provided a well of spring water from ‎which the two men ate and drank during the 12 years they spent in hiding. Elijah would visit them ‎twice daily and teach them, enabling them to escape prosecution by the Romans. Among the ‎lessons Elijah taught them was the fact that in order to make use of G’d’s input into the physical ‎parts of the universe, G’d had to “clothe Himself,” i.e. conceal His essence, by restricting the ‎holiness He radiated, or this would have been too overwhelming for the recipients thereof. Ari ‎zal, sums this up as: “all parts of the universe require that G’d’s essence reduces its ‎natural radiations, as all creatures in varying degrees are unable to withstand the brilliance of the ‎emanations from G’d’s essence unless they had first been screened to some extent.” According to ‎the Ari zal, any part of any universe, by definition contains a degree of substance, as ‎opposed to G’d, Who is entirely abstract, spiritual. According to this view even the purest and ‎holiest thought entertained by a living creature contains an element of physicality, since only G’d ‎can be pure spirit.‎It follows that before G’d could undertake the creation of a physical universe He had to surround ‎His essence with “garments” shielding His creatures from this overwhelming spiritual radiance ‎emanating from Him. In order to achieve this, G’d “clothed” Himself in garments radiating light. If I ‎understand this correctly, the closer G’d came to the eventual physical world, the more subdued ‎was the brilliance exuded from His “garments,” which He changed from stage to stage so as to ‎enable the creatures in each world to tolerate it without coming to harm through being blinded.‎ All of these “worlds” (regions inhabited by spiritual beings of varying degrees of holiness) are ‎extremely bright, Isaiah 58,11 referring to them as ‎והשביע בצחצחות נפשך‎ “He will satiate your soul ‎with brightness.”‎