The next theme Ramchal offers here is that all of creation is a single entity in human form known as Adam Kadmon. As he words it “the whole on-going process of governance (of the universe) … and the whole of creation (itself) encompasses one single phenomenon and order … (that is) the mystic figure of a (single) “person” with all his body-parts, which are all inter-connected exactly as they would be in a person (Petach 12). We’d cited Adam Kadmon (“Primordial Man”) before but let’s now explore it.
For one thing, this raises the whole issue of anthropomorphism, since Adam Kadmon seems to be such a blatant and resolute instance of it. But we’ll return to anthropomorphism below when we discuss Ramchal’s discussion of prophetic imagery.
The earliest allusion to Adam Kadmon is the statement in Breishit Rabbah to the effect that God first created the first man, Adam, as an unformed lump (see Psalms 139:16); as having been created him before the rest of creation; and as having spread him out from one corner of the universe to the other” (8:1). As such, Adam Kadmon is usually depicted as having been formed out of the unformed non-material stuff that preceded the universe, and as then occupying the entirety of the space devoid of God that He’d allowed for with the Tzimtzum.
The other element of Adam Kadmon is that it’s also said to be “Macrocosm” or large-depiction of the “Microcosm” or small-depiction that is the physical universe; and that is illustrated in the Zohar by the idea that Adam Kadmon is “in the image of everything that is above and below” (3, 141b). The truth of the matter is that the above Midrash also alludes to that, in that the original, universe-wide Adam can be seen as the source of the eventual earth-bound Adam.
(c) 2011 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman
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