The paper presents some common motifs of two thinkers who, despite a historical gap of several hundred years, had common roots in the tradition of Judaism. The notion of the Encounter, as analysed by Emmanuel Levinas, and the cosmogonic process of Creation in Isaac Luria‘s system of thought have a common motif in the phenomenon of the so-called “contraction” (Hebrew: tzimtzum). Despite the fact that for the first thinker it is the domain of ethics and for the second the domain of ontology, the act of a certain “self-limitation” or “withdrawal” plays in both cases a foundational role.
