It's All a Game

Watch children play, say the Psychologists, and you'll see that at age three children's play is all about imagination ("I'm the mother, your the father"), yet by the time children reach age six the playing is about maintaining rules ("that's not fair! you can't do that!").

Indeed, a good game includes both rules and imagination. When the world's top checker players discovered that they could play the perfect game by using a set of plays known as "The Book", they squeezed all the imagination out and pretty much killed the game.  

Chess, on the other hand, still holds the imagination of world class players, because "a player looking just eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy; and there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe".

Listening to all of this on the radio (RadioLab, Games) on a trip from D.C to New York, I realized that this is Jewish Mysticism in a nutshell.

Judaism, according to the Kabalah and Chasidic Philosophy, is all about the uniting the infinite creator with the finite world (or in Kabalistic terminology: the unity of the "Holy One Blessed Be He" and "His Shechinah").

It's why Judaism believes that to connect to the infinite G-d you must follow defined and very specific commandments; it's why the Torah scroll losses all of it's infinite holiness if it's missing just one tiny letter; it's why the infinite G-d creates predictable rules of nature, and it's why Maimonides understood G-d to be a indefinable infinite being, who, paradoxically perhaps, relates and expresses himself to humanity in a finite way.       

Because the mystery of true infinity lies in the power that combines the infinity of imagination with the rules of the finite reality.