The Big Bang names not a first moment within time but the ontological inception of this cosmological regime — the constitutive actualization of spacetime, its laws, and its initial conditions, in atemporal dependence on the structure of possibility itself.

That sentence is not a theological proposition. It is, increasingly, what working physicists are willing to say when pressed.

In a 2024 survey of physicists at the “Black Holes Inside and Out” conference in Copenhagen, and again in a larger 2025 Physics Magazine survey of more than 1,600 respondents, roughly 68 to 70 percent of physicists declined to identify the Big Bang as the beginning of time. They preferred to describe it as the evolution of the universe from a hot, dense state — leaving open whether time itself had an absolute beginning. This is not a fringe view. It is now the closest thing to majority opinion in a field famous for its lack of majorities.

The popular understanding of the Big Bang has not caught up. In bookstores and documentaries, “the Big Bang” still means the moment time began, before which there was nothing because there was no “before.” But the physicists have quietly walked away from that picture. What they are converging on — without quite naming it — is something Jewish thought has been articulating for at least eight centuries.

Consider what the survey result actually implies. If the Big Bang is not the beginning of time, then it is the beginning of something else — this cosmological regime, this spacetime, these laws, these initial conditions. And whatever stands in relation to that regime cannot be located within it. The dependency runs from outside the temporal order to within it. The cosmos depends on a structure that is not itself temporal.

This is precisely what the Lurianic Kabbalists meant by tzimtzum — the divine contraction or self-withdrawal that makes space, in the ontological rather than spatial sense, for a created order to exist. The classical commentators were explicit: the “sequence” of tzimtzum, shevirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the vessels), and tikkun (repair) is not chronological.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)