There is a kind of coldness, a stiffness, a certain rigidity that sets in without our even being aware it has happened. It is an effort at self defense, this hardness – a means of protecting ourselves by rendering our souls impenetrable and insensible to pain. This hardening, this shell formed around the heart, is what we mean by qlippah – the shell that hides the sparks of God, makes them inaccessible to one another, interferes with both transmission and reception. Locked inside of our own personal Faraday cage, each of us becomes cut off from the signal transmitted by all.

The dichotomy of qlippah/nitsuts (shell and spark) does not map cleanly onto the material/spiritual divide. We are not living in a gnostic universe, and there is not demiurge we can blame for our predicament. The truth is much simpler, and much sadder – that each of us is their own demiurge, weaving around ourselves a shell of falsehood, a kind of anti-cocoon that calcifies our being and makes us impervious to healthy change.