The bodhisattva vow

The Mahāyāna's great turn: instead of the arhat's liberation from the round, the vow to postpone your own freedom until every being is free — beings are numberless, I vow to save them all. It is a promise that cannot be kept and is made anyway, and the making of it is the practice. The Kabbalah's answer to it is startlingly close in shape and opposite in premise. The tzaddik descends in order to lift others (yeridah tzorech aliyah); the thirty-six hidden righteous hold the world up without knowing they are doing it; the Ari's doctrine makes your own tikkun literally impossible to finish alone, because your sparks are scattered in other people's lives. Both traditions arrive at: there is no private salvation. Buddhism gets there because there is no self to save privately; Kabbalah gets there because every self is wired to every other.