Oneness: God's existence, His will and control
Only His Will is in absolute control — and any other will, no matter how independent it seems, exists through His Will and remains under it.
Klach is a book about cosmic structure — Sefirot, Partzufim, Coupling, the long architecture of repair. But before any structure can be discussed, one foundation has to be set: that there is one Will in absolute control, and that everything else exists at its discretion. Without this, the rest of the book cannot stand. Op. 1 sets the foundation. It also draws a single restriction that quietly determines the shape of every later chapter — Kabbalah speaks only of His Will, never of His Essence. Anything we are about to say for the next 137 chapters is a name for what He chose to reveal of His Will, never a description of what He is in Himself.
The everyday way of saying God is one is monotheism — there is one God, not many. Ramchal wants something stronger. One in his sense means that no other absolute can coexist with Him: no rival sovereign, no parallel power, nothing that exists by its own right. Other beings exist — angels, souls, the natural order, even our own choices — but they exist through Him, sustained at every moment by His Will, and they remain under that Will throughout.
This is harder than it first sounds. The objection comes immediately: if His Will is all that operates, what about my free will? what about evil? what about the apparent independence of the natural order? These are the questions Op. 2 through Op. 4 will answer in detail, and Op. 1 already gestures at the answers. Free will is real, but it is real within the cosmic system He set up to make moral service possible. Evil is real, but it is real as a means — created in order to be overcome, not as an independent power. The natural order operates regularly, but the regularity is itself a feature of His Will, not an independent law that limits it. The strong oneness of Op. 1 is therefore not a flat denial of these realities; it is the framework within which their reality is correctly placed.
The most consequential move in the chapter is the one Ramchal makes about what we are allowed to discuss. The subject of all subsequent Kabbalistic talk is His Will — not His Essence. This is not a piece of theological caution; it is the founding rule of the whole discourse. When the book later names Eyn Sof (the Limitless), or the Sefirot (the visible attributes of His Will), or Partzuf (a fully-articulated mode of governance), every one of these names is a name of His Will, not a description of what He is in Himself. The strong oneness of Op. 1 becomes the strong restriction of every later technical term.
The chapter closes by stating what it has established as an axiom — and by gesturing forward. The same oneness that is the axiom at the start is the same oneness that will be revealed at the end of the cycle of creation. The arc of the entire book is, in one sense, the long pedagogical extension of Op. 1: the foundational claim made manifest through the apparatus of time.
The Will / Essence restriction will be doing silent work in every chapter from here onward. You will see it land most directly at Op. 24, where the Tzimtzum (the cosmogonic act of self-restriction) is shown to take place in one of His powers — never in His Essence, because of Op. 1. And you will see the cycle close at Op. 138, where the same oneness Op. 1 declared as axiom is, structurally, the oneness whose revelation the book ends celebrating. Read Op. 1 once now; the rest of Klach is the long working-out of what is already here in compressed form.