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ZOHAR
Arthur Green
A
(;UIDE
TO THE
ZOHAR
Arthur Green
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2004 by the Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, Arthur, date—
A guide to the Zohar / Arthur Green.
p- cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8047-4907-8 (cloth)—
ISBN 0-8047-4908-6 (paper)
1. Zohar. 2, Cabala—Early works to 1800. 3. Bible. O.T.
Pentateuch—Commentaries—Early works to 1800.
I. Title.
BM525.A59 G73 2004
296.1'62—dc22 2003021735
Original printing 2004
Designed by James P. Brommer
‘Typeset in 11/16 Bembo
For Ebn and Or
Tn” OR
Contents
Diagram of the Ten Sefirot ix
Preface xi
PART I INTRODUCTION
1 Prologue 3
2 The Kabbalistic Tradition: A Brief History Until the Zohar 9
3 Teachings of the Kabbalists: The Ten Sefirot 28
PART II WHAT IS THE ZOHAR?
4 The Zohar: Midrash on the Torah 63
s The Zohar Narrative 71
6 Mysticism of the Zohar 77
7 The Zohar in Historical Context 86
PART ITI SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR
8 Creation and Origins Io!
g Between Worlds 109
10 Evil andthe Demonic 116
11 Torah and Revelation 122
12 The Commandments 126
13 Avodah:The Life of Worship 134
14 The Tsaddig and the Life of Piety 145
15 The Jewish People, Exile,and Messiah 151
Contents vill
PART IV THE ZOHAR AS TEXT
16 Special Sections of the Zohar 159
17 The Question of Authorship 162
18 The Language of the Zohar 169
19 Editing and Printing of the Zohar 174
20 Influence and Canonization of the Zohar 178
Bibliography 189
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The Ten Sefirot
Preface
The purpose of this Guide is to equip readers, including those who
lack prior knowledge of Kabbalah, to understand and appreciate the
Zohar text. The Guide appears in conjunction with Stanford Univer-
sity Press's publication of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, a new translation
by Daniel C. Matt. To appreciate the Zohar in its fullest sense, it must
be said, the work needs to be read, indeed carefully studied, in the
original. Like most of the kabbalistic tradition within which it stands,
the Zohar is fascinated with the mysteries of language, in both its oral
and written forms. No reading through the “veil” of translation could
do justice to the Zohar’s rich and creative appropriation of the nu-
ances of Hebrew and Aramaic speech, its startling transformation of
countless biblical verses, and its frequent subtle rereadings of the older
rabbinic legacy that together constitute much of the Zohar’s charm
and genius.
Nevertheless, a great deal can be gained through carefully reading
and studying the Zohar in this new translation, which is accompanied
by a line-by-line commentary. For this gain to be possible, however, the
reader needs to be initiated into the symbolic language in which the
work was written. Although the Zohar’s poetic spirit often transcends
the symbolic conventions, they were always present in the background
of the writers’ imagination. So too, it was assumed, would they be pres-
ent in the mind of the reader. The Zohar was composed in the hope
that it would be passed on and studied in circles of initiates, as indeed
it was for many generations.
XI
Preface xu
Translation of the Zohar into western languages began as early as
the fifteenth century, when passages were rendered into Latin for use
by Christian devotees of esoteric lore in Renaissance Italy. In the twen-
tieth century, various translations of the entire Zohar, or at least of most
sections of it, appeared in German, French, and English. The previous
standard English translation is that of Harry Sperling and Maurice Si-
mon, published by the Soncino Press in 1931-34.
The new translation and commentary in the Pritzker Edition of the
Zohar bear witness to the high standards of Zohar scholarship that
have been achieved in recent decades. These standards are the result of
the new attention paid to Kabbalah in academic circles, largely thanks
to the writings of Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) and the cadre of
scholars he and his successors have trained within the Israeli universi-
ties. The first scholar to bring Scholem’s approach to kabbalistic studies
to North American shores was Alexander Altmann (1906-1987) of
Brandeis University, whose students include the current translator of
the Zohar, the author of this Guide, and indeed a majority of the Kab-
balah scholars in the English-speaking world.
To appreciate the Zohar you also need to know something of the
historical and literary context in which it appeared. The Zohar makes
use of a very wide selection of Jewish texts that preceded it, ranging
from the Torah itself to legal, mystical, and philosophical works that
were written just shortly before its appearance. It reflects on all of these
texts and uses them freely as inspiration for its own unique sort of in-
novative and sometimes even playful religious creativity. It is also much
concerned with the Jews and their history: that recorded in Scripture,
the present exile, and the dream of messianic redemption. These too
form part of the background needed to understand the Zohar.
The author of this Guide, a teacher of Zohar for several decades, in-
vites the reader to join with him in preparing to read this greatest
‘
work of the Jewish mystical tradition. For reasons of pedagogy, this
sy os
Preface xi
Guide begins with a few matters of definition and then turns to his-
tory. We briefly outline the development of Kabbalah in the century
leading up to the Zohar, considering also the use made in Kabbalah of
prior Jewish sources and the relationship between Jewish philosophy
and Kabbalah. We then discuss the essential teachings of Kabbalah, es-
pecially the symbolic language of the sefirot. With these in place, we
turn to the Zohar itself, discussing in turn its style of thought and ex-
egesis, its narrative modes, and the historical context within which it
was written. Then we treat some key themes within the Zohar, exam-
ining its teachings without, hopefully, reducing them to the object of
mere “intellectual history.’ We proceed to discuss the special sections
of the Zohar, its language, and its appearance and authorship. From
there we go on to examine the Zohar’s canonization and editing, its
publication in printed form, and its influence on the later history of
Judaism and Jewish mysticism in particular.’
The “tall order” detailed in the preceding paragraph requires a dis-
claimer. Monographs and learned articles have been written on each of
the subjects just mentioned. Some of them have been the subject of
entire books. This introduction does not seek to break new ground in
most of these areas. It is rather a digest of what the writer considers to
be the finest scholarship and deepest insights regarding the Zohar that
have been written since Scholem began the era of modern Kabbalah
scholarship. While responsibility for any misunderstandings or omis-
sions are entirely my own, I wish to acknowledge fully that the insights
contained within it are those of three or four generations of scholars
1. The reader who seeks a more extensive introduction to the Zohar should turn
to Isaiah Tishby’s monumental Wisdom of the Zohar. The English translation by
David Goldstein (London: Littman Library, 1989) is published in three volumes.
Tishby offers a thorough historical analysis of many topics covered by the Zohar,
followed by selected passages. Although the original Hebrew version was published
in 1949—61 and thus predates much of current Zohar scholarship, Tishby’s work
remains an invaluable source of knowledge.
Preface xXiv
who have labored hard as today’s mehatsdei haqla, “reapers in the field”
of Zohar scholarship. I am grateful to each of them for their contribu-
tions to our collective efforts to understand even “a drop in the sea” of
the Zohar’s profound secrets. Although this Guide is written with only
minimal footnotes, so as not to burden the reader with scholarly appa-
ratus, references to many of these academic writings (mostly in He-
brew) can be found in the bibliography. The reader is urged to turn
from this guide to the Zohar text itself, but also to read the original
writings of these scholars, insofar as possible.
A GUIDE TO THE ZOHAR
Part I
INTRODUCTION
Prologue
I thank God for not having created me in the
period before the Zohar was known to the world,
because the Zohar kept me a Jew.
Rabbi Pinhas of Korzec (eighteenth century)!
The Zohar is the great medieval Jewish compendium of mysticism,
myth, and esoteric teaching. It is the central text of the Kabbalah, the
grand tradition of Jewish mystical lore that developed in Western Eu-
rope in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It may be considered the
highest expression of Jewish literary imagination in the Middle Ages.
The Zohar is also a lush garden of sacred eros, filled to overflowing
with luxurious plantings of love between master and disciples; among
the mystical companions themselves; between the souls of Israel and
Shekhinah, God’s lovely bride; but most of all between the male and fe-
male elements that together make up the Godhead. Revered and can-
onized by generations of faithful devotees, the Zohar's secret inner uni-
verse serves as the basis of kabbalistic faith, both within the boundaries
of Judaism and beyond it, to our own day, which has seen a significant
revival of interest in Kabbalah and its teachings.
The Zohar is a work of sacred fantasy. To say this about it is by no
means to impugn the truth of its insights or to diminish the religious
1. Imrey Pinhas ha-Shalem (Jerusalem: Mishor, 1988), p. 164, #56.
INTRODUCTION 4
profundity of its teachings. The Middle Ages were filled with fantasy.
Angels and demons, heavenly principalities, chambers of heaven and
rungs within the soul, secret treasures of the spirit that could be seen
only by the elect, esoteric domains without end—all of these were
found in the writings of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic authors through-
out medieval times. All of these descriptions partake of fantasy. It may
be said that all theological elaborations, insofar as they are allowed to
become pictorial, are fantasy. They depict realities that have not been
seen except by the inner eye of those who describe them, or by their
sacred sources.
In the case of Judaism, prohibitions derived from the second of the
Ten Commandments forbade the depiction of such sacred realms in
any medium other than words. Perhaps because of this, the literary
imagination became extraordinarily rich. All those creative energies
that in other contexts might have sought to reify sacred myth in paint-
ing, sculpture, manuscript illumination, or stained glass had instead
focused on the word, especially on the timeless Jewish project of com-
mentary and exegesis. In this sense the Zohar may be seen as the great-
est work of medieval Jewish iconography, but one that exists only in the
words of the written page, thence to be distilled in the imagination of
its devoted students.
Written in a lofty combination of Aramaic and Hebrew, the Zohar
was first revealed to the world around the year 1300. The Castilian
Kabbalists who distributed it, orally and in small written fragments,
presented it as an ancient text they had recently rediscovered. They
claimed it had been composed in the circle of those described within
its pages, Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai and his disciples, who lived in the
Land of Israel a thousand years earlier, during the second century of
the Common Era. The obscurity of the Zohar’s origins combined with
its unique language and its rich poetic imagery to lend to the work an
aura of unfathomable mystery. While a few of the more critical spirits
Prologue — s
in each century doubted the Zohar and questioned its authority, the
great majority of its readers, and later of Jewry as a whole, believed in
the Zohar and venerated it, considering it a holy revelation and a sa-
cred scripture that was to be ranked alongside the Bible and the Tal-
mud as a divinely inspired source of religious truth. Only in modern
times, and largely for apologetic reasons, was the Zohar deleted from
the canon of what was considered “mainstream” Judaism.
The Zohar is the key text of what is often called Jewish mysticism. Be-
fore locating the Zohar within the context of the Jewish mystical tradi-
tion, we need to turn briefly to the question of mysticism and the mul-
tiple ways we use that term when referring to the rich legacy of Judaic
materials, stretching from the Bible to the Middle Ages and beyond, to
our own day. What do we mean by the term Jewish mysticism? The word
mysticism itself is of Greek and Christian origins and is therefore not na-
tive to the traditions of which we speak, none of which saw themselves
as “mystical.” The equivalent Hebrew terms—seod (“secret”), hokhmah
nistarah (“hidden wisdom”), and kabbalah (‘“‘tradition”’)—refer to the es-
oteric nature of these teachings. Mysticism is generally taken to describe
primarily a certain category of religious experiences, and secondarily all
the theology, textual sources, religious movements, and so forth that de-
rive from these experiences. Applying the term mysticism to the Zohar
or to Jewish sources thus requires some adjustment in its usage and cer-
tain reservations about the meanings implied.
Mystics share with other religious people an intense awareness of di-
vine presence and a constant readiness to respond to that presence in
both prayer and action. For the mystic, that presence is revealed through
powerful and transformative inner experiences. These seem to come
from a source that lies beyond the ordinary human mind; they are usu-
ally understood as a divine gift, a source of special favor or grace, an act
of revelation. The intensity of these experiences lends a sense that the
reality they portray represents a deeper source of ultimate truth than do
INTRODUCTION 6
the more usual and widely shared human experiences of sense percep-
tion or rational thought.
The experience that lies at the heart of mysticism has been the ob-
ject of much study and discussion by scholars of religion. Various char-
acteristic types of mystical experience have been outlined and shown to
exist across the borders that historically have defined religious traditions
and separated them from one another. Mystical experience, whatever its
ultimate source, represents a transformation of ordinary human con-
sciousness. Mystics speak of reaching toward another plane of reality.
Some of their experiences reflect a slowing down of mental activity to
a more restful and contemplative pace; others result from a speeding up
of the mind in a rush of ecstatic frenzy. Some mystics describe a fullness
of divine presence that overwhelms and floods the mind, while others
speak of utter emptiness, a mind that becomes so devoid of content that
it can transcend its own existence. There are mystics who see their
experiences conveyed by beings outside themselves: God, angels, or
heavenly voices speak to them. Others view the experience more in-
ternally: a deeper level of the soul is activated, revealing truths or in-
sights that the person was unable to perceive when in an ordinary state
of mind. Most of these experiences, as described by those who undergo
them, contain some element of striving toward oneness, a breaking
down of illusory barriers to reveal the great secret of the unity of all be-
ing. The nature of this oneness and its relationship to the phenomenal
world that appears before us are described in a great variety of ways,
depending on both the personality of the individual mystic and the
theology of the tradition out of which he or she speaks.
All of these mystical phenomena as well as others are well repre-
sented within the Zohar. The history of Jewish mysticism reveals a va-
riety of experiential types as well as widely differing styles of recording
such experiences and integrating them within the normative canon of
Jewish religious life. We should bear in mind that in Jewish mysticism,
yous
Prologue — 7
or even within the specific traditions known as Kabbalah, we do not
have before us a single linear development of a particular type of mys-
ticism, but rather a variety of mysticisms against the shared background
of Judaism, including its sacred texts, its praxis, its interpretive tradi-
tions, and the panorama of Jewish history and life experience in the
periods under discussion. Even the Zohar itself reflects a panoply of
mystical experiences. as is discussed at length in Chapter Six.
Jewish mystical authors are famously shy about speaking directly of
their own experiences. This has to do with a longstanding commit-
ment to esotericism with regard to mystical teachings. The second-
century Mishnah had already stated that certain matters could be
taught only to one student at a time (or “in a whisper,” according to
another version),* while others could be taught only to a single stu-
dent who was both “wise and understanding of his own accord,’ seem-
ingly referring to one who had some personal experience of such mat-
ters. Written accounts of mystical experience, while they do exist, are
relatively rare among the Kabbalists. It is much more their way to garb
the personal within the metaphysical, or at the very least to modestly
ascribe the experience to one of the ancients rather than to themselves.
This is very much the case with the Zohar, as will become clear to the
careful reader.
A special problem deserving of mention before we get under way,
one that lies at the heart of the specific form of Jewish mysticism
called Kabbalah, is that of mysticism and language. The mystic receives
insights from a source that is “deeper” or “higher” than the ordinary
human mind. But how can those insights be conveyed? Language,
whether spoken or written, is our ordinary vehicle of communication,
itself a product of the mind and one that shares the limitations of its
source. In order to communicate a translinguistic or “ineffable” level
of insight, the mystic needs to struggle against the barriers of language,
2. Mishnah Hagigah 2:1; Midrash Tehillim 104:4.
INTRODUCTION 8
perhaps by stretching the ordinary discursive vehicle to new poetic
heights, perhaps by discovering within language a previously untapped
symbolic stratum, perhaps by speaking in a holier tongue, by recourse
to some code, or else by bearing witness to the utter breakdown of
language through such phenomena as glossolalia, sacred stammer, or
the glorification of silence.
Judaism offers a distinctive approach to this problem through its an-
cient belief in the creative and mysterious power of language, stem-
ming back to the myth of creation through the word, the basis of the
opening chapter of Genesis. Because of this belief, Jewish mystical
sources are filled with reflections on the secrets of language and are of-
ten characterized by intense and highly detailed attempts to penetrate
inner and hidden levels of speech. Language in general may indeed be
a human creation, says the Jewish tradition, but the source of Hebrew,
the Holy Tongue, is God. Hebrew is the language of divine speech, that
by which God created the world. In some form, though perhaps one
hidden to us, that language must have preexisted creation. The Hebrew
language as we now have it, seemingly a vehicle of ordinary human
speech (though it was seldom spoken among medieval Jews, who used
it mainly for the study of sacred writings), bears within it an array of
secrets that reveal it to be the premundane language of God. Such a
primally charged language, one that offers a key to existence itself,
might also be a proper vehicle for the conveying of mystical truth or
insights. The nature of God’s primordial speech, the question of its re-
lationship to Hebrew as we know it, and the interplay between the lan-
guage of creation and the languages of revelation and interpretation are
all the stuff of kabbalistic discourse, treated frequently within the pages
of the Zohar.
5
The Kabbalistic Tradition:
A Brief History Until the Zohar
Jewish mysticism of the Middle Ages is a rereading of earlier Jewish tra-
dition, including both the Bible and the corpus of rabbinic literature. It
has to be understood in the context of the great project of medieval
Jewry as a whole, the interpretation of a received, authoritative, and es-
sentially complete body of normative Jewish teaching. This body of
teaching, canonized in the Geonic age (from eighth to tenth centuries),
nominally commanded the loyalty of all Jewry, with the exception of a
Karaite minority.’ But the deeper attachment of Jews to this tradition
had to be rewon constantly, especially in the face of both Christian and
Muslim polemics against Judaism, ever the religious culture of a threat-
ened minority living in the shadow of one or the other of its giant off-
spring. Increasingly, various new intellectual currents that came into
fashion among the Jews also occasioned the need for defense or reinter-
pretation of the tradition. These included Mut’azilite philosophy,” Neo-
1. A sect that rejected rabbinic tradition, seeking to live a Judaism based on biblical
authority alone.
2. The earliest form of philosphic rationalism adopted by Jewish thinkers in the
tenth century, based on Islamic models.
INTRODUCTION’ IO
platonism, and Aristotelianism. The classic form for such reinterpre-
tation of authoritative texts was the commentary, whether on one or
more books of the Bible or on a part of the Talmudic legacy. Kabbalah,
a new sort of mystical-esoteric exegesis that first appeared in the twelfth
century, may be seen as another medieval rereading of the received Jew-
ish canon.
To understand the ways in which Kabbalah, and particularly the
Zohar, finds its home within the earlier tradition, we need to distin-
guish five elements that are present in the legacy that medieval Jews
received from the Judaism of the Talmudic age. Although these five are
not at all equal either in the amount of text devoted to them or in the
degree of formal authority with which they are accredited, each plays
an important role in the new configuration of Judaism that Kabbalah
represents.
The first of the five elements is aggadah, the narrative tradition, con-
tained in the Talmud and the various works of Midrash. Midrash is a
hermeneutical term, renderable both as “inquiry” and “homiletics,” in-
dicating a way of delving into Scripture that tends toward fanciful and
extended rereadings. Much of aggadah is legendary in content, expand-
ing biblical history and recreating the biblical landscape in the setting
of the rabbinic world. But aggadah also includes tales of the rabbis
themselves and teachings of wisdom in many forms: maxims, parables,
folk traditions, and so forth.
The Kabbalists made great use of the midrashic-aggadic tradition,
drawing on both its methods of interpretation and its contents. The
hermeneutical assumptions of Midrash—the legitimacy of juxtaposing
verses from anywhere within Scripture without concern for dating or
context, the rearrangement of words or even occasional substitution of
letters, the use of numerology and abbreviation as ways to derive mean-
ing, the endless glorification of biblical heroes and the tarring of vil-
lains, and others—were all carried over from Midrash into Kabbalah.
wy
Moov ee
4 . 4
A Brief History Until the Zohar 11
Indeed many of these assumptions were used by other sorts of medieval
preachers as well. But the content of the aggadic worldview, with its
mythical picture of God as Creator and Divine Ruler who sees every-
where; who acts in history, responds to prayer and human virtue, even
suspending the laws of nature to rescue His beloved; who mourns with
Israel the destruction of their shared Temple and suffers with them the
pain of exile—all this too was faithfully carried over into the kabbalis-
tic imagination. In fact, the Kabbalists were partial to the most highly
anthropomorphic and mythical versions of rabbinic tradition, such as
those contained in the eighth-century midrashic collection Pirgei de-
Rabbi Eliezer. Here they stood in sharp contrast to the other emerging
intellectual trend of the Middle Ages, Jewish philosophy, which exer-
cised a degree of critical skepticism with regard to the more fantastic
claims of the aggadah and sought out, whenever possible, those more
modest and seminaturalistic viewpoints that could be found among
certain of the early rabbis.
The second element is the tradition of halakhah, the legal and nor-
mative body of Talmudic teaching, the chief subject of study for Jews
throughout the medieval era, and thus the main curriculum on which
most Kabbalists themselves were educated. The early Kabbalists lived
fully within the bounds of halakhah and created a meaning system that
justified its existence. While later Kabbalah (beginning in the early
fourteenth century) contains some elements that are quite critical of ha-
lakhah, little of this trend is evident in the period before the Zohar.
Some transmittors of Kabbalah—Moses Nahmanides (1194~1270) 1s
the great example—were also active in the realm of halakhic creativity,
writing responsa and commentaries on Talmudic tractates. More com-
mon was a certain intellectual specialization, undoubtedly reflecting
spiritual temperament, spawning Kabbalists who lived faithfully within
halakhah and whose writings show its patterning of their lives but who
devoted their literary efforts chiefly to the realm of mystical exegesis,
INTRODUCTION I12
including kabbalistic comments on the commandments or on aspects
of halakhic practice.
A third element of the rabbinic legacy is the liturgical tradition.
While liturgical praxis was codified within halakhah and thus in some
ways is a subset of it, the texts recited in worship, including a large cor-
pus of liturgical poetry, or piyyut, constitute a literary genre of their
own. Medieval writers, including the mystics of both Spain and Ashke-
naz, were much concerned with establishing the precise, proper word-
ing of each prayer. The text of the prayerbook, mostly fixed by com-
pendia dating from the tenth century, became in the Middle Ages the
object of commentaries, many of which sought to find their authors’
own theologies reflected in these venerated and widely known texts by
the ancient rabbis. This is especially true of the Kabbalists, who devoted
much attention to the kavvanah, or inner meaning, of liturgical prayer.
While not formally canonized or seen as the product of divine revela-
tion, as were the books of Scripture, the liturgical texts were regarded as
sufficiently holy and mysterious to deserve and require commentary.
The fourth strand of earlier tradition is that of merkavah mysticism.
Merkavah designates a form of visionary mystical praxis that reaches
back into the Hellenistic era but was still alive as late as tenth-century
Babylonia. Its roots lie close to the ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature,
except that here the voyager taken up into the heavens 1s usually offered
a private encounter with the divine glory, one that does not involve
metahistorical predictions. Those who “go down into the merkavah”’
sought visions that took them before the throne of God, allowing them
to travel through the divine “palaces” (heikhalot), realms replete with
angels, and at the height of ecstacy, to participate in or even lead the an-
gelic chorus. The term merkavah (“chariot”) links this tradition to the
opening vision of the prophet Ezekiel, which was seen as the great par-
adigm for all such visionary experiences and accounts. It is also con-
nected to the gedushah formula (“Holly, holy, holy is Y-H-W-H of hosts;
A Briet History Until the Zohar 13
the whole earth is filled with His glory!’) of Isaiah 6, because it is this
refrain that most merkavall voyagers recount hearing the angels sing as
they stand with them in the heavenly heights.
The merkavah tradition was known to the medievals in two ways.
Treatises by those who had practiced this form of mysticism, often pre-
served in fragmentary and inchaote form, were copied and brought
from the Near East to western Europe. But just as important were the
references to merkavah practice in the Talmudic literature itself,which
lent legitimacy to the fascination that latter-day mystics clearly felt for
this material. Such great Talmudic sages as Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi
Yohanan ben Zakkai were associated with merkavah traditions. Akiva,
considered in some aggadic sources to be a sort of second Moses, is the
subject of the most famous of all rabbinic accounts of such mystical
voyages.” He alone, unlike the other three of the “four who entered the
orchard,” was able to “enter in peace and leave in peace.” While some
modern scholars question the historicity of associating the early rab-
binic sages with merkavah praxis, in the Middle Ages the Talmudic
sources were quite sufficient to sustain this link. It was the philosophi-
cal questioners of the merkavah traditions, rather than their mystical sup-
porters, who were hard-pressed to defend their views. Merkaval tradi-
tions also had considerable influence on the rabbinic liturgy, and this
association also raised their esteem in medieval eyes.
The fifth and final element of this ancient legacy is the hardest to
define, partly because it hangs on the thread of a slim body of text, but
also because it contains elements that seem contradictory to one an-
other. I refer to the speculative-magical tradition that reached medieval
Jewry through the little book called Sefer Yetsirah and various other small
texts, mostly magical in content, that are associated with it. Sefer Yetsirah
has been shown to be a very ancient work, close in spirit to aspects of
Greek esotericism that flourished in the late Hellenistic era. While the
3. Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 14b.
INTRODUCTION I4
practice associated with this school of thought is magical-theurgic, even
including the attempt to make a golem, its chief text contains the most
abstract worldview to be found within the legacy of ancient Judaism.
By contemplating the core meaning of both numbers and letters, 1t
reaches toward a notion of cosmic unity that underlies diversity, of an
abstract deity that serves as cosmic center, in whom (or perhaps better:
in which) all being is rooted. The magical praxis is thus a form of imi-
tatio dei (“imitation of God’), man’s attempt to reignite the creative
spark by which the universe has emerged from within the Godhead.
Here we have the roots of a theology more abstract than anything to be
found in the aggadah or the merkavah tradition, an essentially speculative
and nonvisual mysticism.
Sefer Yetsirah was the subject of a wide variety of commentaries in
the Middle Ages, with rationalists as well as mystics claiming it as their
own. In the twelfth century, the language and style of thought found
in this work became central to the first generations of kabbalistic
writing, as reflected by commentaries on it and by the penetration of
its terminology into other works as well.
Kabbalah must be seen as a dynamic mix of these five elements, with
one or another sometimes dominating. It was especially the first and last
elements—the aggadic-mythical element and the abstract-speculative-
magical tradition—that seemed to vie for the leading role in forging
the emerging kabbalistic way of thought.
Jewish esoteric traditions began to reach the small and isolated com-
munities of Western Europe (some of which dated back to Roman
times) perhaps as early as the ninth or tenth century. How these ancient
materials first came to Franco-German Jewry is lost in legend, but it is
clear from manuscript evidence that much of the old merkavah and
magical literature was preserved among the earliest Ashkenazic Jews,
A Brief History Until the Zohar — 1
along with their devotion to both falakhah and aggadah. These esoteric
sources were studied especially by groups in the Rhineland, who added
to them their own speculations on God, the cosmos, and the secrets of
the Torah. Out of these circles there emerged in the late twelfth and
early thirteenth century a movement known to historians as Hasidut
Ashkenaz, a pietistic revivalism based on small communities or brother-
hoods of mystics who committed themselves to high standards of asce-
tic practice and contemplative devotion. These groups also played a key
role in the preservation and further development of esoteric traditions.
It was in the area of southern France called Provence, culturally akin
in the High Middle Ages to northern Spain, that a somewhat different
version of esoteric speculations began to emerge. These came to be
called by the name Kabbalah, a term applied to this emerging school of
mystical thought in the early thirteenth century. The word means “tra-
dition’’; its use in this context indicates that the Kabbalists saw them-
selves as a conservative element within the Jewish religious community.
Their secrets, so they claimed, were kabbalah, esoteric teachings received
from ancient masters by means of faithful oral transmission from one
generation to the next.
The Provencal Jewish community in the twelfth century was one
of great cultural wealth, forming something of a bridge between the
spiritual legacy of Jewish creativity in Spain of Muslim times and the
rather separate world of Jewry in the Ashkenazic or Franco-Rhineish
area. Here the great works of Jewish philosophy, including those of
Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), were translated into Hebrew, so that
a Jewry not conversant with the Arabic original could appreciate them.
Provence was a great center of creativity in halakhah, religious law, and
the ongoing interpretation of the Talmud, which stood at the forefront
of intellectual concern among medieval Jews. Traditional homiletics
were also cultivated, and important works of Midrash, or homiletical
commentary on the Bible, were edited in Provence. But other studies
INTRODUCTION 16
were encouraged as well in this rather “enlightened” atmosphere: He-
brew grammar, biblical exegesis, theology, and poetry all flourished
among Provencal Jews. These varied and yet interlinking intellectual
traditions were cultivated in small local “houses of study,” often dom-
inated by certain families that preserved in their midst ancient oral
traditions.
In this cultural area there appeared in about the middle of the twelfth
century a previously undocumented sort of theosophical speculation,
known in later literature as Kabbalah. The origins of this spiritual and
literary movement are obscure and still much debated. There were
clearly elements of Near Eastern origin in the earliest Kabbalah, mate-
rials related to merkavah and late midrashic texts that were present in the
Holy Land in the ninth or tenth centuries. There were also strong in-
fluences from elements that were to appear in Rhineland Hasidism as
well, indicating that at some early point these two movements had a
common origin. But here in Provence a new sort of religious discourse
began to emerge in circles of mystics who combined knowledge of
these various traditions. These groups, which may have been several
generations in formation, are known to us as the editors of one of the
strangest and most fascinating documents in the long history of He-
brew literature. This slim volume is known as Sefer ha-Bahir, awkwardly
renderable as The Book of Clarity. We first find reference to it in Proven-
cal works of the latter twelfth century, and from that time forward it has
a continuous history as a major shaper of Jewish mystical ideas.
The Bahir takes the form of ancient rabbinic Midrash, expounding on
biblical phrases, tying one verse of Scripture to another, and construct-
ing units of its own thought around what it offers as scriptural exegesis.
It bears a highly distinctive literary style, dialogic in form but highly la-
conic in presentation. Often the meaning of a passage is difficult to dis-
cM
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A Brief History Until the Zohar 17
cern, even on the simplest level. Like the old Midrash, it makes frequent
use of parables, showing special fondness for those involving kings and
their courts, in which God is repeatedly compared to “a king of flesh
and blood.” In form, then, the Bahir is quite traditional. But as soon as
we open its pages to look at the content, we find ourselves confounded:
Whence do we know that Abraham had a daughter? From the verse
“And Y-H-W-H blessed Abraham with all” (Gen. 24:1). And it is writ-
ten: “All is called by My name; I created, formed, and made it for My
glory” (Is. 43:7). Was this blessing his daughter, or was it perhaps his
mother? It was his daughter. To what may this be compared? To a king
who had a faithful and perfect servant. He tested him in various ways,
and the servant passed all the tests. Said the king: “What shall I do for
this servant, or what can I give him? I can only hand him over to my
older brother, who may advise him, guard him, and honor him.” The
servant went to the brother and learned his ways. The elder brother
loved him greatly and called him ‘beloved’: “The seed of Abraham My
beloved” (Is. 41:8). He too said: “What can I give him? What can I do
for him? I have a beautiful vessel that I have fashioned, containing the
most precious pearls, the treasures of kings. I shall give it to him, and he
shall attain his place.” This is the meaning of “God blessed Abraham
with all.”
The reader familiar with Midrash (as was the intended audience of
the Bahir) will immediately notice something out of the ordinary here.
The text simply does not work as Midrash. Questions are asked and not
answered, or answered in a way that only adds mystification. An image
is proposed, that of the king, which in the context surely refers to God,
and suddenly that king turns out to have an elder brother. Abraham's
daughter, well known from earlier Midrash, might turn out to be his
mother. What sort of questions are these, and what sort of answers? The
scholar is almost tempted to emend the text!
If one comes to the Bahir, on the other hand, bearing some famil-
iarity with the methods of mystical teachers, particularly in the Orient,
4. Bahir (ed. Scholem/Abrams), §2.
INTRODUCTION 18
the text may seem less bizarre. Despite its title, the purpose of the book
is precisely to mystify rather than to make anything “clear” in the ordi-
nary sense. Here the way to clarity is to discover the mysterious. The
reader is being taught to recognize how much there is that he doesn't
know, how filled Scripture is with seemingly impenetrable secrets.
“You think you know the meaning of this verse?” says the Bahir to its
reader. “Here is an interpretation that will throw you on your ear and
show you that you understand nothing of it at all’”’ Everything in the
Torah, be it a tale of Abraham, a poetic verse, or an obscure point of
law, hints at a reality beyond that which you can attain by the ordinary
dialectics of either Talmudic or philosophical thinking.
As we read on in the Bahir, it becomes clear that the authors are
not simply advocating obscurantism for its own sake. The text has in
mind a notion, often expressed only vaguely, of a world that lies be-
hind the many hints and mysteries of the scriptural word. To say it
briefly, the Bahir and all Kabbalists who follow it claim that the true
subject of Scripture is God Himself, that revelation is essentially an act
of divine self-disclosure. Because mast people would not be able to
bear the great light that comes with knowing God, the Torah reveals
divinity in secret form. Scripture is strewn with hints as to the true na-
ture of “that which is above” and of the mysterious process within di-
vinity that led to the creation of this world. Only in the exoteric, pub-
lic sense is revelation primarily a matter of divine will, teaching the
commandments Israel is to follow in order to live the good life. The
inner, esoteric revelation is rather one of divine truth, a web of secrets
pointing to the innermost nature of God’s own self.
The earliest documentary evidence of Kabbalah is found in two
very different sorts of literary sources. The Bahir constitutes one of
these. Alongside it there is a more theoretical or abstract series of kab-
balistic writings. These appeared first in the family and close circle of
Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquieres (c. 1125-1198), a well-known
+)
4 mar & =
A Brief History Until the Zohar — 1g
Provencal Talmudic authority. His son, Rabbi Isaac the Blind (d. c. 1235),
and others linked to his study circle, including family members, au-
thored brief commentaries on the prayers and on Sefer Yetsirah, and dis-
quisitions on the names of God that reflect an ongoing tradition of
kabbalistic praxis within their circles. These treatises, quite dry and ab-
stract when compared with the mythical lushness of the Bahir, point to
an already quite well defined system of kabbalistic contemplation, sug-
gesting that their appearance after 1150 may reflect a decision to reveal
in writing that which had previously been kept secret, rather than an
entirely new genre of religious creativity. The rabbinic circles in which
Kabbalah was first found were highly conservative; it is hard to imagine
them inventing this new sort of religious language on their own. It
seems more likely that they saw themselves as guardians and transmit-
tors of a secret tradition, passed down to them from sources unknown,
but in their eyes surely ancient.
The context for the publication of the kabbalistic secrets was the
great spiritual turmoil that divided Provencal Jewry in the second half
of the twelfth century: the controversy over philosophy, and especially
over the works of Moses Maimonides. This conflict came to a head
with the public burning (by the Dominicans, but possibly with the tacit
approval of anti-Maimonidean Jews) of Maimonides’ Guide for the Per-
plexed in 1232. The surrounding struggle engaged the intellectual life of
the Provencal Jewish elite for several decades. As the era’s great halakhic
authority and codifier of Jewish law, Maimonides commanded tremen-
dous respect. In many writings of the age he is simply referred to as
“the rabbi’’ But his works raised more than a few questions regarding
his degree of theological orthodoxy. Did Maimonides go too far in his
insistence that the Bible’s ascription of emotions, as well as bodily at-
tributes, to God was a form of anthropomorphism that needed to be
explained away? Was it proper that he derived so much of his wisdom
from non-Jewish sources, from the Greek and Greco-Islamic philo-
INTRODUCTION 20
sophical traditions? Was he correct in identifying the ancient rabbinic
references to “The Account of the Chariot” and “The Account of Cre-
ation” with metaphysics and physics as the philosophers taught them?
Did he have a right to dismiss certain old Jewish esoteric speculations
as inauthentic nonsense? Still more painful in this law-centered culture:
how could the rabbi have given legal status to his own Aristotelian
philosophic views, seemingly insisting in the opening section of his
Code that any Jew who did not share his views was either an idolator
or a naive fool?
But the heart of the Maimonidean controversy went deeper than
all of these accusations, touching the very heart of the philosophical
notion of the Godhead. Philosophy insisted on divine perfection, on
the unchanging, all-knowing, all-capabie quality of God. If perfect and
unchanging, this God was necessarily self-sufficient and in no need of
human actions of any sort. Why then would such a God care about
performance of the commandments? How could a Torah centered on
religious law, including so much ritual performance, represent the em-
bodiment of divine will? Maimonides taught that indeed God had no
“need” for us to fulfill the commandments. The chief purpose of reli-
gious observance was educational, a God-given way of cultivating the
mind to turn toward God. But once the lesson had been learned,
some suspected, there would be those who would come to see the
form itself as no longer needed. Moreover, it was rumored that in
some circles of wealthy Jewry in Muslim Spain the abstractions of phi-
losophy had begun to serve as an excuse for a more lax view of the
commandments and the details of their observance.
Some rabbis of Provence were deeply loyal to a more literalist read-
ing of the Talmudic and midrashic legacy, one that left little room for
the radical rationalization of Judaism proposed by the philosophers.
Others had been exposed to the esoteric traditions of the Rhineland
and northern France, which stood in conflict with the new philoso-
co
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A Brief History Until the Zohar 21
phy partly because they seemed to highlight, rather than minimalize,
the anthropomorphic passages in Scripture and tradition. The Franco-
Rhineish tradition also had room for a strong magical component to
religion. Ancient speculations on the secret names of God and of the
angels still held currency in these circles. The use of such names to af-
fect the divine will—utter blasphemy in the eyes of the Maimonideans
—was taken tor granted in early Ashkenaz, as it had been centuries ear-
lier throughout the Jewish world.
The secrets of Kabbalah were made public in the mid-twelfth cen-
tury as a way to combat the influence of Maimonidean rationalism.
The freedom and implied disinterest in human affairs of the philoso-
phers’ God frightened the mystics into coming out of the deep eso-
tericism that until then had restricted them to oral transmission of
their teachings within closed conventicles of initiates. Their secrets
were to serve as an alternative explanation of the Torah, one that saw
Torah and its commandments as not only playing a vital role in the
ongoing spiritual life of Israel, but also as having a cosmos-sustaining
role in a view of the universe that made them absolutely essential. We
will see more of this later when we turn to the actual teachings of the
Kabbalists. But it is no accident that two of the key subjects discussed
in these earliest kabbalistic speculations are the kavvanot, or secret
meanings of prayer, and ta’amey ha-mitsvot, the reasons for the com-
mandments. Both of these elements are interpreted in a way that in-
sists on the cosmic effectiveness of human actions. The special con-
centration on divine names played an essential part in early Kabbalah,
setting on course a theme that was to be developed over many cen-
turies of kabbalistic praxis.
The secret doctrines first taught in Provence were carried across the
Pyrenees in the early thirteenth century, inspiring small circles of mys-
tics in the adjacent district of Catalonia. One key center of this activ-
ity was the city of Gerona, well known as the home of two of the most
INTRODUCTION 22
important rabbinic fioures of the age, Rabbi Moses ben Nahman
(called Nahmanides) and Rabbi Jonah Gerondi (c. 1200-1 263). Nah-
manides, perhaps the most widely respected Jewish intellectual figure
of the thirteenth céntury, is the most important personage associated
with the early dissemination of kabbalistic secrets. He was a leading
Talmudic commentator, scriptural interpreter, and legal authority. His
Torah commentary includes numerous passages—most brief and inten-
tionally obscure, but several lengthy and highly developed—in which
he speaks “in the way of truth,” referring to secret kabbalistic tradi-
tions. Alongside Nahmanides there emerged a somewhat separate cir-
cle of Kabbalists, including two very important teachers, Rabbi Ezra
ben Solomon and Rabbi Azriel. These figures seem to have been more
innovative than Nahmanides in their kabbalistic exegesis and also more
open to the Neoplatonic philosophy of Abraham Ibn Ezra and others
that was gaining credence in their day. Nahmanides was essentially
conservative in his kabbalistic readings, insisting that he was only pass-
ing down what he had received from his teachers, and his view of
philosophical thought in general was quite negative. Rabbi Ezra, the
author of commentaries on the Song of Songs and some Talmudic ag-
gadot, and his disciple Rabbi Azriel, who wrote a larger treatise on the
aggadot as well as a widely quoted commentary on the liturgy, com-
bined the legacy of the Bahir with teachings received from Rabbi Isaac
the Blind and his nephew Rabbi Asher ben David. They read Kab-
balah in a Neoplatonic spirit, which is to say they saw the sefirot (dis-
cussed shortly) as an ordered series of emanations, increasingly re-
moved from an unknowable primal source.
This Catalonian kabbalistic tradition remained fairly close to the
original purpose I have suggested for the publication of kabbalistic se-
crets. Nahmanides’ inclusion of openly kabbalistic references in his
highly popular Torah commentary complemented his fierce polemical
attacks in that same work on Maimonides’ philosophical interpretation
A Brief History Until the Zohar 23
of the Torah. Jacob bar Sheshet, another key Gerona figure, also engaged
in the battle against the rationalists. While neither Rabbi Azriel nor
Rabbi Ezra of Gerona is known to have written anything outside the
realm of Kabbalah, their writings reflect significant rabbinic learning
and show them to belong to the samme traditionalist and anti-Aristotelian
circles. Neoplatonism was a philosophy more amenable to the needs of
mystics, they found, thus rediscovering in a Jewish context something
that Christian mystics had come to know many centuries earlier.
The fact that a figure of Nahmanides’ prestige had openly associ-
ated himself with the publication of kabbalistic teachings undoubtedly
did a great deal for the acceptance of this way of thinking in Catalon-
ian and Provencal circles, where his was the leading name in the anti-
Maimonidean sector of the rabbinic leadership. Explication of the
kabbalistic passages in his commentary became a way of teaching and
transmitting secret lore among the students of his leading disciple,
Rabbi Solomon ben Adret (c. 1235—c. 1310). Ben Adret himself seems
to have been no Kabbalist; his extensive writings consist almost en-
tirely of Talmudic commentaries and responsa to halakhic queries. But
his academy provided a setting for the continuance of mystical specu-
lation. Through these circles it was passed on to Rabbi Bahya ben
Asher of Barcelona, a contemporary of the Zohar and perhaps the last
great figure of Catalonian Kabbalah.
Around the middle of the thirteenth century, a new center of kab-
balistic activity became active in Castile, to the west of Catalonia. Soon
the writings of this new group, out of which the Zohar was to emerge,
overshadowed those of the earlier Catalonian circle with regard to both
volume and originality of output. The Castilian Kabbalists’ writings
were not characterized by the highly conservative rabbinic attitude that
had been lent to Kabbalah by such figures as Rabbi Isaac the Blind and
Nahmanides. This circle’s roots were planted more in the Bahir tradi-
tion than in the abstract language of early Provencal and Catalonian
INTRODUCTION 24
Kabbalah. Mythical imagery was richly developed in the writings of
such figures as the brothers Rabbi Isaac and Rabbi Jacob ha-Kohen
and their disciple Rabbi Moses of Burgos. Their writings show a spe-
cial fascination with the “left side” of the divine emanation and the
world of the demonic.
R. Isaac ha-Kohen developed a full-blown mythos in which the forces
of evil were presented as near autonomous powers emanated in an act
of purgation from the depths of divinity. ... Dependent upon both
the divine and the human for their existence, they exist at the liminal
outskirts of the Sefirotic realm and the phenomenal universe, at the
very borders of chaos and nonbeing. There they wait in ambush for the
Shekhinah and the worlds which she creates and nurtures. Thus, to the
world picture of divine Sefirotic hierarchy and an emanated cosmos,
the Castilians add a parallel but antithetical realm of the demonic, serv-
ing as the source of all that is destructive in the cosmos.
This conception of the “left hand emanation” is founded on a set of
suggestive aggadic statements and Biblical verses. . . . In particular, [the
Castilian Kabbalists’] imagination was sparked by ... R. Abbahu’s fa-
mous dictum?: “The blessed Holy One created and destroyed worlds
before He created these, saying: “These please me. Those did not please
me.” ... Out of these aggadot, R. Isaac spun an elaborate mythos in
which the sefirah binah, at the dawn of time, welled forth emanations of
pure justice, absolute forces of destruction, whose intensity doomed
them to almost immediate annihilation. Prom the residue of these de-
structive forces rose a hierarchy of powers of pure judgement. Possess-
ing no creative potency of their own, these forces are ontologically de-
pendent upon divinity and are energized by the power released by
human transgression.°®
Because of their fascination with myths of the demonic realm, this
group was characterized by Gershom Scholem as the “Gnostic Circle”
5. Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 9:2.
6. Seth Brody, Cosmos and Consciousness, chap. 1. The language of this dissertation
by my late and much-lamented student has influenced some formulations found
elsewhere in this Guide as well. I fully acknowledge my indebtedness to him.
&
i.
Re ys :
a
A Briet History Until the Zohar 25
of Castilian Kabbalists. Their writings had great influence on the fur-
ther development of kabbalistic thought. They are the most immedi-
ate predecessors of the circle of Kabbalists represented in the Zohar.
The mythical imagination of the Zohar, reaching to its greatest heights
in depicting the realms of evil, has its roots in this setting. It is likely
that Rabbi Moses de Leon, the central figure in both the writing and
the circulation of the Zohar, saw himself as a disciple of these “Gnos-
tic” Kabbalists. Rabbi Todros Abulafia, a Kabbalist who also served as
an important political leader of Castilian Jewry, is another important
link between these two groups. Although significant in their own day,
the writings of the Gnostic circle were mostly forgotten by later gen-
erations of Kabbalists and were not printed until Scholem himself re-
trieved them from rare surviving manuscripts.
There is another difference between the Catalonian and the Castil-
ian circles that is especially important for understanding the Zohar's
place in the history of Kabbalah. The earliest Kabbalists were fascinated
with the origins of the sefirotic world, devoting much of their specu-
lation to the highest sefirot and to the relationship of those sefirot to that
which lies beyond them (see later discussion for further details). They
were also deeply committed to the full unity of the sefirotic world,
even to its circularity, so that the rising of all the sefirot to be united
with the highest one was a frequently articulated goal of contempla-
tion. Varied patterns of inner connection in the upper worlds were re-
flected in the kavvanot of prayers and in understandings of ritual com-
mandments, but the ultimate goal of all of these was the full restoration
of the divine unity and the rise of all to the highest rung, designated as
mahashavah or haskel (“‘contemplation”’or “‘intellect”). The situation was
quite different in the Castilian writings. Here the emphasis was placed
not on the highest but on the lower part of the sefirotic world, espe-
cially on the relationships between “right” and “left” and “male” and
“female” The counter-balancing of demonic energies needed the
INTRODUCTION 26
strengthening of the right-hand power of divine love, and this could be
awakened by human love of God and performance of the command-
ments. As these writings developed, it was fascination with the conju-
gal mysteries, reflected in the joining together of divine male and fe-
male, that overwhelmed all other symbolic interests. The uniting of the
male sixth and ninth sefirot with the female tenth became the chief and
in some places the almost unique object of concern and the way of ex-
plaining the religious life as a whole. The mysterium conjunctionis or
zivvuga qaddisha lies at the very heart of Zoharic teaching.
In the divergence between these two tendencies within Kabbalah,
we see mythical and abstractionist elements struggling within the
emerging self-articulation of the mystical spirit. In raising everything to
the very heights of the sefirotic world, the Catalonians were voting for
abstraction, for a Kabbalah that led the mystic to experience a God not
entirely removed from the rarified transpersonal deity of the Jewish
philosophers. The Castilians may have incorporated some aspects of
Gerona’s Neoplatonism, but their spirit was entirely different. Perhaps
influenced in part by renewed contact with more mythically oriented
Ashkenazic elements, and in part reflecting also the romantic troubador
ethos of the surrounding culture, they wrote in a spirit far from that of
philosophy. Here we find a strong emphasis on the theurgic, quasi-
magical effect of kabbalistic activity on the inner state of the Godhead
and on its efficacy in bringing about divine unity and thus showering
divine blessing upon the lower world. The Castilians’ depictions of the
upper universe are highly colorful, sometimes even earthy. The fascina-
tion with both the demonic and the sexual that characterizes their
work lent to Kabbalah a dangerous and close-to-forbidden edge that
undoubtedly served to make it more attractive, both in its own day and
throughout later generations.
The emergence of kabbalistic teaching is more complex and ob-
scure than has been described in the preceding paragraphs. The rela-
a
x ‘9
A Brief History Until the Zohar 27
tionship between Kabbalah and certain late forms of midrashic writing
is still not entirely clear. The nature and degree of contact between the
early Kabbalists and the German Hasidic circles, especially as reflected
in the writings of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (c. 1165—c. 1230), contin-
ues to puzzle scholars. The group of abstract mystical writings known
as Sifrei ha-’Iyyun, or the “Books of Contemplation,” fits somewhere
into this puzzle, but the precise date and relationship of these writings
to other parts of the pre-Zoharic corpus is still debated by scholars.
The sources of the highly distinctive school of “prophetic” or “ecstatic”
Kabbalah taught by Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (1240—after 1292), while
having little connection to the Zohar, would also require treatment in
a full picture of the emergence of kabbalistic thought. But this very
brief treatment of major schools and themes should suffice to set forth
the context out of which the Zohar emerged and within which it is
best understood.
The last quarter of the thirteenth century was a period of great cre-
ative expansion among the Kabbalists of Castile. The sefirotic Kab-
balah as detailed in the works of such well-known figures as Moses De
Leon, Todros Abulafia, Joseph Gikatilla, Isaac Ibn Sahula, Joseph ben
Shalom Ashkenazi, Joseph Angelet, and Joseph of Hamadan (?), all dat-
ing from the period between 1280 and 1310, constitutes a considerable
and highly varied body of writing, even leaving aside the Zohar itself.
It was within this circle that fragments of a more highly poetic com-
position, written mostly in lofty and mysterious Aramaic rather than
in Hebrew, first began to circulate. These fragments, composed within
one or two generations but edited over the course of the following
century and a half, are known to the world as the Zohar.
ae)
Teachings of the Kabbalists:
The Ten Sefirot
Kabbalah represents a radical departure from any previously known
version of Judaism, especially in the realm of theology. While Kabbal-
ists remained loyal followers of normative Jewish praxis as defined by
halakhah, the theological meaning system that underlay their Judaism
was entirely reconstructed. The God of the Kabbalists is not the pow-
erful, passionate Leader and Lover of His people found in the Hebrew
Bible; not the wise Judge and loving Father of the rabbinic aggadah;
nor the enthroned King of merkavah visionaries. The Kabbalists’ God
also differs sharply from the increasingly abstract notions of the deity
created by Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages, beginning with
Saadia Gaon in the tenth century and culminating with Maimonides,
whose work often stands in the background as the object of kabbalis-
tic polemics. The image of God that first appeared in Sefer ha-Bahir, to
be elaborated by several generations of Kabbalists until it achieved its
highest poetic expression in the Zohar, is a God of multiple mythical
potencies, obscure entities eluding precise definition but described
through a remarkable web of images, parables, and scriptural allusions.
28
The Ten Sefirot 29
Together these entities constitute the divine realm: “God” is the col-
lective aggregate of these potencies and their inner relationship. The
dynamic interplay among these forces is the essential myth of Kab-
balah, the true inner meaning, as far as its devotees are concerned,
both of the Torah and of human life itself.
In describing the God of the Kabbalists as a figure of myth, I mean
to say that the fragmented narratives and scriptural interpretations
found in the Bahir and in other early kabbalistic writings refer to a
secret inner lite of God, thus lifting the veil from the ancient Jewish
insistence on monotheism and revealing a complex and multifaceted
divine realm. In sharp contrast to the well-known ancient adage of
Ben Sira' (“Do not seek out what is too wondrous for you; do not
inquire into that which les above you”’), these writings precisely seek
to penetrate the inner divine world and to offer hints to the reader
about the rich and complex life to be found there. Of course out-
right polytheism (like that of the pagan Gnostic groups of late antiq-
uity) 1s out of the question here at the heart of a medieval Jewry that
defined itself through proud and devoted attachment to the faith in
divine Oneness. What we seem to discover in the early Kabbalah are
various stages of divine life, elements within the Godhead that inter-
act with one another. In the Bahir these potencies interrelate quite
freely and mysteriously; a fixed pattern of relationships is somehow
vaguely in the background, but not clearly presented. There is one
passage, however, undoubtedly determinitive for later Kabbalah, that
enumerates the potencies as ten, setting them out as parallel to the
ten utterances (“Let there be . . .”)? by which God created the world.
This passage may be seen as the earliest quasi-systematic presentation
1. Famous wisdom teacher, c. 100 B.C.E., purported author of The Wisdom of Ben
Stra or Ecclesiasticus.
2. Mishnah Avot §:1.
INTRODUCTION 30
of kabbalistic teaching, and it therefore needs to be quoted at some
length:
What are the ten utterances? The frst is supreme crown, blessed be His
name and His people. And who are His people? Israel, as Scripture
says: “Know that YH-W-H is God; it is He who made us and not
[consonantally: L’] we ourselves” (Ps. 100:3). Read rather: “We are of
Aleph [L’]”—to recognize and know the One of Ones, united in all
His names.
The second: wisdom, as is written: “Y-H-W-H acquired me at the be-
ginning of His wav, before His deeds of old” (Prov. 8:22). And there 1s
no “beginning” but wisdom, as it says: “The beginning of wisdom, the
fear of Y-H-W-H” (Ps. rro:11).
The third: quarry of the Torah, treasury of wisdom, quarry of God's
spirit, hewn out by the spirit of God. This teaches that God hewed out
all the letters of Torah, engraving them with the spirit, casting His forms
within it. Thus Scripture says: “There is no rock [tsur] like our God” (I
Sam. 2:2). Read rather, “There is no artisan [tsayyar] hke our God.”
What is the fourth? The fourth is the righteousness of God, His mercies
and kindnesses with the entire world. This is the right hand of God.
What is the fifth? Fifth is the great fire of God, of which it says: “Let
me see no more of this great fire, lest I die’ (Deut. 18:16). This is the
left hand of God. ...
Sixth is the adorned, glorious, delightful throne of glory, the house of
the world to come. Its place is engraved in wisdom, as it says: “God
said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was hight” (Gen. 1:3)... .
99
Did you say “throne”? But we have said? that it is the cown of God, of
which it has been taught “Israel were crowned with three crowns: the
crown of priesthood, the crown of kingship, and the crown of Torah
which is higher than both.” Indeed, there is a priestly crown, above it a
royal crown, and the crown of Torah is above them both. To what may
this be compared? A king had a precious and fragrant vessel that he
loved greatly. Sometimes he places it on his head; these are the tefillin
[phylacteries] on the head. Sometimes he takes it in his hand, in the
3. The reference is to Mishnah Avot 4:13. Ns
a
The Ten Sefirot 31
knot of tefillin, Sometimes he lends it to his son that it might dwell
with him. Sometimes it is called his throne, for he takes it in his hand
as an amulet, like a throne [cup?].
Seventh are the plains of heaven. And why is it called heaven? For it is
round like a head, teaching that there 1s water on its right and fire on
its left, while it is in the center. It is SHa-Mfa-YiM (“heaven’’), from
eSH (“fire”) and MaYiM (“water”), bringing peace between them.
Along came fire and tound on its side the quality of fire; water came
and found on its side the quality of water. Thus “He makes peace in
His heights” (Job 25:2).
Seventh? But there are only six [referring to the six directions]! But
here is the holy palace that bears them all. It is considered two, and thus
seventh. What is it? [Like] contemplation is without end or limit, so
this place too has neither end nor limit.
The seventh ts the cosmic east, whence comes the seed of Israel. For the
spine draws from the mind and reaches to the phallus, whence comes
the seed. Thus Scripture says: “From the east I will bring your seed” (Is.
43:5). When Israel are good before the Ever-present, “I will bring your
seed” and you will have new seed. But when Israel are bad, the seed is
from that which has already come into the world, as is written “A gen-
eration comes and a generation goes” (Eccles. 1:4). This teaches that it
has come already. And what is (Is. 43:5, cont.) “and from the west I shall
gather you”? From that place which turns ever toward the west. Why 1s
it called “‘west”’ (ma’arav)? Because there all the seed is mixed (mt'arev).
To what may this be compared? To a king’s son who had a lovely and
modest bride in his chamber. He would take great wealth from his fa-
ther’s house and bring it to her. She would constantly take it all and hide
it, mixing it all together. After a time he sought to see what he had
gathered and assembled. Thus “and from the west (or ‘assemblage’) I
shall gather you.” And what is it? His father’s house, since “from the cast
I will bring your seed,” teaching that he brings from the east and sows
to the west. Afterwards he gathers in that which he has sown.
What is the eighth? God has a certain righteous one in His world who
is beloved to Him because he upholds the entire world. He is its foun-
dation, its sustainer, the one who sates it, causes it to grow, and gives it
joy. He is loved and treasured both above and below, considered awe-
some and grand both above and below, proper and accepted both above
INTRODUCTION 32
and below, the foundation of all souls. You say “foundation of souls” and
call him the eighth? But it says:““On the seventh day He rested and was
ensouled!” (Ex. 31:17) ... To what may this be compared? To a king
who had seven gardens. In the central garden there was a lovely foun-
tain, coming fromi a source of living waters. It watered the three to its
right and the three to its left. Whenever it did its work or was filled up,
all of them rejoiced. They said of it: For our sake it is being filled. It wa-
tered them and caused them to grow; they waited quietly for it and it
watered all seven. But it says:“From the east I will bring your seed.” Was
it one of them while it watered them? I should rather say that it watered
the heart and afterwards the heart watered them all. ...
Why is it that you said “eighth”? Because the eight began and ended
with it, in the count. But in action it is the seventh. What is it? On it
you begin counting the eight days until circumcision. But are they
eight [when counting from the first day]? They are only seven! Why
then did God say “eight”? Because of the eight human extremities.
What are they? Right and left hand, right and left leg, head, trunk, the
place of the covenant at the center, and the female partner, his wife.
Thus Scripture says: “He will cleave to his wife and-they shall be one
flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Thus eight, and the days until circumcision parallel
these. But these eight are really only seven, since trunk and phallus are
one. Thus eight.
What is nine? He said to him: Ninth and tenth are together, one facing
the other. One is five hundred years’ distance taller than the other. They
are two wheel-like beings, one tending toward the north and the other
toward the west, reaching down toward the earth below. Why “below’’?
The last of the seven lands below, the end of God’s Shekhinah, beneath
His feet, of which Scripture says: “The heavens are My throne and the
earth My footstool” (Is. 66:1). There is the eternity of the lower world,
as it says:“‘For eternity of eternities” (Is. 34:10). What is “eternity of eter-
nities’? “Eternity” is one, the one that turns toward the west. Second to
it is the one that turns toward north. Third is the one below. Third? But
you said: “Two wheels of the chariot!” But the end of Shekhinah is also
an eternity. Thus “eternity of eternities’—One “eternity” and two “eter-
nities” —this makes three.‘
4. Bahir (ed. Scholem /Abrams), #96—-115.
The Ten Sefirot 33
If we try to ask where “God” is in this complex, detailed, and yet
somehow entirely vague picture, the answer is not easy. What do we
mean by “God’’? Is God the One who is seated on the throne? Then
“He” must be higher than the sixth entity. But wait—the throne is also
the crown! But no, “crown” is the first of these entities! And is it God
who 1s crowned, or Israel? Let us then think of God as the figure at the
center, the one from whom all directions lead forth. But that makes
“Him” the seventh entity, identical to the palace. How can all these
other entities be “higher” than God?
The God of the Bahir is the entire elusive collectivity that emerges
from the daring and highly unsystematic group of images that consti-
tutes the book. There is not a God beyond who possesses or uses these
powers. They are quite far from the world of divine “attributes” of
which the medieval philosophers wrote with such caution and preci-
sion, and with which later apologists sought to identify them. Here we
have a God who 1s a mythical universe, a pleroma, or fullness of divine
powers, to borrow a term from the world of ancient Gnostic religion.
What is being talked about here is a group of divine entities that are
called sefirot by early kabbalistic sources outside the Bahir. The term
originates in Sefer Yetsirah, where it refers to the ten primal numbers
that, along with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, con-
stitute the “thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom” or the essential
structure of existence. The Bahir’s listing of ten such powers (the ninth
and tenth seem like something of an afterthought in this list, deriving
from the two angels Metatron and Sandalphon, who stand on either
side of the divine throne) reflects a stage in its editing when mythical
traditions of diverse origins were being organized into a loose system
of associations. Sefer Yetsirah’s ten sefirot, along with the ten divine “ut-
terances” of creation, have here been reinterpreted as a framework for
this pattern of mythical powers or entities, around which the Kabbal-
ists’ theosophic speculations are now ordered.
INTRODUCTION 34
We cannot fully explicate all of the images to be found in this pas-
sage, and to do so would divert us from our task of seeking out the
roots of a system that reaches full development only later, in the gener-
ation of the Zohar: But it is noteworthy that imagery derived from the
natural world is prominent here: gardens, fountains, and parts of the hu-
man body are all symbolic of the inner divine entities. Sexual union,
impregnation, and birth are clearly alluded to by the bringing of seed to
the house of the bride and the gathering of seed “in the west.” The text
also contains the earliest rather clear Jewish reference to a belief in rein-
carnation (“the seed is from that which has already come into the
world”), later to be a mainstay of kabbalistic faith. These natural sym-
bols combine with elements from the Jewish cult and rabbinic tradi-
tion: the three crowns, the divine throne, tefillin, and eighth-day cir-
cumcision. These too are now diverted from their original meaning to
point to some aspect of this mysterious and complex picture of divine
inner life.
The non-Bahir writings of early Kabbalah offer a somewhat differ-
ent picture. Here the term Ein Sof begins to appear as a hidden source
from which these ten sefirot emerge. Originally part of an adverbial
phrase meaning “endlessly,” Ein Sof is used in this context in a nominal
sense to designate “the Endless” or “that which is beyond all limits.” Ein
Sof refers to the endless and undefinable reservoir of divinity, the ulti-
mate source out of which everything flows. Ein Sof is utterly transcen-
dent in the sense that no words can describe it, no mind comprehend
it. But it is also ever-present in the sense of the old rabbinic adage, “He
is the place of the world,” To say that Ein Sof is “there” but not “here”
would entirely falsify the notion. Nothing can ever exist outside of Ein
Sof. It is thus not quite accurate to say that the sefirot “emerge” or
“come out of” Ein Sof: Within the hidden reaches of infinity, in a way
that of necessity eludes human comprehension, there stirs a primal de-
5. Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 68:10. ies
The Ten Sefirot 35
sire, the slightest rippling in the stillness of cosmic solitude. That desire
(not a change, the more philosophically oriented Kabbalist hastens to
add, but an aspect of reality that has been there forever) draws the infi-
nite well of energy called Ein Sof toward self-expression, a becoming
manifest or a concretization that begins with the subtlest of steps, moves
toward the emergence of “God” as divine persona, manifests its spec-
trum of energies in the “fullness” of the ten sefirot, and then spills over
with plentitude to create all the “lower” worlds, including, as its very
lowest manifestation, the material universe. The sefirot are thus a reve-
lation, a rendering more accessible, of that which has existed in Ein Sof
all along.
The sefirot constitute the subject of nearly all kabbalistic discourse, in-
cluding that of the Zohar. It is therefore essential that we understand
them in their full complexity, including the subtle and often elusive pat-
terns of thought found in discussion of them. Beginning with the Neo-
platonist version of Kabbalah, we may view the sefirot through either
temporal or spatial lenses as stages or rungs in the self-manifestation of
the Deity. As stages in an ongoing process of inner divine revelation, the
sefirot will emerge one after another, each deriving from and dependent
upon the one before it. Indeed both temporal and spatial imagery are
employed by the Kabbalists. The lower seven sefirot are referred to as
days, each one proceeding behind those that came before it. Spatial im-
agery abounds in the many diagrams offered by Kabbalists of concen-
tric circles or arrangements of usually circular entities in various pat-
terns of relationship.
But the seftrot exist in neither time nor space. They represent an in-
ner divine reality that is prior to these ways of dividing existence, al-
though both are derived from it. The word sefirah as number represents
a high level of metaphysical abstraction. In Sefer Yetsirah the sefirot seem
to be the numerical “building blocks” of reality; the existence of sefirot
indicates a certain multiplicity or multifacetedness within the divine
INTRODUCTION 36
unity, a tentative “many” within the absolute One. This means that the
oneness of God has a dynamic side; it is a one that is not simple and
undifferentiated but teeming with energy, life, and passion. There are
even tensions and forces that pull in opposite directions within this
unity, so that for the Kabbalist yihud ha-shem, understood previously as
the proclamation of the oneness of God, now comes to mean effecting
the unity of God, bringing the sefirot together in harmony so that a
single energy may flow through them.
It might be helpful to think of the sefirot as the Kabbalist’s way of
responding to the classic question of all mysticism, one we find ad-
dressed in many traditions. “If all is one,” the mystic asks, “where do
the many come from?” The mystic knows, often describes, and longs
to return to a world of complete undifferentiated oneness. In Kab-
balah this reality lies essentially beyond description and even tran-
scends any possible account of religious experience. It is called either
Ein Sof or ayin, the realm of primal “nothingness” associated with the
first sefirah that represents only a stirring of divine will but remains be-
yond any specific content. At this highest level, Kabbalah has a strong
apophatic element, or a mysticism of negative content, parallel to the
“emptiness of mind” found in some other mystical languages. But even
though Ein Sof formally stands beyond both experience and descrip-
tion, the Kabbalist believes that this 1s absolute reality, the deepest truth
toward which he aims. Why, then, does this truth lie so far from ordi-
nary human experience? How is it that we live in a phenomenal world
so frought with division, including the most basic separations of God
and world, self and other? If the mystic’s unitive vision does represent
reality, what is the relationship between that truth and the multifaceted,
differentiated world in which we seem to live? And why is it that even
the Torah seems to reflect a religious worldview so different from this
ultimate mystical truth?
The Kabbalist deals with this question, one that applies tg both the
The Ten Setirot 37
origins of reality and its ongoing nature, by means of finesse. Multi-
plicity begins to arise so subtly within the One that its presence can
barely be detected. Nothing is ever added to Ein Sof, but it ever so
gradually reveals itself to contain an increasingly differentiated reality.
The most important symbol of this reality is the discovery of the sefirot,
the ten within the one. The oneness of God is absolute; it does not be-
gin a series and can be followed by no “two.” The “ten” of the sefirot
does not follow the “one” of God but is contained in it, in the way that
mathematical tenths are contained within the whole. The revelation of
the tenfold nature of the Godhead is the tale of how the abstract deity
of a mystical Neoplatonism came to be manifest as the personified
God of biblical-rabbinic tradition, and how that God’s creation of the
lower universe may be seen as standing within the continuum of the
“great chain of being” that ceaselessly flows from the indescribable
hidden source, allowing for the existence of all that is.
The tension between the philosphical and mythical aspects of Kab-
balah, to which I have alluded, is present in any account one can offer
of the sefirotic world. The rationale for the sefirot just given places them
in the realm of philosophical mysticism, a way of dealing with the ab-
stractness of mystical thought in relation to concrete reality. But this ac-
count seems to have rather little to do with the ten sefirot of the Bahir
in the passage translated earlier. The group of divine potencies de-
scribed there was a mythical universe built out of reflection on Scrip-
ture, on the parables of the rabbis, on typical midrashic wordplays, and
on a host of ancient esoteric speculations. Kabbalah can be understood
only as a thorough amalgamation of these two very different ways of
thinking, with the tension between them never fully resolved. The se-
firot may in fact be viewed as a way of negotiating between the ab-
straction of mystical thought and the highly concrete, personified reli-
gious language of ancient Judaism. The Zohar’s poetic imagination will
infinitely enrich the mythical depictions of the sefirotic world, but the
INTRODUCTION 38
system of emanation developed by the Catalonian Kabbalists is also
fully in place in the back of its authors’ minds. In later Kabbalah this
tension between the philosophical and mythical views will take slightly
different form, emerging as the ongoing debate over whether the sefirot
are the “essence” of divinity or merely “vessels” into which the single
Deity pours His light and through which it comes to be refracted in
seemingly different ways.
We are now ready to trace the pattern of the sefirot and the essen-
tial symbols associated with them. The description in the following
paragraphs does not summarize any particular passage in a single kab-
balistic text, but it attempts to offer a summary understanding of the
sefirot as they were portrayed in the emerging Castilian Kabbalah of
the late thirteenth century. Further reflections on the meaning of the
sefirotic reality as a whole will be saved for the conclusion of this trac-
ing, when the reader will have a detailed grasp of the system.
The first sefirah represents the primal stirrings of intent within Ein
Sof, the arousal of desire to come forth into the varied life of being.
There is no specific “content” to this sefirah; it 1s desire or intentional-
ity, an inner movement of the spirit that potentially bears all content
but actually bears none. It is therefore often designated by the Kabbal-
ists as “Nothing.” This is a stage of reality that lies between being
wholly within the One and the first glimmer of separate existence.
Most of the terms used to describe this rather vague realm are
apophatic, describing it negatively. “The air that cannot be grasped” is
one favorite; “the hidden light” is another. One pictorial image as-
signed to this realm is that of the crown: Keter, the starting point of the
cosmic process. Sometimes this rung of being is referred to as Keter
‘Elyon, the Supreme Crown of God. This image is derived partly from
a depiction of the ten sefirot in anthropic form, that is to say, in the im-
age of a human being. Since this personification is of a royal person-
age, the highest manifestation of the emerging spiritual “body” will be
The Ten Sefirot 39
the crown. The Kabbalists also adapted an ancient myth (one that
reaches as far back as the era when verbal prayer replaced animal sac-
rifices) of the daily coronation of God by a diadem of words and let-
ters fashioned out ot the prayers of Israel. That crown reaches over the
head of God, the highest “place” imaginable. The daily coronation
rite, taking place in heaven as well as on earth, is central to ancient
merkavah traditions, and the position of Keter at the head of the sefirot
reflects the influence of merkavalt mysticism on Kabbalah. But we
should also recall that the more primary meaning of the word keter is
“circle”; it is from this meaning that the notion of the crown is de-
rived. In Sefer Yetsirah, the most ancient document that speaks of sefirot,
we are told that the sefirot are a great circle, “their end tied to their be-
ginning, and their beginning to their end.” The circularity of the se-
firot will be important to us further along in our description.
Out of Keter emerges Hokhmah, the first and finest point of “‘real”’
existence. All things, souls, and moments of time that are ever to be
exist within a primal point, at once infinitesimally small and great be-
yond measure. (Like mystics everywhere, Kabbalists love the language
of paradox, a way of showing how inadequate words really are to de-
scribe this reality.) The move from Keter to Hokhmah, the first step in
the primal process, is a transition from nothingness to being, from pure
potential to the first point of real existence. The Kabbalists are fond of
describing it by their own reading of a verse from Job's Hymn to Wis-
dom: “Wisdom comes from Nothingness” (Job 28:12). All the variety
of existence is contained within Hokhmah, ready to begin the journey
forward. Here we see the subtlety of the inner process used to describe
the transition from the undifferentiated oneness of Ein Sof to the var-
ied nature of existence. In these first two stages we have gone only
from “‘endlessness” to “nothingness” and thence to an immeasurably
small “primal point”—hardly a noticable transition at all. But we have
also journeyed from utter undifferentiation of the divine will to the
INTRODUCTION 40
deepest roots of each specific potentially extant being—a very re-
markable movement indeed.
But Hokhmah, meaning “wisdom,” is also the primordial teaching,
the inner mind of God, the Torah that exists prior to the birth of
words and letters. As being exists here in this ultimately concentrated
form, so too does truth or wisdom. The Kabbalists are building on the
ancient midrashic identification of Torah with primordial wisdom and
the midrashic reading of “In the beginning” as “through Wisdom”
God created the world. Here we begin to see their insistence that
Creation and Revelation are twin processes—existence and language,
the real and the nominal—emerging together from the hidden mind
of God. As the primal point of existence, Hokhmah is symbolized by
the yod, the smallest of the letters, the first point from which all the
other letters will be written. Here all of Torah, the text and the com-
mentary added to it in every generation—indeed all of human wis-
dom—is contained within a single yod. This yod is the first letter of the
name of God. The upper tip of the yod points toward Keter, itself des-
ignated by the aleph or the divine name EHYEH.
This journey from inner divine Nothingness toward the beginning
of existence is one that inevitably arouses duality, even within the inner
realms. As Hokhmah emerges, it brings forth its own mate, called Binah,
or “contemplation.” Hokhmah is described as a point of light that seeks
out a grand mirrored palace of reflection. The light seen back and forth
in these countless mirrored surfaces is all one light, but infinitely trans-
formed and magnified in the reflective process. Hokhmah and Binah are
two sefirot that are inseparably linked to one another; each is incon-
ceivable to us without the other. Hokhmah is too fine and subtle to be
detected without its reflections or reverberations in Binah. The mir-
rored halls of Binah would be dark and unknowable without the light
of Hokhmah. For this reason they are often treated by Kabbalists as the
primal pair, the ancestral Abba and Imma, Father and Mother, the deep-
Wiad 9 me
y
The Ten Sefirot 41
est polarities of male and female within the divine (and human) self.
The point and the palace are also primal Male and Female, each trans-
formed and fulfilled in their union with one another. The energy that
radiates from the point of Hokhmah is described chiefly in metaphors
of flowing light and water, verbal pictures used by the mystics to speak
of these most abstract levels of the inner Mind. But images of sexual
union are never far behind these; the flow of light is also the flow of
seed that fills the womb of Binal: and gives birth to all the further rungs
within the ten-in-one divine structure, the seven “lower” sefirot.
The terms Hokhmah and Binah reflect two qualities or stages of in-
ner mental activity, and indeed they may be experienced within the self
as two aspects of mind: the first flash of intellect, the creative spark, and
the depth of thought that then absorbs the spark, shaping and refining
it as it takes it into itself. This is a rendition in terms of mental process
of that same image of the “point” and the “palace,” showing that the
language of Kabbalah may be read simultaneously as a myth of cosmic
origins and a description of events within the mystic’s mind. Binah is
thus described by the term quarry, the rocky place out of which the let-
ters are hewn forth. Hokhmah, the flash of intellect, seeks articulation.
Itself only the single point of a yod, it carves deeply into the mind in
quest of “letters” or language through which its truth will be spoken.
This primal forming of language, still silent within the mind, carries
the self-revealing process of creation a step further in the emergence of
cosmos, Torah, and the mystic’s own mind. That this should be the case
is taken for granted by the Kabbalist, since his mind is a microcosm of
that which exists “above” and has been created in such a way as to per-
mit it to both reflect and affect happenings on the cosmic plane.
This first triad of sefirot constitutes the most primal and recondite
level of the inner divine world. It is a reality that the Kabbalist regularly
claims to be quite obscure and beyond human ken, although the many
references to kavvanah reaching Keter and the union of all the sefirot
INTRODUCTION 42
with their source tend to undercut such assertions. But in most passages
in the Zohar, Binah stands as the womb of existence, the jubilee in
which all returns to its source, the object of teshuvah (“turning,” “re-
turning”’)——in short, the highest object of the religious quest to return
to the source. Out of the womb of Binah flow the seven “lower” sefirot,
constituting seven aspects of the divine persona. Together these consti-
tute the God who is the object of worship and the One whose image
is reflected in each human soul. The divine Self, as conceived by Kab-
balah, is an interplay of these seven forces or inner directions. So too 1s
each human personality —God’s image in the world. (The Hasidic mas-
ters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made much of this psy-
chological aspect of Kabbalah’s teachings.) This “holy structure” of the
inner life of God is called raza de-mehemenuta, the “Mystery of Faith,’
by the Zohar and has been refined in countless images by Kabbalists
through the ages. In other words, “God” (here meaning the God of bib-
lical and rabbinic tradition) was the first Being to emerge out of the di-
vine womb, the primal “entity” that took shape as the endless energies
of Ein Sof began to coalesce.
These seven sefirot, taken collectively, are represented in the spatial
domain by the six directions around a center (in the tradition of Sefer
Yetsirah) and in the realm of time by the seven days of the week, cul-
minating in the Sabbath. Under the influence of Neoplatonism, the
Kabbalists came to describe the sefirot as emerging in sequence. Again,
this sequence does not have to be one of time, as the sefirot constitute
the inner life of Y-H-V-H, where time does not mean what it does to
us. The sequence is rather one of an instrinsic logic, each stage a re-
sponse to that which comes “before” it. The structure consists of two
dialectical triads (sets of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) and a final ve-
hicle of reception that also energizes the entire system from “below,”
corresponding to Keter at the “upper” end.
First to manifest is Hesed, the grace or love of God. The emergence
yous
The Ten Sefirot 43
of God from hiding is an act filled with love, a promise of the endless
showering of blessing and life on all beings, each of whose birth in a
sense will continue this process of emerging from the One. This gift of
love is beyond measure and without limit; the boundless compassion of
Keter is now transposed into a love for each specific form and creature
that is ever to emerge. This channel of grace is the original divine shefa,
the bounteous and unlimited love of God. But the divine wisdom also
understands that love alone 1s not the way to bring forth “other” beings
and to allow them their place. Judaism has always known God to em-
body judgment as well as love. The proper balance between these two,
ever the struggle of the rabbis themselves (loving the people as well as
the law), is a struggle that Jewish sources have long seen as existing in
God as well. Hesed therefore emerges linked to its own opposite, de-
scribed both as Din, the judgment of God, and Gevurah, the bastion of
divine power. This is a force that measures and limits love, that controls
the flow of Hesed in response to the needs, abilities, and deserts of those
who are to receive it.
Hesed represents the God of love, calling forth the response of love
in the human soul as well. Hesed in the mystic’s soul is the love of God
and of all of God’s creatures, the ability to continue this divine flow,
passing on to others the gift of divine love. Gevurah represents the God
we humans fear, the One before whose power we stand in trembling.
The Kabbalists saw Hesed as the faith of Abraham, described by the
prophet as “Abraham who loved Me” (Is. 41:8). Abraham, the first of
God’s true followers on earth, stands parallel to Hesed, the first quality
to emerge within God. He is the man of love, the one who will leave
all behind and follow God across the desert, willing to offer everything,
even to place his beloved son upon the altar for love of God. Gevurah,
on the other hand, is the God called “fear of Isaac” (Gen. 31:42). This
is the divine face Isaac sees when bound to that altar, confronting the
God he believes is about to demand his life. Isaac’s piety is of a differ-
INTRODUCTION 44
ent quality than his father’s. Trembling obedience, rather than love,
marks his path through life. In the Zohar the “fear of Isaac” 1s some-
times depicted as a God of terror.
The linking together of Hesed and Gevurah is an infinitely delicate
balance. Too much love and there is no judgment, none of the moral
demand that is so essential to the fabric of Judaism. But too much
power or judgment is even worse. The Kabbalists see this aspect of the
divine and human self as fraught with danger, the very birthplace of
evil. Gevurah represents the “left” side of the divine as the sefirot emerge
in humanlike form. The Zohar speaks of a discontent that arises on this
“left” side of God.® Gevurah becomes impatient with Hesed, unwilling
to see judgment set aside in the name of love. Rather than permitting
love to flow in measured ways, Gevurah seeks some cosmic moment 1n
which to rule alone, to hold back the flow of love. In this “moment”
divine power turns to rage or fury; out of it all the forces of evil are
born, darkness emerging from the light of God, a shadow of the divine
universe that continues to exist throughout history, sustained by the
evil wrought by humans below. Here we have one of the most impor-
tant moral lessons of Kabbalah: judgment untempered by love brings
about evil; power obsessed with itself turns demonic. The force of evil
is often referred to by the Zohar as sitra ahara, the “other side,’ indicat-
ing that it represents a parallel emanation to that of the sefirot. But the
origin of the demonic reality that both parallels and mocks the divine
is not in some “other” distant force. The demonic is born of an imbal-
ance within the divine, flowing ultimately from the same source as all
else, the single source of being.
As mentioned earlier, the Castilian Kabbalists were especially fasci-
nated by this “emanation of the left side’ Here as in the ancient apoc-
alyptic and Gnostic writings, the imagination was allowed to bring
6. This is in fact one of several myths of the origin of evil to be found within the
Zohar. See Chapter Ten in this book for further discussion. Ole
s
ss.
The Ten Sefirot 45
forth its most fantastic creations. There are times when these writers
seem to be describing a truly dualistic universe, one in which the pow-
ers of good and evil are pitted against one another in an eternal strug-
gle that will end only with the final redemption. Particularly striking in
the Zohar 1s the imaginative resurrection of monsters and demons that
seem strangely like figures from the bestiary of ancient Semitic myth,
vanquished by biblical monotheism but still echoing in the poetry of
the Psalms, Job, and a few other biblical sources. In the Zohar it almost
seems as though these presentiments of terror have been awakened
from the sleep of millennia to return and haunt new generations. The
mythmaking imagination of the Kabbalists leapt upon the scant mate-
rials preserved in these verses and expanded in certain later Midrashim
to create a powerful and indeed frightening demonic host, one that was
to thrive and continue to develop in the minds of later generations of
the kabbalistic faithful.
This extremely mythic view of the demonic as a cosmic force does
not at all set aside the key role that Judaism has always assigned to hu-
man responsibility in the creation of evil. The wicked forces in the uni-
verse set Out to tempt humans and lead them down the path of trans-
gression, to be sure. But these forces themselves are sustained and
nourished by human evil. The more apologetic Kabbalists insist that
only the potential for evil exists within God (as does all potential), and
that the negative forces emerging from the left side have no power at
all until humans, beginning with the sin of Adam, turn their own en-
ergies in the direction of evil. Just as the righteous, as we shall see more
fully later, can unify the sefirot and bring blessing upon the world by the
concentration of their devotional powers, so can the wicked arouse evil
in the cosmos by the misdirection of their own inner forces. This 1s also
to say that evil resides within each human being, as it exists in the cos-
mos as a whole. Our temptation to do evil is the result of the same im-
balance of inner forces that exists within the divine cosmic structure, 1n
INTRODUCTION 46
whose image every person is made. Neither God's world nor the hu-
man self can do without Gevurah, represented in the person by self-re-
straint, strength of character, and the knowledge of how to act appro-
priately in a given situation. But we constantly have to be sure that
enough love and compassion get through these restraints, or else we are
in grave danger of doing harm to the cosmos itself as well as to our
own souls. Anger in particular is frowned upon by the kabbalistic
ethos, which always urges its followers to lean toward the “right” or
Hesed side of the self, making sure that love remains sufficiently strong
and free to flow.
The balance of Hesed and Gevurah results in the sixth sefirah, the cen-
ter of the sefirotic universe. This configuration ideally represents the
personal God of biblical and rabbinic tradition. This is God seated on
the throne, the one to whom prayer is most centrally addressed. Poised
between the “right” and “left” forces within divinity, the “blessed Holy
One” is the key figure in a central column of sefirot, positioned directly
below Keter, the divine that precedes all duality. The sixth sefirah is rep-
resented by the third patriarch, Jacob, also called Israel, the perfect inte-
gration of the forces of Abraham and Isaac, the God who unites and
balances love and fear. This is not the Jacob of the biblical stories, we
should add, but an idealized patriarch of the kabbalistic imagination. Al-
ready in the older Midrash Jacob is referred to as “the choicest among
the patriarchs,’ the one whose “bed”’ was perfect in that all his sons
were included within the holy people. The rabbis speak of God as hav-
ing a special love for the figure of Jacob, whose “image was engraved on
the Throne of Glory.’ These mythical depictions of the idealized pa-
triarch are woven together by the Kabbalists to create the figure of God
as yisra’el saba, “Israel the Elder,’ the source of blessing to His descen-
dents, who are identified for all time as “the Children of Israel.”
Nonpersonal designations for this sixth sefirah include Tif’eret (“splen-
7. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 146a, Hullin 91b; Bereshit Rabbah 68:13" 82:2.
The Ten Setirot 47
dor’’), mishpat (“balanced judgment”), and emet (“truth”). The three
consonants of emet represent the first, middle, and last letters of the al-
phabet. Truth is stretched torth across the whole of Being, joining the
extremes of right and left, Hesed and Gevurah, into a single, integrated
personality. Thus is the sixth sefirah also described as the central
“beam” in God’s construction of the universe. Adopting a line from
Moses’ tabernacle (Ex. 26:28), depicted by the rabbis as reflecting the
cosmic structure, Jacob, or the sixth sefirah, is called “the central beam,
reaching trom one end unto the other.”
In Jacob, or Tif’eret, we reach the synthesis that resolves the original
tension between Hesed and Gevurah, the inner “right” and “left,” love
and judgment. The “blessed Holy One,” as a personal God, is also the
uppermost manifestation called “Israel,” thus serving as a model of
idealized human personality. Each member of the house of Israel par-
takes of this Godhead, Who may also be understood as a totemic rep-
resentation of His people below. “Jacob” is in this sense the perfect
human—a new Adam, according to the sages—the radiant-faced elder
extending blessing through the world. This is also the God of imitatio
dei. In balancing their own lives, Israel imitates the God who stands at
the center between right and left, balancing all the cosmic forces. That
God knows them and sees Himself in them, meaning that the struggle
to integrate love and judgment is not only the great human task but a
reflection of the cosmic struggle. The inner structure of psychic life is
the hidden structure of the universe; it 1s because of this that humans
can come to know God by the path of inward contemplation and true
self-knowledge.
The key dialectical triad of Hesed-Gevurah- Tif’eret is followed on the
kabbalistic chart by a second triad, that of the sefirot Netsah, Hod, and
Yesod, arranged in the same manner as those above them. Little that is
new takes place on this level of divinity. These sefirot are essentially
channels through which the higher energies pass on their way into the
INTRODUCTION 48
tenth sefirah, Malkhut or Shekhinah, the source of ali life for the lower
worlds. Historically speaking, the chart evolved in the period between
the Bahir and the Zohar. The mostly undefined seventh and eighth se-
firot, Netsah and Hod in classical Kabbalah, are descended from the two
angels who occupied the ninth and tenth places in the Bahir passage
quoted earlier. These two in turn are medieval expansions of the pair
of angels called Metatron and Sandalphon in the older sources, stand-
ing in front of and behind the divine throne. As Kabbalah evolved, it
became important that Shekhinah. be the tenth sefirah, the “end” or
“oateway” of divinity, poised precisely at the transition point between
divinity and the lower worlds. To make this happen, the lowest two se-
firot were “elevated” into side supports of the divine edifice. They rep-
resent the two pillars of the cosmic temple or the two thighs (some-
times the testicles) of the divine anthropos.
The only major function assigned to Netsah and Hod in the kab-
balistic sources is that they serve as the sources of | prophecy. Moses 1s
the single human to rise to the level of Tif’eret, to become “bride-
eroom of the Shekhinah.” Other mortals can experience the sefirotic
universe only as reflected in the Shekhinah, the single portal though
which they can enter. (This is the “formal” view of the Kabbalists,
though it is a position exceeded by a great many passages in the Zo-
har and elsewhere.) The prophets other than Moses occupy an inter-
mediate position, receiving their visions and messages from the sev-
enth and eighth sefirot, making prophecy a matter of participation in
the inner sefirotic life of God.
The ninth sefirah represents the joining together of all the cosmic
forces, the flow of all the energies above now united again in a single
place. In this sense the ninth sefirah is parallel to the second: Hokhmah
began the flow of these forces from a single point; now Yesod, as the
ninth is called, reassembles them and prepares to direct their flow once
again. The life force that flows among and animates the seftxot is often
The Ten Sefirot 49
described in metaphors of either light or water, the two primal sub-
stances that best reity free-flowing energy. But when the cosmic forces
are gathered in Yesod it bcomes clear that this flow is also to be seen as
male sexual energy, specifically as semen, which the Greek physician
Galen saw as originating in the brain (Hokhmalt), flowing down through
the spinal column (the central column, Tif’eret), into the testicles (Net-
sah and Hod), and then into the phallus (Yesod). The sefirotic process
thus leads to the great union of the nine sefirot above, through Yesod,
with the female Shekhinah. She becomes filled and impregnated with
the fullness of divine energy and in turn gives birth to the lower worlds,
including both angelic beings and human souls.
The biblical personality associated with the ninth sefirah is Joseph,
the only figure regularly described in rabbinic literature as tsaddig, or
“righteous.” He is given this epithet because he rejected the wiles of
Potiphar’s wife, making him a symbol of male chastity or sexual purity.
The sefirah itself is thus often called tsaddiq, the place where God 1s rep-
resented as the embodiment of moral righteousness. So too is Yesod des-
ignated as berit, or “covenant,” again referring to sexual purity through
the covenant of circumcision.
But there is more than one way to read these symbols. The ninth se-
firah stands for male potency as well as sexual purity. The Kabbalists res-
olutely insist that these purposes are ideally identical and are not to be
separated from one another. Of course sexual transgression and temp-
tation were well known to them; the circle of the Zohar was quite ex-
treme in its views on sexual sin and on the great damage it could cause
to both soul and cosmos. But the inner world of the sefirot was com-
pletely holy, a place where no sin abided. Here the flow of male energy
represented only fruitfulness and blessing. The fulfillment of the entire
sefirotic system, especially as seen in Castile, lay in the union of these
two final sefirot. Yesod is, to be sure, the agent or lower manifestation of
Tif’eret, the true bridegroom of the Song of Songs or the King who
INTRODUCTION §0
weds the Matronita, Shekhinah, the Grand lady of the cosmos. But the
fascination with the sexual aspect of this union is very strong, especially
in the Zohar, and that leads to endless symbolic presentations of the
union of Yesod and Malkhut, the feminine tenth sefirah.
By far the richest network of symbolic associations is that con-
nected with the tenth and final sefirah. As Malkhut (“kingdom”), it
represents the realm over which the King (Tif’eret) has dominion, sus-
taining and protecting her as the true king takes responsibility for his
kingdom. At the same time, it is this sefirah that is charged with do-
minion over the lower world; the blessed Holy One’s Malkhut is the
lower world’s ruler. The Zohar’s frequent designation of her as the Ma-
tronita (a Latin word in Aramaic garb), Matron or Grand Lady of the
cosmos, is its way of ascribing this queenly status. The biblical person-
age associated with Malkhut is David (somewhat surprisingly, given its
usual femininity), the symbol of kingship. While Malkhut receives the
flow of all the upper sefirot from Yesod, She has a special affinity for the
left side. For this reason She is sometimes called “the gentle aspect of
judgment,” although several Zohar passages paint her in portraits of
seemingly ruthless vengeance in punishing the wicked. A most com-
plicated picture of femininity appears in the Zohar, ranging from the
most highly romanticized to the most frightening and bizarre.
The last sefirah is also called Shekhinah, an ancient rabbinic term for
the indwelling divine presence. In the early Midrash, the Shekhinah was
said to dwell in Israel’s midst, to follow them into exile, and to partici-
pate in their suffering. In the latest phases of midrashic literature there
began to appear a distinction between God and His Shekhinah, partly a
reflection of medieval philosophical attempts to assign the biblical an-
thropomorphisms to a being less than the Creator. In the medieval Jew-
ish imagination this appelation for God was transformed into a winged
divine being, hovering over the community of Israel and protecting
them from harm. The Kabbalists identify this Shekhinah as the spouse or
+ NUS?
The Ten Sefirot ¢1
divine consort of the blessed Holy One. She is the tenth sefirah, there-
fore a part of God included within the divine ten-in-one unity. But She
is tragically exiled, distanced from Her divine Spouse. Sometimes She is
seen to be either seduced or taken captive by the evil hosts of sitra ahara:
then God and the righteous below must join forces in order to liberate
Her. The great drama of religious life, according to the Kabbalists, is
that of protecting Shekhinah from the forces of evil and joining Her to
the holy Bridegroom, who ever awaits Her. Here one can see how me-
dieval Jews adapted the values of chivalry—the rescue of the maiden
from the clutches of evil—to fit their own spiritual context.
In che midrashic tradition, Shekhinah identifies with the sufferings of
the community of Israel and dwells in their midst. Nevertheless, a clear
distinction is maintained between these two. Shekhinah is the presence
of God; keneset yisra’el is the collective body of the Jewish people.
Sometimes the “Community of Israel” is indeed depicted as a hyposta-
tic entity, standing in God's presence and engaging in dialogue with
Him. But this partner in dialogue is always other than God, represent-
ing His earthly beloved. In what was surely their most daring symbolic
move, the Kabbalists combined these two figures, blurring the once
obvious distinction between the human community of Israel and their
divine protector. They claimed that Shekhinah is the Community of Is-
rael; keneset yisra’el became another term for the tenth sefirah. Poised
precisely at the border between the divine and the lower worlds, She ts
at once the this-worldly presentiment of God and a heavenly embodi-
ment of Israel.
The identification of Shekhinah and keneset yisra’el enabled the Kab-
balists to take over the entire midrashic tradition regarding the rela-
tionship of God and Israel and to declare it their own. Particularly, the
rabbis’ reading of the Song of Songs as a love-dialogue between God
and Israel was now transformed into the key text to set the poetic stage
for depicting the inner unity of God as the love of male and female.
INTRODUCTION 52
The change made here in the dramatic structure of Jewish faith cannot
be overstated. The radical monotheism of the prophets, insisting that
YHVH had no consort other than His beloved people, was now set
aside in favor of an intradivine romance. The essential relationship that
Judaism came to depict was now the “secret of faith,” the union of male
and female with God. The earthly community of Israel remains God's
partner and beloved people, but now He and they (the Kabbalists in
particular) share in the task of restoring cosmic oneness, of bringing di-
vine male and female face to face with one another so that the lights
might shine throughout the universe, so that the waters of life might
flow through Her to nourish and sustain all the worlds below.
As the female partner within the divine world, the tenth sefirah
came to be described by a host of symbols, derived both from the nat-
ural world and from the legacy of Judaism, that are classically associ-
ated with femininity. She is the moon, dark on Her own but receiving
and giving off the light of the sun. She is the sea, into whom all wa-
ters flow; the earth, longing to be fructified by the rain that falls from
heaven. She is the heavenly Jerusalem, into whom the King will enter;
She is the throne upon which He is seated, the Temple or tabernacle,
dwelling-place of His glory. In a most blatantly sexual symbolization,
She is aron ha-berit, the ark of the covenant, that in which the berit or
covenant (meaning both the Torah and the circumcised phallus) 1s
contained. The tenth sefirah is a passive-receptive female with regard
to the sefirot above Her, receiving their energies and being fufilled by
their presence within Her. But She is ruler, source of life, and font of
all blessing for the worlds below, including the human soul. The Kab-
balist sees himself as a devotee of the Shekhinah, a spiritual knight of
the Matronita. She may never be worshiped separately from the divine
unity. Indeed, this separation of Shekhinah from the forces above was
the terrible sin of Adam that brought about exile from Eden. Yet it is
only through Her that humans have access to the mysteries beyond.
The Ten Sefirot $3
All prayer is channelled through Her, seeking to energize Her and raise
Her up in order to effect the sefirotic unity. The primary function of
the religious lite, with all its duties and obligations, is to rouse the
Shekhinah into a state of love.
All realms outside the divine proceed from Shekhinah. She is sur-
rounded most immediately by a richly pictorialized host. Sometimes
these surrounding beings are seen as angels; other times they are the
maidens who attend the Bride at Her marriage canopy. They inhabit
and rule over variously described realms or “palaces” of light and joy.
The Zohar devotes much attention to describing seven such palaces
with names that include “Palace of Love,” “Palace of the Sapphire
Brick” (alluding to the vision of God in Exodus 24:10), “Palace of
Desire,’ and so forth. The “palaces” (heikhalot) of the Zoharic world
are historically derived from the remains of the ancient merkavah or
heikhalot mysticism, a tradition that was only dimly remembered by the
Zohar’s day. In placing the heikhalot beneath the Shekhinah, the Kabbal-
ists meant to say that the visionary ascent of the merkavah mystic was a
somewhat lesser sort of religious experience than their own symbolic-
contemplative ascent to the heights of the sefirotic universe, an ascent
with the Shekhinah as She reached into the highest realms.
The energy stored in Malkhut reaches forth beyond the realm of
divine fullness, through these palaces of light, into the lower worlds.
While the inner logic of the Kabbalists’ emanational thinking would
seem to indicate that all beings, including the physical universe, low
forth from Shekhinah, the medieval abhorrence of associating God
with corporeality complicates the picture, leaving Kabbalah with a
complex and somewhat divided attitude toward the material world.
The world in which we live, especially for the Zohar, is a thorough
mingling of divine and demonic elements. Both the holy imprint of
the ten sefirot and the frightening structure of multilayered gelippot, or
demonic “shells,” are to be found within it.
INTRODUCTION $4
Now that we have reviewed the order of the sefirot and some of the
chief symbols associated with them, we have to go back and ask again
what we have just described. What do the Kabbalists believe about the
sefirot? Are they actual “entities,” separate, distinguishable realities on
the cosmic plane? Can they be that and yet still be within God, as the
Kabbalists seem to insist? This is partly a theological question, since
the kabbalistic system seems to veer terribly close to polytheism, es-
pecially insofar as the existence of the sefirot is taken literally. But there
is also an important epistemological question here as we seek to un-
derstand the nature of the reality that the Kabbalists sought to ascribe
to the sefirotic world.
The ambiguous attitude toward the “real” nature of the sefirot may be
traced back to Sefer Yetsirah, that ancient and prekabbalistic source from
which the term sefirah itself is taken. There the sefirot are described by
the obscure term belimah, which may mean “silence” or “holding back,”
implying some esoteric reservations about the entire discussion. But be-
limah is read by many kabbalistic interpreters as beli mah, an awkward
way of saying “without substance,’ meaning that the sefirot exist on
some plane other than that of ordinary reality. Sefer Yetsirah goes on to
describe their existence as that of ‘a flame joined to a coal,’ seemingly
picturing them as darting flames that leap forth from a burning coal but
have no possible existence separate from it.
While some of the earliest Kabbalists indeed had to combat accusa-
tions of polytheism, more sophisticated critics of Kabbalah have wor-
ried that it is in fact a pantheistic system, one that thoroughly com-
promises the idea of divine “otherness” that seems characteristic of the
earlier Jewish tradition. If Ein Sof is without end or limit, all of the se-
firot must exist within it, making them more like aspects or dimensions
of a single reality than substantive stages on any real journey toward
multiplicity. But what then of the “lower” worlds, insofar as they too
are part of the great chain of emanation that proceeds from the Shekhi-
Acres
The Ten Sefirot $5
nah? Are not they too part of Ein Sof, the endless, undifferentiated sin-
gle source of life? Are the seeming multiplicities and differentiations of
this lower world then somehow less than real? What becomes of the
place of evil in a pantheistic universe? What of law and human re-
sponsibility in a world in which everything exists in an unbroken con-
tinuum with the single selthood of God?
Kabbalists throughout history, including the circle of the Zohar it-
self, have had to respond to these challenges, sometimes issued from
within their own struggling minds as well as articulated by their oppo-
nents. Various views are found in the sources. Some authors, especially
in the fitteenth and sixteenth centuries, became quite apologetic about
kabbalistic language and sought to combine it with the originally very
different discourse of medieval Jewish philosophy. Others, including
the authors of the Zohar, were closer to pantheism, but rather incon-
sistently combined it with aspects of dualistic mythology and insistence
on a literalist notion of revelation. The history of Kabbalah reflects an
ongoing struggle over these issues, sometimes resulting in highly orig-
inal and creative attempts at resolving the theological difficulties result-
ing from a position that straddles an all-embracing mystical pantheism
and an authority-centered religious personalism. The conflict between
these two approaches may be seen as endemic to the very enterprise of
Jewish mysticism. We return to them later, in our discussion of Cre-
ation in the Zohar.
The greatest contribution of the Kabbalists, it has been suggested,
was the creation of a new religious language against the background
of biblical and rabbinic Judaism. The mystics had, and occasionally ar-
ticulated, a sense that they were reaching beyond philosophy and en-
tering a realm of reality that rational thought was unable to penetrate.
The move from rationalist philosophy to mystical ways of thinking
(which Rabbi Isaac the Blind described as “sucking” at divine Mind as
a child nurses from the breast) was by no means a descent from the in-
INTRODUCTION 56
tellectual heights to a “lower” state of emotionalism: or passion. It was
rather an intensification of the contemplative, characterized by what
was understood as a breakthrough to a new realm of abstraction or
“nothingness.” From the Maimonideans, however, the Kabbalists had
already obtained a sense of the inadequacy of language to express the
content of the contemplative experience. The philosophers’ flight
from anthropomorphism, carried to the extreme of Maimonides’ in-
sistence that descriptions of the divine were possible only in negative
terms (the so-called theory of negative attributes), left no reason to
hope that still greater depths would be amenable to description by any
currently available linguistic tool.
The Kabbalists thus created for themselves a different way of speak-
ing, a language so enriched by networks of symbolic association that
their words had about them a new profundity, brought about by those
symbolic linkages. For this purpose, the sefirot may be viewed not as
hypostatic “entities” but as symbol clusters, linked by association, the
mention or textual occurence of any of which automatically brings to
mind all the others as well. For this purpose, the conventional names
of the sefirot have no particular importance; they are simply one more
layer within the complex network of associated symbols.
Let us take an example that will illustrate the point. The third sefi-
rah, conventionally called Binah, is described as the “upper palace,” the
first home of the divine light. As such it (or “She’’) is also the higher
Tabernacle or the “First Temple.” This sefirah is also the womb out of
which the seven sefirotic “days” are born. She is the one to whom all
return and is thus called “primal Mother” (imma ila’ah), “penitence”
(teshuvah), and “jubilee” (yovel), as we said earlier. The jubilee associa-
tion also makes Her “fifty” and links Her with the holiday of Shavu’ot
(Pentacost) and thus with the revelation of Torah, or the manifestation
of the seed of Hokhmah hidden within Her. But Binah also means “un-
derstanding,” and it is clear that we are speaking about a djntinct as-
a
The Ten Sefirot $7
pect of mental activity as well. Binal is also the source of language, the
quarry out of which the lower sefirot and the letters of speech are
hewn, the upper Eden out of which the sefirotic “rivers” flow, and the
“spring” trom which the waters of life are drawn. We could continue
to enrich this list by a host of other verbal pictures as well. Joseph
Gikatilla’s Sha’arey Orah, the great symbolary of early Kabbalah, does
just that for each of the sefirot.
For the Kabbalist, each time any of these words appears in a text—
be it the Torah, the prayerbook, or the Talmudic aggadah—all the other
terms are evoked as well. The same is true, especially in the Zoharic
narrative, of seeing or experiencing any of the natural phenomena that
are part of such a cluster. To come upon a spring would thus be to
think also of teshuvah, of the quarry, of the mysterious fifty, and of the
source of life. To encounter the word quarry in a text—that of Sefer Yet-
sirah, for example—would immediately bring about mental pictures of
the Mother, the jubilee, the spring, and all the rest. What then is this
third sefirah, we might ask? True, the Kabbalists did think of it as a hy-
postasis, as a real if only vaguely accessible “entity” or reality within the
Godhead, as a distinct stage in the journey from utter hidden oneness
toward self-revelation. But from a functional standpoint, Binah 1s also a
cluster of symbols, a nugget of enriched speech, by which the Kabbal-
ist can seek to express something of this deeper-than-accessible reality.
It is no accident that each of these associative clusters contains
within it symbols derived from the biblical text and Jewish tradition,
personal figures, and representations of the world of nature. In striving
for a language that would evoke a response from more profound lev-
els of the human soul, the Kabbalists rediscovered the great power of
natural symbols. Including such terms as sun and sky (Tif’eret), moon,
sea, and earth (Malkhut), dawn and dusk (Hesed and Gevurah) in their
symbolic repertoire added greatly to the feeling of awe and grandeur
evoked by each of the symbolic clusters. Rabbinic Judaism had mostly
INTRODUCTION §8
turned away from the magnificent evocations of God’s wonders in
Creation so stirringly described by the psalms and prophets. For the
rabbis, the greatness of God was primarily to be seen in the profundi-
ties of Torah and in its interpretation rather than in the beauties of na-
ture. But the medieval interest in both astronomy and astrology com-
bined with Neoplatonic philosopy to bring forth what has been called
a cosmic spirituality, one that saw the heavenly spheres as the great testa
ment to God's glory. Kabbalah is part of this phenomenon. It is no ac-
cident that the Zohar turns with great frequency and passion to texts
from those parts of the Bible that celebrate God’s handiwork in Cre-
ation. The writings of these ancient poets are fed directly into the net-
work of terms and associations that constitute kabbalistic symbolism.
In addition to the associations found within each symbol cluster,
there are groups or patterns of sefirot that also give rise to ieaps of as-
sociative thinking. The connection, for example, of Hesed-Gevurah-
Tif’eret with the three Biblical patriarchs defines a special sort of link
among these three. It then joins them to the opening three blessings of
the amidah prayer (the central prayer of Jewish worship recited thrice
daily), also associated with the patriarchs. Other triads within the tradi-
tion then might well be homiletically identified with this fixed group
of three. The identification of the four directions with Hesed-Gevurah-
Tif’ eret-Malkhut functions in a similar way, setting the pattern for other
fours to be “discovered” as linked to these. The links between the up-
permost triad of sefirot and the lower septet, particularly Malkhut, are
also of great importance. Hokhmah and Binah are sometimes depicted as
“father” and “mother” to the lower sefirot. Sometimes this “parental”
link reflects nourishment or source of energy. Both Yesod and Malkhut
are closely related to Hokhmah in this way. But in other passages the re-
lationship is more one of structural parallelism. Binah is the “upper
world” whose likeness is reflected in Malkhut, the “lower world” within
the sefirotic realm. These two female elements within the Godhead are
;
The Ten Sefirot 59
sometimes depicted as Leah and Rachel, the two wives of Jacob, who
stands between them. But elsewhere they are “mother” and “bride” of
Jacob-Israel. The male God-figure stands poised between mother and
wife, the two females who exercise overwhelming influence over the
course of His life, just as do His devotees on earth.
All these patterns of association, and many more, enriched the stock-
in-trade available for preachers, helping to join kabbalistic thought and
the Jewish homiletical imagination in a link that became increasingly
strong over the centuries. They account in large part for the great suc-
cess of Kabbalah in capturing and maintaining its hold on the reli-
gious mentality of Jewry until the dawn of modernity. The complex
and highly pictorial forms of symbolic association allowed by the se-
firotic system stimulated the creative thinking of many an interpreter
and provided a profound linguistic vehicle in which both ideas and ex-
periences could be expressed. Later generations, seeking to expand the
“field” of such creativity, tended toward ever-expanding complications
of the system. These included the integration of the four “worlds,” each
of which contained the same tenfold structure, and a sense that each of
the sefirot contained elements of all the others within it. The symbolic
“orid” thus expanded from ten to forty to four hundred. This is not the
case, however, in the Zohar, where the richness of fantasy and language
themselves are sufficient vehicles for the creative imagination. In fact, it
may be said that only the diminishing of that creative spark in later gen-
erations forced Kabbalists to rely on the multiplication of categories.
Part Il
WHAT IS THE ZOHARS?
4
The Zohar:
Midrash on the Torah
The Zohar, as the contemporary reader of the original encounters it, is
a three-volume work constituting some sixteen-hundred folio pages,
ordered in the form of a commentary on the Torah. The first volume
covers the Zohar on Genesis, the second volume is Zohar on Exodus,
and the third volume comments on the remaining three books of the
Torah. The text is divided into homilies on the weekly Torah portions,
taking the form of an ancient Midrash. Within this form, however, are
included long digressions and subsections of the Zohar that in fact have
no relation to this midrashic structure and seem to be rather arbitrarily
placed in one Torah-portion or another. An addition to the three vol-
umes is Zohar Hadash (“New Zohar”), a collection of materials that
were omitted from the earliest printed Zohar editions but later culled
from manuscript sources. Here we find addenda to the Torah portions
but also partial commentaries on Ruth, Lamentations, and the Song of
Songs. Another work usually considered part of the Zohar literature
is Tigguney Zohar, a kabbalistic commentary on the opening verse of
Genesis that explicates it in seventy ways. This work, along with the
Ra’aya Meheimna, or “Faithful Shepherd,” passages published within the
63
WHAT IS THE ZOHAR? 64
Zohar itself, mostly taking the form of a commentary on the com-
mandments, is seen by modern scholars to be the work of a slightly
later Kabbalist, one who perhaps worked in the opening decades of the
fourteenth century and saw himself as continuing the Zohar tradition.
The main body of the Zohar takes the form of Midrash: a collec-
tion of homiletical explications of the biblical text. The Zohar enters
fully into Midrash as a literary genre, even though that form of writ-
ing was considered antiquated in the time and place in which the Zo-
har was composed. Its authors were especially learned in aggadah and
used it ingeniously, often convincingly portraying themselves as an-
cient midrashic masters, but the anachronism of their style was inten-
tional. The Zohar is an attempt to re-create a form of discourse that
would have seemed appropriate to a work originating in the circle of
its chief speaker, Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai, who lived in the Land of
Israel during the period of the Mishnah, the second century of the
Common Era. In fact, this medieval Midrash is based on a thorough
knowledge of the entire earlier Jewish tradition, including rabbinic,
philosophical, and esoteric works. Its purpose, as quickly becomes clear
to the reader, goes far beyond that of the ancient Midrash. The Zohar
seeks nothing less than to place the kabbalistic tradition, as it had de-
veloped over the preceding centuries, into the mouths of these much-
revered sages of antiquity and to use them as its mouthpiece for show-
ing the reader that the entire Torah is alive with kabbalistic secrets and
veiled references to the “mystery of faith” as the Kabbalists taught it. In
this sense the Zohar may be be seen as an attempt to create a new
Midrash or, as one scholar has put it, to bring about a renaissance of
the midrashic art in the Middle Ages.
The homilies of the old Midrash were often preceded by a series of
“Openings, proems in which the homilist would demonstrate his skill,
picking his way through a series of biblical associations eventually lead-
ing up to the subject at hand. The Zohar too uses such openings, but
a8
Midrash on the Torah — 6¢
with a very different purpose. Here the preacher wants to “open” the
scriptural verse itself, remove its outer shell, and find its secret meaning.
In this way the verse itself may serve as an opening or gateway into the
“upper” world tor the one who reads it. This leads us closer to the real
purpose of Zoharic exegesis. The Zohar wants to take the reader inside
the divine life. It wants ever to retell the story of the flow of the sefirot,
their longings and union, the arousal of love above, and the way in
which that arousal causes blessing to flow throughout the worlds. This
is the essential story of Kabbalah, and the Zohar finds it in verse after
verse, portion after portion, of the Torah text. But each retelling offers
a new and often startlingly different perspective on this essential truth.
The Zohar is ever enriching the kabbalistic narrative by means of
retelling it from the vantage point of still another hermeneutic insight.
On each page another verse, word, or tale of the Torah is opened or
“uncovered” to reveal new insight into the great story of the Zohar,
that which it proffers as the truth of the Torah, of the cosmos, and of
the reader's soul.
In the series of homilies by various speakers on a particular verse or
moment in the scriptural text, the Zohar takes its readers through mul-
tiple layers of understanding, reaching from the surface level of “plain”
meaning into ever more profound revelations. A great love of language
is revealed in this process; plays on words and subtle reshadings of
meaning often serve as pathways leading toward a total reconfiguration
of the Scripture at hand. For this reason, the Zohar's best readers, both
traditional and modern, are those who share its endless fascination with
the mystery of words and letters, including both their aural and their
graphic (or “spoken” and “written”) manifestations.
Other Kabbalists contemporaneous with the Zohar offered multi-
leveled readings of Scripture as well. Rabbi Bahya ben Asher of Barce-
lona immediately comes to mind. His Torah commentary, written in
the 1290s, offers the clearest example of the fourfold interpretation of
Wuat Is THE ZOHAR? 66
Scripture in its Jewish form: verse after verse is read first for its plain
meaning, then according to “the way of Midrash,” “the way of intellect”
or phiiosophical allegory, and “the way of Kabbalah.” Rabbi Bahya’s
work is in fact important as one of the earliest sources for quotations
from the Zohar.
The Zohar offers no such neat classifications. Insights suggested by
a group of “companions” discussing a text may bounce back and forth
from readings that could be (and sometimes indeed are) found in ear-
lier midrashic works to ways of reading that belong wholly to the
world of Kabbalah. Kabbalistic interpretations are sometimes so well
“sewn” into the fabric of midrashic readings that the reader is left
wondering whether the kabbalistic referent might not indeed be the
“real” meaning of a given biblical verse or rabbinic passage. In one
well-known text,' the Zohar refers to mystical interpretations as the
“soul” of Torah, distinguished from the narrative that forms the out-
ward “garments” and from the legal derivations that serve as Torah’s
“body” (playing on the phrase gufei Torah, “bodies of Torah,” that in
rabbinic parlance means “essential teachings”). That text also suggests
a further level of readings, the “innermost soul” of Torah, that will not
be fully revealed until messianic times. But when encountering actual
passages from the Zohar, it is not easy to determine just where one
stands in the process of undressing the textual bride. Here as almost
everywhere, the poesis of the Zohar overflows the banks, thwarting
any attempt at gradation or definition. It is mostly within the area of
“soul” or kabbalistic readings that the assembled sages reveal layer af-
ter layer, showing that this level of reading itself contains inexhaustible
riches of the imagination. There is not a single mystical interpretation
of a verse or passage that is the secret in the eyes of the Zohar. “Se-
cret’”’ (sod in Hebrew, raza in Aramaic) is rather a method, a way of
reading that contains endless individual secrets within it.
1. 321§2a. re
Me
Midrash on the Torah — 67
The language of setirotic symbolism offers the Zohar limitless op-
portunies for creative interpretations of Scripture. On the one hand, the
Zohar’s speakers and authors exult in the newness and originality of this
exegesis. Rabbi Shimon and his disciples speak glowingly of hiddushei
Torah, new interpretations of Torah, and their great value. God and the
angels join in rejoicing over each new insight. On the other hand, the
Zohar also seeks to deny the newness of kabbalistic interpretation. Not
only is the work itselt allegedly an ancient one, but the interpretive craft
of the Zohar also goes to a higher, deeper, and hence more “ancient”
level of the text. As the highest rung within the Godhead is sometimes
called Attiga, the elder or “ancient one,’ so does profound interpretation
take Torah “back to its antiquity,” to its original, pristine, highest state.
The Zohar stands within the long tradition of Jewish devotion to
sacred study as a religious act. The faithful are commanded to “con-
template it day and night” (Josh. 1:8), which is traditionally taken to
mean that the study and elaboration of Torah are ideally the full-time
obligation of the entire community of male Israelites (women were ex-
empted from the obligation to study and only rarely were they offered
more than a rudimentary education). This community viewed the
Torah as an object of love, and an eros of Torah study is depicted in
many passages in the rabbinic aggadah. Based on biblical images of fem-
inine wisdom, Torah was described as the daughter and delight of God
and as Israel’s bride. The study of Torah, especially the elaboration of its
law, was described by the sages as courtship and sometimes even as the
shy, scholarly bridegroom’s act of love, the consummation of his sacred
marriage. The Midrash on the Song of Songs, compiled in the seventh
or eighth century, devotes a large part of its exegesis of that erotic text
to discussing the revelation at Sinai and the delights of both God and
the sages in the study of Torah.
The Zohar is well aware of these precedents and expands on them
in its own richer and even more daring version of amor dei intellectualis.
WHat Is THE ZOHAR? 68
The lush and well-watered gardens of the Song of Songs are the con-
stant dwelling-place of the Zohar, where frequent invocation of the
Canticle is the order of the day. In the Kabbalists’ literary imagination,
the gardens of eros in the Song of Songs, the pardes or “orchard” of mys-
tical speculation itself, and the mystical Garden of Eden, into which
God wanders each night “to take delight in the souls of the righteous,”
have been thoroughly linked with one another. Genesis’ description of
Paradise—‘‘a river goes forth from Eden to water the garden, whence
it divides into four streams” (2:10)—and certain key verses of the Can-
ticle—‘‘a spring amid the gardens, a well of living waters, flowing from
Lebanon” (4:15) and others—are quoted endlessly to invoke the sense
that to dwell in mystical exegesis is to sit in the shade of God’s garden.
Even more: the mystical exegete comes to understand that all of these
gardens are but reflections of the true inner divine garden, the world of
the sefirot, which Sefer ha-Bahir had already described as lush with
trees, springs, and ponds of water.
The Zohar is devoted to the full range of religious obligations that
the Torah places on the community of Israel. The mysteries of the
commandments and the rhythms of the sacred year very much occupy
its pages, even if we discount the somewhat later Ra’aya Meheimna
(“Faithful Shepherd”) section, which is almost wholly devoted to this
subject. Both prayer and the ancient Temple ritual, the classic Jewish
forms of devotion, are given lofty kabbalalistic interpretations, and the
figure of the priest in particular is central to the Zoharic imagination,
as we shall see later. Still, it is fair to say that the central religious act
for the Zohar is the very one in which its heroes are engaged, as de-
scribed throughout its pages, and that is the act of study and interpre-
tation of Torah. Again and again Rabbi Shim’on waxes eloquent in
praise of those who study Torah, especially those who do so after mid-
night. They indeed take the place of the priests and Levites of old,
“who stand in the house of the Lord by night” (Ps. 134:1). ahose who
wes.
Midrash on the Torah — 6y
awaken nightly to study the secrets of Torah become the earthly at-
tendants of the divine bride, ushering her into the chamber where she
will unite at dawn with her heavenly spouse. This somewhat modest
depiction of the mystic devotee’s role in the hieros gamos, or sacred mar-
rage rite, that stands at the center of the kabbalistic imagination does
not exclude a level of emotional-mystical reality in which the Kab-
balist himself is also the lover of that bride and a full participant in,
rather than merely an attendant to, the act of union.
Torah in the Zohar is not conceived as a text, as an object, or as mate-
rial, but as a living divine presence, engaged in a mutual relationship
with the person who studies her. More than that, in the Zoharic con-
sciousness Torah is compared to a beloved who carries on with her lov-
ers a mutual and dynamic courtship. The Zohar on the portion Mishpa-
tim contains, within the literary unit known as Sava de-Mishpatim, a
description of a maiden in a palace. Here the way of the Torah’s lover is
compared to the way of a man with a maid. Arousal within Torah is like
an endless courting of the beloved: constant walking about the gates of
her palace, an increasing passion to read her letters, the desire to see the
beloved’s face, to reveal her, and to be joined with her. The beloved in
the nexus of this relationship is entirely active. She sends signals of her
interest to her lover, she intensifies his passionate desire for her by games
of revealing and hiding. She discloses secrets that stir his curiosity. She
desires to be loved. The beloved is disclosed in an erotic progression be-
fore her lover out of a desire to reveal secrets that have been forever hid-
den within her. The relationship between Torah and her lover, like that
of man and maiden in this parable, is dynamic, romantic, and erotic. This
interpretive axiom of the work, according to which the relationship be-
tween student and that studied is not one of subject and object but of
subject and subject, even an erotic relationship of lover and beloved,
opens a great number of new possibilities. . . . 7
Seeing the act of Torah study as the most highly praised form of de-
votional activity places the Zohar squarely within the Talmudic tradi-
2. Melila Hellner-Eshed, “The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar: The
Zohar Through Its Own Eyes.” (Doctoral dissertation, Hebrew University, 2000), p.19.
WuatT Is THE ZOHAR? 70
tion and at the same time provides a setting in which to go far beyond
it. Here, unlike in the rabbinic sources, the content of the exegesis as
well as the process is erotic in character. The Talmudic Rabbi Akiva, the
chief hero of the rabbinic romance with the text, was inspired by his
great love of Torah to derive “heaps and heaps of laws from the crowns
on each of the letters.” It was the early rabbis’ intense devotion to the
text and to the process of ‘Torah study that was so aptly described by the
erotic metaphor. But the laws derived in the course of this passionate
immersion in the text might deal with heave offerings and tithes or
ritual defilement and ablutions; all of these were equally to be cele-
brated as resulting from the embrace of Torah. That indeed is the ge-
nius of Rabbi Akiva’s school of thought: all of Torah, even the seem-
ingly most mundane, belongs to the great mystical moment of Sinai,
the day when God gave Torah to Israel and proclaimed His love for
her in the Song of Songs. But the authors of the Zohar crave more
than this. The content as well-as the process has to reveal the great secret
of unity, not just the small secrets of one law or another. In the Zohar
the true subject matter that the Kabbalist finds in every verse is the
hieros gamos itself, the mystical-erotic union of the divine male and fe-
male, the eros that underlies and transforms Torah, making it into a
symbolic textbook on the inner life of God.
dd?
7
The Zohar Narrative
The Zohar is not only a book of Torah interpretation. It is also very
much the story of a particular group of students of the Torah, a peri-
patetic band of disciples gathered around their master, Rabbi Shim’on
ben Yohai. In the main body of the Zohar there appear eight such dis-
ciples: Rabbi El’azar (the son of Rabbi Shim’on), Rabbi Abba, Rabbi
Yehudah, Rabbi Yitshak, Rabbi Hizkiyah, Rabbi Hiyya, Rabbi Yose,
and Rabbi Yeisa. A significant part of the Zohar text is devoted to tales
of their wanderings and adventures, proclamations of their great love
for one another, accounts of their devotion to their master, and echoes
of the great pleasure he takes in hearing their teachings. In these tales,
while on the road, wandering from place to place in the Holy Land,
they encounter various other teachers, in the form of mysterious eld-
ers, wondrous children, merchants, and donkey drivers, all of whom
possess of secrets that they share with this band of loving and faithful
companions. Usually these mysterious teachers know more than the
wanderers expect, and Rabbi Shim’on’s disciples are often outshone in
wisdom by these most unlikely figures. That too is part of the Zohar’s
story. A contemporary scholar notes that more than three hundred
71
Wuat Is THE ZOHAR? 72
whole and partial stories of this sort are contained within the Zohar
text. In some places the narrative shifts from the earthly setting to one
that is partly in heaven or in “the Garden of Eden,” in which the mas-
ter is replaced by God Himself, who proclaims His pleasure at the in-
novations offered as the Kabbalists engage in Torah.
These tales of Rabbi Shim’on and his disciples wandering about the
Galilee a thousand years before the Zohar was written are clearly works
of fiction. But to say so is by no means to deny the possibility that a
very real mystical brotherhood underlies the Zohar and shapes its spir-
itual character. Anyone who reads the Zohar over an extended period
will come to see that the interface among the companions and the close
relationship between the tales of their wanderings and the homilies
those wanderings occasion are not the result of fictional imagination
alone. Whoever wrote the work knew very well how fellow students
respond to companionship and support and are inspired by one an-
other’s glowing renditions of a text. He (or they) has felt the warm glow
of a master’s praise and the shame of being shown up by a stranger in
the face of one’s peers. Leaving aside for now the question of who ac-
tually penned the words, we can say that the Zohar reflects the experience
of a kabbalistic circle. It is one of a series of such circles of Jewish mys-
tics, stretching back in time to Qumran, Jerusalem, Provence, and Ge-
rona, and forward in history to Safed, Padua, Miedzybozh, Bratslav, and
again to Jerusalem. A small circle of initiates gathered about a master is
the way Kabbalah has always happened, and the Zohar is no exception.
In fact, the collective experience of this group around Rabbi Shim’on
ben Yohai as “recorded” in the Zohar forms the paradigm for all later
Jewish mystical circles.
The group life reflected in the text is that of a band of living Kab-
balists, except that they occupied Castile of the thirteenth century
rather than Erets Israel of the second. They lived in Toledo and Gua-
dalajara rather than Tiberias and Sepphoris. Whether these real Kabbal-
fe,
=
The Zohar Narrative 73
ists wandered about in the Spanish countryside as their fictional coun-
terparts did in the Holy Land is hard to know, but they certainly felt
that the most proper setting for study of Torah was outdoors, especially
in a garden or a grove of trees. Occasionally the companions in the Zo-
har's pages have conversations indoors, as when the disciples visit Rabbi
Shini’on or travel to the home of Rabbi Pinhas ben Ya’ir. Interestingly,
no house of study or synagogue appears as a setting for any of their en-
counters. The Zohar very much prefers that they take place under the
shade of a certain tree, at a spring of water, or at some similar place that
might call to mind a verse from a psalm or the Song of Songs, with
which a homily might then open.
The frequent references in the text to the importance of secret
Torah study at night raises the likelihood that this group of Spanish
Kabbalists shared for some time, as a regular, ritualized activity, a late-
night session for the study of Kabbalah. If they were anything like
their fictional counterparts, these sessions began after midnight and
went until dawn, concluding with morning prayers. These nightly
gatherings (of course there is no way to be certain whether or for
how long they did actually take place) were omitted on the Sabbath,
when it was the companion’s duty to be at home with his wife. They
reached their annual climax on the eve of Shavu’ot, when the vigil
was in preparation for a new receiving of the Torah. The intense cli-
max of the Zohar narrative is the tale of two great and highly ritual-
ized meetings of master and disciples in the Idra, a special chamber of
assembly (see further discussion of the Jdrot in Chapter Fifteen). In the
first of these two assemblies, three of the companions die in the ec-
stacy of their mystical devotions. The story of the second meeting, the
Idra Zuta or Lesser Assembly, records the death of Rabbi Shim’on hiin-
self and forms the grand conclusion of the Zohar.
Gershom Scholem once suggested that the Zohar takes the form of
a “mystical novel.” This suggestion is particularly intriguing because the
WHat Is THE ZOHAR? 74
Zohar appeared in Spain some three hundred years before Cervantes,
who is often seen as the father of the modern novel. One may see the
tales of Rabbi Shim’on and his companions as a sort of novel in for-
mation, but it is clear that the form is quite rudimentary. When the
Zohar wants to express an idea, it needs to slip back into the more fa-
miliar literary form of textual hermeneutics. The novelist in the classic
post-Cervantes sense is one who can develop ideas or suggest complex
thought patterns by means of character development and plot, rather
than by having the characters assemble and make a series of speeches to
one another (though such moments are not entirely unknown in later
fiction). It might be interesting to place the Zohar into the setting of
such works as medieval troubador romances, Chaucer’s fourteenth-
century Canterbury Tales, or the Thousand and One Nights. All of these
are narrative cycles, frameworks of story into which smaller units (in
these cases narrative, in the Zohar’s case homiletical) can be fitted. Al
of them, too, may be seen as precursors of the novel.
The peregrinations of Rabbi Shim’on and his disciples are more,
however, than the “story” of the Zohar, whether fictional or masking a
historical reality. In the Zohar everything is indeed more than it appears
to be. Master and disciples represent wandering Israel, both the ancient
tribes in the wilderness, on their way to the promised land, and the
people of Israel in their present exile. While the ancient rabbis suggest
to the would-be scholar to “exile yourself to a place of Torah,”! for the
Zohar exile or wandering is itself that place. The “place of Torah” is in-
deed wherever the companions happen to be, the home of the master
or the grove of trees. In words that they might prefer, it can be said that
the “garden” of mystical conversation follows them wherever they wan-
der, just as Miriam’s movable well gave drink to Israel throughout their
forty-year trek through the wilderness. The adventures of the compan-
ions show their participation in Israel’s greatest suffering, that of exile.
1. Mishnah Avot 4:14. oe
The Zohar Narrative 75
Israel's historic exile, however, is itself symbolic, an earthly repre-
sentation of a still greater exile, that of the Shekhinah from her divine
spouse. The nature and origin of this inner divine “exile” together
constitute one of the Kabbalists’ great mysteries. Some passages, both
in the Zohar and in earlier sources, attribute this exile to the sin of
Adam and Eve. In this sense Kabbalah may be said to have a true sense
of the “fall” or “original sin” of humans, much more so than the older
rabbinic sources. The world as first created was a true Garden of Eden
because the blessed Holy One and Shekhitiah were “face to face,”
joined in constant embrace like that of Hokhmah and Binah. Divine
blessing thus coursed through the system without interruption, flow-
ing through all of Shekhinah’s “hosts” and “palaces” into an idealized
lower world as well. Only Adam and Eve’s sin, sometimes depicted as
that of separating Shekhinah from the upper sefirot to worship her
alone (symbolized by the separation of the Tree of Knowledge from
its roots in the Tree of Life), disturbed this initial harmony. Since the
expulsion from Eden, the union of Tif’eret and Malkhut, or Blessed
Holy One and Shekhinah, has been sporadic rather than constant, de-
pendent upon the balance of human virtue and transgression.
Other passages, however, express a somewhat darker vision of the
exile within God. They claim that the very existence of the lower
worlds is an after-effect of divine exile and would not have taken place
without it. Some of these sources employ the old Platonic myth of an-
drogyny, embedded in a midrashic description of Adam and Eve, to ex-
plain the cosmic reality. Adam and Eve, according to the aggadah,” were
Siamese twins, conjoined back to back. This single being is that de-
scribed in Genesis 1:29: “God created the human in His form; in the
divine form He created him, male and female He made them.” The
forming of Eve from Adam’s rib (or “side”’) in the next chapter was the
separation of this pair, in which they were first turned face-to-face, to-
2. Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 61a.
WHat Is THE ZOHAR? 76
ward one another, so that they might meet, see one another, and unite
to propagate the species, fulfilling God’s first command. The Kabbalists
claim that in this sense, too, humans are made in God’s image: Tif’eret
and Malkhut, back to back, were a single entity. They had to be “sawed”
apart (a rather violent choice of verb) so that they might be properly
united. Only through this union did the divine life begin to flow out-
ward, giving life to worlds below. In order for our life to come about,
in other words, God had to undergo a transformative act of great pain,
one in which the divine became separated from itself, its future reuni-
fication depending entirely upon the actions of these creatures below.
According to this story, exile and suffering are inherent in the cosmos,
and the balm provided by human goodness is somewhat superficial, an
oasis of relief in the wandering that is indeed the necessary human and
cosmic condition.
It is this exile that the Kabbalists were acting out in their wanderings
through the Galilee of their imagination. In this sense it may indeed be
said that the Zohar in its entirety is a symbolic work rather than a col-
lection of symbolic interpretations of Scripture. The narratives them-
selves may be seen as the most profoundly symbolic and kabbalistic part
of the Zohar’s oeuvre, not just a framework into which the homilies are
woven. The tales of these wandering holy men, seeking to live fully in
God's image through the act of studying and expounding upon God’s
Torah, is the tale of God’s own exile, inherent in the divine choice to
come forth and be revealed in this lowly, corporeal world.
Mysticism of the Zohar
Our discussion leads us now to confront directly the question of the
Zohar and religious-mystical experience. A first reading of the Zohar
might give one the impression that it is more mythical than mystical in
content, that it is more a narrative of cosmic origins and structures
than of inner experience, the soul, or higher states of consciousness.
But this view is partially misleading. To read the Zohar well is to
tathom the experiential dimension of the entire text, including narra-
tive, exegesis, cosmology, and all the rest. The Kabbalist speaking in the
sefirotic idiom is laying bare the innermost structure of reality as he
both understands and experiences it. That same structure 1s reflected in
the cosmos, in Torah, and in the human (or more precisely, “Jewish”’)
soul. The language of sefirotic symbolism provides a new lens through
which to see all of Torah. But the power of that reading, especially as
practiced in the circle of the Zohar, offers more than a hermeneutic. To
Open one’s inner eye to the new reality created by that pattern of
thinking is to live within the realm of the sefirot themselves. The trans-
formations of language and inner experience go hand in hand with
one another; the breakthrough in consciousness to a higher realm of
Ti
WHAT Is THE ZOHAR? 78
contemplative existence is conveyed through the vehicle of self-ex-
pression in sefirotic terms. Therefore, to speak of the origins of the se-
firotic universe, or to interpret the Torah text in terms of sefirotic sym-
bols, is also to entér into those places within the soul. For the speakers
within the Zohar, as for the ideal Kabbalist in any time, to speak of the
sefirot is not simply to draw on a body of esoteric knowledge, but rather
to enter the inner universe where sefirotic language is the guide to
measured experience.
The authors of the Zohar did not generally feel the need to tell
their readers that this is the case. In a work written for initiates, the
link between the intellectual and experiential dimensions was taken
for granted. It is primarily the frequent expressions of enthusiasm and
ecstacy with which the text is dotted that serve to indicate how
deeply and personally the sefirotic teachings were felt. The repeated
refrain “Had I come into the world only to hear this, it would be suf-
ficient!”’ and the kisses showered upon speakers by their grateful com-
panions make it clear to any but the most obtuse of readers that in the
pages of the Zohar we are witnessing both the ecstatic heights and the
contemplative depths that constitute the shared inner life of a vital
mystical circle, not merely a series of exercises in biblical homiletics
interspersed with exotic stories.
The sefirotic universe as a representation of inner religious experi-
ence may be described in more specific ways as well, though these are
surely not exhaustive. The “descent” of the sefirot, beginning with Keter,
is said to describe the emergence of God from hiddenness to revelation.
Both the creation of the world and the giving of Torah are this-worldly
extensions of that inner divine process. On a more realistic plane, how-
ever, so too is the mystic’s own inner life. Sefirotic symbolism provides
a language for describing the mystic’s own return from an experience
of absorption in the “Nothingness” of God and gradual reintegration
Mysticism of the Zohar 79
into the framework of full human personality, the reemergence of con-
scious selfhood. It should be emphasized that the Zohar never makes
such a claim. In general the Kabbalists were loath to speak too openly
about the experiential aspects of their teaching. Especially when it came
to the highest triad of the sefirotic world, to speak in terms that claimed
direct experience was considered far beyond the bounds of propriety.
But one who reads the Kabbalists with an eye to comparative and phe-
nomenological descriptions of mysticism cannot but suspect that such
experience is the source of these descriptions. The accounts of a mys-
terious energy that flows from undefined endlessness, through a primal
arousal of will, into a single point that is the start of all being, and
thence into the womb-palace, where the self (divine or human) is born,
sound like descriptions found elsewhere in mystical literature of the re-
birth of personality that follows the contemplative experience. Even
though the Zohar depicts it chiefly as the original journey of God, we
understand that the mystical life repeats that divine process. In fact, it is
out of their own experience that mystics know what they do of the
original journey on which theirs is patterned. Perhaps one can go even
a step farther to claim that the constant movement within the sefirotic
world, including both the flow of energy “downward” from Keter and
the rising up of Malkhut and the lower worlds into the divine heights,
represents the dynamic inner life of the mystic and the spiritual motion
that ever animates his soul. It is these nuances of inner movement that
constitute the “real” subject of a very large part of the Zohar and the
world it creates. To most fully appreciate the Zohar as a mystical text is
to understand these movements as reverberations in the mystic’s soul of
events as they transpire within the divine reality, and vice versa.
When the Zohar does speak of mystical experience, it is largely
through use of the term devequt, “attachment” or “cleaving” to God,
and its Aramaic cognates. Ever since the early rabbinic discussions of
WHat IS THE ZOHAR? 80
Deuteronomy 4:4 (“You who cleave toYHVH your God are all alive
today”) and 10:20 (“Fear YHVH your God, cleave to Him and serve
Him”), devequt has played a central role in the devotional life of pious
Jews. But the Zohar is also quick to associate this term with its first
biblical usage in Genesis 2:24, where man “cleaves to his wife and they
become one flesh.” Attachment to God, for the Zohar, is erotic at-
tachment, whether referring to the Kabbalist’s own attachment to
God by means of Torah, to Shekhinah’s link to the upper “male” sefirot
as God’s bride, or in the rare passages where Moses becomes the kab-
balistic hero and himself weds Shekhinah, entering the Godhead in the
male role. The contemplative and erotic aspects of attachment to God
are just different ways of depicting the same reality, quite wholly in-
separable from one another.
With the experience of human love and sexuality as its chief meta-
phor for intimacy, the Zohar depicts devequt as a temporary and fleet-
ing experience. Scholars have debated for some time the question of
whether true unio mystica is to be found in the Zohar. But this debate
may itself hinge on the sexual analogy. Is true loss of self or absorption
within the union to be attained in sexual climax? How does one be-
gin to answer such a question without interviewing all of the world’s
great lovers? Whether or not the experience underlying countless pas-
sages in the Zohar can be described as “union” lies, I would submit,
beyond our ken. But it is clear that no possibility of permanent bliss is
offered to those still attached to bodily existence; only in the world to
come will the disembodied spirits of the righteous enjoy the endless
delight of basking in the divine presence. Religious experience in this
world is but a foretaste of that eternal joy.
The attachment to the erotic metaphor colors the Zohar’s descrip-
tion of religious experience in other ways as well. Throughout the
book there is a fascination with the reproductive process, including
sexual arousal, courtship, union, birth, and nursing, that can be char-
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Mysticism of the Zohar 81
acterized as childlike or perhaps Edenic.' The union of male and fe-
male is the great cosmic mystery, one in which the Kabbalist himself
is engaged as he speaks, through the act of studying and teaching
Torah. This means that verbal and physical creativity, or what we
would call the creative and the procreative processes, are inseparable
from one another. The ancient analogy made in Sefer Yetsirah between
berit ha-lashon and berit ha-ma’or, the verbal and the sexual covenants,
inspires the Kabbalist to an understanding that the creative expression
coming forth from these two unique and parallel organs, mouth and
genitalia, both located in the middle of the human body, represents a
single and sublime mystery.
As the Zohar seeks to develop a language for what we may call its
eros of poetic creativity, exegesis of the Song of Songs plays a major
role. The Zohar turns with great frequency, especially in its proems, or
homiletical “warm-ups,” to that great font of sacred eros. The Song of
Songs, a text in which eros in fact remains unconsumated, offers poetic
language for every other aspect of the complete drama of courting, in-
cluding even loss, separation, and longing. All of these elements come
to the fore in the Zohar’s frequent disquisitions on the Song, which is
often surprisingly linked to verses describing some aspect of the Tab-
ernacle cult or another seemingly dry detail of biblical law. These texts
are utterly transformed by association with the Canticle. The Torah
text as a whole, it may be said, 1s “washed over” in an eroticizing bath
created by repeated juxtaposition of Torah texts with verses of the Song
of Songs, poetically enriching the eros of sefirotic symbolisation itself.
The historical context for this inner divine reading of the Song of
Songs is discussed in the next chapter.
The writers of the Zohar learned from the Neoplatonist milieu
within which they lived to speak of the flow of energy, usually de-
1. The formal schematization of these developmental stages within each element of
the God was to have an important role in the later Lurianic Kabbalah.
Wuat Is THE ZOHAR? 82
scribed as light, from one cosmic realm to the next. The Neoplatonists
tended to emphasize the diminution of that light as it reached “down-
ward” toward the material plane. For the Kabbalist, this constantly re-
newed pouring forth of divine presence could be felt both in the daily
renewal of nature and in the creative vigor of Torah interpretation. He
sought to align himself with the cosmic flow, in order to receive its
bounty, but also to act in such ways as to stimulate the flow itself. Im-
ages of both light and water abound in the Zohar’s pages to describe
the shefa, the endless flux of divine bounty that sustains the universe. In
the context of our earlier discussion, it is clear that this fluid is also the
divine seed, that which enters into Shekhinah and allows for the con-
stant rebirth of life in the realms beneath her.
Read this way, the Zohar is very much a mystical, often even an ec-
static, work, or at least one in which the ecstatic dimension is highly
developed. One of the strongest expressions of this reality is found in
the Zohar’s powerful and poetic solilogquies on the word zohar itself,
and on the verse (Daniel 12:3) from which the work’s title is taken:
“The enlightened shall shine like the radiance [zohar] of the sky, and
those who lead multitudes to righteousness, like the stars, forever.” Zo-
har represents a hidden radiance issuing forth from the highest sefirotic
realms, a showering of sparks lighting up all that comes into its path. Its
inspiration is surely the night sky, the wondrous event of shooting stars
against the background of the Milky Way. But like all such images in
mystical literature, the beacon of light or drop of divine seed is a picto-
rial representation of an event that takes place also within the mystic’s
heart, the inspiration that “sparks” this creative vision.
The inner event of this radiant presence is outwardly manifest in
the shining gaze of the Kabbalist’s face. “The enlightened shall shine”
is also understood in this rather literal way. Here, as frequently in the
Zohar, there is an assimilation of the Kabbalist into the biblical de-
scription of Moses as he emerged from the Tent of Meeting, his face
Mysticism of the Zohar 83
glowing with the radiant presence of God. But the Kabbalist is also
Moses’ brother Aaron, the ancient priest whose face shines with divine
presence as he bestows the blessing of God’s own countenance upon
the children of Israel. “May the Lord cause His face to shine upon
you” (Num. 6:25) is seen as the Torah’s personified way of calling forth
the same light that the Kabbalist as Neoplatonist perceives to be shin-
ing forth from one cosmic rung to another. He now seeks to become
the earthly bearer of that light, transmitting it to his community of
disciples and readers. This is the Kabbalist (most often personified in
the Zohar by Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai) in the role of tsaddiq, right-
eous conveyer of divine light.
A main purpose of the Zohar is to arouse within the reader a con-
stant longing for such “enlightenment” or inspiration. The great reli-
gious creativity——and even the ecstatic deaths—of Rabbi Shim’on and
his disciples are meant to induce in the reader a sense that he too, as an
initiate into the Zohar’s secrets, may continue in this path. While no
generation before the advent of messiah will fully equal that of Rabbi
Shimon, all those who come in his wake are encouraged to follow in
his path. The Zohar is thus a highly evocative work, one that seeks to
create and sustain a mood of ecstatic devotion. Certain famuliar biblical
verses, including the “garden” passages mentioned earlier, are used as
awakeners—one might almost think of them as “bells” —to regularly
restimulate awareness, rousing the reader from his daily torpor and re-
minding him of the constant vital flow needed to quicken the cosmos.
This reminder is meant to renew and refresh his participation in Israel's
great collective task of rousing Shekhinah. She in turn awakens her di-
vine Lover to release the flow of light-water-seed, enveloping her in
his presence and renewing the universal flow of life.
The “Eden” (or “Lebanon’’) whence that flow 1s to come is an ac-
cessible if hidden rung within the divine and human self. It 1s not just
an ancient and lost site of the biblical tale, nor is it only the “paradise”
WHat Is THE ZOHAR? 84
to which souls will ascend after death. Eden is the “upper world,’ a rec-
ondite and inward aspect of being that is mirrored in the “garden,” the
One who needs to be watered by that flow. We creatures of the “lower
world,” souls who.are the fruit of trees growing in the garden, need to
trace back the course of that river to its source, linking the upper and
lower worlds (Binah and Shekhinah, but also Shekhinah and “this” world,
or Shekhinah and the soul) so that the flow will never cease.
Reflecting on these nature-evcking verses takes us back to the typ-
ically outdoor settings of the companions’ conversations, mentioned
earlier. These settings represent the varied topography of the Land of
Israel as it existed in the authors’ imagination, including deserts and
vast, forboding mountains as well as fertile oases and springs of water.
The lush garden, especially as evoked in the Song of Songs, 1s a partic-
ularly characteristic setting to inspire such conversations. It may be
connected to the much older designation of the “place” of mystical
speculation as pardes or “orchard.” But it is also related to the verses
quoted in this chapter and to the series of connected gardens in which
the Kabbalist sees himself as dwelling. This world is a lower garden,
needing constantly to be watered by sources from above, ultimately by
the love and sustenance that is the gift of Shekhinah. But she too is a
garden, nurtured by the river that comes forth from the hidden Eden,
itself also a “garden” in some unknown, mysterious way. Somewhere
between this world and Shekhinah stands the “Garden of Eden” that
contains the souls of the righteous, both those who have completed
their time on earth and those not yet born. It too is divided into “up-
per” and “lower” sections, described in various mythical ways.
All of these gardens are linked to one another. The Kabbalist sitting
and studying Torah with his companions in an earthly garden—phys-
ically in Castile but imaginatively in the Holy Land—is aware that at
the same moment the righteous in the Garden of Eden are also en-
gaged in such study. Their garden is open from above, because it is
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Mysticism of the Zohar 8&5
taught that God Himself descends into that Garden to take delight in
the souls of the righteous.- All of these point still higher, toward the
sefirotic gardens, and all these levels of the imagination fructify and
enrich one another. The sweet aromas rising from these gardens also
play a role in the descriptions of mystical intoxication frequently found
in the Zohar’s pages.
2. Gardens were an important feature of upper-class life in both Muslim and
Christian Spain; it was through medieval Spain that gardening entered Europe.
See D. Fairchild Ruggles, Garden, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), especially “The Garden
as Paradise on Earth,’ pp. 215-20.
a
/
The Zohar
in Historical Context
We have spoken of the emergence of Kabbalah into public discourse as
a result of the ongoing struggle with philosophy that characterized Pro-
vencal and Catalonian Jewry in the century after Maimonides. The Zo-
har, emerging in the last decades of the thirteenth century, contained
strong echoes of that conflict, even though its sharpest phase had by
then passed into history. There happens to have survived a copy of Mai-
monides’ Guide for the Perplexed that was written for Rabbi Moses de
Leon, the central figure of the circle in which the Zohar was composed.
That manuscript stands alongside many references in the Zohar text it-
self, as well as in de Leon’s Hebrew treatises, telling us that the greatest
work of Kabbalah was written partly in self-conscious response to what
was universally taken to be the greatest work of Jewish philosophy.
The Zohar also has to be seen, however, in the broader context in
which it was written. I refer to the life of Spanish Jewry during the
years of the Reconquista, in which small, threatened Jewish communi-
ties lived in the context of a proud, fervent, and militant Christianity.
While the closing decades of the thirteenth century were not a partic-
ularly terrible period in the long history of Jewish-Catholic relations
©,
86 PS
The Zohar in Historical Context — 87
in Spain—certainly nothing to compare with what was to come a cen-
tury later—Jews did live with a constant sense of being surrounded
and besieged by Christian triumphalism. The Zohar was composed in
Castile of the late thirteenth century, a period that marked the near-
completion of the Reconquista and something of a golden age of en-
lightenment in the history of medieval Christian Spain. As the wars of
conquest ended, the monarchy was able to ground itself and establish
central authority over the semi-independent and often unruly Spanish
nobility. This included responsibility for protection of the Jews, who
generally fared better at the hands of kings than at the arbitrary mercy
of local rivals. Alfonso X (1252-1284) was known as el Sabio or “the
Wise” because of his interest in the sciences, which he was willing to
learn from Jews and Muslims when necessary, as well as in history, lit-
erature, and art.
Jews retained a high degree of juridical and cultural autonomy, as
well as freedom of religious practice, in Castile of this period. They
constituted a significant percentage of city and town dwellers, gener-
ally choosing to live in self-enclosed neighborhoods and communities.
But Jews were seen by Christian society as barely tolerated outsiders,
and they viewed themselves as humiliated and victimized exiles. As an
emerging class of Christian burghers came to see the Jews as rivals, the
economic opportunities afforded by the early Reconquista years were
gradually eroded. Jews were required to wear distinguishing garb, syn-
agogue building was restricted, and various burdens of extra taxation
came to be an expected part of Jewish life.
Most significantly, Jews were under constant pressure to convert to
Christianity in the atmosphere of a church triumphant with the glory
of having vanquished the Moorish armies and standing on the verge of
ending the “‘stain” of Islamic incursion into Christian Europe. Alfonso
X commissioned translations of both the Qur’an and the Talmud into
Castilian, partly out of scholarly interest but also as an aid to the ongo-
WHat Is THE ZOHAR? 88
ing missionary campaign. The success of the Reconquista itself was
trumpeted as great testimony to the validity of Christian claims. The
Christian supersessionist theology of the age claimed tirelessly that Ju-
daism after Christ was an empty shell, a formalist attachment to the
past, lacking in true faith. This message was delivered regularly in po-
lemical writings, in sermons that Jews were forced to hear, and in ca-
sual encounters between Jews and Christians. We should remember
that Jews in Spain spoke the same language as their neighbors and lived
with them in the towns and cities. Their degree of linguistic and cul-
tural alienation from their surroundings was significantly less than that
of later Jews in Eastern Europe, the lens through which all Jewish dias-
pora experience is often mistakenly viewed in our time.
In this context, the Zohar may be viewed as a grand defense of Ju-
daism, a poetic demonstration of the truth and superiority of Jewish
faith. Its authors knew a great deal about Christianity, mostly from ob-
serving it at close hand but also from reading certain Christian works,
including the New Testament, which Dominicans and other eager
seekers of converts were only too happy to place in the hands of liter-
ate and inquisitive Jews. The Kabbalists’ attitude toward the religion of
their Christian neighbors was a complex one, and it has come down
to us through a veil of self-censorship. Jews writing in medieval Eu-
rope, especially those promulgating innovative religious teachings that
were controversial even within the Jewish community, must have been
well aware that their works would be read by Christian censors (often
themselves Jewish apostates) who would make them pay dearly for
outright insults to the Christian faith.
The Zohar is filled with disdain and sometimes even outright hatred
for the Gentile world. Continuing in the old midrashic tradition of re-
painting the subtle shadings of biblical narrative in moralistic black and
white, the Zohar pours endless heaps of wrath and malediction on Is-
rael’s enemies. In the context of biblical commentary, these are always
“”
The Zohar in Historical Context — &g
such ancient figures as Esau, Pharaoh, Amalek, Balaam, and the mixed
multitude of runaway slaves who left Egypt with Israel, a group treated
by the Zohar with special venom. All of these were rather safe objects
for attack, but it does not take much imagination to realize that the
true addressee of this resentment was the oppressor in whose midst the
authors lived. This becomes significantly clearer when we consider the
Zohar's comments on the religion of these ancient enemies. It casti-
gates them repeatedly as worshipers of the demonic and practitioners
of black magic, as enemies of divine unity and therefore dangerous dis-
turbers of the cosmic balance by which the world survives. Israel, and
especially the kabbalistic “companions” who understood this situation,
are told to do all they can to right the balance and save the Shekhinah
from those dark forces and their vast network of accursed supporters
on earth. As Moses fought off the evil spells of Balaam, darkest of all
magicians, in his day, so must the disciples of Rabbi Shim’on fight those
evil forces that stand opposed to the dawning of the messianic light
that 1s soon to come.
All of this is said, of course, without a single negative word about
Christianity. But Rabbi Shim’on and his second-century companions
lived in a time when the enemies of biblical Israel had long ago disap-
peared from the earth. They had been replaced by the Loman Empire
—pagan in the days of Rabbi Shim’on, to be sure, but by the Zohar's
time, long associated with Christendom. The reader of the Zohar liv-
ing in medieval Christian Spain was being firmly admonished to join
the battle against those ancient enemies who strengthened the evil
forces, wounded or captured the Shekhinah, and thus kept the divine
light from shining into this world. It does not require a great deal of
imagination to understand who these worshipers of darkness must have
been, particularly in view of the fact that this was also the era when the
Christian image of the Jew as magician and devil-worshiper was first
becoming rampant. The Zohar’s unstated but clearly present view of
J
Wuat Is THE ZOHAR? 90
Christianity as sorcery is a mirror reflection of the image of Judaism
and Jews that was gaining acceptance throughout the Christian world.
But this is only one side of the picture. As people of deep faith and
of great literary and aesthetic sensibility, the Kabbalists could appreciate
why Jews were impressed by, and perhaps even attracted to, certain as-
pects of the Christian story and the religious lives of the large and pow-
erful monastic communities that were so prominent in Christian Spain.
The tale of Jesus and his faithful apostles, the passion narrative, and the
struggles of the early Church were all powerful and attractive stories.
Aspects of Christian theology, including both the complicated oneness
of the trinitarian God and the passionate and ever-present devotion to
a quasi-divine female figure, made their mark on the kabbalistic imag-
ination. The monastic orders, and especially their commitment to celi-
bacy and poverty, must have been impressive to mystics whose own
tradition did not make such demands on them but who shared the me-
dieval otherworldliness that would have highly esteerned such devotion.
The Kabbalists were deeply disconcerted by the power of Chris-
tianity to attract Jewish converts, an enterprise that was given high pri-
ority particularly by the powerful Dominican order. Much that is
found in the Zohar was intended to serve as a counterweight to the
potential attractiveness of Christanity to Jews, and perhaps even to the
Kabbalists themselves. Of course this should not be seen as an exclusive
way of reading the Zohar, a mystical work that was not composed
chiefly as a polemical text. Nevertheless, the need to assert Judaism’s
spirit proudly in the face of triumphalist Christianity stands in the
background of the Zohar and should not be ignored as we read it.
The narrative and its setting is the first issue that comes to mind as
we examine the Zohar in this light. The tale of a great holy man,
Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai, followed by a group of faithful disciples as
he wanders about the Holy Land, especially the Galilee, has a familiar
ring to it. The Zohar may be seen as proposing the account of this an-
,
woe
oe
4
:
The Zohar in Historical Context — 91
cient band of Kabbalists as a counter myth to the Gospel tales of Jesus
and his apostles. The Zohar’s holy men, master and disciples, love one
another and shower each other with endless blessings and praises. They
also have great supernatural encounters with other holy men, some of
them anonymous, who reveal great secrets. The climax of the Zohar
narrative, the Idra Zuta, is the tale of Rabbi Shim’on’s death, preceded
by the precisely choreographed assemblage of his faithful disciples.
Rabbi Shim’on, like Jesus a figure much associated with the period of
Romian persecution of Judaism, dies in ecstacy rather than in martyr-
dom. But his death casts a dark shadow across the world and his disci-
ples do not know how they will go on without him.
Of course there are differences between the Zohar narrative and
that of the Gospels. The influence is subtle and it is impossible to know
to what extent it was conscious and to what extent it is simply a car-
ryover of cultural patterns that were so widely accessible (depictions of
the Last Supper, for example). Most basically different is the fact that
the Zohar’s accounts of these wandering holy men always provide the
setting for a return to mystical-homuletic interpretations of Scripture.
The Zohar narrative in this sense remains addressed to an elite com-
munity of Torah scholars. The New Testament apostles were witnesses
to miracles; the tales of healing and resurrection in those narratives
(themselves modeled on the Elijah-Elisha tales in Hebrew Scripture)
had wide appeal and were meant to attract a popular following to the
nascent Christian movement. Rabbi Shim’on and his disciples offer
surprisingly little by way of such miracles. Their single greatest super-
natural act is the disclosure of the secret Torah, a miracle designed to
appeal more to the mystical -intellectual elite than to the masses.
The heart of Christian faith lies in the Incarnation, the claim that a
specific human being at a particular time in history was in a full sense
both God and man, or that God chose to reside wholly in the hfe,
death, and resurrection of this single person. Incarnational faith is seem-
Wuat Is THE ZOHAR? 92
ingly quite far from Judaism, which insists with the psalmist (Ps. 115:16)
that “the heavens are the heavens of the Lord; the earth has He given to
the children of Adam”; the border between divine and human realms
remains quite firmly fixed. In the account of Sinai that stands at the
heart of Torah—Judaism’s parallel, one might say, to the Incarnation in
Christianity—Moses ascends the mountain and returns, still very much
man and not God. His shining countenance and the peoplie’s inability
to look at him give some indication of the Near Eastern tales of apoth-
eosis that lie behind this narrative, but in the Torah the line is not
crossed: God is God and man is man. Only in the later midrashic tradi-
tion (reflecting on Ps. 90:1,“‘A Prayer of Moses, the Man of God”) are
we told, somewhat shockingly to most Jewish ears, that Moses was “half
man, half God.”
The Zohar remains on the Jewish side of this great theological di-
vide, but comes very close to crossing it. The human tsaddiq is an earthly
embodiment of the ninth sefirah or the tsaddig figure within God. Rabbi
Shim’on is the most perfect example of such an earthly tsaddiq. He is
“the holy lamp,” giving light to the Temple above as well as to the earth
around him. He embodies both Moses the prophet and Aaron the
priest, each of whom may be seen as prefiguring an aspect of his per-
son, the final revealer of those secrets that will allow for the great re-
demption that is soon to come. Such biblical figures as Moses, Aaron,
and King Solomon are regularly depicted in the Zohar as heirophants
or mystagogues, priests who perform unfathomable mystery rites that
are vital to the world’s survival. It is clear that Rabbi Shim’on is the
same figure for his own time (and perhaps for all the latter generations)
that these men were for theirs. In this way he assumes a role that Rabbi
Akiva sometimes plays in rabbinic and merkavah sources: that of a latter-
day Moses. But both of those figures may be partly shaped as alterna-
tives to the human-divine person of Christianity.
1. Midrash Tehillim, ad loc. ae
The Zohar in Historical Context 93
We have referred several times in this essay to the strong erotic ele-
ment in Kabbalah and especially in the Zohar. The frank and uncen-
sored use of bold sexual language for talking about the inner life of
God is a major part of the Zohar’s legacy and found throughout the
later mystical tradition. Such phrases as “to arouse the feminine waters”
or ‘to serve with a living limb” became so much a part of the conven-
tional language of later Kabbalah that one almost forgets how shocking
it is that the divine life is being described in terms of female lubrication
or maintaining an erection. How did it happen that such unbridled erot-
icism Was permitted to enter the domain of the sacred? How especially
could this have happened in a circle that was at the same time so very
cautious and extreme in its views of sexual transgression or temptation?
Use of erotic language to describe the relationship between God and
Israel was already well known in biblical times, as witnessed by several
of the prophets, especially Hosea. In the rabbinic imagination, the chief
vehicle for this all-important metaphor was the Song of Songs, claimed
by none other than Rabbi Akiva as the “holy of holies” among the
Scriptures.” This assertion assumed an allegorical reading of the Song as
describing the love and marriage between God and the community of
Israel, an idealized representation of the Jewish people. This collectivist
reading of the Canticle dominates throughout the midrashic tradition.
Its importance was underscored by the fact that the Christian Church,
from the time of Origen, had adopted a parallel interpretation, in which
Christ and the ecclesia were the lover and beloved of the Song. This
Christian allegory was an important vehicle of supersessionist theology;
the Church now served as the chosen maiden of divine delight. The
Jews, whose rejection by God seemed so obviously confirmed by their
historical plight, had a great need to hold fast to the faith that God was
their true Lover, the one to whom they cried out even in His seeming
absence: “On my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves”
2. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5.
WHAT IS THE ZOHAR? 94
(Cant. 3:1), knowing in faith that “here he stands behind our wall, peer-
ing through the lattice-work, gazing through the windows” (Cant. 2:9).
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was a great shift in the
reading of the Song of Songs, from a collectivist to an individualist al-
legory. The Canticle now came to be seen as a song between God and
the soul, a reflection of the new emphasis on individual quest and per-
sonal pilgrimage in the religious life of the era. In Christianity this was
the development of an old tradition and it especially flourished at the
hands of Bernard of Clairvaux and other Cistercians. The Jews were
slower to follow this trend, and their few attempts at it were not great
successes. The individual Jewish reader (typically a noncelibate male)
did not easily see himself as the bride or female beloved of God.
Instead the Jews developed another reading, one that was to reshape
Jewish devotional life in a most basic way. If the male Jewish reader
could not wax passionate about the erotic relationship between him-
self and the essentially male figure of God, what was needed was a fe-
male presence, inserted between these two males, with whom both
could have that passionate relationship. This is exactly what Kabbalah
did in placing the female Shekhinah at the end of the sefirotic chart or
as the gatekeeper between the upper and lower worlds. The inner
unity of the Godhead was now seen—especially in Castilian Kab-
balah, as we have already noted—primarily in erotic terrns. The union
of “the blessed Holy One and His Shekhinah” became the central fo-
cus of all devotional life. But Israel too, as the devoted children, ser-
vants, and bridal attendants of the Shekhinah, served as “awakeners of
her desire to unite with the Holy King.” They did this by cultivating
their own love for the divine bride in their devoted lives of Torah
study and performance of the commandments, including that of holy
union with their own wives, an earthly representation of the union
x
The Zohar in Historical Context 95
above. The presence of this feminine hypostasis opened the gateway to
permut the revival of religious passion that so characterizes Kabbalah
and especially the community of disciples depicted in the Zohar.
Where did the Jews get this idea of a female intermediary between
themselves and God above? It seems quite likely that this is a Jewish
adaptation of the cult of the Virgin Mary, very much revived in the
Western Church of the twelfth century, especially in France and Spain.
Marian piety permeated the culture of Western Europe in this age: the
dedication of cathedrals to the Virgin, roadside shrines, passion dramas,
music, and art of all forms glorified her role. The Jews surely witnessed
this and must have found themselves of two minds about it. On the
one hand it would have confirmed their worst impressions of Chris-
tianity as pagan, idolatrous, and polytheistic. But there was also some-
thing beautiful and tender about the religious life associated with it that
could not be ignored. The Jews, whose culture knew no glorification
of virginity or celibacy, adapted the notion of a female object of wor-
ship to suit their own needs. The notion that there is a divine (or quasi-
divine) female presence poised at the entrance to the divine realm, one
who loves her children, suffers with them, and accepts their prayers to
be brought before the throne of God, is shared by the Marian and kab-
balistic traditions. Most likely the latter, which developed in the cen-
tury following the great Marian revival, is derivative of the former.
Once the female aspect of divinity was in place, without the Chris-
tian insistence on virginity, repressed erotic energies could find expres-
sion in the spiritual life and strivings of the Kabbalist. In practice, the
Zohar’s authors indeed represent an especially strict halakhic viewpoint
on all sexual matters, one that continued in kabbalistic circles for many
centuries. But the gates were thrown wide open to the entrance of rar-
ified and only lightly masked erotic fantasy to fuel the intensity of re-
lizious passion. The Kabbalist’s self image as tsaddiq, the “guardian of the
covenant,” was, as we have seen, at the same time an image of male po-
WHAT Is THE ZOHAR? 96
tency. His task was to direct the aroused power of his kavvanah, or spir-
itual intention, toward Shekhinah, thus stirring the female waters within
her so that she aroused, the tsaddiq above to unite with her, filling her
with the flow of energy from beyond in the form of his male waters,
the lights from above as divine semen. As she is filled, the fluid within
her overflows to the lower world as well, and the earthly tsaddiq re-
ceives that blessing. Here the paradigm is of a fully coital expression of
sexual union, seemingly closer in some ways to the religion of South
India than to the virginal and celibate piety of Christian monks.
But the immediate influence that helped to stir these new energies
within Judaism was clearly that of Christianity. If we look again at the
kabbalistic chart, especially at the elements highlighted within it by the
Castilian Kabbalah, we may see a further parallel to the Christian
structures of faith that so characterized this era. Tif’eret, or the blessed
Holy One, stands at the center; this is the essential figure of the male
Deity, the God of the Bible and Jewish tradition. He is flanked on right
and left by Hesed and Din, compassion and judgment. This triad of se-
firot is complemented by Malkhut or Shekhinah at the lower end of the
kabbalistic chart. Together these four sefirot constitute a whole, repre-
sented by such symbols as the four directions, the four species of
Sukkot, the three patriarchs plus King David, and so forth. These are
all Jewish symbols of great antiquity. But if we look at this chart struc-
turally, we cannot help but notice that it constitutes a trinity, with
“God” at the center flanked by two others, with the female “below”
them serving as intermediary between heaven and earth, bearer of
prayers to God above and birth chamber of divine blessing as it flows
into the world. Another kabbalistic configuration imagines Hokhmah
as the Father, Tif’eret as the Son, and Shekhinah as His bride, to which
parallels can also be found in the Christian sources. Because of the sec-
ond commandment, Jews were held back from any concrete expres-
sion of these structures beyond occasional diagrams and charts. But
Sy
The Zohar in Historical Context 97
imagine what such kabbalistic images might have looked like in
stained glass, for example. There we would have found something in-
deed very closely parallel to the image-world of medieval Christianity.
It is not at all clear how conscious the Kabbalists themselves were of
these patterns of cultural influence. Commonalities of structure that
may appear obvious to us from the vantage point of distant centuries
may not have been at all clear to those who bore them. Consciously or
not, these tremendous importations of spiritual structures were carried
out in a subtle and highly creative way, so the connections were far
from obvious. Anything less than this would have led to the Kabbalists
being labeled heretics and enemies of Judaism, precisely the opposite
of their goal, which was to strengthen Judaism in the face of its all-
powerful and dangerous rival. It was in part because they were them-
selves so affected by the attractiveness of Christianity that the authors
of the Zohar set out to create a Judaism of renewed mythic power and
old-new symbolic forms. Far from being crypto-Christians, they sought
to create a more compelling Jewish myth, one that would fortify Jews
in resisting Christianity.
An area in which we can clearly see this attempt to put forth a Ju-
daism that stands in direct challenge to Christianity is that of the rela-
tionship between marriage and the presence of Shekhinah or the Holy
Spirit. The culture of Christian Spain in the thirteenth century was
highly monastic. The time of the Zohar was the great heyday of both
Dominican and Franciscan spirituality, and these and other orders
played a great role in the socioeconomic as well as the religious life of
the surrounding culture. While Judaism contained neither a tradition of
monasticism nor a glorification of celibacy, the great monastic estab-
lishments must have been impressive to Jewish pietists, who did share
in some of the values represented by the monkish life. Scholars have
long noted the influence of Christian monasticism (especially its glori-
fication of poverty) on circles close to the Zohar. In sharp contrast to
WHat Is THE ZOHAR? 98
the Christian glorification of celibacy, the Zohar insists (with relatively
meager support in earlier Jewish sources) that an unmarried man is
merely half a person and that the Shekhinah does not dwell where the
wholeness of male-female union is lacking. When a man is away from
his wife, the Zohar tells us—whether he is traveling, busy studying
Torah with his companions, or prevented from union with her because
of her menstrual impurity—the Shekhinah joins to him, becoming his
female spiritual companion. But she does so only by merit of the fact
that he has an earthly female partner to whom he will return in holy
union. Anyone who has no wife cannot expect that the presence of
God will be joined to him. Moses is the sole exception to this rule. The
Zohar’s insistence on the spiritual necessity of marriage can best be un-
derstood, relative to Castile of the thirteenth century, as a frontal attack
on Christian monasticism, focusing its claim precisely where it would
hurt most. Abstinence from marriage, claims the Zohar, does not free
one for marriage to God, as the monks would have it; rather, celibacy
makes it impossible for one to contain the presence of the Holy Spirit.
The relationship of the Kabbalah and the Zohar to the surrounding
Christian culture was thus highly ambivalent and complex. The resent-
ment that the Jews naturally bore as an oppressed and taunted minor-
ity is very much present in the outcries of the Zohar’s speakers against
the wicked nations. From a formal theological and halakhic point of
view, the Zohar offers not the slightest leniency in its attitude toward
Christianity or any other non-Jewish religion. But operating as it did
on the plane of myth and imagination, the Zohar absorbed subtle cul-
tural influences and structures of thought that were current in the sur-
rounding culture. The Zohar is very much a reflection of Judaism in
the setting of the medieval Christian West, shaped by a unique inter-
weaving of resentment, attraction, and creative adaptation.
Part III
SELECTED THEMES
WITHIN THE ZOHAR
The purpose of the following brief sections is not to offer a complete outline of the
Zohar’s views on these key theological topics. The Zohar is a vast and nonsystematic
work, and a wide range of opinions is presented within it, especially when various
subsections of the Zohar are considered. The remarks in the following chapters are
meant rather to help prepare the reader who will encounter these points within the
Zohar text and would like a brief reference to them.
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.
Creation and Origins
The Zohar devotes a great deal of attention to Creation and the origins
of existence. In this the Zohar shows itself to be very much connected
to the world of medieval Jewish philosophy, in which Creation was
seen to be a central theological issue. Unlike the early rabbis, whose
primary theological focus had been on revelation and the chain of au-
thority, the medievals viewed religion through the lens of the Middle
Ages’ “cosmic spirituality.’ This was an orientation that saw philosoph-
ical, scientific, and religious knowledge as belonging to a single whole.
A growing scientific awareness of the vastness of the universe combined
with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics to depict a wondrous
multitiered cosmos radiating out from a divine center. The material
world was the lowest rung of that hierarchy of being and only the palest
reflection of the single source that animated all of existence. Knowledge
of God was better obtained by an understanding of the universe as a
whole, with concentration on the upper, immaterial spheres. God was
glorified by the grandeur of that entire universe and by the beauty and
wisdom of the natural law that governed it. Speculation on the origin
and nature of that cosmos was seen by the medievals as essential to the
IO!
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR 102
quest for wisdom or truth. This characteristic of medieval thought tran-
scends the lines between religious traditions as well as any distinction
one can make between “philosophers” and “mystics.”
While this shift in emphasis from the rabbinic to the kabbalistic
imagination took place under the aegis of medieval philosophical spec-
ulation, the Zohar typically seeks to ground its views in a biblical rather
than a contemporary context. For this it turns to the legacy of the
prophets and psalmists, who were so often enthralled with the wonders
of Creation, depicting them as witnesses to the Creator’s wondrous
power. Verses from Isaiah, the Psalms, and Job are widely quoted in the
Zohar, whose authors’ thorough familiarity with even the most ob-
scure parts of Scripture indeed rivaled that of the ancient midrashic
masters. These verses bring to the Zohar a powerful evocative poesis,
rooted in their original meaning, while dissecting and reweaving them
to hint at the upper Creation, the realm of kabbalistic mystery.
In the context of medieval philosophy, it is not surprising that the
Zohar deals with cosmic origins primarily on the inner divine level. It
is the emergence of the sefirot from Ein Sof and the resulting constitu-
tion of the divine persona that captures most of the Zohar’s attention.
The lower Creation, that of actual corporeal existence, seems almost
unworthy of discussion, and indeed is treated only somewhat cursorily
by the Zohar. But there are some important theological reasons for this
choice and omission. These require further discussion here.
The questions of God (proofs of God’s existence, the nature of God
and divine “‘attributes’’) and Creation were deeply intertwined in the
medieval theological mind. Creation was used by Maimonides and
others as a basis for belief in God, the Unmoved Mover or the primary
force that lies behind all chains of cause and effect. This God, however,
is an abstraction or a logical principle, whether derived through Aris-
totelian arguments of cause and effect or through Neoplatonic reflec-
tions on the prime source of spiritual energy or “light” and the succes-
a
Qa
Creation and Origins 103
sively dimmer reflections of it through the universe. Philosophers in
both schools struggled mightily with the question of willful Creation.
Does existence How naturally out the cosmic Source into all of being?
Did God choose to create the world, or does it simply exist by dint of
God's own nature? There is a great and unresolved distance between
these Hellenically rooted philosophical speculations and the God of Is-
rael, the supreme Person of the biblical-rabbinic tradition, Who creates
by an act of supreme and absolute will, for the sake of Israel, Torah, or
the righteous who are to inhabit His earth and bring Him pleasure.
The philosophers, especially Maimonides, had found ways to dismiss
this earlier and more personified view of God, seeing it (since they
continued to view Torah as divine revelation and thus had to account
for the Torah’s depiction of God) as some combination of a concession
to the primitive thinking of the ancients and a divinely given educa-
tional tool to effect moral behavior among the masses. Much of the
first section of the Guide for the Perplexed is devoted to a treatment of
biblical language that serves to undermine the naive theology of bibli-
cal literalism. The God of philosophy was indeed the Source of Sources
or the Unmoved Mover, but endowed with just enough of will and
consciousness to meet the needs of Judaism as recast in the philosoph-
ical mode. The fact that there might exist within this framework, as
there surely did for Maimonides, a highly refined form of religious pas-
sion and devotion to God’s service, was lost on all but the most careful
of readers.
The Kabbalists were utterly opposed to this theological stance. For
them, the God of the rabbinic tradition was very much alive. They af-
firmed not only willful Creation, but Creation for the sake of Israel and
the souls of the righteous. They turned back to the fragmentary cos-
mogenic myths found in ancient sources, both in classical Midrash and
in some aggadic works bordering on the merkavah tradition, and wove
them into their own system of kabbalistic speculation. In fact, a large
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 104
part of their inspiration came from the seemingly most bizarre corners
of the earlier Jewish theological imagination. They were unwilling to
join with the philosophers in dismissing the mythical and folk elements
of Jewish piety that had such a strong hold on the popular religious
mind. At the same time, their own mystical speculations had led them
down the path of abstraction. The Kabbalists’ Ein Sof, the endless and
undefined source of existence, was very like the object of the philoso-
phers’ pure contemplation. The tension between the abstract One of
Ones that underlies both philosophy and mysticism and the personified
God of Jewish myth and imagination remained unresolved for the
philosophers. For the Kabbalists, it stood as a great challenge.
It is in part for this reason that the Zohar’s treatment of Creation
concentrates mostly on the inner divine process. Much of the Zohar
may be seen as an attempt to discover how the personal and anthro-
pomorphic God came forth out of the recesses of mysterious oneness.
Described in some of the Zohar’s most poetic and imaginative pas-
sages as theogonic process, the emergence of “God” from the hidden
Godhead, this treatment may also be viewed as the Kabbalists’ way of
resolving the tension between their own mysticism and their deep
commitment to the personalist and mythical elements of the ancient
Jewish legacy. The real story of Creation therefore has to be that of the
“birth” of God, the personified Father ‘and Mother, in this case) of
the universe. How that God then brought forth the lower, material
word 1s only of secondary interest. In good Neoplatonic fashion, the
lower universe is depicted as structurally parallel to, yet a pale imita-
tion of, the upper one. The relationship between these “upper” and
“lower” stages of Creation is described by Gershom Scholem:
Theogony and cosmogony represent not two different acts of creation,
but two aspects of the same. On every plane—in the world of the
Merkabah and the angels, which is below the Sefiroth, in the various
heavens, and in the world of the four elements—creation mirrors the
inner movement of the divine life. The “‘vestiges” of the innermost re-
Creation and Origins — 10
ality are present even in the most external of things. Everywhere there
is the same rhythm, the same motion of the waves. The act which re-
sults beyond and above time in the transtormation of the hidden into
the manifest God is paralleled in the time-bound reality of every other
world. Creation is nothing but an external development of these forces
which are active and alive in God Himself. Nowhere is there a break, a
discontnuity. . . . The most frequent illustration of this doctrine . . . is
that of the chain and the links of which it consists. There are in this
chain, the links of which are represented by the totality of the different
worlds, ditferent grades of links, some deeply hidden and some visible
from outside, but there is no such thing as isolated existence.!
Here we may see another reason that the Zohar says little about the
emergence of the lower world. The kabbalistic system, by its very na-
ture, is one of emanation, of existence flowing forth from a source,
both in its origins and in its daily renewal. For the lower world that
source 1s Malkhut, or the union of the sefirot culminating in Malkhut,
that allows for the “birth” of souls and the overflow of bounty that sus-
tains existence. Life is the result of this outpouring of energy from
Malkhut, very much affected, as we shall see later, by the course of hu-
man actions. The relationship between God and world in this sort of
faith is essentially not that of Creator and Creation, indicating a true
separation between God and the universe, but rather one of inner core
and outward manifestations. The “lower” world is in fact a “vessel” or a
“garment” to contain that radiating energy. The divine Self emanates
through the universe and is revealed, paradoxically, as it is “garbed” in
each of the many creatures that inhabit it.
This theology of emanation implies a degree of pantheism. The lan-
guage of the Zohar, to be sure, is that of Creation, even the morally de-
termined and willful Creation of rabbinic tradition. Behind this termi-
nology of Creation, however, stands a dynamic indwelling God whose
presence pulsates through the entire cosmos. But pantheism has impor-
1. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941),
P2232.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR 106
tant and potentially problematic theological ramifications. The “other-
ness” of God is called into question if God underlies and animates all
that is. Such issues as moral responsibility and divine punishment might
require reexamination in the context of an emanation-centered theol-
ogy. The Kabbalists, a morally conservative group within the Jewish
community, sought to keep these questions under wraps. Opposing
philosophy as champions of traditional faith, the role in which they had
cast themselves, they surely did not want the dangers of their own the-
ological position to make them the object of new controversy. For this
reason too they kept their discussions about the emergence of the lower
worlds quite vague, avoiding any specific treatment of the sublunar
creatures’ relationship to the sefirotic universe out of which they came
and in whose image they were formed.
In fact, the Zohar reflects a form of Kabbalah that throroughly if
inconsistently combines emanationist and personalist views of the re-
lationship between God, world, and humanity. It is from the overflow
of grace, the bounteous shefa pouring forth in moments of divine
union, that souls are born and that the world is sustained. But this
bounty derives from the coupling of the male and female sefirot, es-
sentially the sacred marriage of Tif’eret and Malkhut, which can take
place only through the stirring aroused by Israel. It is their good deeds
and longings for God, as we shall see later in our discussion of the
commandments, that arouse the “feminine waters” within Malkhut to
call forth and awaken the love of her (and Israel’s) divine Partner. The
emanational flow is thus made dependent upon an act of divine will,
depicted in the form of eros, a personalist passion that is as much in-
ner drive as it is response to specific human actions.
The Zohar's focus on the inner divine aspects of Creation allows it
to shift the meaning of certain key terms and symbols. The philoso-
phers’ insistence on creatio ex nihilio, yesh me-ayin in Hebrew, was com-
pletely reinterpreted in sefirotic terms. Keter, also called ayin or divine
‘he
\- “4.
Creation and Origins — 107
“Nothingness,” is now the “nothing” out of which Creation comes.
The Kabbalists tirelessly quote Job 28:1 in this context: ve-ha-hokhmah
me-ayin timmatse. Rather than reading it interrogatively as “Whence
does wisdom come?” they interpret it as a statement: “Wisdom (Hokh-
ntah) comes trom Nothing (ayin).” The six days of Creation, the frame-
work of the opening chapter of Genesis, are also transferred to the se-
firotic realm, representing the six sefirot from Hesed to Yesod, culimating
in Malkhut, the bride who is their Sabbath. Even such terms as “upper
world” and “Jower world” are used internally in the sefirotic descrip-
tions, referring to Binah and Malkhut. Often it is not clear when this is
the case and when the Zohar is actually referring to the lower world of
material existence. “Earth” (adamah) and “land” (erets) are also symbol-
terms for the Shekhinah, again complicating the discussion.
When the Zohar does refer to the creation of this world, it does so
by combining three networks of mythical symbolism. One is the lan-
guage of birth, to which we have already referred. Shekhinah giving
birth to the lower worlds may be the “lower mother” or the “hind of
dawn.” In some passages, Her painful birthing may involve some com-
promise with the forces of darkness, thus giving them a degree of
power over the emergent lower realms of being. Human souls in par-
ticular are spoken of as being “born” of Shekhinah, bearing within
themselves the stamp of the sefirotic world that is the Zohar’s under-
standing of Creation “in God’s image.”
Another set of symbols goes back to Genesis’ image of Creation
through the power of divine speech (“God said, ‘Let there be . . . ’ and
there was... ”). The Kabbalist exults in the notion that God creates
the world through some supernal and mysterious manifestation of lan-
guage. This may take the form of permutation of letters, in the tradi-
tion of Sefer Yetsirah, the uttering of mysterious divine names, or some
other aspect of verbal self-revelation. A key symbol for the emergence
of the sefirot is the movement within God from thought (Hokhmah and
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 108
Binah) to voice (Tif’eret) to speech (Malkhut). This to say that Creation
is a form of divine self-articulation. The revelation of the Torah, as we
shall see, is a repetition or an externalization of this inner divine process.
A third mythical element has to do with the ancient legacy of picto-
rial depictions of Creation. These aggadot, preserved most vividly in the
opening chapters of the eighth-century Midrash Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer,
were well known to the Zohar’s authors and they used them in an ex-
pansive and creative way. Some aggadot tell of elements that preexisted
Creation, while others, preserving fragments of pre-Israelite mythology,
tell of forces opposed to Creation that had to be slain or defeated so
that Creation might come forth. These become constituent elements of
the Zohar’s demonic universe, playing a significant role in the Zohar’s
repeated and highly colorful descriptions of Creation.
Q)
Between Worlds
The Kabbalist inhabits a cosmos of interlocking and interpenetrating
realms. The physical structures of the “lower world” reflect the dynam-
ics of “higher” spiritual worlds and embody their energies. “Above”
and “below” exist in an analogical relationship to each other. The
lower world is sustained by the emanatory flow from the upper world,
one that is increased or lessened in response to human actions. But the
lower world is also a reflection of the world above or behind it. Just as
the sefirot both hide and reveal the light that flows into them (one that
could not come to be known except through them), so too does the
lower world both hide and disclose the power and the structure of the
sefirot that underlie it.
The vertical and hierarchical model on which the medieval universe
is structured underlies the entire Zohar. Upper world and lower world,
terms used with great frequency throughout the work, are both paral-
lel and interdependent. At times the phrase “upper world” refers to the
sefirotic realm as a whole, as parallel to the “lower world” that is the
concrete universe of human action. But elsewhere the upper and lower
worlds may reflect an intradivine distinction. Most commonly these are
10g
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ IIO
Binah and Malkhut, the two “female” realms into which a divine force
enters. But the terms upper and lower may also refer to any number of
other distinctions, including those between Shekhinah and Her heav-
enly hosts, between Tif’eret and Malkhut, between the three highest se-
firot and the seven others, and so forth. In fact, it is often both impossi-
ble and unnecessary to know just which “‘address”’ is intended, since the
claim applies to all the upper and lower realms at once. Such is the way
of the Zohar’s worldview that it sees each realm as part of the great hi-
erarchical system, fully linked to all those above and below it.
This way of seeing the world be-aspeklaria shel ma’alah, or from an
upper-world perspective, is held to be true regarding both of the pri-
mary dimensions by which the lower world is measured: time and
space. The passage of time—days, years, eons—points beyond time it-
self to the world of the sefirot. The days of the week are the seven lower
sefirot in earthly incarnation. This perception is cultivated particularly
in the extensive reflections on the Sabbath found throughout the Zo-
har. Celebrating or “entering into” the Sabbath is in effect partaking of
Shekhinah, entering into that cosmic and transtemporal realm that is
replete with God’s presence. With regard to space, the six sefirot above
Shekhinah are regularly referred to as the “six extensions,” encompass-
ing within them all of primal “space.’ Sometimes the four key sefirot,
Hesed-Gevurah- Tif’ eret-Malkhut, are symbolically represented by the
four directions, again giving the sense that all of primal space is in-
cluded within them. The influence of the Sefer Yetsirah tradition is par-
ticularly to be felt here, as the sefirot are referred to as “‘the deep struc-
ture” of all reality.
Hierarchically “below” the ten sefirot in the Zohar’s cosmology is a
series of heikhalot, or “palaces.” These are intermediary chambers of di-
vine radiance, arranged in the pattern (mostly) of the seven lower se-
firot. The heikhalot are described in several sections of the Zohar in
highly experiential and ecstatic terms. While these heikhalot are set
m,
Between Worlds 9111
forth with great pomp and enthusiasm, the journey through them is
given a role subordinate to contemplation of the sefirot, on which the
Zohar'’s main energies are focused. The hetkhalot are in fact used in
part to show how the sefirotic structure extends beyond the Godhead
and is repeated throughout the lower forms of existence.
Kabbalists more or less contemporaneous with the authors of the
Zohar had begun to describe a four-tiered universe, with the successive
“worlds” denoted by the terms atsilut (“emanation’’), beri’ah (‘‘cre-
ation’), yetsirah (““formation’’), and asiyyah (““fashioning”’). These terms
respectively referred to the inner divine realm; the world of visionary
experience, including the divine throne and the heikhalot; the realm of
the angels; and the world of souls. The material world was taken to be
lower than assiyah but dominated by its spirit. Each of the four worlds
was structured in the same tenfold pattern of the sefirot. For reasons un-
known to us, the Zohar refrains from using this system, leaving the 1n-
termediary and angelic universes with no clear pattern of organization
beyond that of the heikhalot themselves. The poetic spirit in which the
Zohar is written seems better fulfilled by vast hosts of angels rushing
about the universe, often counted in fantastic and seemingly arbitrary
numbers, than by the more ‘“‘systematic” angelologies and structured
cosmologies described by others.
Also absent from the Zohar is speculation on the cosmic jubilee
and the return of all being to its origins in Binah at the culmination
of a great 49,000 year cycle. Kabbalists before the Zohar, including
Nahmanides, referred to this matter as one of special secrecy, to be
taught only in the most esoteric of mystical circles. On the basis of a
Talmudic aggadah that said, “The world exists for six thousand years:
two thousand chaos, two thousand Torah, and two thousand messianic
times,”! the mystics imagined a seventh millennium in which earthly
existence would cease, a spiritualized “world that is wholly Sabbath.”
1. Sanhedrin 97a.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR II2
They then counted seven such sabbatical aeons, each under the aegis
of a particular sefirah. These were to culminate in a cosmic jubilee, in
which all being was to return to its source in the womb of Binah,
thence presumably to be born again into another series of sabbaths. It
is unknown to us why the Zohar’s authors chose to ignore (aside from
occasional possible hints) both of these key tools of kabbalistic cos-
mological speculation. Further investigation of this matter may prove
fruitful in characterizing the particular mystical circle out of which
these writings emerged.
The natural world is seen by the Zohar to contain a great many
phenomena that point to the supernal structure. The relationship of
heaven and earth, and of sun and moon, the way rivers flow into the
sea, the growth of trees due to sunlight and water—all of these are seen
as earthly replications of the sefirotic pattern. There is an embrace of
nature in the Zohar that sees it as a manifestation of divine reality.
Some of this is presented as an enthusiastic renewal of the psalmist’s ex-
ultation in the wonders of God’s creation. But as the Zohar unravels its
exegetical interest in the biblical descriptions of Creation, it is often
these structural parallels between upper and lower worlds that it seeks
to uncover.
The most important earthly representations of the cosmic structure
in the Zohar are to be found in the Tabernacle-Temple and the hu-
man being, particularly the soul. In both of these cases, the Zohar
builds on older midrashic traditions that saw soul or Temple as micro-
cosm or earthly reflection of the divine reality. The Zohar adapts these
typologies to its own symbolic structure, one based on, but going far
beyond, that which is found in the rabbinic tradition.
The origins of the Zohar’s hierarchical worldview reach back into
the depths of Israel’s mythical imagination, and perhaps even into an-
cient pre-Israelite structures of thought. The notion that the earthly
Temple stands parallel to the heavenly Temple that is God’s true
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Between Worlds 113
dwelling is well attested by both biblical and midrashic texts. Even a
triple-tiered universe, with the Temple standing over the opening to the
nether-world as well as at the gateway to the heavens, is documented in
early sources. The extended wings of the two cherubim over the ark in
Moses’ Tabernacle seem to form a “seat” for the divine Glory (kavod in
the Bible, shekhinah in the rabbinic sources), a presence that extends
downward from its home above. Human actions, according to well-
known Midrashim, cause that presence either to be present in this
world or to retreat up its own inner ladder to the seventh heaven, far
from the sullied realms below. All of this stands in the background of
the Zohar’s own more elaborately constructed cosmological vision.
The human being as an earthly embodiment of the divine structure
also plays a major role in the Zohar’s religious worldview. Kabbalah rep-
resents a highly anthropocentric version of Judaism, especially in con-
trast to the more theocentric views of the medieval Jewish philoso-
phers. It sees the world as having been created for the sake of humanity,
and the person as a locus of divine energy, playing a vital role in the
maintenance of the entire cosmos. Humans were created in the divine
image in order to fulfill this purpose. This view of humanity is manifest
in the Zohar’s perspectives on both soul and body.
The Zohar speaks frequently of three parts of the soul, designated by
the terms nefesh, ruah, and neshamah (literally but inadequately rendered
as “self” “spirit,” and “breath”). The tripartite division of the human
soul was widespread in medieval intellectual circles, based on notions
first developed by Plato and Aristotle. Discussion of various aspects of
the human soul, or even multiple souls within the person, is found in
earlier Jewish philosophical and mystical writings. But the linkage
made in the Zohar between these three terms and specific (if some-
times variable) loci within the sefirotic world seems to be original.
Most Zohar discussions link nefesh, the lowest and most universally
shared rung of soul, to Malkhut, the sefirah from which souls are born.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR II4
Ruah is parallel to Tif’eret, the divine male principle whose union with
Malkhut brings about that birth. Neshamah, sometimes said to belong
only to the righteous, represents the mysterious rung of Binah, point-
ing to the unknowable realms beyond.* Some passages also refer to two
higher aspects of soul, hayyah and yehidah, a theme taken up by later
Kabbalists influenced by the Zohar.
The analogy between the soul and the sefirotic universe bears with
it implications that lead-in two directions. One is the sense that true
self-knowledge leads to the knowledge of God, also a widespread be-
lief in the medieval world. Turning inward to contemplate the self and
its origins was an important part of kabbalistic knowledge. The other
implication is more in the direction of theurgy, or the potential effect
of human actions on the divine world. The soul partakes of the divine
structure in a real way. It is not just a copy of the sefirot, but actually rep-
resents their presence within the self. Because of this, the actions of the
person, including both the sanctification and the defilement of the
soul, make their mark above. The interrelationship between God and
person is quite mutual; the parts of the soul both show their divine ori-
gins and allow for the possibility of human action on the cosmic plane.
The human body as well as the soul reflects the divine image. This
is a unique view of the Kabbalists in the medieval Jewish context, one
that generally shared in the Platonically inspired denigration of ‘“‘coarse
matter,’ and with it all things physical. The fact that the sefirot are usu-
ally depicted in a chart that corresponds to the human body lends the
latter a symbolic dignity that is quite striking. It is because of this like-
ness to the supernal realm that the body can serve as a vehicle for the
uplifting of sacred energies and the restoration of the divine cosmos.
The Zohar is fascinated by the possibility of using parts of the body for
2. The Zoharic discussion of the soul, its parts, and its origin is particularly com-
plex. Here the treatment by Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 677-722, is especially
recommended.
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Between Worlds 115
sacred purposes. Such acts as raising one’s hands in blessing or opening
the mouth in prayer are subjects for deep reflection and discourse
among the companions. Such bodily phenomena as the coursing of
blood through the veins or (according to Galenic medicine) the flow
of semen from the brain, through the spine, and into the phallus, are
depicted as earthly analogies to mysterious divine processes. Of course
it is also possible to read the analogy in the reverse, suggesting that
these biological phenomena lent to the Kabbalists a certain view of
processes in the upper world. All of this is part of the union of sciences
(in the broadest sense, culminating in religion) widely accepted in the
Middle Ages.
Alongside these passages that glorify the body by analogy to the di-
vine, the Zohar also contains vivid descriptions of the dangers of bod-
ily temptations and hints that demonic elements may have had a hand
in the formation of the physical body itself. This conflict of views
shows the deep ambivalence with which bodily matters were seen by
the Kabbalists of the thirteenth century. This is especially true with re-
gard to sexuality. The Zohar contains glorious descriptions of the cor-
respondence between the upper union and the lower union, assuring
the reader than his coupling with his wife, carried out within the
proper halakhic rules and bounded as well by mystical intention, is po-
tentially a holy and cosmos-redeeming act, one that unites the sefirot
and draws a holy soul to come into this world. But that same deed, or
even the temptation to think of it, outside those bounds of propriety, is
condemned in the fiercest terms imaginable. This terror of sexual sin
and the damage it can do to the cosmic structure was an important part
of the Zohar’s legacy to later forms of kabbalistic praxis.
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Evil and the Demonic
We have seen that the Zohar’s theology is an attempt to tame and
reconcile several competing and even contradictory insights and ex-
periences. The Kabbalists were true mystics, aware of the oneness un-
derlying and uniting all discrete phenomena. They were influenced
profoundly by their own inner pneumatic experiences and by the
metaphysics bequeathed to them by their Neoplatonic predecessors.
But as medieval Jews, they were also members of an exiled and op-
pressed community. They were thus uniquely sensitive to the undeni-
able reality of evil in the world and the horrors of history. These too
needed to find an outlet in their very personally expressive writings,
despite their seeming threat to the harmonic unity of being. The ten-
sion between the sublime vision of sefirotic unity, resulting in light
and bliss throughout the worlds, and the reality of darkness and op-
pression colors almost every page of the Zohar. As noted earlier, the
work is distinguished as well by a second tension, deriving from an
attraction to an abstract contemplative mysticism combined with a
powerful mythical imagination. The latter expressed itself in a set of
potent and sometimes frightening symbols. Much of the kabbalistic
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Evil and the Demonic — 117
ouevre can be interpreted as the product of an inner dialectic around
these two tensions. Nowhere is this more clearly felt than in the Zo-
har’s treatment of evil and the demonic realm.
By its very nature, mysticism bears within it a monist strain in the-
ology. The mystic seeks to uncover the ultimate oneness of all being
and to experience some taste of that primal truth. The theology that
accompanies this attempt is hard-pressed to deal with the reality of evil.
If all existence is a reflection of divinity, what is evil’s place? Generally
there have been two tendencies in dealing with this problem, as is true
within Western theology more generally. One approach, often associ-
ated with Neoplatonism, is the denial of evil as real. What seems to be
evil is in fact illusion, ignorance, or distance from the ever-shining di-
vine light. When we become enlightened, closer to God, evil will dis-
appear from before us. The other approach is the path of Gnosticism,
differing sharply from Neoplatonism in this area. Evil is here depicted
as real and frightening. Some compromise with dualism is needed to
explain its origin and continued existence. Yes, God is the one source
of all that is. But somehow in the transmission of that divine presence
into its this-worldly garb there has been a tragic fault or flaw, a rebel-
lion within the lesser cosmic forces, or perhaps an unwillingness of the
lower worlds to receive God’s light, allowing the forces of evil to exist,
and even to achieve awesome power.
Both of these approaches are to be found in the Zohar. The former
view, largely that of the earlier Gerona Kabbalists, is manifest in depic-
tions of evil as a pale imitation of the sefirotic realm. Indeed, it bears
the same tenfold structure as the world of divinity, but it is a mere
shadow, a mocking imitation of the divine realm. This illusory world
has power only over those foolish enough to take it for true. The latter
view, certainly dominant within the Zohar, links that work to the cir-
cle of “Gnostic” Kabbalists active in Castile in the mid-thirteenth cen-
tury, especially to the writings of Isaac of Soria and Moses of Burgos.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR II8
Out of Isaac of Soria’s teaching, the Zohar developed a vision of the
“Sitra Ahara” —‘“‘the Other Side”—which plays a significant role in the
Zoharic mythos. In one of its most powerful set of images, the Zohar
describes the Sitra’Ahara as a series of gelippot, four interlocking “shells”
surrounding the realm of divinity and constituting a “side” of impurity.
The image of the shell, surrounding and protecting the inner content
of a particular divine constellation, was part of the older kabbalistic
legacy. But in the Zohar these shells take on the frightening counte-
nance of actively demonic forces. The names of these gelippot—‘stormy
wind,” “huge cloud,’“‘flashing fire.” and “radiance” —were derived from
the blustery conflagration envisioned by Ezekiel as surrounding the Di-
vine Chariot. “I looked, and lo, a stormy wind came sweeping out of
the north—a huge cloud and flashing fire, surrounded by a radiance”
(Ez. 1:4).“Radiance” (Nogah), the shell closest to the worlds of divinity,
is viewed as a mixture of good and evil, capable of interaction with Di-
vinity. The innermost core of the Sitra Ahara, “Stormy Wind” (Ruah
Se’arah) is a domain of unalloyed defilement.
Constrained to account for the way this highly pictorialized de-
monic realm exists in a universe where all comes forth from Ein Sof,
the Zohar presents two distinct pictures of the Sitra Ahara’s origins.
Most prevelant is the image of the Other Side as the fiery dross emit-
ted by Gevurah at the moment of its emanation. Some passages de-
scribe this in terms of the tension between Hesed and Gevurah dis-
cussed earlier. Other texts see it as an act of purgation, as God casting
the roots of anger and harshness out of the emergent divine Self. Hav-
ing been forcibly, even violently, removed from the realm of divinity,
this dross reconstitutes itself as the forces of the demonic Other. This
vision was derived from the teachings of Rabbi Moses of Burgos. A
second vision, enunciated in hints and veiled allusions, goes beyond
even the teachings of Rabbi Isaac in its radicality. It uses the Torah’s
account of the genealogy of the Edomite kings (Gen. 36: 31 ff.), who
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Evil and the Demonic — 119
“reigned and died before there was a king in Israel.” These “kings that
died” are taken by the Zohar to allude to a set of primordial, purgative
expulsions of negative energy from the depths of Keter, preceding even
the very beginning of the ordered sefirotic emanation. Only this re-
moval of the dross at the highest level cleared the way for the proper
revelation of the sefirotic potencies. Its origin in this highest and most
recondite divine realm accounts for the great and mysterious power
the Zohar attributes to the demonic.
These explanations of evil’s origins within the divine world in part
serve the role of apologetics, assuring the concerned reader that belief
in the Other Side is not as profoundly dualistic as it might first ap-
pear. But this is not the primary way they should be read. Out of the
works of the “Gnostic” Kabbalists the Zohar’s authors have con-
structed a vivid mythology of evil, one in which they and their orig-
inal intended readers thoroughly believed. They saw both cosmos and
soul as the battleground in an eternal struggle between two contend-
ing cosmic forces, one that will not be finally resolved until the end
of time. There are passages in the Zohar that recall the tone, and even
some of the specific imagery, of the Jewish apocalypses of the first and
second centuries. Yet like all other aspects of reality, the Other Side
originates within divinity, is animated by a divine spark, and yearns to
ascend back to its source. When all worlds, above and below, exist in a
state of perfect balance and harmony, the Other Side is under the firm
control of the sefirot and plays a positive role in the management of
the world, functioning as an obedient punishing rod of divine justice.
However, when the worlds are askew and imbalanced, Sitra Ahara de-
velops an independent will. In its quest for an autonomous life fueled
by divine light and energy, it oversteps its bounds and strives to usurp
the place of Tif’eret or Yesod in the holy union, snatching the Shekhi-
nah and the world from His embrace in an act described quite vividly
as abduction or even rape. The great moments of redemption enu-
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR 120
merated in the biblical history of salvation belong as much to the
Shekhinah as to Israel, with redemption occurring both above and be-
low. Isiael’s human enemies and oppressors, such as Esau, Pharoah, and
Amalek, are but the phenomenal agents of a far greater and more dan-
gerous cosmic foe.
In describing this ongoing battle against evil, the mythical, mysti-
cal, and moralistic elements of the Zohar all work in tandem and in-
deed are inseparable from one another. The often personified em-
bodiments of wickedness—Samael, chief of the demons; his consort
Lilit, or Na’amah; and all their hosts—are depicted with great color in
many places within the Zohar. Images abound of the primordial ser-
pent and the great sea monster floating through ten rivers of defile-
ment. These all set about the task of leading humans into sin. Indeed
this mission is vital to them, for it is only through the energy released
to them in acts of human transgression that they receive the life-
energy they need to sustain themselves. Cut off from adequate suste-
nance by their divine source, the forces of evil are powerless unless
given energy from “below.”
The only bulwark that stands against these antidivine forces and
their utter dominance of the world is that of Israel, and especially of the
righteous among them. Every good deed they do, every command-
ment they fulfill or prayer they offer with the proper mystical intent,
serves to awaken the Shekhinah. She unites with her spouse, is ener-
gized by Him, and they together become mighty warriors in the bat-
tle against evil. They are more powerful than their wicked counterparts
and ultimate victory will surely belong to them. But they will be able
to claim that victory only when the merit of human goodness clearly
outweighs the burden of human evil, a condition against which all the
forces of evil and temptation are arrayed.
Sometimes it 1s clear that the battle cannot be won, that evil is
stronger than goodness in the present world. Then it is possible, through
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Evil and the Demonic 121
certain prescriptions of the Torah, to either “bribe” or fool evil (Samael
is sometimes described as “an old and foolish king”) to keep it from de-
stroying those vital points of goodness that do exist. Such sacrifices as
the Yom Kippur scapegoat or the monthly sin offering exist for that
purpose. The chiet of the demons here becomes something of a desert
scavenger, so busy devouring the meager meal he has been given that
he fails to notice the righteous, who are meanwhile uplifting whole
universes of goodness and saving them from his grasp.
Tt
Torah and Revelation
As faithful Jews, the Kabbalists were firm believers in the revelation of
the Torah. The day of the event at Sinai was taken, alongside those of
the erection of the Tabernacle and the Temple, as the apex of human
history. The rich legacy of rabbinic legends and theologoumena set out to
glorify Torah and its revelation were fully embraced by the Kabbalists.
They enthusiastically affirmed that every letter, vowel point, and musi-
cal notation in the Torah was of divine origin. The Torah given to
Moses at Sinai was an embodiment of the primordial Torah, which ex-
isted with God before Creation and which He consulted in making
the world. This view stood in great contrast to the reservations placed
by the Jewish rationalists of the Middle Ages on certain aspects of
Torah, including both its seemingly naive view of prophecy, its many
accounts of miracles, and its anthropomorphic views of God. While
they too formally accepted the literal belief in Sinaitic revelation as
dogma, their efforts at reinterpreting or even “purifying” concepts ex-
pressed in the Torah text led away from literalism and toward what has
been characterized as a protocritical approach to reading the scriptural
text. Here as in other areas the Kabbalists donned the mantle of theo-
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Torah and Revelation 123
logical orthodoxy, depicting themselves as yreat defenders of ancient
tradition, reaching all the way back to Sinai itself.
Despite their protestations at the reinterpretations of others, however,
the Kabbalists were far from literalists. While they did defend the literal
truth claims of the biblical and rabbinic sources, they, like the philoso-
phers, were interested primarily in a deeper reading of the text, one of-
ten thought of as “esoteric” in both intellectual camps. The Kabbalists
developed this way of reading much more thoroughly, however, and
were able to tind secret meanings even in the seemingly most obscure
or insignificant portions of the Torah. The very fact that many of the
important works of Kabbalah, including the Zohar, took the form of
commentaries on the Torah (unlike the major writings of the philos-
ophers, which were chiefly independent treatises) opened the way to-
ward a deeper integration of kabbalistic thinking and the interpretive
project. The nature of the secret truth that this deeper exegesis was to
find also distinguished Kabbalah from philosophy. The latter sought to
learn scientific and metaphysical truth, often in the Aristotelian mode,
from the study of Scripture. This was at best a difficult, even somewhat
tortured, enterprise. The Kabbalist sought allusions everywhere to the
secret inner life of God. But the language of those allusions, thanks both
to the flexibility and to the deep Jewishness of sefirotic language, indeed
often made one feel that they sprang directly from the Torah text. In this
way Kabbalah succeeded in capturing the imagination of Jewry, while
philosophy retained the air of a burden forced upon it from without.
The Zohar is interested in three levels of Torah, associated with three
rungs of the sefirotic mysteries. The primordial Torah corresponds to
Hokhmah, the written Torah to Tif’eret, and the oral Torah or the inter-
pretive tradition to Malkhut. Many passages treat these three aspects of
Torah as parallel but distinct entities. The correspondences between
them reflect the parallels the Zohar frequently finds between “upper
worlds” and “lower worlds,” or various levels of the sefirotic structure.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR 124
But there is also a view expressed in some places that understands the
three as stages in a single process of divine self-disclosure. Here the pri-
mordia! Torah is depicted as mahashavah, the innermost “thought” or
mind of God. This Torah is the original plan or inner map of the uni-
verse within the divine mind. The flow from Hokhmah to Tif’eret, or the
revelation of the primordial Torah as that of Sinai, happens at the level
of gol, where “voice” is joined to God’s thought, allowing for articula-
tion. But this act of divine speech is not yet complete, for it is hardly ac-
cessible to the human ear. (Indeed the word gol in the account of reve-
Jation in Exodus 19-20 may be rendered “thunderclap” more readily
than “voice” in the human sense.) Only at the level of Malkhut, or when
the interpretive tradition is linked to the written Torah, does the voice
of God truly emerge in dibbur or “speech.” This corresponds to the clas-
sic rabbinic (and in the medieval context, anti-Karaitic) view that the
written Torah can be understood and followed only through the au-
thoritative chain of interpretation.
Creation and Revelation are thus seen by the Zohar as twin pro-
cesses of divine self-disclosure, the emergence of God from hiddenness.
Just as the divine presence, in the form of sefirotic structure, is “garbed”
in all of Creation, so too is it found in the written and oral Torah. Like
Creation itself, Torah must be contemplated deeply by those who seek
to attain its secrets. The outer levels of Torah, the narratives and
halakhic readings, are depicted by the Zohar as the “garments” and
“body” of Torah. The true self of Torah, however, lies in its soul or kab-
balistic mysteries. Even these will eventually give way to a “soul of
soul” within the Torah, presumably a place where no distinction exists
between the innermost Torah and the divine Self of God.
The notion of primordial Torah, itself derived from ancient images of
Wisdom as God's eternal plaything or companion, is a mainstay of rab-
binic theology. By the time of the Zohar, this constellation of ideas had
evolved into the second of the ten sefirot, the “first point” of existence,
or the divine mind. All of Torah is contained within it, but in highly
Torah and Revelation — 126
concentrated form. Torah here correspondeds to the letter pod, associ-
ated with Hokhmah, and itself but a dot on the page. This is the Torah
that the rabbis had described as written in “black fire on white fire?’ the
Torah tar beyond any ordinary understanding of human language.
The emergence of that secret Wisdom in the form of written Torah
is the great achievement of Moses, hero-prophet of the written Torah
and prototype for the kabbalistic sage as well. Moses has ascended to the
level of Tif’eret, that of the blessed Holy One Himself. Only he, of all
humans, is called ba’ala de-Matronita, “Husband of the Lady,’ for he re-
lates to Shekhinah as male to female. The written Torah, called “the
Torah of YHVH,” thus becomes “the Torah of Moses” as well. The giv-
ing of this Torah at Mount Sinai was the unique revelation of God to
humankind. All Israel, including those yet to be born in future genera-
tions to the end of time, were present at that revelation and faithfully
agreed to abide by it.
The revelation of Sinai is not yet complete. Moses only began the
process, opening up the wellsprings of divine self-disclosure in the
form of Torah. The various rabbinic teachings and legends that see rev-
elation as ongoing are all part of the Zohar’s legacy. Revelation is a
great stream of truth, with more of it revealed in each generation. Here
the Zohar tends to reverse the old bias that favored earlier generations
over those that came after them. The rabbinic dictum that “things that
had not been revealed to Moses were revealed to Rabbi Akiva”! is now
transferred to the Zohar’s hero, Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai, who 1s in-
deed a form of Moses redivivus, the bearer of revelation for his own
time. The disciples who receive his teaching constitute a new holy
generation, the likes of which has not existed since that of Sinai and
will not be seen again until the final redemption. Their study of Torah,
and the Zohar’s faithful student’s contemplation of their insights, car-
ries forward the process of revelation, making it indeed “a great voice
that has never ceased.”
1. Midrash Be-Midbar Rabbah 19:6.
zZ
The Commandments
From its origins, Kabbalah took great interest in the subject of ta’amei
ha-mitsvot, or the reasons for the commandments. Among the earliest
kabbalistic secrets committed to writing were brief hints at the mean-
ings of various commandments, along with mystical explications of
prayer and of passages in the prayerbook. This is in no way surprising
for a movement that was dedicated, as we have seen, to the defense of
rabbinic Judaism in the face of challenges from both philosophy and
Christianity. But the frequent and often extended discussion of mitsvot
in the Zohar requires some further introduction.
The Torah itself offers rather little by way of explanation for the 613
(according to traditional count) commandments that it contains. Oc-
casionally a reward is mentioned in connection with the following of
a commandment, as in “so that your days be lengthened,” but this is
hardly to be taken as the reason for following it. The sacrificial offer-
ings of Leviticus are often described as “sweet savor unto the Lord,”
perhaps a dim reflection of the prebiblical view that the gods actually
partook of and enjoyed the sacrifices. But that view is sharply denied
by various passages in the prophetic writings. There are lyrical passages
he
Pox
126
The Commandments — 127
describing the rewards of a life in harmony with God’s command-
ments, as well as dire warnings to those who transgress them, but the
purpose or meaning of specific commandments is little discussed within
Scripture.
The rabbis understood Israel to have fully accepted the “‘yoke of the
commandments” at Sinai and viewed the entire Jewish people as com-
mitted to the oath of “we shall do and we shall listen” from that time
forward. They even projected the Torah’s commandments back onto
the patriarchs, insisting that they had followed every detail of the Law,
even their own rabbinic innovations. Various rabbinic sources insist that
all of the commandments are equally and eternally valid and that no
distinction is to be made among them. “Be as careful regarding a minor
mitsvah as a major one, for you do not know how reward for the com-
mandments is given.” If there is a purpose to the commandments it is
singular: to show Israel’s devotion to God and to purify Israel through
the disciplined demonstration of that loyalty. “What difference does it
make to the blessed Holy One whether one slaughters an animal from
the neck or from the throat [as prescribed by halakhah]? The com-
mandments were given only to purify people.”
At the same time, the rabbis did allow for certain categorizations
among the commandments. Best known are two such rubrics. One
distinguishes “commandments between man and God,’ the devo-
tional and ritual realm, from “commandments between man and his
fellow,” the moral-ethical domain. Neither type is taken to be more
vital to the life of holiness than the other, but the distinction between
them is important. This is indicated by the fact that the former cate-
gory of commandments is preceded by recital of a blessing (since its
essential purpose is that of worship) while the latter is not. Another
pair of categories, overlapping but not identical with these two, is that
I. Mishnah Avot 2:1.
2. Bereshit Rabbah 44:1.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 128
of huggim (“statutes”) and mishpatim (“judgments”). Mishpatim are
those commandments that have an obvious value, often an ethical
one. Had God not given these commandments, it is sometimes said,
humans would have needed to devise them anyway, to allow for the
conduct of society. Huggim are divine commandments that defy rea-
son but that must be followed nonetheless. “I have issued a statute, a
decree, and you are not permitted to question it [le-harher ahareha].””
A major reason given in the rabbinic sources for following com-
mandments is that of imitatio dei, doing that which God does. A famous
passage on devequt, often quoted in later sources, says that it is impossi-
ble to “cleave” to God, whom Scripture describes as “a consuming fire.”
‘Rather cleave to His qualities,” is the solution given. “‘Just as He is mer-
ciful and compassionate, so you be merciful and compassionate.”* This
quality of compassion is then illustrated by several divine acts: God vis-
iting the sick (Abraham), God burying the dead (Moses), God celebrat-
ing with bride and groom (Adam and Eve), and so on. Thus is one to
imitate God in the realm of interpersonal kindness. But some ritual acts
are also taken to be in imitation of God: God dons tefillin, according to
the Talmud; God studies Torah; God observed the first Sabbath; God
wrapped Himself in a great prayer shawl, both in Creation and at Sinai.
The medieval philosophers made much use of the earlier categories
of commandments, restating mishpatim and huqgim as “rational” and
“disciplinary” commandments. Though formally they were fully com-
mitted to both categories, they tried to bring as many commandments
as possible into the “rational” camp. This is the purpose of the rather
large body of “reasons for the commandments” created by the Jewish
rationalists. Maimonides in particular was known for both historical
(mostly “countering pagan practices”) and educational explanations
for the commandments.
3. Midrash Tehillim 9:2.
4. Sotah 14a.
The Commandments — 129
The Kabbalists shared the attempt of other medieval intellectuals to
find meaning in the Torah’s commandments and in the halakhic praxis
that had grown up around them. They understood that the rabbis’ sim-
ple insistence on unquestioning loyalty to God’s Word was not a suffi-
ciently compelling rationale for observance in their day, due to the
challenges of other faiths and in the face of the seeming absence of di-
vine reward, as reflected in Israel's exilic and defeated status. But the
meaning they sought was of a different order. Observance of the com-
mandments was taken as participation in the divine mystery. Each
commandment contained hints as to its origin within the sefirot or
pointed to a particular combination of forces within the sefirotic world.
Knowing these “secrets of the commandments”—handed down first
orally, then in writing, by the earliest Kabbalists—allowed one to par-
take deeply of the sefirot themselves. To perform a mitsvah with the
proper kabbalistic intent (kavvanah) was actually to abide in the desig-
nated sefirotic realm and to experience the flow of divine energy
(shefa) that flowed through those sefirot. Kabbalistic tradition notes that
the word mitsvah has its last two letters in common with the name of
God (YHVH). The first two letters, mem and tsade, represent yod and
heh in a widely used reverse alphabet. Thus the word for “command-
ment” contains within it the name or presence of God, in half-revealed
and half-hidden form. To engage in a life of mitsvot is to dwell inside
that mystery.
The commandments were even more than this. Experiential par-
ticipation in the sefirotic realm (devequt) was only a part of the Kab-
balist’s intent. He saw the mitsvot as divinely given means by which he
could actually affect the condition of the inner divine world. The se-
firot ever needed to be brought together, so that divine life might flow
through them and sustain the lower worlds. The powerful forces of
evil, as we have seen, are arrayed against this cause. In choosing Israel,
God has provided a very powerful and efficacious set of tools by
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 130
which to combat evil and bring about sefirotic union. This was espe-
cially true regarding the Shekhinah, who dwelt in a semipermanent
state of exile from the upper sefirot. “The uniting of the blessed Holy
One and His Shekhinah” became for the Castilian Kabbalists the over-
whelming goal of the religious life, and virtually all of the command-
ments were viewed as part of this effort.
This understanding of the commandments, referred to as theurgy in
the scholarly literature on Kabbalah, in fact veers much closer to magic
than do other interpretations of Judaism. The belief that human actions
can have a direct impact on God, and the sense that God 1n some way
requires or depends on those actions, would have been anathema to
the philosophers, and for good reason. It was Nahmnanides, the great
antiphilosophic voice among the early Kabbalists, who claimed (based
on certain strands of old rabbinic tradition) that the commandments
fulfilled a “divine need.” By implication, such a view posits an imper-
fect Deity and gives real power to humans. What is to prevent humans
from misusing the power to fulfill or deny God’s “needs” in order to
bend the divine will to their own ends? The Zohar is indeed aware of
this problem, and is quite careful to distinguish its own theurgic prac-
tices from the deeds of magicians, whom it roundly condemns. The
Kabbalist is to act only for the sake of the divine unity. He is a faithful
devotee of the Shekhinah, a knight in Her service. The powerful weap-
ons She has given him are just an extension of the ancient belief that
“Israel adds power and strength above.” Yes, it is true that the blessings
of divine unity will also flow down into this world, even bringing re-
ward to the Kabbalist who has helped to effect that unity. But that is
not the intent of the spiritual knight, who knows well “not to be like
a servant who ministers to the master for the sake of reward.”
There is a list of mitsvot in the Zohar, referred to as Pigqudin, that be-
gins a detailed accounting of each of the commandments and its se-
firotic setting. Unfortunately only a small part of the list exists, and it is
u,
ty
, 1%
The Commandments 131
not known whether the rest was ever written. Rabbi Moses de Leon
wrote a Hebrew work entitled Sefer ha-Rimmon, which offers a fuller
list of ta’amey ha-mitsvot, very much in the spirit of the Zohar. Various
individual commandments are interpreted in his other works as well,
as in the writings of several contemporaries. The Ra ‘aya Meheimna,
printed within the Zohar, also offers a fuller list of the commandments
and their kabbalistic meaning, although one supplied by a slightly later
author writing in the Zoharic tradition.
Throughout the pages of the Zohar, however, there is frequent dis-
cussion of the mitsvot. The Zohar is especially partial to certain seem-
ingly mysterious practices such as tefillin (phylacteries), tsitsit (fringes
on the four-cornered garment), shofar (blowing of the ram’s horn) and
arba’ah minim (the “four species” of the Sukkot ritual). The multiple
aspect of each of these practices refers to various sefirot, especially the
fourtold groupings of Tif’eret and Malkhut, with one or another pair-
ing from the right and left sides of the sefirotic chart (Hokhmah/Binah,
Hesed/Gevurah, or Netsah/Hod, depending on the mitsvah and the par-
ticular passage). These secrets are described in elaborate detail and
must be seen as contemplative exercises that were meant to accom-
pany and enhance the actual performance of the rites involved. There
is a very strong sense of sacramental piety about the Zohar, with the
commandments leading their doer into a realm of infinite and myste-
rious inner sanctity.
In this context, the sacred calendar of Israel takes on special impor-
tance, and both Sabbath and festivals are given great significance. Some
of the most beautifully lyrical passages in the Zohar describe the Sab-
bath, the time of hieros gamos, or the sacred marriage between Shekhi-
nah and Her Spouse. These writings inspired later Kabbalists to create
a special ritual for the greeting of the Sabbath Bride, probably the best-
known and most widely accepted kabbalistic innovation to Jewish
practice. The ritual of the Day of Atonement is also described at length
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 132
in the Zohar as a time when Hesed triumphs in expiation of Israel’s
sins, defeating the power of Din or judgment and uplifting the Shekhi-
nah. Passover celebrates the redemption from Egypt that 1s the appear-
ance of Binah, the undiminished redeeming presence that rescues both
Israel and Shekhinah from the House of Bondage. The presence of Bi-
nah also leads to the counting of fifty days until Shavu’ot, a holiday of
both Binah (jubilee, the fiftieth day) and Tif’eret (the written Torah).
The Zohar also acclaims a supposedly ancient practice, mentioned for
the first time in its pages, of staying awake through Shavu’ot night to
study Torah and await the renewal of revelation at dawn. This practice
too, although possibly an adaptation of Easter and Pentacost vigils that
were well known in the medieval church, came to be widely observed
by later generations.
The sacramental character of the Zohar’s understanding of the com-
mandments naturally leads it to have a greater interest in the “between
man and God” realm than in the ethical-moral category of mitsvot. But
this is not entirely the case. The Zohar is quite concerned with charity
and proper treatment of the poor. The giving of alms is interpreted in
precisely the same sort of sacramental way as are “ritual” command-
ments, as an extending of the hand to the ever-needy and “poor”
Shekhinah. Such ritualized readings are found with regard to other
seemingly “rational” commandments as well, bearing witness to an at-
tempt by the Kabbalists to undermine the philosophers’ distinction and
view all of the commandments as belonging to a single sacral realm.
Such a unitive view is important to the Zohar because it sees the
mitsvot as “limbs of the King,” or aspects of a single sacred structure.
While the tenfold grid of sefirotic symbols is always central to its
imagination, the notion of 613 commandments, divided into 248 in-
junctions and 365 prohibitions (supposedly parallel to 248 “limbs” and
365 “sinews”’ of the human body), is also the object of a good deal of
speculation, including numerological associations, in the Zohar and
me,
The Commandments — 133
throughout Kabbalah. The commandments are an organic whole. To
observe them is to build up the “form of the Shekhinah” and at the
same time to acquire for one’s own soul a proper “garment” that will
be required for passage into the world to come.
Because the Zohar 1s such a vast compendium of Jewish lore, it also
reflects in significant ways on actual details of Jewish practice as carried
out by the circle of Kabbalists who created it. While these Jews were
clearly native to Castile and therefore followers of the Sephardic litur-
gical rite, it 1s interesting to note that there is a good deal of Franco-
German influence on certain practices within the Zohar. The esoteric
secrets that were imported to Spain from Provencal circles, themselves
linked to groups further north, seem to have brought with them some
typically Ashkenazic practices and attitudes as well. While these are wit-
nessed in certain fine details of halakhic praxis, they may also be pres-
ent in the Zohar’ attitude toward the commandments as a whole. The
strong emphasis on theurgy, as well as an openness to the real efficacy
of magic (even while opposing its use), is more reflective of the Ashke-
nazic setting than of Spain, where rationalistic influence, left over from
centuries of Islamic domination, was somewhat stronger. It could be
said that the mystical-pietistic circles out of which the Zohar emerged
represented a new amalgamation of some of the strongest elements in
the Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.
aaatamnaal
Cad
Avodah:
The Life of Worship
Among the commandments of the Torah, the Zohar pays special atten-
tion to Judaism’s key acts of worship, the sacrificial rites of the ancient
Temple, and prayer, the “service of the heart,” which replaced sacrifice
after the Temple’s destruction, more than a millennium before the Zo-
har was written. As a work focused on the devotional life, the Zohar,
it may be said, views all the commandments as forms of avodah, or wor-
ship. Nevertheless, the frequent and often lengthy treatments given to
the services of both Temple and synagogue require discussion in their
own right.
The aggadic tradition in fact contains two views of the relationship be-
tween liturgical prayer and sacrifice. One view indeed claims that the
fixed prayers of the synagogue came about in lieu of the sacrifices. In
particular, the required daily morning and afternoon amidah prayers re-
placed the regular communal offerings (tamid) of dawn and dusk each
day. The other view claims, on the basis of a reading of various biblical
verses, that prayer itself is ancient, each of the three daily services hav-
yy
134
The Lite of Worship 135
ing been initiated by one of the patriarchs,. While the former view is
much closer to historical accuracy (though not completely, since pro-
torabbinic prayer already existed in late Second Temple times), the lat-
ter makes a metahistoric claim, seeing it as unthinkable that there could
be any sort of Judaism without regularly defined forms of prayer. The
very sacrifice offered by Abraham, that of his son Isaac on Mount Mo-
riah, site of the future Temple, is here preceded by Abraham’s morning
prayer, offered on the dawn when he set forth on that fateful journey.
The demand for human sacrifice is forever negated by this story; ani-
mal slaughter takes its place. But fixed prayer, says this aggadah, remains
an unbroken tradition since Abraham.
Rabbinic Judaism, created largely in response to the catastrophe of
Jerusalem's destruction, preserved a great loyalty to the memory of
Temple, priest, and sacrificial altar. In contrast to Christianity, it did not
accept that the Temple worship had been set aside by a new dispensa-
tion of divine grace. The razing of the Temple was the deed of the
wicked Romans, and the rabbis would continue to wrestle with its
theological meaning for centuries to come. Meanwhile, the Mishnah
codified the laws of sacrifice and ritual purity as though the Temple
were still standing, indicating an early hope that it would be rebuilt, just
as the Second Temple had replaced that destroyed by the Babylonians
some six centuries earlier. The midrashic glorification of both Moses’
Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple (especially at the moments of their
dedication) also points in this direction.
For the present, however, the Temple cult, or avodah, had been sus-
pended and replaced by prayer, avodah sheba-lev (“the service in the
heart”), and this was by no means to be taken lightly. The daily amidot
(two required plus one voluntary) and recitations of the shema (“Hear
O Israel” —Deuteronomy 6:4 and so on—twice each day) were cod-
ified and discussed extensively by the early sages. Prayer was under-
stood to have great power both in the life of the individual and in the
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 136
collective life of Israel. According to a well-known aggadic motif, the
daily prayers of Israel were collected by angelic emissaries and placed
as a crown upon God’s head, much as the rings of smoke rising from
the altar had once reached heaven, offering an aroma that aroused di-
vine pleasure and bringing blessing to the world. This mythical assim-
ilation of liturgical prayer into the role and powers of Temple sacrifice
took place in the generations immediately following the great de-
struction. It was centered around the ritual proclamation of the two
key phrases of prophetic vision: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts;
the whole earth is filled with His glory” (Is. 6:3) and “Blessed be the
glory of God from His place” (Ez.3:12). These are both called out at
once by God’s angelic and human hosts in the very moment that the
prayers arise and are received in heaven. The fact that the ritual proc-
lamation of these words exists in Christianity as well as in Judaism
stands as testimony to the first-century origins and mystical setting of
this gedushah rite.
Certain mixed feelings, however, regarding the sacrificial cult were
contained within the vast and often complex rabbinic corpus. While
everyone joined in mourning and bewailing the destruction, some re-
membered as well how corrupt the Jerusalem Temple had been in its
later years, from the Pharisaic or protorabbinic viewpoint. Perhaps it
was these memories that led some midrashic voices to depict the build-
ing of Moses’ Tabernacle, following the incident of the Golden Calf, as
a response to the obviously idolatrous tendencies of the ancient Is-
raelites. When God sought to destroy His sinful people, Moses cried
out to God (as the Midrash has it)' that He was in fact responsible for
their sins: “The excess of gold and silver that You gave them (from the
plunder of the Egyptians) caused them to build the idol!” A parable de-
scribes Israel as the son of a rick man who is given a full purse by his
father, who then seats him at the entrance to a house of ill repute. Is the
I. Berakhot 32a. aN
The Life of Worship 137
poor lad to be blamed for the ensuing whoredom, or is it the father
who led him into temptation? It is hard to read this Midrash and not
think of the Greek idols that reputedly stood in the late Second Tem-
ple precincts, supported by a Hellenized priesthood seduced by rich
purses of gold and silver. It was the corrupting influence of wealth, so
the Midrash claims, that led those descendents of Aaron to accept idol-
atry in God’s house. Some among the rabbis went so far as to proclaim
that all the commandments regarding the Tabernacle and the sacrificial
system had come about only as a result of Israel’s attraction to idolatry.
By implication this would seem to mean that the revelation in its orig-
inal intent might have preferred another form of worship, perhaps that
of the heart rather than the sacrificial altar.
While such conclusions remain vague and implicit in the rabbinic
sources, their implications are spelled out quite clearly in the writings
of medieval thinkers. Rabbi Bahya Ibn Paquda (late eleventh century),
one of the great spiritualizers of Judaism in the Middle Ages, shows a
clear preference for the “Duties of the Heart” (the title of his work)
over those of the limbs, and clearly understands worship as belonging
in its essence to the former category. Maimonides follows him in pro-
claiming theTorah’s prescription of sacrificial worship as a compromise
with the weak nature of the Exodus generation, made up of slaves
whose ancestors had lived for generations in ancient Egypt, the very
heart of idolatry. While his code follows the Mishnah in including sac-
rificial laws and laws of Temple purity, Maimonides’ philosophic writ-
ing clearly expresses his preference for prayer over animal slaughter as
a way of coming into God's presence.
In contrast to these philosophical views, the Zohar devotes an ex-
traordinary amount of attention to the Temple cult, to the priesthood,
and to all aspects of the Torah that are associated with them. It is in the
course of these discussions, in fact, that the view of the command-
ments as “divine need” becomes most apparent. Here the Zohar builds
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 138
on aggadic traditions that came surprisingly close to understanding
sacrifice as a way of “feeding” or strengthening God. Throughout its
treatment of the Temple cult, the Zohar clearly identifies fully the two
types of worship, sacrifice and prayer, with one another. It 1s not un-
usual for both types to be discussed in a single passage in which the
Zohar leaps back and forth between the synagogue and Temple rites.
The Zohar makes powerful, even audacious, claims for the power of
kabbalistic prayer and devotion to unify the sefirot and bring about the
flow of divine blessing. It may be that its authors were aware of the
dangers of such claims—those of a theurgy that verges on magic. It
may also be that they were concerned with the reception these claims
might find among Spanish Jews still imbued with the spirit of philos-
ophy, who would have scoffed at the assertion of so much human
power in the act of prayer. It was thus “safer” to couch the most ex-
treme of kabbalistic claims for worship’s power in expressions of de-
votion to the ancient Temple cult, one that in any case had not been
practiced in a thousand years. The initiate reader would well under-
stand that “‘prayer was instituted parallel to the regular offerings,” and
thus all that was being said of the Temple altar’s powers was true of the
heart’s inner altar as well.
The Temple, along with all that took place within it, is viewed by the
Zohar as an object of contemplation and a paradigm of inner spiritual
experience. Its courtyards and chambers, culminating in the innermost
Holy of Holies, are parallel to both cosmic hierarchies and stages of hu-
man devotion. The Temple’s appurtenances, from the basin used for
priestly washing to the great Menorah itself, are all objects of symbolic
interpretation. In this the Zohar builds on the earlier Kabbalah and
stands parallel as well to the contemporary German Hasidic tradition,
both of which turned back to these classic forms, linking them fre-
quently to the experience of liturgical prayer. Similarly (as we shall see
in the next section), the Kabbalist or tzaddik stood in place of the priest,
“;
. Ce a
The Lite of Worship 139
and all the powers attributed to one referred by implication to the other
as well. But all this, spoken in the context of the ancient Temple, was
said in a way that would not offend, remaining semihidden from those
who did not know how to properly unpack the Zohar’s secrets.
Among the lengthiest sections in the Zohar are its homilies on the
latter portions of Exodus, where the construction of the Tabernacle is
set forth in great detail. The Tabernacle and all that it contained are of-
ten taken to represent the mysteries of Binal and Malkhut, which are
sometimes designated as ‘‘upper” and ‘“‘lower” Tabernacle or even as
“First” and “Second” Temple. The Tabernacle is described as a micro-
cosm both of the terrestrial world and of the worlds above. The Kab-
balist, serving as a priest at the inner altar, stands parallel to the angel
Michael, who is the high priest in the Temple of Malkhut, and even to
the blessed Holy One Himself, who serves that role in the highest Tem-
ple of Binah. These discussions are interwoven with the Zohar’s com-
mentary on the liturgy, reflecting the links between sacrificial and ver-
bal forms of devotional life. The section Terumah in particular contains
a large fragment of an ordered commentary on the synagogue service.
Despite the seeming “naturalness” of locating its treatment of sacra-
mental piety in those Torah passages that command and then describe
the erection of the wilderness Tabernacle, the Zohar in fact makes clear
its preference for the grand Temple of Solomon over the portable sanc-
tuary of Moses. While not disputing Moses’ status as the greatest of all
prophets, the Zohar’s authors see Solomon as the mystical hierophant
par excellence, the human being who attained the greatest success in
unifying the sefirot in a long-lasting way and thus bringing divine bless-
ing to flow through all the worlds. Solomon, it is important to remem-
ber, symbolically represents Yesod on the sefirotic chart. He or it is the
agent through which Malkhut is linked to the divine forces above.
The purpose of the sacrifices offered in both Tabernacle and Temple
was the bringing together of those cosmic forces. The Kabbalists repeat
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 140
tirelessly Sefer Bahir’s assertion that sacrifice is called qorban in Hebrew
(“offering,” related to Q-R-B, “to approach,” “to be near’’) because it
draws the inner divine forces near to one another. The various sacrifices
of the Torah’s priestly code fulfill different aspects of this unification: the
reconciliation of left and right (usually including the subjegation of left
to the greater power of the right side’s love), the linking of Binah with
the sefirot below her, or the ever-dominant union of male and female,
the center of contemplative unification for the Zohar. Crucial to the
fulfillment of the Temple cult’s true purpose was the priest's awareness
of the kabbalistic intentions of his deeds. As one reads the Zoharic de-
scriptions of the priest, either when he turns toward God to offer expi-
ation of Israel’s sins or when he blesses the people with shining face, it
becomes clear that he is the prototype of the Kabbalist himself, one
whose knowledge of worship’s secrets gives infinite power and mean-
ing to his own acts of devotion, now in the forms of liturgical prayers.
But there may as well be another reason for the. Zohar’s fascination
with the Temple rites and the close linkage of sacrifice and prayer. The
elaborate descriptions of the Temple service and the attribution of great
mystery to them offer the reader a Jewish alternative, albeit a fantastic
one, to the pomp and ceremony of the medieval Catholic Church. The
decades after the Reconquista, as we have noted, were marked by the
erection of great cathedrals in Castile, as throughout the Iberian penin-
sula. These were vast structures within which, especially as they were
filled with solemn music and the aroma of incense, the worshiper was
to feel a palpable sense of sacred presence. Partly because of legal re-
strictions, but also because of differences in tradition, we have no evi-
dence that Castilian synagogues in any way rivaled these structures. In
Christianity, unlike in Judaism, the cathedral had fully replaced the an-
cient Temple as a locus of sacred space. The synagogue, even formally
designated as migdash me’at (“a lesser sanctuary”), was seen as 2 mere
temporary stand-in for the one Temple, hopefully soon to be rebuilt.
“%
ran
The Life of Worship 141
The Zohar, anxious to counter whatever attraction Jews might have to
the beauty and mystery of those great churches, takes pains to ascribe
endless glory to God's single true dwelling upon earth, the Temple of
the great King Solomon. This Temple was a this-worldly house of God,
parallel to God's true “House,” the Shekhinah. She is the heavenly Jeru-
salem, the holy Tabernacle, House, Palace, the place the great King en-
ters and makes His home. Moses’ entry into the earthly Tabernacle and
Solomon’s moment of dedicting the Temple were earthly imitations of
God's entry into Shekhinah (or the union of Tif’eret and Malkhut), the
sacred marriage that stands at the center of the Zohar’s spiritual life.
This 1s raza de-razin, the secret secretorum that surpasses all others, calling
forth the loyalty of Jews to a mysterium greater than that offered on the
altar of any church.
This reason for paying such great attention to the Temple cult ap-
plies especially to the priesthood and to the power of blessing that lay
in the hands of Aaron and his descendents. Unlike their brethren who
lived in Islamic societes, Castilian Jews dwelled in the shadow of a
powerful and active priesthood, one that made full use of the quasi-
magical powers of priestly blessing. The Christian priest’s hands and
mouth, which conveyed the sacraments and spoke the words of trans-
formation that made them real, also had the power to heal the sick, to
fructify the fields, and to protect one from enemies. While Catholic
theology understood that these were the blessings of God, conferred
through the priest as His humble agent, in the eyes of the people the
priest clearly had a part in these powers and was feared and respected
accordingly. The medieval rabbinate by tradition bore almost nothing
of this mysterium. The Zohar’s authors, perceiving its attractiveness and
importance, commented frequently and powerfully on the priestly
blessing, on the divine presence of the sefirot that enters the priests’
hands, and on the power of such blessing both to affect the upper
unity and to bring forth the flow of divine bounty. Once more the
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 142
message was that the Israelites had the real cult, priesthood, and con-
nection to the Holy. Even if historical circumstance had brought Israel
low and seemed to show favor to the religion of its foes, Jews were to
remain true to the.now partially revealed secret faith of Aaron and his
sons, and to receive blessing from their descendents, who still bore the
ancient right to bless Israel in the name of God, to “place My name
upon them, that I bless them” (Num. 6:27).
As a work reflecting on and seeking to defend traditional forms of
Jewish practice, the Zohar does not limit its discussions of prayer to the
sort of rarified calls for inwardness and concentration that character-
ized such treatises as Bahya’s Duties of the Heart. The Zohar is interested
in the forms of Jewish prayer practiced in its day. It speaks avidly in fa-
vor of communal worship and advocates great respect for the syna-
gogue and the public prayers recited within it. Reflections abound on
the structure of the service, especially on the shema, the amidah, and the
supplications (tahanun) that follow it in the weekday service. The pub-
lic reading of the Torah is treated as a grand event, one reverberating
with echoes of Israel’s standing before Sinai when the Torah was first
given. The special prayers of the Sabbath liturgy are also seen by the
Zohar as grand testimony to that day’s holy status as parallel to Malkhut
(the seventh of the lower sefirot) in the realm of time.
In order to demonstrate the complex and multileveled treatment of
both commandment and liturgy in the Zohar, we might do well to re-
view its discussion of a single mitsvah, that of reciting the shema. This
twice-daily obligation, implied already by the biblical text (Deut. 6:7),
is fully codified in the Mishnah and is universally accepted as a corner-
stone of Jewish religious practice. The power of the shema’s opening
line (“Hear O Israel, YHVH our God, YHVH is One”) as a declara-
tion of Judaism’s monotheistic faith and the association of the shema
with Jewry’s history of martyrdom both lent even greater drama and
importance to the fulfillment of this commandment. The Zohar dis-
iy
The Lite of Worship 143
cusses the shema in several key passages,” each emphasizing one or more
aspects of this practice's secret meaning. The 248 words that constitute
the full text of the shema represent the 248 limbs of the human body;
by reciting these holy words one brings holiness to each of one’s limbs
and causes divine energy to flow into it. The twenty-five letters of the
opening line and the 24 in the doxology that follows it (“Blessed be
the name of His glorious kingdom forever!) together represent the
forty-nine gates of Binah, or the seven lower sefirot, each containing all
the others, in the fullness of their source. The six words of the shema’s
opening proclamation stand for the six lower sefirot, constituting an
“upper unity” parallel to Malkhut, the “lower unity” represented by the
doxology. The recitation of the shema is the joining of these two levels
of inner divine oneness. The fact that two letters of the shema, the ayin
(the letter ayin also represents the number seventy) of shema and the
dalet of ehad, are written in large script in the Torah scroll indicates that
all seventy names of God, themselves an expansion of the seven lower
sefirot, are conjoined in Malkhut, represented by the dalet.
Among the many kavvanot of the shema, however, the Zohar is most
interested in the sequence of three divine names (YHVH Elohenu
YHVH) that occurs in the opening verse. Some Zohar passages inter-
pret these names as referring to Hesed, Gevurah, and Tif’eret, the central
triad of the divine persona. Elsewhere the three names are seen as ex-
tending across the entire sefirotic world, representing Hokhmah, Tif’eret,
and Malkhut. The domininant tradition, however, is that the three stand
for Hokhmah, Binah, and Tif’eret, the two hidden sources (or “parents ’)
of the personified Deity and the divine figure itself. The six words of
the shema then extend Tif’eret in all directions, encompassing the entire
divine realm. Malkhut is represented by the concluding dalet of the word
chad, traditionally elongated in performance. Malkhut is both here and
elsewhere associated with the letter dalet because dal means “‘poor,’ and
2. 1:12a; 2:133b—134b, 160b, 216b; 3:236b, 258a, 263a.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR 144
Malkhut, as the receptive principle, seemingly has no blessing of her own
until she receives that which is poured into her from beyond.
These three names of God are also those that are traditionally used
on the outside of the mezuzah scroll affixed to the doorposts of Jew-
ish homes. There the three names are written in hidden fashion, each
letter replaced by the one following it in the alphabet (rendering
YHVH Elohenu YHVH as Kuzu Bmukhsz Kuzu). The sequence is sup-
posed to possess a mysterious apotropaic, or protective, strength as a
writing out of God’s “full” name in all its awesome power. This cus-
tom, mentioned in the early fourteenth century Arba’ah Turim of Ja-
cob ben Asher, may have originated among the Rhineland Hasidim. It
is likely that the Zohar, influenced by sumilar traditions, views the pro-
nunciation of these three names in the shema as an especially forceful
invocation of divine presence and power.
The tripartite character of this most essential Jewish calling upon
God’s name did not go unnoticed by later Christian students of Kab-
balah, who hoped to see in it a secret reference to their own Trinitar-
ian views. While there is of course no basis for such a reading of the
Zohar, it is possible that here too the Kabbalists were responding to a
well-known structure of the dominant religious tradition. In that case
we would understand the Zoharic authors as seeking to point to the
“true” trinity, a series of three levels within the sefirotic realm. These
would probably be the most hidden (the first triad of sefirot), the divine
Person (centered around Tif’eret), and the immanent divine Presence
(Shekhinah or Malkhut). Elsewhere the Zohar refers to these three lev-
els of divinity by use of the three pronouns He, Thou, and I.° Thus the
recitation of the shema is seen as truly encompassing yihud ha-shem, the
proclamation of God’s oneness across all dimensions of existence.
3. 1:65b, 204a—b; 2:90a; 3:2g0a. The hidden Godhead is “He” because the Hebrew
grammatical term for the “third person” is nistar, literally, “the hidden one.” This
aspect of the Deity can be spoken of, but not addressed.
The Tsaddig
and the Life of Piety
The human ideal of classic Jewish piety is described in the old rab-
binic sources by several terms. He (the ideal is always male) is a talmid
hakham, a “‘disciple of the wise”; a hasid, or pious lover of God; and a
tsaddig, or righteous one. The precise meaning of these terms and the
interplay between them has been discussed considerably both within
the sources and by scholars attempting to understand and categorize
the value structure of rabbinic Judaism, so lacking in systematic pres-
entation of its basic assumptions. Talmid hakham refers primarily to the
world of Talmudic learning and is the designation by which the rab-
bis most commonly described themselves. Hasid generally bespeaks an
extreme pietistic ideal, referring to one who goes beyond the letter of
the Law in a display of selfless devotion. Some texts show an edge of
tension between the talmid hakham and the hasid. The ideal of the for-
mer incorporates a degree of sobriety and communal responsibility,
while the latter seeks to cast all reservation to the wind in offering his
soul in each moment on the altar of devotion to God.
The third term, tsaddiq, presents a somewhat more complicated pic-
Py rs ° ° ° 99
ture. It is used in the forensic sense to refer to one who is “innocent,
145
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 146
or righteous as opposed to sinful. At times this seems to include all
those whose merits outweigh their faults on the scales of divine jus-
tice—hopefully, a healthy percentage of the population. Some texts
further distinguish: between the complete tsaddig, one who has routed
the evil urge altogether, and the incomplete tsaddig, one who still
struggles, even if successfully, with the temptations of the flesh. But the
word tsaddig is also used in a more limited sense to refer to a special
class of spiritual supermen, those who sustain the world by their merit.
“Tsaddig is the foundation of the world,” says Scripture (Prov. 10:25),'
and the rabbis add, perhaps borrowing from the Hellenistic picture of
Atlas, “The world stands upon a single pillar. Who is that? The tsad-
dig’? Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai referred to himself, according to a
well-known aggadah,° as the single righteous one of his generation,
perhaps giving birth to the coinage tsaddig ha-dor, “the righteous one
of the generation.”
As distinct genres of moralistic and mystical literature began to de-
velop in eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, the terms hasid and
tsaddiqg took on new importance. Hakham or talmid hakham was gener-
ally left alone as the designation of scholars in the ongoing field of
Talmudic-halakhic learning. But in such diverse circles as those repre-
sented by Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart (written in eleventh-
century Muslim Spain, showing considerable Sufi influence) and Judah
he-Hasid’s Book of the Pious (written in twelfth-century Rhineland),
hasid was used to characterize the ideal pious type. This was also true
in the earliest circle of Kabbalists, where Rabbi Isaac the Blind was
generally referred to simply as “the hasid,” following traditions borne
by his distinguished Provencal family.
The Zohar, however, overwhelmingly prefers tsaddig to hasid in rep-
1. The literal meaning is probably “The righteous one stands firm forever.”
2. Hagigah 12b.
3. Bereshit Rabbah 35:2.
The Life of Piety 147
resenting its ideal. Hasid is philologically related to Hesed and is thence
assocated with Abraham, who did all for the love of God. This figure
does appear occasionally in the Zohar’s pages. But the mythmaking
imagination is much more interested in the tsaddiq, the earthly incar-
nation of the ninth sefirah, Yesed or ‘foundation,’ whose very name de-
rives from this association with the tsaddig, based on the verse from
Proverbs cited above. The “pillar” on which the world stands represents
the phallic form we discussed earlier in connection with the ninth sefi-
rah. This linkage is underscored by the fact that in the Zohar’s Aramaic
the word geyama means both “pillar” and “covenant,” referring to the
covenant of circumcision or the circumcised phallus itself. But the
same pillar also functions as what scholars of religion call the axis mundi,
a central pole of existence that links upper and lower worlds. Tsaddiq,
both divine and human, is the personification of this geyama, joining
together heaven and earth in a union that can be understood in both
mythic-cosmological and moral-covenantal terms.
As pilar or channel linking the upper and lower worlds, the tsaddiq
is a great source of blessing. Rabbi Shim’on and other figures in the
Zohar often take on that priestly role, conveying the light of God's
presence to the company around them. The common designation of
Rabbi Shim’on as botsina gaddisha, “the holy lamp,’ is a reflection of
this function. While the tsaddigim are very much elite figures, there 1s
also a tendency within the Zohar for them to share the qualities of
tsaddiq as broadly as possible, bringing all of Israel into their fold.
Among the biblical verses most frequently quoted by the Zohar is
“Your people are all righteous (tsaddigim); they will forever inherit the
land . . .” (Is. 60:21). This verse is used in defense of Israel, which is
very much a part of the Zohar’s agenda. (The “land” here is taken to
refer to Shekhinah, ever in Israel’s midst.) Its authors saw themselves as
leaders of the beleagured people, standing in the tradition of the
prophets and the early rabbis. This role of leadership included reproof
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 148
of Israel for their sins, sometimes in the strongest terms. But it also in-
cluded defending them before the punishing arm of heaven, trying to
protect them from excesses of divine wrath. The righteous stand
poised between heaven and earth, seeking to defend their people both
from the wiles of sitra ahara, ever seeking to lead them astray, and from
the destruction that will be the result of their sins. The tsaddiq as
prophet-leader also comes to console Israel, the same people he has so
harshly reproved, assuring them that God will never wholly depart
from them.
In designating its heroes with the mantle of tsaddiq, the Zoharic au-
thors were by no means abandoning the ideal of Torah study as their
central religious preoccupation. Although in its Talmudic designation
tsaddiq seems quite separate from the ideal of learning, the Zohar sees
the “righteous” and “those who occupy themselves with Torah” as one
and the same. Of course for the Zohar this refers to kabbalistic study
and interpretation of the Torah in terms of the sefirot. The righteous
are those who engage in such study, by which they partake of the di-
vine tsaddigq’s task of upholding the universe. The world exists “for the
sake of Torah” and “for the sake of the righteous.’ In the consciousness
of the Zohar, these are one and the same. Thus the “companions” or
disciples of Rabbi Shim’on, the ideal type of tsaddig in the Zohar, are
seen primarily in the role of loving students and interpreters of Torah.
We have mentioned previously the combination of sexual energy
and commitment to chastity that constitutes the symbol cluster of
Yesod. The same is true of the earthly tsaddiq, as personified both by
Rabbi Shim’on and by tales of other righteous figures scattered
throughout the Zohar. The tsaddiq is the potent bearer of righteous
souls into this world, and his life is fulfilled only by marriage and fa-
therhood. He is potent also with regard to the worlds above; the en-
ergy of his love-driven prayers arouse the Shekhinah and thence course
through the sefirotic realm. But he achieves this power only by going
1,
The Life of Piety 149
in the way of Joseph the Righteous, conquering temptation and liv-
ing in accord with the strictest interpretation of Judaism’s sexual ta-
boos. The Zohar is fiercely concerned with the sins of onanism, phys-
ical contact with one’s wife before her postmenstrual ablution, and
sexual relations with non-Jewish women. The vain spilling of seed, so
laden with symbolic meaning in the kabbalistic imagination, is con-
demned as being a sin worse than murder. Such seed is gathered up by
Lilith or Na‘amah and used to give birth to demons. Onanism is even
designated by the Zohar as the one sin for which there is no atone-
ment through the power of repentance.
The sin of sexual relations between men receives little mention in
the Zohar and does not seem to have been a special concern. Yet it is
fair to say that a strong current of homoerotic energy is found within
its pages. The open displays of affection between master and disciples,
including kisses on the lips, the exclamations of love and devotion to
one another, and the intense portrayals of male bonding and compan-
ionship that abound in the text all point in this direction. It was per-
haps partly for this reason that the Zohar needed to insist on marriage
and procreation as essential to the life of the companions. But we are
left with a somewhat unsettling picture of a group of men sharing an
intensely erotic (and apparently heterosexual) life of sacred fantasy
while declaring their passionate affection for one another, sometimes
expressed in the language of the Song of Songs. Recent scholarship,
particularly the work of Elliot Wolfson, has begun to question the bal-
ance between heteroerotic and homoerotic elements in the Zohar’s
worldview, especially around the relationship between Yesod and Mal-
khut. While Malkhut as Shekhinah is bride and female partner of Yesod,
she is also described as atarah. Atarah means “crown,” but the term is
also used to describe the corona of the circumcised phallus. If the re-
lationship of the final two sefirot is partly that of phallus and corona,
we have a picture of purely self-oriented male sexual fantasy, hidden
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ I50
behind the brightly described pictures of male-female union. Here the
female could be seen more as to be incorporated within the male than
as truly encountered as other. This tendency within Zohar scholarship,
obviously influenced by trends within contemporary feminist thought,
remains somewhat controversial.
The strong sexual component in Zoharic symbolism surely had
much to do with the work’s powerful impact and long-lasting hold on
the Jewish religious imagination. This is especially true regarding the re-
pressive or ascetic elements within the Zohar. The kabbalistic ethos that
developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represents the
most extreme position ever articulated within Judaism on the dangers,
both to soul and cosmos, of even the faintest degree of sexual pollution.
The various works known as Tiqqunei Teshuvah, or Orders of Penitence,
prescribe extraordinary regimens of fasting and self-punishment even
for thoughts of sin or involuntary emissions of semen. The Zohar was
used to create an atmosphere that was alive with fear of contact with
menstrual blood or with women who were not properly purified. This
attitude was extended, both within the Zohar’s pages and in the society
later created in its wake, to an actual fear of women as sorceresses and as
bearers of demonic energy. This negative view of women remains a
leitmotif that exists side by side with the lavish and affectionate por-
trayals of Shekhinah as the bride arrayed among her maidens, their light
and beauty extending throughout the worlds.
LS
The Jewish People,
Exile, and Messiah
The Zohar is not only a book of Jewish teachings and Jewish symbols,
a commentary on the Torah. It is also a book of the Jewish people.
The shared historical situation of Jewry, contained primarily within
the drama of ancient glory, destruction, exile, and dream of restora-
tion, is very much that of the Zohar as well. In adapting itself to the
midrashic form, the Zohar returns to themes that had already rever-
berated through Jewish preaching for nearly a thousand years.
One of these themes is the mourning for Jerusalem's destruction and
the loss of the Temple cult. The destruction of the Temple is vividly felt
in the Zohar, where so much loving attention is lavished on biblical
verses dealing with sacrifices, incense offerings, and other aspects of the
ancient shrine. In choosing to deliver its message through the mouths
of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai and his disciples, who lived less than a
century after the great destruction, the Zohar opted for a vision of Ju-
daism in which the memory and pain of that trauma were fresh and
undiminished. It succeeds in conveying the immediate sense of loss, and
with it capturing, to a remarkable degree, how alive that feeling still was
even a millennium later. This is true especially of the poignant little
1§1
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR 152
treatise called Zohar to Lamentations,' contained within Zohar Hadash,
but also in the many references to the theme of destruction and its lam-
entation throughout the work.
The exile of Israel sets a tone that is felt throughout the Zohar. It
serves as a dark and tragic counterpoint to the lush colors of eros de-
scribed earlier. Master and disciples represent homeless Israel, encoun-
tering wise teachers and mysterious holy men in the course of what
seem to be endless and aimless wanderings. Their exile parallels that of
Israel, as we have indicated. But Israel’s own exile is itself a replication
of the universal predicament, since all humans share in the exile from
Eden resulting from Adam’s sin. All souls (there is some confusion as
to whether they are “the souls of Israel” or of all humanity) were there
in Adam, as they will be present in the Messiah. The Zohar bears a
strong sense that humankind, and the universe with it, exists in a fallen
state. Shekhinah, long said by the rabbis to participate in the exile and
tribulations of Israel, is portrayed in the Zohar as victim of Adam’s sin
and of all of human transgression that comes in its wake. The longing
for redemption that so much pervades the classical Jewish imagination
is transformed in the Zohar, where it is depicted as the longing of
God and cosmos alongside that of the suffering people. All of them
long to be redeemed.
Given that strong sense of history, one might expect that the Zohar
would be a highly messianic work, filled with the sense of impending
redemption. That indeed is the character of certain works of Kabbalah,
including some contemporaneous with the Zohar, and many that have
come in its wake. The fact is, however, that messianism plays a relatively
minor role in the main body of the Zohar. The Kabbalists who fill its
pages have learned to invoke the presence of God within the life of Ju-
1. Available in an English translation by Seth Brody in Rabbi Ezra ben Solomon of
Gerona, Commentary on the Song of Songs and Other Kabbalistic Commentaries (Kalama-
zoo: Western Michigan University, 1999).
fe
,&
The Jewish People, Exile, and Messiah — 153
daism, enriching both prayer and commandments, as we have seen, by
use of their powertul symbolic language. The kavvanah, or mystical in-
tention, of the Kabbalist does affect the upper universe, bringing the se-
firot into harmony with one another. But it seems to do so only in a
temporary way. The torces of evil are great, and this world has a natu-
ral predisposition to fall under their spell.
The Zohar seems to accept this reality and its heroes do not openly
rebel against it. Human efforts toward the restoration of the Shekhinah
operate within the framework of certain rhythms, both historical and
liturgical. The regularity of ritual patterns, especially those of Sabbath
and weekday, is well known. But even the “historical” fluctuations of
Shekhinah’'s tate seem to be reframed into what is primarily a liturgical
mode, through the cycle of weekly Torah readings and their homilet-
ical exposition. Thus the exegesis of such potentionally redemption-
inspiring events as the erection of the Tabernacle or the sending of
spies into the Land of Israel come to stand, as they do in classical
Midrash, as part of the well-known annual cycle and do not inspire
calls for messianic activism that would break out of that cycle.
Like all general characterizations of the Zohar, this one too should
not be taken as absolute. There are some apocalyptic passages within
the text, including even hints at dates of the Messiah’s arrival. But
these are to be expected in a work of thirteenth-century Jewish
preaching, part of the discourse of the age. Our remarks concern the
overall tone of the Zohar and are not to be taken as a full accounting
of all that is to be found within its pages. The Zohar is indeed con-
cerned with the work of restoration and the Kabbalist is to engage in
it constantly. But little hope is held out that this will bring about the
end of history or the full redemption that remains the ultimate dream,
for the Zohar as for every Jew in its era.
This situation changes dramatically when we turn away from the
main Zohar narrative and focus on the two special sections known as
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR 154
the Greater and Lesser Assembly, Idra Rabba and Idra Zuta (or Idrot).’
Here both the literary style and the symbolic content are quite differ-
ent from the rest of the Zohar. These are passages that culminate in
high drama: the Idra Rabba tells of the ecstatic deaths of three of the
disciples and the Idra Zuta reaches a climax of emotion with Rabbi
Shim’on’s passing and the devastation that the surviving disciples feel in
a world bereft of him. The Idra Zuta seems to have been composed as a
dramatic conclusion to the Zohar. It is clear that in the Idrot the Zo-
har’s central hero has made a transition from the archetype of tsaddiq to
something very like a messianic or protomessianic figure.
As the ultimate revelation in the lifetime of Rabbi Shim’on, the Idrot
purport to offer a higher or deeper truth than that found elsewhere in
the Zohar. This truth may correspond to the “soul of soul” level of in-
terpreting the Torah, one that the Zohar has told us will be revealed
only in messianic times. Now that veil is pulled aside, as it were, and the
Zohar lets the reader in on this most profound level of discourse. The
teachings revealed here supposedly come directly from Keter, the high-
est and most purely compassionate rung within the sefirotic world.
The new Kabbalah of the Idrot constitutes the most radically anthro-
pomorphic section of the Zohar. The by-now conventional symbolic
language of the ten sefirot is set aside in favor of a new five-part config-
uration of the Godhead. These five figures are designated as partsufim,
or “countenances,’ meaning that each is a face of God and a way God
looks at the world. In the place of Keter, the mysterious source of the se-
firot, is the face of God as a loving elder. Sometimes this countence is
called Attiga Qadisha,“ the “Ancient Holy One,” based on the depiction
in Daniel 7 of God as atiq yomin, “the Ancient of Days.” Elsewhere it is
refered to as Arikh Anpin, the “long countenance,’ usually meaning the
long-suffering or patient countenance of God. The pure and totally
loving quality of this aspect of God is much emphasized, symbolized by
2. Idra Rabba is printed in Zohar 3:127b—145a; Idra Zuta in 3:287b—296b.
The Jewish People, Exile, and Messiah — 155
the white light that endlessly radiates from it. Next are the counte-
nances of Abba and Imma,‘ Father” and “Mother,” corresponding to
Hokhmah and Binah on the older chart, as could be predicted from sym-
bols already associated with them. The following six sefirot are re-
configured into a single entity known as Ze’ir Anpin, the “short coun-
tenance” or impatient face of God. This is a black-bearded, “younger”
sort of male deity, as distinct from the white-bearded elder. (These two
male divine figures are based on an ancient Midrash that distinguished
between God’s appearance to Israel as an “elder” at Sinai and as a
“youth” at the splitting of the sea.)? Malkhut, the tenth sefirah, is now the
fitth of the inner “faces” of God, here simply designated as Nuqva, “the
female.” She is the female counterpart and mate of Ze’ir Anpin.
This new language called for an intense focusing of the mystics’ en-
ergies on the inner restoration of divinity. The situation of Nuqva was
seen as especially precarious, and all energies had to be marshaled to-
ward the turning of Ze’ir’s attention to Her rescue. The rhythms of
shabbat and weekday are forgotten here; indeed little attention is given
to any of the conventional rubrics of prayer or worship through the
commandments. The Kabbalist is to focus rather on a somewhat bizarre
and highly anthropomorphic mental image of God's face, concentrat-
ing especially on the hairs of the divine beard. It is by means of pro-
longed and uninterrupted meditation on these figures that the cosmic
energies leading to redemption are to be aroused.
The symbolic language of the Idrot entered the “mainstream” of
kabbalistic discourse after its adoption by Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-
1572) in a new version of Kabbalah that attained great popularity be-
ginning in the late sixteenth century. There it was used in a highly mes-
sianic context, so much so that it has become difficult to distinguish
the Zohar’s original Idrot from their use in the Lurianic setting. But it
does seem fair to say that the turn of Kabbalah toward a new magni-
3. Mekhilta Shirta 4 (ed. Horovitz-Rabin), p. 129.
SELECTED THEMES WITHIN THE ZOHAR_ 156
fication of the messianic element, so characteristic of the sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century developments, began in the Idrot themselves.
Later Kabbalists, figures such as Rabbi Meir Ibn Gabbai and Rabbi
Moses Cordovero, both of the sixteenth century as well, focus much
more on the main body of the Zohar and remain at a relative distance
from any sort of messianic activism.
Part IV
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT
[0
Special Sections
of the Zohar
The main body of the Zohar constitutes about two thirds of the mate-
rial included in the three volumes that are published as Sefer ha- Zohar.
The Zohar literature, in the broader sense, encompasses these as well as
two other volumes, Tigguney Zohar and Zohar Hadash. Since it is gen-
erally accepted that Tigguney Zohar and the Ra’aya Meheimna (pub-
lished within Sefer ha-Zohar) are the work of a slightly later Kabbalist,
we shall omit these two from our discussion of the Zohar and its sec-
tions; indeed, as they have been omitted from the current translation.
In addition to the main part of the Zohar, which we have already
treated at length, there are a number of subcompositions of great im-
portance within the Zohar. Because detailed outlines of the sections
of the Zohar are readily available in the works of both Scholem and
Tishby,' only the most important sections are discussed here.
Midrash ha-Ne’elam, or the “hidden” Midrash, is a separate composi-
tion covering the earlier sections of Genesis (through the Abraham
narratives), the opening parashah of Exodus, and a few other small sec-
1. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, pp. 159-63; Isaiah Tishby,
Wisdom of the Zohar, v.1, pp. 1-7.
1$9
THE ZOHAR AS JEXT_ 160
tions of the Torah. There is also Midrash ha-Ne’elam material in the Zo-
har Hadash, including sections on Ruth and the Song of Songs. Like the
Zohar, the Midrash ha-Ne’elam consists of homilies on the Torah em-
bedded within a narrative framework. Here the range of heroes is
wider than in the main Zohar, including both earlier and later Talmu-
dic sages. There is no concentration on Rabbi Shim’on or any partic-
ular group of teachers, although some special interest can be detected
in Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and his first-century disciples. Unlike
the Zohar, the Midrash ha-Ne’elam was written largely in Hebrew, with
something less than half of it shifting toward Aramaic.
The content and approach of the Midrash ha-Ne’elam are quite dif-
ferent from the rest of the Zohar literature. Sefirotic symbolism, the
very basis of most Zoharic exegesis, is present only in partial form and
is not employed with nearly the same range or skill as elsewhere in the
Zohar. Instead, the Midrash ha-Ne’elam opts for more allegorical treat-
ments of biblical themes, an approach hardly found in other parts of
the Zohar.
Matnitin and Tosefta are brief nuggetlike passages scattered amid the
pages of the Zohar. Their teachings almost always concentrate on the
secrets of the sefirot, especially on the earliest stages of emanation. They
are written in an especially obscure and mysterious-sounding Aramaic
and are often difficult to understand.
Sitrei Torah, also scattered short passages throughout the Zohar, pos-
sibly reflects a transitionary document between Midrash ha-Ne’elam
and the main body of the text. These passages include both allegorical
treatments of the soul and discussion of the sefirot.
Sifra di- Tseni’uta is a single six-page treatise that constitutes the first
revelation of the doctrine to be developed more fully in the Idrot. It
takes the form of an anonymous commentary on the opening chapter
of Genesis. Here, as in the Matnitin, the language is especially sonorous,
impressive, and obscure.
Special Sections of the Zohar 161
Idra Rabbah and Idra Zuta have been discussed in the preceding
section.
Heikhalot are two portions of the Zohar that deal with the “palaces”
that lie below the sefirot in the Zohar’s cosmology. These sections con-
tain a good deal of the Zohar’s unique angelology, very influential for
later developments within Kabbalah. The second of these two passages
also includes a description of the “seven palaces of defilement,” de-
monic realms parallel to those of the sacred.
Special narrative-homilectical sections, essentially long digressions
within the main Zohar text, are Sava (“the elder’), Yanuqa (“the
child’), and Rav Metivta (“the academy master”). These are similar in
form and content to the main body of the Zohar, if somewhat more
elaborate in construction.
Zohar Hadash, (literally, the “new” Zohar) includes materials belong-
ing to both the main body of the Zohar and the Midrash ha-Ne’elam
that had been omitted from the original editions. This volume also
contains commentaries on three of the “Five Scrolls,” biblical books
read liturgically in the course of the sacred year (surprisingly there is no
Zohar to the Scroll of Esther, a text that is frequently treated elsewhere
in the extant Zohar’s pages), as well as additions to the Tigquney Zohar.
L7
The Question
of Authorship
The Zohar first appeared in Castile around the year 1290. Passages from
it are included in works by Castilian and Catalonian Kabbalists writing
at about that time. In some cases these are presented as quotations, at-
tributed to ““Yerushalmi” (usually referring to the Jerusalem Talmud, but
sometimes also to other works originating in the Holy Land), to Mid-
rash, particularly “the Midrash of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai’’; or to Zo-
har. Some scholars refer to it as an ancient work. In other cases, includ-
ing passages in the writings of well-known Castilian Kabbalist Moses de
Leon and Barcelona author Bahya ben Asher, pieces identical to sec-
tions of the Zohar are simply absorbed within other writings and pre-
sented as the authors’ own. By the second decade of the fourteenth
century, the Zohar was referred to (by the author of Tigqunei Zohar) as
a “prior” or completed document. Large portions of it were by then
available to such authors as David ben Judah he-Hasid, who paraphrased
and translated various sections, and Italian Kabbalist Menahem Reca-
nati, who quoted copiously from the Zohar in his own commentary on
the Torah.
The question of the Zohar’s origins has puzzled its readers ever
162
The Question of Authorship — 163
since that first appearance, and no simple and unequivocal statement as
to the question of its authorship can be made even in our own day.
There is no question that the work was composed in the decades im-
mediately preceding its appearance. It responds to literary works and
refers to historical events that place it in the years following 1270. The
1280's seem like the most likely decade for composition of the main
body of the Zohar, probably preceded by the Midrash ha-Ne’elam and
possibly certain other sections. Indeed it is quite possible that the Zo-
har was still an ongoing project when texts of it first appeared, and that
parts of it were being written even a decade later. Because the question
of the Zohar’s origins has been so hotly debated by readers and schol-
ars over the centuries, it is :mportant to offer a brief account here of
the history of this discussion.
Debate about the Zohar’s origins began in the decade of its first
appearance. Fragments of the Zohar were first distributed by Rabbi
Moses de Leon, who claimed that they were copied from an ancient
manuscript in his possession. This was a classic technique of pseudepig-
raphy, the attribution of esoteric teachings to the ancients, to give them
the respectability associated with hoary tradition. While some naive
souls seem to have believed quite literally in the antiquity of the text
and the existence of such a manuscript, others, including some of De
Leon’s fellow Kabbalists, joined in the pretense in order to heighten the
prestige of these teachings. While they may have known that De Leon
was the writer, and may even have participated in mystical conversa-
tions that were reflected in the emerging written text, they did believe
that the content of the Zohar’s teachings was indeed ancient and au-
thentic. They probably saw nothing wrong in the creation of a grand
literary fiction that provided for these ancient-yet-new teachings an el-
evated literary setting, one worthy of their profound truth. There were,
however, skeptics and opponents of the Zohar right from the begin-
ning, who depicted the whole enterprise as one of literary forgery.
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 164
Fascinating evidence of this early controversy is found in an ac-
count written by the Kabbalist Isaac of Acre, a wandering mystic who
arrived in Castile in 1305. A manuscript version of Isaac’s account was
known to sixteenth-century chronicler Abraham Zacuto and was 1n-
cluded in his Sefer Yuhasin. Isaac tells us that he had already heard of the
Zohar and came to Castile to learn more about it and specifically to
investigate the question of the Zohar’s origins. He managed to meet
De Leon shortly before the latter’s death. De Leon assured him that
the ancient manuscript was real and offered to show it to him. By the
time Isaac arrived at Avila, where De Leon had lived in the last years of
his life, he had a chance only to meet the Kabbalist’s widow. She de-
nied that the manuscript had ever existed, recounting that her husband
had told her that he was claiming ancient origins for his own work for
pecuniary advantage. Others, however, while agreeing that there’ was
no ancient manuscript source, claimed that De Leon had written the
Zohar “through the power of the Holy Name.” (This might refer ei-
ther to some sort of trancelike “automatic writing” or to a sense that
he saw himself as a reincarnation of Rabbi Shim’on and through the
Name had access to his teachings.) Various other players then enter the
account in a series of claims and counterclaims, and the text breaks off
just before a disciple of De Leon is able to present what seems like
promising testimony in the Zohar’s behalf.
This account has been used by opponents of the Zohar and of Kab-
balah in general in various attempts to dismiss the Zohar as a forgery
and Moses de Leon as a charlatan. Most outspoken among these at-
tempts is that of nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Graetz, for
whom the Zohar was the epitome of the most lowly, superstitious ele-
ment within medieval Judaism. Graetz and others assumed that the wife
was the one who spoke the truth, with all other explanations serving to
cover or justify the obvious chicanery of the author. Wanting to deni-
grate the Zohar, which did not fit the early modern enlightenment idea
sth,
The Question of Authorship — 16
of proper Judaism, Graetz did not consider the possibility that De Leon
might have told his wife such things for reasons other than their being
the simple truth. Sadly, her account may reflect the Kabbalist’s assump-
tion of his wife's inability to appreciate his literary intentions. The claim
that he did it for the sake of selling books has about it the air of an ex-
planation to a spouse, offered in a dismissive context.
Modern Zohar scholarship begins with the young Gershom Scho-
lem's attempts to retute Graetz. He set out in the late 1920s to show
that the picture was more complex and that indeed there might be ear-
lier layers to the Zohar. Awed by the vastness of the Zohar corpus, he
found it hard to believe that all of it could have been the work of a sin-
gle author. But in a series of stunningly convincing essays Scholem re-
versed himself and came to the conclusion that the entire Zohar had
indeed been written by De Leon. He supported this conclusion by
careful analysis of the Zohar’s language, its meager knowledge of the
geography of the Land of Israel, its relationship to philosophy and to
earlier works of Kabbalah, and its references to specific historical events
or dates. Most convincing was Scholem’s painstaking philological anal-
ysis. He compared the Zohar’s unique (and sometimes mistaken) use of
Aramaic linguistic forms to characteristic patterns of language found
(uniquely, he claimed) in De Leon’s Hebrew works. Here he believed
he had found something ofa literary fingerprint, making it finally clear
that De Leon was the author. As to the magnitude of the work and its
attribution to a single individual, Scholem was consoled by historical
parallels, particularly that of Jakob Boehme, a seventeenth-century Ger-
man shoemaker, who had composed a vast corpus of writings under
the force of mystical inspiration.
But the matter is by no means ended here. The fact that Scholem
agreed with Graetz on the question of single authorship did not at all
mean that he shared in his lowly opinion of the Zohar or its author.
The parallel to Boehme in fact sounds rather like the writing “through
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 166
the power of the Holy Name” that had been suggested to Isaac of
Acre. Assuming that Moses de Leon did write the entire Zohar, the
question became one of understanding how this might be the case. Two
specific questions come to the fore here. One concerns the notable
differences between the Zohar’s various sections. Could one person
have written the Midrash ha-Ne’elam, with its hesitant, incomplete us-
age of sefirotic symbolism; the Idrot, where that symbolism has been
incorporated and surpassed; and the obscure matnitin and heikhalot,
along with the rich narrative and homilies of the main Zohar text?
What can account for all these seeming variations in both literary style
and symbolic content? The other question has to do with the intrigu-
ing relationship between a single author and the many voices that
speak forth from the Zohar’s pages. Is the community of mystics de-
scribed here entirely a figment of the author's creative imagination? Is
not some real experience of religious community reflected in the Zo-
har’s pages? Might it be possible, to take an extreme view, that each of
the speakers represents an actual person, a member of the Castilian
Kabbalists’ circle, here masked behind the name of an ancient rabbi?
Or is there some other way in which the presence of many voices can
be detected within the Zohar’s pages?
Contemporary scholarship on the Zohar (here we are indebted es-
pecially to the pioneering work of Yehuda Liebes and its more recent
development by Ronit Meroz) has parted company with Scholem on
the question of single authorship. While it is tacitly accepted that De
Leon did either write or edit long sections of the Zohar, including the
main narrative-homiletical body of the text, he is not thought to be the
only writer involved. Multiple layers of literary creativity can be dis-
cerned within the text. It may be that the Zohar should be seen as the
product of a school of mystical practitioners and writers, one that could
have existed even before 1270 and continued into the early years of the
fourteenth century. Certain texts, including the Midrash ha-Ne’elam
™
The Question of Authorship — 167
(perhaps an earlier recension of it than that which has survived?) belong
to the oldest stratum of writing. The main part of the Zohar, including
both the epic tale and the teachings of Rabbi Shim’on and his disciples,
were indeed composed in the decades claimed by Scholem. Work on
the Zohar did not cease, however, with the turn of the fourteenth cen-
tury or the passing of Moses de Leon. In fact, the author of the Tigqunei
Zohar and the Ra’aya Mehcimna, seen by Scholem as “later” addenda to
the Zohar corpus, may represent the third “generation” of this ongoing
school. It would have been in his day, and perhaps with the cooperation
of several editors, that the fragments of the Zohar as first circulated
were linked together into the somewhat larger units found in the sur-
viving fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscipts.
There is no single, utterly convincing piece of evidence that has led
scholars to this revision of Scholem’s view. It is rather a combination of
factors stemnung from close readings of the text and from a body of
scholarship on it that did not yet exist in Scholem’s day. There is con-
siderable evidence of what might be called “internal commentary”
within the Zohar text. The “Secrets of the Torah” are an expansion of
the brief and enigmatic matnitin, as the Idrot comment and enlarge upon
themes first developed in the Sifra di- Tseni’uta. In the Zohar narrative
there are also whole or partial stories that are told more than once, one
version seemingly an expansion of an earlier recension. The same 1s
true of certain homilies, some of which are repeated in part or whole
several times within the text. While these could be explained as the de-
veloping project of a single author, they combine with ongoing con-
sideration of the two questions just raised, the differing sections of the
Zohar and the multiple “voices” that speak within the text, toward con-
sideration of multiple or collective authorship. Historical evidence has
shown that closed schools or societies (havurot) for various purposes
were a common organizational form within Spanish Jewry. The image
of Rabbi Shim’on and his followers encountering a series of mysteri-
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT. 168
ous teachers in the course of their wanderings looks rather like a pos-
sible description of a real such school encountering from outside its
ranks various mystics who were accepted by the school’s leader as le-
gitimate teachers of secret Torah.
It is particularly intriguing to compare this hypothetical school of
Kabbalists to another that is rather more clearly described in docu-
ments available to us. In neighboring Catalonia, the kabbalistic school
of Nahmanides lasted, side by side with his halakhic school, for three
generations. Nahmanides’ disciple Shlomo ben Adret carried his mas-
ter’s teachings forward to a group of disciples who then wrote multi-
ple commentaries on the secret aspects of Nahmanides’ work. That
circle was significantly more conservative in its views of kabbalistic
creativity than was the Castilian group. But we could easily imagine a
parallel school of Castilian Kabbalists, beginning with the “Gnostics”
of the mid-thirteenth century and extending forward over the same
three generations, whose collective literary product, much freer and
richer in imagination than the Nahmanidean corpus, included the
body of work finally edited into what later generations have come to
know as the Zohar. It may indeed be that competition between these
two schools of mystical thought played some role in the early stages of
the editing process that finally resulted in the Zohar as we know it.
[es
The Language
of the Zohar
The unique genius that finds expression in the Zohar has everything
to do with language. Its homiletical style builds on midrashic sensitiv-
ity to the nuances of biblical language and often seeks to go beyond it.
Underlying every page of the Zohar’s reading of Torah is a rich “‘ear”
for associative links and plays on words, a constant search for “hints”
within the text that will allow for an opening to deeper levels of in-
terpretation. This careful attention to the text 1s joined to the Zohar’s
readiness to apply to it the symbolic language of the seftrot. It 1s the in-
terplay between these two factors, heightened midrashic sensitivity and
the old-new grid of sefirotic symbols, that creates the unique and
powerful literary style of the Zohar.
Another element that plays a key role in the powerful impression
the Zohar has made on its readers throughout the generations is the
sonorous and seemingly mysterious Aramaic in which it was written.
All the sections of the Zohar, except for about half of Midrash ha-
Ne’elam, are written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. While scholars
have devoted much attention to the unique grammatical and syntacti-
cal features of the Zohar’s Aramaic, few have tried to understand why
169
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 170
the Zohar is written in Aramaic and what meaning this surprising
choice of language might have had for the work’s authors.
Aramaic was the spoken language of Jews, both in the Land of Israel
and in Babylonia, from late biblical times (fourth to third century B.C.E.)
until after the Islamic conquest and the replacement of Aramaic by Ara-
bic (seventh century c.£.). The Talmud, in both its Babylonian and Pal-
estinian versions, is composed mostly in Aramaic, as are portions of
Midrash and other rabbinic writings. The Targum, existing in several
versions, is the old Jewish translation of the Bible into Aramaic.
By the time the Zohar was written, Aramaic was a purely literary
language for all but a tiny group of Jews in the mountains of Kurdi-
stan. Knowledge of it elsewhere was purely passive, even among rab-
binic scholars; only very rarely was a short treatise or poem still writ-
ten in Aramaic. The choice to compose the Zohar in Aramaic gave to
the work an anachronistic cast, and this immediately set the stage for
its mysterious quality.
Some have claimed that the use of Aramaic was an attempt to write
in the language of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai and his generation, thus
adding a ring of authenticity to the Zohar’s claim of antiquity. This is
a rather difficult claim to press, however, since Rabbi Shim’on lived at
the time of the Mishnah, in which his and his contemporaries’ views
are recorded in pure rabbinic Hebrew, the chief literary language for
Jews in that Tannaitic period. Why would Rabbi Shim’on have writ-
ten the Zohar in Aramaic? Certainly if he had set out to compose an
esoteric work he would not have written it in the spoken vernacular,
thus rendering it more rather than less accessible to unlettered Jews,
from whose eyes the secrets were to be protected.
It would seem that we have to look to the effect of Aramaic on the
Zohar’s readers and writers rather than to the myth of Rabbi Shim’on
to explain this surprising choice of language. In Spain of the thirteenth
century, unlike Palestine of the second, Aramaic was indeed a mysteri-
*
The Language of the Zohar 171
ous and only vaguely understood language. Presenting secrets in Ara-
maic rather than Hebrew (a method that had been tried, in brief texts,
before the Zohar) shrouded them in an obscuring veil, forcing a slower
pace of reading upon those who delved into its pages. It also permit-
ted a certain grandiloquence that might have seemed pretentious in
the more familiar vehicle of medieval Hebrew. Images that might have
been seen as trivial in Hebrew, especially if frequently repeated, main-
tained a certain mysterious grandeur when veiled by the obscurity of
Aramaic dress.
The Zohar'’s Aramaic made the text significantly, but not impossi-
bly, more difficult for the educated Jewish reader in its day. This was
probably the precise intent: to offer the reader a sense that he had
come to a more profound, and therefore less penetrable, sort of teach-
ing. With some extra effort it would reveal to him the secret universe
that the Zohar sought to share and pass on to its elite community of
readers. Students of the Zohar come quickly to understand that the
Aramaic of the Zohar was indeed a penetrable veil. The real difficulty
in reading the text was of mastering the symbolic language and the
subtlety with which it was employed.
It may also be that the Zohar’s composition in Aramaic was not en-
tirely a matter of conscious choice. Perhaps it was something that “hap-
pened,” either in the author's psyche or in the community of mystics
where the Zohar teachings were first shared orally. If there was a living
community of Kabbalists in Castile in the 1280s, meeting by night in
courtyards and gardens to study the secrets of the Torah, in what lan-
guage did they share those secrets with one another? How did the
transition take place from discussing the Hebrew text of Torah in Cas-
tilian, their only spoken language, back into Hebrew or Aramaic, for
transcription onto the written page? Could it be that the rich sound
of Aramaic, where each noun ended in a vowel, better reflected the
sounds of their own Castilian speech than did Hebrew? Were they
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 172
themselves somehow “seduced” by the mysterious sound of Aramaic to
follow it into the fantasy realm represented by the Zohar?
These speculations may also be applied to the written text itself, es-
pecially if we assume that Rabbi Moses de Leon is the author of large
portions of the Zohar. Some twenty Hebrew treatises of De Leon have
survived, and several of these have now been published. Compared to
the Zohar, they are relatively dull and uninspired. While the doctrinal
content is very much the same, they possess little of the poetic muse
and freedom of expression that so characterize the Zohar. One has the
impression that De Leon stepped into another world when writing the
Zohar, and that the transition from Hebrew to Aramaic was one of the
ways he marked that portal. Working in this other, more dimly per-
ceived language released his muse, as it were, giving him the freedom
to soar to heights of imagination and literary excess that he would not
have dared attempt in Hebrew. We might almost say that the use of
Aramaic was some part of “the Holy Name” by which it was said that
De Leon had written the Zohar.
The Aramaic of the Zohar is indeed a unique composite of dialects
and features drawn from ancient literary sources. Details of Scholem’s
analysis of the Zohar’s language can be found in his writings and need
not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that the Zohar is a combination
of Palestinian Aramaic, essentially the dialect of Targum Onkelos, with
certain features, especially in the area of rhetorical terminology, that re-
flect the Babylonian Talmud. Various terms and usages of words in the
Zohar clearly show the influence of medieval Hebrew, of interpreta-
tions (and sometimes misinterpretations) of Aramaic found in medieval
Jewish dictionaries, and of the special vocabularly of medieval philoso-
phy. A few Spanish terms have also been uncovered in the Zohar, al-
though adequate research has not yet been done on the Zohar’s lan-
guage by scholars possessing a thorough knowledge of old Castilian.
What is surprising about this seemingly patched-together language
The Language of the Zohar 173
is how well it works. There is a sense, as one reads the Zohar in the
original, that the authors have created a linguistic vehicle that allows for
great drama and passionate self-expression. That they did so with a lim-
ited vocabularly and a repertoire of few syntactical forms makes it all
the more remarkable. Although technically one may say with Scholem
that the Zohar’s Aramaic is “artificial,” not reflecting any known spoken
dialect, in fact one who dwells for a while in the Zohar’s pages finds it
very much a living language, powerful and evocative in its own right.
A remarkable feature of the Zohar is the creation of new words that
appear to be either Aramaic or perhaps typically Greek loan words in
Aramaic garb but that in fact have no basis in any older text or lan-
guage. These neologisms have given trouble to many an interpreter
over the centuries, some of whom have sought to emend them in or-
der to line them up with one Talmudic term or another. For reasons
that are not clear, the majority of these words contain the “Q” sound,
and often the “S,"“‘F” or “T” as well. Perhaps their secret will be un-
covered when the Zohar is studied in the context of its authors’ spo-
ken language. The current translation is particularly adept and creative
in dealing with these linguistic inventions of the Zohar, as will be seen
from the accompanying notes.
J
1 ‘
“kx
Editing and Printing
of the Zohar
One of the mysteries of the Zohar is the process by which it was edited
and came to take the form in which we know it. All the manuscripts of
the Zohar that predate its first printing (1558-60) are fragmentary, and
there is reason to believe that the book was placed into its present form
only by those who prepared it for printing. But the stages of the writ-
ing and editing process, reaching from the scattered quotations of Zo-
har materials found in the 1290s to the three grand volumes to come
off the presses in Mantua (and the equally impressive one-volume
counterpart in Cremona) some 270 years later, are difficult to trace.
The Zohar was identified as a book by the second decade of the
fourteenth century. This is clear from references to it in the Tigqunei
Zohar and in other sources that quote it. But the extent or the exact
contents of this book remain unknown. Just a bit later, around 1320,
the Italian Kabbalist Menahem Recanati had access to large sections of
the Zohar text, to which he referred copiously in his own works.
Other fourteenth-century Kabbalists, such as David ben Judah he-
Hasid (a grandson of Nahmanides) and Shem Tov Ibn Gaon, also seem
to have had only parts of the Zohar, and not the same parts as Recanati.
174
Editing and Printing of the Zohar 175
This probably indicates that variously organized collections of Zohar
material were being circulated, each containing different parts of the
written record. The surviving manuscripts that date to the fourteenth
and fitteenth centuries correspond to these various quotations. Only
rarely is there material in an early secondary source that does not ap-
pear in one or another manuscript and does not show up somewhere
in the printed corpus of the Zohar. All this is to say that the editors,
probably in the employ of the Italian printing houses, did their work
well, including preparing much of the extant materials within the text.
That being the case, we have no good explanation of why the Zohar
is SO sparse in its treatment of the latter three books of the Torah, espe-
cially Deuteronomy, compared to the vast collections of material on
Genesis and Exodus. Was the Zohar left incomplete possibly because of
the death of Rabbi Moses de Leon? Did he or his circle simply run out
of steam or lose interest in the project before its completion? Or does
this seeming imbalance of materials have more to do with the editors at
one stage or another than with the original authors?
Although Hebrew printing began in the 1470s, nearly a hundred
years passed before the appearance of the Zohar. This is partly ex-
plained by a concern about making secrets too readily available, a con-
cern shared by rabbinic authorities and some Kabbalists themselves.
The dissemination of hand-copied manuscripts, few in number and
costly to produce, could be much more carefully controlled than that of
printed books. Kabbalah in the fifteenth century was still the esoteric
doctrine of a small elite, and the ban on printing helped to keep it that.
Only a few purely kabbalistic works were printed before the Zohar,
Recanati’s commentary on the Torah being the most prominent among
them. The delay in printing may also mean, however, that there simply
was no text appropriate for publication until that time. It is to the
mostly anonymous mid-sixteenth-century editors that we owe a great
debt of gratitude for the existence and preservation of the Zohar text.
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 176
The Mantua edition of the Zohar (dated 1558-1560 but possibly
having followed the Cremona, 1560 edition in actual publication)
opens with a letter of approbation by Rabbi Isaac De Lattes (d.c. 1570)
permitting the printing of the Zohar. After reviewing the various rab-
binic prohibitions against the public teaching and distribution of eso-
teric materials, De Lattes strongly urged that this policy be changed as
messianic times drew near. Almost a third of the sixth millennium (that
directly preceding and preparing the way for the seventh millennium
or messianic age) had passed, he lamented, and only a wider knowledge
of the Torah’s secrets would stir Israel to do what was needed to effect
redemption. This approbation has been reprinted in all later editions of
the Zohar, despite the passage of centuries and the complex history of
Jewry’s messianic dreams. Printing of the Zohar opened the floodgates
for the publication of various other kabbalistic works, issued first by
various Italian printing houses in the 1560s and continuing from that
time forward almost unceasingly to our own day.
As interest in Kabbalah continued to grow, another group of editors
avidly sought manuscripts containing materials that had been omitted
from the first editions. These efforts resulted in the Zohar Hadash,
printed in Salonika in 1597. An Amsterdam printing of the main Zo-
har (1715) also added a significant number of variant readings to the
text, cluttering the printed page but preserving some important man-
uscript sources. This Amsterdam text forms the basis of all later
printed Zohar texts, including the very popular and widely reprinted
Livorno (Leghorn) and Vilna editions.
Commentaries on the Zohar began to appear in the sixteenth cen-
tury. Some of these (particularly the ones that did not devote their ef-
forts to reinterpreting the Zohar to fit the later Lurianic Kabbalah) are
very helpful in understanding the Zohar and occasionally also pre-
serve a variant reading of the Zohar text. The largest and intellectually
most significant of these is the Or Yagar by Rabbi Moses Cordovero
x
Editing and Printing of the Zohar 177
(1§22-1570). This vast opus has survived only in a single manuscript
and has been published (in more than twenty volumes) only in the
late twentieth century. But Cordovero was included in Abraham Azu-
lai’s seventeenth-century digest of Zohar commentaries Or ha-Hammah,
and was influential in that more accessible form. Other significant
commentaries include Ketem Paz by Rabbi Shim’on Lavi of Tripoli
(sixteenth century) and Migqdash Melekh by Shalom Buzaglo of London
(eighteenth century). The important twentieth-century editions are
those of Reuben Margulies (Mossad ha-Rav Kook), with the most help-
ful source index Nitsotset Zohar, and that of Yehudah Ashlag with the
commentary Ha-Sulam. Ashlag’s commentary is of the Lurianic vari-
ety and useful only for that purpose. He has also, however, translated
the entire Aramaic text into Hebrew, a most important aid especially
to the beginning student. More recent Hebrew renditions are found in
two commentaries appearing in the 1990s, Yedid Nefesh and Matoq mi-
Devash, as well as in a vocalized Zohar published by Yerid ha-Sefarim
in 1998.
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ts
,
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§\
4
Influence and Canonization
of the Zohar
During the last two centuries of Jewish life in Spain, the Zohar con-
tinued to be copied and studied among small groups of devotees. It
competed with two others schools of kabbalistic thought, the Cata-
lonian and the Abulafian, for the attention of those few people inter-
ested in mystical pursuits. Some Kabbalists seem to have combined
these various approaches, or else to have “migrated” in the course of
their own quests from one school of mystical thought to another. Jew-
ish rationalism was also very much alive in Spain through the fifteenth
century, probably continuing to have a larger following than did Kab-
balah. Manuscripts of Zohar fragments, increasingly compiled into
longer sections of what we now recognize as “The Book Zohar,” also
reached Italy, the Byzantine lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, and
the Holy Land during this period.
It was after the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492 that the influ-
ence of Kabbalah entered a period of rapid growth. Some have attrib-
uted this to the suffering and despair that visited this once-proud
group of Jewish communities in the period between 1391 and 1492.
The devastation of the age, so it is said, caused Jews to seek out deeper
an
178
Influence and Canonization of the Zohar — 179
resources of consolation than those offered by the typically optimistic
worldview of the philosophers. The Lurianic Kabbalah of the late six-
teenth century in particular has been read by Scholem and others as a
reaction to the expulsion trom Spain. This view has been disputed in
more recent Kabbalah scholarship, notably by Moshe Idel.
Others claim that the growth of Kabbalah came as a response of a
ditferent sort to the Spanish expulsion. Jews throughout the Mediter-
ranean world, including many Spanish exiles, were shocked and dis-
graced by the high numbers of Spanish Jews who converted to Chris-
tianity in the course of the fifteenth century. Once again the blame
was placed partly at the door of philosophy. The intellectual sophisti-
cation of Spanish Jewry had supposedly led to a laxity in religious ob-
servance and a relative indifference to the question of religious iden-
tity. If ultimate truth lay with philosophy, it was said, one could wear
the more convenient garb of the Christian rather than that of the
hated and persecuted Jew while still believing in the same essential
truths. Here again Kabbalah was brought forth as a weapon against
such laxity and indifference to Jewish religious praxis.
Yet another view attributes the growth in Kabbalah’s influence to
the new home cultures in which former Iberian Jews found themselves.
Ottoman Turkey of the sixteenth century was a welcoming haven for
Jewish craft and mercantile skills. But it was not a good home for philo-
sophical rationalism. The religious worldview of Turkey and the Near
East, expressed both in Islam and in the Christianity of the region, was
that of the closed millet system, with each faith community led by the
sort of clergy who held fast to exclusive truth claims and total denigra-
tion of all outside influences. In this atmosphere it was precisely the
closed-minded Zoharic view of the outside world that best served the
community’s needs, rather than the Aristotelian quasi-universalism of
the philosophers, an ideology deriving from a very different time and
place. A kabbalistic Judaism was better suited than was philosophy to
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 180
help Iberian Jews fit into and define themselves in the Ottoman con-
text and in the spiritual universe of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Whatever the reason (and a combination of these factors is most
likely), new kabbalistic works were written and old ones were widely
distributed and explicated in the early sixteenth century. The Zohar
and other works of the Castilian tradition became especially prominent
in this period. Perhaps typical is the figure of Rabbi Meir Ibn Gabbai,
a Turkish Kabbalist who tells us that he was born in Spain in 1481 and
left as a child among the exiles. Ibn Gabbai’s magnum opus, Avodat ha-
Qodesh (published in Venice in 1567) is a grand systematization of
Kabbalah and a defense of it against philosophy. Typically of scholars in
the sixteenth century, Ibn Gabbai knew a great many earlier texts and
sought to harmonize them with one another. But the great source of
kabbalistic truth was the Zohar, which Ibn Gabbai quotes on virtually
every page as “the Midrash of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai.”
The kabbalistic conventicles of Safed, which flourished in the late-
sixteenth century, also accorded to the Zohar top place as the author-
itative source of kabbalistic truth. Clearly the choice of Safed as a
place of settlement for Jews attached to the kabbalistic legacy had
much to do with its proximity to Meron, the supposed burial place of
Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai. His tomb had been a site of pilgrimage for
local Jews much. earlier, playing an important role in growth of the
Safed community. By the mid-sixteenth century it became a truly im-
portant shrine. Both Rabbi Moses Cordovero, who probably immi-
grated to Safed from elsewhere in the Ottoman realm, and Rabbi
Isaac Luria, who came from Egypt, chose to live in Safed because of
the nearness of holy graves and the possibility (described by Cor-
dovero in his Sefer Gerushin) of achieving mystical knowledge through
prostration upon them. Among the sacred dead of the Galilee, Rabbi
Shim‘on, now acclaimed as the undisputed author of the Zohar, took
a central place. Luria specifically hoped to achieve a true understand-
™-
Influence and Canonization of the Zohar 181
ing of passages in the Zohar by visiting what he believed to be the
grave of its author.
The “return” of Kabbalah to the Galilean landscape of the Zohar’s
heroes fired the imagination of Jews throught the diaspora. Reports of
the holy men of Safed, especially the mysterious figure of Luria, known
as ha-ARI ha-Qadosh (“the holy lion”), were widely copied and
printed in several versions. A vast literature of both kabbalistic writings
and ethical or pietistic works influenced by Kabbalah poured forth
from the printing presses of Venice, Constantinople, and Amsterdam, to
be distributed throughout the Jewish world. It did not take long until
the claim emerged that the soul of the ARI was in fact a reincarnation
of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai.
It was in this period that the Zohar came to be considered not only
an ancient and holy book but also a canonical text, bearing authority
comparable to that of the Bible and the Talmud. The authority of the
Zohar as the prime source of mystical truth had already been consid-
ered by fourteenth-century Kabbalists, some of whom came to view its
words as superior to those of Nahmanides, for example, because of its
allegedly greater antiquity. Nahmanides was portrayed by these writers
as a “modern” source, whose word could be set aside by a contrary
quotation from the work of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai. But in the six-
teenth century it was said that Elijah himself had appeared to Rabbi
Shim’on, and the Zohar’s authority became that of heaven itself. Meir
Ibn Gabbai traced the kabbalistic tradition back to Sinai, claiming that
Zoharic secrets were given to Moses along with the written Torah.
Canonical status, in the context of Judaism, potentially bears within
it halakhic authority as well as mystical prestige. If the Zohar contained
the “true” meaning of both written and oral Torah, might it be used as
a source of legal authority, especially in ritual and liturgical matters, as
well? This question came up among halakhic scholars, especially in a se-
lect few cases in which the Zohar seemed to contradict the majority
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 182
opinion of rabbis deciding the law on the basis of Talmudic precedent
and its formulation in the literature of responsa and codes. In fact, as
scholars have shown, these cases mostly turn on local custom, with the
Zohar reflecting either Franco-German or old Spanish customs, while
the halakhah had decided in favor of other customs. A classic example
of such halakhic dispute involving the Zohar concerns the donning of
tefillin on the intermediate weekdays of Passover and Sukkot. The Zo-
har expresses itself strongly on the issue, considering the wearing of
tefillin on those days an insult to the festival and a virtual sacrilege. Al-
though the halakhic codes mostly tended otherwise, some halakhic au-
thorities bowed to the Zohar, and the use of fefillin on those days was
rejected throughout the Sephardic (and later Hasidic) communities.
Thanks to the influence of the Safed revival of mystical studies,
Kabbalah became widely known among Eastern European Jews in the
seventeenth century. The works of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, a Prague
Kabbalist who later settled in Jerusalem, carried the teachings of Ibn
Gabbai and Cordovero, among others, to preachers throughout the
Ashkenazic communities. Here too the Zohar was widely quoted.
Prayerbooks with kabbalistic commentaries, including those by Cor-
dovero and Horowitz, brought kabbalistic thinking into the realm of
actual synagogue practice. The highly mythical Kabbalah of Naftali
Bacharach, seventeenth-century German author of Emeg ha-Melekh
(“Valley of the King”), is primarily influenced by the language and
imagery of the Zohar.
Another area of the growing canonicity of the Zohar is its use in
liturgical contexts and its appearance in digests of daily religious prac-
tice. Various kabbalistic Tigqunim, or “Orders,” were published through-
out the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These included many
collections of Zohar passages to be recited during the night vigils of
Shavu’ot and Hosha’na Rabbah, at the Sabbath table, and on various
other occasions. It came to be understood in this period that recitation
~*~
Influence and Canonization of the Zohar 183
of the oral Zohar was efficacious even for those who did not under-
stand its meaning. In the nineteenth century, vocalized editions of the
Zohar were printed to facilitate this practice and to ensure that the
recitation would nevertheless be performed with some degree of accu-
racy. Various digests were also produced for daily study and recitation,
especially in the eighteenth century. The most widespread of these was
called Hog le-Yisra’el (published in Cairo in 1740), including passages to
be recited each day from the Torah, the Prophets, the Hagiographia,
Mishnah, the Talmud, the Zohar, ethical guides, and legal decisors. The
Hemdat Yamim, an anonymous compendium of kabbalistic praxis (pub-
lished in Izmir in 1731-1732), prescribes readings from the Zohar for
nearly every conceivable occasion in the Jewish liturgical year. In both
of these compendia we see the Zohar at the apex of its acceptance and
integration into the daily regimen of Jewish spiritual life.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the mes-
sianic movement around Sabbatai Tsevi (1626-1676) swept through
the Jewish communities. In the more radical forms of Sabbatianism,
the place of the Zohar became even greater as the authority of Tal-
mudic law came to be questioned. The kabbalistic system of Nathan
of Gaza (c. 1643-1680), the great prophet of Sabbatianism, is based on
the imagery of the Zohar, and devotion to the Zohar was touted
loudly throughout the history of Sabbatianism. Some of the later Ash-
kenazic Sabbatians, followers of Jacob Frank, came to refer to them-
selves as “Zoharites,” Jews who followed the authority of the Zohar
while rejecting that of the Talmud and the rabbis. This would of
course be a spurious claim had the authors of the Zohar been asked
their opinion, because they had no intention of rebelling against Tal-
mudic authority. But by this time (and in these circles) the Zohar was
being read through the lenses of such radical interpreters as the Ra’aya
Meheimna, the fifteenth-century Sefer ha-Kanah, the anonymous work
Galei Razayya, and the writings of Nathan of Gaza. When seen as the
THE ZOHAR AS JEXT 184
font of this literary tradition, the Zohar could be read as a very radical
work indeed. .
The decline of Sabbatianism in the mid-eighteenth century pre-
ceded by only a few decades the beginning of the Enlightenment era
in Western Europe and the admission of Jews into a more open and re-
ligiously tolerant society. As large numbers of Jews became eager sup-
porters of what they could see only as emancipation, readings of Ju-
daism that supported or fit this new situation became widespread. One
feature of this emerging postenlightenment Judaism, whether in its re-
form or orthodox versions, was either an open rejection or a quiet set-
ting aside of Kabbalah and of the Zohar in particular. Scholem wrote
an essay about several obscure nineteenth-century figures whom he
designated as “The Last Kabbalists in Germany.’ We have already spo-
ken of Heinrich Graetz’s negative views of the Zohar, a position that
was widely shared by his contemporaries. While there were a few
scholars in the period of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Adolf Jellinek
of Vienna is the most notable) who studied the Zohar, it was mostly
neglected by westernized Jews throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
In Eastern Europe the situation was quite different. Hasidism, a pop-
ular religious revival based on Kabbalah, continued to revere the Zohar
and believe in its antiquity. Several significant Zohar commentaries
were written within Hasidic circles, and the authors of Hasidic works
often referred to the Zohar. Rabbi Pinhas of Korzec, an early Hasidic
master, was said to have thanked God that he was born after the ap-
pearance of the Zohar, “for the Zohar kept me a Jew.” Hasidic legend
has it that when the Zohar was published by his sons, who owned the
printing works in Slawuta, they dipped the press in the mikveh (“ritual
bath”’) before printing each volume, so great was the holy task that was
about to come before it. Hasidic masters, because of this legend, went
out of their way to acquire copies of the Slawuta edition of the Zohar
Influence and Canonization of the Zohar — 185
and to study from it. The great opponent of Hasidism, Rabbi Elijah
(the “Gaon”) of Vilna (1720-1797) was also a Kabbalist, and within the
circle of his disciples there was a small group that continued the study
of Zohar for several generations.
Among the Sephardic Jews, the reputation of the Zohar as a holy
book was particularly strong. Jews in such far-flung communities as
Morocco, Turkey, and Iraq studied it avidly. Simple Jews recited the Zo-
har much in the way that uneducated East European Jews recited the
Psalms. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Jerusalem became known
as a center of kabbalistic studies, and Jews from throughout these com-
munities went there and studied works that emanated from that center.
Among Sephardic Jews it was primarily the Lurianic Kabbalah that
held sway, and the Zohar, while revered, was generally viewed through
the Lurianic prism. Only as enlightenment ideas began to spread in the
early twentieth century, partly through the arrival of European Jews in
the Colonial era, was the authority of the Zohar questioned.
The writings of Scholem, Tishby, and the scholars following in their
wake have done much to make the Zohar intelligible to moderns and
to renew interest in its study. Tishby’s Wisdom of the Zohar, which
translated selected passages from Aramaic into Hebrew, was a highly
successful attempt to make the Zohar more accessible to an educated
Israeli readership. The interest aroused among scholars of religion by
Scholem’s highly readable and insightful essays, especially those first
presented at the Eranos conferences, served to kindle great interest in
Kabbalah within the broader scholarly community. This interest 1s
maintained today thanks to the profound and sometimes provocative
studies of Yehuda Liebes, Elliot Wolfson, and others. The important
writings of Moshe Idel continue to bring many aspects of Kabbalah
to the attention of the scholarly and intellectual world. The availabil-
ity of English and other translations, including the selections in Tishby
and anthologies by both Scholem and Matt, have also served the Zo-
THE ZOHAR AS TEXT 186
har well in creating readerships outside of Israel. In more recent de-
cades this intellectual interest in Kabbalah has spread to wider circles,
including many interested in questions of symbolism, philosophy of
language, and related issues.
At the same time, two other seemingly unrelated phenomena have
come together to increase greatly the interest in Zohar studies at the
turn of the twenty-first century. One is the broad interest throughout
the Western world in works of mysticism and “spirituality.” Our age has
seen a great turn toward sources of wisdom neglected by two or three
centuries of modernity, partly in hope of finding in them a truth that
will serve as a source of guidance for the difficult and complex times in
which we live. Recently interest in the Zohar and Kabbalah has
emerged as part of this trend. As is true of all the other wisdoms ex-
amined in the course of this broad cultural phenomenon, the interest
in Kabbalah includes both serious and trivial or “faddist’’ elements.
This revival of Kabbalah is a complicated phenomenon, containing ex-
pressions of great hunger for religious experience and personal growth,
alongside the broader quest for wisdom. Types of thought once set
aside as “irrational” and views of the universe dismissed as “unscien-
tific’ are now being reexamined as reflections of deeper aspects of the
human spirit, creations stemming from a realm of mind that reason it-
self cannot comprehend.
This interest has come to be combined with a very different revival
of Kabbalah, primarily in Israel, after the 1967 and 1973 wars. It is
manifest in the growth of kabbalistic yeshivot, or academies; by the pub-
lication of many new editions of kabbalistic works; and by a campaign
of public outreach intended to spread the teachings of Kabbalah more
broadly. This new emphasis on Kabbalah is partly due to the reassertion
of pride in the Sephardic heritage, where Kabbalah has an important
place. It is also in part related to the difficult and trying times through
which Israel has lived, resulting in both a resurgence of messianism and
eu
Influence and Canonization of the Zohar — 187
a turn to “practical Kabbalah,” a longstanding part of Near Eastern Ju-
daism, as a source of protection against enemies and hope of victory
over them. The Kabbalah taught in these circles is primarily of the
Lurianic variety, as interpreted through a long chain of Jerusalem-based
teachers. Some versions of what is proferred as “Kabbalah” today can be
described only as highly debased renditions of the original teachings
and include large elements of folk religion that have little to do with
actual kabbalistic teachings. But the Zohar, even if reinterpreted in
Lurianic terms, even when enshrined more than it is comprehended,
is revered throughout these circles as the primary font of kabbalistic
truth, the ancient teaching of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai.
How this very complex interweaving of forces will affect the future
of interest in Kabbalah is yet to be seen. It is certain, however, that the
Zohar will continue to find a place in the hearts of new readers, some
of whom will turn to the more authentic and profound aspects of its
teachings. It is hoped that these readers will be helped and guided by
this Guide as they turn to study the holy Zohar in its most recent trans-
lation and commentary.
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.““Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs.” AJS Review 26:1
(2002): I-§2.
Gr6zinger, Karl, “Tradition and Innovation in the Concept of Poetry in the
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Gruenwald, Itamar. ‘From Talmudic to Zoharic Homiletics.” Jerusalem Studies in
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Hellner-Eshed, Melila. ‘A River Issues Forth from Eden: The Language of
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.“Do Not Stir Up or Awaken My Love Until It Pleases: The Language
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.““A Sage Is Preferable to a Prophet: Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai and Moses
in the Zohar.” Kabbalah 4 (1999): 103-39. (H)
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%
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Hermeneutics.” AJS Review 11:1 (1986): 27-52.
. “The Hermeneutics of Visionary Experience: Revelation as
Interpretation in the Zohar.” Religion 18 (1988a): 311-45.
.“Light Through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in the
Zohar.” Harvard Theological Review 81:8 (1988b): 73-95.
‘The Anthropomorphic and Symbolic Image of the Letters in the
Zohar.” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 8 (1989): 147-82. (H)
.““Beautiful Maiden Without Eyes: Peshat and Sod in Zoharic
Hermeneutics.” In The Midrashic Imagination. Ed. M. Fishbane. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 155-203.
.“‘Forms of Visionary Ascent as Ecstatic Experience in the Zoharic
Literature.” In Gershom Scholem’s ‘Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism’: 50 Years
After. Ed. P. Schafer and J. Dan. Tiibingen: Mohr, 19942.
. Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish
Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994b.
-WISH MYSTICISM
| “Green's Guide to the Zohar is a tour de force. depicting the
| state of the art in Zohar studies. It crystallizes the s holarship on
early Kabbalah in general, and the Zohar 171 particular, away
that is comprehensive, exceedingly lucid, and highly sophisticated.
Green displays his distinctive talent for providing scholarly detail
while at the same time bringing to the surface the broader reli
gious sensibilities that shape the Zohar and the cultural world in
which it was composed. This superb book is the first comprehen-
sive overview of the Zohar since the work of Gershom Scholem
and Isaiah Tishby.” — LAWRENCE FINI
MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGI
Che Zohar is the great medieval compendium of Jewish esoteric and mysti-
cal teaching, and the basis of the kabbalistic faith. It is, however, a notori-
ously difficult text, full of hidden codes, concealed meanings, obscure sym-
bols, and ecstatic expression. This illuminating study, based upon the last
several decades of modern Zohar scholarship, unravels the historical and
intellectual origins of this rich text and provides an excellent introduction
to its themes, complex symbolism, narrative structure, and language. A Guide
to the Zohar is thus an invaluable companion to the Zohar itself, as well as a
useful resource for scholars and students interested in mystical literature,
particularly that of the west, from the Middles Ages to the present.
Arthur Green is the Philip W. Lown Professor of Jewish [ hought at Brandeis University.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS _ www.sup.org
~~
ISBN 0-8047-4908-6
Cover illustration: Title page of the Cremona edition of Sefer ha-
Zohar (1559-1560). From the collections of the Jewish National and
University Library, Jerusalem. Reprinted with permission
Cover design: Rob Ehle
A Guide to The Zohar, Arthur Green (2003)
Rabbi Arthur Green