Daniel C. Matt
THE ZOHAR
Pritzker edition
Volume One
500pp. 0 80474747 4.
Volume Two
496pp. 0 804 74868 3
Stanford University Press. $49.95 each; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £29.95 each.
Arthur Green
A GUIDE TO THE ZOHAR
191pp. Stanford University Press. Paperback, $15.95.
0 8047 4908 6
Moshe Idel
KABBALAH AND EROS
371pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $45).
0 300 10832 X
Judaism is the religion of the law. Law as an institution requires clear definition, and the Hebrew Bible no doubt owes its wider acceptance in part to the clarity of its law. Whereas the Pentateuch retained its value for Christianity and Islam, which added their own revelations, the rabbis codified the law in the Talmud, the “teachings” collated in Palestine and, in their most important form, in Babylonian exile, which supplement the original laws. In the high Middle Ages, later commentators, such as Rashi in Tours, and Maimonides, whose troubled life took him from Cordoba to Fez and on to the Holy Land and Egypt, similarly emphasize the law as the cornerstone of Judaism. The revelation of the single God assures the unity of His people. Yet the Hebrew Bible also contains other features, not least its Prophetic Books, and these inaugurated a different tradition. The Book of Ezekiel, to take a prime example, begins with a vision that inspired Jewish mysticism, a spiritual experience contrary to or beyond the law. The medieval writings associated with this mysticism go by the name of kabbala, a word which today connotes mystery and magic, but in fact means “tradition” or “reception”. The term imputes ancient authority to a once new and still startling practice.
Ezekiel’s vision is as magnificent as it is mysterious:
“And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man . . . .
And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness of a man above upon it.”
This evocative, light-filled imagery and the vision of a heavenly throne in which it culminates gave rise to the most ancient form of Jewish mysticism, so-called merkabah or “throne” mysticism. The doctrine was apparently established by the period of the Second Temple, and the key documents concerning this journey of the soul stem from the period before the expansion of Islam: as in related traditions, upon performing sundry ascetic rites the mystic approaches the Divinity, in this case after a journey through His “seven Heavens” into the “seven palaces”, until he finally witnesses the manifestation of His glory on the “throne”. Unlike the literal truths in the Pentateuch, a text like Ezekiel that enshrines this mystery demands to be approached symbolically, a mode which could hardly differ more sharply from that required by the law. Thus, whereas the Talmudists interpret the Bible rationally, expounding the laws in a continuous dialectic by adducing other parts of the Bible as evidence, the mystics read the sacred Book the other way round: they begin with the visionary mode in Ezekiel and treat the earlier Books as symbolic. This enables them to search behind the literal truth.
The kabbala has captured the Jewish religious imagination at key moments, in different places, often at times of change or crisis: seminally in Provence in the twelfth century, whence the doctrine travelled to Spain; after the expulsion of 1492, when Lurianic kabbala thrived; in the seventeenth century, when the false Messiah Sabbatai Sevi unleashed a wave of popular enthusiasm for mystical ideas; and again in the last century, when the Jewish nation was threatened with extinction, around which time the study of the kabbala became an intellectual discipline.
Gershom Scholem inaugurated this latter phase, in a series of magisterial studies to whose influence the volumes here reviewed bear eloquent testimony. His method involved developing a philosophical argument, using the terminology of German idealism, yet firmly based on philological exegesis. Put differently: he brought the rigour of a hermeneutics of the law to a sphere inherently beyond the law. Although he claimed to occupy an “ironic” stance vis-à-vis the kabbala, his reader senses that Scholem himself lived its arcana, as if history were rekindled in his mind; yet whether he refers to first-century Palestine or fifteenth-century Spain, he adduces precise local evidence to support his case. By this clear yet inspirational procedure, he makes ideas that are inherently inchoate both plausible and persuasive. This was paradoxical, yet effective: largely thanks to Scholem, the kabbala entered the agenda of the modern intellectual, where it created a religious presence in many a secular text. Walter Benjamin owes much to his friend’s ideas; Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics – which Scholem himself claimed not to understand – could probably not have been written without his work; and the same holds for some of Paul Celan’s poems, of which, again, the scholar disclaimed any comprehension, modestly protesting that he was just “a simple man”. The magnificent new edition of The Zohar, translated by Daniel C. Matt, Arthur Greene’s masterly essay, and Moshe Idel’s brilliant new book, Kabbalah and Eros, all confirm the discipline’s efflorescence in America and continue Scholem’s task of restoring spirituality to the public sphere. Indeed, there must be many who subscribe to Green’s epigraph by the eighteenth-century rabbi Pinchas of Korzec: “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”. The rise of the modern intellectual kabbala confirms Simon Dubnow’s thesis that Jewish history involves a series of migrations in which each cultural centre takes over from the last, thereby preserving, adapting and transforming the religious heritage.
The Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Radiance, is the chief glory of the kabbala, and has long enjoyed canonical status both among adepts and in the community. It proudly affirms its counter-cultural strategy:
“Woe unto those who see in the Law nothing but simple narratives and ordinary words! Were this really the case, then could we, even today, compose a Law equally worthy of admiration. But it is all quite otherwise. Every word of the Law contains an elevated sense and a sublime mystery. The narratives of the Law are but the raiment for the Law itself! It was to avert such a calamity that David prayed, “Open mine eyes that I might behold wondrous things out of the Law!” ”
The kabbala in general, and the Zohar in particular, is less a doctrine than a religious universe. It plays host to a wealth of beliefs, practices and aspirations, among them folk elements and myth, homiletics and fiction, cosmology and magic, gnosticism and eroticism, ideas
that are subtle, elevating and subversive. Its devices, maybe inspired by Arabic poetics or by the medieval German Hasidim, include reading words backwards, gematria (number symbolism), notarikon (treating a word as an abbreviation of others) and temura (rearranging
letters). In fact, these devices (condemned by Maimonides) can be traces back to the period of the Second Temple as a means of interpreting the tetragram, YHVY. Such features have prompted the misunderstanding that the kabbala is a form of magic and the Zohar a magical book. For the Jewish people, however, it has long been a religious text to set alongside the Talmud, and its imagery has entered the liturgy.
Hitherto, the best short introduction has been Scholem’s own chrestomathy, Zohar: The book of splendour (1943); but now Green’s introduction to Matt’s translation, also separately printed as A Guide to the Zohar, provides a worthy companion, a succinct study that in distilling half a century’s research, including Green’s own, proves unfailingly lucid and illuminating: he is equally skilful at explicating ideas and at explaining their historical context.
The question of authorship has ever been a matter for dispute. As Green records, the Zohar emerged in Castile around 1290, when passages are first quoted as an authority and, in typical pseudepigraphic style, are attributed, inter alia, to the Jerusalem Talmud. In fact, the text refers to events after 1270, making the 1280s the most likely decade of composition. Its advocates bolstered the book’s authority by invoking its antiquity; others regarded it as a forgery, not least since the putative compiler, Moses de Leon, had failed to provide manuscript evidence. This latter view was held in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Graetz and combated by Scholem, who initially claimed that the Zohar embodied ancient layers, but subsequently revised his position and maintained that Moses de Leon was the sole author; however, far from being a forgery, the Zohar was to be regarded as a genuine religious text. Today, following the research of Yehuda Liebes and Ronit Meroz, the view prevails that, while Moses de Leon may be the chief compiler, in Green’s words “multiple layers of literary creativity can be discerned”. These point to collective authorship, reflected in the book’s central conceit, that the Zohar recounts the adventures and conversations of a peripatetic group of kabbalists, the circle around Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, on their travels through the Holy Land. Rabbi Simeon lived in the second century CE. The Talmud relates that he and his son hid in a cave for thirteen years to escape the Roman persecutions, during which time they gave themselves up to mystical speculations. The Zohar purports to be his book. In appealing to this source, it also evokes the wanderings of the Jewish people and the way in which the kabbala is always pursued by a small band of initiates gathered around a master. This provides the frame for what Scholem calls a “mystical novel”, indicating the Zohar’s formal kinship with The Arabian Nights. However, the artistry of the Zohar lies not in creating a land of make-believe, but in the skill with which it weaves a recondite commentary on the whole Pentateuch into a narrative.
As Green stresses, the kabbala breaks with earlier Jewish concepts of God. A new image appears in the Bahir, composed in twelfth-century Provence, and is elaborated in the Zohar.
“This divinity is a God of multiple mythical potencies, obscure entities eluding precise definition but described through a remarkable web of images, parables and scriptural allusions. Together these entities constitute the divine realm; “God” is the collective aggregate of these potencies and their inner relationship. The dynamic interplay among these forces is the essential myth of kabbala, the true inner meaning, as far as its devotees are concerned, both of the Torah and of human life.”
It is confusing to call this system “mythical” rather than “mystical”, given that it forms a science of the Godhead. The Bahir divides God’s Oneness, the unchanging Ein Sof, into ten facets or powers that continuously interact. Contemporaries call these the sefirot. The term refers to the ten primal numbers, which alongside the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, form “the thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom”. The kabbalists conceive the sefirot spatially in a tree, or diagram, with keter at the top (the crown, will, or nothingness), tif’eret in the middle (beauty, compassion, the sun) and malkhut at the bottom (kingdom, presence, the assembly of Israel). The other seven radiate from the centre. As Green explains, the sefirot can be understood as stages in the divine
manifestation; and yet, since they do not occur in space or time, they remain prior to existence, the spiritual building-blocks of reality. Significantly, they indicate a plurality within the Divinity – a dynamism, even
tensions, in His life – and provide a sensible link between the supernal realm and the community. Whereas Ein Sof lies beyond experience, as the ultimate abstract reality to which the adept aspires, and can readily be linked to the Pentateuch, the system of sefirot stretches
monotheism to its limits by breaking the second commandment, “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness of anything that is in heaven”; or, to put the matter another way, the mystic admits a fruitful plurality into monotheism. By such elasticity Judaism could absorb conflicting, even contradictory, lore. If the belief in a single God united the people across time and throughout the Diaspora, the potential for counter-cultural beliefs within the community enhanced its resilience.
Scholem invited this kind of interpretation by proposing two contextual factors, one extrinsic and the other intrinsic to Judaism, that influenced the emergence of kabbala in medieval Provence: the Manichaeism of the Albigensian Heresy, that the kabbalists may to some extent have assimilated; and Maimonides’ emphasis on abstract law in his Guide for the Perplexed, whose Aristotelianism they rebut. Rather, the kabbalists turned to Plotinus as inspiration, and stressed the need for prayer and the Commandments to reaffirm the efficacy of individual action in God’s universe.
The kabbala entered Renaissance philosophy largely through the advocacy of Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, but for many years Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Denudata (1677–8), translated into English by S. L. Macgregor Mathers (1887), provided the chief reference for scholars unable to read the Aramaic and Hebrew original. A French Zohar appeared a century ago, and Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon produced a vivid English one (1931–4). However, Daniel C. Matt’s Zohar offers a completely new access for the anglophone reader by providing the aids to interpretation normally reserved for the Torah itself. More than a translation, this projected twelve-volume Pritzker edition amounts to an encyclopedia of the Zohar and is set to become one of the single most important contributions to the topic in the English-speaking world. It provides both an original text and a commentary on every feature. Matt returns ad fontes and collates the standard edition with the manuscripts to establish a new text, also drawing on early printed ones, the Mantua (1558–60) and Cremona editions (1559–60). His Aramaic and Hebrew version is available online free of charge from Stanford University Press (http://www.sup.org/zohar). The whole project was made possible by the generosity of a patron, Margot
Pritzker, after whom the new edition is named.
Matt calls his method “literal yet poetic”, giving as an example his rendering of the so-called qumrin teherim encountered by the soul on its nocturnal flight. Sperling and Simon translate these as “certain bright but unclean essences”; Isaiah Tishby, another major scholar, calls them “vaulted splendors”; but Matt gives the relevant sentence as: “Flying, she (the soul) encounters those hooded, hunchbacked, dazzling demons of defilement”. He explains this as follows:
“Qumrin derives via rabbinic usage from the Greek qamara, “arched cover”, while tehirin is a cognate of the Aramaic tihara, meaning “Brightness, noon”. One class of demons is named tiharei, “noonday demons”. The virtuous soul who evades these demons reaches heaven and receives a divine message . . . .”
The extract epitomizes Matt’s technique: his text turns the Zohar into modern English; but his notes transfer the reader back into the authors’ world by engaging with the original, its references, its grammar, its etymologies, its echoes. This is crucial, not least given the part that the Zohar attributes to language in the act of creation, and, correlatively, the role it plays in the Zohar’s own biblical exegesis, as can be seen, for example, from the account of the words, “Let there be light!”:
“Here begins the discovery of hidden treasures . . . . light is a concealed mystery, an expansion expanding, bursting from the mysterious secret of the supernal aura. First it burst, generating from its mystery a single concealed point, for Ein Sof burst out of its aura, revealing this point: (the Hebrew letter) yod. Once this yod expanded, what remained was to be: or, light, from that mystery of concealed avir, aura . . . . That point of light is light. It expanded, and seven letters of the alphabet shone within, not congealing, still fluid. Then darkness emerged, and seven other letters of the alphabet emerged within . . . .”
The “single concealed point” is hokmah, one of the sefirot, which breaks through the aura of ketir, the crown. The “seven letters” represent divine speech. Thus the Zohar finds a cosmology in Genesis according to which
language itself belongs to the divine reality. Only very rarely does Matt disappoint by forgoing poetry for accuracy. The primal moment recorded in the Zohar reads like this in Scholem’s version:
“ “In the beginning” – when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the heavenly sphere. Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from the mystery of eyn sof, the Infinite, like a fog forming in the unformed – enclosed in the ring of that sphere, neither white nor black, neither green nor red, of no color whatever.”
Matt writes:
“At the head of potency of the King, He engraved engravings in luster on high. A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed within the concealed of the concealed, from the head of Infinity – a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all.”
If Scholem’s “engraved signs” dazzle more than “engraved engravings”, the juxtaposition yet reveals the advance: rather than narrate, Matt enters the linguistic interstices in which the mystical act becomes real. Thus, his dynamic “spark of impenetrable darkness”, recalling Milton’s “darkness visible”, gazes more deeply into creation than Scholem’s painterly “dark flame”. With interpretations such as this, the Zohar constantly invites us to reverse our views, introducing some homiletic gem with a phrase like “Come and see!”. The same holds for Green’s monumental achievement.
Just as the decapolar Creator accounts for the cosmos in terms that resonate with “big bang” and atomic theory, by concentrating on the lower sephirotic sphere and its two “sides”, left and right, the Castilian kabbalists also revealed a bipolar, gendered God, consonant with the love that unites man and woman – and the people with their Lord. This is Moshe Idel’s theme in Kabbalah and Eros, but his findings extend beyond the kabbala and touch on the nature of Judaism. Starting with the prayer book’s striking kabbalistic formula that the liturgy is performed “for the sake of the union of the Holy One, blessed be He, with His Divine presence”, Idel analyses the mystic’s concept of love in a fascinating array of sources, and, more widely, its role in daily life: marriage and union are imagined as having “a tremendous impact on the upper worlds”. Hence Idel locates a widespread theurgical note in Jewish lore, albeit perhaps not the “magical” one he claims, but rather a subtle, life-enhancing variety of erotic mysticism, in some ways akin to and, as has recently been claimed, perhaps indebted to Tantrism.
Judaism has long debated with other religions, and these have reciprocated, just as secularity has responded with all manner of quaint notions. Indeed, the kabbalists claim the Messiah will come after every possible interpretation of Scripture, and perhaps this explains the more unlikely, not to say crass, instances of the kabbala’s reception. A spark has even illumined the charade of pop, like the Zohar’s “rose” among “thorns”, ever since Madonna rebranded herself as “Esther” and encouraged her acolytes, staged as if by Leni Riefenstahl, arms waving equivocally in salute or prayer, with the motto: “Let’s shine as the brightest light! Light is the law of the Universe!”.
