Kabbalah (4 page)
J E W I S H M Y S T I C I S M A N D E M E R G E N C E O F T H E K A B B A L A H
brew alphabet. These
sefirot
are not divine powers; thirteenth-century kabbalists did not attribute this meaning to this term.
The
sefirot
are described as the directions or dimensions of the cosmos (north, south, east, west, up, down, beginning, end, good, and evil), as well as the holy beasts of Ezekiel’s chariot, the stages of the emergence of the three elements (divine spirit, air or wind, and water and fire), and other characteristics that are unclear. The early commentators interpreted the
sefirot
as the ten basic numbers from one to ten. Most of the work is dedicated to a detailed description how the various letters and groups of letters served the process of creation and dominate the various aspects of the universe.
The central concept presented in this work is
harmonia
mundi
(harmony of the universe). There are three layers of existence, the cosmic, that of time, and that of man. Each letter, or group of letters, is in charge of one aspect of each layer.
Thus, for instance, the Hebrew letters that can be pronounced in two different ways—whose number, according to this work, is seven—in the cosmos, are in charge of the seven planets; in “time,” are in charge of the seven days of the week; and, in man, are in charge of the seven orifices in the head (eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth). The twelve letters that the author describes as “simple” are in charge of the twelve zodiac signs, the twelve months, and the twelve principal limbs, and so on. This model was used by subsequent thinkers to develop the concept of human beings as microcosmos, reflecting the characteristics of the cosmos as a whole (especially by Shabbatai Donolo, who used it to interpret the verse in Genesis 1:27, indicating that man was created in the image of God). God achieved the process of creation by tying “crowns” to the letters and assigning them to rule their particular realms in these three layers. The harmony that results from the same linguistic power govern-ing the three realms was accepted, in different ways, by subsequent Jewish thinkers and served as a central concept in the kabbalistic worldview.
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K A B B A L A H
The concept that the universe was created by the power of divine speech is an ancient one in Judaism, and the Sefer Yezira developed this idea systematically. The guiding principle seems to have been that if creation is accomplished by language, then the laws of creation are the laws of language. Grammar thus was conceived as the basic law of nature. The author developed a Hebrew grammar based on 231 “roots”—the number of possible combinations of 22 letters. He explained the existence of good and evil in the universe as a grammatical process: if the letter
ayin
is added to the “root”
ng
as a prefix, it gives
ong
, great pleasure, but if it is added as a suffix, it means infliction, malady. The author also insisted that everything in the universe, following grammatical principles, has two aspects, parallel to the gender duality of masculine and feminine.
The work—as far as can be gleaned from the sections that are common to the main versions—seems to be mainly scientific. It does not mention the people of Israel, nor any religious concept—the Sabbath, commandments, ethics, redemption, messiah, afterlife, sin, sanctity, or anything of this kind. It is no wonder that editors of various versions and early and late commentators tried to insert into the text and into their interpretation elements of Jewish religiosity. The fact that the kabbalists gave new meaning to the terminology of the Sefer Yezira, and scores of them wrote commentaries on this treatise, positioned this work in the heart of Jewish sacred tradition, a source of divine secret wisdom parallel to that of the Hebrew Bible.
In the High Middle Ages, a short time before the emergence of the kabbalah, we find another example of a major Jewish school of estoerics and mystics, centered mainly in the Rhineland, known as Hasidey Ashkenaz, the pietists of Germany. Most writers of this school, and many of the leaders, writers, halakhists, and poets of German Jewry in twelfth and thirteenth century, belonged to one family, the Kalonymus family. The 18
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central figures were Rabbi Judah ben Samuel the Pious (who died in 1217), and his relative and disciple, Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (who died about 1230). Their worldview was deeply influence by the waves of crusaders who massacred Jews in France, Germany, and England on their way to fight the Muslims in the Holy Land. They developed a unique system of religious ethics, directed to prepare their people for the experience of martyrdom (
kiddusch ha-shem
).
We have about a score of volumes, many of which are still in manuscripts, in which the pietists presented an esoteric worldview that was deeply pessimistic about the nature of the created world. They saw the world mainly as a series of trials presented by God in order to prepare the few righteous, courageous people for everlasting bliss in the next world. One of the most important ideas they presented and expounded is that the divine world consists of several layers, each emanating from the superior one. The tasks of making revelations to prophets and receiving human prayers were relegated to secondary divine powers, which emanated from the eternal, perfect, and unchanging Godhead. We have several, independent descriptions of a system of emanated divine powers (often three in number) from the pietists and other circles of esoterics. Rabbi Judah the Pious developed a unique conception of the Hebrew prayers, intensely mystical in character, which viewed the text of the traditional prayers as a reflection of a hidden, intrinsic numerical harmony that binds together the words and letters of the sacred texts and all phenomena of existence.
The writings of these circles of esoterics are presented, in most cases, as commentaries on biblical verses, which serve as the source of authority for the speculations included in them.
We do not know of any practical, active aspect of these esoteric speculations. They used the Hekhalot and Merkavah texts extensively, but we do not know of any attempt to follow the visionary, experiential path described by the descenders to the chariot. They did incorporate the image of the Shiur Komah as one of the divine emanated powers.
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The early circles of the kabbalists were very similar to the Kalonymus family circle and the other groups of esoterics in medieval Germany. The earliest manifestations of the kabbalah are, first, an anonymous work, the Book Bahir, which was written in Provence or northern Spain around 1185; second, a circle of kabbalists in Provence, the most prominent figure of which was Rabbi Isaac ben Abraham the Blind; and third, a school of kabbalists that flourished in Girona, in Catalonia, in the first half of the thirteenth century. The Girona kabbalists, whose most prominent leader was Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides), integrated the teachings of the Book Bahir with those of the Provence school, expounded and developed them, and established the basic ideas and terms that characterized the kabbalah.
The Book Bahir is a brief treatise; its modern editions present it as consisting of 130 to 200 paragraphs. It is written in the form of a classical midrashic collection, many paragraphs beginning with the name of a talmudic sage who said it. All paragraphs expound a biblical verse or several verses. The sages to whom the sections are attributed are known
tanaim
, second-century rabbis, but some have fictional names, such as Rabbi Amora. The first paragraph is attributed to Rabbi Nehunia ben ha-Kanah, who is a prominent figure in some treatises of the ancient descenders to the chariot. Because of this, the whole work is often attributed to Rabbi Nehunia. The paragraphs are only loosely connected to each other, and the work does not seem to have a coherent, systematic structure. Many sentences and sections are very difficult to understand, and in some cases there seems to be deliberate mystification, intended to astound the reader. The work begins with a few statements concerning the creation. In the first part of the book there are many discussions of the letters of the alphabet, their shapes, and the meaning of their names. The best-known part of it, the last 20
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third of the work, is an enigmatic description of ten divine powers, which together represent the divine realms.
The author of the book made use of numerous sources that are known to us, mainly talmudic and midrashic statements concerning biblical verses, some passages from the Hekhalot and Merkavah literature, and comments on phrases from traditional prayers. Scores of paragraphs expound sentences and terms from the ancient Sefer Yezira (The Book of Creation), which undoubtedly served as a major source of inspiration and terminology. The author made use of ancient midrashic works on the letters of the alphabet and developed their ideas and methods in new directions. This work is the first Jewish treatise that presents in a positive manner the concept of transmi-gration of souls, the reincarnation or rebirth of the same souls again and again. The author used several dozens of parables, presented in a manner found often in classical midrashic literature; most of them begin with the sentence “This is like a human king.” when the subject of the parable is God. He also made use of some medieval sources, such as the writings of Rabbi Abraham bar Hijja and Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, Jewish philosophers of the twelfth century; these references make it possible to fix the time of its writing in the last decades of the twelfth century, probably about 1185.
The designation of this treatise as the earliest work of the kabbalah is based on its presentation of three major concepts that are not found in any earlier Jewish source. The first is the description of the divine world as consisting of ten hypostases, ten divine powers, which are called
ma’amarot
(utterances), which were known in later kabbalistic writings as the ten
sefirot
.
The second is the identification of one of the ten divine powers as feminine, separate from the other nine, and thus introduc-ing gender dualism into the image of the divine realms. The third is the description of the divine world as a tree (
ilan
); the work states that the divine powers are positioned one above the other like the branches of a tree. It seems that the image was one of an upside-down tree, its roots above and its branches 21
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growing downward, toward the earth. These three conceptions became characteristic of the kabbalah as a whole (with a few exceptions, including Abraham Abulafia who rejected the concept of the ten
sefirot
), and their presence identifies works as belonging to the kabbalah. In addition to these three concepts there is in the Book Bahir a more dramatic description of the realm of evil than those usually found in earlier Jewish sources, but there is no final separation between God and Satan. The powers of evil are described as the fingers of God’s left hand.
The dualism of good and evil is found in the kabbalah only three generations later, in the treatise of Rabbi Isaac ha-Cohen of Castile, written about 1265.
Gershom Scholem identified these ideas, found for the first time in the Book Bahir, as gnostic in nature. He believed that the author received them from earlier sources, which, according to him, could be either external, probably Christian gnostics, or from ancient Jewish gnostic tradition secretly transmitted from generation to generation. Scholem described the whole treatise as an anthology, assembled in the late twelfth century, but including several layers of sources going back many centuries. Scholars in the last half-century have intensely debated the origins of the ideas in the Book Bahir, and despite many efforts no source has been identified, neither within Jewish tradition nor outside of it. It seems that a prudent, methodological approach demands that we assume that these ideas are original to the Bahir, developed by its author, until we have proof of an earlier source.
In the middle of the twentieth century—at the time that Scholem and others categorized the Book Bahir, and to some extent the kabbalah in general as including central gnostic characteristics—Gnosticism acquired the dimensions of a world religion, parallel in impact and significance to those of Judaism and Christianity. One of the most forceful expressions of 22
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this view was the great monograph on the subject written by Scholem’s friend Hans Jonas, which was translated, in an abbreviated form, from German into English as
The Gnostic
Religion
(1958). This was the culmination of a long historical-theological development in German thought, best expressed by the views of the German Protestant scholar and theologian Rudolph Bultmann, who considered that Gnosticism included the roots of Christianity. In 1945, when a library of ancient theological works in Coptic was discovered in Nag Hamadi in Egypt, it was interpreted as being a library of ancient gnostic texts, and seemed to validate Bultmann’s and Jonas’s descriptions of the religion.
Thus, twentieth-century scholarship transformed Gnosticism from a common term that described heretical Christian sects, as presented by the church fathers in the second century CE and later, into a vast religion that served as a source for many Christian and Jewish spiritual phenomena and several medieval heretical movements, includinge the Cathars in Southern France. Many scholars in this field attributed the origins of Gnosticism to ancient Judaism, insisting that there was an ancient, pre-Christian Jewish Gnosticism. Scholem’s attitude was greatly influenced by these concepts. He designated the Hekhalot literature as Jewish Gnosticism in a book on the subject published in 1960, and he connected the Book Bahir to this realm. Other scholars tried to establish connections between the early kabbalah and the Christian Chatharic movement in Southern France.
