Moshe Idel, born in 1947, submitted his doctoral dissertation on the Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia to the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1976. In the quarter-century since, his researches and publications have reconfigured the field of Kabbalistic study, essentially founded by his majestic precursor, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982). Half-a-century younger than Scholem, Idel is both Scholem’s successor and his major revisionist. It is not too much to speak of the Kabbalah of Gershom Scholem and the Kabbalah of Moshe Idel, since these great scholars are as much visionary speculators as they are historians of what can be called “Jewish mysticism,” though I distrust that term and will not use it again here. Scholem—I would not say “in conversation” since one learned to listen to him—spoke with authority, and with more than a scholarly immersion in Kabbalah. One can speak of conversations with Idel, but there also one hears a Kabbalistic voice, experiential as well as historical, which speaks with authority in both realms.
I hesitate to describe the present book as Moshe Idel’s masterpiece, since his is a life’s work-in-progress, but Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation is certainly his most important volume so far, fulfilling much of the project first set forth in Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988). Since I myself am a literary critic and not a Kabbalistic scholar, this Foreword will address itself largely to three matters: the relationship between Scholem’s and Idel’s achievements; Idel’s account of the arcanization of the canon of the Hebrew Bible and of the exegetical modes that emerged to decode the arcana; the significance of Idel for interpretive procedures not in themselves Kabbalistic, nor even concerned with Kabbalah.
Kabbalah, a word meaning “tradition” with the nuance of “reception,” originally referred to the entire vast body of the Jewish Oral Law, but from about 1200 on it became more specific. The term was applied to the teachings of the Ravad (Rabbi Abraham ben David), the great sage of the twelfth-century Jews of Provence. His son, Isaac the Blind, composed the first texts of Kabbalah proper, as commentaries upon the Sefer Yezirah (Book of Creation), which exists in two tenth-century versions and which must be much older (perhaps third century). The Book of Creation says that God made the world with ten Sefirot (possibly just the numbers one through ten) and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
There were many pre-Kabbalistic (a term no Kabbalist would accept) commentaries on the Book of Creation, all of them quite normative. The next esoteric work was the Book Bahir, or “Book of Brightness,” which scholars date as thirteenth century. We thus have the puzzle of a thousand years of Oral Tradition between the Book of Creation and Book of Brightness. To a true Kabbalist, this is no problem at all, since Kabbalah insists it is the esoteric side of the Oral Torah that Moses received from God at Sinai. In the Bahir, the Sefirot are what they have been ever since, the ten divine attributes, principles, or powers. Isaac the Blind circulated his treatises secretly, after dictating them to favorite disciples. It is generally agreed that Isaac re-created the Sefirot and that he reconceptualized God as the en-sof, an intranslatable Infinite. Kabbalah itself has a canonical text that is postbiblical, the Zohar of Moses de Leon, a book-of-books written in Guadalajara, Spain, from 1280 through 1286, but attributed by its author to much more ancient sages. The Zohar hardly required arcanization, but as the canonical work for Kabbalists it provoked exegetical speculation that transcends even its intricate splendors. From Isaac the Blind onward, the Kabbalah as Scholem and Idel study it was essentially formed, though the Zohar elaborated it magnificently.
Idel’s Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation takes all this, and much more, as the given, and works on from there. His purpose is to show the Kabbalists’ very varied ways of locating the central values of the Hebrew Bible, and also to illuminate their modes of interpretation for revealing those values. This purpose was Gershom Scholem’s before it was Moshe Idel’s: what is the difference between these two masters of Kabbalah? Idel’s reverent critique of Scholem informs all his writings; in Messianic Mystics (1998), he speaks of “an oftentimes critical dialogue with the magisterial studies” of his precursor. In the most memorable chapter (7, “Ancient Jewish Theurgy”) of Kabbalah: New Perspectives, Idel dissents from Scholem’s great essay on “Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists.” Scholem contrasts the ritual of rabbinical Judaism, which “makes nothing happen and transforms nothing” with rituals established by Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the innovative genius who created later Kabbalism in Safed, Palestine. In Lurianic Kabbalah, myth reenters Judaism, according to Scholem. Idel regards this as Scholem’s own powerful myth, based upon “a simplistic division between a defeated mythical Gnosticism and a triumphant rabbinism.” Against this, Idel argues that ancient Jewish theurgy, the augmentation of God by man, continued throughout normative rabbinism. Idel’s emphasis upon the esoteric elements in ancient Jewish religion seems to me the center of his Kabbalah: New Perspectives, since it marks “the beginning of a return to another approach to Judaism,” as he inscribed a copy of the book for me in 1988.
Judaism, like Christianity, is a belated religion: both stem from the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. Judaism before that was a transitional seething of rival sects, including the followers of Jesus, among whom St. Paul won out over James the brother of Jesus. The ultimate heirs of James and his Ebionites, or “poor men,” were Muhammad and Islam. The great puzzle remains: what was the archaic Jewish religion? The Kabbalistic answer always has been that Kabbalah was, which is both impossible and yet intriguing, and which is an element in the rival speculations on the origins of pre-Judaism by Scholem and by Idel.
Scholem was not a Jewish Gnostic, but accurately could be termed a Gnostic Jew on the basis of his re-creation of Kabbalah, in which such astonishing figures as Sabbatai Zevi, Nathan of Gaza, and Jacob Frank received scrutinies as sympathetic as were accorded to Moses Cordovero, Isaac Luria, and Hayym Vital. Since Kabbalah in Scholem is identified with the genius of the Jewish religion, for Scholem even its deviant spirits are not heretics (unless they turned Christian). But Idel has no deep quarrel with Scholem upon this, since his own Kabbalism is equally intense. Visionaries do not like to think of themselves as agonistic, and Idel doubtless will not welcome my suggestion that his “critical dialogue” with Scholem has its hidden model in Jacob’s wrestling with a nameless one among the elohim in order to win the new name of Israel. Hemingway had the audacity to say he was in training in order to go fifteen rounds with Count Leo Tolstoy, but that is not a Kabbalistic trope. Still, Kabbalah always insists it came early, not late, in Jewish spiritual history, yet to come after the Hebrew Bible and the Babylonian Talmud is necessarily to be belated, and to come after Gershom Scholem as historian-exegete of Kabbalah is also to battle belatedness. Idel’s relation to Scholem is like that of the Romantic poets to John Milton, and there is something distinctly Miltonic in Scholem’s Kabbalistic authority. You can correct and complete Scholem, which are the wise ambitions of Idel, but you cannot displace him, as Idel is first to acknowledge.
Idel’s most compelling challenge to Scholem always has been to question the master’s judgment that the eruption of Kabbalah in thirteenth-century Provence and Catalonia represented an influx of a long-dormant Jewish Gnosticism back into Jewish spirituality. Shrewdly, Idel has argued that ancient Gnosticism itself derives from Jewish speculations upon the Anthropos, or Divine Man, Enoch, who did not die but was mutated into the startling Angel Metatron. The second-century exemplar of the minim, or heretics, Elisha Ben Abuyah, is reputed to have ascended to heaven, where he saw two enthroned Gods, Yahweh and Metatron, the God-Man. Reconstructing the ancient Jewish foundations of Gnosticism, Idel turned Scholem’s argument on its head, but in a manner that I think would not altogether have displeased Scholem. Like Idel, Scholem credited the Kabbalistic assertion of its continuity with an esoteric Oral Tradition, and in any case Scholem told me that both Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, in his intuitive judgment, as well as the Hermetic Corpus, all had emerged from Jewish Alexandria. Idel does not go so far (as yet), but in this regard anyway his revision of Scholem is quite Scholemian.
Idel always has been wary of Scholem’s tendency to ascribe Kabbalistic transformations to the direct effect of Jewish catastrophes, such as the Spanish Expulsion. Again, this is a disagreement mostly in degree and not in kind, almost as if Idel’s aim is to sharpen Scholem’s focus. Idel follows Kabbalistic tradition in being reticent about his own spiritual stance; he has published no equivalent of Scholem’s fascinating “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah” (1958), in which Scholem reaffirms that the authentic Kabbalah remains hidden; that Torah and God, being one, both cannot be known; that the name of God reaches us only in fragments; and that Kafka was secular Kabbalah, whose writings therefore possess “something of the strong light of the canonical, of that perfection which destroys.” Against this, Idel champions the canonical, both Scriptural and Kabbalistic, as “the perfection which absorbs.” Against the Kafkan emphasis upon the Negative, Idel urges the plenitude of Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah, and sets himself the task of so relating Kabbalah to interpretation that we are taught the work of “absorbing perfections.”
Again, Idel is not overthrowing Scholem, but treats Scholem as another canonical work, whose arcana can be revealed through positive modes of interpretation. Scholem’s disciples are displeased by this, but I suspect that Scholem himself would have been delighted, since his own Jewish Gnosticism was not dualistic and constituted for him the essence of Judaism. Hans Jonas, who with his friend Scholem made a formidable exegetical pairing, disliked the idea of a Jewish Gnosticism, and several times in discussion with me said that Idel’s quest to uncover “another approach to Judaism” was bound to fail, because the archaic Jewish religion, whatever it may have been, was not to be traced. Scholem, Jonas, Henry Corbin, and Idel seem to me the inescapable fourfold of Western scholarship on esotericism or gnosis, and Idel may yet find in Kabbalah a decoding instrument of interpretation that will answer Jonas’s skepticism.
Absorbing Perfections is an advanced work, going beyond Idel’s previous studies of Kabbalah. Its difficulties are legitimate and rewarding, not only for the understanding of Kabbalah by general readers like myself, but also for other common readers who have wearied of postmodernist negations of interpretation and are more than ready to welcome a plenitude of meaning, in the Bible and in Kabbalah and in secular canonical works as well, from Dante and Shakespeare on to Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett. What Idel calls “the absorbing quality of the Torah” is akin to the absorbing quality of Shakespeare or of Joyce. Strong authors, like sacred texts, can be defined as those with the capacity to absorb us. To “absorb,” in American English, means several related processes: to take something in as through the pores, or to engross one’s full interest or attention, or to assimilate fully. At the beginning of Chapter 5 Idel defines his “absorbing”:
I use this term in order to convey the expanding comprehensiveness of the concept of the text which, moving to the center of the Jewish society, also integrated attributes reminiscent of wider entities like the world or God. This expansion facilitated the attribution of more dynamic qualities to the text conceived of as capable of allowing various types of influences on processes taking place in the world, in God, and in the human psyche.
That is certainly an interpretative principle of plenitude, and I find it vastly preferable to our current academic modes of reading Shakespeare, in which King Lear is seen as being shaped by cultural and historical circumstances, rather than by William Shakespeare, strongest of all authors. I myself read, teach, and write about Shakespeare as someone who is absorbing perfections, conceiving his text as influencing what takes place in the world and in the human psyche, and even in God, if there is God. Shakespeare, like the Bible or Dante or the Zohar, absorbs us even as we absorb him, or them. Historicizing Hamlet or Lear breaks down very quickly: they themselves are the perfections that absorb us all.
Moshe Idel, as I write, sits at his desk in Jerusalem, finishing a book to be called Kabbalah and Eros, and starting another on Kabbalah and the Great Chain of Being. He can hear gunfire as he writes, and though I regard myself as a Jewish Gnostic, unable to pray to the alienated God, I would pray for his safety if I could. Like Scholem before him, he has made Kabbalah his life’s enterprise, and like Scholem his work has become essential for anyone who desires to confront Kabbalah, and find herself there, more truly and more strange.