Two main processes informed most of the speculative hermeneutical corpora in the postbiblical forms of Judaism. The first is the expansion of the relevance of the content of the canonical texts to increasingly more cosmological, theosophical, intellectual, and psychological realms than those ancient texts themselves claimed to engage. This expansion is often related to processes of arcanization, secretive understandings of the canonical texts understood as pointing to these realms in allusive ways: anagrammatic, numerical, allegorical, or symbolic.
The other main process is intimately intertwined with the first: it consists in the emergence of complex exegetical systems that present specific methods to decode the arcana believed to be concealed within the canonical texts. This proliferation of exegetical systems is a corollary of the expansion of the content dimensions of the classical texts. The arcanization processes, then, should be understood as having some boundaries, which means that the term arcana in its various Hebrew forms is used only in order to disclose it. As I understand it, arcanization does not mean the creation of a concept of text that is opaque since the arcana cannot be decoded. No special process of arcanization is related to a transformation of the text as transcendental. Secrets are commensurable to the methods that will resolve the enigma implied in the secrets. On the other hand, secrets should be imagined to exist, otherwise the resort to eccentric exegetical techniques, without the trust that something inherent in the text or in the mind of the author is available, would become a hollow game.
To a certain extent, these processes represent two sides of the same coin: to no canonical text are attributed semantic dimensions that cannot be discovered or uncovered, and their discovery necessitates reliable, namely authoritative, techniques. The expansion of the dimensions of the canon and the proliferation of exegetical methods sometimes occurred in those intellectual moments when Judaism came into contact with other forms of thought; those encounters created both tensions and enrichments, one of the latter being the ascent of new forms of hermeneutics. We shall be concerned here not with hermeneutics in Judaism in general but with a rather specific form of esoteric literature, the mystical one. The other main type of arcanization, represented by philosophical understandings of the canonical texts and the corresponding allegorical method, will involve us only tangentially, to the extent that it has been absorbed in Kabbalistic hermeneutics.
The following discussions, I should like to make clear, attempt to describe hermeneutical developments in a fairly well-defined literary corpus. They do not make any ontological claims as to the nature of text in general, as some forms of philosophy of text strive for, nor do they make claims as to the structure of exegetical methods as such, as modern hermeneutics does from time to time. My discussions should therefore be seen as part of an effort of understanding some specific hermeneutical processes whose possible relevance for general hermeneutics is to be analyzed elsewhere (if at all), perhaps by other authors. I have tried to avoid lengthy discussions about the Kabbalistic concepts of the nature of language, because I have dealt with them on other occasions and I hope to elaborate on this topic elsewhere.1 Here, the emphasis is solely on language as it is structured within canonical books; Kabbalistic discussions of the importance of the discrete linguistic unities are ignored.
Jewish religion has undergone substantial changes over the millennia. One of the most important was the transition from a nomad religiosity, centered around the mobile Tabernacle, as described in the Pentateuch, to a more stable one, focused on the stationary Temple, as described elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, and finally to a religion focusing on canonical writings: the Bible and the rabbinic texts. The renomadization of postbiblical Judaism is characterized by its novel gravitation toward books and their study,2 together with rituals that could be performed anywhere, no longer relying on a sacred building and the rituals connected to it. According to most of the rabbinic sources, God is encountered within sacred texts rather than sacred spaces. However, the text is not a mere substitute for a sanctuary or a temple; it has, and creates, a dynamic of its own. Despite the renomadization of Judaism, or its transformation into a less topocentric religion than it was in the later biblical period, we witness a radical change of the medium of the divine theophany. In the postbiblical period God is conceived of much less as penetrating reality at His free will, using the apparatus of the Tabernacle or the Temple, than as constantly present within the literal signs of a portable book.
Or, to put it in more theological terms: the speaking God of the biblical period, who became more taciturn in rabbinic literature, was believed to have been addressing His elite few, who approached Him not by means of free direct speech—neither was He using His vibrant, imposing, direct voice when addressing them—but by the medium of a canonized formulation expressing His will, which became a written book.
In rabbinic literature it is through the canonized reification of this voice in written documents that most of the rabbinic masters conceived their encounter with the divine. Also in the rabbinic documents the assumption is that there is no absolute freezing of the text’s content, and the midrashic commentators were asked to capture the resonances and nuances dormant in the canonical texts. Moreover, many of the characteristics of the divine power were transferred to the entity that now embodies the presence of the divine voice in the present religious and historical state, represented by the centrality of the sacred text.
While the notion of the sacred Bible is not itself a biblical concept, the sacralization of that book in the rabbinic period created another path, which became more and more dominant, of encountering the divine by resorting to a written document and to letters as pronounced by the student, rather than through divine voices or apparitions. While the intervention of the divine will within the life of the individual, the tribe, and the nation was central for the first two phases of Jewish religion, in the third one the divine will was conceived of as being already encapsulated within and perpetuated by the biblical text. The divine voice, as captured within the text, has been verbally reactivated by the human voice via studying or praying. It is this textualization of religious life, which stamped the nature of many aspects of rabbinic and meta-rabbinic Judaism, that will occupy us here.
One of the most important consequences of this process of textualization is the emergence of an ontologically perceived zone of literary—that is, the structured and written—expression of the divine will. This zone does not merely oblige human religious behavior because it has become, in the form of a book, canonical and thus very stable; it also—and this point needs emphasizing—restricts divine free choice itself. From the religious point of view, the idealization of the canonical text shaped Jewish society but at the same time created a vision of the content of the scriptures as embracing nonhuman and non-historical zones as well: both the natural and the divine. So, for example, not only humans are required to fulfill certain rituals, like praying or donning tefillin, but also God is described as doing so. In other words, rabbinic literature, and some writings composed at its periphery, has created a new myth, that of the Torah, or in more general terms a myth of a canonical book that is of overwhelming relevance for both the reader and the Author, but also for the created reality that is the arena of the encounter between them.3 This new rabbinic myth of the text, related to the phenomenon of textualization—whose details will be treated in Chapter 1—served as the basis of many developments in the various types of hermeneutics found in Jewish mysticism. In fact, the two main processes to be discussed below depend on the transition from a topocentric to a text-oriented religion. While the former attributes special powers to the sacred place, or to the building and rituals related to that place, the text-oriented religion locates them in a new center, the book. Different as the two religious mentalities are, they nevertheless share a concern with a concrete center, which can be seen, touched, and experienced firsthand.
The methodological presupposition that underlies many of the following observations is that the most significant Jewish literary corpora have never been composed in a literary, terminological, and conceptual vacuum. This means that many of the authors who contributed a substantial layer to Judaism were well acquainted with a panorama—though not always the full panorama—of Jewish culture, in either written or oral form.4 Those corpora are based on texts and traditions that preceded them and are in a constant dialogue—often multiple dialogues, which in many cases meant sharp controversies—with some of the preceding and contemporary ideas and texts. In turn these corpora become part of a web of relations with the subsequent strata of Jewish creativity, a consideration that is pertinent in the case of Jewish esotericism as well. This assumption is based on two considerations:
(a) There was a very rigorous selection of the material that has been preserved, and those types of corpora that were seen as not salient to the rabbinic elite have been efficiently censored or even eliminated from the orbit of Jewish culture.5 The Qumran literature, Philo, Josephus Flavius, and the apocryphal literature did not leave significant traces in the rabbinic texts. The fact that non-rabbinic forms of Jewish literature, like the Heikhalot and magical literatures, have nevertheless been transmitted presupposes the awareness of the existence of a certain consonance—or at least not a stringent dissonance—between them and the rabbinic circles who made the selection. Jewish culture is a cumulative one par excellence; it assumes that the earlier is very often the better. Moreover, the curriculum of study, which started with the Bible and went through the most important stages of cultural developments, fosters this view. The peculiar propensity to preserve as culturally active numerous layers of classical literature creates the possibility of continuous dialogues, and frictions, between those layers.
(b) Most Jewish literary corpora either consist of commentaries or resort to at least some interpretive stands. Because dialogues with literatures of the past are intrinsic features of these interpretations, both deep continuities and radical changes define the dynamics of Jewish religion. Rarely, however, have total ruptures produced significant types of influential literature. It seems that moments of crises are prone to encourage turns toward more conservative stands, toward more “authentic” types of thought that will ensure, in a religious society, the continuity of a certain sort of mentality despite the historical, social, or political ruptures. Thus, the necessity to engage a variety of literary corpora seems to me to be a sine qua non of serious studies concerning the conceptual and literary structures of Jewish religious types of literature. I would like to emphasize the difference between this importance of the layered and accumulative vision in Jewish culture, which is relevant for understanding Jewish mysticism as well, and the idea of authority, or theological authority, which informs the attitude of mystics, as least as presented in the formulations of Gershom Scholem.6 There is a variety of attitudes toward classical texts, including classical mystical texts, even among the Jewish mystics, and one of the key points is the question of the various degrees and forms of assimilation of the prior types of Jewish literature.
Therefore, both significant forms of continuities and profound changes are well represented by the recurrent processes of arcanization of the canonical texts by those who subsequently interpreted them. The discovery, in fact the projection, of a secret meaning helps the ancient text not only to survive in new situations and to enhance its influence, but also to enrich the present. A more balanced understanding of the dynamics of a certain traditional culture must take into consideration the stabilizing factors, the stasis of the system, and the ex-static elements that are instrumental in changing, diversifying, or annihilating some of the static elements. Hermeneutics is oftentimes part of these complex processes.
An interesting formulation of the young Stephane Mallarme asserts, “Toute chose sacree et qui veut demeurer sacree s’enveloppe de mystere.”7 To take Mallarme’s statement by letter, mystery is an inherent quality of the sacred, both a systemic quality and a strategy, sometimes conscious, for ensuring the preservation and the continuation of the sacred. In fact, one of the possible definitions of the special status of a text is the feeling of the necessity to adopt it in a later period and to adapt it to that period. One of the basic strategies of adaptation is interpretive arcanization, which may correspond to Mallarme’s “s’enveloppe de mystere,”a phrase that may be rendered, in a more technical way, as a crisical arcanization.8 By this phrase I refer to arcanizations that result from the pressure of external events, historical or cultural, that demand a reorganization of the order of the text as rotating around an esoteric core that answers the repercussions of that crisis. It would, however, be too simplistic to attempt to separate the two forms of arcanization, because the crisical one will always attempt to capitalize on the systemic arcanization, and even to disguise itself as such.9 This deep affinity is very subtly implied in Mallarme’s formulation. The whole range of classical Jewish literature—the Bible, Sefer Yetzirah, the talmudic literature, Midrash, liturgy, the Heikhalot literature, R. Abraham ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Pentateuch,10 Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed,11 Nahmanides’ Commentary on the Pentateuch,12 the Book of the Zohar,13 and even some of the Lurianic texts—has been commented upon, time and again, because of the prevailing assumption that they include secrets. The question is, why had the secrets been accepted and the above books become the subject of so many commentaries? One of the many possible reasons is the need to supply new areas of significance to the ancient canonical corpora. Thus, when crises intervene, they affect the particular form of existing arcanization which did not fulfill the needs of the intellectuals and thus is to be rejected, implicitly or explicitly, in favor of another, new type of arcanization. In that manner, I assume, most of the developments took place: the existence of a systemic arcanization allowed the development of new forms of arcanization.
Thus, a move from the exoteric nature of some of those texts to an esoteric understanding of them is one of the major moves characteristic of the development of Jewish literature, especially the speculative and some of the interpretive ones. Even in those cases when some esoteric elements are found in some interpreted texts, like ibn Ezra’s commentaries, the Guide of the Perplexed, Nahmanides’ commentary on the Torah, or the Book of the Zohar, the subsequent commentaries have often enhanced the scope of the esoteric topics beyond what was intended by the original authors.
This move from an exoteric to an esoteric religiosity, or from the biblical weltanschauung to some of its medieval elaborations that took the various forms of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah, is a salient description of one of the major developments of postbiblical Judaism up to the sixteenth century and is related to the arcanization of the biblical text. Most of the works mentioned above are themselves attempts to explain, allude to, or extract secrets from the Bible, or at least to hint at their existence without revealing them, as in the case of Nahmanides. Thus, two forms of arcanization may be discerned. The primary one, which created new classics, is based on the belief that the Bible hides some secrets; however, since the medieval classics that proposed the arcane understanding of the canonical texts themselves resorted to allusive literary strategies, a second move becomes necessary, one which consists in a huge series of supercommentaries attempting to decode those secrets by elaborating on the hints included in the former writings. This second move can be described as superarcanization, not only because it decodes secrets found in an already arcane sort of writing—a medieval book—but also because the supercommentaries are inclined to the uncover secrets that are not to be found even in the medieval classics of esotericism, which already started to arcanize the Jewish canons. The main direction can be described as a gradual disclosure of secrets, received orally or in writing, or invented, which is at the same time the gradual introduction of secrets within the earlier classical texts.14 Conscious dearcanization was preceded by, or was concomitant with, unconscious deeper arcanization. Along more general lines, only after the canonization of the Bible and the assurance of its special status, namely its integrity as an ultimate text, was it possible to move toward the process of its interpretation15 and then to resort to another aspect of its alleged nature: the existence of nonexoteric aspects, namely the arcana. I would say that if the written Torah, which served as the main object of commentary, belongs to a prior stage of human consciousness, the orality that is characteristic of the preaxial age, the commentaries on the text that has been committed to writing, is the definite representation of what Jaspers called the “axial age.” The period of the transition between the two would be the committing to writing of the Torah and its canonization, a period that roughly approximates the emergence of the axial age. The process of arcanization is an elitist impulse that moves from the tribe or community to smaller groups and is therefore part of the more complex process of axialization.
The process of arcanization in Judaism reached its peak in the sixteenth century, when the last comprehensive corpus of Jewish myths and symbols, as presented in the various versions of Lurianic Kabbalah, became crystallized. By and large, the medieval types of arcanizations can be designated as hypersemantic moves, namely the imposition of sets of symbolic meanings on the already existing plain senses of the Scriptures, or of the original meanings of the medieval interpreted texts. This hypersemantic arcanization has, however, been preceded by a late antiquity magical or hyposemantic arcanization, which means that some texts, the Pentateuch and the Psalms, have been viewed as fraught with magical powers, which underlay their plain sense and the canonical sequel of letters and words.16
On the other hand, a move from esotericism toward exotericism is discernible since the end of the sixteenth century. Apparently unrelated to the Protestant emphasis on the literal and historical senses and the rejection of secrecy that emerged in the sixteenth century, or the rejection of the occult symbolism described in some studies of B. Vickers, or Spinoza’s rejection of the medieval theories of double meanings of the Bible, the surge in propensity for exotericism in some Jewish circles was not a matter of one specific development. Rather, it sprang from a series of smaller, yet major, developments, that included the printing of numerous Kabbalistic writings that undermined the esoteric nature of this lore, the attempts of Kabbalists to spread aspects of their secrets in more popular treatises (the ethical Kabbalistic literature), and the emergence of the last significant form of mystical literature, Hasidism, which is ostensibly exoteric in its general approaches, and finally the demythization of the mystical forms of Judaism by Enlightenment approaches. These diverse processes conspire to produce a relative dearcanization of the religious life, though the classical texts themselves are imagined as pregnant with infinite meanings. To a certain extent, the hypersemantic arcanization has been attenuated, and in some instances—Hasidism, for example—the magical arcanization has become more visible. Again this is a surfacing of much earlier views, as we shall see later on.
Let me dwell on my use of the term move. I scarcely can believe in the possibility of pointing out the precise meaning of many passages in ancient and medieval texts, especially those dealing with such complex topics as secrecy, mystical experience, revelations, and the structure of a dynamic divine world. Given the relative indeterminacy of so many crucial passages that inspired the later discussions, it is difficult to assess the exact nature of the semantic and conceptual moves. The scholarly effort, which is naturally inclined to pinpoint meanings, is often thwarted by the fluidity of the interpreted texts, by the inner experiences that may reflect altered states of consciousness, or by descriptions of the dynamic nature of the divine, angelic, or demonic worlds. A very creative hermeneutical approach to the sacred texts, which are reinterpreted time and again by the same mystic in new ways, is not a good prescription for the belief in a stability of meanings in the mystical texts under scrutiny below. This is why, in my opinion, it is necessary to take into account the broad semantic field of a given word, notion, or conceptual structure both in the earlier literatures and in the more recent ones, which will be able to map all its usages. As is the case with terms for secrecy in ancient and medieval Jewish literatures, the move—in fact our understanding of the different forms and directions of developments of a particular term—consists in semantic oscillations and fluctuations. Such semantic mutations, as well as continuities, are necessary for a better understanding of each of the stages of a term’s evolution. The cumulative mutations of individual terms provide a clue to much larger conceptual changes.
A later semantic meaning of a given term may mark a development caused by a dramatic change, a rupture with the past—a crisical arcanization—but also a gradual development of possibilities that are inherent in the earlier texts but not obvious to a modern scholar for various reasons, like the fragmentary nature of the pertinent literature or oral transmission.17 There may, indeed, be instances of systemic arcanizations, namely various visions of the secret sense of the text not caused by a rupture with the historical context that informed the text, nor characterized by a stringent dissonance with the semantic fields organizing the initial discourse and the main spiritual values that constellate the original authors, because of dramatic new changes in the cultural ambiance of the interpreter. In other words, the texts themselves are sometimes prone to provide the springboard for various esoteric logics—I emphasize the plural—which evolve through the interpretive efforts of a variety of interpreters, where the difference between them may be a matter of personal idiosyncrasy. This observation can be easily confirmed by the fact that mystics of the same religion living in the same period, sometimes in the same geographical area, offer different interpretations of the same text: for example, the Zoharic theosophical-theurgical interpretations differ drastically from the allegorical-psychological interpretations of the contemporary ecstatic Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.
On the other hand, the same interpretations may be embraced by Jewish mystics living in different historical periods and in different geographical areas, just as a particular mystical text may be understood differently by modern scholars who subscribe to the same academic methodology. Much depends, in such subtle and obscure matters, on what the mystic (or modern scholar) is able to bring to the text in order to illuminate it. In any case, I would like to emphasize that crisical arcanization, which is invoked sometimes by scholars in order to explain the emergence of the Kabbalah itself or of the Lurianic Kabbalah, is a rather doubtful assumption, for it relies less on detailed analyses of texts than on historiosophical suppositions which, interesting as they may be, represent what the scholar understands as external history, the scholar’s views on the impact of history on individuals and groups, their ways of reacting to crises, and other paratextual factors.18
Sometimes what can be regarded as a religious, intellectual, or cultural crisis triggering a certain type of arcanization, such as Maimonides’ Aristotelian reading of the Jewish tradition, has been resolved by resorting to traditional esoteric terms like sitrei torah, ma’aseh bereshit, and ma’aseh merkavah. The perplexity of Maimonides’ Jewish contemporaries has been resolved not by proposing Aristotle’s thought translated in Hebrew as the real solution but by reinterpreting ancient Jewish esotericism. To what extent there is a certain sort of continuation, in addition to obvious innovations, in Maimonides’ esotericism is yet a matter of further investigation.19 In my opinion, the Maimonidean project represents crisical arcanization, which is quite obvious even in the title of the work in which it has been expounded: Guide of the Perplexed. This is a comprehensive, though neither systematic nor systemic, arcanization. Crisical as Maimonides’ own move is, however, it does not easily renounce its conservative claims, namely self-presentation as a systemic development, more precisely a partial disclosure, of rabbinic esotericism. It seems that Kabbalistic arcanization, as well as that of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, whose writings date from the generation immediately following Mai-monides’ floruit, is much more systemic than crisical. As a reaction to Maimonidean arcanization, some of the Kabbalistic texts betray a crisical nature, as they attempt to counteract the purportedly pernicious views of the great eagle.
However, when criticizing Maimonides’ esotericism, the Kabbalists have often asserted that they do not invent an ad hoc explanation but rather continue a much longer chain of tradition.20 Their recurrent claim is that their esotericism, and thus their arcanization, pertains to the very nature of the original texts beginning with the Bible itself. It is, according to them, not merely one dimension of the canonical texts but rather the decisive core of a text’s religious mentality that determines their esoteric interpretations. In other words, significant forms of medieval Jewish speculative literature can be described as representing different, in some cases even opposing, forms of arcanization that were aware of each other and sometimes even contested the legitimacy of its competitor. What is nevertheless accepted as fact by both Maimonides’ disciples and the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists is that they retrieved, though in rather different manners and by cultivating different religious ideals, the “original” esotericism inherent in the Bible as mediated by the rabbinic conceptualization of esotericism, as mentioned in the late-antiquity talmudic, midrashic, and in some cases even Heikhalot literatures. Thus, this is a medieval arcanization of much earlier arcanizations of
Judaism. The debates of the medieval masters about the esoteric views of the ancients constitute one of the most fascinating components of Jewish speculation since the late Middle Ages. Let me therefore turn to those earlier layers of discussion which nourished the medieval battles. Without understanding some developments that are already conspicuous in the premedieval Jewish corpora concerning esoterica, it will be difficult to assess the evolution of these topics in the Middle Ages. Medieval Jewish esoteric topics should be examined from the point of view of the continuation of earlier traditions and of their changes, adoptions and adaptations of alien material, and, oftentimes, the proposal of audacious innovations. The general move can be viewed as a greater propensity for a mysterious understanding of the ancient secrets.21
This approach to the text as pointing to secrets that are allegedly not evident in a prima facie reading allows a much more creative role for the reader or the commentator, who is deemed to deal with the absent, the concealed, or the omitted elements.22 By amplifying the scope of the Torah to the status of a world-absorbing entity, some medieval Jewish authors also amplified their own role as interpreters.23 To a great degree, they added or projected the secrets, namely what they conceived of to be the most sublime aspects of the Torah, and then extracted them, as two fundamental phases of their interpretive activity. On the other hand, by portraying the Torah as God-absorbing and man-absorbing, as we shall see in Chapter 2 and Appendix 2, the perusal and interpretation of the Torah become much more than a process of fathoming the secret meanings of the most important texts: possibilities of much more emotional and extreme forms of mystical experiences emerged.
The assumption that will lead the following discussion is the existence of three major modes of arcanization: the magical, the philosophical, and the mystical. Each of them comprises several distinct subcategories, whose precise mapping is still an important desideratum of modern scholarship of Judaism. As the main concern of my discussions below will be Kabbalistic hermeneutics, I shall focus my analyses on the implications of different Kabbalistic trends on the ensuing hermeneutics, relegating the implications of the distinctions of the other forms of arcanization to the margin. It is quintessential, however, to be aware of the ongoing intertwining and overlapping relations between these three modes. Direct influences, open and hidden forms of antagonism, and a variety of syntheses between them account for many of the characteristics of the historical developments and the phenomenology of Jewish hermeneutics. This methodological assumption holds as much in the case of Jewish hermeneutics as it does in the development of Jewish thought, a point that is often overlooked by those who have suggested broader pictures of the different aspects of Jewish thought. This is not the place to develop this methodological observation,24 but I shall attempt to follow it whenever pertinent. In general I would say that Maimonides’ struggle with magic and ancient Jewish esoterica has not been put into relief in modern scholarship, and consequently the possibility of the articulation of worldviews that are reactions from circles who were attacked by his critiques has not been sufficiently explored. Similarly, the fact that Maimonides has been alleged to hold exactly the same type of views to which he strongly protested has been underestimated as an indication of intellectual interactions that took place in the formative period of Kabbalah.25 The gradual strengthening of the astromagic of ultimately Hermetic origins in post-Maimonidean thought, a development that had a deep impact on Kabbalah, supports my thesis as to the dialectical role of the relationship between magic, philosophy, and Kabbalah. In fact, the last major development in Jewish mysticism, Hasidism, owes much to this still-unrecognized dialectic.26
The dialectic is most evident in the metamorphoses of a statement stemming from a magical vision of the Torah that describes the unique nature of the Torah as consisting, on its esoteric level, of a continuum of divine names.27 Moreover, the relations between allegorical-philosophical hermeneutics and the combinatory one will engage us in Chapter 11, and the integration of various exegetical trends will be shown in Appendix 1. This interpenetration between the various approaches is one of the reasons for the absence of sectarian tendencies that are characteristic of purist approaches.
The working hypothesis behind my approach to Jewish mysticism since the Middle Ages is that differing speculative models informed the thought, praxis, and subsequently the writings of various Kabbalists and Hasidic masters. Far from representing a unified or monochromatic line of thought that allegedly has changed throughout history, the diverse Kabbalistic sorts of literature, and to a lesser extent various Hasidic schools, have centered around at least three major models: the theosophical-theurgical one, the ecstatic one, and the talismanic one.28 The interplay and interactions between these models characterize many important moments of Kabbalistic creativity. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, we should better observe how system into system runs. Yet, given the fact that a theory of models in Jewish mysticism still has to be carefully formulated, I will attempt to delineate only what seems to me to be the salient points relevant to one model: the talismanic one, which will be addressed in Chapter 5. I shall not elaborate on the three models but only mention very briefly their most important characteristics relating to the nature of language.
The theosophical-theurgical model, which informs many of the discussions in Spanish Kabbalah and flourished afterward in sixteenth-century Safed, assumes that language reflects the inner structure of the divine realm, the sefirotic system of divine powers. At the same time, language was thought to influence this structure by means of theurgical activities that aim to restore the harmony within the divine realm. Either in its cognitive-symbolic role or in its theurgical-operational function, language has been conceived by this type of Kabbalah as hypersemantic. This means that not only is the ordinary sense of language maintained by the Kabbalists, but its basic function as part of the Kabbalistic enterprise is due to a surplus of meaning, which adds semantic fields to that or those designated by the ordinary meaning. The two aspects, the symbolic (referential) and the theurgical (performative), different as they may be from each other, should not be viewed as totally independent. The symbolic role of language, namely the concept that it reflects the structure of the divine powers, is often only one side of the coin; the other is the use of symbolic knowledge in order to amend processes taking place within the divine realm.29 In the following I use the term theurgy to designate the rituals by which God or a divine structure like the ten sefirot is affected, rather than the techniques of spiritual purification that enable someone to elevate. Both definitions are found in modern scholarship, but I prefer the first.30
The ecstatic approach is palpably different; it assumes that the Kabbalist can use language and the canonical texts in order to induce a mystical experience by manipulating elements of language, together with other components of the various mystical techniques. This approach is much less concerned with divine inner structures, for it focuses on the restructuring of the human psyche in order to prepare it for the encounter with the divine. The ecstatic theory of language is less mimetic, and thus less symbolic and theurgic, than the view espoused by the theosophical Kabbalah. While the theosophical-theurgical approach to language assumes the paramount importance of information that is either absorbed by the human mind or transmitted, in an energetic form, by the soul to the divine, in many cases the ecstatic view of language encourages the effacement of knowledge as part of the opening toward the divine. Language helps, according to ecstatic Kabbalah, to cleanse someone’s consciousness by breaking, as part of a mystical technique, the words of the sacred scripture into nonsemantic units.31 While the theosophical Kabbalah emphasizes the given, structured aspects of language as manifested in the canonical writings, in ecstatic Kabbalah the deconstruction of the canonical texts, and of ordinary language as well, is an important mystical tool for restructuring the human psyche.
The talismanic model, which will occupy our attention much more in the following discussions, conceives the divine text as one of the major means to attract supernal (divine or celestial) powers on the magician or the mystic, who becomes, in many cases, the portent of extraordinary forces that can be described as magical. In general, this approach can be called hyposemantic, which means that language is regarded as magically effective even when one ignores its semantic aspects. This is a strongly anthropocentric attitude, because it envisages the enhancement of the spiritual and material well-being of an individual, and often a whole religious group, as a core value of religion.32
The theosophical-theurgical and the talismanic models assume that, in addition to the semantic aspect of the sacred text, and of the Hebrew language in general, there is an energetic aspect that may either have some effect on the supernal world or attract it onto the low. While in ecstatic Kabbalah these two aspects are sometimes present, they nevertheless play a relatively marginal role there. This brand of Kabbalah recognizes the magical powers of language, though it sees them as exercising an influence on an inferior level of existence as compared to the cathartic role language plays in purifying the soul and the intellect in order to prepare them for receiving the supernal efluvia.
By and large, the talismanic model, as exemplified by linguistic magic, is a synthesis between the particularistic tendency characteristic of the theosophical-theurgical model, which deals basically with halakhic behavior, and the more universalistic tendency of the Hermetic sources. Focused as they are on Hebrew words as major tools, the linguistic talismanics and sometimes also the ecstatic Kabbalists assume that not only Hebrew words but also Hebrew letters, and especially what can be called, according to the Jewish authors, “Hebrew” sounds, may serve as talismanic means. At least on the level of monadic linguistic elements, a more universalistic potentiality can be assumed; I mean that given the need to deconstruct conventional language, including Hebrew, into its elementary units, on the phonetic level the notion of a resemblance between the different languages is more plausible.33
The theosophical-theurgical and ecstatic models are amply represented by distinct Kabbalistic schools and literary corpora, which can be described as embodying the speculative assumptions mentioned above insofar as language is concerned. Thus, the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah and the ecstatic Kabbalah are known from rather independent Kabbalistic bodies of writings; the talismanic model, however, has been adopted by both theosophical-theurgical and ecstatic Kabbalists, who adapted the astromagical sources to their specific spiritual purposes. This is one of the reasons why this last model has been neglected by modern scholars of Kabbalah. The concern with a more unified picture of the development of this lore has induced a rather monochromatic view of its phenomenology, which pushed the magical schemes, and to some extent the ecstatic literature, to a corner, emphasizing—in my opinion, overemphasizing—the centrality of the theosophical mode of Kabbalah.34
Let me formulate the three models in terms of their objectives. The ecstatic model is concerned more with the changes a certain mystical technique, based mainly on language, may induce in man; the talismanic model emphasizes the effects that someone’s ritualistic linguistic acts may have on the external world; and the theosophical-theurgical model centers on inducing harmony within the divine realm. In the following exposition I shall attempt to give a more detailed linguistic description of the talismanic model and to trace the main stages of the infiltration of this model within the various forms of Kabbalistic literature. Interesting as the description of these models may be, the models have only rarely been expounded as completely separate approaches. Indeed, the ecstatic was sometimes combined with the talismanic one, so that the talismanic operator was described as achieving contact with the divine realm before he is able to draw down the supernal power. Likewise, the theurgical operation, which ensures the continuing pulsation of energy within the divine realm, has often been combined with the magical or talismanic approach, so that drawing the emanation from the higher sefirot to the lower ones was followed by causing the emanation’s descent into the extradivine world. Common to all these models is the view that language, at least as represented by the canonical texts, involves a strong type of “speech acts,” to use John Searle’s phrase, or, to use J. L. Austin’s category, the recitations of letters are performative utterances par excellence. However, the efficiency of the Kabbalistic approaches to language or text depends much more on their parasemantic qualities than on their semantic ones.
Like Kabbalah, the term hermeneutics covers a variety of different schools and opinions, and it has been understood differently by various scholars. Here I would like to distinguish between three main topics that constitute the field of hermeneutics as it is approached in this book.
The first topic is the nature of the author, which encompasses a variety of authors, beginning with the Author of the divine book, Whose nature was thought to inform the nature of the text He generated, as well as the task of the reader or interpreter. The author may also be an angel or any other supernal entity who inspires the human interpreter or the interpreter’s unaided spiritual activity. When the subject of the discussions is an entity heterogeneous to the interpreter, like the divine author, we are in the area of theology; when an angel, we deal with angelology. Indeed, there can be no doubt, as I shall demonstrate, that without an understanding of the overall speculative structures that informed the worldviews of the interpreters, it is hard to fathom some of the aspects of their hermeneutics. The consonance between the infinite author and the infinite text, which will be discussed in Chapter 3, is a good example. The vision of the hermeneutical project as aiming to understand the nature of the author and his intentions has been not only part of literary approaches but in fact quite widespread in religious hermeneutics, where the sacred book was conceived to be the main source for understanding of the nature of God. From this perspective hermeneutics, like philosophy, is no more than a maidservant of theology. Also in modern scholarship of Judaism, and of Kabbalah in particular, texts have been investigated basically in order to extract from them a system or theology, whose precise articulation was regarded as one of the main targets of the scholar.35
In keeping with the call to recognize a diversity of models of thought in Kabbalah, my goal will be not to discover the system or theology of a given text but to point out the threads that lead from a particular theology to the understanding of the text and the interpreter’s task. From this point of view, I shall travel a trajectory different from the theological one: systemic and abstract knowledge that informed the thought of an author will be supposed as known by me, as part of my perusal of the pertinent texts, and my task will be the disclosure of the impact that system had on the text under scrutiny. This is the reason why, in the following chapters, discussions of theological stands will be relatively rare. By and large, without addressing the issue of the existence of ontologically heterogeneous sources for religious experiences, I will assume that the external entities are to be understood as the production of different forms of the religious imaginaire. The starting point of the enterprise of many of the hermeneutes whose views will be discussed below had, in my opinion, framed the range of their attainments, just as the modern secular imaginaire, based on a propensity for elements of negativity, confines the forms of experience a modern reader may have in any given text. The extension of the range of topics allegedly included in the canonical texts, which amounts to an imaginaire of the text, allowed the hermeneute experiences that would otherwise have been impossible.
The second topic, which will concern us much more than the first, is the nature of the text or, to resort to other terminology, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “matter of the text” or Paul Ricoeur’s “the world of the text.” Attempting to disassociate my discussion from an organic linkage to an external being, or to human authors—though not from a certain way of imagining such a being—I follow, broadly speaking, Ricoeur’s call for a threefold distancing of the literary work from the psychology of the author, from the circumstances of its composition, and from the audience to which it has been addressed.36 The following analyses largely deal with the nonreferential world created by the influence of the Bible in the postbiblical forms of religion. However, unlike Ricoeur’s main concern with possible worlds of the text, which are related to the readers and then attracted by a certain book, thus constituting its more comprehensive world, my claim will be that many of the Jewish elites whose concepts I shall scrutinize are initially informed by a variety of books, while the sacred book they studied and interpreted was consumed as part of a much broader and variegated culture that conditioned its understanding so substantially that it is difficult to separate it from a more comprehensive and articulated spiritual structure. The world of the book is, in the contexts to be discussed below, too vague a concept. That is why, in the first part of the present book, I shall deal with various conceptions about the sacred book, many of which have as their subject matter the Bible but often differ dramatically from the concepts found in the Bible itself.
My assumption is palpably different from Ricoeur’s general theory of hermeneutics—what has been called the eclipse of the reader37—which separates the more objective world of the text from the reader, its psychology and subjectivity. Rather, I will take the main book under discussion, the Bible, sometimes to be a reservoire semantique (following Gilbert Durand) of concepts that are far away, not to say utterly different, from what I understand to be the book’s intellectual horizon. Two thinkers, Ricoeur and W. C. Smith, who were influenced by a Christian view of gratia, regarded the Bible as the source of inspiration. Ricoeur, who to a certain extent follows Gadamer, has been discussed briefly already. Smith formulated his view thus: “The significant question is not whether the Bible is inspired, but whether it is inspiring.”38 These views presuppose a weak reader or interpreter, while I assume that in some forms of mystical exegesis we may speak of a stronger interpreter. Characteristic of those more radical interpreters is what I propose to call an intercorporal situation, namely the resort of many Jewish thinkers to a long series of concepts stemming from previously alien and intellectually structured literary corpora. This situation seems to me to be symptomatic of the way the sacred book has been studied in the centuries after it was written, in historical and cultural circumstances that differ from the ancient authors’ main preoccupation. I consider this intercorporal situation to characterize many of the medieval and premodern attitudes toward the Bible, a stand that attributes transformative valences to cultural encounters between Jews and other peoples.39
In fact, I shall be more concerned with strong readers and interpreters, whose interaction with sacred books is a matter not only of fusion of horizons, in a Gadamerian sense, or the reader’s self-understanding, as Ricoeur would put it, but of much more dramatic restructurings of the ancient texts. Interpretation should be understood as more of an interpenetration than a fusion. The Kabbalists resorted to radical exegetical techniques and to more comprehensive and systematic theological conceptions that are the result of an acculturation of some parts of Jewish elites to their environment. Unlike Gadamer, I assume that it is hard to point to one specific horizon informing a given period that would serve as the conceptual receptacle for understanding a particular reading of a specific book. Moreover, I would even claim that in the writings of a given author, or perhaps even in a single text, it is possible to discern a variety of theological and other concepts that conditioned the author’s horizon; thus it would be better to deal not with the fusion of two horizons but with a con-fusion of numerous spiritual horizons. Moreover, unlike Ricoeur, the assumption that will inform my discussions is that sometimes readers or interpreters did not come to the sacred scriptures only in order to better understand them, or to understand themselves better, but rather in an attempt, conscious or no, to change the conceptual identity of the scriptures by infusing their sometimes already structured identity. In fact, there can be little doubt that the regular fusion of horizons between someone’s prejudices and a text being met for the first time is hardly the common situation in Jewish mysticism. The Bible was never met by the Jewish mystic for the first time when he became a mystic, but it already contributed in different manners to the religious life of the hermeneute. The ongoing reading, reflection, and confrontation with the biblical text is a constant factor in the biography of Jewish mystics. It is always a renewed encounter that is the basic experience, since the Bible served as the first main topic of study in the early childhood of the future mystic. Neither should we assume, as Gadamer does, that the canonical text has an “absolute priority over the doctrine of those who interpret it.” Though such a theoretical stand may be detected in principle, our assumptions regarding the strong reader and the importance of the intercorporal form of exegesis, which will be addressed in Chapter 9, allow much more aggressive forms of interaction than extraction of some form of religious truths actually found in the Bible.
Thus Jewish mysticism in most of its main forms is exegetical, as it consists in different searches for contact with God, when the Bible plays an important role as a repository of secret knowledge about the divine realm, as a source of models to be imitated or even techniques to reach the divine encounter, in addition to the more conspicuous engagement of many Jewish mystics in the more technical interpretive sense.40
The emphasis I propose to put on the phenomenology of strong readers is related to some of my earlier studies of Kabbalistic exegetes like Abraham Abulafia and some of the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists,41 to my awareness that their eccentric exegesis has sources in earlier Jewish corpora, and to the fact that their approaches were shared by some subsequent Kabbalists. I assume that the stronger and more formative that mystical experiences are, the more radical the exegetical enterprise may be. Those forms of stronger experience were attained by resorting to mystical techniques, nomian and anomian, which represent initiatives of the Jewish mystics to encounter the divine realms in the way each of them imagined them. In line with an earlier proposal to accentuate the importance of understanding mystical techniques if one is to understand the structure and nature of mystical experience,42 I would say that the results of the interpretive enterprises are determined largely by the nature of the exegetical technique, perhaps even more than the contents of the interpreted text. Given that I shall be concerned with exegetical texts as one of the main topics of analysis, the emphasis will fall more on the concepts and practices of the late interpreters than on the nature of the interpreted texts. Though interactions indeed took place between them and the sacred scriptures, I am inclined to attribute to the later interpreters, especially those who belong to “innovative Kabbalah,” a pivotal role in the emergence of mentalities that encouraged a somewhat greater freedom of interpretation which, though radical in comparison to modern hermeneutics, was nevertheless accepted as legitimate in many Jewish conservative circles.
By moving the emphasis from theological and book-oriented approaches as the main source of meaning to the centrality of the exegetical activity of interpreters—in many cases interpreters who did not play a major role in Jewish life—I hope that a more variegated and dynamic understanding of Jewish mystical hermeneutics will be achieved. The move from the academic concern with abstract messages, theological and sometimes even teleological, to concrete exegetical practices invites more detailed analyses of the different manners in which texts were approached, and those analyses are rarely prone to be formulated in broader and more “inspiring” conclusions. Thus, the accent in some of the following discussions falls on what the Jewish mystics did rather than what they believed. To a certain extent, to follow Aby Warburg’s remark, “God dwells in the details,” but those details belong to human exegetical activity.
The “upward” move that I propose as a methodological approach, starting with the more concrete concepts of the nature of the texts and exegetical techniques, not only strives for a less theologically oriented discourse but is based on concrete practices and their impact on lived experience and is informed by a more kataphatic attitude than that prevalent in modern scholarship concerning Kabbalistic hermeneutics. The accent dominant in many of the modern treatments of the Kabbalistic “theory” of symbols is on an apophatic theology as informing the spiritual preoccupations of the Kabbalists, and this presumption shaped the academic analysis of the nature of symbolism.43 I find this emphasis exaggerated, for reasons I have addressed elsewhere.44 In any case, I shall try to demonstrate throughout the following discussions that a much more kataphatic attitude is evident among the vast majority of the theological systems directly involved in the hermeneutical projects of the Kabbalists. Most especially, the theological assumption of an infinite divinity, designated in many Kabbalistic writings by the term ’Ein Sof, which was taken as defining Kabbalistic apophasis, should be understood in much more kataphatic terms, and it invited a vision of the Bible as containing an infinite number of distinct meanings.45 The possibility of reaching the divine intention, or an encounter with the divine realm via the interpretive process, is of paramount importance for the “technical” approach that will be described below. Preoccupation with a book that is believed to be sacred was seen as a path to attaining experiences of plenitude, rather than a casuistic enterprise.
Moreover, I shall attempt to describe the practice of interpreters whose interactions with the text presuppose a certain performance of the text, which may take different forms—for example, vocalization of nonvocalized scrolls of the Bible46 or combination of letters47—as part of the exegetic enterprise. I shall designate this practice ergetic exegesis48 and call its practitioners ergetic exegetes. This ergetic impulse is to be understood as part of a more activist anthropology characteristic of the vast majority of Kabbalistic writings, as they assumed a primordial affinity between the inner core of man, described as soul in some forms of Kabbalah and as intellect in others, and the divinity. To a certain extent the process of exegesis is a recirculation of divine power as embodied in man, when striving to return to its source. From this point of view, one of the slogans of later Kabbalah shared by Hasidic writers and some of the so-called Mitnaggedim, which contends that God, the Torah, and Israel are one unit, reflects the integrative approach dominant in the relationship between author, text, and interpreter. In a way, this primordial and recurring triunity creates a situation reminiscent of the modern hermeneutical concept of belonging.49
Though I adopt a historical approach to the various processes to be described below, the main purpose of this book is to point out the Jewish mystics’ various attempts to locate a sense of value they imagined to be inherent in the sacred scriptures, as well as their interpretive efforts to elicit those various “values” from the sacred texts. I believe that it is important to supplement a historical approach to the emergence of Kabbalistic symbols that demystifies (in a manner reminiscent of Freud’s psychoanalysis) their content by elucidating the mechanics of the emergence with the phenomenological approach that strives to understand the way in which they were thought to operate. By so doing we may adopt the sociological attitude of Emile Durkheim or the philosophical hermeneutics of Ricoeur, who take into consideration the fullness of the symbols as already existing factors.50 Thus, there is a conflict of interpretations, to resort to Ricoeur’s term, between the scholarly analytical attempt to understand the emergence of a phenomenon by means of a historical approach and the concern with understanding the inner logic of this phenomenon. The two approaches are indeed in conflict—in my opinion, more than Ricoeur would assume—because the moment of recognizing the historicity, or contingency or subjectivity, of the symbolic meaning that is attached to a certain ancient text may become the moment of its demystification, which will attenuate or even undermine its efficacy. The drama of a strong interpreter who struggles with a canonical text, of conceptual innovators who strive to appear conservative, of exegetes who apply extreme exegetical techniques but still believe that they find some historical and spiritual truths, are the parameters that inform many of our discussions. Struggling with the ancient text takes sometimes extravagant forms, from extreme atomization of the interpreted texts into separate letters, to the vision of the text as identical with the divinity, or from dense textuality, which addresses the peculiarities of the biblical text, to ontotheology. I shall discuss some eccentric visions of textuality and interpretive practices that question more harmonistically oriented views that medieval Jewish interpretatio is to be regarded as “a process of continuation of the Bible.”51
One argument is that some medieval exegetes may be described as strong readers in comparison to the modern or postmodern hermeneutes, given their profound belief in the all-comprehensiveness or the absorptive nature of the interpreted texts, a belief that allowed exegetical approaches much more eccentric than the modern exegetical tools. This assumption is part of a more comprehensive view of the difference between medieval and modern attitudes, a view that, following Nietzsche, is concerned with the will-to-power of the interpreter over the text.52 However, my emphasis will be mainly on the plenitude that emerges from this activistic approach, and much less the negativity that is sometimes attributed to it.53 Unlike modern hermeneutics, which is inclined to suspicion, I would say that the strong Kabbalistic and Hasidic interpreters resorted to a hermeneutic of trust, to borrow a phrase from George Steiner.54
Nevertheless, a much more agonistic approach, emphasizing the tensions, frictions, appropriation, and clinamenic attitudes (Harold Bloom’s terms), will dominate some of the following discussions. The sociological aspects will be addressed, particularly in the last chapters and some of the appendixes, in order to account for the differences between elites who elaborated hermeneutical systems, allowing a freer approach to the arcane dimension of the classical texts, and elites who were more conservative. It is not an idealistic or romantic picture of free creativity that characterizes the discussions of most of the Kabbalistic interpretations below,55 but much more their need to maneuver between different codes, even overdetermined codes, that often dictated contradictory ways of understanding ancient literary corpora. The Bible is a text that, because of its elliptical style and its variety of topics, invites extensive interpretation more than some other ancient religious texts do.56 In the Middle Ages it was contemplated and commented upon from cultural angles that prompted questions alien to the cultural horizon of its ancient authors. The Bible and its rabbinic interpretations served as both centripetal and centrifugal factors in Jewish culture. On the one hand, the common book with its rabbinic satellites produced spiritual universes shared by almost all the Jews throughout Jewish history. On the other hand, some of the contents of the biblico-rabbinic tradition were perceived of as inadequate for the medieval and modern sensibilities, thus creating centrifugal impulses and the need to find strong interpretations of the Bible by resorting to exegetical methods different from the rabbinic one, and meanings different from the plain sense of the Bible. Other aspects or religious vectors of the biblico-rabbinic corpora continued to develop and change in ways more consistent with their initial logic. In the following, an effort will be made to survey the two developments, though the emphasis of the discussion will be on the most common vector, the centripetal one. Fascinating as the centrifugal forms of hermeneutics are, their transgressive propensities did not facilitate their impact on larger audiences of Jews, who preferred the charitable over the uncharitable readings.57
Most of the material that served as the springboard for the following analyses stems from various Kabbalistic schools, in the more restricted definition of the term. Thus, the Kabbalistic writings that attracted the maximum attention date from the end of the twelfth century to the end of the eighteenth century and were written in Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. Nevertheless, a significant part of the discussions below engages also rabbinic texts, most of them midrashic, and Hasidic texts, compounded since the last third of the eighteenth century. Topics relating to ancient exegesis as found in Philo or Christian and Gnostic literatures are adduced only marginally. In comparison to the latter’s more peripheral status in the general economy of this book, more substantial attention has been paid to medieval philosophical allegoresis as practiced by Jewish writers.
Needless to say, owing to the huge size of these literary corpora and of the related secondary literature, it is impossible to offer anything like an exhaustive treatment of even those topics which have been selected for systematic treatment here. Given the fact that the main topic under scrutiny is a relatively new subject in the field of Jewish mysticism, the enterprise advanced in this book suffers from the subjectivity, selectivity, tentativeness, and error characteristic of any broad exposition of topics that underlie analyses of huge corpora and countless volumes. In our case, the pertinent literature amounts to some hundreds of lengthy and often complex books and innumerable shorter treatises, many still in manuscript, which constitute the core of the Kabbalistic literature, not to speak of the daunting rabbinic corpora and the vast philosophical literature. In fact, one can hardly find an important book written by a medieval Jew that is not a potential source for a better understanding of concepts or terms related to the interpretations offered to the different parts of the Bible.
Most of the material stems from and is related to formal commentaries on the Bible, though some significant quotations stem from more theoretical treatises written by Kabbalists and Hasidic masters. They deal not only with specific exegesis of a particular text but also with issues germane to our discussions, such as recitation of the sacred scriptures, which do not involve an understanding of their meaning; reading of the text envisioned as a form of interpretation; the text’s study, limmud or talmud torah, which involves intense or “absorbing” forms of preoccupation with the meaning of the canonical text; as well as the more formal interpretations that constitute the literary genre of commentary.
I have attempted to take into consideration the findings of other studies devoted to Kabbalistic hermeneutics, including my book on Abraham Abulafia’s hermeneutics, the preliminary analysis of general hermeneutics in Kabbalah that constitutes Chapter 9 in Kabbalah: New Perspectives, and my forthcoming analysis of R. Menahem Recanati’s hermeneutics. Nevertheless, I did not repeat my analyses there, but sought to adduce new material and approaches.
An attempt has been made to offer a balanced picture of the themes under consideration as they occur in the various forms of Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature. However, the immense amount of material creates great problems in attaining an equilibrium between various Kabbalistic schools—Sefardi, Italian, North African, Safedian, or Ashkenazi—between the Cordoverian Kabbalah and the Lurianic one, or between the Hasidic and the contemporary Mitnaggedic attitudes. Determining the weight of influence of the earlier rabbinic hermeneuticstics on Jewish mystical hermeneutics is a major issue that demands much more research, as does the spiritualistic hermeneutics of the Jewish Sufi in the Near East during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and their spiritualistic counterparts in Europe. Immensely problematic is the need to take into account the rich manuscript material that should have its place by the side of the printed literature, and thus more influential Kabbalistic material. I have tried to give special attention to unknown material extant only in manuscripts, but at the same time not to fall in the trap of conferring too great a role to idiosyncratic views just because they are extreme.
Indeed it is difficult to strike a reasonable balance between what I conceive of being representative and what seem to be the more interesting aspects of mystical hermeneutics in Judaism. I have striven to resist succumbing to the common scholarly overemphasis on the transgressive and anarchistic elements by highlighting what seem to be the more recurring and influential themes. This means that although the great figures were indeed those who formulated the most interesting ideas, we should pay equal attention to the manner of their reception and distribution. Thus, important as R. Abraham Abulafia’s or R. Moses Cordovero’s thought was for the articulation of some of the most influential conceptualizations of Torah, their impact was facilitated by means of other authors, such as R. Elijah da Vidas’s Reshit Hokhmah or R. Isaiah Horowitz’s Ha-Shelah. Nevertheless, the central question of the precise boundaries of the relevant material for the following discussions remains: Are R. Yohanan Alemanno, R. Isaac Abravanel, R. Yehudah Loewe of Prague, or even R. Moses Alshekh, all commentators on a variety of Jewish canonical writings, the most representative of some trends of Kabbalah or of Jewish mysticism? Or, one might ask: What are the hermeneutical Kabbalistic aspects of such an influential commentary on the Pentateuch as R. Hayyim ben ‘Atar’s ‘Or ha-Hayyim, which is venerated by the Polish Hasidim, beyond his resort to themes stemming from Lurianic Kabbalah? Those and other quandaries are inextricable both from the problem of the boundaries of the Jewish mystical literature and from the vagaries of the definition of hermeneutics.
Despite the huge number of commentaries produced by Kabbalists and Hasidic masters, very few mystical treatises had been devoted solely to the nature of the Torah. While in the rabbinic literature the central role of the discussions dedicated to the Torah had to do with the minutiae of the writing of the scroll, we find a medieval Sermon on the Appraisal of the Torah, based on talmudic and midrashic sources.58 However, it is only the late-sixteenth-century Maharal who composed a treatise dealing with the nature of the Torah,59 and it took more than a century and a half before short Kabbalistic treatises by R. Abraham ben Shlomo of Vilnius and R. Isaac Aizik Haver appeared.60 Thus, despite the numerous short statements that define the nature and importance of the Torah, this topic was not treated to an elaborate exposition. The situation is better insofar as the methods of interpretation are concerned, as we learn from discussions of this topic by R. Eleazar of Worms and Abraham Abulafia.61
Given the absence of extensive treatments of the majority of the main terms and concepts that informed Jewish mystical hermeneutics,62 the inherent quandaries related to mystical hermeneutics in general, and the initial phase of the study of Jewish mystical literature in particular, many of the findings presented in this book are preliminary and thus tentative, even more tentative than the findings in humanistic studies typically are. As to the research already done in the field, I would like to highlight the importance of Scholem’s treatment of one of the foremost topics to be addressed below, his seminal study “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” available in English in a major collection of his studies entitled On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. This is a supremely mature, insightful, and comprehensive contribution to Jewish mystical hermeneutics, and any further treatment of concepts in this field is indebted to Scholem’s groundbreaking essay. Likewise, Scholem’s various treatments of the nature of tradition and mysticism, tradition and revelation, and revelation and interpretation have shed light on many crucial aspects of these concepts.63 Helpful in many ways for the writing of this book was the Hebrew monograph of A. Y. Heschel, Theology of the Ancient Judaism, a very learned three-volume work that collected and arranged an enormous number of rabbinic, medieval, and even Hasidic passages and analyzed them succinctly. Treatments of the views of the Torah in some important types of Kabbalistic literature, like Isadore Tishby’s and Yehuda Liebes’s analyses of this topic in the Zohar or B. Sack’s discussions of R. Moses Cordovero’s views, significantly facilitated my work. Some more recent studies, such as those of Yehuda Liebes, Elliot R. Wolfson, and Barbara Holdrege, have introduced new vistas, which I have attempted to integrate in the following pages. Recent research in related areas of Jewish studies, like the hermeneutics of halakhah, by David Weiss Halivni, Moshe Halbertal, and Yochanan Silman have contributed their share to some aspects of the following discussions. Needless to say, the present study hardly strives to address the immense area of Jewish hermeneutics even in general terms. It would even be difficult to mention the most important studies in this area, necessary though the understanding of their findings and concepts is for the description of Kabbalistic hermeneutics.64