In the previous discussions I resorted several times to the various writings of R. Abraham Abulafia to describe his contributions to Kabbalistic hermeneutics. Nevertheless, those quotes do not represent the breadth and depth of his concepts. Some of that material has been treated separately elsewhere, especially in my monograph devoted to Abulafia’s hermeneutics. Here I would like to present a translation of a fascinating passage dealing with the “absorbing” status of the Torah, found in one of Abulafia’s commentaries on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. It constitutes one of the thirty-six secrets that Abulafia claimed that Maimonides hid in his book and the ecstatic Kabbalist contended that he reveals. The title of the secret is sippurei ha-torah, “stories of the Torah.” Maimonides himself had already criticized those who deride the stories of the Torah, but he did not offer any specific speculative theory as to how to counteract such derisions.1 This phrase was often discussed in Abulafia’s lifetime as part of the response of theosophical Kabbalists to real or imaginary derisions that philosophers hurled at the simple-minded contents of the biblical stories. This is the case in R. Moses de Leon’s Kabbalistic responsa, some discussions of the Zohar, and perhaps also a passage from de Leon’s Sefer ha-Rimmon.2 Whereas the theosophical Kabbalists solved the quandary by resorting to symbolic decoding of the various biblical narratives, elevating the mundane stories to the status of an inner-divine drama (see Appendix 3), this avenue was not available to Abulafia, who followed, mutatis mutandis, Maimonides’ Aristotelian theology. What did Abulafia offer, as a Kabbalist, to the Kabbalistic understanding of the biblical stories? Let us first translate the salient passage:
[1.] The twenty-two letters of the Torah are the sanctum sanctorum on which it has been written at the end of Tractate ‘Avot what our sages, blessed be their memory, said:3 “The son of Ben Bag Bag said: Turn it and turn it because everything is in it and you are within it in its entirety, and you shall see in it and you shall not stray from it, because there is no better virtue4 than it.” And the son of He’ He’ said: “The retribution is in accordance to the sorrow.” And see what the rabbi, blessed be his memory, commented in his commentary.5
[2.] But we had received and we indubitably know that the two double names which had been mentioned at the end of the above-mentioned spiritual treatise, which was composed according to the views of the great rabbis, the saints of the earth, blessed be their memory, are double in order to disclose wondrous secrets. And after they warned us concerning all the good virtues and every intellectual rank, they returned to clarify the purpose of the intention and hinted to us the secret of the combination of the twenty-two letters, and said that the entire world is within the Torah and we are all of us in the Torah and from within it we see and from it we do not stray, and there is no better virtue than this. And they called it “virtue” because it indeed points to all the other virtues, supernal and low, and according to its virtues everything behaves, and it is a virtue and a “measure against measure.” And “if all the measures were annulled, the measure against the measure is not annulled”6 and will never be annulled and the secret is “the attribute of judgment” and “the attribute of mercy,” and this is why they finished their statement with [the phrase] “the retribution is in accordance with the sorrow.” And they said that it is good [’tovah] because its numerical value is twenty-two, and this is also the secret of Bag Bag and the secret of He’ He’ together amount to tovah.7 And the secret of half of the measure against the measure is GaB ‘AH GaB ‘AH which [amounts to] ‘AHWY and the secret of Ben is a witness, and everything is appropriate. But I am not allowed to disclose more than this but face to face and mouth to mouth. However, the sagacious Kabbalist will understand it from his own mind. Indeed, the secret of “measure against measure” is ha-’anan [the cloud], ha-me’ayyen [the one who speculates] and ha-meniy’a [the activator] and its secret is ‘av gilgul. And if I shall come to announce to you the secret you should understand it easily from the statement of God to Moses:8 “Behold I come to you in a heavy cloud.” And all the blood [ha-dam] is manifest [galuy] and on it has the book of the Torah been written, on the parchment [ha-gevyil] whose secret is mid[d]ah and its matter is ’ed dam ‘ed dam9 and you should understand it in depth.
[3.] However, I am adding to what I said announcing to you that each and every letter found in the Torah, even when part of the story regarding whatever happened to whomever is mentioned in it, is an endless matter in regard to what can be understood concerning that letter and what is found in it. The mind of man will never exhaust the understanding of even the paths of a tittle of a yod, because there are heaps of heaps of halakhot,10 even more so in [a matter that] is more important. And so did the rabbi mention in the chapter Heleq, and said there concerning what David said:11 “Open my eyes and I shall look the wondrous of thy Torah” concerning the eighth tenet where it is said that in “each and every letter”12 in the Torah there are great secrets and sciences for whomever God, blessed be he, caused to understand them. However, the ultimate wisdom13 of the Torah cannot be comprehended as it is written,14 “its measure15 is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea,” and so he said in relation to all the commandments. And it is similar, in my opinion, to what Nahmanides, blessed be his memory, said in his commentary on the Torah, and as I referred above, that the entire Torah is [constituted] by the names of the Holy One, blessed be He. Thus, what would be the need, after all this, to interpret to you the essence of the stories of the Torah, since it had been disclosed completely that even a matter of small significance is a divine name.16
This is a dense and, in part, coded text, whose precise content is not conspicuous from a superficial reading. As Abulafia indicates, there are issues that one should understand by himself since he cannot commit them to writing, because they necessitate an oral transmission. This is a rather exceptional case of eso-tericism uncharacteristic of Abulafia’s more exoteric approach. What is this secret matter that he can expound orally but did not want to do in a written manner? It is not a matter that is difficult to understand, as he explicitly indicates, and thus is related neither to ineffability nor to a quality of mysteriousness.17
The understanding of the “secret” depends on decoding the various gematrias found in the passage and explaining their meaning. The most important is the gematria of the words that amount to twenty-two, the number of Hebrew letters. Thus, the word tovah, pointing to the high status of the turning over, namely of the combination of letters, amounts to twenty-two. This is also the case with the names of the two rabbinic authors quoted in the passage from ’’Avot: Bag Bag He’ He’, which amounts to twenty-two. There should be no doubt: these calculations have nothing to do with the plain sense of the ancient text. The ecstatic Kabbalist has ostensibly introduced the concept of twenty-two letters and manipulated the ancient material in order to convey the fundamental status of the turning of the Torah as a combinatory technique. Moreover, in one of the hints in the above passage, he introduces what he conceived of as the hidden divine name ‘AHWY—a combination of two other divine names18—which amounts, again, to twenty-two. Abulafia therefore described the preoccupation with the Torah as if it consists in a process of permutation of its letters, as the ultimate mystical ideal.
Another crucial gematria in the passage is forty-nine. It is the numerical value of the most recurrent word in the passage, middah, which has been translated above sometime as “virtue” and sometimes as “measure.” Indeed, this is a very polyvalent word in Hebrew, and it is difficult to assess its precise meaning in all its occurrences above. In any case, Ben Bag Bag had described the study of the Torah as the ultimate virtue. Its numerical value is forty-nine, as is that of gevyil, “parchment,” and galuy, “manifest.” What is of much greater importance, however, is the apparently less significant gematria of ha-dam, “the blood,” or ‘ed dam, “vapor of blood,” which amounts to forty-nine. An attempt to relate the significance of these words by gematria is crucial for our understanding of Abulafia’s intention, and I shall make such an attempt now only in part. Basically, the significance of the numerical affinities is that the manifest aspect of the Torah, the parchment, is related to blood, and I shall elaborate on this issue below.
A third gematria that plays a certain role is that of seventy-two, the gematria of ‘av and of gilgul—another word for combination of letters.19 It is presented as part of the biblical verse portraying the apparition of God to Moses in a cloud. The biblical archaic imagery is interpreted by Abulafia as indicating esoterically the achievement of the revelation of God by means of permutations of letters, especially as seventy-two points to the important divine name of seventy-two units of three letters, which is a main component in Abulafia’s mystical technique as presented in his books Hayyei ha-’Olam ha-Ba’ and Sefer ha-Hesheq.20
Abulafia resorts to an additional gematria that organizes some of the statements above: 175. This is the numerical value of the phrase mid[d]ah ke-neged mid[d]ah, measure against measure, and of each of the words he-’anan, ha-me’ayyen, and ha-meni’ya. The last two words point perhaps to the importance of the speculation, understood by Abulafia as activating, ha-meni’ya, the letters that are studied or interpreted. He-’anan is the construct part of the phrase in the verse which includes av. The significance of these gematrias is rather positive. (The meaning of the recourse to the “measure against measure” will be elucidated below.)
Yet another string of numerical equivalences is constituted by the following Hebrew phrases: tav dam = demut = nafshekha = kashfan = keshafim = shofekh dam, each of which amounts to 450. All these words imply a rather negative valence.
What is the common denominator of many of the gematrias adduced above? They introduce another code while claiming that they decode the significance of the archaic request of immersion in the study of the Torah: the authentic study is not the repetitious perusal of the canonical text to discover all the meaningful messages there. The imperative hafokh should be understood in ’Avot as turning everything up, like turning a stone over, to discover under it the relevant messages. In Abulafia, however, hafokh should be understood as an act intended to affect the disintegration of the studied matters. Indeed, in one of the passages analyzed above we encountered the word hippukh as a technical term for combination of letters.21 It is the permutation of the letters of the Torah, which amounts to a deconstruction of the canonical sequel of letters and words, in order to achieve a mystical experience, which is related also to the speculative, namely philosophical, preoccupation.
What would be the relation Abulafia envisions between the plain study of the Torah, following the ordinary sequence of letters, and his own manner of study, in fact what he regarded as interpretation? This seems to me to be the basic question underlying the above passage. After all, it is only in the normal sequence of letters that stories are told in the Bible. By restructuring the order of letters, the stories disintegrate or disappear. Abulafia created a quandary between the canonical sequence of letters, which is fundamentally semantic as it is structured in words and sentences, and the discrete letters that interact between themselves. This approach introduces a moment of chaos, a dissolution of the ordinary sequence, at least before another sequence possessing some semantic valences is construed. To formulate the question differently: Is the maximum religious effect achieved when resorting to the words of the Torah, or is it attained when dealing with its separate letters? Or, from the point of view of authority: Is the received tradition of the sequence of the text also the supreme structure, or is the mystic able to put forward other types of linguistic order, provided he resorts to the same letters?
On one hand, the answer is simple: Abulafia himself, in paragraph 2, paraphrases the apotheotic description of the Torah in ’Avot, as quoted in paragraph 1, as an entity that encompasses everything. Thus, the answer would be that the canonical order understood as Torah is of paramount importance, and apparently no other indication is to be found in the above passage. On the other hand, this apotheosis of the regular status of the text would not invite expressions of such an unusual esotericism from a Kabbalist like Abulafia. I assume that the clue to the hidden message of the passage is found in the significance he attributes to the word “blood.” After all, the meaning of writing the Torah on the blood is not clear, and this strange claim should be viewed as a clue to the proper understanding of the passage. I suggest understanding the blood as pointing to the plain, manifest sense of the Torah. The problem, however, is how this sense is understood in connection to blood. In order to fathom Abulafia’s understanding of this word let me adduce some instances where he clarifies it. In his Commentary on Sefer Yetzirah he puts it blatantly: “And within the blood is Satan and within Satan is blood.”22 Elsewhere, in a passage from Sitrei Torah, Abulafia writes:
Adam and Eve [amount] in gematria [to] “My father and my mother,” and their secret is blood and ink.23 The latter points to the name YHWH24 and the former points to the combination of this name and it is recited Yod He’ WaW He’. And know that the innocent has a sign inscribed on his forehead, and the guilty is inscribed on his forehead with a sign.25 To one the sign of blood, to the other the sign of ink. And the secret of the sign of blood is being born,26 and its matter of sign-blood and its secret is image,27 which means that it preceded the existence of man, and from it your soul emerges, and all our sorcery will turn to the path of sorceries, and whoever does so spills blood. And the secret of the sign of ink is parturient.28 Behold there is one form born and another form that gives birth … and the secret is that Adam and Eve are two but [also] are one, and the witness is “He created them male and female.”29
The passive and active elements are described in pairs, which include, on one side, Adam, male, ink, parturient, innocent, and the Tetragrammaton and, on the other side, Eve, female, blood, soul, sorceries, image, being born, and the compounded letters of the Tetragrammaton. There can be no doubt as to the superiority of ink over blood. There can also be no doubt, however, that the two opposing elements complement and, to an even greater degree, unite with each other. Thus, the plain sense of the Torah, referred to by “blood,” and the imaginary faculty referred to by demut, “image,”30 allude to the common order of the letters of the Torah. This is the starting point, material and passive, or the substratum represented by the parchment. The dynamic aspect, however, is represented in the context of the text of the Torah by the ink. Therefore, the passive, which can be understood as Satanic—in the manner in which Maimonides envisioned Satan as imagination—or imaginative, is the lower plain sense, the manifest one, which should be transcended in order to reach the esoteric intellectual or spiritual meanings. I assume that the polarity between the two forms of existence is also implied in the phrase “measure against measure.” Since one of the two measures relates explicitly to blood, it is possible that the opposite measure refers to the intellect. In such a manner we should understand the significance of the two attributes, mercy and judgment, as standing not for divine modes of acting in the world but for human actions.
In Abulafia there is an inversion of the axiology we found in passages cited in Chapter 2 belonging to theosophical forms of Kabbalah where the white aspects, or the parchment as substratum, were conceived of as superior to the black aspects of the Torah scroll. There the primary, primordial, passive elements were given priority, while for Abulafia what the mystic creates by combining letters counts more. In order to make such a claim he had to allow the individual letters valences of their own. He could do so by resorting to several mystical and magical sources.31
He chose, however, to do so by resorting first to Maimonides’ contention concerning the depth of the Torah, not to a Kabbalistic one. Indeed, paragraph 3 is, in part, the philosophical “justification” of the practice of letter manipulation. Whereas the second paragraph starts with “but,” implying a possible tension between the manner in which Maimonides interpreted the relevant part of ’Avot and the Kabbalistic tradition, the third paragraph greatly attenuates it. After all, in Sitrei Torah Abulafia strove to demonstrate that he reveals secrets of the great eagle, not theories found in mystico-magical books, which were understood by Abulafia to be different from Maimonides’. In his earliest commentary on the Guide he wrote explicitly that there are two paths, “the path of the Guide and [another one] according to my own path, that is the path of Kabbalah … the paths of Kabbalah which are the secrets of Sefer Yetzirah.”32
There can be no doubt that Abulafia perceived the combinatory theories as belonging to Sefer Yetzirah. However, he compares Maimonides’ view on the inexhaustibility of the Torah to Nahmanides’ dictum about the Torah as a series of divine names, an issue already discussed above.33
Let me attempt to elucidate the difference between the Tetragrammaton and its being written in a plene manner. The simple form of spelling the Tetragrammaton corresponds to the ink, the plene or compounded one to the blood. Indeed, in one of the discussions on blood and ink Abulafia emphasizes that blood stands for death and mixture.34 This distinction may point to the necessity to transform the biblical text by various devices, such as the gematria ve-dyo = 26 = YHWH, into expressions of the divine name.35 This possibility is reminiscent of the more general principle found in the work of Abulafia’s student, R. Joseph Gikatilla, that all the words of the Torah are ramifications of the Tetragrammaton.36 It is quite plausible that Abulafia had access to an earlier tradition that also inspired Gikatilla. Such an assumption would involve the ongoing interpretive attempts to extract the divine names from all the biblical verses by all possible exegetical techniques. In any case, this might have been a mystical ideal that informed Abulafia’s own literary activity. In one of his prophetic books, Sefer ha-Haftarah, God is reported to have revealed to Abulafia, “I innovate a new Torah within the holy nation, which is my people Israel. My honorable name is like a new Torah, and it has not been explicated to my people since the day I hid my face from them.”37 This is a quote from a book composed in the same period as Sefer Sitrei Torah. I assume that the name mentioned herein is the very same one mentioned in paragraph 2: ’AHWY.38 Thus, God revealed to Abulafia another Torah, which is identical, as in some other earlier Kabbalistic sources, with the newly revealed name of God. Indeed, the assumption that one can receive a revelation that is similar to Moses’ revelation was not exceptional in Abulafia’s thought. He contended that his prophetic book should be read as part of the Sabbath ritual, after the reading of the Torah, as one of the prophetic books, and this is the reason he entitled it Sefer ha-Haftarah.
Let me now address the “absorbing” aspect of the Torah as expressed in Sitrei Torah. It is obvious that Abulafia offered a paraphrase to the formulations found in the ’Avot treatise. It is also evident, however, that his formulation is much more comprehensive, because his vision is much more ontological and anthropological: the Torah contains all. What does such a far reaching theory mean in his thought? In order to answer this question, let me quote a parallel discussion, written nine years later, from Abulafia’s commentary on the Torah:
The Torah shows to us today everything depicted39 in front of us, supernal and lower things,40 everything is known in accordance with it when you will be willing to follow it in accordance with the divine, prophetic intention, and fathom it in an appropriate manner, as it is said: “Turn it and turn it, because everything is in it, she is entirely within you, and you are entirely within it, and by it we see, and from it you should not stray.” And insofar as our matter dealing with esoteric issues is concerned we should compare the Torah to the menorah and its lamps, because the lamps are the very Torah because it illumines every spirit from six extremities, and the four directions of the world, and it is the median41 between all [things] in gematria[—]and according to the subject matter. Without Kabbalah, what are we, and what would our life be! This is why it is said: “Blessed be He who precedes the [creation of a] medicine to the malady.”42 … He left us a remnant related to the Torah and the language. This is the reason it is incumbent to inquire into the understanding of the Torah in a manner that man will know himself within it, like someone who contemplates a mirror in order to see his face and himself and the other within it, and from there he who looks into it will ascend to the contemplation of God, blessed be He, and referring to this speculative principle they said: “When you make the lamps ascend in front of the menorah, all the seven lamps will light up.”43
The comparison of the Torah to a mirror is fascinating for several reasons. One is that it helps us understand the manner in which man is included in the Torah, according to the two main passages discussed here. It is a comprehensive entity that allows one to contemplate oneself and also others. How may such a statement be understood? As we have seen, the Torah incorporates both intellectual and imaginary aspects, which correspond to man’s two most important spiritual faculties. It is by interpreting the Torah that these faculties may be actualized. So, for example, we read in Abulafia’s Gan Na’ul: “When the name, whose secret is in blood and ink, began to move within him, and he will feel it, as one who knows the place of a stone which is within him, he will then know that the knowledge of the name acted in him, and it began to cause him to pass from potentiality to actuality.”44 Therefore, the discussions of blood and ink are not related to the divine name in an exegetical manner alone. For a Kabbalist whose main mystical practice is related to combining the letters of the divine name, using also the written medium, what seem to be scholastic numerical affinities may have, initially or post factum, an experiential dimension; in this regard we had the opportunity to discuss above the activation of the blood during the mystical experi-ence.45 In any case, the last quote is also helpful in elucidating the possible meaning of the word ha-men’ya, translated here as “the activator”: it is the divine name, which is described in the last quote as mitno’e’a.
Abulafia’s assumption that the Torah encompasses man means that the scriptures contained two levels, the imaginary and the intellectual. Such an understanding opens the possibility for these human faculties to be actualized by activating linguistic possibilities found in the text. This practice is, as Abulafia contended in the quote from Sefer Mafteah ha-Sefirot, conducive to self-knowledge, the tests and examinations mentioned in one of the passages dealt with above,46 and then to the knowledge of God. From this point of view, the Torah is more comprehensive than man, as a mirror is, but this parable does not imply a visual contemplation of oneself within a text. A metaphorical concept of comprehensiveness is implied here. It seems, however, that the concept of the Torah as encompassing man, evident in Abulafia’s recurrent use of the phrase “you are entirely in the Torah,” also had more graphical expressions. R. Isaac of Acre, a Kabbalist whose contact with Abulafia’s views was quite significant, describes Moses’ vision of the Torah as follows:
I awoke from my sleep and suddenly I saw the secret of the saying of the rabbis concerning Moses, our teacher’s writing of the Torah, that he saw it written against the air of the sky, in black fire upon white fire.47 This is that, when a man ascends a very high mountain standing within a broad flat valley without any hills or mountains within it, but only a great plain, and he lifts up his eyes and they look about and he gazes at the firmament of the heavens close to the earth, around around, to the place of the sky close to the earth, as it appears to his eyes, this is half the circle, and is known in the language of the sages of zodiac signs as the circle of the horizon. This was seen by the soul and intellect of Moses our teacher, surrounding him from above as the entire Torah, from the letter bet of bereshit, which is the first letter, to the lamed of yisra’el written in one complete circle, each letter next to its neighbor, surrounded by parchment.48 That is to say, it is as if there were a hair’s breadth between one letter and the next, for all the air that is around the letters of the Torah is entirely within the circle, and between each letter and outside of the letters there was white fire dimming the circle of the sun, and the letters themselves were of black fire, a strong blackness, the very quintessence of blackness. She [Moses’ soul] gazed at them here and there to find the head of the circle or its end or its middle, but did not find anything … For there is no known place by which to go into the Torah, for it is wholly perfect. And while he yet gazes at this circle, she combines on and on into strong combinations, not intelligible ones.49
The image of the Torah as a circle is not new with R. Isaac. To give a few examples: the early-twelfth-century R. Yehudah Barceloni implies it in his Commentary on Sefer Yetzirah,50 and one of R. Isaac of Acre’s contemporaries, R. Joseph Angelet, formulated it as follows: “The book of the Torah is required to be round,51 for just as in a ball one cannot detect its beginning and its end, so in the Torah is its beginning fastened to its end.”52 Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 12, at the end of the fifteenth century Johann Reuchlin reported Nahmanides’ words at the beginning of his Commentary on the Torah, concerning the writing of the Torah in black fire upon white fire, adding that the Kabbalists had a tradition that the Torah was written in a “sphere of fire,” globum igneum.53 I assume that the Christian Kabbalist had access to a certain understanding of Nahmanides’ introduction to the Commentary on the Pentateuch, which was combined with a statement in Nahmanides’ Commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, to the effect that the first and last letters of the Torah form one word, a view we examined earlier.54
None of these authors spoke about the sphere or circle of the Torah as a real, ocular vision. Such a cosmic simile for the Torah emphasizes, on one hand, its perfection and comprehensiveness, while on the other hand there is a feeling of impenetrability. It is not only the picture of the hermetic closure of the huge circle of letters so close to each other,55 but also the last sentence dealing with the unintelligible combinations of letters. What concerns me most in this context, however, is the statement that Moses considered himself, in his spiritual senses, to be encompassed by the Torah, although later on in the same text the Kabbalist indicates there is no way to enter the Torah. The description of the mountain as standing at the center of the horizon assumes that Moses saw himself as being at the middle of the circular Torah. I assume that the circular Torah embodies, in R. Isaac’s view, two hypostatic powers, the sefirot Hokhmah and Binah, as we shall see in Appendix 3, while the penetrable Torah, that which is studied here below, is the available book as extant in the reproductions of the copy first made by Moses.
The encompassing nature of the Torah in those two ecstatic Kabbalists should be compared to the somewhat later vision of R. Menahem Recanati concerning the all-encompassing nature of the Torah, which we discussed earlier.56 Although they are, presumably, unrelated historically, they nevertheless point in a direction that late-thirteenth-century Kabbalah opened: to include everything that matters in their Kabbalistic system within the Torah.