In the following I would like to translate and analyze in some detail an interesting text by R. Isaac ben Shmuel of Acre, a Kabbalist of vast knowledge and substantial influence. I find the following passage relevant to several topics that we have addressed, especially the nature of Kabbalistic symbolism, the relationship between Kabbalistic symbolism and philosophy, and the nature of Kabbalistic hermeneutics. R. Isaac had an inquiring mind and was a prolific and itinerant Kabbalist, active in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, who moved from Acre in Galilee, where he made his first advanced studies, to some cities in Spain and then, presumably, to northern Africa. He was acquainted with a variety of Kabbalistic schools and wrote some books in which the various types of Kabbalah are combined in several ways. The following text is written largely in the vein of symbolic Kabbalah, mostly as it was practiced in the schools of Gerona and Barcelona in the mid-thirteenth century, though I suspect a secondary influence of Ashkenazi Hasidism or Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah:
[1.] I, the young Isaac of Acre,1 have been reading the portion of Genesis in the secrets of the Torah by our master Nahmanides, blessed be his memory. And while reading that the Torah preceded the creation of the world by two thousand years, and that a black fire was written on a white fire,2 I understood the secret of this matter and I thirsted to placate the wrath of the difficult questions of the philosophers who said that the number of the days and years depend upon time, and time depends upon the motions of the sun and moon and stars, as it is said: “let them be for signs and for seasons, for days, and for years.”3 Because upon their motions and revolutions the measures of time depend, and how can we mention years before the existence of the sphere? Despite the fact that their argument is true, they did not merit to know the intention of our sages, blessed be their memory. You should know that just as heaven is higher than earth, double is the height of the intention of our sages in their sayings in comparison to the understanding of the philosophers.
[2.] Their intention is related to the secret of the ten sefirot of Belimah found in the [letter] ’aleph of ’AEYA’4 in accordance with the path of the true truth5 because from the secret of the intentions of the blessings that world hints at the [sefirah of] Tiferet, and the ten sefirot of Belimah are the foundation of all matters, and the essence of all numbers, and there is no end to the details of their number, because they are more numerous than the hair of the head and understand that the letters of ten” [’eser] are the same as the letters of “hair” [se’ar] because they are more numerous than the hair of the head and you will find in them the secret of 18,000 worlds.6
[3.] And since you know that the [sefirah of] Tiferet is the world, you should understand the intention of the sages, blessed be their memory, when they claim that7 one should always8 enter the measure of two openings and then pray. But when one prays in a place where there are neither openings nor houses, what should he do? Therefore you should know that despite the fact that one should always cause the adherence of the thought of his intellect to the unique Lord, he has also to put before his eyes the attribute of T[iferet] all day and all night long … T[iferet] includes the six [sefirot], and since the thought of man is [fixed on] T[iferet] all day long, when the time of prayer arrives—and all men who are fearful of God are eliminating the matters of the world from their heart—because T[iferet] is the secret of the world, as it is written that his heart and the eyes of the thought of his intellect adhere to the place of the supernal simplicity9 and the complete unity, he has to enter two openings in order to come to the house of the supernal YHWH which is the B[inah], the secret of the complete unity and the proper simplicity, because the simplicity of the three supernal [sefirot] in comparison to Ti[feret] and the six extremes is comparable to the simplicity of the soul in comparison to its palace,10 and to the simplicity and sanctity of the seventh day in comparison to the six days of the week. And the two openings are the [sefirot of] G[edulah] and P[ahad], which are [situated] between B[inah] and T[iferet]. And provided that the essence of the intention of the sages, blessed be their memory, is not [concerning] the corporeal sensibles, which are the openings of the sensible houses, but are certainly the secret of the supernal emanation, the emanation of the divine secret, they did not say that it is incumbent to enter two openings but said the measure [of two openings], namely that he should enter into the thought of his mind the measure of these two openings.
[4.] I shall return now to my first place and say that each of the ten sefirot of Belimah comprises all the ten sefirot and thus they amount to a hundred. And each comprises a hundred and thus they are a thousand, and each of them comprises the whole thousand and thus they are ten thousand. And the secret of shannah [year] is sefirah and the essence of the place of the Torah is H[okhmah], which is the beginning of the emanation and the beginning of all the creatures, and this is why the Torah said,11 “God created me at the beginning of his way,” the beginning being Hokhmah,12 we see that all their sayings are true to the intelligent believers who merited to understand my intention in a proper manner. And those two thousand years by which it had been mentioned that the Torah preceded the world hint at Hesed and at Binah, and this world is T[iferet], as it is said that immediately with the emanation of Hokhmah the Torah was emanated because H[okhmah] is the Torah, and the Torah is H[okhmah] and it was written by black fire on the white fire, not by a fire as it is believed by those of little faith who speak about the righteous in a boastful manner, thinking that all the sayings of the sages, blessed be their memory, all concern the sensible fire and concern the [two thousand] years that they are dependent upon the motions of the spheres of the firmament and of the planets. However, this is a fire that is not a fire, as it is said by the sages, blessed be their memory:13 “When you arrive at the stones of pure marble do not say: Water, water, etc. Because there are neither stones of marble nor water.” So too is the matter of this fire: the black fire hints at the attribute of judgment, which is B[inah], and the white fire hints at the attribute of mercy, which is H[okhmah]. Behold that our eyes see that within the secret of the supernal emanation, the Torah preceded by two thousand years, namely two ‘alephim, two units … the divine thought, shannah is the secret of sefirah, whose secret is mahashavah,14 because these two units are H[okhmah] and B[inah], before the world was created, before the emanation of T[iferet], and it has been inscribed on H[okhmah] which is the white fire, [and] the attribute of Mercy, which are blank and white like white paper, by black fire, on B[inah] which is the black fire, the grand attribute of judgment … similar to the black ink.
[5.] And when arose in the thought15 that the unique Lord desired to create the [sefirah] of T[iferet] … He emanated the MShH—M[etatron] S[ar] H[a-Panim]—certainly the emanated MShH, the supernal Moshe, who copied the Torah from a primordial book, from the two primordial sefirot which preceded in the [realm of] emanation, and this is the written Torah, and this is the secret of the waw16 which unites all the six extremities. And this is the reason the majority of the verses of the Torah of Moses start with waw, and concerning T[iferet] which is the secret of the written Torah our sages, blessed be their memory, said that “the simile of the supernal Hokhmah—which is [the sefirah of] H[okhmah]—is Torah,”17 which is the T[iferet].18
Although R. Isaac describes his reading of Nahmanides’ commentary on the Torah, it is obvious that therein he did not find sufficient answers to the quandaries posed by the philosophers. The rabbinic dictum describing the preexistence of the Torah involves the prior creation of the celestial bodies that determine time. While not accepting the centrality of philosophy, Nahmanides’ commentary does not constitute a sustained attack on allegorical interpretations, nor a Kabbalistic disclosure of the symbolic-theurgical layer of the Bible which constitutes Nahmanides’ Kabbalah. Thus, to follow the philosophers whose quandary is presented as containing some truth, he would admit that the rabbinic dictum is based on an inner contradiction. It is this contradiction that bothers the Kabbalist and urged him to make an effort to solve it. Let me start by explicating the emergence of the quandary. A rabbinic text attempting to exalt the Torah asserts its preexistence to the moment of creation. A precise span of time between the moment the Torah came into existence and the moment the world was created is mentioned, but such an issue did not bother rabbinic authors as they were not particularly concerned with ontological problems like the nature of time and the relation between time and creation. However, the emergence of Jewish philosophy, which introduced preoccupations with the nature of time and space, opened the question of measuring time, and in the vein of the Aristotelian definition of time as the measure of the movements of the spheres, the rabbinic dictum became immediately incoherent. It is this clash between the archaic religious vision and the philosophical causality that prompted R. Isaac to search for a solution. This is a conspicuously apologetic effort to make sense of the rabbinic dictum that inspired the exegetical exercise in paragraphs 2, 3, and 4.
The Kabbalist approaches the quandary by disentangling the nexus between world, namely material world, and time, namely two thousand years. If the term “world” in the rabbinic dictum does not denote the created world, and if time in years is not the measured time, then the causality of the philosophers is not relevant in this case and no contradiction can be discovered in the rabbinic statement. R. Isaac “achieves” this end by a process symbolic of these two elements to another realm, where the causality put forward by the philosophers does not hold more. R. Isaac interprets “world” and “two thousand years” as symbols for sefirotic powers. There the philosophical causality is substituted by an hypostatic hierarchy, which installs another type of process. How does this symbolic reading operate?
The term ha-’olam occurs in the first dictum, where it has been translated as “world.” It also occurs, however, in the second rabbinic dictum, in paragraph 2, as part of an adverbial construct, le-’olam, translated as “always.” This second dictum is interrogated by R. Isaac and brought to the point of absurdity: What is the meaning of the sages requiring someone always to enter the measure of two openings if there are cases where one prays in a desert, for example? “Always” means that there is no prayer exempt from this entrance. Yet since in rabbinic sources there is no exemption from prayer on architectonic grounds, it follows that “always” should be understood metaphorically. This means that the phrase le-’olam is to be interpreted in the rabbinic dictum, according to rabbinic logic, as a metaphor. This argument is necessary in order to put forward the metaphorical understanding of ’olam in the first dictum. Thus, the philosophical critique of one rabbinic dictum compelled R. Isaac to claim that the plain-sense reading of the rabbis is also problematic in another case where the term occurs, and that in general the rabbis’ dicta should be interpreted according to another interpretive code, the sefirotic one.
Before going into the details of this interpretation, it is important to point out that although reading a Kabbalistic book—R. Isaac expressly indicates that he read Nahmanides’ Sitrei Torah19—the answer to the quandary was not found there; nor does he claim that he had ever received an oral tradition that could solve his quandary. In this passage, unlike many other passages in the same book, R. Isaac does not contend that he received a revelation that could help him solve the exegetical problem. In this case he describes himself as standing, as a Kabbalist, alone before the derision of the philosophers, armed not with a specific traditional deciphering of the dictum but with a symbolic code that he applied to the difficult text. I believe that this situation, mutatis mutandis, is characteristic of a good many instances that provoked symbolistic interpretations of the semantically or intellectually difficult parts of Jewish tradition. Here, unlike the other cases, we have a report of the starting point of the interpretation, not only its final results.
Interestingly, R. Isaac starts his interpretation not by resorting to Kabbalistic cosmogony or theogony, as the chart that will allow the symbolic elevation, but with a ritualistic statement by the rabbis which has been interpreted, plausibly before him, in a symbolic manner. The experience of the lived ritual apparently is more immediate for him than general speculations. The experience of having the divine name before his eyes all the time, namely the sixth sefirah, is conceived of as a common one. This sefirah is symbolized, however, as he reiterates time and again, by the term “world.” In this case “world” stands for the mundane preoccupations that should be transcended by mental elevation in the moment of prayer. In other words, the sefirotic realm that is the object of mystical uninterrupted adherence during the time of human awareness, the sixth sefirah, is low in comparison to the sefirotic powers that are involved in the shorter but more intense experience of mystical prayer. Then the Kabbalist has to transcend the lower sefirot in order to reach the highest divine unity or simplicity. Although R. Isaac does not resort in this context to the term ’Ein Sof, the Infinite, there is no doubt, on the basis of many other discussions in his writings that a Kabbalist should fix his mystical intention on the Infinite and even cleave to it.20 This move from the lower to the highest divine levels should, however, be understood according to the second rabbinic dictum as involving the Kabbalist’s entrance through two openings. Here, too, the Kabbalist insists on the need to read the rabbis metaphorically: the rabbinic dictum does not indicate, as he stresses, the imperative to enter physically through two openings but the measure of two openings. In Hebrew “measure,” shi’ur, is a term that was part of the famous expression shi’ur qomah, the measure of the [body] of God. R. Isaac himself dealt several times with this phrase, and I assume that for him the very occurrence of the term shi’ur invited an elevation of the significance of the phrase to the sefirotic realm.21 Therefore, he claims, the rabbinic dictum is again to be read metaphorically. This is the case, according to R. Isaac, of another, more famous rabbinic passage, which deals with the mystical ascent to the supernal world: the passage, found in various versions, concerning the four sages who entered the pardes. In this case the rabbinic formulation includes a negation, “do not say,” which the Kabbalist interprets as indicating a metaphorical reading of the terms “stones of marble” and “water.” In other words, R. Isaac accepts, at least to a certain extent, the stand of the deriding philosophers, who claimed that the corporeal reading of the rabbinic sources renders these statements incoherent. Yet while the philosophers are described as persons of little faith, who see only the contradictions without making the effort to provide an alternative spiritual explanation that would solve the problem, the Kabbalah is conceived of as being able to supply such an answer, and R. Isaac attempts to do it.
What is the metaphorical reading of the two openings? They stand, according to the symbolic system that R. Isaac adopts in that passage, for the two sefirot, Gedullah and Pahad, that mediate between the sefirah of Tiferet, the world, and the higher sefirah of Binah, which belongs to the supernal triad of divine unity. The entrance is therefore not necessarily a corporeal move but is paramountly a mental tour of the divine architectonics that starts, during prayer, with the lower sefirot and ascends to the higher level.
The ascending hierarchy that informs the mental process related to the liturgical ritual—found in a Kabbalistic source quoted by R. Isaac in another book22—serves R. Isaac’s purpose in describing the descending theogonic hierarchy, which will provide the solution for the initial quandary. The preexistence of the Torah to the world is interpreted by him as an ontic, not a temporal, priority. It is not time that plays the defining role in the relationship between the Torah and the world, but the emanative primordiality of the supreme hypostases related to the Torah in comparison to the hypostasis that symbolizes the world. The Torah is identical to the second sefirah, Hokhmah, although according to other statements this sefirah is to be conceived of as the white fire, or the substratum on which the black letters are written, letters that are identified with the third sefirah, Binah. Thus, the Torah as an entity identical with these two sefirot is found on a level higher than the world, the sefirah of Tiferet, and as such it precedes it ontologically, and perhaps even temporally, if time were allowed to play a significant role in the process of emanation.
Indeed, it seems that the issue of temporality bothered R. Isaac enough for him to attempt to do away with this aspect of the rabbinic dictum. He resorts to the gematria of the word for year, shannah, in order to identify it with sefirah and mahashavah, namely a hypostatic being. Also, the other word implying a measure of time, ‘alppayyim, “two thousand,” is decoded as pointing to two ‘alephs standing for the two sefirot, Hokhmah and Binah. Again temporal quantity, two thousand years, is forced to refer to hypostatic entities.
So much for the hermeneutical details of the above passage. I am inclined, however, to consider this passage as representative of broader hermeneutical phenomena. The first and most conspicuous is the relation between the plain sense of a text and the symbolic sense. The absurd reading of the several rabbinic dicta does not, in my opinion, leave room for doubt that the metaphorical reading of the crucial elements of these dicta, and even the relationship between them, not only has been drastically transformed by the symbolic reading but also obliterates the possibility of approaching them seriously on the plain level. Both the disclosure of the incoherence and the decoding of the alleged hints in the rabbinic texts pointing to a metaphorical understanding seriously undermine the possibility that the plain sense retains the status of a significant statement after its symbolic explanation. The rabbinic texts as understood above do not function on the two levels but on one level alone. Before the understanding of the incoherence, they have a plain sense which is problematized when the symbolic one is imposed. Thus, the plain sense amounts to a misunderstanding, while the disclosure of the symbolic sense destroys the possibility of believing in the plain one. From this point of view the alleged critique of the anonymous philosophers dramatically affected the perception of rabbinic issues even among the “great” believers. Although a way of thought characteristic of the theosophical Kabbalah was adduced in order to safeguard the rabbinic material, it succeeded in some cases only at the price of sacrificing the plain sense. The assumption dominant in the scholarly understanding of the Kabbalistic symbols, that they do not weaken the plain sense of the interpreted material, should be modified.23
Even more important for the understanding of the manner in which Kabbalistic symbolism worked is R. Isaac’s general strategy in this passage and many others. The quandary created by the philosopher can be solved only because there is an interpretive code that is deemed to be accepted by him and his readers: the symbolic code. The structure of the sefirotic realm is not described, but only the nature of the particular sefirot that are involved in the suggested “solution.” In other words, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the above passage presumably was composed, the symbolic systems of Spanish Kabbalah were articulated enough from the systemic point of view, and known well enough, to allow resort to them without introducing the reader to their details. Or, to put it differently: in some parts—rather small ones, I assume—of the Jewish intelligentsia in Spain, Kabbalistic symbolism was known well enough to serve as a hermeneutical common denominator that could facilitate communication and rescue difficult aspects of Jewish tradition. However, such a function of the different Kabbalistic symbols as codes contradicts the role attributed to them by the dominant theory of Kabbalistic symbolism, which contends that symbols are the only available avenue for approaching the divinity.24 The divine hypostatic system as composed of ten sefirot was already known by the Kabbalists from their studies of the available Kabbalistic literature. They subsequently resorted to their theosophical knowledge, and perhaps also their experiences, as was the case with R. Isaac, in order to elucidate problems provoked by classical Jewish texts, in the same manner in which I proposed to understand important parts of the Kabbalistic symbol-ism.25 It is more what I called the impressive rather than the expressive aspect of the symbols that became more dominant with the later development of Kabbalah. In the writings of R. Isaac of Acre, the above passage in particular, and those of some of his contemporaries, most eminently the many books of R. David ben Yehudah he-Hasid, with whose Kabbalistic thought R. Isaac was presumably acquainted,26 Kabbalistic theosophy made quantum jumps from the point of view of the multiplication of the divine powers and worlds. Not only were the four worlds introduced and referred to technically by the acronym ’ABYA’, which also appears above,27 but the move toward a theory allowing the existence of innumerable divine powers is already obvious, as the pun on ’eser / se’ar in paragraph 2 evinces. This is not only a development concerning theosophy; it could also have implications for the nature of hermeneutics, since the different divine and non-divine realms of reality could invite corresponding exegetical approaches. The richer the supernal pole that serves as the map for the exegetical enterprises, the richer their results are. Indeed, the proliferation of the divine worlds should also be seen as relevant for the Kabbalistic exegetical projects described above as basically vertical,28 although, as we have seen, at a certain stage in the development of Kabbalah the hypertrophy of divine powers diminished the symbolic function.29
Indeed, in R. Isaac of Acre’s book from which we quoted above, a fourfold exegetical method has been put forward which, like pardes, is designated by an acronym: nisa’n. It is composed of three methods of interpretation: nistar, sod, and ’emmet, to which a fourth method has been added as the highest one, the “correct true” sense, ha-’emmet ha-nekhonah, mentioned explicitly in paragraph 2. There it is explicitly related to the first world of ’ABYA’, ’Atzilut, or Emanation.30 Hence, an explicit correlation between the expanding theosophy and the developing exegetical methods is manifest.
What could have been the perception of R. Isaac as a commentator, according to the above passage? Did he believe, for example, that his symbolic interpretation is the one and only possible way of understanding the rabbinic dicta? Or did he allow, at least in principle, additional symbolic interpretations? In my opinion, the very mention of the highest way of interpretation allows the assumption that he would resort to the lower ones, too, were it necessary to do so. In a generation when several complex exegetical systems were already articulated, as we saw in Chapter 12, it would be unnatural or implausible to return to monosemic types of interpretation.
Let me now turn to paragraph 5, which deals with the copying of the supernal, primordial Torah by Moses. As is the case in many Kabbalistic writings, Moses is conceived of here as symbolizing the sixth sefirah, which is also symbolized by the written Torah. R. Isaac accepts these symbolic commonplaces but interprets them as part of a supernal myth having to do with the descent of the primordial Torah to the level of Tiferet. Moses is not solely a human mortal; his name becomes, characteristically enough for the above passage, an acronym for the emanated Metatron, angel or prince of the divine presence,31 which is now described as the copyist within the divine realm. Functioning as a copyist, Moses had an impact on the style of the Torah, which abounds in the letter waw, another classical symbol for Tiferet, in order to strengthen the linkage between the Torah and that sefirah.
R. Isaac addresses the issue of Moses the copyist because it is part of Nah-manides’ introduction to his Commentary on the Torah, just as it occurs in some other rabbinic statements interpreted above.32 Nahmanides insisted on copying from one book to another, in a manner reminiscent of the copying of the Qur’an from a preexisting book and in manifest opposition to Maimonides’ insistence that Moses received a vocal revelation that he committed to writing.33 In other words, what we find in the above passage is an attempt to offer symbolic valences for rabbinic statements that seemed to R. Isaac not sufficiently significant, even when brought together in Nahmanides’ book. He had the feeling that without loading them with a detailed symbolic valence they might suffer the critique of the philosophers and lose their authority. He thereby arcanized not only some rabbinical statements but also a small segment of Nahmanides’ classical book.34 I would suggest seeing this arcanization of Nahmanides not as part of the much wider and better-known process of committing to writing the secrets Nahmani-des hinted at in his Commentary on the Torah by some of his students’ students, a process with which R. Isaac was well acquainted, but as an independent effort that does not claim a transmitted tradition but responds to some contemporary debates.35 Indeed, at the end of the first third of the fourteenth century there are beginnings of a critique of Nahmanides in Catalan Halakhic circles which stem from his students, including somewhat later remarks that the great master had “immersed himself too much in Kabbalah.”36 Moreover, the general ambiance of early-fourteenth-century Catalonia was permeated by the second debate on Maimonides, one of the main protagonists in this debate being a Kabbalist, R. Shlomo ibn Adret. Jewish philosophy, we should recall, remained both a challenge and a trigger for Kabbalists long after it had articulated the theosophical theurgical Kabbalistic systems at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In any case, in the immediate environment of R. Isaac in Spain, in R. Moses de Leon’s Sefer ha-Rimmon Jewish philosophers were described as deriding the pious students of Torah and the dicta of the rabbis. What is pertinent for our discussion is the fact that de Leon describes the clash in terms of “sons of the books of the Greeks” who deride the students of the sacred books.37
Are R. Isaac’s remarks responding to this nascent critique when they arcanized so many rabbinic statements occurring in Nahmanides’ introduction? In any case, the analyzed passage demonstrates the strong urge of several Kabbalists, contemporaries of R. Isaac, to offer symbolic interpretations to parts of mystical or Kabbalistic books, which were not intended to be understood as symbols. This extreme symbolization is part of what I have proposed to designate as superarcanization.38
The question, however, is whether discovering symbols wherever a quandary appears does not testify to a certain strengthening of a mechanistic propensity that reduces the entirety of interpreted texts to a schematic, over determined code. This is especially evident in the case of the symbolization of Moses’ copying the Torah. Yet it seems that the routinization of the massive resort to symbols does not automatically coincide with a literary activity devoid of experiential aspects. As we saw in Chapter 11 and Appendix 2, R. Isaac’s description of Moses’ experience is quite reminiscent of personal experiences of some contemporary mystics with whom he apparently was acquainted. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the idea that the Torah was copied by Moses and the view that it was written by two fires points, in my opinion, to a deep preoccupation with finding a more comprehensive meaning of Nahmanides’ introduction. So, for example, we read: “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.”39
Let me emphasize that it is the textual quandary that provoked the exegetical discourse of R. Isaac of Acre, not his effort to understand the recondite secrets of the divine world. Indeed, another text, which plausibly predated R. Isaac’s passage, may illustrate the impenetrability of the biblical text. R. Joseph of Hamadan wrote in his Commentary on the Rationales of the Commandments:
Woe to whoever believes that there is no more than the plain sense of the Torah,40 because the Torah is the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, in its entirety … because the Torah in its entirety is the name of the Holy One,41 and it consists in inner [namely spiritual] things … that any creature cannot comprehend the greatness of its rank, but God, blessed be He, the supreme and the wonderful that created it, and the Holy One, blessed be He, His Torah is within Him and in Him there is the Torah, and this is the reason why Kabbalists said that “He is in His name and the name is in Him,”42 He is His Torah and the Torah is made out of the holy and pure chain, in [the image of the] supernal form, and it is the shadow of the Holy One, blessed be He.43
The depths of the Torah cannot be penetrated by mortals, and the Torah does not serve as a telescope to attain a vision of the divine. Rather, being identical to God, it is fraught with the divinity of the divine realm, designated as the pure and holy chain and the supernal form. Thus, the nontransparent nature of the Torah is emphasized, and I assume that any effort to achieve its spiritual essence consists in discovering the correspondence between the different aspects of the text and the divine structure, as we had already seen above.44 The transparency achieved by theosophical-symbolic exegesis consists in the imposition of the theosophical scheme on the Torah, in a manner reminiscent of R. Isaac of Acre’s enterprise. Thus, according to these two cases, in lieu of regarding the Kabbalistic theosophical symbols as tools for passing from the clear text to its symbolic but less clear meaning, which intimates the distant divinity, we may assert that in the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalistic literature there are instances where the divine secrets are the exegetical tools for making sense of a text whose recondite significance escapes otherwise human understanding.
It is worthwhile to point out the difference between the view that identifies the Torah with the divine realm and the contention that the Torah is the shadow of God. The term “shadow” should perhaps be understood not as diminishing the strong identification but as claiming that God is the image for or paradigm of the Torah. This seems to be the case in a book that was composed in the early 1280s in Castile, R. Shema’yah ben Isaac ha-Levi’s Sefer Tzeror ha-Hayyim.45 If this reading is accepted, the revealed Torah is to be understood as less transparent than the prevailing theory of symbolism would have it be. Rather than seeing the copy (the revealed Torah) as more understandable in comparison to the paradigm (the supernal Torah), we should better conceive the supernal paradigm as the clue to a better understanding of the lower copy. In other words, the understanding of supernal structures may be taken as a prerequisite for the understanding of the lower reverberations.