Ancient Jewish monotheism was generally uncomfortable with the idea of the preexistence of any entity to the creation of the world, a premise that would imperil the uniqueness of God as the single creator. The coexistence of an additional entity would produce a theological dynamics that would question the most singular religious achievement of ancient Judaism. Implicitly, allowing any role to such a founding and formative entity would reintroduce a type of myth that could recall the pagan mythology, where once again the relationship between the preexistent deities as a crucial condition for the cosmogonic process would be thrown into relief.
Even in the biblical account of the creation, however, there is an implicit assumption regarding the preexistence of the tool of the creation: the Hebrew language. God created—or, according to another possible interpretation of the first chapter of the Bible, organized—the chaotic matter. The language that served as a crucial instrument in the cosmogonic process is presented as naturally existent and effective, and in any case there is no hint of any need to create language itself. Its existence is taken for granted. A preexistent tool, whose mythical features are minimized, enabled the transition from the chaotic matter, which cannot be considered as a creative entity, to the structured natural world. The Hebrew language was implicitly interposed between the accomplished creation and the preexistent chaos. This language plays, in the biblical view, solely an instrumental role, and it lacks an independent organization that could transform it into a text. Language appears only in those circumstances when the emergence of a certain entity or its denomination is referred to; in itself, it seems that language was not an object of discussion in the ancient Jewish reports of cosmogony. Thus the inner structure of language did not serve as an object of contemplation in order to understand the details of the cosmogonic processes.
No metaphysics or ontology of Hebrew is manifest in the biblical sources. Even the distinction between Hebrew as the divine language and other, “lower” languages does not explicitly occur in the Bible. Although we may assume that such a distinction is inherent in biblical thought, it is conspicuous that the self-perception of the Jews as inheritors of this special language was not presented in a polemical context.
Partially it seems that this lack of metaphysics regarding language is the result of its basically oral nature. The creative processes were accomplished by means of speech; the written form of language was confined only to the legal part of the Bible, namely the Ten Commandments, and not to those sections concerning the cosmogony. In rabbinic thought the vocal form of the creative process still prevails. The creative logoi were articulated by the invention of a new term to denote the spoken formulas in the first chapter of Genesis. The so-called ma’amarot are discussed in some detail, and there are even various versions of their precise identity.1 God is described as “He Who spoke and created the world.” However, at the same time as the oral status of the creative language was articulated and preserved, rabbinic literature expressed the written dimension of the creative language. God was not conceived as creating by writing but, according to a highly influential midrash, as contemplating the Torah as the paradigm of the world. Thus the written manifestation of the Torah, and implicitly of the Hebrew language, becomes crucial for the transition from the chaotic to the cosmic state. The intermediary status of the written Torah now shares with the divine the status of preexistence, and it cooperates in the process of creation. Meanwhile it seems that the importance of the written form of the Torah in the process of creation was expanded to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Although we cannot establish the exact historical sequence of this expansion, I assume that the concept of the creative letters emerged somewhat later. According to a midrash, of which there are several versions, each and every letter competed with the others so that God would create the world by its means. From the various discussions in this midrash, it transpires that the written shapes of the letters were alluded to by the midrashist.2
Even more conspicuous is the status of the written language in the cosmogony of Sefer Yetzirah. For the first time in a systematic way, the creation of the world was described as preceded by the creation of the letters. They were hewn from a primordial air, or ether, and after their emergence God combined them in order to create the world. I shall have much more to say on the crucial turn introduced by the combinatory technique of Sefer Yetzirah in the conception of language and the hermeneutics of Jewish mysticism in the following chapters, especially Chapter 12. Here it will suffice to stress again that this basic treatise envisioned the creation of the language as preceding that of the world and as instrumental for the mystical cosmogony. From these observations we can affirm that the written form of the Torah, and of the Hebrew letters in general, antedated the cosmogonic process or are part of the initial stages of that process. Thus, the “logical” question was asked as to the status of a written document before the creation of the material cosmos. In a long series of midrashic passages, the primordial Torah is described as having been written on a white fire with the letters of a black fire.3 More specifically, however, some midrashic sources became aware that if the Torah antedates the world, a quandary arises as to the material involved in the visible manifestation of the written. This question was explicitly posed in at least two different midrashim, using similar structural formulations, though the details differ substantially. A late midrash, ’Aseret ha-Dibberot, formulates the question as follows: “Before the creation of the world, skins for parchments were not in existence, that the Torah might be written on them, because the animals did not yet exist. So, on what was the Torah written? On the arm of the Holy One, blessed be He, by a black fire on [the surface of] a white fire.”4
It is obvious that the quandary of the midrash is related to the written form of the Torah; only this version can raise the question of the substratum for the letters. Here the preexistence of the Torah is envisioned in purely written form, and the graphical component of the text is of paramount importance. The basic assumption is that the material for the written Torah is a skin or parchment prepared from the hides of animals. Provided the primordial status of the Torah, no such material was yet in existence. The solution proposed by the midrash seems to be adumbrated by the phrase used in the question: If skins of animals were not in existence, was there another skin upon which the Torah was written down? The answer is positive; the Torah was written on the arm of God and implicitly on the skin of God’s arm. This skin, though not mentioned explicitly, is hinted at by the term “white fire,” on which the black letters of the Torah were engraved. The description of God as fire is not new; it is already found in the Bible, where God is designated as ’esh ’okhelah, a “devouring fire.”5 The fact that the divine arm is envisioned as a substitute for the animal skin forcibly invites the concept that the divine skin is the locus of the primordial Torah. The above midrash is one of the rare instances of an anthropomorphic understanding of the Torah. It is not, however, a unique text. According to the view of midrash Tanhuma’, the very question asked by midrash ‘Aseret ha-Dibberot is answered using a biblical locus probans, which had important resonances in other discussions: “On what was the Torah written? On the white fire with the black fire, as it is said:6 ‘His locks are wavy, and black as a raven.’ What is the meaning [of the phrase] ‘His locks are wavy’?7 On each and every tittle8 there are heaps and heaps9 of halakhot.”10
The midrashic exegesis is based on a rather peculiar reading of the biblical verse: the locks, taltalim, are divided into two words, which are understood as tilei tilim, literally “heaps of heaps”; qevuzotav, “wavy,” is understood as referring to an imaginary plural of qotz, a tittle.11 So, the meaning of the text is that depending on the tittles of the divine locks there are heaps of implicit halakhic issues. Obviously there is an anthropomorphic overtone of the description of the Torah as written on the white fire; here the effect is achieved by mentioning the biblical verse where the description of the Beloved in the Song of Songs is included. The first part of the verse, “The locks of the Beloved,” depicted here as black, is an interpretation of the black fire and implicitly the letters of the Torah and the halakhic decisions emerging from the biblical text. Thus, another text, using a different approach, alludes too to the anthropomorphic nature of the primordial Torah.
What are the theological implications of these attempts to identify the preexistent Torah with the divine skin? Such an identification may be viewed as bridging the gap between God and the primordial Torah so that the monotheistic attitude of ancient Judaism will not be imperiled. This is achieved, however, within the framework of an anthropomorphic theology. It seems that the above texts do not worry too much about the “danger” of an anthropomorphic reading. Rather, they appear to have simply accepted an anthropomorphic theology of the Heikhalot literature, which includes discussions of the huge dimension of the divine manifestation on the throne. Provided such an anthropomorphic theology operates beyond the above texts, the riddle of the material on which the Torah was written before its disclosure at Mount Sinai can be elegantly solved. These identifications of God and Torah are, however, only part of a more comprehensive view of their relationship, which asserts that the Torah was written on the limbs of God. I should like to forgo elaborating on that view here; however, we have already seen that the Torah was written on the arm and head of God, as the mention of the locks apparently implies. The Torah is viewed as an inscription on the divine body, to be compared with the inscriptions in ancient Jewish and non-Jewish magic. This mythical Torah is, at the same time, an inscription on a divine limb and a sacred canon, a perception that emphasizes the visual dimension of the text. It is a divine manifestation, to the extent that the Torah is the black fire, and we may assume that the contemplation of our Torah is reminiscent of its status in illo tempore, before the creation, or possibly even its status today. Contemplating the Torah will, accordingly, involve more than a study of certain sacred contents, more than the disclosure of an ideal modus vivendi; it will include, at least partially, a divine self-revelation. Thus the white fire will stand for the divine substance of the Torah, the black one for the letters.
Semiotically, only the black dimension operates as a meaningful signifier because it alone imparts content to the readers. Mystically, however, the white fire involves a higher status which, though semantically meaningless, directly reflects the divine body rather than God’s intention as articulated in the Torah. I assume that the split in the two aspects of the written Torah, the black and the white, reflects a much deeper axiology than the common preference for white, as a positive color, over black. The implicit preference for the white and amorphous fire may represent a tendency to be immersed into a more contemplative and direct approach to the divine, which will regard the letters, namely the limited contents of the revealed religion, as a lower and mediated relation to the beyond. Such a religious phenomenology is, in my opinion, not representative of rabbinic Judaism, which was centered on the semantic facets of the text more than on its formal ones. However, it seems to be in full consonance with the theology of the Heikhalot literature, where not only is the anthropomorphic aspect central but also the importance of the semantic aspects of the Torah is attenuated. In this type of literature, and in writings related to it, the magical aspects and the measurable dimensions of the Torah are addressed much more than in the classical rabbinic tradition. A religiosity based on a theology that emphasizes the formal and dimensional aspects of the divine, and the attempt of the mystic to experience them, supports the conception of the white fire as the substratum of the Torah, as identical with the divine skin. The higher status of the white fire in the constitution of the Torah is, I would like to repeat, only implicitly found in midrashic texts. In other words, the above discussions of white and black do not invite a distinction between a transcendental deity, identified with the white fire, and a revealed one. There is no concept similar to negative theology that is involved in the whiteness of the divine skin, but perhaps some concept of purity or sublimity.
Before moving to the later reverberations of the two fires, let me record what seems to me to be a reaction to the anthropomorphic solution to the quandary of the preexistence of the Torah. In Rashi’s commentary on the treatise ’Avot 5:6, it is said that the body of the letters had been created only during the six days of creation, while the preexistent Torah was standing orally, be-‘al peh.12 This stand is indeed exceptional given the midrashic view that God contemplated the Torah and created the world. I see here an attempt to neutralize the already existing understanding of the preexistence of the Torah on the divine body by assuming this oral status. I would summarize the few midrashim adduced above as describing the close relation between God and the Torah with the intention of solving a quandary produced by the previous midrashic elevation of the Torah to the status of a preexistent entity by supplying a substratum for it, rather than as consciously attempting to confer divine status on the text.13 The passages under scrutiny above can be understood as narrowing the gap between God and Torah, but they apparently are characteristic of a later development and hardly represent the main thrust of the more classical midrash.
In the medieval Kabbalistic treatments of the nature of the two fires, however, the symbolic interpretations manifestly present the white part of the letters and the Torah as symbols of the higher aspects of the Torah, in comparison to the black parts of letters. The details of the symbolic interpretations will be adduced in a moment. First, though, I would like to note the major difference between the ancient theological stand on the white/black dichotomy and the medieval position as evidenced in the following passages. The Heikhalot literature is based on a theology that emphasizes the huge dimension of God, but it is also a static theology. In comparison to rabbinic theology, which includes views of God as being influenced by human activity (essentially the commandments), the quintessence of Heikhalot theology is the knowledge of the dimensions, whose immutability endows them with the special status of an important religious gnosis.14
Later on, in medieval Kabbalah, the two types of theology became obsolete in the eyes of some Jewish elites. The Kabbalists among them, who held to the theosophical trend of Kabbalah, expressed their theology by resorting to a complex system of divine powers, the sefirot, whose reflections here in the world below were perceptible by means of symbols or, as I shall explain later in this study, by imposing a code on the Jewish canonical writings.15 Though substantially different from the rabbinic and Heikhalot theologies, the Kabbalistic theosophies combine major elements of both of them; from the Heikhalot literature, or similar theologies that are only hinted at in a few texts, the Kabbalistic theosophies accepted the anthropomorphic description of the revealed divinity. From some aspects of rabbinic theology dealing with the divine attributes the Kabbalists accepted the dynamic nature of the divine realm. This synthesis was conceived as expressing ongoing processes, which are rather difficult to represent because they are ever changing. Everything in the canonical writings was taken by those Kabbalists as symbolic, either of the divine powers or of the sinister part, the side of evil. In this symbolic frame the whole biblical imagery became a tissue of symbols, as did the most significant segments of the midrashic and talmudic literatures. This process of symbolization—one major aspect of the more comprehensive process of arcanization that will be discussed below—became vital for the expression of important parts of the Kabbalistic literature.16
In the course of this expanding process of symbolization, the above discussions of the white and black fires underwent a profound semantic metamorphosis. They were now understood not only as describing the primordial Torah, in accordance with the literal meaning of the sources, but also as symbolically expressing the relationship between the divine, spiritual powers. Although those powers may or may not have anything in common with attributes of the Torah, the very identification of the fires with specific sefirot had some resonances in the Kabbalistic conception of the Torah. The nature of the supernal powers involved in this symbolic process was transposed by the Kabbalist to the nature of the mundane Torah.
Thus, an interesting development in Kabbalistic thought, which stems from ancient midrashic traditions, generated a special theosophical understanding of the nature of written language and, implicitly, of the biblical text. At the middle of the thirteenth century, in Castile, R. Isaac ha-Kohen, the son of R. Jacob ha-Kohen, expounded an interesting theory concerning the relation between the white and black configurations of the Hebrew letters. Regarding the letter ’aleph he wrote:
The inner [form] stands for the Holy One, blessed be He, as He is hidden from the eye of any creature and His innerness cannot be reached. The external form stands for the [external] world, which depends on the arm of the Holy One, blessed be He, as an amulet does on the arm of a powerful man.17 And just as the inner form is the locus of the external form, so [also] is God the locus of the world, and the world is not the locus of God.18 What I have mentioned to you [is] that the white form in the ’aleph stands for the level of Holy One, blessed be He, but not the black one, [which is] external. I did tell you this by way of a [great] principle, and as a great secret because the white form stands for the white garment, and our sages, blessed be their memory, said:19 Whence was the light created? It teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, clothed Himself in a white garment, and the splendor of it shone from one end of the world to another, as it is said:20 “Who covers himself with light as with a garment” and21 “and the light dwells with him.”22
The inner form is the white space that is the locus of the black configuration of the letter. It is the inner form that is the most important, as it is the soul that sustains the body. This last type of image is expressly used in the context of our passage, and it reflects the Neoplatonic view of the soul as sustaining the body by the very act of surrounding it. Moreover, the white light is conspicuously identified with the divine light, which was described as the divine garment. All this is related to the divine arm, albeit the anthropomorphic aspect was somewhat attenuated in this passage. Crucial for our discussion is the fact that the amorphous component of the letter, the white space, is conceived as the paramount element, identical with a divine manifestation. Obviously, the above discussion does not refer, as in the earlier literature, to the Torah in its entirety and to its role in the creative process. The white spaces are now described in terms reminiscent of the negative theology. Intertwined as the white and black letters are, they point to theosophical layers that sharply differ from one another.
The above passage seems to include, however, an even more striking factor: not only is the primordial written version of the Torah pregnant with a divine dimension, but so are the individual Hebrew letters in general, independent of their role in the cosmogonic process. To a certain extent the separate letters are fraught with their own meaning, independent of their context in the biblical text. Two hermeneutical processes can be discerned here: the one Rojtman described in other contexts as autonomization,23 and the one that she identified as plenitude of the form.24
Consequently, not only the primordial Torah has divine status but, in principle, any Hebrew text does. The present passage conclusively demonstrates that Kabbalists have moved from a theory of the Hebrew letters as part of the divine text to the special status of Hebrew letters in general, thus opening the way for a much more comprehensive hermeneutics of Hebrew texts, though the opportunity has been hardly exploited de facto. The nature of the white light, the space surrounding the letter, is compared to an emanation of the light stemming from the divine garment. This light is comparable to the white fire, corresponding to God’s skin in some midrashic texts. In both cases the external appearance of God is involved in the constitution of the written text. In the above Kabbalistic passage, however, the light is preferred because it better serves Kabbalistic theosophy, which is interested in the emanative process. As can be shown in other Kabbalistic passages as well, the emergence of the text—or, according to other Kabbalistic discussions, of the articulated verbal aspect of language25—is a metaphor for the emanation;26 the white fire of the midrash, with its anthropomorphic connotations, would be less appropriate as an image of a pure spiritual emanation.
Let me examine a Kabbalistic text, whose precise dating is unclear, which combines the beginning of the emanative process with the imagery of the two fires. R. Shem Tov ben Shem Tov, an early-fifteenth-century Castilian Kabbalist, quotes from an unidentified Kabbalistic book where it was written:
The Name, our Lord, blessed be He, who is One, Unique and Special,27 because all needs Him, and He does not need them, His knowledge is united to Him and there is nothing outside Him.28 And He is called ’Aleph, the head of all the letters, corresponding to the fact that He is One … and how did He innovate and create the world? Like a man who comprises his spirit and concentrates his spirit, and the world remains in darkness, and within this darkness He chopped rocks and chiseled cliffs in order to extract from there the paths called “Wonders of Wisdom,”29 and this is the meaning of the verse30 “He took out light from the hiddenness,” and this is the secret of “a dark fire on the white fire,” and this is the secret of’ face and back.”31, 32
The anonymous Kabbalist quoted here, who apparently thrived early in the thirteenth century, combines Sefer Yetzirah’s emphasis on the creation of the letters as the first divine activity with the concept of divine withdrawal from the space that will serve as the locus of the cosmological processes. I assume that the black fire is hinted at by the dark elements that are the material from which or within which the letters were excavated. These raw and resistant materials emerged after, or as the result of, the withdrawal of the divine light from a certain space. On the basis of another passage very close to the one under scrutiny,33 I propose to identify the white fire with the divine light that remained in the evacuated space. Thus, the primordial processes that are imagined to precede the process of emanation of the world are described in terms that were commonly used by midrashic sources to designate the inscription of the Torah onto the divine organism. Similar views of the two fires are combined in a text written by the above-mentioned R. Shem Tov, with the contention that the white fire is identical with the special shapes of the five letters mem, nun, tzade, peh, and kaf when they appear at the end of a word.34 This contention is important because it assumes that the white fire entered into the very constitution of the present Torah. According to R. Shem Tov, those letters are also identical to the hidden light, stored for the righteous, the tzaddiqim.35 I shall come back to this theme later on in the chapter, when dealing with Hasidism.
One of the most extensive discussions of the theme of white and black fires is found in a late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century commentary on midrash Konen. In the unique manuscript in which this commentary is extant, it is attributed to R. Isaac the Elder (ha-Zaqen). Gershom Scholem, who was the first to call scholars’ attention to this text, surmised that the author is none other than the famous R. Isaac the Blind, the Provencal sage whom the Kabbalists consider to be one of the founders of Kabbalah. The cautious attribution of the commentary to R. Isaac the Blind changed, however, in the same article of Scholem, into an explicit assignment of authorship.36 Let me address some of the pertinent points related to our topic which play a central role in the commentary on the midrash. R. Isaac the Elder starts his commentary as follows:
On the right hand37 of the Holy One, blessed be He, all the engravings which are expected to be actualized are engraved. They were engraved, inscribed, and depicted out of the emanation of all the crowns,38 in the level of Hesed, as an inner, subtle, impenetrable [entity] and it was called from the [very] beginning the Thought of the Integrated Torah39 [and] the Torah of Hesed. And as part of the totality of all the engravings, two engravings were engraved in it [in the Sefirah of Hesed]: one [engraving] which is the depiction of the Written Torah, the other one which is the Oral Torah. The depiction of the Written Torah, is [formed out of] depictions of colors of white fire, and the depiction of the oral Torah is a depiction of likeness of colors of black fire.40
Here we can see how the ancient anthropomorphism was translated into theosophical terminology. The right hand of God is identical with the sefirah of Hesed, upon which the two fires are formed. The anthropomorphic tone is also explicit in the reference to the colors and their manifestations as depiction, tziyyur. The two kinds of Torah are only some of the engravings found in the sefirah of Hesed in an attempt not to identify the two Torahs with the divine power or hand. The specific form of existence of the two types of Torah on the divine hand, or within the sefirah of Hesed, is designated by the phrase mahashevet torah kelulah, which Scholem did not translate verbatim. He suggested—actually, his English translator suggested—the term “the not yet unfolded” for kelulah, which in my opinion is not only clumsy but to a certain extent incorrect. In my view, the two forms of Torah were found together, perhaps in an integrated manner, before the next stage of emanation, which separated the written Torah from the oral one, the former being identified with the sefirah of Tiferet (Beauty) or Rahamim (Compassion), while the latter was identified with the last sefirah, Malkhut. So far, we have a rather understandable Kabbalistic discussion describing the processes of emanation in terms related to the canonical books.
The separation between the two types of Torah corresponding to the hierarchy of the two sefirot has been known in Kabbalah since the Book of Bahir.41 What is new with this author is the fact that the oral Torah is the black fire, a view that seems to be an innovation of this text. Semantically speaking, however, the novel imagery does not dramatically alter the relationship between the content of the white and the black. In the former cases the black fire reflects the limited, formed, written manifestation, whereas in this treatise the oral Torah seems to function as the limited aspect of the entity conceived of as the written, but amorphous, Torah.
More precise elaborations on the significance of the blank spaces are found in some Kabbalistic fragments that discuss the nature of the letter yod.42 The numerical equivalent of this letter, according to the Hebrew system of counting, is ten. In those texts, the Kabbalists assume that there is a black yod, which is sustained by a white yod. The white one, which is also hidden, is conceived of as symbolic of the ten supernal sefirot, the ten tzahtzahot, or divine lights, which serve as the static and hidden paradigms of the lower and dynamic sefirot.43 According to at least one of the fragments, however, the white yod and black yod are related to each other, so that from the lower, black yod one can perceive the higher, white yod. Thus, no negative theology is involved here, but a hierarchy that allows access to the higher by means of the linguistic material.44
The higher sefirot are arranged, according to an esoteric teaching in the circle of the Kabbalists who wrote the above texts, in an anthropomorphic structure. Thus, the white fire is again emblematic of a divine anthropomorphic view. The late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century Kabbalists returned, to a certain extent, to the ancient view of the Torah as written on the divine skin—an interesting parallel to Derrida’s “transcendental space of inscription”45—while employing a much more sophisticated theosophy than their ancient predecessors.
Let me address the hermeneutical significance of attributing such great importance to the white parts of the text. We may distinguish between two different approaches to this matter. The ancient one, basically an anthropomorphic theology, integrates the view that the white fire points to the divine skin, thereby ensuring the divinity of the peculiar writing of the Torah scroll. On the other hand, the symbolic interpretation of the white fire has something to do with the assumption that the higher or inner level in the divine realm is made much richer by its very ambiguity. The written, namely the limited, aspects of the text are the lower ones, whereas the higher ones, which reflect the divine essence, are less definite. In the period when the Kabbalists elaborated the theory that there are infinite meanings hinted at in the biblical text, it seems strange, prima facia, that the external, static aspect of the biblical text became so important. Since it was possible to confer on the written aspect of the Bible such an unlimited range of interpretations (as we shall see in Chapter 3), why bother about the minutia of its manifestation? Historically speaking, it seems that the theory concerning the infinite meanings of the biblical text was emphasized by Kabbalists who were also anxious to stress the importance of the external facet of the Bible. I assume that the drastic relativization of the semantic aspect of the words by the assumption of infinite semiosis required an absolutization of their manifest side. It is precisely an attempt to postulate the absolute gestalt underlying the ongoing flow of the meaning that contributed to the ascent of the importance of the substratum of the words. That is to say, when it became obvious that the authoritative significance of the Bible depended on subjective interpretations, the need for a balance to stabilize and thus create a center of gravity contributed to the emergence of an emphasis on the other aspects of the text. The limited aspect, the black fire, became unlimited as far as the number of the senses of the text is concerned. The authority installed by the identification of the white with the divine permitted Kabbalists to relate to the Bible as the absolute text. However, this “new” authority was consonant with that mystical authority which may be amorphous, that is, which may express amorphous experiences. The view of the Torah manifest in some late-thirteenth-century Kabbalistic texts may suggest that the ultimate source and substratum of the Torah is amorphous, just as the highest aspect of the divine is conceived to be in some descriptions of the encounter between God and man, whereas the limited, black part of the text, namely the letters, is the communal, public manifestation of the divine in the external world. The retreat to the semantically indeterminate aspects of the Bible, the white “forms” of the letters, is probably the answer to the need to emphasize the uniqueness of the Hebrew formulation of the Bible, much beyond the necessity to relate to its grammatological gestalt. The elevation of the external form of the biblical text, which includes the white parts, to such an exalted rank secured among the theosophical Kabbalists a special significance for the punctilious Jewish observance of the minutiae in the copying of the biblical scroll. It is not sufficient, so the implied argument may go, to study Hebrew in order to be in contact with the innermost aspect of the Bible; the semantics of the scriptures are not sufficient for decoding the ultimate, divine message; one must accept the formal facets of its written transmission, as formulated by the rabbinic regulations, to be able to fathom the subtle, almost imponderable finesse of the scroll, which points to the indeterminate Godhead. To a certain extent, the Kabbalists attempted to validate not only the biblical text but also the importance of the rabbinical manner of writing the Torah scroll.
Let me call attention now to an additional text, written by a very influential Kabbalist, R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi.46 R. Joseph angrily protests against the view of the characters of the Hebrew alphabet as conventional and argues for the existence of numerous secrets in each of the aspects of these letters: “God forbids that our holy Torah, namely its letters, [for it] to be said that they are signs invented by the hearts of men. How may it be in relation to characters which were engraved by the finger of God, that they are invented letters? Indeed the trace47 of the letters consists in the ink and the blank,48 and each and every part possesses heaps and heaps of secrets of the account of the chariot and the account of the creation.”49
Interestingly enough, the Kabbalist resorts to the phrase that was discussed above dealing with the heaps of halakhah, which depends on each and every tittle, namely the black aspects of the letters, in order to designate the dependence of the secret aspects of the oral law, the two accounts, on the blank and black parts of the letters. Here the process of arcanization is evident: secrets are a matter of topics concerning a double or multiple message related not only to the semantic structure of the text, but also to the very layout of the text.
It is quite reasonable to assume that this emphasis on the ideogrammatic aspects of the Hebrew letters, and implicitly the Hebrew Bible, constitutes a reaction to Maimonides’ view of Hebrew as a conventional language.50 R. Joseph responds to Maimonides twice in his writings;51 this is a revealing example of how the Kabbalistic fundamentalist attitude toward language was provoked by the introduction in Jewish circles of Greek philosophical stands, including the emergence of a symbolic interpretation of aspects of the Bible.52
A fundamental question should be asked about the more precise content of the above argument. Is the claim that the blank spaces contain supernal secrets more than a blank statement? Indeed, that may be the case, but it is not necessary. As we have seen, the attempt to discover the possible meaning of the blank spaces was already part of the Kabbalistic literature. Moreover, for R. Joseph the secrets of the accounts of creation and the chariot were not abstract topics; according to his own testimony he had composed commentaries on these issues, although it is not so clear whether they are extant.53 In his own commentary on the Hebrew letters, which immediately follows the above passage, there is no attempt to address the white spaces; neither did I find any trace of such an enterprise in the other commentaries on the same topic from his circle.54
Exalted as the two types of account may be in the eyes of a Kabbalist, they do not point to the Infinite. Thus the white parts may be understood as more sublime than the black ones, but still not as pointing to the highest layer in the divine world. Such a stand is found, however, in the writings of a famous sixteenth-century Kabbalist, R. David ibn Avi Zimra. In the introduction to his Magen David, a welter of Kabbalistic traditions related to the Hebrew alphabet, R. David wrote: “Because of His outmost occultation, there is nothing that points to Him as a particular sign. But the whiteness of the parchment that encompasses all the letters from within and without includes a certain allusion that He, blessed be He, encompasses all the worlds, the supernal and the lower, from within and without … On this issue our sages said55 that any letter that is not encompassed by the parchment is disqualified. Because just as the parchment supports all the letters … so He, blessed be He, supports all the worlds.”56
R. David attempts to resolve a Kabbalistic quandary known since the end of the thirteenth century: Is there a term for ’Ein Sof in the Bible? Since this very phrase does not occur in classical Jewish texts, some Kabbalists assumed that its absence has to do with the sublime status of this layer of divinity, which is not even hinted at by the biblical material.57 His answer is indeed fascinating: nothing in the black letters of the written Torah alludes to the Infinite, but the nature of the Infinite, which both encompasses and penetrates the worlds is intimated by the nature of the writing of the Torah on a scroll. Here, the white aspects of the Torah scroll are quite explicitly pointing to the Infinite.
Interestingly, the stress on the importance of the white surface safeguards, in the eyes of the Kabbalists, the unique status of the Hebrew Bible as embodied by an halakhically performed scroll, even in an age when the study of Hebrew by some Christians had been an achievement of Christian exegesis since the twelfth century. The proper study of the Torah would, a Kabbalist could claim, depend not on acquaintance with the semantics of the biblical Hebrew but on the punctilious act of copying the text according to the rabbinic instructions. In a curious manner, the hermeneutic freedom that Kabbalistic exegesis achieved by cultivating the polysemic, dynamic symbolical approach to the biblical text culminated in the apotheosis of the static, parasemantic, or hieroglyphic facets of this text. To be sure, also in talmudic-midrashic thought, there was a conspicuous concern with the precise writing of the Torah scroll; the major interest of the ancient Jewish sages, however, was limited to the possible semantic mutations that may occur as the result of changes introduced by the copyists.58 Kabbalists added to this concern the metaphor of the Bible as the picture of God, namely the iconic-ideogrammatic facet, an issue to be addressed in more detail later in this chapter.
Let me adduce a passage from a book written by an early-eighteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalist, R. Joseph Ergas:
On the parchment that is under the [letters of] the Tetragrammaton there is a likeness of an image possessing the form of the Tetragrammaton, because under the yod of ink there is one white yod of the parchment which sustains the yod of ink, and so also underneath the he’ and the other letters, in a manner that the Tetragrammaton of ink limits the whiteness of the parchment in a form similar to the form of the Tetragrammaton and so is the case in other names written on a parchment. This is so long as the letters of ink are on the parchment. But if the letters fly and disappear from there, the parchment will remain white without any letter and likeness [of letter] at all. Now, remove the shell of corporeality from the above parable and imagine that ’Ein Sof together with the sublime instrument, Keter of ’Adam Qadmon, is the simile of the parchment that does not have any name, letter or vowel, because the Keter of ’Adam Qadmon is His simple act, as mentioned above.59 And since ‘Ein Sof had emanated all the names and the sefirot by means of Keter of’Adam Qadmon, and they are sustained and maintained within Him, like the letters on the parchment, we can attribute the names and the attributes written in the Torah to ’Ein Sof and read Him in them … because there is not, as we had already said, word and speech worthy to be pronounced on ’Ein Sof … and there is no word in prayer that points to ’Ein Sof, but the [mental] intention.60
The manner in which the biblical semiosis functions here is quite interesting. The names that are understood as referring to God do not do so by a regular direct reference to something outside the sign, to an ontological presence that exists independently of the signifier. According to the parable, the inked letters create their signifier, the white letters of the parchment, which point to the divine infinity. Likewise, the emanation of the divine names and of the sefirot does not take place without the absolute source, the ’Ein Sof. They constitute, so to speak, a transcendental inscription on the very substance of the Infinite. The structure of the Torah scroll, namely the forms of its letters, is therefore the aspect that points to the structures and processes taking place within the Infinite, not by means of a symbolic mode based on understanding of the semantics of the text but as structural and functional similitudes. In this case, which reflects the Lurianic theosophy that includes the concept of withdrawal, the Infinite is the substratum of all reality, and thus it constitutes an eminently positive vision of divinity.61
Hasidic interest in the status of the biblical text has attracted little attention in modern scholarship. Though offering a view that was not consonant with the more intellectualistic approaches found in rabbinic circles of the eighteenth century, Hasidic masters were more inclined toward the nonsemantic aspects of the Bible, especially its oral performance as part of study.62 The concern with the visual aspects of the text is secondary in Hasidism. Nevertheless, one of the few discussions dealing with the white letters has drawn attention from scholars. It deals with an apotheosis of the white aspects of the Torah found in a tradition connected to R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev, to which Gershom Scholem called attention; following him, it was also mentioned by Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco. In the following I would like to deal in some detail with this Hasidic treatment, for two reasons: First, this Hasidic master apparently paid more attention to this topic than any other Jewish thinker. Second, his view has been interpreted in a manner that conflicts with our own suggestion concerning how the white aspect of the Torah functioned. In lieu of playing a conservative role, as I believe it did, it was interpreted as revolutionary.
The eighteenth-century Hasidic master was reported to have interpreted Isaiah 51:4, “A Torah will go forth from me,” as follows:
We can see by the eye of our intellect why in the Torah handed down to us one letter should not touch the other. The matter is that also the whiteness constitutes letters, but we do not know how to read them as [we know] the blackness of the letters. But in the future God, blessed be He, will reveal to us even the whiteness of the Torah. Namely we will [then] understand the white letter in our Torah, and this is the meaning of “A new Torah will go forth from me,” that it stands for the whiteness of the Torah, that all the sons of Israel will understand also the letters that are white in our Torah, which was delivered to Moses. But nowadays the letters of whiteness are obscured from us. But in the Song on the Sea, when it has been said, “This is my Lord, I shall praise Him,”63 it is written in [the writings of] Isaac Luria that “their soul flied when they heard the song of the angels” and God had opened their ear to hear etc., … and this is the reason why the maidservant had seen on the sea [more Ezekiel]64—the whiteness of the letters [she saw] what has not been seen etc., because the matter has been occultated until the advent of the Messiah.65
Scholem emphasized the novelty of the Torah that will be revealed in the messianic future; he understood this passage as part of a series of Kabbalistic discussions, in fact a tradition, dealing with future revelations of yet-unknown parts of the Torah.66 Relating this passage to views found in the Talmud about the existence of seven books of the Pentateuch, and more substantially with the stand of Sefer ha-Temunah, which claims that one of the books of the Torah has been lost,67 the above passage has been interpreted as concerning the revelation of another hidden religious document, or a least a part of it. This insertion of the Hasidic passage in a longer earlier tradition that has some antinomian features is characteristic of Scholem’s flirtation with antinomianism in his phenomenology of Jewish mysticism, which remained part and parcel of many of Scholem’s followers. Or, to use David Biale’s terminology, this is part of Scholem’s “counter-history.” R. Levi Isaac mentions Sefer ha-Temunah explicitly in the context of the shape of the letters.68 Did, however, R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev, an icon of traditionalism in Hasidic circles, indeed subscribe to the radical view of the earlier Kabbalistic book?
It is plausible, in my opinion, to propose a much less revolutionary understanding of this passage. God is emanating a new Torah from Himself, me-’itti, and because this new Torah is the revelation of the meaning of the white letters, it is in fact a revelation not of a new document but of the divine as the background of the white letters, in the vein of the above discussions. Such an understanding is less innovative than Scholem’s, but it is corroborated by at least three discussions, one stemming from R. Levi Isaac’s main teacher, another by R. Levi Isaac himself, and a third adduced in his name by his disciple R. Aharon of Zhitomir. Let me therefore attempt to elucidate the meaning of the passage by resorting to the texts dealing with this topic, which should inform any analysis of R. Levi Isaac’s views.
R. Dov Baer of Mezeritch, known as the Great Maggid and the master of R. Levi Isaac, interprets Isaiah 51:4 as follows:
Behold that the Torah in its entirety is collected from [the deeds of] righteous men, from Adam, and the forefathers, and Moses, who caused the dwelling of the Shekhinah on their deeds, and this is the complete Torah. However, the luminosity of the essence69 has not been revealed yet, until the Messiah will come and they will understand the luminosity of His essence.70 And this is the new Torah that goes forth from me, whose meaning is “from My essence.”71,72
The Great Maggid argues that the revealed Torah deals with human deeds and their interaction with the divine. The forefather had been able to cause the descent of the divine presence here below. However, the divine essence in itself is not expounded in the Torah that counts their deeds, perfect as it is. Thus, according to this passage, the luminosity, the new Torah, and the divine essence are explicitly related to each other. It is not a new text that is revealed but the depths of the canonical document already in the possession of the Jews. R. Levi Isaac, too, commented on this verse from Isaiah, in the context of the apprehension of God and the Torah, yet without mentioning the white letters.73 Elsewhere, however, R. Levi Isaac writes:
It is known that the letters of the Torah have the aspect of inner lights74 which are revealed according to the order of the emanation of the worlds. And the boundary of the white that encompasses the letters possesses the aspect of the encompassing lights, which are not revealed but are found in a hiddenness, in the aspect of the encompassing light. From this we may understand that the white boundaries possess also the aspect of letters, but they are hidden letters, higher than the revealed letters … because the aspect of the whiteness which is [identical with] the hidden letters is derived from the revelation of the aspect of the revealed letters, and that is the meaning of what has been written,75 “The maidservant had seen on the [Red] Sea [more than what Ezekiel has seen],” because the revelation of the divinity was so great that even the maidservant was capable of understanding. This is the meaning of the verse “A new Torah will go forth from me”: that in the future, when the revelation of the divinity and the glory of God will be disclosed, and all men will see etc., it means that the revelation of the aspect of the encompassing76 and the revelation of the aspect of the whiteness, namely the white letters which encompass the revealed letters of the Torah, [will take place,] this being the meaning of “A new Torah will go forth from me.”77
This text draws upon a distinction already found in the passage from R. David ibn Avi Zimra: the white stands for the highest and hidden aspects of the divinity, although according to the Kabbalist God encompasses both the external and the internal aspects of the world. R. Levi Isaac, however, resorts to a distinction found in the thought of two of ibn Avi Zimra’s contemporaries, R. Moses Cordovero and R. Isaac Luria, one between the “encompassing” divinity or transcendental light—a view already found in the thirteenth-century Kabbalah—and the inner or immanent light. In the Lurianic systems the transcendental light is totally beyond human perception. For the Hasidic master, the white is the transcendental aspect alone. But what seems to be interesting in R. Levi Isaac’s last passage is the assumption that the revelation of the maidservant was higher than the highest revelation according to the Kabbalists: that of the prophet Ezekiel. I take this view as assuming that the maidservant had in fact seen the divinity, which in this context is the white aspect of the letters. Thus, it is not only a messianic experience of the text that is implied in the knowledge of the structure of the white letters, but also one that has taken place in the past. Moreover, according to some statements it is in principle available also in the present, because the white and the black letters are intertwined. Let me attempt to explicate the views of the Hasidic master from another standpoint. The text is not used in order to reach an experience of the signifié of the text by means of a symbolic decoding of the newly revealed letters. The Torah is not instrumental in transcending a certain common or ordinary experience in order to attain a divinity totally divorced from the text by leaving the text behind or experiencing the author without the text. The two are conceived of as profoundly intertwined. God’s revelation depends on one’s ability to see Him within parts of the texts that before the revelation were opaque. Therefore, the Hasidic discussions adduced above do not follow a theory of the lost text, or of a portion of it, but the approach that the divinity actually stands beyond the revealed aspects of the written Torah. In theosophical terminology, the revealed Torah is identical to the third sefirah, Binah, and the Torah to be revealed in the future is identical to the second sefirah, Hokhmah.78
Is there any significant difference between Scholem’s interpretation and the one suggested above? In my opinion there is, and it consists in the status of the text. Scholem’s interpretation stems from his framing the passage within the antinomian tradition of Sefer ha-Temunah,79 mentioned immediately before and after the above quote, a strategy that construes the feeling that the Hasidic master assumes that the perfect Torah will be revealed in the messianic future. Scholem makes it quite clear that “unquestionably this doctrine left room for all manner of heretical variants and developments. Once it was supposed that a revelation of new letters or books could change the whole outward manifestation of the Torah without touching its true essence, almost everything was possible.”80
The excitement of a modern reader to learn about the heretical variants is, however, not satisfied by Scholem’s note, where only the name of Cagliostro is mentioned,81 and I would not put too great an emphasis on the representativeness of this figure for the concept of Torah in Jewish mysticism. Yet the Hasidic master does not speak about a change in the “whole outward manifestation of the Torah,” namely an ontic change of the founding document, but about an epistemological change that opens the eyes, or hearts, of the people. Is such a change something to be deferred to another eon or restricted to the advent of the Messiah? Is the life of a Hasidic mystic one that is lived in deferment, as Scholem would say?82 Had the mystic to pay a price, as Scholem put it, when he venerates the given form of the canonical text or of the tradition? Or is there a way to attain, from the perspective of the mystic, even nowadays an epistemological transformation that will enable one to contemplate the luminosity of God without smelting down the sacred text?83 Is his capacity to read between the lines as the ultimate space of meaning, as Walter Benjamin put it, not to be adopted as a better interpretation than the assumption that the very structure will be changed in the messianic future?84
The answer to these questions insofar as the above passage is concerned should be sought first and foremost in the thought of R. Levi Isaac, a Hasidic thinker whose direct attachment to God was considered to be famous. An inspection of the references to the expression behirut ha-bore’, namely the luminosity of the Creator, will detect instances where the ancient mystics are described as being able to transcend the limited luminosity found in this world, after the act of divine contraction, and to reach the unlimited luminosity that precedes the moment of contraction.85 Even more important is the fact that elsewhere in the same book R. Levi Isaac identifies the white letters of the Torah and the parchment with ’ayin, a term that literally means “nothingness” but serves in the Kabbalistic and the Hasidic theosophical literatures for a very high, even the highest, divine realm.86 For this Hasidic master, however, as for other Hasidic masters, the righteous already have access to this divine realm.87
Therefore, I would suggest reading the passage adduced in the name of R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev not as a statement about a definitive deferment but as an invitation for the elite to attain now what all other Jews will attain in the eschaton. This reading is, in my opinion, consonant with other statements in early Hasidism, where the messianic experience may be attained even in the present.88 If understood so, R. Levi Isaac’s statement quoted at the beginning of this section does not exactly open the gate to “all manner of heretical statements,” nor does it involve a change in the “outward manifestation of the Torah.” I wonder also if, as Scholem put it elsewhere, “the sacred text loses its shape and takes a new one for the mystic.”89 Instead I would opt for an epistemic change, one that invites much more intense contemplation of the depth of the text of the Torah as it is. The reading of the Torah mystically is conceived of as an experience reminiscent of Martin Buber’s gegenwartiges Urphanomenon. Shifting Scholem’s emphasis on the ontic and messianic transformation of the canonical text to the assumption that the gist of the Hasidic text is the spiritual transformation of the recipient of the revelation contends that the Torah still retains its shape but opens its blank parts to a process of more sublime decoding. By putting the accent on this issue, I believe that we come closer to the main concern of Hasidism, namely the deepening of the spiritual life of the devotee, than if we adopt the explanation referring to an ontic transformation of the text. In Hasidism in general, and in R. Levi Isaac’s generation in particular, we know about the basic indistinctness between the encompassing and the inner lights, a fact that can be perceived by the transformation of the mystic’s inner capacities.90 A long discussion that buttresses this emphasis on both the centrality of an epistemic change and the availability of such a change in the present is found in a book, which will be quoted several times in the following pages, written by R. Aharon of Zhitomir, the disciple of R. Levi Isaac: Toledot ‘Aharon. The assumption is that there are two manners of studying the Torah: with an intellect (or “great intellect”) and without intellect. Study with an intellect is related to causing the return of the letters to the primordiality of the intellect,91 on the one hand, and on the other to causing the return of the combinations of the letters of the studied Torah to their primordial state, where they were white.92 There is nothing specifically messianic in this discussion, but rather a contention that perfect study will retrace the primordial Torah described as consisting of white letters. Perfect study is “to bring the letters of the Torah to the primordial whiteness.”93 Thus, it is not a transcending of the black in order to meet another, more sublime entity, but the elevation of the black to its supernal source, in the vein of a more general mystical demand widespread in Hasidism. Or, to put it in more semiotic terms: the written Torah, with its semantic aspects, stems from another realm, which includes a surplus of meaning, the white letters, the knowledge of whose language adds to the written—black—document without subtracting anything from it.
Even when this master invokes the messianic nature of the revelation of the white letters, he immediately writes that “even now, when the righteous pronounces the letters in a state of devotion … he unites the letters to the light of the Infinite … and ascends higher than all the worlds to the place where the letters are white and are not combined and then he can perform there whatever combination he wants.”94 Also, the emphasis on the possibility of attaining an experience of a direct encounter with the divine, pointed out by the luminosity, does greater justice to R. Levi Isaac’s thought. R. Levi Isaac asked, for example, “How is it possible to attain the supernal luminosity which has not yet been limited within the worlds? [The answer is:] By means of enthusiasm95 man is capable of cleaving to the Creator, blessed be His name, [and] by means of that enthusiasm he will reach the supernal luminosity which has not yet limited itself within the [lower] worlds.”96
The last two quotes allow a plausible solution to the quandary concerning the role of messianism in the revelation of the white letters: mystics are capable of attaining even nowadays the kind of experience that will be achieved by all in the eschaton. Even now there are spiritual means to anticipate the “sublime” understanding of the Torah, by a sort of study that implies a resort to a “great intellect.” This answer is relevant for a theory of reading in Hasidism, but also for the importance of the reader’s role. The self-transformation, in this case the resort to enthusiasm, is the clue for the ascent to a contact with the highest level of the divinity. If we may infer from this instance a possible understanding of the ideal reading of the Torah—in both cases the concept of divine luminosity is involved—the disclosure of the hidden dimension entails an experience of self-transformation that culminates in a cleaving to God. The clue for reading the invisible Torah is not lost, nor is it necessarily waiting for the advent of the Messiah. Mystics are often stubborn persons who invest all their energy in discovering clues. Moreover, I would say that the doors of spiritual understanding and contemplation were, at least in Jewish mysticism, basically open, for the clues were created using, from the very beginning, the mold of the lock.97
Let us reflect for a moment on the additional implications of the above Hasidic passages, which follow the way opened by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist R. David ibn Avi Zimra: the white spaces are either identical to or point to the highest realm within the divine world, the ’Ein Sof. Just as the white parts of the text are statistically more extensive than the black ones, so is the Infinite more extensive than the revealed divinity.
What, then, is the relation between the white and the black aspects according to R. Levi Isaac and his student? In one of his discussions R. Levi Isaac claims that “the letters point to the influx of ’Elohim within the world of nature.”98 Elsewhere he writes that “the shape of the letters [points to] the manner in which the intellectual [entities] and the influx [descending from] the Lord of Lords operate within corporeality and nature.”99 The black letters function, therefore, as pipes or channels for the descent of the divinity within this world. According to another text, however, these letters serve, in the case of the righteous, as the starting point for the ascent to the spiritual realms.100 There two movements are mentioned together in the context of the righteous within the discussion of the letters.101 Thus, the two aspects of the text reflect the two basic motions that constitute what I propose to call the mystical-magical model, which combines the mystical ascent to God with the descent of the mystic’s soul that brings down the divine influence.102 So, for example, we read:
There are those who serve God with their human intellect, and others whose gaze is fixed as if on Nought,103 and this is impossible without divine help … He who is granted this supreme degree, with divine help, to contemplate the Nought, then his intellect is effaced and he is like a dumb man, because his intellect is obliterated … but when he returns from such a contemplation to the essence of [his] intellect, he finds it full of influx.104
An interesting parallel to some of the ideas in the above quotes is found in the writing of a disciple of R. Levi Isaac, R. Aharon of Zhitomir, who cites his master as follows:
There are two kinds of righteous: there is a righteous who receives luminosity from the letters of Torah and prayer;105 and there is another righteous, who is greater, who brings the luminosity to the letters from above, despite the fact that the letters are in the supernal world, when the great righteous brings new luminosity to the world, this luminosity cannot come to the world but by its being clothed in the letters … and when the luminosity comes down the letters fly upwards106 whereas the luminosity remains here below. And the [great] degree of this righteous is connected to recitation of the speeches with all his power and with dedication and with all the 248 limbs he comes to each and every word that he recites, he brings [down] luminosity … and performs a unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Shekhinah and by means of this he brings luminosity to the letters and from the letters to the entire world, this only when there are recipients capable of receiving the luminosity. However, if there is no recipient below, the righteous himself has to receive the luminosity arriving at the letters of the [pronounced] word.107
What is fascinating in this passage is the fact that the vocal actualization of the written Torah induces, rather explicitly, the descent of the luminosity of the supernal Torah. Thus the ideal and the real forms of the Torah are not in conflict but in concert. The ideal man, the righteous, causes the descent of the ideal by performing the actual. The divine luminosity is transformed into a sort of energy that is brought down and distributed by the righteous to the recipients. In fact, if my reading of R. Levi Isaac’s approach to the white letters is correct, they should not be understood as betraying a sense of absolute transcendence of the mystical experience available in the present but rather as a possible promise for an active mystic. It is not the expectation of a future change that will be induced by the Messiah alone that is to be understood from the wider context of this Hasidic thought, but rather an urge to ascent to the whiteness in order to transform it into a power from which this world will benefit now.
To close this analysis of the white letters, let me adduce another passage attributed to R. Levi Isaac by R. Aharon:
Sometimes the letters are ruling over man, and sometimes man is ruling over the letters. This means that when man speaks speeches with power and devotion, the speeches are then ruling over him, because the light within the letters108 confers to him vitality and delight so that he may speak speeches to the Creator, but this man cannot abolish anything bad by performing other combinations [of letters]. But when someone speaks speeches with devotion and brings all his power within the letters and cleaves to the light of the Infinite, blessed be He, that dwells within the letters, this person is higher than the letters and he combines letters as he likes … and he will be capable of drawing down the influx, the blessing, and the good things.109
In Hasidism the light of the infinite is not conceived of as an absolutely transcendental realm, as it is in the Cordoverian and Lurianic types of Kabbalah, but as a level of reality that is open to human experience. This light is found within letters, and the mystic can approach it and utilize it. Thus, according to the last passage, the light of the Infinite is not contemplated but rather exploited in order to bring down supernal power. In another passage, attributed to R. Levi Isaac, the process of interpretation of the Bible is described as bringing down the influx.110 To return to the last quote: according to the Hasidic text, there are righteous whose study and prayer are done in a routine manner, and thus they are dominated by the canonical texts. The latter include the power of the Infinite, which has an impact on some form of experience—speaking to the Creator—but this is not a creative activity. The speaker is found within the net of language and is defined by it. It is possible, however, to avoid this net by intense linguistic activity, which consists in mystical devotion and magical acts, referred to here by combinations of letters. Escaping language is related to escaping, for a while, ordinary experience and even dominating it.
Yet this downward move involving a certain use of the power in order to bring even more influx here below is not the single result of the cleaving to the infinite light within letters. According to another passage by the same author, dealing expressly with the writing of the Torah black on white fire, which is even more pertinent for our discussion, devotion enables the mystic to break the external cover of the letters in order to reach the internal light, an attainment that is described as getting away with the state of tzimtzum.111 This transcendence of the state of limitation is related thereto contemplation of supernal lights: “When someone cleaves to the light of the Infinite, blessed be He, that dwells within the letters, out of his devotion, each and every moment he looks112 to bigger lights and to the luminosity [stemming from] the light of the Infinite, and this is the essence of delight.”113
In another context in this book, mentioned already above, the act of tracing the letters to the primordial state enables the mystic to combine them differently and thus to perform miracles.114 Like R. Levi Isaac’s “enthusiasm,” his disciple’s “devotion” opens the way to direct contact with the supernal worlds or, as we had seen above, with the combinations of white letters of the primordial Torah. Unlike some modern literary critics, who would emphasize the importance of the absent or the omitted aspects of the text in order to understand it,115 R. Levi Isaac would say that the divine text does not omit anything, and the sole problem is the capacity to read what is found within the plenitude of the text.
This plenitude, however, is rather vague, white, and is not translated in particular secrets, as we had seen in the theosophical Kabbalah in the case of the ten tzahtzahot. Not that the concept of the secret is totally absent in the context of the lights or luminosity that are related to the white letters.116 It seems, however, that no specific code was offered for deciphering the specific meaning of the white letters. Manifestation remained compact with proclamation. The medieval process of arcanization has been neutralized in those Hasidic texts in favor of a more emotional and devotional experience. Or, to formulate this hermeneutical move in Buber’s terms, Hasidism has deschematized what he called the Kabbalistic mystery.117 It is paramount to emphasize that the blank letters were not decoded but were left, as in the ancient mystical texts, as the divine background of the revealed Torah. Reaching them amounts to transcending the details of the written Torah and even of the Kabbalistic secrets. It is a more unified vision which is far from Maimonides’ philosophical-political esotericism or from oral pieces of information that were passed down secretly at the beginning of Kabbalah. Neither are they related to the numerous technical treatments of Luria’s Kabbalah. The sacred text is conceived of as understood only if experienced. Those who did experience it are anticipating the messianic revelation, but they are scarcely prone to transmit this experience. Indeed, this experiential dimension is well expressed by passages from R. Menahem Mendel of Premiszlany and R. Qalonimus Qalman Epstein, who deny the importance of the secrecy of the Kabbalistic tradition, arguing that this lore is based on an experiential attitude.118 Understanding a text presupposes an experience of encountering a certain aspect of the author, in a manner reminiscent of more historicistic literary critical theories.
The emphasis in the above texts on the importance of the white parts of the Torah scroll invites reflection on the Kabbalistic texts as embodying an iconic conception of the Torah. An iconic understanding of the human body we have encountered already in rabbinic thought.119
Already in early Kabbalah and the writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz there are a few statements suggesting the identity of the Torah with a body, presumably a divine one.120 A straightforward identity between Torah and God is found in the classic of Kabbalah, the Zohar, which declares, “The Torah is no other than the Holy One, blessed be He.”121
Let us turn to some late-thirteenth-century Kabbalistic descriptions of the Torah. The first occurs in a long-forgotten Kabbalistic work entitled The Book of [Divine] Unity:
God gave us the entire perfect Torah from the [word] bereshit to the [words] le- ‘einei kol yisra’el.122 Behold, how all the letters of the Torah, by their shapes, combined and separated, swaddled letters, curved ones and crooked ones, superfluous and elliptic ones, minute and large ones, and inverted, the calligraphy of the letters, the open and closed pericopes and the ordered ones, all of them are the shape of God, blessed be He. It is similar to, though incomparable with, the thing someone paints using [several] kinds of colors, likewise the Torah, beginning with the first pericope until the last one is the shape of God, the Great and Formidable, blessed be He, since if one letter be missing from the scroll of Torah, or one is superfluous, or a [closed] pericope was [written] in an open fashion or an [open] pericope was [written] in a closed fashion, that scroll of Torah is disqualified, since it has not in itself the shape of God, blessed be He the Great and Formidable, because of the change the shape caused. And you should understand it! And because it is incumbent on each and every one of Israel to say that the world has been created for him,123 God obliged each and every one of them to write a scroll of the Torah for himself, and the concealed secret is [that he] made God, blessed be He.124
According to this passage, the exact form of the authorized writing of the Bible is equivalent to the shape of God. The Bible, therefore, in its ideal form, constitutes an absolute book, including in itself the supreme revelation of God, which is offered anthropomorphically and symbolically, limb by limb, within the various parts of the text. What is more important, however, for understanding the status of the canonical text is the identification between the scroll of the Torah, which was incumbent to be written for or by each and every Jew, and the concept of making or reproducing the image of God. There is no doubt that the scroll is conceived in iconic terms as a faithful representation of the divine shape.
Apparently part of the same Kabbalistic circle was a Kabbalist who was very concerned with anthropomorphic descriptions of the ten sefirot, much more than the conventional views of the other theosophical Kabbalists. R. Joseph of Hamadan, a Kabbalist whose views have been identified and analyzed recently by many scholars,125 contends in his Commentary on the Rationales of the Commandments:
Why is it called the Torah and it has an open and a closed pericope, refer-ring126 to the image of the building and the form of man, who is like the supernal, holy, and pure form. And just as there are in man joints connected to each other, so in the Torah there are closed pericopes as in the case of the structure of the pericope va-yehi be-shalah pharaoh127 and the secret of the song ’az yashir moshe128 are the secret of the joints of the Holy One, blessed be His hands. And the song of ha-’azinu129 is the secret of the ear of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the secret of ’az yashir yisra’el130 is the secret of the divine circumcision131 … and the positive commandments correspond to the secret of the male and the negative commandments correspond to the secret of the female and to the secret of the Shekhinah and to the secret of Malkhut. This is the reason why the Torah is called so, because it refers to the likeness of the Holy One, blessed be He.132
R. Joseph of Hamadan offers an interesting interpretation of the word torah. While the noun points to instruction, the medieval Kabbalist interprets it as meaning “refer,” morah. Yet while the ancient use points to the instruction as stemming from the supernal realm to man here below, the Kabbalist assumes the inverse direction: the lower entity, the Torah, reflects a higher one, and thus it opens the way for understanding the divine by fathoming the structure of the text. This understanding is based on a type of isomorphism shared by certain portions of the Torah and the limbs of the divine anthropos. This symbolic function does not, however, work on the narrative level, by introduction of a divine myth as paralleled by and reflected in mundane events, as is the case in many types of theosophical Kabbalah. According to R. Joseph of Hamadan, it is the shape of the portion of the canonical text that counts, not its content. As in Sefer ha-Yihud, a book very close to this Kabbalist, the assumption is that God and the Bible are identical or at least isomorphic. What I find fascinating in the last quote, though, is not the confession about this isomorphism, an issue to which we shall return in a moment, but the attempt to flesh it out in some detail by correlating specific sections of the biblical text to specific limbs of the supernal anthropos. What may be the significance of this relation? Is it that the contemplator of the specific manner in which the letters, words, or verses were copied sees a divine form that reflects visually the divine limb? If so, how does this transformation of the text into an anthropomorphic structure take place? I have no precise answer to this quandary, but before attempting to investigate additional texts on this point, I would like to put forward a conjuncture.
The Kabbalist resorts to the term pereq, translated above as “joint,” in order to convey the human limbs at the points they are related to each other. The corresponding textual parts are described as parshiyyot, a term translated here as “pericope.” The similarity between the Greek pericope and the anatomic pereq is rather surprising. Even more interesting is the fact that the Hebrew term adopted for expressing the Latin division of the Hebrew Bible into chapters, which do not correspond to the Jewish pericopes, is pereq. The history of this transition is not clear, and I assume that it is already reflected in some Kabbalistic discussions contemporary to R. Joseph of Hamadan. Given the absence of a study dealing with this adoption—a real desideratum for the understanding of the reception of the Bible among Jews—it is difficult to assess the role played by the linguistic similarity between pereq and pericope and the double meaning of the term pereq.133 If this similarity can be proved, then the Kabbalistic isomorphism between the Torah and the human body, found already in the Geronese Kabbalah, will be enriched by the linguistic speculation.
Let me introduce an additional passage from another book of R. Joseph of Hamadan, dealing again with a complex isomorphism:
This is the red attribute of judgment,134 and from those five fingers were created five lower sefirot and corresponding to them David, blessed be his memory, has composed the five books of Psalms, and corresponding to the three joints of each and every finger there are three topics in each of the [five] books. Genesis corresponds to the thumb, is divided into three topics: the creation of heaven and earth, the events related to the forefathers, and the matter of exile. And the second finger corresponds to Exodus, and just as there are three joints in a finger, so is the book divided into three topics. The book of Exodus reports events related to Moses, our master, blessed be his memory, who brought the people of Israel from Egypt as a mission of God, blessed be He, and tells the laws and rules, and tells the matter of the Tabernacle. Behold they are three things. And the book of Leviticus, which corresponds to the third finger, so is this book the middle of the Pentateuch, and it is divided into three topics corresponding to the three joints of the middle finger. They are the law of the sacrifices, and the law of the leprosy, and the blessings and curses. The book of Numbers corresponds to the fourth finger and is divided into three topics: the numbers (census), the issue of the priesthood, and the issue of the spies. The fifth book corresponds to the fifth finger and is called Deuteronomy, which explicates the issue of the wonders and the miracles done by God to Israel, and the issue of the commandments, and Moses’ death. Behold the five fingers of the right hand corresponding to the five books of the Pentateuch. But the five books in the book of Psalms correspond to the five fingers of the left hand, and each of these books too is divided into three topics corresponding to the three joints of the finger.135
Although there is a certain correlation between the anthropomorphic details related to the correspondences found in the two last quotes, the main intention of the Kabbalist is rather clear: the shape of the human body is the common denominator for both the Torah and the divine realm. In order to understand these topics and the correspondences between them, the Kabbalist must resort to his anatomical knowledge in offering a detailed account of the literary and divine structures:
Happy is the man who knows how to relate a limb136 to another and a form to another, which are found in the Holy and Pure Chain, blessed be His name, because the Torah is His form, blessed be He. He commanded us to study Torah in order to know the likeness of the supernal form, as some few Kabbalists said,137 “Cursed be he who will not keep this Torah up.” Can the Torah fall? This [verse should be understood as] a warning for the cantor to show the written form of the Torah scroll to the community in order that they will see the likeness of the supernal form. Moreover, the study of the Torah brings someone about to see supernal secrets and to see the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, indeed.138
The gist of this passage is the knowledge of the structural affinity between the human limbs and forms and the divine ones. The cognitive movement is expressly upward. The form of the letters in the Torah is assumed to play the same role as the human body: the latter is an icon enabling the contemplation of the supernal form. This quality explains, according to the last quote, the custom of showing the open scroll of the Torah to the members of the community after the reading of the weekly portion. Yet it seems that the formal correspondences between the lower and higher limbs should be understood more broadly. The Hebrew expression ’ever ke-neged ’ever, “a limb for a limb,” is reminiscent of another recurrent phrase in R. Joseph of Hamadan’s nomenclature, ’ever mahaziq ’ever, which means that the lower limb is maintaining the supernal one. This Kabbalist contends that the performance of the commandments by a certain limb strengthens the corresponding limb found on high, which is a sefirah.139 Thus the contemplation of the higher starting from the lower is not the single, and may not even be the most important, sort of relationship between the privileged shapes here below, the human body and the Torah on the one side and the supernal sefirotic structure on high on the other. The lower not only knows the higher but also contributes to its making, as in the above quote from Sefer ha-Yihud, or maintains it, as in R. Joseph of Hamadan’s books. This theurgical influence is possible only because of the affinities existing between three isomorphic structures: the Torah, the human body, and the ten sefirot conceived of as divine. Indeed, the relation between contemplation and theurgy was made explicit by R. Menahem Recanati, a Kabbalist inspired by the views found in the circle of Sefer ha-Yihud: “It is incumbent upon man to contemplate the commandments of the Torah, [to see] how many worlds he maintains by their performance and how many worlds he destroys by their neglect.”140
Thus contemplation is a starting point, an invitation for another and apparently more important act, that of maintaining the supernal isomorphic structure. The Torah is, to a certain extent, the libretto for the ritual to be performed by the human body, and the result is the impact on the supernal structure. This view has had a long career in the history of Jewish mysticism, whose details have been addressed elsewhere.141 Thus if contemplation of the Torah in order to see the isomorphic picture of God assumes the transcendence and superiority of the metaphysical over the literary, the theurgical dimensions of the significance of the instructions for action invites another form of relation between the two realms. The processes taking place within the divine structure depend on the actions of the human body. If the text does not absorb the divine within it, at least it shapes it according to its content. Both man and God depend therefore on the activating aspects of the Torah, not only its static iconic perfection.
Perhaps also under the influence of these books, another important Kabbalistic book, Sefer ha-Temunah, composed somewhere in the Byzantine empire at the middle of the fourteenth century, claims that the forms of the Hebrew letters constitute the image of God.142 Another classic of Kabbalah that assumes an iconic vision of the Torah is R. Meir ibn Gabbai’s ’Avodat ha-Qodesh, composed around 1530 in the Ottoman empire. R. Meir writes: “The Torah is, therefore, the wholeness143 of the grand and supernal Anthropos, and this is the reason it comprises the 248 positive commandments and 365 negative commandments, which are tantamount to the number of the limbs and sinews of lower and supernal man … and since the Torah has the shape of man it is fitting to be given to man, and man is man by its virtue, and at the end he will cleave to Man.”144 This iconization of the Torah enacts its transformation into an intermediary man, a mesoanthropos,145 as it is “the intermediary which stirs the supernal image toward the lower [one]”146 or, according to another statement by the same Kabbalist, “the Torah and the commandments are the intermediary which links the lower image with the supernal one, by the affinity they have with both.”147 In other words, to invoke Mallarme, the Torah is “Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel.”148 The above quotes do not exhaust the Kabbalistic treatments of the Torah as the image or icon of God. More can be found in later Kabbalistic sources, some of which have been analyzed elsewhere.149
I have described a phenomenon that can be envisioned as scroll fascination, which emerged in the same short period when the free symbolic interpretations of Kabbalists reached its apex, late in the thirteenth century, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter. Overemphasizing the stable and static aspects of the text, Kabbalists and, later, the Hasidic masters strove, in my opinion, to balance the great freedom that emerged from the relativization of the symbolic interpretation which resulted from the ascendance of the concept of the Bible as an open text. The equilibrium between extreme semantic fluidity and extreme structural stability, namely the gestalt of the external features of the text, allowed innovative developments without endangering the authority of the canonical text.150 It may well be that the eccentric exegetical devices that prevailed in the Kabbalistic and Hasidic literatures, like discussions of the white aspects of the letters, could flourish precisely because of the extreme canonization of all the details of the Torah scroll. The theosophical Kabbalists attempted to resolve the problem of authority of the text versus a drastic increase in exegetical creativity on the level of Kabbalistic hermeneutics; they did not rely on the three “lower” types of non-mystical interpretation in order to safeguard the authority of the text.151 They invoked the mystical relevance of the white aspects of the text, found already in earlier sources, in order to establish a stronger authoritative anchor for their symbolic-narrative interpretations, in the case of the Kabbalists, or an anchor for a direct contemplation of the divinity, in Hasidism.
To formulate these topics in a different manner: in some forms of Kabbalah and sometimes in Hasidism, much more than in ancient Jewish literature, the Torah becomes the manifestation of the divine shape, not only the expression of the divine will. Interpretations, especially the secret one, that “retrieve” the divine significance of some parasemantic elements of the book can be understood as acts of proclamation which are part of the process of exhausting the infinity of the manifestation.152 Here the text is conceived of as a visible and anthropomorphic manifestation; it plays a role similar to that of the concept of Jesus Christ’s identity with nomos,153 or the view found in Islam, where the early-eighth-century Shi’ite heterodox author Mughira ibn Sa‘id, a magician and visionary, claimed to have had a vision of God in the form of a man of light whose body is constituted by the letters of the alphabet.154 It is possible that these views reflect a more magical praxis of stamping the human body with special letters and seals.155
I would like to mention that recently some scholars of religion have proposed to regard the different reports of the mystics as reflecting experiences of different aspects of the divine: the impersonal versus the personal.156 The affinity of the two aspects of the Torah to the two aspects of God in theosophical Kabbalah invites a comparison to the assumption of these scholars as to the various types of experience of the mystics.
According to the mystical texts analyzed above, God is not only the author of the written Torah: He is also the substratum of the written letters. The intimacy between the text and the author is therefore maximal: the text can be read only against the background of its author. It is not only conveying a certain specific authorial intention but expressing the very being of the author, sometimes in an iconic manner.157 Yet this iconic trend, which conceives of the contemplation of the Torah as a technique for seeing God,158 should be understood as a less influential tradition in the general economy of Jewish mystical literatures, as I understand them, than the recurrent resort to the recitation of the Torah as another technique to induce a mystical experience.159
According to some modern literary theories, however, the text can become meaningful only when it is understood in itself and solely from itself. Its dissociation from the author and the interplay between the different elements that constitute the text are considered part of its semiosis. In this context the material substratum, the white page, has also been introduced as part of the signification. The resort to the important status of the white page has been known in the West since Stephane Mallarme’s discussions,160 and they were taken over also in Derrida’s thought.161 This move was conceived of as a secularization,162 which indeed it may be: the question, however, is whether a complete secularization is possible in speculative systems speaking about infinities and all-comprehensiveness,163 or about mysteries of letters, as is the case with Mallarme. This is not to say that Derrida and Mallarme were in any way Kabbalists, or even that they derived their vision solely from Kabbalistic sources. Yet it seems to me undeniable that both were acquainted with Kabbalistic attitudes toward letters,164 and although they were critical toward this lore, their resort to ideas that are hardly found outside Kabbalistic literature testifies to a certain contribution of Jewish mysticism to a modern philosophy of the text. The shared assumption of the two French thinkers who do not resort to a referent outside the text may be conceived of a total secularized attitude. Their claims to secularization notwithstanding, we still may encounter descriptions of their thought that are less clear-cut. So, for example, Bertrand Marchal, the author of a voluminous analysis of Mallarmé’s religion, entitles his chapter dealing with the poet’s conception of letters quite cogently “une théology des lettres.”165 His view of the poem as a hierophany may also be relevant in our context.166 Though the ontotheology is rejected, the cult of the book and the letters remains, as well as the claims of mysteries and revelations. It is an attitude rather than a faith that characterizes Mallarme’s approach, for the poet speaks of’ “one attitude de Mystere.”167 This may be a rebellion against a certain rather specific vision, proposed by Western theologians, of deity as transcendental, but such reverence for the book does not deviate too much from other theological attitudes centered on a spirituality gravitating around a book.168 After all, according to both Mallarme and Derrida, the transcendental role of the book and its cosmological status invite reflections whose intrinsic logic is not far removed from the theological one. Indeed, Derrida, apparently influenced by Scholem’s approach to the status of the text as he understood R. Levi Isaac’s passage, described Kabbalah as evincing “a kind of atheism” because of the emphasis on textuality and plurivocality characteristic of this lore.169 Why atheism is characterized by a strong textuality or plurivocality is a point that was not explicated by Derrida, at least not in this context. Ignorant as I am of any other clarifications of this topic anywhere in Derrida’s vast opus, I indulge in speculation that religiosity, or theology, is implicitly interpreted here as subscribing to a monosemic reading or to a tendency to speak about an abstract deity that may not be intrinsically or organically connected to a text. Such a contention, however, decides a priori what forms of theology and textuality are conceived of as religious or atheistic, without allowing the exponents of those concepts to define themselves as religious or atheistic. I would say, for example, that a text-centered community may be more religiously oriented than one that is not. Or that a polysemic text fits the belief in an infinite author, as we shall see in the next chapter, as well as a modern atheistic theory of dissemination.
Moreover, if the Kabbalists or the Hasidic masters may be thought to exhibit “a kind of atheism,” then it seems to me that deconstruction may indeed contain a certain residue of Kabbalistic thought in its cult of the book or textuality or, as Eco called this phenomenon, “atheistic mystics.”170 (I shall have more to say on this issue in Chapters 5 and 9.) Or, to put it in Maurice Blanchot’s terms, “The book is in essence theological.”171
From this point of view we may describe some modern preoccupations with the text as encompassing everything (a topic to which we shall return in Chapter 4), as an almost complete absorption of the concept of divinity, by negating its independent existence while accepting some of its major attributes as pertinent for understanding the nature of the text. If the Hebrew Bible introduces a speaking God whose will is formulated in documents that constitute, inter alia, its reflection, the rabbinic sources canonized these texts while preserving the stark distinction between them and the divinity. Some trends found in mystical forms of literature gradually closed this gap, at times producing strong forms of identifications. In some cases the structure of the divine realm was conceived in terms of a written document, a strong case of a God-absorbing kind of textuality.
In modern philosophy of text, however, the author was formally excluded, but in fact some attributes of divine authorship have been transferred to the nature of the text qua text. Yet while Derrida formulated the concept of infinity by resorting to intertextuality, by contending that other texts will enrich the readings of any given text—in fact an extratextual approach insofar as any specific text is concerned—some of the Kabbalistic views discussed above extract concepts of infinity by referring to what they conceived to be an intratextual aspect, the white aspect. That is to say, for some Kabbalists the text means much more than its all-embracing textuality. The sacred text is, after all, understood to be a telescope, able to bring the divine closer, whether it be transcendent to the text or immanent in it. Even in those rare cases where Kabbalists acknowledged the difficulty in reflecting in the Torah the divine configuration in a language understandable by the common people, such a reflection is nevertheless presupposed. So, for example, the anonymous author of Sefer ha-Temunah claims that “the wondrous Torah,” ha-Torah ha-Nora’ah (a recurrent term in the book)
comprises the ten sefirot, their paths and revolution,172 in each and every one of them all is inscribed in a supernal and hidden language, one which is very sublime, and supernal wondrous, and hidden letters, which are not understood [even] by an angel or a supernal archangel, but by God, blessed be His noble and wondrous name. He interpreted them to Moses our master and announced to him all their secret and matter and Moses wrote them in his language in the book, in a supernal manner that is hinted at in the Torah in the crowns, and in tittles, in big and small letters, in broken and crooked ones … all being supernal, wondrous, and hidden hints because he was unable to find a language to write them down, neither a way to relate them in detail. Sometimes [Moses resorted to] bizarre words because there is no language to catch them, all being wondrous paths and hidden allusions.173
The idiosyncrasy of the writing of the text is conceived of as reflecting a meaning higher than what is commonly expressed in an ordinary understanding of language. The text of the Bible text is written in a bizarre manner because only the eccentric is able to express the supernal secret. Nevertheless, such a secret may be understood by the few who are able to fathom the peculiar forms of writing the letters of the Torah.174 Ultimately, those hints found in the ideogrammatic aspects of the Torah point to the divine shape or image, which is indeed the title of the book, Sefer ha-Temunah. This is one of the few passages in Kabbalah where the Hebrew language, even in its biblical form, is not connected to an exhaustive expression of the signifié. It is the brokenness of some Torah letters, or the parasemantic aspect of the hieroglyphic language, rather than its perfection that plays a crucial role in the process of representation. The anonymous Kabbalist is resorting to a very moderate version of negative theology, which means that language as it is commonly used is not capable of reproducing a type of order that is more graphical than semantic.
For a modern thinker like Derrida, however, the text is more a kaleidoscope, whose internal changes do not reflect anything transcending its dense literacy. Given his kaleidoscopic view of the nature of the text, Derrida rejects the importance, or even the existence, of extratextual factors as conferring meaning. Most of the Kabbalists, however, positing an infinite ontology, could subsequently assume the textual infinity to be a derivative result of the authorial infinity. Both Kabbalists and Derrida did search for some forms of the infinite, although the latter was more inclined to deal with textual indeterminacy. This quest, which was sometimes conducted as interpretations of the canonical texts, will be explored in the next chapter.