The suppression of some conceptual elements and forms of discourse already found in ancient Jewish circles is characteristic of the rather homogeneous type of rabbinic discourse. Though allowing divergences of opinion and, one may even claim, encouraging, preserving, and studying them for generations, the ancient rabbis nevertheless controlled the nature of the topics on which divergences are allowed. No allegorical or symbolic interpretations of the Bible, abundant as they were in Alexandrian Judaism (especially Philo), were given access to the exegetical methods characteristic of rabbinic literature. Alchemy, astrology, philosophy, and physical sciences remained at the margin of rabbinic discourse. A full-fledged magical interpretation of tradition was rarely allowed, though some polemical attitude toward it is sometimes discernible, as we shall see in the next chapter. A personal divinity, whose characteristics are power and will, was addressed by people who were required to perform the divine will, the commandments, with all their power. This interaction between the human and the divine power become more prominent in some instances in rabbinic literature—an interaction I call theurgy—though it never reached the center of rabbinic literature. The more ordered reality, the independent cosmos of many of the Greek philosophers, was less attractive to the voluntaristic worldview of rabbinic literature.
The second wave of the repression of magical, theurgical, and theosophical speculations came much later, in the Middle Ages. It is characteristic of philosophical Jewish literature in general and of Maimonidean thought in particular, and this time it invited several forms of reaction. Not only was there a reaction against the philosophical readings of the canonical texts in new lights inspired by a variety of Greek philosophies, as in the case of the controversies against Maimonides, but also a resort to a more “constructive” strategy that proposed more structured alternatives. The nascent Kabbalah offers evidence of this reaction.1 The emergence of this literature was not only a decisive development for Jewish theology; it also had the utmost influence on the subsequent unfolding of Jewish hermeneutics.2 Underground myths and symbols surfaced in plain view, and hermeneutic methods that were rarely used by rabbinic authorities,3 as well as entirely new perceptions about the biblical text, came to the forefront.4 With this theological shift came also powerful new exegetical devices enabling Jewish mystics to revolutionize the conventional understanding of the biblical message. I should like to describe the nature of the components of the truly new hermeneutics.
Under the impact of ancient kinds of magic and mysticism, and in the polemical atmosphere of medieval periods, different forms of Kabbalah were able to generate a relatively unique theory of Hebrew language that applied to the Bible and its interpretation. The Hebrew language was no longer considered the exclusive instrument of divine revelation of sacred history and the Jewish way of life.5 It was conceived also as a powerful tool which, used by God in order to create the world, could also be used by the Kabbalist masters in imitation of God in an effort to achieve their own marvelous creations or attain mystical experiences or sometimes even unio mystica.6
Another decisive change in medieval Jewish hermeneutics was the rise of a far-reaching assumption, expressed almost exclusively in Kabbalistic texts,7 regarding the nature of the interpreter. As already mentioned, the divine spirit was categorically excluded from the interpretive process as viewed by the rabbis.8 Ecstatic states, prophetic inspirations, angelic revelations, and oneiric messages were unacceptable as exegetical techniques or reliable testimonies. It is true that such experiences never ceased to attract some rabbinic masters, and accounts of sporadic occurrences of altered states of consciousness in connection with particularly knotty interpretative quandaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, it was the Kabbalists alone who went so far as to condition the attainment of the sublime secrets of Torah on paranormal spiritual experiences. In certain Kabbalistic commentaries on the Bible we find indications that a prophetic state of mind is believed necessary to the proper decoding of the Bible. (I shall have more to say about this issue in Chapter 6.) And in a more general way the Kabbalists’ reaching for a transcendent interpretative dimension even assumed categorical significance. Indeed, we come now to an issue of central importance in Kabbalistic interpretation: the direct relationship between the notion of the transported interpreter and the growing perception of the Torah as infinity. The Kabbalistic blurring of the distinction between God and man during prophetic experiences is coextensive, I believe, with the blurring of the difference between infinite God and infinite Torah.
In the rabbinic sources the primordial Torah is of course given a unique ontological status, unparalleled by all but the divine throne. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Torah was widely thought to predate the creation of the world; it was considered God’s daughter and constituted the single way to contemplate the Godhead. However, whereas in the non-mystical texts there is a clear reticence to identify Torah with God Himself, in the Heikhalot literature there is a tendency to conceive Torah as inscribed on God’s “limbs,” thereby minimizing the difference between it and God.9 The rabbinic opinion that after its revelation Torah is not to be found in heaven, as it was delivered to Moses in its entirety and is thus completely and finally in our possession, seems to be rejected by earlier Jewish mystical groups. Nevertheless, it fell to the Kabbalists to take the decisive step toward the explicit identification of Torah with God.
Thus, identification of Torah and God took place as the result of resorting to earlier anthropomorphic mythical themes, but when the divine was conceived of in terms of infinity, the possibility emerged that the Torah itself would assume qualities related to infinity. I shall attempt to describe instances of explicit awareness of the possible existence of infinite interpretations in the Bible and also (though rarely) other texts, an enterprise that has nothing to do with the rather limited range of mystical interpretations offered by the Kabbalists de facto. I strive not to make a statement about the nature of text as infinitely open but to survey the conceptualization of a sacred text as comprising, or including, infinite meanings.
One of the interesting developments in the theosophical speculations in some early Kabbalistic circles is the resort to the term ’Ein Sof, the Infinite, in order to refer to the highest level within the divine realm.10 Though certainly not the single term used for this purpose, it became slightly more prominent toward the end of the thirteenth century and reached its dominant status only much later, by the mid-sixteenth century.11 Influenced as some of the uses of this term are by the negative theology that avers the impossibility of knowing this divine realm, it also has more positive meanings, which emphasize the infinity of the divinity rather than its unknown or inexpressible aspects.12 According to some Kabbalistic statements, within the Infinite there are inner structures consisting in ten supernal sefirot.13 This more positive aspect of the Infinite is reflected in the positive vision of the infinite interpretations implied within the special structures of the text of the Torah. In my opinion, the following discussions should be understood as pointing not always to an indeterminacy of the meaning of the text, a negation of the possibility of finding the one ultimate sense of a text, as in modern hermeneutics, but rather to the assertion by many Kabbalists of a richness intrinsic to this particular text. Many of the Kabbalists would opt for the existence of infinite specific and understandable interpretations. In contrast to Hegel’s claim that Jews cannot see the infinite within the finite, Kabbalists were eager to do so, and the following discussions represent attempts to see the reflection of the absolute knowledge with a finite object, the Torah scroll. Interestingly enough, Hegel’s view has been combatted by Derrida, a thinker who has been influenced by Kabbalistic views of the nature of the text, though he too was reluctant to allow that a positive infinite may be harbored by a finite object.14
Thus, aside from the kinds of identification of Torah with God or divine manifestations described in the previous chapter, some Kabbalists viewed the Bible as encompassing an infinity of meanings.15 The Bible therefore is regarded by Kabbalists as akin to, and in several texts identical with, aspects of the Godhead itself. I should now like to survey three significant kinds of infinity of the Torah,16 which are, in my opinion, consonant with various modern literary theories of writing, reading, and interpretation. Indeed, some of the Kabbalistic views of Torah discussed below were known to Christian theologians and could, at least theoretically, have influenced the subsequent unfolding of European culture. One of them is explicitly cited by Jacques Derrida, as we shall see.
(i) The characteristic of Hebrew (and Arabic) orthography that words may be written with only the consonants is the starting point of an important hermeneutical comment made by many theosophical Kabbalists. The Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch, is traditionally written without vowels. Only rarely do some forms of mater lectionis indicate the vowel sounds that link the consonants. Thus, the common reading of the biblical text becomes a vocal performance that requires the application of the vowels to otherwise unpronounceable series of consonants, and then the pronunciation of the vocalized consonants. From this point of view the following discussions are reminiscent of the Qur’an, a sacred nonvocalized book to be recited as part of a religious performance. Thus, by dint of pronouncing the text the reader is an interpreter. This situation may be described as an ergetic exegesis, because understanding and interpretation involve an operation that shapes the text.
According to R. Jacob ben Sheshet of Gerona, a mid-thirteenth-century Kabbalist, “it is a well-known thing that each and every word of the Torah will change [its significance] in accordance with the change of its vocalization though its consonants will not be changed … and see: its significance changed … the word [i.e., the consonants constituting it] will not change its order. Likewise we may state that the Tetragrammaton will be used [during the prayer] with [Kabbalistic] intentions, in accordance with its vocalization. If someone who knows how to construct its construction will direct [his attention] to the construction which that [peculiar] vocalization points out, his prayer will be heard and his request will be announced by God.”17 The Torah scroll, written without vowels, is therefore pregnant with a variety of vocalizations, all of them possible without any change in the canonical form of the sacred text. The fluctuation of the vocalization, as it causes shifts in the meaning of a given combination of the consonants, alters the meaning of the sentence and of the Torah itself. Interestingly enough, the Kabbalist indicates that this process is his own discovery, or one that stems directly from the Sinaitic revelation itself.18
A long line of Kabbalists copied this text and expanded on it. I should like to cite and analyze only two of them, in which the implications inherent in R. Jacob ben Sheshet’s observation are framed more explicitly. An anonymous Kabbalist, writing (scholars surmise) at the end of the thirteenth century, asserts:
Since the vowel [system] is the form of, and is soul to, the consonants, the scroll of Torah is written without vowels, since it [the scroll] includes all facets [i.e., aspects] and all the profound senses and all of them interpreted in relation to each and every letter, one facet out of other facets, one secret out of other secrets, and there is no limit known to us and we said: ‘The depth said: It is not in me’ [Job 28:14]. And if we should vocalize the scroll of Torah, it would receive a limit and measure, like the hyle that receives a peculiar form, and it [the scroll] would not be interpreted but according to the specific vocalization of a certain word.19
Freedom of interpretation is presented here not as a sheer accident arising from the special nature of Hebrew; rather, this freedom is implied, according to this Kabbalist, in the very prohibition against vocalizing the Torah scroll, a prohibition that permits an unlimited range of possible understandings for the divine text. The biblical text is, in this view, the touchstone of man’s capacities. Its potential infinity, however, is not wholly dependent on our capacity to actualize it, but is inherent in the peculiar structure of the biblical text itself. All perfections are conceived of as being encompassed within the Torah, as each and every word of the Torah is pregnant with an immensity of meanings.20 The various vocalizations are explicitly connected with secrets, presumably Kabbalistic secrets. Moreover, this Kabbalist notes the unlimited nature of the nonvocalized Torah scroll. According to the same source, the relationship between vocalization and consonants is like that between soul (or form) and matter; a certain vocalization is seen as tantamount to giving form to the hyle. Therefore, reading the Torah is equivalent to limiting the infinity of the Torah, and the embodiment of any meaning is potentially inherent in the consonants of the Torah. The Kabbalistic reading is an act of cooperation with God, or a co-creation of the Torah. The occurrence of the relationship between soul and body in the above passage has much to do with the metaphor of the vowels as causing, like the soul, the motion of the consonants. Thus, the vocal performance of the Torah transforms it into what Umberto Eco calls “a work in movement,” as a quality of the open work.
Very close to this anonymous passage is a formulation found in one of the earlier writings of R. Joseph Gikatilla’s Commentary on Matters in the Guide of the Perplexed:
According to this path you should know that Moses, our master, had been given a way of reading the Torah in many fashions, which are infinite, and each and every way points to the inner wisdom. This is the reason why the scroll of the Torah is not vocalized so that it may bear all the sorts of science found in the divine will. Because would it be vocalized, it would be like a matter to which a form had arrived, because the vowels are, for the words, like the form for the matter, as if you would say ’Adam, ’Odem, ’Edom. If it was not vocalized, it could bear each of the three, but if it were, it would bear only the limited one. This is the reason that the Torah has not been vocalized so that it will become as a hill in which all the intelligible sciences are found … All the sciences are connected to one word and no one understands the purpose of [even] one word but God, blessed be He … Because there is no one science in the world or wisdom or any other matter that is not hinted at in the Torah either in a letter, or a word or in a vowel or otherwise.21
The Castilian Kabbalist made a double claim: as in the other instances discussed in the paragraph, it is solely the divine text, and not texts compounded in Hebrew, that should be understood as inherently infinite. This infinity compresses, according to this passage, all the sciences, including the philosophical, and thus it is a more universalistic approach to the Bible as absorbing all available knowledge, regardless of source. On the other hand, Gikatilla contends that the Torah comprises only the sciences that are found in the divine will, a statement that has a much more particularistic tone.
Let me introduce another, quite similar expression of the same contention, found in a book of wide influence, R. Bahya ben Asher’s Commentary on the Pentateuch:
The scroll of the Torah is [written] without vowels, in order to enable man to interpret it however he wishes … as the consonants without the vowels bear several interpretations, and [may be] divided into several sparks. This is the reason why we do not write the vowels of the scroll of the Torah, for the significance of each word is in accordance with its vocalization, but when it is vocalized it has but one single significance; but without vowels man may interpret it [extrapolating from it] several [different] things, many, marvelous and sublime.22
A comparison of this passage with R. Jacob ben Sheshet’s discussions on this subject evinces what seems to me a major departure from older Kabbalistic views. Ben Sheshet assumes that the variation in vowels enables one to offer many interpretations of a given phrase; for him, however, there is Kabbalistic significance to this variation only in the case of the divine name, which refers to various sefirot according to the particular vowels by which it is vocalized; free Kabbalistic exegesis of the Bible is not implied. By contrast, R. Bahya explicitly refers to “several things … marvelous and sublime” which may be derived by interpretation of the text ad placidum; what is implied here is not simply a one-to-one relationship of the vocalized divine names to specific sefirot but a new tenet of Kabbalistic hermeneutics. What is described is not a magical-theurgical operation performed by the divine name when used correctly during prayer, as is the case in ben Sheshet, but a novel way of exegesis.
Another formulation of this mystical explanation of the nonvocalized form of the Torah should be noted here since it serves as a conduit between Jewish Kabbalah and Christian culture. According to the Italian Kabbalist R. Menahem ben Benjamin Recanati (early fourteenth century), in his influential Commentary on the Torah, “it is well known that the consonants have many aspects when nonvocalized. However, when they are vocalized they have only one significance, in accordance with the vocalization, and therefore the scroll of Torah, which has all the aspects, is nonvocalized.”23 Recanati’s Commentary was translated into Latin by Flavius Mithridates for the use of Pico della Mirandola. The translation is apparently no longer extant, but its impact is registered in one of Pico’s Kabbalistic theses: “We are shown, by the way of reading the Law without vowels, the way divine issues are written.”24
I would like to conclude my brief survey of this aspect of the infinity of Torah with one more point. Despite the fact that these Kabbalists maintained the traditional order or morphe of the Torah, they still conceived its meaning as amorphous, allowing each and every interpreter an opportunity to display the range of his exegetical capacities. This initial amorphousness is not, however, identical to indeterminacy, a concept that would assume that the meaning of a given text cannot be decided in principle. A Kabbalist would say that all the meanings that are created by the different forms of vocalization are inherent in the text because they had been inserted, premeditatedly, by the Author, each of them in a rather transparent manner. It is not human feebleness to enchain language in a certain determined discourse that opens the text to many interpretations, but the infinite divine wisdom, as we shall see immediately below, that allows a powerful author to permit the existence of different vocalizations that coexist in the same consonantal gestalt. In the vein of modern literary critics like Georges Poulet, Roman Ingarden, and Wolfgang Iser, the theosophical Kabbalists would conceive the nonvocalized scroll of the Torah as the text to be recited in order to become a work; or, to adopt Roland Barthes’s terminology, the work named Torah becomes a text by its production.25 The “concretization of the text,” to resort to Ingarden’s term, by the ritual of reading the Torah is, according to the above Kabbalistic texts, an interpretation. However, the different, in fact infinite possibilities implicit in the nonvocalized text are to be understood as one possibility out of many distinct readings, a view that differs from Derrida’s dissemination, based on differance, indecidability, and semantic ambiguity. There a basic instability, or to resort again to Ingarden’s terminology “the places of instability,” is assumed by the understanding of an unstable language and of all the texts as changing and enriching each other, in a manner that the theosophical Kabbalists would not admit. For them, to judge by the examples adduced above, each vocalized reading/interpretation constitutes a specific concretization that has its own stable meaning. These Kabbalistic passages are closer to Iser’s theory of diverse concretization than to Ingarden’s more static approach, which assumes some implicit idealism of meaning. It should be noted, however, that in practice the vocalization of the scroll during the ritual reading of the Torah was quite stable, and no one could imagine a free process that would depend on the reader. Nonetheless, the factual vocalization, though regulated by tradition, varies from one Jewish community to another insofar as the Sefardi and Ashkenazi pronunciation of the same vowels differs.
(ii) While the infinity mentioned above is related to the special nature of the text, which should be “animated” or performed by the act of pronunciation, some Kabbalists grounded their view of infinity on an extra textualfactor, divine infinite wisdom. This is a nonergetic approach, which consists basically in exhausting the conceptual infinite cargo of the text generated by an infinite mind. The sources of this vision of Torah infinity precede Kabbalah; Charles Mopsik had kindly drawn my attention to the fact that in a late Midrash, R. Moses ha-Darshan’s Bereshit Rabbati (p. 20), David is reported not to have known anything insofar as the Torah is concerned, because “its wisdom is infinite.” In the same text the medieval Midrashist contends that David had seen the “principles of the Torah and knew that there are therein midrashim and minutiae, heaps upon heaps, to infinity.” What seems to be interesting here, however, is that no divine infinity is assumed to constellate the textual one. This correlation characterizes many of the Kabbalistic treatments.
According to R. Moses de Leon, an influential late-thirteenth-century Kabbalist active in Castile, “God has bequeathed to Israel this holy Torah from above in order to bequeath to them the secret of this name and in order to [enable Israel to] cleave to Him [or to His name] … in order to evince that as this name [or He] is infinite and limitless, so is this Torah infinite and limitless … since the Torah being ‘longer than the earth and broader than the sea’ we must be spiritually aware and know that the essence of this existence is infinite and limitless.”26 This Kabbalist operated with the image found in Job 11:9 in the context of wisdom. Thus, not only does the infinity of the Torah reflect God’s infinite wisdom, but apprehension of this infinity offers a way to cleave to Him. The Torah is here conceived in a quite instrumental manner, as a path for a uniting experience avoiding any specific reasoning that addresses its specific textuality. Moreover, we do not know precisely how this union happens. De Leon assumes that, unlike infinities related to features of the biblical text, it is the presence of God as author that ensures the text’s infinity. This reading shows the deep difference between this Kabbalistic type of claim for infinity and deconstruction, which denies any form of metaphysical presence.
From a different starting point, another Kabbalist reached a similar conclusion: “Since God has neither beginning nor end, no limit at all, so also His perfect Torah, which was transmitted to us, has, from our perspective, neither limit nor end, and David therefore said,27 ‘I have seen an end of all perfection, but thy commandment is exceeding broad.’”28 This Kabbalist learns about the infinite Torah through God’s infinity. Another Kabbalist, a younger contemporary of the authors quoted above, specifically identifies Torah with God’s infinite wisdom. Treating God’s “unchangeability,” R. David ben Abraham ha-Lavan, a fourteenth-century Neoplatonically oriented thinker, maintains that as all measure is a result of boundaries or limits, so is the wisdom of a man limited by the peculiar science he knows; and yet “the science which has no measure [i.e., is infinite] has no measure for its power; this is why the Torah has no limit since its power has no measure, because it is the primordial wisdom … the wisdom has no limit since this wisdom29 and His essence are one entity.”30 Here the essential identity between God and Torah is explicit. So, too, wisdom, power, and will—as we have seen in Gikatilla’s passage quoted in subsection (i)—are positive attributes of the divine which are reflected on the textual plane.
(iii) Torah is infinite, again, because the number of combinations of its letters—according to the complex Kabbalistic techniques of permutation—is infinite.31 This is one of the most ergetic forms of interpretation, since the order of the letters of the interpreted text are changed as part of the interpretive process in order to infuse them with meanings that are not supported by the ordinary sequence of letters. These techniques of combination, developed in medieval treatises written under the impact of Ashkenazi Hasidism and in the prophetic Kabbalah,32 are described by R. Joseph Gikatilla, a student of R. Abraham Abulafia:
By the mixture [’eiruv] of these six letters [the consonants of the word bereshit33 ] with each other, and the profound understanding of their permutation and combination, the prophets and visionaries penetrated the mysteries of the Torah, and … no one is capable of comprehending the end of these things but God alone … it is incumbent on man to meditate upon the structures of the Torah, which depend upon the wisdom of God, and no one is able to [understand] one [parcel] of the thousands of thousands of immense [secrets] which depend upon the part of one letter34 of the letters of the Torah.35
The ars combinatoria is perceived here as the path toward the partial comprehension of the secrets of the Torah. Its affinity to Abulafia’s sixth path of interpretation of Torah is clear. Abulafia describes this advanced form of interpretation as the “wisdom of letter combinations,” a term that recurs later in other Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts apparently influenced by him.36 Still, we can discern here two different, though possibly complementary, views of infinity. The first is a mathematical infinity resulting from the application of complicated exegetical methods to letters of each of the separate words of the Torah and from the attempt to understand the significance of each combination. I assume that Gikatilla attributes to the combinations of the letters of a certain word a semantic function; he presumably contended that the semantic field of a given word, in this case bereshit, is constituted by all the meanings related to all the other combinations of the same consonants. If each word’s meaning is an accumulation of all the meanings related to its letters’ combinations, the aura of each word is so wide that an attempt to understand even one sentence by this technique is seen as impossible for a finite mind.
On the other hand, the monadic infinity inherent in each and every letter adds a further dimension to the mathematical infinity. The former is achieved by the deconstruction37 of the order of the letters of the Torah by the combinatory process.38 The latter, however, is quite independent of such permutations and, indeed, meditation upon the infinite significance depending on each letter is recommended when the “structures” of the Torah—ostensibly including also the order of the letters—remain unchanged. Yet the very concentration on one individual letter is said to have a destructive effect on the plain meaning of the text (or sentence) as a whole. Gikatilla seems to have combined Abulafia’s last two paths of interpretation of the Torah into a single way. Permutation and monadization both lead away from the significant text toward an incommunicable or asocial perception achieved in a paranormal state of consciousness. The monadization is instrumental, according to Abulafia, in bringing on the Kabbalist’s experience of unio mystica. The path of permutations, the sixth one in his exegetical system, is intended for those who attempt the imitatio intellecti agentes, persons who practice solitary concentration exercises and are presumed to invent novel “forms”—namely, meanings—for the combinations of letters.39
This effort of imitation of the intellectus agens is apparently to be understood as a transition from a limited state of consciousness to a larger one.40 Interestingly, according to Abulafia, each higher path of interpretation is described as a larger sphere or circle;41 the expansion of the intellect is therefore tantamount to the use of ever-more-complicated hermeneutic methods bent on achieving ever-more-comprehensive understandings of the Torah.42 Indeed, Abulafia is interested here in transcending the natural understanding of reality, which in medieval philosophy was closely connected with Aristotle’s logic. While Aristotelian logic is based on coherent sentences that generate conclusions significant in the natural world, Kabbalah—specifically prophetic Kabbalah—has a special logic that is the only suitable exegesis of the biblical text. To decipher the message of the Torah, this Kabbalah relies on what it calls an “inner higher logic,” which employs separate letters in lieu of concepts, as well as the combination of these letters. This method is deemed superior to Greek logic inasmuch as it returns the canonical text to its original state, when it was but a continuum of letters, all viewed as names of God.43
In this context it is worth noting that Jacques Derrida has combined Abulafia’s view of Kabbalistic logic with Stephane Mallarme’s definition of the role of poetry. In La Dissemination he writes, in explicit reference to Kabbalah, “La science de la combinaison des lettres est la science de la logique interieure superieure, elle coopere a une explication orphique de la terre.”44 Umberto Eco, too, refers to Lullian techniques of combination of letters in describing Mallarme’s method of combining pages.45 As we have learned from Pico della Mirandola,46 the Kabbalistic ars combinatoria is closely related to Lull’s practice. Not without interest, then, is the fact that in Pico’s Theses47 Orphic issues were compared to and connected with Kabbalistic discussions, particularly those of Abulafia’s school. Thus the concept of infinity of meaning transforms the Torah from a socially motivated document into a tool employed by mystics for the sake of their own self-perfection. Moreover, the Torah is perceived by certain Kabbalists as a divine and cosmic entity, what I have called the world-absorbing Torah, variously interpreted in the infinite series of universes. According to Gikatilla’s Sefer Sha‘arei Tzedeq:
The scroll [i.e., the Torah] is not vocalized and has neither cantillation marks nor [indication where] the verse ends; since the scroll of the Torah includes all the sciences,48 the exoteric and esoteric ones, [it] is interpreted in several ways, since man turns the verse up and down,49 and therefore our sages said:50 “Are not my words like as a fire? saith the Lord,” like the forms of the flame of fire that has neither a peculiar measure nor peculiar form,51 so the scroll of Torah has no peculiar form for [its] verses, but sometimes it [the verse] is interpreted so and sometimes it is interpreted otherwise, namely in the world of the angels it is read [as referring to] one issue and in the world of the spheres it is read [as referring to] another issue and in the lower world it is read [as referring to] another issue, and so in the thousands and thousands of worlds which are included in these three worlds,52 each one according to its capacity and comprehension,53 is his reading [i.e., interpretation] of the Torah.54
Therefore, in Gikatilla’s view, there is another infinity in addition to the combinatory one, an infinity stemming from the fluctuation of the vocalizations. In my opinion, the importance of some concepts of infinity is that they are part of a polemical stand that attempts to deny the exclusivity of philosophical sciences by integrating everything within the structure of the Torah. Here, just as in the passage quoted earlier from this Kabbalists, Torah is conceived also as a sciences-absorbing text. What seems to be interesting in Gikatilla’s text is that he expounded one of the first and most explicit models of Torah accommodation, what I shall designate the Neoplatonic model, on which I shall have more to say in Chapter 12.
(iv) A fourth aspect of infinite meanings of Torah is expressed in the flexible nature of Kabbalistic symbolism. The broad question of Kabbalistic symbolism has been discussed time and again in modern scholarship, and we shall have the opportunity to elaborate on this topic in a later chapter.55 Here only a succinct description of symbolism is offered. According to some important Kabbalists,56 an infradivine dynamic is reflected by biblical verses, wherein each word serves as a symbol for a divine manifestation57 or sefirah.58 The relationship between a given word and its supernal counterpart is relatively stable in earlier Kabbalah. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, however, greater fluctuation in this relationship is perceptible. In the very same treatise a word may symbolize more than one sefirah. The theoretical possibility thus emerges of decoding the same verse in several symbolic directions. Indeed, this possibility is fully exploited in the central mystical work of Kabbalah, the Zohar.59 Therefore, the supernal dynamic is reflected not only in a symbolic rendering of the theosophical content of a particular verse but also in the very fact that the same verse can be interpreted again and again, all interpretations bearing equal authority. According to this perception, discovery of new significances in the biblical text is yet another way of testifying to the infinite workings of the sefirotic world.
The Kabbalistic transformation of words and whole sentences into symbols has a deep impact on the perception of language itself. For even as the individual word retains its original forms, even as its place in the sentence or its grammatical function remains stable, its status as a lower projection of an aspect of the Godhead renders it an absolute entity. The result is a mystical linguistics forged into a skeletal grammar. Rather than being understood as mundane and conventional units of communication or representation, the words of the Bible, grasped as moments of God’s enacted autobiography, become instruments for His self-revelation in the lower realms of being.
The primary unit, then, remains the biblical word to be interpreted, which, in contrast to Abulafia’s text-destructing exegesis that annihilates the “interpreted” material in order to reconstruct it in a new way, is viewed as a monadic symbol.60 Nevertheless, as we shall see in Chapter 10, a proper understanding of Kabbalistic symbolism must take into consideration the more comprehensive symbolic system that informs each and every individual symbol.
The assumption of the existence of one faithful interpretation of a text is especially conspicuous in cosmic and spiritual systems that are closed. A closed universe will tend to emphasize the uniqueness of a faithful interpretation stemming from a certain idealism of meaning, to resort to Ricoeur’s expression, much more than an open one will. The basic correlation that is significant for a proper understanding of the contribution of many forms of Kabbalah to interpretation is the correspondence between the nature of the text and that of the divine realm that emanated and presides over the text. To put it in literary terms, the nature of the infinite author radiates on the conception of an infinite textual composition. Specifically in the type of Kabbalistic theosophy that explicitly emphasizes the infinity of the divine realm, and within this framework of Kabbalistic thought, are the canonical texts regarded as infinite. In contradistinction to the assumption found in many texts in Jewish philosophy that God is an intellectual entity—an assumption that is often, though not always,61 related to the view that there is one correct meaning of the text—Kabbalists of different schools explicitly operate with the concept of infinity as relevant both for the divinity and for the text and its interpretations.
I would like to address another aspect of infinite interpretations, found in later Kabbalistic and in Hasidic texts. In addition to the view of intrinsic indeterminacy, or infinity, of the text, because of its imitating the divine infinity or because of the special nature of the canonized text, I shall deal here with reasons for the possibility of infinite interpretations as related to factors that are independent of the text. There are four main reasons offered by Jewish mystics for assuming the infinity of possible interpretations, which do not depend on the special nature of the Hebrew language and the canonical text itself: (i) the dynamic quasi-astrological structure of the metaphysical system that informs the meaning of the interpreted text; (ii) the existence of infinite and different universes that are sources of the souls of the various interpreters; (iii) the view of the constitutive Sinaitic revelation, intended differently, to each of the children of Israel; and (iv) the charismatic authority of the spiritual leader who is able instantaneously to create potentially infinite oral texts, to be discussed in Appendix 5.
One of the main interpretive practices in Kabbalah is the explanation of the canonical texts as reflecting relations between divine powers. The articulation and crystallization of the theosophical systems have created strong interpretive schemes whose components and processes have been imposed on the commented texts. The understanding of the theosophical systems as quintessentially dynamic, much more than transcendental or unknown or unknowable, will open the possibility that scholars will better understand one of the basic principles of Kabbalistic hermeneutics. So, according to a Lurianic text that will be quoted and discussed below, the specific interpretations depend on the specific moment in time which is presided over by a special sefirotic constellation.62 In principle there are no two identical interpretations, as the multiple supernal system is continuously changing. In a manner reminiscent of Gadamer’s view it is time, though not history, that is an important factor in shaping the nature of the interpretations, because each moment is constellated in a different manner by the changing relations between the various divine attributes.
As Eco has pointed out, there are affinities between ways in which science and culture understand reality, and the structures of the artistic forms.63 This statement is also true insofar as some of the Kabbalistic views of the Torah are concerned. The great importance of divine infinity in early Kabbalah may be related to the emergence of the existence of infinite worlds later on. The view that presupposes an infinity of coexisting worlds is relatively rare in Kabbalistic literature before the sixteenth century, but nevertheless it exists. Early Kabbalah operated with much simpler forms of universes, and only at the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth a vision of four levels of existence emerged, suggesting a much greater complexity of the divine world than in the thirteenth-century Kabbalah.64 In Lurianic Kabbalah, however, which continued some of the developments of that Kabbalah, the existence of infinite worlds between ’Adam Qadmon, the primordial cosmic man, and the totally transcendental ’Ein Sof is explicit.65 The insertion of those infinite worlds was intended to create an even more transcendental status for ’Ein Sof, as they are unknown universes. However, R. Hayyim Vital, R. Isaac Luria’s main disciple, claims that every soul has a root above, and this root reverberates in all the worlds, as a result of which “there is no soul which has no endless roots.”66 Therefore, there is an infinity of coexisting worlds, which are related to every soul in this world. From a Lurianic text, written in the second third of the seventeenth century, we learn about another form of infinity of worlds:
The issue is that the Torah, “its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea,”67 and just as there is an infinite number of worlds, so there is the depth of the Torah infinite. Because in each and every world, the Torah is read in accordance to its [the respective world’s] subtlety and spirituality, namely that there is no end to the degrees of its interpretations. And each and every one of the Tannaites and the Amoraites in this world understands and interprets the Torah in accordance with the world his soul is emanated from it. This is why those say [so] and the other say [otherwise] and the saying of these and these are the words of the living God. This is why R. Meir apprehended in the Torah something that was not apprehended by someone else, and it was appropriate to him [to interpret this] more than to another sage, because his name was Meir, which means light, and the stored light is good.68
Two different approaches are combined in this passage. One assumes a process of accommodation of the meaning of the Torah to the different worlds, a view already found in Judaism and in some Kabbalistic texts.69 A younger contemporary of Giordano Bruno and apparently a reader of one of his books,70 R. Jacob Hayyim Tzemah, also operates with another concept, that of the infinite worlds. Indeed, the infinity of the worlds—an idea that became more compelling when thinkers like Giordano Bruno, who believed in an infinite universe, started to emphasize the existence of an infinite universe—is this Kabbalist’s rationale for the existence of an infinity of souls, each of them capable of producing an interpretation corresponding to its special constitution. The Kabbalists active in the latter part of the sixteenth century acted in a spiritual and scientific ambiance different from that of the thirteenth-century Kabbalists, and the explanations of their thought should be more open to parallels, osmotic processes, and influences that were not available earlier. Thus, I suppose that the theory of infinity is not superseded by that of accommodation, although the latter is indeed mentioned in the text.
Already in the rabbinic literature there is a correspondence between the particular nature of the recipients of the Torah and their perception of the revelation. In Yalqut Shim‘oni there is a hologrammatic description of God when revealing Himself: “Rabbi Levi said: The Holy One, blessed be He, has shown Himself to them as this icon71 that is showing its faces in all the directions. A thousand people are looking at it and it looks at each of them. So does the Holy One, blessed be He, when He was speaking each and every one of Israel was saying, ‘The speech was with me’. I am God is not written, but I am God, your Lord.72 Rabbi Yossei bar Hanina said, ‘According to the strength73 of each and every one, the [divine] speech was speaking.’ “74 The aural revelation at Sinai, like the visual one related to the eikon that serves as an illustration to its polymorphism, presupposes an individual rather than a group that is submitted to one compact revelation. Differentiation between the recipients is quite evident in this passage. Here it is the divine voice, not the written text, that is the basic subject matter of the rabbinic passage, and thus multiplicity of meanings is the result of the divine accommodation.
The view that each and every Jew is in the possession of a special revelation and of a unique interpretation disclosed only to him is found in R. Meir ibn Gabbai, R. Shlomo Alqabetz, and R. Moses Cordovero’s writings, in several Lurianic sources, and in R. Isaiah Horovitz’s influential book Ha-Shelah, though the Kabbalistic sources implying it may be much earlier.75 This vast topic cannot be exhausted here and deserves a much more detailed analysis. Let me adduce only a few sources, starting with a book composed at the middle of the seventeenth century, R. Naftali Bakharakh’s well-known ‘Emeq ha-Melekh; I have selected this text, which in many ways paraphrases prior Lurianic texts, because it offers a more comprehensive discussion of the various Lurianic motifs.76 In Bakharakh’s version, R. Isaac Luria—who is described as someone knowing whatever exists in heaven and earth—resorted to a special mystical technique: he resorted to the souls of the dead Tannaites and Amoraites in order to learn from them the secrets of the Torah. This fact was prima facie surprising, since Luria was thought to be someone who possessed the holy spirit and a very creative master, described as kema‘ayan ha-mitgabber in the treatise ’Avot. This quandary was resolved by the assumption, found in earlier Lurianic texts, that all the souls of the children of Israel were present at Sinai and “it was decreed that this one will innovate this issue and that one [will innovate] that issue, [and they] ought to be disclosed precisely by each of them and not by any other person, because this is the particular spark of his soul.”77
This principle is exemplified with the help of a legend regarding Moses, who was unable to understand R. ‘Aqivah’s homiletic interpretations on the Torah.78 Thus, according to the Kabbalist, even Moses was unable to fathom the interpretation of the book he wrote, an interpretation that was unique to R. ‘Aqivah.79 Likewise, Bakharakh contends, following earlier Kabbalistic sources, that all the souls of the Israelites comprise all the interpretations.
Another interesting discussion of the multiple significance of the Torah, related to the concept of particular interpretations revealed to each of the Jews present at Mount Sinai, is found in R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, known as Ramhal, a seminal thinker who flowered in the 1730s and was deeply influenced by Cordoverian and Lurianic themes. In his book Qelah Pithei Hokhmah he offers one of the most ergetic understandings of the theory of infinite meanings:
God spoke: “Are not my words like fire?”80 … because just as the coal that is not enflamed, the flame within it is hidden and closed, but when you blow on it, it expands and broadens like a flame and many sorts of nuances81 are seen which were not visible prior to it in the coal, but everything emerged from the coal. So too is the case of the Torah that is before us, whose words and letters are like a coal … and whoever is preoccupied and busy with it enflames the coals, and from each and every letter a great flame emerges, replete with many nuances, which are the information encoded in this letter … All the letters we see in the Torah point to the twenty-two lights found on high and those supernal lights are illuminating the letters, and the holiness of the Torah and the holiness of the scroll of the Torah and of tefillin and mezuzot and all the holy scriptures, and in accordance with the holiness of its writing the dwelling and the illumination of those [supernal] lights on the letters are enhanced … and those nuances are numerous and the ancient masters received [a tradition] that all the roots of the souls of Israel are all within the Torah and there are six hundred thousand interpretations to all the Torah, divided between the souls of the six hundred thousand [children of] Israel … This is the reason why though the Torah [as a whole] is infinite, even one of its letters is also infinite, but it is necessary to enflame it and then it will be enflamed, and so too the intellect of man.82
Here the reasoning is tautological: the souls of the recipients of the Torah are already within it—a Kabbalistic version of the reader in the text—and this is why there are so many meanings in the Torah, and the study of the Torah by each of them enflames it and discloses the potential colors and nuances in it. An individual is tantamount to all the others, and he can actualize the significance of the Torah by his enthusiastic study of the book. In any case, the interpretation is not only an actualization of the linguistic and eideic treasuries of the text, but in fact an activation of a primordial spiritual affinity between the Torah and the souls of Israel. The act of blowing in itself contributes a substance to the flame and causes its expansion.83 Thus, at least on the metaphorical level, the nature and spiritual effort of the interpreter contribute to the further expansion of the Torah. The importance of the metaphysical dimension of Luzzatto’s discussion should be emphasized: the mundane Torah is dependent on the supernal twenty-two letters, which infuse their lower representations and permutations with light or holiness. The infinity is therefore dependent on the linkage with a higher universe, which transcends the linguistic formulations and stresses the basic units, the letters, in a manner reminiscent of Sefer Yetzirah. Holiness and meaning do not emerge by virtue of an intratextual relation (like permutations of letters), as part of an horizontal interaction, but by dint of a vertical interaction between the twenty-two fundamental letters on high and the multiplicity of their reflections in the scriptures. I assume that Luzzatto adopted a rather talismanic understanding of the study of the Torah, and perhaps of its interpretation, as part of the talismanic model that will be examined in more detail in the next chapter. If this proposal is correct, the intense preoccupation with the Torah, which implies vocal activity, may be understood as drawing the divine lights on the corresponding letters below. “Illumination” of the lower letters by the higher would be connected to the enflaming, and the nonmetaphorical illumination could be connected to the metaphorical one, which would be related to interpretation.
Let me return to the schematic figure of the number of children of Israel. Since there were six hundred thousand souls at Mount Sinai, six hundred thousand interpretations are available. Yet this figure, which occurs in the earlier Lurianic writings, did not satisfy the Kabbalists; according to some sources,84 given the fact that the Torah is interpreted in accordance with the fourfold exegetical technique known as pardes, each of the four ways of interpretation includes six hundred thousand different interpretations.85 According to this view, the interpretive singularity of the voice of every Jew is ensured by his very essence as a Jew, meaning his presence at the constitutive moment of Sinaitic revelation. In fact, according to some formulations of Lurianic passages, including that of R. Naftali Bakharakh, the soul is not only the depository of a certain singular interpretation; its very essence is the expression of that interpretation. Indeed, let me adduce the voice of the Kabbalist himself: “Out of each interpretation, the root of a certain soul of Israel emerged, and in the future each and every one [of Israel] will read and know the Torah in accordance with the interpretation that reaches to his root, by which he was created … Behold that at night, after the departure of the soul during sleep, whoever merits ascending reads there the interpretation that reaches his root.”86 Therefore, interpretation is not only a function of the peculiar quality of the soul, or of the particular universe from which the soul emerged into this world; the identity of the soul is created by the interpretation itself. Indeed, the soul not only proclaims its unique vision of the Torah but is itself the very manifestation of that unique interpretation. Faithful interpretation, therefore, is conceived not so much as the projection of the values of the religious society onto an antiquated canon but as faithfulness to the inner nature of one’s soul.
The Kabbalist’s emphasis on the “singularity of the voice”87 should not, however, be overemphasized. There is nothing modern here, no special veneration of the uniqueness of the individual; the soul is conceived of as but part of the greater spiritual reservoir of primordial souls, which are no more and no less than sparks of the divine essence which descended into the mundane world and will return to their supernal source at the end of time. Thus interpretation is not the expression of the separation of the individual from the group or community, or an idiosyncratic vision that sets him apart, an act of creativity or originality particular to him, in the way the romantics would understand it. On the contrary: his interpretation is a minuscule particle of the larger and already existing tradition, which is a huge puzzle composed of six hundred thousand pieces, and without his contribution the puzzle will never be completed. Hence the theory of the singularity of the voice does not imply an insularity of the discourse, or of the soul of the interpreter; far from creating a centrifugal moment intended to facilitate personal uniqueness, this theory advocates a centripetal move, which presupposes cooperation. According to explicit statements of Lurianic Kabbalists, each and every soul includes in itself all the other souls88—a Kabbalistic version of a Leibnitzian monadic theory—and implicitly also the interpretations of all the others. Thus, though being unique, an interpreter reflects in himself the whole range of his community, just as his own interpretation, unique as it is, comprises in some mysterious way the whole spectrum of interpretations preserved within his community. Only by maintaining and transmitting the unique message of the text inherited by him is the individual interpreter capable of completing all the others, and of completing the proclamation of the manifold senses of the Torah. This point, which was not articulated in any of the pertinent texts, seems nevertheless to be implied in the whole Lurianic discourse. Still, the existence of a net of affinities between one’s soul and the interpretation one offers is part of a new emphasis on the individual emerging in Safedian Kabbalah, an issue that deserves a separate study. However, it would be salient to see authenticity as a value that reflects the gist of the above passages rather than as a search for originality.
The above theory seems to be the hermeneutical counterpart of the tiqqun theory, so crucial for the Lurianic Kabbalah. Just as the Kabbalistic interpretation and performance of the ritual allow the restoration of the primordial unity of the ’Adam Qadmon out of the dispersed sparks, designated as tiqqun, so also the restoration of all the dispersed interpretations has an eschatological meaning. Three major entities tell the same story, or myth, of Lurianic Kabbalah in a parallel manner: the Torah, the souls of Israel, and ’Adam Qadmon.89 All three were scattered into particles, and all are supposed to return to their source.90 Interpretation, therefore, may become not only an ergetic involvement with the text but also an individual eschatological activity.
This eschatological move is only partially expressed in the sources. Most of them contain two possibilities, which prima facie seem to be exclusive. One is the assumption that unless the imperative of studying the Torah in accordance with the fourfold way of interpretation is fulfilled, the individual will return to this world, by means of metempsychosis, up to the moment that the imperative is to be fulfilled. Indeed, personal redemption depends on the completion of study. Thus, actualizing one’s special understanding of the whole Torah means also the cessation of mundane existence, which is the arena of the actualization of one’s peculiar interpretation.91 Such a reading would necessitate human initiative, which is indispensable for acquiring perfection, an experience of plenitude that is deemed to be attainable in this world independent of the eschaton. The individual’s understanding of the Torah, being a personal soteriology, is able to save him from metempsychosis.
On the other hand, statements can be found, in the same contexts as the above theory, to the effect that only in the future each and every one of the children of Israel will know the whole Torah in accordance with the interpretation that corresponds to the root of his soul.92 Such a conception would mean that a complete awareness and manifestation of all the meanings of the Torah is a matter of the eschatological future. It seems, however, that the two views, which appear to be antithetical, can be reconciled. The retrieval of all the interpretations may be understood as an accumulative process to be completed in the collective eschaton, but its stages consist in the personal attainments of those who are able to anticipate the historical eschaton and achieve their own redemption. This is why I believe that each interpretation is part of the general complex of the eschaton, just as every performance of the commandments is part of the general tiqqun. Several Lurianic sources describe the study of the Torah in general in terms of tiqqun.
This survey of the history of the infinity of meanings as developed in Kabbalah yields a significant development: early Kabbalah is much more concerned with infinities of interpretations, without emphasizing the different types of souls or their various sources on high, than are the Kabbalistic sources after the middle of the sixteenth century. In my opinion, the shift from a more objective approach to Kabbalah to a more subjective one seems to transpire in many cases in late Kabbalah, an issue corroborated by other topics, such as the emergence of mystical diaries in the sixteenth-century Safed. The accent is not only on the fullness of the Torah and its being pregnant with infinite meanings, but much more on the contribution of the individual to this fullness.
Let me now introduce another type of infinity, which also depends on the infinite nature of the substance of God rather than on processes that constellate the meanings of the Torah. A nineteenth-century Hasidic master claims that “out of your union [with God]93 you will be able to pass from the word ’anokhi alone to the entire Torah, because just as God, blessed be He, is infinite, so too His word is infinite, and likewise you, if you will be united to God, blessed be He, will comprehend by an infinite understanding.”94 Here the infinity of the Torah depends not on an inherent quality of the text but on the infinite nature of the divine author, which is reflected in the nature of the interpreter who cleaves to God. The achievement of adherence or mystical union of the Hasidic master opens the gate to an infinity in the textual entity because of the acquired infinity of the interpreter. From this achievement, and from a primordial affinity between God and the Torah, a common denominator is created: God, Torah, and Man are one and infinite at the same time.95 When this is achieved, the mystical interpreter will be able to discover the infinity of the divine word within the divine pronoun ’anokhi.96
The concept of infinity of the Torah was, as we have seen, well established prior to the emergence of Lurianic Kabbalah. With the ascent of the centrality of a new book for the Kabbalists, the Zohar, Kabbalists and Hasidic masters applied this concept to the now-canonical text.97 One passage preserved by Luria’s main disciple, R. Hayyim Vital, may appropriately illustrate Luria’s influential attitude toward the Zohar:
The worlds change each and every hour, and there is no hour which is similar to another. And whoever contemplates the movement of the planets and stars, and the changes of their position and constellation and how their stand changes in a moment, and whoever is born in this moment will undergo different things from those which happen to one who was born in the preceding moment; hence, one can look and contemplate what is [going on] in the supernal infinite, and numberless worlds … and so you will understand the changes of the constellation and the position of the worlds, which are the garments of ’Ein Sof; these changes are taking place at each and every moment, and in accordance with these changes are the aspects of the sayings of the book of the Zohar changing [too], and all are words of the Living God.98
The Zohar as a inexhaustible text was conceived, therefore, to reflect the nature of its ever-living Author, the living God, who composed, according to some Kabbalists, a continuously changing composition, in a manner reminiscent of Mallarme’s Livre. The organic vision of the Zoharic text as a body that changes, just as its Author did, is reminiscent of the rabbinic vision of the Torah, whose dialectical nature has been described in similar terms: words of the living God. Elsewhere, Luria asserts that “in each and every moment the [meanings of the] passages of the holy Zohar are changing.”99 Hence, for a Kabbalist the Zoharic text has reached a status very similar to that of the Bible itself.
Another important Jewish mystic, R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, the founder of Polish Hasidism, also envisioned this Kabbalistic book as changing its meaning every day. He was reported by his grandson to have asserted, consonant with Luria’s view, that “the book of the Zohar has, each and every day, a different meaning.”100 R. Eliezer Tzevi Safrin, a late-nineteenth-century Hasidic commentator on the Zohar, quoted his father, R. Isaac Aiziq Yehudah Yehiel Safrin of Komarno—himself a renowned commentator on this book—as saying that “each and every day, the Zohar is studied in the celestial academy, according to a novel interpretation.”101 In addition to the literary activity of interpreting the Zohar, which generated a rich literature that has yet to be explored as a special literary genre, parts of this book have been recited ritualistically, especially in the Jewish communities in Morocco and the Middle East, even by persons who were not familiar with its precise content.102
The forms of infinity of interpretations discussed above in section III do not assume the possibility of concomitantly faithful mystical interpretations stemming from the same person. The potential anarchism inherent in the assumption that the number of mystical interpretations is not limited has been attenuated by various restricting circumstances. According to the first theory presented above, the divine constellation imposes the assumption of a proper interpretation characteristic of a given moment. As in the case of astrology, there is a certain deterministic moment that regulates the nature of the understanding of the text. According to the second view, there is only one single interpretation that characterizes the approach of each master, namely one representative of his primordial source in a specific world. In the case of the third view, the nature of the interpretation is predetermined by the primordial spiritual constitution one inherited at the time of the Sinaitic revelation. Therefore, while the Torah is still conceived of as possessing an infinite or quasi-infinite number of meanings, a much more conservative attitude toward the interpreter is expressed in the above texts.103 If the earlier Kabbalah was much more text-oriented, in time it became more theosophically oriented. With the elaboration on the theosophical structure since the end of the thirteenth century, the symbolic meaning of the scriptures became quite determined and is imposed mechanically onto the canonical texts. From this point of view it is obvious that those texts were conceived of as pointing to supernal realms whose meaning was known to the “soul” of the interpreter. This is just one of the examples that invalidated the theory that Kabbalistic symbols are significands that have no signifieds. The signified is part and parcel of one’s very identity. At least theoretically some of the Kabbalists were confident that the symbols reveal an esoteric dimension that expresses their particular identity. I would like now to compare this emphasis on the identity of the interpreter, who is also a reader and an author, to modern trends in critical theory.
Modern literary theory has turned its attention to the nature of the text in a rather intense manner by gradually marginalizing logocentric attitudes. Following the cultural crises involved in the Nietzschean and Freudian revolutions, the instability of meaning secured by factors external to the text has become a big issue, which betrays not only the fluid semantics of the interpreted texts but also the flexible attitudes of readers. A destabilization of philological certainty in the possibility of ascertaining authorial intention (intentio auctoris) facilitated the emergence of more subtle, intricate, sometimes even oversophisticated discourses over the possibilities implied in the earlier discourses. I attribute this move to the discovery of the discrepancy between the poverty of the author and the richness of language. Unstructured language, which is enchained by creative processes, is never subservient to the author’s capacities and transcends his intentions by displaying a much greater spectrum of meanings than the author intended; that is to say, the work contains its own intention (intentio operis).104 It is a weak mind, genial though it may be, that attempts to enslave the variety of possibilities inherent in language as constituted by a long series of semantic shifts. This view of the secular text entails a crisis in the former focus on the author and proposes a much greater interest in the contribution of the reader or, even more, the sophisticated interpreter. Readers and interpreters complete the meaning by bringing their own riches to the interpreted texts. The secular attitude toward texts is a fundamentally democratic discourse.
Sacred texts, however, almost always imply strong authors. Either God or His prophets or the Hasidic tzaddiq, or at least the authority of the ancients, supply an authorship that provides a much firmer basis for the belief that the canonical texts by themselves represent higher forms of intelligence, if not absolute wisdom. This faith in the distinct superiority of the author over the interpreter, part of a hierarchical structure of the universe, society, and human minds, dominates the approach of a religious reader to canonical texts. Assuming such a superior wisdom means also that it is hard to believe that an inferior reader, or even a community of readers, will ever be able to exhaust the multiple intentions implied in the canonical texts. Thus, it is not only the awareness of the riches of language, of its fluidity and ambiguities, that serves as the ground for ongoing interpretive projects, but also an assumption of the existence and activities of higher, even infinite forms of intelligences or divine attributes that are logocentric entities. It is not in history, as Gadamer would claim, but in an atemporal supernal reservoir that a Kabbalistic interpreter believes he will found his interpretations. Thus, Kabbalists operated with a radical trust in the text, rather than a basic mistrust in its author as the generator of the text, which characterizes modern deconstructive approaches. The horizontal intratextuality and intertextuality characteristic of recent secular approaches have replaced the vertical interchange between the reader and the metaphysical subject of his belief in religious hermeneutics.
A modern reader reads largely in order to express himself; a religious reader is looking much more to be impressed. Secular reading is an analytical, disintegrative process; it subverts much more than it integrates. Its agon is provoked by the self-imposition of the historical relations as generative factors. The gist of religious reading, on the other hand, is synthetic. It reflects a higher order, which is to be absorbed, imitated, or at least venerated.
I would say that earlier Kabbalah preferred the assumption that an infinity of meanings is latent in the gestalt of the divinely authored text over the view, found in several Christian texts, that the process of interpretation alone is infinite. According to the latter, each and every exegete is able to contribute his view to the exegetical tradition, whereas the text per se is very rarely regarded as infinite in its significances. Yet despite the indifference and even hostility of Christian religion toward language,105 this did not preclude the emergence of the idea of infinite accumulative interpretations.
Indeed, it would be much more representative to describe the conceptions of the Kabbalists regarding the relationship between the Torah and man as requiring that the Kabbalist be assimilated to the Torah rather than vice versa. It is man who must accommodate himself to the infinite Torah rather than Torah to man. In addition, I would distinguish between the Kabbalistic emphasis on infinity of meanings and a view recurring in many other mystical literatures dealing with ineffable experiences. Kabbalistic texts do not emphasize a negative theology and rarely speak about experiences that cannot be rendered in words. The concept of interpretations found on high and waiting, so to speak, for the corresponding souls to actualize them does not allow ineffability, at least insofar as this important form of religious activity is involved. In lieu of the scholarly assumption that Kabbalah starts with a realm of unarticulated and inarticulable meanings,106 I would say that the belief in primordially articulated meanings is quite representative of rabbinic and Kabbalistic literatures. In fact, the affinity between the specific interpretation and the root of one’s soul, both of which preexist on high, emerged concomitantly in Safedian Kabbalah and points to a greater importance of the individual in the theosophical Kabbalah, a move that received an even greater impetus in Polish Hasidism. Unlike the earlier vision of the root of the soul in an upper world of Neoplatonic origin, which was accepted in thirteenth-century Kabbalah and remained a rather general principle, in Safedian Kabbalah this principle has become a much more vibrant issue which, together with other principles such as the more elaborated and individualized conceptions of metempsychosis, contributed to a vision of a more structured primordial psyche.107
We may portray the evolution of medieval and modern Jewish mysticism in the context of the infinity of canonical texts. In the thirteenth century the Bible was thought to possess infinite meanings; in these sources the question of the special nature of Hebrew was often addressed, and a correlation existed between the specific modes of writing of the Torah and infinities of meanings. In the sixteenth century the Zohar, a composition written in the thirteenth century but canonized only much later, was conceived of as possessing infinite meanings. The explanation has nothing to do with the special status of Hebrew, as this language is not relevant in the above discussion, but is related to the quasi-astrological understanding of the divine configuration. In Hasidism both views were preserved, but the kind of canonization characteristic of this mystical movement differs from the earlier two stages, given the fact that it concerns an oral performance whose canonization is now instantaneous. In this phase of Jewish mysticism there is indeed no need of an elaborate canonization process; students would debate the meanings of the sermon just after it was delivered. Canonical status was achieved by some of the Hasidic writings, like R. Shne’or Zalman of Liady’s Sefer ha-Tanya or R. Nahman of Braslav’s Liqqutei Moharan. Since the sermons were originally delivered by the Hasidic masters in Yiddish, a language very different from biblical Hebrew and even more so from the Zoharic Aramaic, it is not the status of the language that bears on the radical canonization but rather the status of the speaker (an issue addressed in more detail in Appendix 5).
The existence of views regarding the infinity of the canonical texts in systems of thought that do not assume a special status for a sacred language, as in the case of a philosopher like R. Yehudah Romano108 and in Christianity,109 invites a much more sophisticated explanation than one finds in recent speculations, based as such views are solely in the belief in the sanctity of Hebrew.110 In fact, the recent surge in emphasis on the infinity of meanings of a text in Derrida’s deconstruction does not rely at all on a sacred vision of language or text. Therefore, the scholarly overemphasis on this theory in order to understand some aspects of Kabbalistic hermeneutics is reminiscent of the modern secular reduction of Jewish culture to a cult of Hebrew language as a formative factor, irrelevant to the cultural content expressed in that language. Most of the Kabbalists, however, were concerned much more with the nature of the canonical text than with the special nature of language, which emerged in a rather specific historical moment as part of a polemical approach. The four reasons offered above demonstrate that a variety of nonlinguistic speculation can inform views assuming infinities of meaning, which have relatively understandable signifieds in what the Kabbalist believed was a different dimension of reality.
I would say that as long as the competition with the concepts of the ideal Arabic and perfect Qur’an was pressing and significant, a few Jewish philosophers and more among the Kabbalists were interested in dealing with the perfect language, and this is the reason for the importance of the many discussions of Hebrew as a perfect language in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Another reason for the emphasis on the sanctity of Hebrew was part of a reaction to Maimonides’ vision of Hebrew as a conventional language.111 Yet once the “danger” of, or competition with, Islam became less obvious, metaphysical, cosmological, and psychological speculations came to be introduced into Kabbalistic discussions, which also conceive of infinity as stemming from nonscriptural sources. In fact, a change takes place between the thirteenth-century discussions of infinity, as based mainly on the argument of a perfect language and its organization in the canon, and the sixteenth-century discussions, which are much more oriented toward other forms of explanation anchored in domains of Kabbalistic speculation that were much more developed in that century, such as theosophy and psychology. If during the thirteenth century Kabbalah was just beginning to build its complex theosophy on the basis of earlier, simpler theologoumena and mythologoumena and, together with Ashkenazi Hasidism, emphasize linguistic speculation, the sixteenth-century Safedian Kabbalistic schools already articulated extraordinarily complex theologies and psychologies, which become, together with complex theurgies, the focus of such speculation. In Hasidism the center of gravity moved dramatically toward emotional experiences, which became the source for and mode of validation of new insights in the mystical meaning of the texts.
To summarize: all the important components of the interpretive triangle—text, author, and exegetical devices—underwent decisive transformation in Kabbalistic hermeneutics. Also, in many Kabbalistic writings the nature of the interpreter’s task differs from what was expected in earlier exegetical enterprises. The theosophical Kabbalistic interpreter is interested in the subtleties of divine life. He decodes the Bible as a mystical biography concerned with the infradivine infinite processes and the religious regulations that influence the function of these processes, rather than as a humanly directed document. Or, as in the prophetic Kabbalah, he views the highest interpretation of the Torah as the actualization of its infinite mathematical potentialities as they may assist in the expansion of the interpreter’s consciousness of, or in the influence exercised by, the Godhead. Therefore, Torah is either pushed in the direction of revealed divinity and sometimes even identified with it; or, attracted in the opposite direction, Torah becomes an instrument by which the union of man’s intellect with God is at-tained.112 The status of the Torah as an independent entity—such as we find in the talmudic and midrashic literatures—standing between man and God though separated from both, vanishes. Likewise, in most forms of Kabbalah man’s separate identity or self is jeopardized. The divine source of his soul, according to the sefirotic Kabbalah, or of his intellect, according to the prophetic brand, endows the Kabbalist with strong spiritual affinities to the Godhead. These affinities authorize, as they facilitate, the emergence of pneumatic exegeses to be defined against talmudic-midrashic, philologically oriented hermeneutics. The text becomes a pretext for innovating far-reaching ideas, which are projected onto the biblical verses. The exegetical methods whereby these innovations are injected into the text differ considerably from the talmudic-midrashic rules of interpretation. The various forms of combinations of letters and gematria are entirely indeterminate and superflexible interpretive techniques. Hence they are liable to produce radically heterogeneous results. The looseness of these hermeneutic methods is counterbalanced solely by doctrinal inhibitions. When these inhibitions disappeared or were replaced by others, as was the case with the emerging of writings by Christian Kabbalists, they used highly similar Kabbalistic hermeneutics and easily drew the conclusion that Kabbalah adumbrates Christian tenets.113 Thus, an emphasis on the importance of exegetical techniques for the shaping of the resulting interpretation should be balanced by taking into consideration the theological stands that allow rather limited spaces for interpretation. The more flexible the exegetical methods are—and they are both numerous and complex—the greater is the role of the theological inhibition in orienting the interpretations so as not to irritate the audience.
The Kabbalistic perceptions of the Torah as an absolute book that is both identical with and descending from the divinity supplied a point of departure from which the pneumatic exegete is able to discover its infinite significance, as we shall see in Chapter 6. The Hebrew Bible is viewed in some Kabbalistic discussions as an opera aperta par excellence, wherein the divine character of man finds its perfect expression even as it discovers God’s infinity reflected in the amorphous text. To put it another way: the Torah is a divine masterpiece, while Kabbalistic exegesis, and Kabbalah in general, should be understood as an attempt at unfolding both Torah’s infinite subtleties and (paradoxically, to some extent) the Kabbalist’s inner qualities. It is noteworthy that only those Kabbalists who belong to what I call “innovative Kabbalah”—R. Abraham Abulafia, R. Moses de Leon, R. Joseph Gikatilla, and partially R. Bahya ben Asher—formulated in explicit terms the principles of Kabbalistic hermeneutics. Moreover, there is a latent contradiction between the notion of Kabbalah, when it is perceived as a corpus of very defined esoteric theurgical-theosophical lore, as in the case of the perception in Nahmanides’ school, and the existence of an articulate body of hermeneutic rules that tacitly assumes that the details of the Kabbalistic lore are not in the possession of the Kabbalists, who are presumed to apply those exegetical rules in order to reconstruct the Kabbalistic system.114
In sum, the question of the infinity of interpretations in Jewish mysticism should not be understood as the result of the influence of one single factor, namely the belief in the sanctity of the Hebrew language. Rather, we should allow as great a variety of explanations as the pertinent sources may indicate. Polemical factors like the resistance of some Kabbalists to philosophical allegorical interpretations, which are by and large monosemic,115 and the assumption of a resonance between the nature of the author and the text are as good an explanation as the unproved theory that the sanctity of language invites a polysemic hermeneutics. The monolithic historical explanations that dominated the academic history of Kabbalah and reify complex matters—such as regarding Sabbateanism as stemming from just one factor, Lurianism, or resort to unilinear types of history and phenomenologies through terms like “messianic idea” or an “idea of the golem,” or reducing the explanation to one basic “solution”—are as simplistic in these cases as they are in the attempt to understand the variety of concepts of textual and paratextual infinities.116
I have assumed that the Kabbalistic concept of infinite interpretations that are found in the Bible is related to concepts of infinity that emerged in the theosophical and cosmological realms. In midrash, however, this concept is not found, and the most we can detect there is the contention of indeterminacy. By and large the Kabbalists preferred the view that an infinity of meanings is latent in the gestalt of the divine text over the somewhat similar view, found in several Christian texts, that the process of interpretation alone is infinite.117 According to the latter, each and every exegete is able to contribute his view to the exegetical tradition, whereas the text per se is only rarely regarded as infinite in its significances. Indeed, it would be much more representative to describe the Kabbalistic conception of the relationship between Torah and man as requiring the Kabbalist to be assimilated to the actually infinite Torah rather than vice versa. One example of such a process has been adduced above from a Hasidic statement, which also reflects faithfully the stands of some Kabbalists.118 From a more detached point of view, however, it is human inventiveness that determined the nature and content of the interpretations offered by Kabbalists, even when they would claim the opposite. As we shall see in Chapter 12, there were, nevertheless, important cases where man’s nature and deeds dramatically affected the structure of the Torah, and this too-human text was more easily understood by the human interpreter, as it mirrors him.
I wonder whether the divergence between the assumption that the text is infinite and the position that the possible interpretations are infinite does not reveal a basically different attitude toward the nature of the divine text. Some of the Kabbalists and the Hasidic masters conceive of the text as much more “divine” than the sacred text appears to be regarded in Christian literature. Although there are some statements as to the infinity of the scriptures in Christian literature, they seem to be rare.119 However, one of the most influential texts in Christian spirituality, Augustine’s Confessions, includes a passage that is noteworthy both for its intrinsic importance and for a comparative remark: “For my part … if I were to write anything that was to become supremely authoritative, I would choose to write in such a way that my words would resound with whatever truth anyone could grasp in them, rather than to put down one true meaning so clearly as to exclude other meanings, which, if they were not false, would not offend me.”120
This apotheosis of polysemy is not only a matter of the sacred scripture but also an ideal to which even a human author may strive. It is part of an effort to deny one single, exclusive deep meaning in a manner reminiscent of many of the Kabbalistic passages above. We have seen that the sixteenth-century Kabbalists and those who were influenced by them claimed that each Israelite received one interpretation at the revelation at Mount Sinai, and at the end of time all the revealed and possible interpretations would exhaust them, thus restricting the notion of infinity. It seems, as Martin Irvine had formulated it, that in ancient Christian concepts of the sacred scriptures “this Text can never signify its totality—the sum of its productivity of meaning—in one instantiated act of interpretation, but continuously promises and postpones this totality through dissemination in a limitless chain of interpretations in supplementary texts. This model of textuality implies that a variorum commentary on the Scriptures compiled at the end of the world would still be incomplete, even though the claim of interpretations would be temporally closed, superseded by a signless, transcendental grammar.”121 According to this interpretation, the text is indeed semantically limitless, but also unattainable because of its postponing its semantic fulfillment, and thus it seems that it is the ancient Christian hermeneutics that comes closer to modern deconstruction than the Kabbalistic views on the topic. If Irvine is right, the ancient Christian vision of the scriptures’ textuality is devoid of a transcendental meaning, while Kabbalistic and Hasidic masters would be more oriented toward a plenitude to be located in a past revelation. So, for example, R. Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, a late-eighteenth-century follower of R. Dov Baer of Mezeritch, known as the Great Maggid, wrote as follows: “Our holy Torah comprises in itself much, since the promulgation by Moses and the generations after him until the advent of our Messiah, all the interpretations inherent in the [technique of] pardes122 that are revealed and added by the sages of the time, it all comprises in itself from the voice of the shofar which has been heard at the Sinaitic revelation, as it is written,123 ‘and the voice of the Shofar sounded louder and louder,’ and the reason for ‘becoming louder’ is that it comprises in itself so much.”124 However, according to some discussions earlier in Irvine’s excellent work, Origen held that “the transcendental signified remained beyond the reach of all temporal sign relations yet is immanently manifest in all of them.”125 On the other hand, the Hasidic passage does not deal with a future development of interpretations that is endless, but an actualization of the contents already implicit within the divine voice heard by the Israelites. Thus, it is not a metaphysical or transcendental entity that is posited as the immediate source of meaning here below, but the divine voice that had already descended in the world and is continuously unfolding through human interpretative activity.126 This pulsating voice, like the ever-emerging interpretations, does not require the hypothesis of a transcendental Torah which cannot be reached. Fugitive as are the spiritual truths achieved by listening to the voice or to the interpretation that emerges from the encounter of one’s psyche’s with the holy books, nothing is supposed to remain “beyond the reach.”127
At least according to an interesting formulation of R. Pinhas of Koretz, when God revealed the Torah, the world became full of it, and thus there is nothing in the world that is not permeated by Torah.128 It is in this context, however, that the Hasidic master claims that the Torah and God are one.129 Kabbalists and Hasidic authors did not indulge in negative theologies, which left the core of the meaning as completely transcendent to human experience; in fact, the experience of the “ancients” may be understood as stronger than that of the “moderns,” to judge by the leading assumptions that informed that experience: the text mediates the divine presence in the world and the possibility of a direct encounter with the mystic rather than deferring such an experience.