The Torah is the perfection of all.
—ZOHAR, I, FOL. 234B
Books are not simply literary objects to be arranged carefully on library shelves; neither are they simple mediators of ideas between minds or media for, to resort to Ricoeur’s felicitous term, “proposed worlds.”1 They are also nebulas created by rumors, religious belief, wise advertisement, or, in more modern times, the consumption of a variety of critiques. They are units that constitute intellectual fashions, which in turn create predispositions toward the reception and digestion of their own and other books’ content. Books, especially famous books, possess auras that may enwrap them long before most of their readers open them. The social imagination of certain elites prepares the ground for the acceptance, dissemination, and depth of influence of a book even before it has been conceived by its author. Even more so in the case of books dealing with religious topics that already permeate the faith of many individuals and the praxis of groups and movements. These books, which are founding documents of a religion, ideology, or intellectual movement—that is to say, canonic—are rarely consumed as pure literature and only seldom are able to evince their “proposed worlds” without the mediation of the imaginary that surrounds them and has been accumulated over the centuries and has conferred on them their particular status. In other words, books may be influential not only because of their distinct message but also because of the myths that accompany them.
The imaginary of the book may take two major forms: historical and ontological. The former is best represented by actual forgeries of books, what is often called pseudepigraphy and I would call “actual” pseudepigraphy, or by the invention of titles of books allegedly written in the past that in fact were never written, a phenomenon I shall call “hollow” pseudepigraphy. The historical forger assumes, or would like his reader to assume, that sometime in the past a more original, insightful, powerful, and authoritative mind was active, or he exploits a cultural image of it that is present in the society he is addressing, and as such its book should inspire a new perception of tradition, knowledge, magic or religion, or power. Hollow pseudepigraphy circles around mythical figures whose importance is advanced by enhancing its image by attributing some literary output to its cultural image. Both forms of pseudepigraphy have something to do with a feeling of a spiritual renascence, which is sometimes in search of validation. If there were nothing new to be offered in the present, no one would care to invoke the ghosts of ancestors. In some instances, however, the imaginary books are projected into the future, as is the case with the concept of Torah of the Messiah in rabbinic literature,2 or with the concept of Torah de-’Atzilut in some forms of Kabbalah,3 or the Testament of the Holy Spirit according to Joachim of Fiore.4 Here the ideal writing is conceived of as completing the actual canonical book or books by means of the assumption of a final revelation. This projection, hardly a pseudepigraphical phenomenon, even less a forgery, is nevertheless part of what I call the historical imaginary of the book, for it is supposed to mark some turn in history.
Both the past-oriented and future-oriented imageries validate something in the present, but the strategy is connected to the belief in better times, either past or future, whose special knowledge passed to the present writer or the alleged, hollow pseudepigraph. The ontological imaginary of the book, at least in the way I suggest using the term, assumes that an actual or imaginary book already in existence is much more than a literary composition, profound and powerful as it may be, but is an extended metaphor for the structure and dynamics of reality or even of God. This form of book imaginary is much less concerned with validating a tradition, be it old or invented, or subverting one than it is with offering a new worldview. This mode of imaginary is much more current in literature, as in the works of Tommaso Campanella, Stéphane Mallarmé, Velimir Khlebnikov, Jorge Luís Borges, or Edmond Jabes.
In our generation the text (a reverberation of what I shall attempt to show, a very specific concept of the book) has been conceived of as embracing everything, as we learn from the famous pronouncement of Jacques Derrida, “Il n’y a pas rien dehors de texte.” The text becomes a leading metaphor. In religions with a strong element of literary canonicity, however, the book may be regarded not only as a source of revelation and inspiration for human behavior but sometimes also as a comprehensive, all-embracing ontological entity, in some cases even the sustaining power of reality. Thus, while existent books are concerned less with ontology than with historical claims (such as validations of genealogies of knowledge) the building or aggrandizing of some historical figures in the past (such as Jesus Christ in Christianity) or in the future (such as the Messiah according to Jewish tradition and the Mahdi in Muslim tradition), the ontological approach deals mainly with an ever-present book. Distinct as they are, the two approaches nevertheless often overlap. A new religious insight, though attempting to anchor itself in hoary antiquity, may nonetheless attempt to advance some forms of insight in the nature of reality, and not only of history, just as the ontological imaginary may insist on a certain historical appearance of the ontological book in mythical time.
On the other hand, a historical imaginary may in time turn into an ontological one, and we shall be dealing with such examples below, in the case either of the Torah or of the Zohar as understood by mystics. Jewish mystical literature is replete with pseudepigraphical books attributed to men, angels, and God, most of them actual treatises, a few pertaining to the imaginary of some Kabbalists or to the category of the hollow imaginary. Among the pseudepigraphical writings we may mention Sefer Yetzirah, attributed to none other than Abraham or, according to another tradition, to a founding father of rabbinic thought, R. ‘Aqivah; then, parts of the Heikhalot literature attributed to another leading figure of rabbinic literature, R. Ishmael, or even to one of the patriarchs, Enoch. Early in the Middle Ages one of the first Kabbalistic books was attributed to another important early rabbinic figure, R. Nehunya ben ha-Qanah. It is the famous Sefer ha-Bahir (Book of the Bahir) that shaped some of the developments of the nascent Kabbalah. Pseudepigraphical mystical literature was also known in late-twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century Germany, where the Hasidei Ashkenaz had access to material that is no longer extant. In the second half of the thirteenth century, pseud-epigraphical literature flowered among the Kabbalists, a process that culminated in the composition of the most important book of Kabbalah, the Zohar.
The Zohar is a large-scale body of literature attributed, like many of the earlier forgeries, to a second-century rabbinic figure, R. Shim’on bar Yohay. Despite some doubts that arose when the first short treatises started to appear in public, the Zohar was accepted as authentic and managed to become a revered part of Jewish literature. It is a historical imaginary book, as its composition is projected back into late antiquity, into another place, second-century Galilee; part of this projection is to be understood as an attempt to confer an aura of antiquity to Kabbalistic ideas and thus to Kabbalah as a whole. Though claiming the authority of a revered figure, an authority derived either from his actions while living or from post-mortem revelations, the book does not claim the status of an ontological imaginary; that is, it does not pretend to be the container of the universe or the power that sustains it. These claims were, as we have glimpsed above and as shall see more immediately below, already known in the context of the Torah and sometimes affected also the view that the authors of the Zohar had seen the Torah. Thus, though a strongly historical pseudepigraphy, the Zohar was not eager to request the status of the cosmic book. I shall come back to this book in the latter part of my exposition, when its status will be treated as a cosmic entity.
Now let me introduce some earlier instances of ontological interpretations of the book of the Torah, which contributed to the emergence of the ontological imaginary of the book in Kabbalah. In these passages the Torah, which stands for the text par excellence, serves as a means not only for the transmission of religious messages but also, and perhaps in some cases quite prominently, for an extended metaphor for an ideal paradigm that informed the creation of the world at the beginning of time and sometimes also continues to inform—literally to give form, to existence.
In the history of Jewish mysticism there may be discerned a gradual process of convergence of the divine being and the canonical book,5 or, if one prefers a more literary nomenclature, a gradual convergence of the divine author and his book. In Chapter 2 we saw examples from late midrashic and Kabbalistic sources that evince partial identities between the two, but this was primarily related to the graphic isomorphism of the book and the author, as both were conceived mainly in anthropomorphic terms. Let me first attempt to explicate the problems and their solutions as envisioned by the Jewish mystics, in order to learn about an exotic vision that is not regularly confronted by modern literary criticism or by contemporary philosophies of texts, although the latter are nevertheless dependent on the former.
One of the hermeneutical problems that faced some of the Jewish mystics was the daunting quandary created by a double heritage: the biblical one, concerned with the display of the will of God as operating and visible on the scene of history and in the details of the revealed way of life, the commandments; and the growing importance of the fixed form of sacred history and ritual in a book that became canonical. Or, to formulate the issue differently: the Jewish mystics had to determine what is more important, the author’s free will or the author’s book. In modern, most conspicuously in postmodern, literary criticism, the author has gradually been marginalized, not to say killed, in order to safeguard the integrality and integrity of the book, and sometimes also the importance of the reader. It was a relatively simple enterprise, as most of the authors did not outlive their books.
In religious systems, however, it is easier to kill the book, important as it may be, than its divine author. Easier, but not easy, if the book becomes the founding text of the religious tradition. This is the case in rabbinic Judaism, where the canonical text was established as the most important source of authority, the paramount subject of study, and the main object of interpretation. In fact, the emergence of rabbinic Judaism can be described as connected to a renomad-ization that is reminiscent of an earlier type of worship centered on a portable sacred object, formerly the tabernacle, now a book. So, in such a tradition it is incumbent on author and book to coexist, and a modus vivendi should be ensured in order not to trivialize the book by relegating it to the status of one of the many possible literary products of the eternal author; but at the same time it is essential not to minimize the importance of the author, which ensures the importance of the book. This quandary becomes more acute in a minority culture, as the Jewish one was for most of its history, where other books, such as the New Testament and Qur’an, competed for the status of the final revelation. Thus, the battle over the book is much more central for a culture that gravitates around books, one that attempts to validate its canonical books but has to allow a significant role for the author.
One of the regular solutions for the tension between the two values is to subordinate one factor to the other, thus establishing a hierarchy between the two or, to resort to a phrase coined by a scholar of Islamic mysticism, “une distinction hierarchisée.” Such a view sees the book as dependent on the author but somewhat reduces the dominant role of an author who is omnipresent.6 This is the classical rabbinic stand which contends that the Torah is not found in heaven but is in the full possession of and is the legitimate responsibility of the rabbinic masters,7 who apparently were more content to deal with the divine will as embodied in the specific literary expression they possessed without allowing further interference by the author. The rabbinic masters, and even less their mystical descendants, would not subscribe to Paul Ricoeur’s theory about the eclipse of the author,8 but rather assume an ongoing process of reading and elaboration on the book in the presence of the living author, yet without subscribing to his free will. What may be the precise difference between an eclipse of the author in Ricoeur and the presence of a living author in the consciousness of the religious reader—a living author who is not allowed to intervene in the act of reading, though he may be the ultimate goal of this act of reading—is an issue that I cannot dwell on here. Indeed, the phenomenology of reading is dictated less by modern assumptions about the actual death of the author than by the awareness and imagination of the reader, who may imagine the author as alive and attempt to enter into intellectual or spiritual dialogue him, even over centuries. This is especially so when the reader believes that the author is eternal and omniscient.
Although for a rabbinic master the “world of the text” and a certain distanciation between the author and the text, to use Ricoeur’s terms, are plausible concepts, for the Jewish mystics the situation becomes much more complex. The mystics were part of a religion and culture which, at least in its elite forms, inherited a fascination with the book, but at the same time they were also pursuing the search for more direct contact with God, either as an author or as an entity before the very writing of the book, and these two forms of spiritual concern were a primary purpose of their mystical life.9 Apparently they pursued a more vibrant relation with the supreme author, a direct contact with him, but could not, or perhaps refused to, circumvent the book as the canonical expression of the divine will, as the center of their culture, and as a divine entity that might mediate between them and the divine. However, a full-fledged mediation, by assuming a hypostatic status of the book, is only one of the solutions they accepted. The other was to conflate the book and the author, and this process of conflation is going to preoccupy us here.10 In any case, the emergence of the main form of Kabbalah, the theosophical-theurgical one, dealing as it does with the details of theogenesis, namely the emanation system of the ten sefirot conceived of as divine powers and the processes that take place between them, can be described as a great concern with the authorial persona, as opposed to the rabbinic fascination with the book rather than its author.
The speculative corpora that emerged after the first millennium C.E. represent a return to the written Torah, the canonical Bible, in comparison to the rabbinic literature, both those works that preceded that period and those which followed it. Jewish philosophers and the great majority of Kabbalists invested most of their energy in presenting their worldviews as included in the Bible, much more so than in the rabbinic literature. Those corpora can be described as “protestant” to a certain limited extent, in comparison to the more “catholic” rabbinic literature, which put a great emphasis on the traditional lore and institutions. One of the changes that accompanied this protestant turn is, however, remote from the Protestant Christian emphasis on sensus literalis. In fact, philosophers’ and Kabbalists’ focusing of attention on the Bible was connected to a metaphorical impulse, alien (as pointed out by Susan Handelman) to rabbinic metonymic discourse. This change is already conspicuous in the earliest Kabbalistic literature.
Since the first documents of the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah, the book of the Torah was conceived to be a main symbol in the various Kabbalistic symbolic codes. Already evident in Sefer ha-Bahir, one of the earliest Kabbalistic documents, the written Torah is the symbol for the sixth sefirah, Tiferet, while the oral Torah symbolizes the last sefirah, Malkhut. The union between the two, described as the result of the theurgical operation of the Kabbalist, was conceived of in sexual terms. Yet the precise status of the sefirot (a very rare term in this book) does not allow a simple identification of the Torah with the divine essence. If the sefirot are understood to be divine instruments, then the two books should be conceived of as preexistent to the creation of this world, though not automatically identical with the divine essence, and at the same time capable of being theurgically influenced by religious activities here below.11 Elsewhere in the same book we find a pivotal passage dealing with Torah as a cosmic book:
The attribute which is named Israel contains the Torah of Truth.12 And what is this Torah of Truth? Something which indicates the true nature of the worlds and whose action takes place through the mahashavah, and it bestows existence upon the ten logoi, through which the world exists, and it is itself one of them. And He created in man [organs] that correspond to these ten, ten fingers. And when Moses lifted his hands and directed a little bit his intention to that attribute named Israel, in which there is the Torah of Truth, and hinted at it by the ten fingers of his hands that it maintains the ten [divine attributes], and if He13 will not help Israel, the ten logoi will not be sanctified each and every day. This is why it is written, “and Israel prevailed.”14
The cosmic dimension of the book of the Torah is conspicuous: it reflects the “true nature of the worlds.” The precise nature of those worlds, however, is far from clear. Indeed, this is a difficult passage because it is based on a symbolic code whose details are not transparent. Is the “Torah of Truth” contained within the sixth attribute, Tiferet, which is almost invariably identified by Kabbalists as Israel? Or, as Gershom Scholem has suggested, is it to be identified with the third sefirah?15 What is the meaning of the Torah that operates through mahashavah, thought, an attribute connected in this treatise to a higher level within the sefirotic world?16 Is there a primordial Torah in Sefer ha-Bahir, as Scholem claims,17 which informs the lower Torah of Truth? How is this Torah one of the ten creative logoi and the origin of them at the same time? These and many other quandaries related to the content of this passage do not, however, attenuate the explicit statement dealing with both its reflecting the nature of the worlds and its bestowing their existence. We may portray the Torah of Truth as the starting point of the ten logoi, which in turn are the origin of the universe. This pyramidal structure with the Torah on top, which deserves more detailed discussion than can be provided here, underlies the paramount importance of a book for the constituency of the universe.
Let me address now the contention that the Torah is contained within a sefirah that has been designated here explicitly as Israel. Who precisely is the entity called by that name? And what is the possible relationship between it and the functions of the Torah it contains, as regards the cosmic nature of that Torah? Does Israel also contain the ten creative logoi? A pertinent object for comparison seems to be the following passage from ’Avot de-Rabbi Nathan: “He who saves one person [one life] is worthy to be regarded as if he had saved the entire world, which was created by ten logoi … And he who causes one person to perish is to be regarded as if he had caused the destruction of the entire world, which was created by ten logoi.”18 Moreover, in a passage very similar to the one from ’Avot, preserved in Hebrew by a medieval Ismaili author, it is said that “by means of ten ma’amarot the world was created, and by the Decalogue it stands.”19 This quotation is paralleled in a Jewish writing influenced by the Isma’iylia, which presumably reflects an older Jewish view, and by two short statements in Midrash Tadsche’, a later midrash that evidently includes earlier material as well, as some scholars have already recognized. According to one statement, “The world is maintained by the merit of those who study [the Torah] and perform the Decalogue; and the world was created by ten logoi, and its sefirot are [also] ten,” and in the same context we learn also that “the world is maintained by the ten sefirot of Belimah.”20
The strong affinity between the supernal attribute Israel, apparently corresponding to what the classical structure of ten sefirot designated as the sefirah Tiferet, and the Torah of Truth contributed, in my opinion, to the emergence of one of the most widespread views of the Torah in Kabbalah: the identification of God (represented by Tiferet), the Torah, and Israel. The origin and development of this triple identification, expressed by the Aramaic formula qudsha’ berikh hu’, ‘orayyita ve-yisra’el had hu’, namely that God, the Torah, and Israel are one, have been studied in modern scholarship, but it seems that the possible relevance of the passage from Sefer ha-Bahir has escaped scholars.21 Therefore, we may conclude that from the very beginning of Kabbalah, ten divine speeches found in the first chapter of Genesis were conceived of as both creating the world and maintaining it. That the first Kabbalists inherited this view and elaborated it in various ways is corroborated by the passage from Sefer ha-Bahir.
Let me address separately the two views of the Torah, as involved in the creation of the world and as maintaining it, despite the fact that the creative role and the maintenance function are closely interconnected. This combination of two operations commonly related to concepts of divinity is emblematic of the conception of the Torah as a divine being and of its more explicit identification with God in later Kabbalistic texts.
An important step in the development of the propensity to identify God and the Torah is found in the writings of thirteenth-century philosophically oriented Kabbalists. In several texts from the very beginning of the history of Kabbalah the Torah is regarded as identical to the divine mind, or divine wisdom, and as such it serves as the paradigm for the intradivine and extradivine emanative processes. According to other views, closer to medieval philosophy, the Torah is tantamount to the realm of ideas, namely the book is conceived of as identical to the spiritual world as it was variously envisioned by medieval thinkers. In some cases the Torah may be identical to the realm of ideas regarded as extradeical entities.22 Let me adduce a few examples, out of the many available, for the concept that God contemplates Torah as a symbol of an intradivine pattern or attribute that comprises the ideas. First, from R. Jacob ben Sheshet, a thirteenth-century Catalan Kabbalist:
God was contemplating the Torah23 and he saw the essences24 in Himself, since the essences were in wisdom25 [and] discerned that they are prone to reveal themselves. I heard this version in the name of R. Isaac, son of R. Abraham, may his memory be blessed. And this was also the opinion of the rabbi,26 the author of [The Book of] Knowledge, who said that He, knowing Himself, He knows all the existent [creatures].27 Nevertheless, the rabbi was astonished, in part 2, chapter 6 of the Guide, at the dictum of our sages that God does not do anything before He contemplates His retinue,28 and he quoted there the dictum of Plato that God, blessed be He, does contemplate the intellectual world and He emanates therefrom the emanation [which produces] reality.29
R. Isaac, son of R. Abraham, is none other than R. Isaac Sagi Nahor, one of the earliest Kabbalists, a Provençal master who came to Gerona to propagate his brand of Kabbalah; there he became the teacher of some of the local second-elite authors, learned persons who did not play a central role in communal life. Ben Sheshet conflates two different discussions of Maimonides: one in Mishneh Torah, where the author presents his view, which stems ultimately from The-mistius, that God comprises the forms of all the existents and thus cognizes them by an act of self-intellection;30 the other in the Guide of the Perplexed, where Maimon-ides sharply opposes the “simplistic” interpretation of the midrashic dictum that God created the world by contemplating the Torah as the blueprint for reality. According to this Kabbalist, the two views seem to be identical, and he is surprised by Maimonides’ inconsistency in accepting the first formulation while rejecting the second. Since the stand of R. Isaac the Blind, adduced before Mai-monides’ views were introduced, must be regarded as the truth in the eyes of ben Sheshet, Maimonides’ second view is implicitly rejected, whereas the dictum of Plato, quoted in the Guide in order to oppose it, is taken by the Kabbalist to be the correct one.
Again, in the context of the midrashic view that God had contemplated the Torah when He created the world, R. Azriel ben Menahem of Gerona, a contemporary and compatriot of ben Sheshet, explains, in a manner that recalls the above-mentioned view of ben Sheshet:
“The thirty-two wondrous paths of Hokhmah are the ten sefirot of Be-limah31 and the twenty-two letters.”32 And each of them has a separate path per se, and their beginning is the will, which precedes everything, and nothing is outside it,33 and it is the cause of the thought.34 And the sefirot and the paths and everything which will be created in the future out of them, [indeed] everything, was hidden within the mahashavah, and it is revealed in its paths, in the paths of speech35 and the paths of deed.36 And “He contemplates the Torah” [means] He contemplated the mahashavah, [namely] the paths that are included in it, and He drew each and every path out of its beginning37 … and in the forms38 of that mahashavah, the speeches and the deeds were figured,39 since the mahashavah is the root.40
The existence of the roots of speech and deed in divine thought is compared by R. Azriel with the existence of form and hyle in divine thought according to the Neoplatonic sources he quotes. However, whereas the philosophers deal with entities alone as comprised in divine thought, the Kabbalist is interested also in the speech and deeds, therefore in dynamic processes as comprehended in the mahashavah. The view of letters as ideas found within Hokhmah is congenial with the view, expressed several times in ben Sheshet’s writings, that identifies the second sefirah with the Torah, the latter being considered as comprising all the sciences.41 This comprehensiveness is shared by the two Geronese Kabbalists, who thus confer on the canonical book the role not only of the perfect repository of Jewish lore but also of the book that comprises all knowledge in general. Unlike the first two layers of Jewish literature which we examined previously, the midrashic literature and Sefer ha-Bahir, where the Torah was indeed identified somehow with the divinity but retained its status as the characteristic type of religious knowledge of the Jews, the Geronese Kabbalists, influenced by some forms of Greek philosophy, regarded the ideal Torah as more universalistic in scope. Indeed, for them the book of God and the book of nature are one. This is the reason why R. Azriel claimed that “the words of the wisdom of the Torah and the words of the masters of investigation42 mentioned above are both identical,43 their way is one, and there is no difference between them but the terms alone, since the investigators did not know to designate the proper name to each and every part.”44
Both ben Sheshet and R. Azriel conceived of the Torah as representing that divine attribute corresponding to the divine mind, the locus of all ideas that are contemplated by God as part of the emanative process. This is, however, the contemplation of an attribute that is part of the divine realm, no longer the contemplation of the Torah as an external pattern, as is the case in midrash. The Torah has, so to speak, been absorbed and become part of the configuration of the divine attributes. This identity between the Torah and one of the divine attributes is a step toward identifying the author with his book, though such a complete identification is still ahead.
I would like nevertheless to emphasize that in the writings of both Catalan Kabbalists the divine attribute contemplated by God is not just one among many. It is an attribute that encompasses the lower ones, and to a certain extent the Torah comprises most of the sefirot by virtue of its being identical with the locus of all the other sefirot. In other words, the first Catalan Kabbalists, apparently following their Provençal predecessor, envisioned the Torah as identical to the divine mind, and as such its content, the “world of the text” or noema45—is perfectly identical to the authorial intention, the noesis. No process of distanciation is possible, and the maximum that Kabbalists like these two authors could imagine is less than an absolutely faithful reproduction of the divine noesis in a mundane book; their assumption from the very beginning would be, however, that the objectification involves more material entities than those taking the emergence of the book to be identical to the divine mind. The received Torah is therefore not a reproduction of a more sublime form of book but an entity conceived of in terms of a book. Although in some cases Kabbalists would include the stage of a verbal discourse as preceding the constitution of the book—in fact the scroll—of the Torah, Kabbalists like Nahmanides speak of Moses as a copyist working from a supernal book.46 By identifying the primordial Torah with the second sefirah, one that encompasses all the other lower sefirot and consequently the entire world, this Torah becomes a world-absorbing text.
In the writings of two Kabbalists who flourished at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, we find a formula that conveys a total identification of the Torah, in many cases the Pentateuch, with God. The first text is a late-thirteenth-century Castilian treatise named Sefer ha-Yihud, which influenced the early-fourteenth-century Italian Kabbalist R. Menahem Recanati.47 In his introduction to the Commentary on the Rationales of the Commandments, Recanati wrote: “All the sciences altogether are hinted at in the Torah,48 because there is nothing that is outside of Her49 … Therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, is nothing that is outside the Torah, and the Torah is nothing that is outside Him, and this is the reason why the sages of the Kabbalah said that the Holy One, blessed be He, is the Torah.”50 The identification of the author and the book reinforces the two values but also changes them. The book becomes tantamount to the divine, while the divine is now conceived of as the Torah. It seems to me that this is quite a logical development in a religion based on a book, but it leads to some forms of extreme mysticism. Sefer ha-Yihud is a work that, though extant in many manuscripts, did not attract the due attention of scholars. I would dare to say that this treatise is one of the most important Kabbalistic writings of the thirteenth century, one that had a special impact on all R. Menahem Recanati’s writings. Recanati’s book that includes the passage on the Torah as God is indeed extant in many manuscripts and was among the first Kabbalistic writings to be printed. Yet unlike other writings of this Kabbalist, which were translated into Latin and had a great influence on Pico della Mirandola’s Christian Kabbalah, it was not translated into any European languages, and its striking identification of author and book apparently did not leave any mark on the development of modern hermeneutics. There is, however, one exception, and it is a major one.
Recanati’s passage discussed above has been mentioned in a major study by Gershom Scholem dealing with the concept of the Torah in Kabbalah, originally delivered in German as a lecture at the Eranos Conference at Ascona in 1954. It was printed concomitantly in English and French translations in the UNESCO journal for the humanities, Diogenes (Diogène). For our purposes the French translation (1955–1956), made by a very distinguished scholar of Judaica in Paris, Professor Georges Vajda, is the salient one.51 in Vajda’s translation the passage reads: “Car la Torah n’est pas en dehors de Lui, pas plus qu’il n’est Lui-même en dehors de la Torah.”52 This is a faithful translation without being particularly literal. Nonetheless, the Hebrew original has nothing like “il n’est Lui-même en dehors de la Torah” because the term Torah in this phrase is an explication of a demonstrative Hebrew pronoun, mimmenah. In order to better understand the text, the demonstrative pronoun has been fleshed out and translated as if the Hebrew were “hutz me-ha-Torah.” The difference is a matter of style, not content, but it nevertheless may show how the French phrase emerged. The fact that this statement about the identity between the Torah and God was available in French in 1957 may account for the emergence of one of the most postmodern statements in literary criticism: “There is nothing outside the text.” Derrida could have had easy access to the French translation and could have absorbed it for his purposes, as he did in the context of another important statement by another Kabbalist.53 In lieu of Recanati’s “there is nothing outside her,” namely outside the Torah, Derrida pronounced that “there is nothing outside the text,” “il n’y a rien hors de texte” or, according to another version, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”54 Thus, he substituted the term and concept of Torah with that of text. Derrida’s De grammatologie was first printed in 1967, ten years after the publication of the French translation of Scholem’s article. The source of Recanati’s phrase “there is nothing outside” used in a theosophical sense, namely that there is nothing outside God, is found already in the thought of R. Azriel of Gerona, who deeply influenced Recanati’s theosophy.55 However, while the Catalan Kabbalist was mainly concerned with a view of the divine will, the Italian one, though influenced by Castilian Kabbalah, expanded the pantheistic view to God Himself. In Recanati’s writings, unlike those of R. Azriel, the concept of the divine will does not play an important role.
Interestingly enough, a contemporary of Recanati, the Provençal philosopher R. Levi ben Gershom, known as Ralbag or Gersonides, advanced a similar perception of the Torah: “Behold, the book that God wrote is the existence in its entirety, that is caused from Him … Existence is compared to a book because just as a book points to the ideality from which it was, in the same manner the sensible world points to the law of the intelligible universe, which is [the ideality of] God, from which the sensible world is.”56 Indeed, the philosopher refers to the all-comprehensive book as a parable for the divine creation; it seems quite plausible that it is not the dense textuality of the book which matters, but the fact that the divine ideal concept was materialized in creation, just as happens in the case of the author of a book. Unlike Recanati and his Kabbalistic sources, which refer explicitly to the identity between God and the Torah, here it is the created reality that is the divine book. Here the book is a simile for the whole reality, but it does not “absorb” God, as I attempted to show in other cases of Recanati’s thought analyzed in Chapter 2. In other words, Gersonides’ passage, which is reminiscent of ben Sheshet’s ideas discussed above, is essentially logocentric. The text stands for a metaphysical or theosophical structure, defined by reverberations of the Platonic and Neoplatonic realm of ideas as understood in medieval Neoaristote-lianism, and the qualities of text qua text, its special texture (as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) are conspicuously absent.
Let me indulge for a moment in a comparison of Recanati’s view with that of Derrida. For the Kabbalist, the book becomes more and more important, to the point where, in Recanati’s most extreme formulation, it is conceived of as comprising God in itself. The book is conferred an extreme meaning, the all-comprehensive infinity of the divine nature, and it becomes the locus of all the sciences. I hope I do not exaggerate by assuming that despite the negation implied in the phrase “there is nothing,” a quite positive meaning is ensured by the presence of the divine. For Derrida, however, God and all forms of metaphysical presence have been obliterated. His negative formulation, “il n’y a rien,” seems to be a silent critique of the Kabbalistic insertion of God or metaphysics within the realm of the text. Yet despite the attempt to distance himself from the Kabbalistic formula and its metaphysical implications, and to allow the text a free and independent role void of any metaphysical presence, Derrida did not totally emancipate himself from the implications of the medieval source he adopted and adapted. After all, the fact is that the book remained the main metaphor for reality, and it survived even Derrida’s attempt to get rid of God. I used the word attempt because my modest reading of Derrida has taught me that he conceives of the text as so pregnant with infinite meanings that his system is, after all, another reading, slightly secularized, of the formula of the Kabbalist: the canonical text is God—not a transcendental entity emanating meaning into a lower text, but an immanent divinity that ensures the infinity of meanings within the human text. The conservative medieval Kabbalist R. Menahem Recanati and the postmodern de-constructionist Jacques Derrida agree on one major point: the absolute centrality of the book. For the former, the book of the Torah is the transparent prism in which the infinite God is seen; for the latter, the text is the prism within which it is possible to discover an infinity of meanings. From Recanati to Derrida the nature of the infinity changed, but not the absolute statement regarding the all-inclusiveness of the text.
As to the relationship between author and book, in Derrida’s formula the author has lost the battle with the book; he has been completely excluded. Or, to formulate it differently, the Kabbalistic fusion of the author with his book prepared the ground for the dissipation of the author within his text in the next stage, in Derrida’s deconstruction, although the dissipating author is bringing within the text his most important attribute: infinity. The dissolution of the author within the text opened more room for the reader and his activity in shaping the content of the text he reads. The less distinct the persona of the author is, the more diffuse the meaning of the book will be. In addition, with the identification of text and author, the infinity acquired by the text left plenty of room for an attitude that I have proposed to call “innovative Kabbalah,”57 which assumes that provided the presence of the infinite author in the text, it is possible to extract from it an infinity of meanings, an assumption that creates a strong reader. The assumption of an infinite God reduces the distinct characteristics of His persona as well as the distinctness of His messages, leaving the reader with the task of redefining, time and again, the content of the book as he reads it. It is not the eclipse of the author that opened the door for a creative hermeneutics in Kabbalah but, on the contrary, the assumption of his indelible omnipresence within the text that creates a process of omnisemiosis. While modern hermeneutics, especially French, takes as a defining characteristic of textuality the silence of the author after the completion of his work and regards it as decisive for the act of interpretation, some Kabbalists would opt for the possibility of a richness of interpretation as the effect of a pressing, though diffuse, presence.
To formulate this hermeneutical observation in terms closer to a sociology of knowledge, the absence of the authoritative author was necessary for a secular theory of reading in order to confer on the book the possibility of omnisemiosis. The less authoritative the author is, the greater the authority of the reader or the listener will be. In other words, the secular stand moved from an aristocratic and hierarchical attitude found in the religious views described above toward a more democratic one. By showing the development that preceded, and in my opinion also inspired, Derrida’s postmodern vision of the centrality of the text and the reader at the expense of the author, I have attempted to insert it within a larger scheme of theories of text found in European culture and thus to attenuate its novelty. Indeed, if the above remarks have been persuasive, the Kabbalistic theories about the text should be given a certain place in the emergence of Derrida’s view of the text, alongside those of Freud and Heidegger. This claim may be construed in Derridean terms as part of a larger project to allow a greater role to forms of knowledge that, though formulated and transmitted in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, have been neglected or repressed by the historiography of European culture. Is it reasonable to ignore precisely those forms of speculation about the text that were more consonant with the postmodern form? Is the linguistic turn in postmodern thought to be understood solely in terms immanent to the Enlightenment, to Christian visions of the text, or to modern secular developments? Is the postmodern speculation under scrutiny here solely the culmination of processes that immediately preceded it, or may we assume that a more “chaotic” history, what I propose to call a panoramic approach to European culture,58 should take into serious consideration ideas expressed by minorities like the Kabbalists, whose theories, repressed by modernism, found their way to the forefront when the more rationalistic mold of this thought began to crumble? If this more comprehensive approach is adopted by a modern historiography, the need to resort to historical appropriations of Kabbalah, or at least to phenomenological comparisons, will become more conspicuous. Postmodernism is not only a culmination of processes that immediately preceded it and are discernible in modern times, but also the move to the center of some much older forms of intellectual concerns characteristic of other periods in European history.
To put it in other terms, my reading of the history of the perception of the text as culminating in Derrida’s deconstruction makes the Derridian contribution part of an ongoing and thus still-incomplete process of secularization, one that did not attain its most extreme object, as it still believes not only in meaning but in a multiplicity, if not an infinity, of meanings. Postmodern views attribute the source, however, not to a strong monolithic author who possesses an infinite mind but to the infinity of readers as a corporate community of individuals that succeed one another. The infinity of meanings of a text now unfolds in history, as Gadamer put it explicitly and as Derrida would agree in principle.
Modern deconstruction has turned its attention to the nature of the text as disassociated from its author but strongly dependent on the reader. Following the cultural crises in the elites involved in the Nietzschean and Freudian revolutions, the instability of meaning has become a crucial issue that betrays not only the fluid semantics of the interpreted texts and the eclipse of the author but also the flexible attitudes of the readers. A destabilization of classical philology’s certainty of the possibility to ascertain the authorial intention or the idealism of meaning facilitated the emergence of more subtle, intricate, sometimes even oversophisticated discourses on the possibilities implied in the earlier discourses. This postmodern move toward the disclosure of the discrepancy between the poverty of the author and the richness of language is quintessential for and inherent in the secularization of the attitude toward literature that constitutes the reading in the non-presence of the author. The unstructured elements of language, which are enchained by creative literary processes, never submit to the author but transcend his intentions by displaying a much greater spectrum of meanings than presumably he intended. 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 assumes 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. The interpreter completes the meaning by bringing his own riches to the interpreted text.
The secular attitude toward texts is a fundamentally democratic discourse. Sacred texts almost always imply strong authors. The concept of God or His prophets, or at least the authority of the ancient sages, supplies an authorship that provides much firmer bases for the belief that the canonical texts themselves represent higher forms of intelligence, if not absolute wisdom. It is this faith in the distinct superiority of the author, or even in that of ancient authors, over the modern reader (a reverberation of a medieval hierarchical structure of the universe, society, and intellects) that 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 large community of readers, will ever be able to exhaust all the intentions implied in the “divine” texts. Thus, it is not only the awareness of the riches of language, of its fluidity and ambiguities, as Derrida assumes, that serves as the ground for ongoing cognitive and interpretive projects, but an assumption of the existence and pertinence of supernal, even infinite forms of intelligence that are in their original very close to Greek and medieval systems; they are quintessential logocentric entities but were interpreted by ecstatic Kabbalah linguistically as being sources of revelations that take linguistic forms. It is not in history or society but in the atemporal upper reservoirs of knowledge that a religious reader will found “his” innovative interpretations of a sacred text. Thus, it is a radical trust in the text, or more precisely in the plenitude or even semantic abundance of its linguistic components, rather than a basic mistrust in its author as the generator of the text, that characterizes many Kabbalistic views. This belief in the existence, omnipresence, and availability of the transcendent reservoirs of meaning, the supernal agent intellect which pulsates intellectual contents into the world that may be captured by well-prepared human intellects, that creates a logocentric way of thinking. Thus, the ecstatic Kabbalah can be defined as a vertical striving toward intellectual and mystical experiences interconnected with forms of eccentric exegesis.
The horizontal intertextuality characteristic of recent secular approaches has replaced the vertical interchange between reader and the subject of his belief or the reservoir of interpretations on high. A modern reader, too, sometimes reads in order to express himself. A religious one, by contrast, is more likely to read in order to be impressed. The former reading is analytical, disintegrative; it subverts much more than integrates. It allows readers to partake of the creative process during the reading process, and the different receptions atomize the world of the text by the intrusion of the multiple worlds of the readers. Its agon is provoked by the self-imposition of historical relations as generative factors. The gist of most cases of religious reading, on the other hand, is more synthetic. It reflects the search for a higher order, what Derrida would call a presence, to be internalized, imitated, or at least venerated. The reading process and synchronized rituals unify the individuals because of their common belief in an authoritative author, whose noesis is a message to be internalized. The very fact that in a religious society so many readers were perusing the very same book also contributed to the unifying nature of religious reading.
Let me point out, at the end of this short comparison between medievals and postmoderns, the more optimistic mode that transpires from the Kabbalistic attitudes toward the text. By assuming that the Torah comprises everything, the sacred text fulfilled the role of allowing religious readers, when they were so inclined, to adapt themselves to new intellectual developments and encounters. For them the text was not a prison that confines the reader, as Derrida would put it, but an opportunity for discovering more and more layers of divinity and, sometimes, reality. Indeed, as we shall see, according to the Jewish mystics it could even be a means of maintaining both God and reality.
One of the most important differences between the postmodern view of the text as a crucial metaphor and the Kabbalists’ concept is the assumption that the canonical text not only constitutes reality but also maintains it. This type of text not only is a static paradigm, in the Platonic sense of an immutable supreme model, but continues to inform and sustain the entities created according to the inner structure of the Torah. More than the cosmogonic aspect of the text, the Kabbalists were concerned with the implications of such a stand as dealing with the post-creational process. In other words, the Kabbalists and the postmodern linguistic turn to some extent share the view that language, and the metaphor of the book, may account for the structure of reality. (The Kabbalists, however, unlike the postmoderns, claim that language not only noetically constitutes the world but also created it. This minimal agreement disappears where the more operational aspect of the book, namely its maintaining quality, is concerned.) Both use metaphor to explain a certain approach to reality, but they depart drastically when the possibility of affecting reality is addressed. I shall examine some instances where the book is conceived of as sustaining the world, in a non-Kabbalistic early-thirteenth-century text, in the Kabbalah of the renowned early-eighteenth-century author R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, and in some views found in early modern Hasidism. Common to all these texts, and to many others that I cannot address here, is the pursuit of a validation of the book, of its study, and of the performance of the precepts taught in it. An exhaustive analysis of these vast and variegated materials is beyond the scope of this chapter, but several passages are adduced here to demonstrate that these texts regard the canonical book not only as a particularistic revelation but also as one having cosmic and ontological dimensions.
An anonymous and neglected commentary on the divine chariot, described in the first chapter of Ezekiel, is extant in two manuscripts.59 It runs as follows:
The pillar that sustains the world is called Tzaddiq,60 and He sustains it by His right hand, as it is written, “The Righteous is the foundation of the world.”61 Ve-’ay’al in gematria is ha-gadol, because He is the great God. Shemo in gematria is va-sefer, “and the book,” because by virtue of the book which is on high the world stands, and it is written, “He carves62 his firmament63 on water,”64 ha-meqareh in gematria [amounts to] sefer gavoah [supernal book].65
This rather hermetic text requires some explanation. The Righteous mentioned here is none other than God, who is described as supporting the universe with his right hand. The right arm of God is mentioned explicitly in the phrase that immediately precedes this passage. The rest of the commentary relies on gematria, the assignment of numerical values to Hebrew letters, to establish affinities between significant words. One of God’s cognomens, ve-’ay’al, whose origin is obscure, is thereby understood as tantamount to the Hebrew term for “the great,” ha-gadol. Similarly shemo, literally “His name,” is found to be tantamount to va-sefer, “and the book,” as both phrases have the value 346. The affinity between the book and the divine name may point to a more precise relation between the Torah and the divine name, known from two texts written by Geronese Kabbalists, contemporaries of the anonymous author.66 The world therefore “stands,” or according to another plausible translation “exists,”67 because of the book or the divine name. The author adduces as a proof text a verse from Psalm 104, which is interpreted as pointing to the book, a concept totally absent in the biblical verse. It is nevertheless projected there by a numerical calculation, which substitutes for the ha-meqareh, God as “the carver” of the firmament, the numerically equivalent phrase sefer gavoah, “supernal book,” as both expressions amount to 350.
Thus, a supernal book identical to or at least closely related to the divine name is found on high, apparently as part of the divine creational process—Psalm 104 is a paramount creational text—but it also sustains the world. It should be mentioned that the verse from the psalm probably served as the trigger for the addition of the image of the book as the opening of a firmament, as a scroll is referred to in the Bible68 and as is mentioned explicitly by this author at the very beginning of his own book.69
In fact, we should read the two parts of the quote—the first representing God as the Righteous who sustains the world and the second as the name and the book—as sustaining the universe in parallel. They not only follow each other but convey the same general idea. If this conjecture is correct, then the book is more closely related to God than to His name. God, His name, and the book all sustain the world. Indeed, the anonymous commentator was inclined to transform, by means of gematria, a variety of terms that prima facie have nothing to do with God into divine names.70 The term “supernal book” thus becomes just one of many instances exemplifying the propensity to assign to God nouns that in the more common discourse are not related to Him.
In Theses on Feuerbach Marx and Engels described the difference between their approach and that of the philosophers as follows: “Up until now philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point now is to change it.” This difference is parallel to that between the interpretations offered by medieval Jewish philosophers and some Kabbalistic schools, which can be described as theosophical-theurgical. The former were interested in understanding the structure of the universe as a religious duty, resorting also to the canonical texts as a source of inspiration. Many Kabbalists, however, had different agendas, which can be described as ergetic. One of the most ergetic explanations offered by Kabbalists for the study of the Torah is that Torah study has an influence on the divine realm, especially the relations between the divine attributes. This is already the case in Sefer ha-Bahir, where the two lower sefirot, Tiferet and Malkhut, which respectively represent the written and oral Torah, are described as united by the human act of study, and the number of examples to this effect is huge.71
Another important effect of the study of the Torah is the ascending human power emerging from the act of study, which affects the supernal potencies, as we learn in numerous Kabbalistic sources. Let me adduce one passage from Cor-dovero exemplifying the theurgical effect: “When [people of] Israel study the Torah here below they72 come together in order to cleave to the secret of the innovated spirituality of the Torah73 that ascends from the vapor of the mouth of man to the supernal worlds in order to link and unite them … like the joy of the bride and bridegroom who are united because of the secrets of the Torah, and they enjoy the supernal union … and this is certainly the account of Merkavah, that the [sefirot] of Tiferet and Malkhut are united together.”74 As in several other cases in theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah, the account of Merkavah is understood in terms of the union between the two lower sefirot. This union is achieved by the ascent of a spiritual force, created by the act of intense study, which changes the relationship between the divine powers. This view constitutes a version of the more widespread concept of the ascent of prayer on high and its impact there, and sometimes it takes the form of an inverse chain of being.75 The theurgical aspect of the Torah and Torah study became one of the leitmotifs of Kabbalah, but there is no way to exhaust such a huge topic. The few examples adduced above should be supplemented by numerous other Kabbalistic discussions, medieval and modern, culminating in R. Hayyim of Volozhin’s Nefesh ha-Hayyim, which was discussed in detail by Charles Mopsik in his Les grands textes.
Eighteenth-century Hasidic literature was full of linguistic speculation. Especially conspicuous is a concept that I have proposed to call “linguistic immanence,” which portrays the divine presence in the world not only in terms of ontological emanation but also as the immanence of the divine language within all creatures, an immanence that ensures their persistence. Already the Besht, founder of what will become a movement, is quoted to this effect. A student of one of his main disciples, R. Shne’or Zalman of Liady, himself founder of an important Hasidic school, wrote in his Sha’ar ha-Yihud ve-ha-’Emunah in the name of the Besht76 that letters and words that were creative of a certain entity (there the firmament)
“stand upright forever within the firmament of the heaven”77 and are clothed within all the firmaments forever, in order to enliven them … because should the letters disappear for a second, God forfend, and return to their source, [then] all the heavens would become nought and nil indeed, and become as if they had never existed at all … And this is also [the case for] all the creatures that are in all the worlds, higher and lower, even this corporeal earth, and even the aspect of mineral, would the letters of the ten logoi78 disappear from it [the earth] for a second, God forfend, by means of which the earth was created … and the combination of letters that form the name ’even [stone] is the vitality of the stone, and this is the case of all the creatures in the world, their names in the Holy language are the letters of the speech that are emanated from one gradation, which corresponds to stages of emanations, to another, from the ten logoi in the Torah, by their substitutions and permutations of letters according to the 231 gates,79 until they arrive and are clothed within that creature.80
Significant parts of the passage already occur, anonymously, in a collection of doctrines of R. Shne’ or Zalman’s master, R. Dov Baer of Mezeritch, known as the Great Maggid,81 although other parts are quite reminiscent of a passage quoted in a book by a younger contemporary of R. Shne’or Zalman, R. Hayyim Tirer of Chernovitz. Since the two masters were contemporaries and the latter does not mention the former, I assume that they drew from a common source that mentioned the name of the Besht. R. Shne’or Zalman’s widely read text is important because it shows once again, and in a version somewhat different from that preserved by R. Hayyim Tirer, that the immanentist linguistics was attributed to the very founder of Hasidism. The Besht’s view assumes that everything created by the ten creative logoi is maintained by the letters of the words that were pronounced in illud tempus and preserved in the first chapter of Genesis. However, all the other creatures, whose names were not mentioned there, like the stone, can subsist only by different derivations from the letters that constitute the ten logoi. Indeed, in the middle of the above passage, in a phrase we skipped earlier, we read:
The earth was created during the six days of creation, it may return to absolute nothingness and nil, like before the six days of creation, and this is what the Ari [Isaac Luria], blessed be his memory, has said, that even in the mineral, like the stone and dust and water, there is an aspect of soul and spiritual vitality, namely an aspect of the clothing of the letters of the speech of the ten logoi, which are vitalizing and generate the mineral, such as it may exist, out of the nothingness and the nil of the preheptameronic situation, even if the name “stone” was not mentioned during the six days of creation, nevertheless vitality is drawn to the stone by the combinations of letters and the change of their order.82
What seems to me of special importance for the history of Hasidism is the paramount emphasis on a linguistic framework for the cosmology, not only as contributing to theological speculation but also as informing the mystical and magical acts of the founder of this movement and his most influential followers. More than any previous Jewish mystics, they seem to have construed a metaphysics of language, more precisely of the ten creative logoi, which enabled them to act and explain their actions as a skillful activation of language. Also interesting for the phenomenology of Hasidic mysticism is the interpretation of the vitalist stand of Luria, who assumes, following some earlier trends in Kabbalah,83 the existence of soul and vitality even within the minerals, in terms of linguistic immanence. The transition from Luria’s view to the Hasidic master’s is indicated by the word de-hayyinu, translated above as “namely.” What is important to note is the attempt to derive the existence of entities not even mentioned in the creation story by assuming that their name emerges from one of the divine logoi by means of transforming the order of the letters. This transformative process is one of the main practices in Hasidism, and I shall elaborate on it in Chapter 12.
Let me introduce now a quote from R. Hayyim Tirer of Chernovitz, one of the most learned among the third generation of Hasidic authors:
On each and every letter of our holy Torah thousands and thousands, in fact infinite worlds depend,84 and their existence, vitality, and maintenance depend on the existence of the people of Israel, who sustain this [particular] letter in the Torah, this being the reason for [its] existence. And it is known what the Besht, his merits should safeguard us, said about the verse85 “His Word stands upright forever within the firmament of the heaven” … and the Torah letters by means of which He has created His world … by these very letters the firmament has been generated, and until now these letters are the vitality and existence of the heavens and of the heavens of heavens … And if someone were to imagine the absence of the influx of the vitality of the letters for one moment, all the firmament would return to nothingness and nil.86
The letters that compose the creational discourse are, therefore, not only mediators of primordial events, components of myths describing the divine as an actor in the cosmological drama. The words that are included in Genesis are the eidos of the creatures, their essence and a form of divine presence. The created cosmos is dependent on the language as inscribed in the canonical book, which now not only is the blueprint of creation but also continues to be part of the continuous subsistence of the individual creatures. This is not, however, a static presence but one that depends on the worship of the people of Israel, who indeed are presented here as the people of the book—not a book that is imposed on them and venerated in servitude but one whose components are sustained by their acts. No doubt this is a fine example of the more particularistic vision of the Torah, which is described at the same time as a cosmic book; but now this book is coauthored by a particular nation, which saw itself as responsible for the religious and cosmic qualities inherent in the book.
What I find especially fascinating in this passage is the “absorptive” description of the individual letters of the Torah: on each of them infinite worlds depend. Thus, following earlier Hasidic views, R. Hayyim Tirer emphasizes the comprehensiveness of the linguistic units as organized in the canon over the cosmic reality. Long after the emergence of the concept of the infinities of worlds in the Renaissance, each fragment of the canonical text was conceived of as superior to the cosmic realms. For the time being, the last quote represents the apotheosis of the Torah from the point of view of the absorption of the cosmos within the all-encompassing text.
The above discussions were formulated superbly by Edmond Jabes, who wrote that “if God is, it is because He is in the book. If the sages, the saints … man and insects exist, it is because their names are found in the book. The world exists because the book exists, because existence is growing with its name.”87 It would be hard to find a more adequate expression of the world- and God-absorbing understanding of the book.
The propensity for identifying the book with the author, as described above in so many cases, should also be addressed from a more general point of view concerned more with the history of religion than with hermeneutics. There appear to be three stages in the development of the relation between author and book: in the biblical period, the divine author is mainly a speaker, and his being and activity transcend the importance of the message. In the rabbinic period, the canonical book reached a status that may transcend even the authority of the supreme author, though in some circles (those of the Heikhalot) the two factors are imagined not only as intertwined but also as overlapping. In the third phase, the mystical one, the two factors are even more closely linked, the mystic having not only identified them but presumably also experienced them as being together, as part of the process of study and ritualistic reading of the Torah. To a certain extent, the author now becomes more important than his book, despite the fact that the two are often deeply interconnected.
I have formulated the development of the relation between author and text in terms reminiscent of Gershom Scholem’s famous proposal to distinguish three phases in the development of religion: the animistic phase, where there was no clear distinction between the divine and nature, and the divine could be experienced directly; the institutional phase, constituted by an abyss created between man and God and filled by an institutionalized structure, and the mystical phase, in which the mystic bridges the gap by his search for a more direct contact with the divine.88 According to such a view, any religion that grows enough will eventually pass through the first two phases and reach the final, mystical phase. Nevertheless, Scholem did not offer even one concrete example that would explain in detail the nature of the premystical phases in Judaism. From perusing his treatment, one cannot be sure what historical period in Judaism, or what type of literature, is covered by the animistic or the institutional phase. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that the mystical element, occurring after the opening of the gap between God and man, is late. It attempts to overcome the institutionalized apparatus that appeared in the vacuum created by the withdrawal or “departure” of God. In the threefold scheme I have presented in this chapter, the book may play the role that the institution played in Scholem’s scheme; the canonical book also mediates, and in the mystical phase is absorbed within, the divine. So far the two threefold schemes coincide. But unlike Scholem’s scheme, which does not address the historical question as to precisely how and under what circumstances the second phase emerges from the first, nor how the third “emancipates” itself from the second, the above suggestion proposes to see the emergence of the second phase not as a “natural” development but as much more connected to a historical accident. If the Israelite temple was conceived of as ensuring the divine presence here below, its destruction was understood as a painful rupture between the mundane and the divine plane or a departure of the divine from the lower world. The book itself was, however, only rarely taken to be a final substitution for a destroyed temple and its sacrificial role89 but rather was viewed as a much more democratic form of ritual different from the more restricted one, the sacrifices in the Temple. The centrality of the book in rabbinism and other forms of Judaism is, in my opinion, not merely an antidote or a substitute for the Temple, an escapist enterprise undertaken by an elite that has lost its ritualistic center or the geographical terrain, a manner of alleviating a trauma, but a novel religious strategy promoted by another type of elite, one compounded of rabbis and scribes, different from the priestly one, which was connected to the Temple. This is not simply an immanent evolution but a dramatic change that was facilitated, though not created, by a decisive blow to the topocentric religion inflicted from outside, the supremacy of one party, the Pharisees, over the more priestly elite.
Furthermore, the emergence of many of the medieval formulations concerning the nature of the book should not be understood simply as a result of a natural development; rather, they are due to the influence of Greek thought, especially Neoplatonism, as we have seen. Again, this is not necessarily the result solely of a systemic development within a certain religion. According to Isaac Baer and Harold Bloom, the move from the Bible to the rabbinic emphasis on the importance of learning is related to Platonic influence.90
Indeed, it will suffice to see the relatively more marginal role of the book in early Christianity, in the generations contemporary to the early rabbinic masters, in order to understand that biblical Judaism could evolve in more than one direction, the centrality of the book being more a conscious choice than anything like a natural development. The identification of the word with flesh and the placing at the heart of religion the vicissitudes of the fate of a semidivine figure, conceived of as the savior, is an adequate comparison for the possibilities open in Jewish circles around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. Indeed, as scholars have already duly emphasized, in the Greek Bible the Christ has been identified with the nomos,91 and thus the literal aspects of the book have been dramatically reduced in favor of an interpretation focusing on the details of the Christ’s via passionis. It is less a matter of carefully reading the original Hebrew text and commenting on its details that entertained early Christian thinkers than one of building an elaborate theology around the life and nature of the Savior, to which the spiritual life of the Christian mystics has been devoted. The emphasis on faith and heresy, more than study of canonical texts and ritual deeds, constitutes the paramount redemptive acts. The more general idea of Torah as pointing to in-struction92 took the form of a scroll or book that exhausts the divine will according to rabbinic Judaism, or the form of a nomos empsychos, found already in Philo and apparently reverberating in early Christianity.93 Views attributing an anthropomorphic structure to the Torah may, however, be found in ancient Judaism, and they become much more evident in theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah.94 Yet the elements emphasized by the mystical understanding of the Torah were either its perfection and the identification with its perfect nature or the need to perfect it by human activity. To a great extent Jewish mysticism was much more fascinated by via perfectionis than it was by via passionis.95