The absorbing quality of the Torah, a trait related to many of the issues we have addressed so far in this book, assumes that the nontextual reality either is a small part of the broader textual reality or is sustained by it. This nontextual reality was conceived of as consonant with the textual one and as reflecting changes taking place within it. The leading assumption has been, nevertheless, that the textuality of existence is informed by the temporal and hierarchical priority of the concept of the Torah, whose structure and content reality is believed to imitate. In one way or another creatures were regarded as being accommodated to the structure of the primordial Torah, not vice versa. This type of relationship was inspired by a rather static vision of the Torah. The eternity and immutability of the Torah was considered to be one of the principles of Judaism, especially since its formulation in the sixth and seventh tenets of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. One of the main elements of this principle is the concept, established long before Maimoni-des, of inviolability, which means that no single letter should be added to or subtracted from the sacred scriptures.1 Kabbalists and Hasidic thinkers also adopted this view, as a plethora of examples corroborate. So, for instance, we learn from an interesting formulation of R. Moses Hayyim Ephrayyim of Sudylkov that “the Torah is eternal, and it is found in every man and in every time.”2
This traditional and highly influential view notwithstanding, various Kabbalistic schools envisioned different sorts of textual alterations and mutations that the Torah has undergone or will undergo in the future. In rabbinic thought it is possible to discover some forms of mutability that did not move to the center of medieval speculations. So, for example, there is an assumption that the very characters in which the Bible is written, the so-called old Hebrew alphabet, were changed in the time of Ezra the scribe into the Assyrian alphabet. Moreover, the sins of Israel, as distinguished sharply from Adam’s sin, were believed to have affected the structure of the Torah. The nature of the alterations that will be addressed below, however, reflects much of the deep structure of the system within which they were formulated. The very possibility of substantial changes in crucial aspects of reality should be admitted in order to allow changes in the Torah. I would say that in more static speculative systems like Maimonides’ thought, which assumes a perfect deity who does not change, it is hard to allow meaningful changes in the structure of the Torah.
The various expressions of Torah mutability in Jewish mysticism fall into four main categories: the astrological, the eschatological, the Neoplatonic, and the combinatory. In the scholarly discussions of topics related to the mutability of the Torah, those views have been described without a clear distinction between the different models,3 and I believe that the entire issue deserves a much more thorough discussion. I shall devote most of the discussions below to the last of the four categories. First, however, let me succinctly introduce the other three and offer some examples that will help to highlight the divergences between them.
The most famous type of Torah mutability has been addressed several times in modern scholarship and is related to certain forms of the theory of shemittot (sabbatical years) and yovelim (jubilee years), namely cosmic cycles of seven thousand and forty-nine thousand years, respectively. I shall designate this attitude as astrological, because the structure of this Kabbalistic thought is deeply indebted to astrological concepts of order. According to some statements of Kabbalists as early as the end of the thirteenth century, but more conspicuously in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, each shemittah is presided over by a sefirah of the seven lower sefirot; the nature of the creation and the processes that take place during this period are affected by the special qualities of that sefirah. This stand implies the specific nature of the Torah, whose decrees change in accordance with the corresponding sefirah. In those cases in Kabbalistic literature, especially the mid-fourteenth-century Byzantine Sefer ha-Temunah, where the governing sefirah is Gevurah, the attribute of stern judgment, the laws of the Torah are considered to be very harsh. The assumption is that in the future eon the text of the Torah will change and adopt more lenient laws.4 According to this particular version of the cosmic cycles, the present sefirah is the worst, as are, therefore, the laws of the Torah. The antinomian leanings of this book were duly detected by Gershom Scholem, and they are the result of the impact of astrological views, quite widespread in the Middle Ages, that envisioned changes in religion as due to astrological changes taking place cyclically in the celestial world. The changing of the structure of the Torah relevant during a certain eon reflects, therefore, a supernal shift that does not constitute a progressive development but varies with the specific natures of the various sefirot.
What seems to me to be characteristic of this model is that, eschatological as this view is, the envisioned change does not consist in revelation of the secrets of the Torah but in the successive emergence of other texts, which have their own secrets. Moreover, the basic eschatological stand of this model can be described as macrochronic, as it deals with cosmic units of time, beyond the scope of individuals and even nations.5 Radical as this theory may appear, it influenced a series of influential Kabbalists, like the anonymous author of Sefer ha-Peliy’ah and R. David ibn Avi Zimra, whose Magen David is permeated by discussions on the mutability of the Torah.
The second category of Torah mutability may be roughly described as eschatological: changes occurring at the end of time will require the revelation of a new Torah, which differs from the old one and is thought to be much more sublime. Here, the change takes place within history, unrelated to cosmic upheavals, or in what I propose to call mesochronos.6 This view is preceded by a famous division of mesochronos into three equal periods, each consisting of two millennia: one of chaos, the other of Torah, and the third of Messiah, a view found in both Jewish7 and Christian sources.8
This view reverberated in the theosophical Kabbalah, especially in the Zoharic one, where there are two different theories. The first occurs in the main body of the Zoharic literature, particularly in those forms that belong to the ’Iddra’, the most secret of the Zoharic treatises. It deals with the aspect of the Torah that is “the soul of souls,” Torah of the Ancient of Days, torah de-’attiq yomin, or the Torah of the Occult Primordial Entity, and stands for the Kabbalistic layers of the Torah or for the Torah of the World to Come; or, according to other texts, ’orayyta’ de-’atiqqa’ setima‘, a utopian vision of the Torah that consists in secrets that will be revealed in the messianic eon.9 The second type of eschatological mutability is epitomized by the terms torah de-beriy’ah and torah de-’atzilut, which stand, respectively, for the present Torah, which is the law obeyed by persons described as slaves or servants, and the ideal one, which is pertinent only to the Kabbalistic elite. As they occur for the first time in the later layer of the Zoharic literature, their importance may be related to the acute messianic impulse characteristic of this Zoharic layer.10
Let me adduce one passage dealing with the Torah of Creation, which is important for some of the subsequent discussions. The anonymous author asserts that this kind of Torah “is the garment of the Shekhinah. And if man were not created, the Shekhinah would remain without covering, like the poor. Consequently, whoever sins strips, as it were, the Shekhinah of her garments. And this is man’s punishment. And whoever fulfills the commandments of the Torah clothes, as it were, the Shekhinah in her garments.”11 The Torah of Creation, as explicated in this passage, constitutes a need of the Shekhinah, but it could appear only when man was created. This form of law constitutes the interaction between the divine need and human religious obligations. This is not a divine text but an accommodation to the needs of man and the Shekhinah. What seems me important to point out, however, is that this is not an accommodation to the sinful nature of man, and from this perspective the attitude toward this lower form of Torah is quite positive. Yet according to other discussions in this layer of the Zoharic literature, the Torah of Creation represents an adaptation of the exalted Torah of Emanation and is much more accommodated to human beings’ sinful nature,12 although the precise process of adaptation is not clear. This view was later developed in R. Moses Cordovero’s Kabbalah, as we shall see. It should be mentioned that these two kinds of Torah had a long and influential career in Kabbalistic literature, especially in the Sabbatean one, and the main phases of their development have already been treated by many scholars.13
In this context it should be mentioned that the concept of the Torah of the Messiah, which was regarded as immanently subversive and radical, does not always involve a dramatic change but may serve as a conservative idea. This is the case in the manner in which R. Jacob Emden described one of the functions of the Messiah: “He should illumine the world during the exile by his Torah, so that the world will not perish.”14
The third category, the Neoplatonic one, assumes that the revelation of the Torah is a matter of the descent of a spiritual entity into this corporeal world, a descent that is a materialization and clothing of the inner soul into a body and a garment. Unlike the midrashic view that the Torah is now found solely in the mundane world, some Kabbalistic sources, beginning with the Book of Bahir, refer to a supernal Torah, which is identified with a variety of divine attributes and as such coexists with the Torah as revealed here below.15 The revelation of the inner meaning of the Torah consists, therefore, in the retrieval of the spiritual core by removing the coarse, embodied aspects of the Torah. Either in the present, for the few mystics, or in the eschatological future, for the entire nation of Israel, this removal is considered to be possible and conducive to mystical experiences. I adopted the term Neoplatonic for this category because it is possible to discern the impact of Neoplatonic terminology in many of the Kabbalistic discussions, as the description of the descent of the Torah is imagined as part of the process of emanation, which is characterized precisely by the Neoplatonic process of descent and materialization, the processio, versus the ascent and spiritualization, or re-versio.16 So, for example, we learn from an anonymous Kabbalistic text, apparently composed at the end of the thirteenth century or early in the fourteenth century in Castile, dealing with the “Secret of the Tablets of Law,” that “things are emanated; when they are on high, in the spiritual world, they are spiritual and subtle; when they are in the world emanated from the supernal one, they are more shaped.17 And when they are in the corporeal world, they are corporeal. So the Torah [too] is in all the worlds: when it is in the intermediary world it is more spiritual, and when it is in the separated world it is more spiritual, and so on until the [sefirah of] Hokhmah, which is the cause of the Torah.”18 The ontic descent of things, a version of processio, is complemented by the Torah that is described as ascending to its source in the second sefirah. This description assumes that while the emanational process created this world, it is by means of the Torah that it is possible to achieve the reversio.
It is interesting, though not surprising, that the view of Torah as an entity read or deciphered differently on the different levels of reality found its way into Christian thought. According to Emmanuel Swedenborg,
The whole sacred scripture teaches that there is a God, because in its inmost content there is nothing but God, that is, the divine which proceeds from time; for it was dictated by God, and nothing can go forth from God, but what is Himself, and is divine. The sacred scripture is this in its inmost content. But in its derivatives, which proceed from the inmost content but are on a lower plane, the sacred scripture is accommodated to the perceptions of angels and men. In these also it is divine, but in another form, in which it is called the divine celestial, spiritual, and natural, which is the inmost and is clothed with such things as are accommodated to the perception of angels and men, shines forth like light through crystals, but with variety according to the state of mind which a man has acquired, either from God or from himself.19
It is not unlikely that the similarity between this Christian visionary’s perception of the sacred scripture and the Kabbalistic one is the result of the influence of Jewish texts.20 Those are but few examples, which can easily be multiplied, as to the theory that the Torah had to accommodate itself to the various ontic levels in order to be understood.21
The fourth model, the combinatory type of Torah mutability, contends that the pristine Torah was composed of exactly the same number of letters, arranged in the same sequence as they are in the common biblical text, but their combinations differ from that of the present one. The revealed Torah constitutes a different sequence of the same number of letters, one that reflects the nature and order of the present world, and the assumption is that in the future another order of letters will be achieved reflecting a new type of reality. Though similar to, and sometimes even almost identified with, the Neoplatonic theory of the descent of the Torah, the theory of letter combination as the main explanation for the appearance of the mundane Torah should be understood as basically a linguistic process. Throughout the preceding chapters ample space has been devoted to combination of letters as a method and concept widespread in Kabbalah and Hasidism. Both the technical aspects recurrent in ecstatic Kabbalah, which employed recitations of combinations of letters in order to attain mystical experiences, and the more creational and cosmological aspects prominent in Hasidism conspire to allow a unique role to this method in Jewish mystical thought, one that was not sufficiently acknowledged for the time being.22
Important as the differences between these models are, however, I would like to emphasize that many discussions in the Kabbalistic literature do not reflect adherence to clear-cut categories but combinations between two or more categories. More common is the conjoining of the Neoplatonic and combinatory models of mutability, and many examples will be adduced below. The first two models were combined more often in some Sabbatean circles.23 The eschatological and the combinatory models of accommodation, too, were sometimes combined with each other.24
Kabbalists, however, were more flexible. Let me adduce an interesting passage written by R. Samuel de ’Uzeida, a mid-sixteenth-century Safedian author, where the Torah has not been revealed in its entirety:
The Holy One, blessed be He, did not deliver all the Torah in its entirety, because Moses was not prepared to receive it in its entirety, because it is written,25 “Yet thou hast made him a little lower than ’Elohim,” etc., and this is the reason why it is said that “Moses received,” because [the disclosure] has been in accordance with the recipient in order to let us know that the revelation is according to the preparation and the receptacle that was there, and so it has been received … and it has been said that Moses received the Torah without he’,26 which would mean that he received the Torah in its entirety, but this was not the case … namely that what he received was the Torah but he received only a part of it, not its entirety.27
This passage is an excerpt from a widespread well-known text that has been widely studied for centuries. It is not exceptional but is corroborated by other parallels, including another famous commentary on the treatise ’’Avot, by R. Moses Alsheikh,28 and the Hasidic interpretation of R. Isaac Aizik Yehudah Safrin of Komarno.29 Those passages are but a few examples of the assumption of the existence of the Torah on a higher level, and its substance or content did not transpire in its entirety with the Sinaitic revelation. The basic assumption is that there is an ontological gap between God and His Torah, apparently because of their infinite or perfect nature on the one hand, and the human recipient, exalted as he may be, on the other hand. Complete transmission is impossible because of the limited nature of even perfecti like Moses.
Each of the two different Kabbalistic schools that traveled throughout the history of Kabbalistic literature, the theosophical-theurgical and the ecstatic, addressed one of the main quandaries related to the relationship between the primordial and the revealed Torah. The emergence of detailed theosophies, characteristic of the main strands of Kabbalah, created a certain tension between the evaluation of the mundane entities and their supernal, more spiritual archetypes. Though substantially influenced by Neoplatonism, the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalists were less inclined to a Platonic, paradigmatic, and static worldview but tended to emphasize the importance of human deeds performed here below for the processes taking place in the divine realm, not to speak of the reverence toward the book of the Torah, although it is conspicuously an artifact produced by human copyists. As seen in several cases above, and especially in Appendix 3 below, the supernal existence—in fact, preexistence—of the Torah has received substantial treatment in the Kabbalistic literature, and the underlying question as to whether the belief in the existence of a supernal, primordial, pure Torah detracts any authority from the lower Torah, which was revealed at a specific point in time and is embodied in the material world, remains to be addressed by scholars of religion.30 I would formulate the emergence of an inner tension between a model of thought based on the assumption of a primordial Torah, related to its metaphysical status, and another based on the search for the religious plenitude as connected to the study and performance of imperatives related to the formulation of the Torah as it was revealed here below.31 Kabbalists adopting the strategy of the theosophical-theurgical school were more inclined to describe the descent of the supernal Torah in terms of embodiment and darkening, or of the spiritual being materialized, in a manner that should be classified as Neoplatonic.
Another way of explaining the transition from one level of existence of the Torah to another was to hold that the letters of one Torah had been permuted into a new order, a technique commonly described as tzerufei ‘otiyyot. This view is prevalent in ecstatic Kabbalah and, as we are about to see, had an impact on both Safedian Kabbalah and Hasidism. The theosophical-theurgical theme of the embodiment will be dealt with below only marginally, to the extent that it has been put together with the combinatory theories describing the descent of the Torah. I have described this technique, when used as part of the interpretive process, as deconstructive radicalism,32 but with the descent of the Torah from one plane or another by permutation of its letters it can be called creative radicalism, because the pristine Torah is materialized as part of the creational process. In some cases the descent takes the form of the immersion of the linguistic elements in matter, a theory I refer to as linguistic immanentism.
I would now like to draw attention to a development that culminated in a mid-nineteenth-century version of the Hasidic cosmological vision of combinations of letters of the Torah, one that elaborates on early views attributed to the Besht, to R. Shne’or Zalman of Liady, to R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev, or to R. Hayyim Tirer of Chernovitz, already discussed above.33 R. Israel Friedmann of Ryzhin was reported to have embraced a cosmological view that assumes that each of the worlds is informed by a unique combination of the six hundred thousand letters of the Torah, and a passage on this idea from his writings will serve as our main object of study in this chapter. In order to better evaluate his specific view, however, let us start with some earlier Kabbalistic and Hasidic discussions on the descent of the Torah by embodiment or by letter combinations which indubitably informed his thought. These discussions elaborate on some tendencies that had been emerging in Kabbalistic literature since the late thirteenth century but reached their apex in Cordovero’s writings and those of his followers among the Kabbalists and the Hasidic authors.
Let me distinguish first between two major forms of combinatory accommodation. According to the triangular model, the core of the Torah is the divine name, and the Torah in its entirety is the explication of that name, which involves elaborate ramifications of its meaning. This model is closer to the Neoplatonic type of accommodation. The other model, represented by a double-line theory, assumes that there is no limited core of letters in the Torah but that exactly the same number of letters constitutes the two distinct “lines” of the Torah by allowing various divisions of letters in different words. According to this approach, the Torah in its original form is a continuum of divine words.
In Gikatilla’s Sha’arei ‘Orah an important theory concerning the structure of the linguistic elements of the Torah contends that all ten divine names, which point to the ten sefirot, depend on the divine name, the Tetragrammaton. On each of these ten divine names depend numerous cognomens referring to angelic powers. Each cognomen organizes many other linguistic elements in the Bible, which refer to more mundane affairs.34 This linguistic triangle, with the Tetragrammaton at the top and all the regular words at the bottom, assumes a certain transformation of the fewer and higher elements into lower ones, a process also described by the metaphor of the lower as the garment of the higher. In other words, the semantics of the different parts of the Torah is to be understood as informed by a strictly hierarchical structure, with one word pointing to God as comprising all the other words. The semantic order of the Torah therefore parallels the ontic structure of reality in its entirety. According to Sha’arei ‘Orah, the Torah is a map of signs that represents the whole spectrum of being, but it does so by assuming a web of relations on the linguistic level that reflects the ontological.35 Gikatilla does not, however, go into the details of the processes involved in transforming the higher linguistic elements into lower ones, or what he calls the weaving of the biblical text.36 He offers no specific explanation as to the way in which the divine name is explicated by all the other words, nor how he imagined that it comprises all those words, although it is obvious that he refers to a combinatory technique.37
Gikatilla’s basic assumption is that the texture of the Torah consists quintes-sentially in diverse ramifications of the letters of the Tetragrammaton; the Kabbalist who is able to understand how those ramifications emerged is able to envision the divinity of this sacred text and to cleave to God. The Kabbalistic reading of the text means the ability to use the sefirotic tree as a framework for the retrieval of the way in which the four letters of the divine name inform the ten divine names, and so on. According to Gikatilla’s parable, the king, who stands for the Tetragrammaton, reveals himself to the people in war by donning a heavy garment, but gradually he removes his clothes when closer people are with him, and finally he reveals himself naked to his wife. It is possible to watch the innermost essence of the Torah, an experience that involves reducing the plurality of the diverse words of the Torah to the one original root. Here the linguistic journey from the ordinary words to the Tetragrammaton parallels the ontic reversio of the Neoplatonic thinkers. In late Gikatilla, the Neoplatonic model is associated with a combinatory model, though not one that deals with restructuring the division of the Torah letters in the way we shall see in the texts analyzed in the following paragraphs.
According to a passage from R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, the Torah consists in the text that emerges from the combinations of the letters of the divine name, the Tetragrammaton, which is the symbol of the sefirah of Tiferet, and each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which points to the sefirah of Malkhut. This view, apparently stemming from Abraham Abulafia via Cordovero’s writings, addresses the explication of the divine name which becomes the Torah by resorting to the process of letter combination.38 Indeed, according to another passage, the revelation of the Torah to each of the participants at Mount Sinai took different forms, or facets, which are no more than different “combinations of the secrets of the names.”39 This explanation is also applied to the emergence of the stories found in the Torah.40 Interestingly, Ramhal adopts Abulafia’s technique of combining letters to reach a mystical experience for quite a different purpose: to describe how the Torah emerged from within the divine realm. As we have already seen, this triangular perception of the Torah reverberated in Hasidic texts.41
In addition to the triangular structure of the Torah as evolving from one simple linguistic unit into the full-fledged biblical text, there was another Kabbalistic tradition that conceived the relation between the primordial Torah and the revealed one as two textures constituted from the same number of letters and differing from each other by their various letter combinations. Already found in a premetaphysical manner in Nahmanides’ position regarding the two paths of reading the Torah, as analyzed in Chapter 11, the theory I would like to survey here is adumbrated in various passages from Abraham Abulafia and in a passage from R. Nathan’s Sha’arei Tzedeq. Let me first introduce, however, an important text known to the Ashkenazi Hasidim and to Abulafia. In a late midrash dealing with the creation of the golem, we find the first case of explicit juxtaposition of Sefer Yetzirah and its combinatory practice and the Torah:
By Sefer Yetzirah God created His world … At the beginning, when He created the world alone, and the thought emerged to create the world, He was strengthening the foundations of the earth and it did not subsist until He created the Torah [and] Sefer Yetzirah and He gazed into it and understood its wisdom and He immediately created the world. His eyes were gazing at Sefer Yetzirah and His hands were roaming42 and building within the world … like a man who builds a building and has a book and contemplates it, so did the Holy One, blessed be He, when He created the world. And he finished it43 and put it in the Torah … And when Abraham understood [Sefer Yetzirah] his wisdom was enhanced and he studied the entire Torah. So did the Holy One contemplate Sefer Yetzirah and create the world.44
This passage relates the anomian technique of Sefer Yetzirah to an understanding of the Torah and should be seen as one of the major sources for later developments in this direction. To a great extent, the quintessence of the hermeneutics of ecstatic Kabbalah can be seen as the reading of the Torah in a combinatory manner, part of which was inspired by Sefer Yetzirah. Abulafia recommends, “Read the entire Torah, both forwards and backwards, and spill the blood of the languages. Thus, the knowledge of the Name is above all wisdoms in quality and worth.”45 The phrase “forwards and backwards” points to the movement of a circle on which letters had been inscribed in order to allow their permutation, a view found already in Sefer Yetzirah. Thus, we have here a parallel passage to other discussions of Abulafia’s dealing with the circle of the Torah, galgal ha-torah. About this syntagm we read:
The circle of the Torah, namely the permutation of the twenty-two letters, and their weight, and their metathesis, and their combination according to the two hundred and thirty-one gates … Behold the principle of the reality of up and down, of front and back,46 from which emerge good and delight [on one side], evil and affliction [on the other], whatever you may choose by your permuting of the circle of the letters, and take. Because two pericopes there are in your hand, “life and death I set in front of you, and you should choose life.”47 And this is the secret of [the verse] “the tablets were written on both their sides,”48 namely they are written front and back.49
It is easy to see how the concepts of Sefer Yetzirah concerning combination of letters were mingled with the concept of choice characteristic of the Torah. Here the Torah is less a matter of commandments or a nomian text and much more a technique of combination that raises the possibility of choosing between different types of messages. Elsewhere in the same book the more ecstatic nature of the exegetical technique is explicated: “I know that by necessity you should attain the knowledge of the Name and you will speak with the Agent Intellect and it will speak with you in accordance with your strength.50 First you should operate when under [the impact of] this supernal and divine comprehension, you should begin to permute the Torah.”51,52
It is extremely interesting that R. Nathan’s Sha’arei Tzedeq makes an explicit nexus between the path of the names, which reflects the supernal letters and their metaphysical roots, and the path of the commandments, which reflects the structure of the lower entities. According to this view, the structure of the Torah as transmitted in the common form mirrors the mundane beings and processes, although its text constitutes a reorganization or recombination of the same letters that reflect a supernal order.
I take this distinction to corroborate an interpretation offered by Abulafia in juxtaposing the account of the Chariot, understood as the combination of the divine names, and the account of the Creation, which deals with words that represent transient beings: “You must know that on the one hand the Names, in their form of combination, are likened to the phenomena that subsist and pass away and on the other hand to those that endure. Indeed, those that endure are called the ‘work of the Chariot’ and the others are called the ‘work of the Creation,’ and the secret of this is ‘ivrit.”53 The passage is based on the equivalence of the numerical values of the word ’ivrit, “Hebrew,” and the phrase ma’aseh merkavah, “work of the Chariot,” namely 682.54 This implies that the phenomena that endure do so by means of the holy names, which exist only in the Hebrew language. This assumption transforms Hebrew into the intellectual language, since only that language has the ability to express the intellectual nature of unchanging existence. Hebrew is construed as the metaphysical language, and that is the reason God chose it.
According to a passage written in the circle from which R. Abraham Abulafia emerged, Moses was introduced to the secrets of the “science of the letters,” which point to their supernal sources. This is a supreme form of Kabbalah, and R. Nathan contended that “Moses learned the entire Kabbalah from the alphabets, and his study of wisdom and knowledge and understanding refers to the letters and their vowels. And anyone who will understand and know the power of the letters and vowels and their [visual] forms and the effects of their forms will understand and have knowledge of the Blessed Creator.”55 Thus, it is the profound knowledge of language in its alphabetical order that constitutes a vision of Kabbalah at the beginning of the second half of the thirteenth century. I see no other way to understand this relation of the alphabets to the Torah than by assuming that the letters of those alphabets were combined into verses. To turn to a quote from Sha’arei Tzedeq, Moses then arranged the Torah as a continuum of letters that constitute divine names which reflect “the structure of supernal letters,” and only at the end did Moses divide this continuum into another one, which is designated as the path of the commandments. We may distinguish between four parallel levels of existence connected to the Torah: (i) the supernal roots of letters, or the ontic level, which is close to God; (ii) the discrete letters on high, or the supernal letters; (iii) the Torah as a continuum of divine names; and (iv) the Torah as a textual structure dealing with commandments and sacred history. It is worth mentioning in this context that a contemporary of R. Nathan, and himself an ecstatic Kabbalist, R. Isaac of Acre, is the first to have expounded a fourfold theory of cosmogony, which parallels a fourfold exegesis.56 The author of Sha’arei Tzedeq, less inclined to metaphysical discussions, did not elaborate on his structure of reality, but it is possible that the four states of the existence of letters point to a fourfold cosmogony. It is in the immediate context of the discussion of the path of commandments that we learn that this sequence of letters constitutes the back and the present structure of the Torah, while the path of the names is its front or face structure. The former is described as “very weak and found nowadays in our hands, and we need it and we revolve57 and sometimes we receive [a revelation], sometimes not.”58 This theory is reminiscent of a passage of Abulafia’s adduced earlier in this section.
Elsewhere in the same book we read:
The entire world is governed in accordance with [the laws of] nature, which indicates the attribute of judgment. Thus, the world of Names is suspended and obscured, and its letters and combinations and its virtues are not understood by those who conduct themselves in accordance with the attribute of judgment … and this is the secret [meaning] of the cessation of prophecy in Israel; [for prophecy] inhibits the attribute of judgment. [And this continues] until the one whom God desires arrives, and his power will be great and will be increased by being given their power. And God will reveal His secrets to him … and the natural and philosophical wisdoms will be despised and hidden, for their supernal power will be abolished. And the wisdom of the letters and Names, which now are not understood, will be revealed.59
Kabbalah is thus described as an immersion in the structure of language, as it was before the emergence of the biblical canon. Departing from Nahmanides’ stand and following Abulafia’s view as expressed in his Hayyei ha-’Olam ha-Ba’ and Commentary on the Pentateuch,60 R. Nathan introduced the theory of combinations of letters within a more conservative position, as formulated in Nahmanides, which in fact preceded this Kabbalist, one that deals with another division of the same sequence of letters but not with the combinations of those letters in new structures, as the ecstatic Kabbalists thought.
In sum, the supernal letters, which apparently are understood to be discrete entities, are first combined so as to constitute divine names and only then divided into commandments, a process that should be understood as an accommodation of the Torah letters to mundane affairs. Let me emphasize the specificity of this sort of explanation of the emergence of the revealed Torah from the pristine Torah: in the two cases we may speak about two parallel lines that contain exactly the same number of letters, whose sequence is identical but the separation between units of letters that become words differs. If we take into consideration that in ancient times the scroll of the Torah was written with consecutive letters not separated into words—a fact that allows modern scholars of the Bible plenty of room for exegetical imagination—the later Torah, as it has come down to us, is based on a separation between the words.61 Thus the ancient manner of writing the text created allowed numerous readings of the same sequence of letters. This transition has been projected onto the more primordial plane by many Kabbalists, as we shall see in more detail below.
Let me adduce now a version of this stand found in one of the most influential writings of Christian Kabbalah: Johann Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabalistica. Although I am not sure that the following passage was influenced by Abulafia’s writings, I see the Abulafia’s way of thought as the closest parallel to Reuchlin’s view. Concerning the mystical potency of the Torah, which is capable of elevating the human mind to the supernal world, Reuchlin wrote:
At first—the Kabbalists assert—“God wrote his Law onto a fiery globe, applying dark fire to white fire.” As Ramban Gerondi says, “it appears to us through Kabbalah that Scripture came into being in black fire on white fire.” Hence in Deuteronomy 33: “From his right hand is a law of fire for them.” The letters, so they say, were confused and jumbled up at that stage, although studious men could look at them and speculate with careful consideration until, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, they have no difficulty in picking and choosing letters from every place possible after thorough scrutiny, and then collecting and forming them into particular words, to show good for the virtuous and bad for the sinner. So Moses, under God’s instruction, reduced all the letters to order for telling to the people. Everyone then knew what the laws were and could keep them, and the Law was divided up into books and put into the ark in the same form as Moses had received it from the Lord. Moses did not explain to the vulgar the art either of ordering and varying the order of the letters or of sweetly interpreting Sacred Scripture to elevate the mind, even though he had by then received that art from the Divine Majesty.62
According to Reuchlin, the order of the Torah letters was “confusae ac inglomer-ate.” I wonder if behind the Latin words one should perhaps discern a Hebrew source describing the situation of the primordial Torah letters as tohu va-bohu (“unformed and void,” Genesis 1:2). Such a hypothetical source may allow us to draw a parallel between the material creation that started with the confused pre-existent matter arranged as part of the move from chaos to cosmos, on the one hand, and the arrangement of the disordered letters and the emergence of the Torah dealing with ways of religious behavior, on the other. I use the word “disorder” in a relative manner having nothing to do with the sequence of letters as found in the revealed Torah, regardless of whether those letters are divided into words. According to Reuchlin, Moses or the Kabbalist is not dividing the same sequence of letters into words different from the original, but the double-line stand implies that the same letters will occupy different places on the two lines, because the process of selecting letters occurs in different places in the text, a method that can be identified with combination of letters.63 Here the creativity of the interpreter is much greater than it is in those texts adduced earlier from the ecstatic Kabbalists, although the exegetical technique is not essentially different. Reuchlin creates in this passage a certain tension, even an opposition, between the regular, rabbinic students of the Torah and the mystical reading that elevates the mind to the supernal world, in a manner reminiscent of ecstatic Kabbalah. Indeed, the very description of Kabbalah as the technique or rearranging the letters of the Torah, which Reuchlin advances immediately after the above passage, demonstrates his close affinity to Abraham Abulafia’s thought.64 Moreover, as in the ecstatic Kabbalistic school, the process of reading the Torah is informed by a mystical experience, the Holy Spirit guiding the exegete.65 The Christian Kabbalist implies, however, that Moses’ technique for composing the Torah is not a lost science but is the very essence of Kabbalah and may be used again to create new forms of ritual instruction. No doubt the fluidity of the primordial text is much greater in Reuchlin’s passage than in any other of the texts I am acquainted with, including the later examples adduced below, and the role of the interpreter becomes much greater. Indeed, it is a strong ergetic drive, inspired by a superior power, that informs the restructuring reading of the Kabbalist.
Let me address the manner in which the superior line is conceived. The Torah letters, if indeed this concept is adequate for this passage at all, are circular, as the word “globe” shows. I am not sure that the original intention of the hypothetical Hebrew source was a globe or a sphere. I suppose that the original word was galgal, which may point to either circle or sphere and which Reuchlin translated, in fact mistranslated, as “globe.” The resort to two colors, or two fires, in order to point to the substratum and the letters may have something to do with the manner in which R. Isaac of Acre envisioned the Torah (see Appendix 2, par. IV). If we assume that the lower line is composed from the scroll of the Torah, we may speak about a theory of two circular lines that parallel each other, although this parallelism does not consist in keeping the same sequences of letters.
The double-line theory is reminiscent of a text written by an influential Kabbalist active at the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth, R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi. In one of the most influential Kabbalistic treatises, a commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, R. Joseph writes that “the circles were void and the letters moved within the letters so that all the languages and speech were combined from them, as well as all the 613 commandments. And this is the Torah that preceded the world [Binah].66 And it is the name of God, because there is no interruption or corporeal combination,67 because all are sacred, and the Tetra-grammaton is within it.”68 R. Joseph deals with the combinations of letters by means of twenty-two concentric circles within which Hebrew alphabets were inscribed;69 their movement creates the combinations of letters, apparently called the corporeal combinations, which produce the ordinary sequence of letters constituting the mundane Torah, which differs from the supernal one, where the letters are found in a continuous manner, as we learn also elsewhere in the same treatise.70 This compact existence of the Torah letters was regarded as forming the name of God. By resorting to this view of the Torah, R. Joseph ignores Nahmanides’ tradition of the Torah as divine names—which, as we have seen, was interpreted by the ecstatic Kabbalists—and accepts instead a position found in the writings of his contemporaries, R. Ezra and Azriel of Gerona, and recurring in the Zohar.71 I assume that the unit of one name has something to do with the mode of writing the letters of the alphabets without interruption. It should be mentioned that the concept of combination of letters as connected to the sefirah of Binah is found in a Kabbalistic Ashkenazi commentary on Sefer ha-Yihud written by an anonymous Kabbalist well acquainted with peculiar Kabbalistic views characteristic of R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi.72
According to a statement found in another of R. Joseph’s writings, “the conjunction between the letters will change in accordance with the deed, thought, and speech of the children of Israel … because all the movement of man and his speech, deeds, and thought are written and done on the supernal letters.”73 This view is not necessarily related to the passage from his Commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, but if such a nexus can be established—and I see that as possible—then a view close to that described above in connection with Sha’arei Tzedeq can be plausibly reconstructed. On high are Torah letters, whose conjunction depends on human deeds. As such, the corporeal combination of letters reflects the nature of the realm that induced that combination. This syntagm is, in my opinion, of great importance for subsequent Kabbalistic and Hasidic theories of combination of Torah letters and recurs in R. Moses Cordovero’s classic book Pardes Rimmonim.74 It assumes a certain impact on a development taking place between letters found on a very high level, this development reflecting consequently the nature of the deeds of the human being. I would suggest calling this approach theurgical linguistics, to be compared to theurgical theosophy, which contends that human deeds can affect divine powers. This attitude had a huge impact on Hasidic thought and practice, and examples of the assumption that combinations of letters can affect the supernal realms abound in this literature.75
It seems, however, that the most interesting forms of dealing with the linguistic accommodation can be found in a variety of sixteenth-century Kabbalistic treatments. Let me start with a prolific Kabbalist active in Jerusalem and Syria in the middle of the century, R. Joseph ibn Tzayyah. In Sefer Tzeror ha-Hayyim he writes:
The Torah, according to the secret of the twenty-two letters and its combinations [as] it has been combined according to the commandments, has been revealed in order to purify Israel by them … and in it the 231 gates were combined: the letter ‘aleph with all the letters, and all the letters with it … because the entire Torah, and its combinations done in this manner, is an inner and spiritual matter just as it is in our hand today, without receiving any addition or subtraction, neither a change nor a permutation [is allowed], and it is eternal and stands forever, and within it the entire world is found; and it [the Torah] is subordinated to the ten commandments … and you should understand that all the matter of the combinations of the Torah and its stories and the order of the manner in which the commandments were promulgated, all are inner matters, which are interpreted in different forms and modes. This is why you should find that in it there was written, according to the secret of its combination, “if a man dies in a tent,” [already] two thousand years before the creation of the world, when death had not been exacted upon the generations76 … all its words are hidden.77
This is an interesting synthesis between the combinatory theory of Sefer Yetzirah and the sanctity of the order of letters concerning the commandments. A Kabbalist well acquainted with the views of ecstatic Kabbalah, ibn Tzayyah is quite reluctant to allow the possibility of combinatory changeability of the Torah. He insisted that the preexistence of the ordinary sequence of letters to the creation of the world invites the possibility that a view which would assume that cosmogonic and religious processes might have been able to affect the primordial sequence, inflicting a change that expresses a theory of accommodation, existed already before ibn Tzayyah and is reflected in the formulations of Cordovero and his school, as we shall see immediately below. In other words, I assume that a view close to Cordovero’s had been in existence several decades earlier and is refuted by ibn Tzayyah.
One of the topoi dealing with the revelation of the Torah to Moses is the rabbinic legend, found in various sources, where the angels are described as opposing the revelation of the Torah to man. Moses is portrayed as telling the angels that the Torah is not pertinent to their status because it deals with human affairs. The angels, convinced by Moses’ argument, not only allow the revelation of the Torah but, as we have seen, give Moses some gifts, which should be understood as a metaphor for holy names.78 This legend was interpreted quite often in the Middle Ages, and the various interpretations deserve a detailed survey, which cannot be made here (although in the next section one specific interpretation salient to our discussion will be adduced). R. Joseph al-Ashqar, a Kabbalist active in Tlemcen, North Africa, in the 1520s and 1530s, argued that the angels possess a Torah different from the one to be revealed to Moses, and they mistakenly opposed the revelation of “their” Torah. In describing the difference between the two forms of Torah the Kabbalist wrote:
The angels were reading the Torah according to the path of the combinations of holy names,79 and they thought that the Torah would be revealed to Israel in this manner. And this was considered to be impossible, as how is it possible that six hundred thousand men, in addition to younger persons, would be able to comprehend all the combinations of letters? And since the Holy One, blessed be He, announced to Moses the manner in which he would receive the Torah, namely that the very Torah letters, from which the names of the havvayyot80 have been combined, would be the letters of the [revealed] Torah, but He will not resort to the same combination, but He will clothe the letters differently, and He will combine the letters in another way, like the exodus from Egypt and similar issues … and the angels knew that the Torah would be clothed by matters of peshat, which is like a body, and the matters of the combinations of names would remain [the patrimony] of the few elite, which are similar to a soul hidden in a body.81
Two motifs are clearly related in this passage: the two forms of Torah differ because they consist in different combinations of letters and because the lower constitutes a clothed form of the higher. Again, as in some of the above passages, the divine names constitute the preexistent Torah, whereas the stories emerged out of the restructuring of the supernal order of Torah letters.
It is difficult to pinpoint the precise source that influenced al-Ashqar. Since there are no traces of ecstatic Kabbalah in his book, it is implausible that one of the sources quoted above from this school served as his starting point. Rather we may assume a source in Spain, which inspired both this Kabbalist and one of his contemporaries, R. David ibn Avi Zimra. A much younger contemporary of al-Ashqar, ibn Avi Zimra interpreted the same legend as the Kabbalist from Tlemcen did, as follows: “We have received an explanation of this quandary82 that the entire Torah is [consists] of divine names … the Torah was written in the front of God according to the path of His names, blessed be He, without any division of words, without vowels or cantillation marks … And its reading was very spiritual, not corporeal.”83 According to this view, the angels agreed that the Torah would be revealed to human beings because they understood that only the corporeal aspect was to be transmitted, while the spiritual one, based on divine names, would not been disclosed. We may assume that the Torah was conceived of as existing on two different levels at the same time: on high, in the front of God, and on low, as revealed now. Such a view is similar to an argument that a late-fifteenth-century Jewish thinker, R. Isaac ‘Arama, made in his influential sermon,84 and that later appeared in R. Yoshi’ah Pinto’s commentary on the talmudic ‘aggadot entitled Me’or ’Einayyim.
Some of the views we have surveyed influenced many Kabbalistic discussions, one of the most consequential being R. Moses Cordovero’s elaborations on the topic of the Torah.85 He explicitly resorts to the triangular view found in Gikatilla’s Sha’arei ’Orah, and he was acquainted with Abulafia’s Hayyei ha-’Olam ha-Bd’ and with R. Nathan’s Sha’arei Tzedeq, which he attributes to Abulafia.86 No doubt he knew the eschatological model of the two layers of the Zohar and had access to R. Joseph Ashkenazi’s commentary on Sefer Yetzirah. The Safedian Kabbalist resorts to a theme that is very characteristic of his thought in various writings, whereby he portrays the descent or the clothing of the Torah as its becoming more material; the higher level of the existence of the Torah as divine names is related to the concept of lights, while the lower is associated with that of darkness.87 Several times Cordovero employs the verb TzRF, namely “to combine,” in order to explain the transition from the higher linguistic elements to the lower ones. We may describe this process as an accommodation of a supernal and luminous pattern to the qualities of the different worlds while changing the structure of the letters as part of this metamorphosis.88
Using the metaphor of the various metals that are imprinted by a seal, hotam,89 or paradigm, temunah, which stand for the Torah, Cordovero attempts to account for the corporeal stories and parables of the Torah. Two different elements are involved in his description of the transition from the higher world to the lower one: the model remains the same, but it takes a coarser form because of the nature of the lower world, or the metal, and adds another element. This seems to be inconsistent with the former element, namely that there is a change in the model itself, as letters changed places and even were replaced in the process of combination. This inconsistency notwithstanding, it is plausible that Cordovero believed that the coarse nature of the lower world triggers changes understood as combination of letters, which produces parabolic discourses.
Let me adduce a passage that exemplifies Cordovero’s view on the accommodation of the Torah structure while descending to this world:
The original combination of letters in the Torah before the fall did not include the interdiction of sha’atnez tzemer u-fishtim but the same consonants in another combination, namely satan ’az metzar ve-tofsim, a warning to Adam not to exchange his original garment of light for the garment of serpent’s skin, namely the qelippot named satan ‘az, “insolent Satan.”90 Further, the words embodied a warning to the effect that these powers would assuredly bring fear and affliction [tzarah ve-tzuqah] upon man and attempt to gain possession of him [ve-tofsim] and thereby bring him down to hell. But what brought about this change in the combination of letters, so that we now read sha’atnez tzemer u-fishtim? It came about because when Adam put on the skin of the serpent his nature became material, thus necessitating a Torah that gave material commandments. This called for a new reading of the letters to convey the meaning of a commandment. And so it is with all other commandments based on the corporeal and material nature of man.91
This passage, recorded in R. Abraham Azulai’s Hesed le-’Avraham, presents a moderate form of accommodation: the Torah is understood to have had a sublime message intended for Adam before his fall but changed the message afterward. Thus, the Torah was conceived of as dealing with human matters, either in its pristine form, which corresponds to the spiritual and innocent Adam, or with the fallen man in its new combinations of letters. Cordovero exemplifies the pristine message as one that can be deduced by combinations of letters, but this recombination does not lead to a version of the Torah that consists in divine names. The specific type of combination exemplified by Cordovero involves restructuring the letters of some words by moving one of the letters from one word to the next one without changing the sequence of letters found in the Torah text. It is not a matter of adding letters to one word or subtracting them from another but of restructuring the order of the very same letters. Such a theory calls into question the importance of the symbolic mode based on the concept of rigid designation, since the main semantic anchoring is considered to be the ever-changing nature of the mundane world rather than the essence and structure of the divine one.
Unlike in this passage, which ascribes a distinct semantic valence to the primordial Torah, in other passages Cordovero offers a vision of this Torah, and of the future Torah, as unknown and unknowable in the present. Indeed, the human intellect is understood as unable to penetrate the sublime meaning of those forms of Torah.92 Cordovero insists, however, that dramatic as the change in the understanding of the meaning of the Torah will be in the future, the nature of the commandments will not be affected at all.93
The most explicit combination of the Nahmanidean stand and the Abulafian one is found in Ha-Shelah, one of the most influential books dealing with Kabbalistic issues: “The secrets of the Torah and the combinations of its names94 will be revealed in the future, because now the letters are arranged [according to the order of] the Torah that is in our hand. But in the future the Torah will be new, but not new really, God forfend, but only its letters will be combined so as to [point to] another matter, as it was on high before it was given, as it has been explained in Nahmanides’ introduction to [his commentary on] the Pentateuch.”95,96 Especially interesting is the formulation offered by this same Kabbalist, who asserts that “just as man materialized himself, so too the Torah materialized itself,” and then he continues to refer to a Cordoverian discussion.97
In the first quote R. Isaiah Horowitz offers a stand that indeed takes into consideration Cordovero’s view but still relies on Nahmanides. Unlike the Safe-dian master, Nahmanides never spoke about a preexistent Torah that consists of separate letters, but he assumed the existence of two different forms of combinations of letters: the secret one and the revealed one, the latter dealing with the path of the commandments. Never, to my knowledge, did Nahmanides contend that there would be a return to the secret combinations of the Torah letters as divine names, a point that seems to be introduced into the view of the Catalan Kabbalist by the second quote.
In the late seventeenth century, in a short quotation from an anonymous source found by R. Elijah ha-Kohen ‘Ithamari of Smyrna and preserved in his influential compendium Midrash Talppiyyot, we read: “The Torah was before the Holy One, blessed be He, in [the form of] letters, six hundred thousand letters which were not arranged in the form of words. And because Adam sinned He arranged the letters so as to point to matters that were caused by sin, like ‘[This is the Torah of] Man, when he dies in a tent’98 … and many like these. However, had Adam not sinned those letters would have been arranged in other words. End of Quotation.”99
According to this text, the assumption is that the discrete letters were arranged by God to represent the nature of the state of things in the eon before the sin. Thus, the non-conjugated letters were combined in a manner that reflects the situation created by the sin. It should be emphasized that according to this passage, the contention is that there was no order before sin, if by “order” we mean a sequence of letters in specific words. The single form of structure is constituted by the sequence of the same letters, each of them standing alone. On the other hand, there is no express claim in the passage that disorder related to the letters of the primordial Torah is implied according to this anonymous quote. R. Elijah added a remark at the end of the quote, again reflecting a Cordoverian concept:
Behold, in the future when the sin of Adam will already be forgiven and things will return to their original state, the very Torah of our master Moses, blessed be his memory, with the number of its letters, without any subtraction or addition, arranged according to other words, as it was worthy to be arranged had Adam not sinned, and this is the new Torah that God preaches to the righteous, namely the very Torah of Moses, or it is possible that the arrangement of the words as they are arranged now, “Man, when he will die in the tent,” … God preaches them by disclosing their intention despite the fact that then there will be no death, and He interprets it in another manner, and this is the new Torah indeed, a concealed and very profound thing which is an innovation for the listeners.100
It is obvious that R. Elijah makes an effort to clarify his attachment to the rabbinic vision of the perfection of the Torah, understood here as keeping intact the number of the Torah letters. The meaning of God’s teaching another reading is found elsewhere in a passage by R. Elijah, in a quotation from a lost treatise of his, preserved in a book by HYDA’. The latter quotes first a passage from R. Bahya ben Asher on the non-vocalized scroll of the Torah,101 and then writes:
And the Rabbi, our master R. Elijah ha-Kohen, may his memory be blessed, the author of Shevet Mussar, and more [books], has written in a manuscript treatise [Quntres]: It should be assumed that this [nonvocalized] Torah, which was in front of the Holy One, blessed be He, before it was delivered to the mundane realm, its letters were in the [same] number in His front, but it was not formed into words as is the case today. And the reason for its arrangement [in words] is [to reflect] the way the world behaves. Because of Adam’s sin, He arranged the letters in the front of Him, according to the words describing death and the levirate and other issues. Without sin there would have been no death, and He would not have arranged the letters into words telling another issue. This is the reason the scroll of the Torah is neither vocalized nor divided into verses, nor does it have cantillation marks, thus hinting at the original state of the Torah, [consisting in] a heap of unarranged letters. And the purpose of His intention is that when the king messiah will come and death will be engulfed forever, there will be no room in the Torah for anything related to death, uncleanness, and the like, then the Holy One, blessed be He, will annul the words of the scroll of the Torah, and He will join a letter of one word to a letter of another word in order to create a word that will point to another matter. And this is [the meaning of] “A new Torah will proceed from Me.”102 Is not [however] the Torah eternal? [The answer is] the scroll of the Torah will be as it is now, but the Holy One, blessed be He, will teach its reading according to the arrangement of the measure of the letters that He will be joining to each other to form one word, and He will teach us the [new] division and the joining of the words. End of quote from above R. Elijah ha-Kohen, may the memory of the righteous be blessed; [quoted] in a shortened manner.103
Three different states of the Torah are mentioned here: (i) the original or pristine state, when the letters were discrete, no words having been formed at all, since there was no world, nor any processes to be reflected by conjoined structures of the Torah letters; from this point of view there is a parallel to the stand of Sha’arei Tzedeq;104 (ii) the present Torah, which consists in words reflecting the actual human condition; and (iii) the future Torah, which will differ from the present one by consisting in new words and from the primordial Torah by the fact that the Torah letters are nevertheless destined to constitute words. None of the three versions of the Torah reflects another except by dint of possessing the same number of letters, which follow each other according to the same sequence. Nevertheless, the latter two forms of the Torah are much closer to each other, not only because words are involved in both but also because the scroll of the Torah will remain the same, but God will teach the manner of a different reading of the same scroll. On the grounds of the earlier quotes from R. Elijah, we may assume that the new Torah was in fact the option of the combination of letters that might have emerged had Adam not sinned.
Let me focus for a moment on the concept of the primordial Torah, which consists of exactly the same number of letters arranged in the same order as the other versions but existing separately. The word “heap,” tel, which appears in this passage alone, constitutes the single significant addition to the series of discussions of our theme. Whatever the role of this term in the economy of the above passage may be, it should not be understood as essentially changing the significance of the passage. I would argue that the idiosyncratic phrase tel shel ‘otiyyot— or, in the passage to be adduced below, tel ’otiyyot—is reminiscent of the widespread interpretation of the word talppiyyot as tel she-kol ha-piyyot ponim’ elav,105 the hill (namely the authority) to which all the mouths are turning. This suggestion has something to do with R. Elijah’s compiling Midrash Talppiyyot, an encyclopedic treatise on Kabbalistic matters arranged according to the order of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It may be assumed that the primordial Torah is conceived of as semantically vacuous, because each of its letters stands alone, while the two latter forms of Torah point to either the human or the divine realm.
The quote from R. Elijah’s manuscript treatise has been commented on by Scholem, who declared this text to be a “daring formulation,” for reasons which he did not elaborate.106 The perception of the passage as daring is complemented by his claim that HYDA’, who quoted R. Elijah’s passage, “protested in horror against so radical a thesis,” all because of the former’s piety.107 Just as it is hard, in my opinion, to find a real break in R. Elijah’s views with the already existing Kabbalistic theories, so it is difficult to find any horror in HYDA’ ‘s reaction. What he says immediately after the above passage is worth quoting: “But I, in my paucity, say that what he wrote, that the Torah was in front of God as a heap of letters [tel’otiyyot], if it is not a saying of the rabbinic sages, [then] it is not accepted by my short knowledge. But the Torah in its entirety is [consists of] the names of the Holy one, blessed be He, and those letters were written as a combination of holy names. And the words of the sages are ‘The Torah in its entirety is [consists] of names of the Holy One, blessed be He.’ But the sin caused those letters to be written by those words.”108
HYDA correctly distinguishes between the view that the primordial Torah consisted in divine names and that of R. Elijah, who argues that it consisted in a heap of discrete letters. Emphasizing that he is not acquainted with a reliable source for the latter view, HYDA’ indicates that he does not accept it. Given the very respectful attitude toward R. Elijah, as seen in the manner in which he has been cited, I fear that Scholem’s portrayal of HYDA’s reaction as one of horror is quite exaggerated. As HYDA’ himself indicated after the last quote, his views on the theme under scrutiny here were detailed elsewhere, in his commentary on the prophetic readings, the haftarot:
It is known that the Torah has clothed itself in these stories because of the sin of the calf, though this very Torah is [consists] in combinations of holy names109 and supernal secrets which are not read like those words that had been divided in other words which are stories, but the letters that will come are profound, supernal secrets [found] on high and combinations of holy names. But in the future we shall be worthy of studying the Torah from the mouth of God … and the Torah will be [consist] in combinations of holy names and secrets of secrets and these letters will be the very same, but in lieu of stories there will be holy names and wondrous allusions. And this is the sign of what is written by our sages, that “This Torah will be a vanity in comparison to the Torah of the Messiah.”110 The meaning of this is that the sequence of these words is stories, and it is vanity in comparison to the Torah of the Messiah because the letters will then be read in accordance with combinations of holy names, because then we shall study the Torah as if from His mouth, not by the mediation of an intermediary111 … but in the future the Torah will not have those stories, but these letters will constitute combinations of names and secrets of secrets.112
When the mediator is active in delivering the Torah, it consists in combinations of letters that reflect his nature. When God is revealing the Torah directly, however, He expresses in its structure His spiritual nature. HYDA’ assumes that the primordial Torah will be similar to or identical with the one to be revealed in the eschatological future. Thus, the Torah in all its forms is conceived of as pointing to some form of structured reality. Therefore, I see no reason to portray this thinker as reacting in horror or indignation to R. Elijah’s resort to the term “heap.” Indeed, as Scholem himself admitted on the same page where he mentions horror, HYDA’ himself expressed a view that is “scarcely less radical.”113
One of the most original among the eighteenth-century Kabbalists, Ramhal of Padua, paid attention to the Nahmanidean formula in his writing, advancing an interesting interpretation of his own. According to his view, the Torah as a continuum of divine names points to that form of the Torah by means of which the world has been created. Moreover, this view on the series of divine names is related to the concept that by this Torah miracles have been performed by the righteous, including resurrection of the dead. This form of the Torah is described as tzerufei ha-beriy’ah, combinations of creation.
The path of the commandments, on the other hand, is conceived of as the combination of letters that is conducive to the worship of God, tzerufei ha-avodah. Provided Ramhal’s eschatological conviction, this path represents the last combination of letters, which will repair all the other previous forms of Torah, which are described as combinations of letters.114 This point dealing with reparation, tiqqun, seems to be characteristic of his view. He claims that “because of the reparations, that man repairs the Torah by preoccupation with the combination of their worship, they will cause the extension of the Torah to them from the aspect of the influence and comprehension.”115 Thus the combination of letters which one performs means drawing down an aspect of the Torah from its root, a branch that constitutes one’s own Torah.116 From time to time Ramhal mentions the view that the Torah is compounded of 231 combinations.117
From the very beginning of Hasidism the Cordoverian theory of the Torah was absorbed and adapted. A more precise version of it than the one quoted above from Hesed le-’Avraham can be found, anonymously, in R. Gedalyah of Lunitz’s Teshu’ot Hen.118 None other than the Besht is reported, in this collection of traditions printed at the end of the eighteenth century, to have said:
It is true that the holy Torah was originally created as a mixture of letters.119 In other words, all the letters of the Torah, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy, were not yet combined into combinations of words as we now read, such as the words “In the beginning God created” or “go from thy land,” and so on. These words, on the contrary, were not yet present, for the events of creation that they record had not yet taken place. Thus all the letters of the Torah were indeed mixed in mixtures,120 and only when a certain event occurred in the world did the letters become combined so as to form the words in which the event is related. When, for example, the creation of the world or the events in the life of Adam and Eve took place, the letters formed the words that relate these events. Or, when someone died, the combination “and so-and-so died” came into being. So it was with all other matters: as soon as something happened, the corresponding combinations of letters came into being. If another event had occurred [instead], other combinations would have arisen. For know that the holy Torah is God’s wisdom, which is infinite.121
This Hasidic source seems to be much more concerned with an ethical issue than are most of the Kabbalistic texts adduced above, which have a more metaphysical orientation. The concern with free will may be understood as underlying some of these formulations, because a preexistent and paradigmatic Torah, which serves as the model for both the emanated and the created universes and also absorbs subsequent human history, creates a tension between the content of a text that emphasizes free will and its new ontological and over determining status. The attainment of the status of an ontic zone by the Torah fixed the structure of the world, and of the events taking place in the world, and clashed with the dynamic attitude of the biblical and rabbinic forms of Judaism.
Let me address the special terminology employed in the above passage. I have translated as “mixed in mixtures” a phrase including two words derived from the root’RV. Scholem, in contrast, rendered it as “incoherent jumble of letters,” so as to fit the manuscript text of R. Elijah of Smyrna dealing with the heap of letters. I see no special reason, however, to emphasize the incoherence, because the verb form me’uravin should be understood as pointing to combinations of letters, without any negative implication. This is already the case in a passage from R. Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’ar ha-Niqqud, as printed in ‘Arzei Levanon, at folio 8217b (quoted earlier)122 and again at folio 37a. The Besht was influenced by this treatise with respect to one of the most important topics: the cleaving to letters.123 This more neutral understanding of mixture is perfectly consonant with the way most of the Cordoverian sources were formulated and seems to me to be much more plausible, given that any sequence of discrete letters is neither coherent nor incoherent. Rather, I would suggest seeing the status of all the Torah letters as forming a single word, a theory reminiscent of R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi’s view of the Torah as one name. Cordovero also mentioned the possibility of making combinations of letters of the entire Torah, although he attributed these infinite combinations to God—the new Torah—and not to the Messiah.124
I have not found clear expressions of accommodation theory in the second generation of Hasidic masters, although it seems that R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye was acquainted with it.125 In any case, this author is reported by his disciple R. Gedalyah of Lunitz to have transmitted a tradition in the name of the Besht: “When the Messiah comes, let it be soon in our time, he will interpret [yidrosh] the entire Torah, from its beginning to the end, according to all the combinations [found] in each and every word. Afterwards, he will construe the Torah as one word and the combinations will amount to infinity, and he will interpret all these combinations.”126 This quote, which presents the Messiah’s study of the Torah in quite an Abulafian manner,127 is interpreted by R. Gedalyah within the context of the Cordoverian theory of Neoplatonic-combinatory accommodation, with which he was well acquainted, which also assumes that it is possible to reach the understanding of the Torah before Adam’s sin.128 Elsewhere in the same book this emphasis on the Neoplatonic-combinatory view is combined with the eschatological model relating to terms that reflect the concepts of torah de-beriy’ah, the revealed Torah that starts with the letter bet, and the future torah de-’atzilut, called the Torah of the ’Aleph because it will start with that letter, a theory he claimed to have seen in some unidentified books.129
The basic assumption of this quote deserves a more detailed discussion. I assume that the Messiah is understood to combine the letters of each word, and of the entire Torah as one single word, and to explain them not as part of a continuum or sentence but as constituting one semantic field. My understanding is that all the combinations of the letters of one word, when taken together, form a discourse that should be investigated in itself, rather than as part of a narrative. This is much more conspicuous where the Torah’s becoming one long word is concerned, since in this case there is no way to assume the existence of a biblical narrative. This mode of interpretation is found in R. Abraham Abulafia, as I have attempted to show elsewhere,130 and it was also adopted by the early Gikatilla.131 In Ha-Shelah there is an example of permuting the letters of one word to build a narrative based on the different combinations of letters, and this passage was quoted in an early Hasidic treatise, R. Benjamin of Zalisch’s’Ahavat Dodim.132
What may be the meaning of this theory of interpretation? Given that two basic elements count in this process, the fixed number of letters and the attempt to exhaust their combinations, I would explain the last passage as an instance of “operational validity.”133 If meaning is not a given message transmitted by means of a text but is created in pure textual contexts, for the Hasidic master, as for his Kabbalistic forerunners, the meanings that emerge out of a given set of letters are related to the ergetic mode of interpretation that exploits the semiotic potential of those letters, creating a discourse out of those combinations. In such a manner a maximum exploitation of the linguistic material available emerges from the above passage, one that intervenes in the given structure of the text in order to liberate the potential meaning enchained by the ordinary sequence of letters. This creative and liberating ethos is the main reason for the importance of the combinatory technique. Indeed, in a collection of R. Yehiel Mikhal of Zlotchov’s teachings, the Besht is quoted in the following context:
If he is strongly united to the holiness, he is able to elevate profane things to [the level of] holiness by means of the lore of combinations of letters which is known to the holy and divine Besht, blessed be his memory, and to his disciples, who possess the divine spirit … But the tannaim were in the possession of the divine spirit and they possessed this lore in a perfect manner, [namely] the combinations of the letters, and they spoke in accordance with the divine spirit, and they [the topics] are secrets of the Torah, and everything stems from their cleaving to the supernal holiness, because of their righteousness.134
Thus, it seems that the formulations of the three quotes in the name of the Besht, which deal with the combinatory interpretation of the Torah, come close to Abulafian views of combinations of letters as a way to interpret the Torah, which are associated in two cases with the more dominant theories stemming from Cordovero’s school.
In the third generation of Hasidic authors, R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev, whose views on the Torah have already attracted our attention,135 asked a pertinent question:
Since the Torah preexisted the world, how is the verse “And Timna’ was the concubine”136 or all the other stories of deeds137 before the creation of the world? It is certainly true that the Torah in its entirety is [consists of] the names of the Holy One, blessed be He, and there were within it combinations of letters, arcana and recondite secrets which were never seen by eyes but by means of its [descending] emanation138 to this mundane world, when they were clothed in a thick garment, and so too the stories of the Torah. But he to whom God has given the gift of knowledge, of understanding, and of intelligence, and whose veil of blindness has been removed from his eyes, will see wondrous things in the Torah.139
In the circle of this master we find another, more explicit reverberation of the theory under scrutiny here. R. Aharon of Zhitomir wrote:
The Torah is preexistent and before the creation of the world it was written in front of God as combinations of names and it was solely letters. It is only when the time came that the Torah should be clothed in deeds according to the time, and become combinations of letters according to the needs of the time. And the archangel takes the letters and combines them for himself as he wishes, namely “Every son should be cast into the River [Ha-YeLWD Ha-YeWoRaH].”140 Before the creation of the world the combination of the letters was ‘aVYR Yah wa-HMY [a reference to the supernal air]. Then the archangel came and combined [the letters as] Ha-YeWoRaH [“into the River”] you should throw, and he confuses the mind so that he will not elevate the letters to the primordial intellect.141,142
R. Aharon seems to be the first to exemplify the theory we have discussed above. Unlike Cordovero’s text, where the pristine Torah is not described as dealing with divine names, the Hasidic master’s example strives to substantiate precisely this point. He interpreted the biblical phrase dealing with a historical issue, Ha-YeLWD Ha-YeWoRaH, which means “the male born to the Nile,” by resorting to combinations of letters and gematria, as pointing to “the air of Yah” namely the air of God143 and of MY, the last two letter pointing, apparently, to the sefirah of Binah. According to another passage MY is indeed related to mahasha-vah, thought, to the primordial Torah, or to its secrets.144 Perhaps, the name Yah stands for the sefirah of Hokhmah and thus the passage refers to the two sefirot related to the primordial Torah.145 The noun Ha-YeLWD is equivalent in gematria to MHY, namely 55.146
What is quite novel in this passage, however, is the introduction of a median entity that performs the “descending” combinations; angels are conceived of as changing the order of the supernal letters, which form sequences of divine names, into phrases that point to historical events. In any case, also according to this master it is conspicuous that the nature of the lower world dictates the type of combinations the governing angel is operating. In fact, the author assumes the existence of many angels, which are appointed on the seventy nations and regulate the profane history, and I am inclined to see in his discussions a reverberation of the triangular structure of text and reality as proposed by R. Joseph Gikatilla. Those angels are conceived of as preventing the mystical student from returning to the initial combinations of letters by elevating the verses of the Torah to their primordial status as divine names. According to another passage from the same author, the elevation of the letters to the primordial intellect, qidmat ha-sekhel, is related to the white letters, which are not combined, an issue that has been discussed above in some detail.147 In a way reminiscent of the texts discussed above about the Sar ha-Torah, the angel of the Torah, here too the angels are related to some parts of the Torah or even create them by combining letters. The pernicious role of the seventy angels in mediating the Torah is reminiscent of earlier views, which were not connected to the accommodation theory but regarded the negative aspects of the Torah with the angelic powers governed by Sammael.148
A contemporary of R. Levi Isaac and his disciple, R. Yehudah Leib of Yanov, also addressed the emergence of the revealed Torah following the combinatory model. He asserts that the meaning of the Torah, apparently the primordial one, cannot be exhausted, but “it has been revealed out of the great occultation149 so that those letters of the holy names emerged and were combined, as it is written in books … Beforehand the letters were united and merged in a complete union, as it is written that ‘Bezalel knew how to combine the letters by which heaven and earth were created’150 … this is the revelation from the great darkness.”151,152
It seems that this Hasidic master points to printed books, sefarim, where at least part of the passage is found. Unfortunately, I have been unable to uncover those books. The basic assumption is that the primordial Torah consisted in letters that were strongly connected to each other and were found in darkness and occultation. The nexus between the two terms is implied in this passage and is explicit in another passage, where they are identified with primordial thought153 and tohu va-bohu.154 Moreover, at this level the Torah of unity is described as consisting in divine names.155 I wonder if the term mahashavah qedumah in this book does not parallel the term qidmat ha-shekhel, which occurs in many other Hasidic texts, both pointing to a certain form of unconsciousness, which produces the revealed Torah, paralleling the conscious. According to this Hasidic master, the secrets of the Torah, which I take to be identical to the unconscious, can be perceived by the sense of sight, when a veil separating sight from the secret level will be removed, while the plain sense can be perceived by hearing.156 It seems plausible that this removal is connected to the transition of the Torah, as found in darkness, to the revealed and luminous level.
A stand reminiscent of R. Yehudah Leib of Yanov’s passage is found in the works of his contemporary, the Hasidic writer R. Isaac of Radvil, who claimed that the new Torah to be revealed consists in a content hidden within the existing Torah, which is the garment of the future one.157 This new revelation means, according to R. Isaac, the recognition of the divine immanence everywhere in the world.158 This immanence is attainable even now, by means of purification.159 The printer’s introduction, by the way, is replete with elements taken from the Cordoverian theory of the accommodation of the Torah to the human material condition.160
The most elaborate and complex treatment of the accommodation theory of Torah letters is reported in a Hasidic book first printed in 1880 and attributed to R. Israel Friedmann of Ryzhin. (It is difficult to confirm the correctness of this attribution; that in the following discussions I refer to R. Israel as the author should not be taken as a sign that I have been able to substantiate it.) I shall translate parts of his neglected discussion and point to its affinities to earlier treatments in both Kabbalah and Hasidic literature:
The holy Torah precedes the creation of the world by two thousand years … the “two thousand years” emerge out of the sefirot of Hokhmah and Binah161 … and its precedence points to the grandeur of its concealment and its [not being] comprehended by the thought of men, as the sefirot of Hokhmah and Binah belong to the three first sefirot … and the secret of the Torah emerges from the supernal Hokhmah162 … And R. Shimeon bar Yohay said that by means of the Torah the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, and this is according to the secret of the six hundred thousand letters. And for each and every world, the combination of the six hundred thousand letters, which stems from the combinations of the divine names, corresponds to the greatness and the strength of its luminosity163 so that it164 will illumine it165 and cause the descent of the good and the great light so that it may behave according to light so as to maintain that world … The combinations of six hundred thousand letters are numberless, in accordance with the number of the worlds, which are numberless and limitless … By the [primordial] Torah the Holy One, blessed be He, created the Torah, [and] the world is maintained by it. And then [there was] the descent [of the Torah] to this world, to the six hundred thousand souls, each of which has a letter in the Torah that draws the influx and the vitality and the illumination to the soul that is related to it in order to maintain it and vivify it according to the secret of the maintenance. This is why you should find that in the ten generations between Adam and Noah the corporeal and thick deeds are made explicit. This is so because they were close to the sin of Adam and the impurity of the serpent, there was not in them and in the light of their soul strength to receive the light of the Torah,166 [concerning] the combinations of the words [related] to the deed[s] of the commandments, because of the materiality of their body and the deficiency167 of the light of their soul because of the sin of Adam, so that the vessel should not be broken because of the abundance of the oil that causes the extinction of the candle. And it was necessary that the combinations of the letters be according to the combinations of the words of the deed[s] of corporeality so that they will have a possibility of receiving, and it sufficed to them in accordance with the deficiency of the light of their soul. So also concerning the ten generations between Noah and Abraham which distanced themselves a little bit from the sin of Adam; the light of their soul was enhanced, and they were purified from the materiality and the thickness of their body. Then the letters of the holy Torah were combined so as [to reflect] the stories of Torah that are more subtle in comparison to the prior ten generations from Adam to Noah, but then was added a little bit of the light of the Torah according to the addition of the good deeds of the commandments of the seven commandments of the sons of Noah, because the light of their soul was enhanced … and there was a possibility that they would receive the light of the Torah according to the combinations of a few of the commandments so that the vessel would not be broken, in a manner that was not so in the previous ten generations. Also in the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the twelve tribes who distanced themselves even more from Adam’s sin, and it has been cleaned up in [the case of] Abraham, and has been lustrated in [the case of] Isaac, and purified in [the case of] Jacob, and then the materiality of their body has been purified very much, especially when standing under Mount Sinai, when the impurity of the serpent has entirely stopped, and the light of their soul was enhanced so that they had the possibility of receiving the light of the Torah … of the positive and negative commandments, and it has been lustrated to them and combined in the form of the stories of the Torah, as the light of their soul has been enhanced. The conclusion [to be drawn] from this is that the six hundred thousand letters of the holy Torah are illumining in the supernal worlds in the combinations of the names of each and every world according to the grandeur of its luminosity. Each and every world according to a combination different from the other world according to the grandeur of its luminosity. And the entire Torah is illumining there without a garment, solely as combinations of the holy letters with subtle and luminous lights. Only the descent to this corporeal world necessitated its combinations according to corporeal deeds, and [included] positive and negative commandments … and our master Moses, blessed be his memory, because he purified his matter and his body completely … and he reached the rank and degree that is higher than that of the angels, the serafim, and the ofanim, so that the angels were jealous of him when he received the Torah.168 And by his purification of his matter and body he knew the entire Torah according to the combinations of the names [found] in all the supernal worlds without any garment and cover whatsoever … and it is known that the Shekhinah was really speaking from the throat of Moses because he was the prepared vessel169 for the very dwelling of the Holy One, blessed be He, in him by the complete purification of his body and his matter.170
This passage deals with several paths of progress that conspire in the complete revelation of God from the throat of Moses.171 There is the gradual purification of the bodies, which starts with the lowest point, the sin of Adam, which inflicted the presence of the impurity of the serpent, and slowly reaches its apex when Moses becomes a pure vessel. R. Israel mentions the three decades of generations as significant temporal units for the rhythm of purification, with Moses as the culmination of the process of spiritualization. The purification of the body enables the reception of a more spiritual form of Torah: it is only in the second decade that the commandments of the sons of Noah become significant, and only in the third decade has the Torah been revealed. Thus, the structure of the Torah is consonant with the material preparation of the generations, because a spiritual manifestation of the Torah letters is likewise prone to destroy the unprepared body. This means that the structure of the Torah itself changes with time, and the modes of the combinations of letters accommodate to the state of the recipients. This is quite unlike the more widespread concept of accommodation, which assumes that divine teaching has been adapted to the level of understanding of a certain generation or age. In our case, however, the accommodation is that of the uninformed Torah letters, which are understood to adopt the properties of a particular period in human history.
This form of historical accommodation is to be understood as part of a more comprehensive attitude toward the concept of accommodation, which includes a more ontological approach that assumes that the specific combinations of the letters of the Torah reflect the status of each and every world. Thus, the original or primordial Torah letters illumine in the supernal world while they are not yet combined in words but are combined with lights.172 However, the descent of the Torah in worlds lower than the world of ’Atzilut, which are nevertheless described as being supernal, involves a double process: one of combining letters with themselves and the other regarding the covering of the lights. Thus, whereas the creational process, or the ontological accommodation, starts with the spiritual and moves toward the more coarse or material, the historical accommodation moves in the opposite direction. Man is capable, as was the case in Moses, of transcending the human status and becoming the vessel of the direct divine presence. The cosmological descent of the spiritual letters and the materialization of the Torah do not create an unbridgeable abyss between the primordial Torah and human existence. It is as if the spiritualization of the human body undoes the descending creation by preparing the substratum for the dwelling of the divine presence.
Let me return to the role played by the process of “descending” or creative radical combinations. They are the clue to the different ways of accommodation of the pure Torah to the nature of each of the lower worlds, and of the ascending accommodation of the human to the divine. In both cases the same root is used: TzRF, which in its different inflections can stand for combination and for purification.173 In his experience Moses combined the two forms of spirituality: he purified his body, which was prepared to encounter the pure divinity, and achieved the knowledge of the entire gamut of combinations of Torah letters, including its primordial status.
Let me draw attention to the special treatment R. Israel has given the concept of the primordial letters of the Torah. When dealing with some of his Kabbalistic and Hasidic sources, Gershom Scholem suggested the resemblance between those Jewish mystical views and Democritus’ and Aristotle’s presentation of the doctrine of the atomist about the stoicheia, which means both letters and ele-ments.174 Analysis of the treatments of letters in the two contexts, however, discloses many more differences than affinities. The most important is that the elements serve, according to the Greek thinkers, as formative components of the more complex entities, which cannot be regarded as emerging except as the result of the combination of preexistent elements. In the Jewish texts, however, the lower and complex entities and processes emerged first—Adam, serpent, sin, etc.—and then they induce the occurrence of the new combination of letters that reflects the essence of the newly created entity. This explanation of the relationship between the material entities and lower events and the corresponding linguistic formulations within the Torah contradicts the much more widespread and opposite assumption that the name of an entity represents its core or its form, as has been discussed above.175 This anti-Platonic move attributes to the human and the mundane a pivotal role for the mode in which the Torah is formulated. Rather than imposing or inspiring human behavior here below, the structured forms of Torah are understood as reflecting it by the special types of combinations the Torah letters acquired. Unlike the more common Kabbalistic theories that describe the Torah as the divine shadow176 or divine impression, roshem,177 some of the texts above adopt a special form of accommodation.
Let me call attention to another attitude toward combinations of letters in Hasidism. R. Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir’s ’Or ha-Me’ir betrays a fascination with the method of combination of Torah letters, which is unparalleled in Hasidism from the point of view of the recurrence of this concept. According to one of the numerous discussions regarding this method, the Hasidic author argues that by contemplation of biblical verses new combinations of letters emerge, which reflect the religious status of the contemplator; if he is a perfect man the new combinations will be holy, but if his deeds are wicked they will be ugly.178 Again, the Torah letters adopt a sequence that reflects a heterogeneous process: whereas for the ecstatic Kabbalist, for Cordovero and his many followers, and for the Hasidic masters the restructuring of the Torah letters into the Torah verses represents the nature of human deeds in the hoary past, R. Ze’ev Wolf claims that such a restructuring is still taking place today. From this point of view he does not accept the historiosophy expounded by R. Israel of Ryzhin, which attributed to definite historical periods different types of letter combinations that are characteristic of them. It is one’s spiritual achievements, and not one’s point in history, that determines the combinations one will make.
In another passage the same Hasidic author describes a process that leads from the stories of the Torah, portrayed as material combinations, to the cognomens and then to the divine names, a process that is understood as the apokatastasis of the Torah to its primordial status in the luminosity.179 Here the Hasidic master resorts to Gikatilla’s triangular structure of the Torah in order to describe the technique for reaching the initial status of the Torah or to undo the process of descending accommodation; material combinations are elevated to spiritual combinations and finally to the sefirah of Hokhmah.180
The reflecting aspect of the Torah as combining preexistent letters in order to relate some states or events should be dealt with in the context of the passages addressed in Chapter 6 as to the description of Torah study as conducive to experiences of plenitude, especially in some elite circles, mystical or philosophical. Experiences of plenitude should be understood as connected to deep convictions that the Torah, as it is transmitted to its students nowadays, reflects on its inner or esoteric level, a richness that can be fathomed, and its attainment allows a paranormal experience. However, if the Torah is understood to reflect, at least in some of its parts, the deeds, not to say the sins, of mankind, the question arises as to whether there may exist a deeper sense that allows experiences of plenitude. Indeed, someone may distinguish, following the passage attributed to R. Israel of Ryzhin, between the different parts of human history and the corresponding “depths” of the Torah, which are conceived of as increasing with time. Yet, even when such a “progressive” approach is adopted, it is hard to ignore the emphasis on the heterogeneity of the canonical text and the relativization of at least those “historical” aspects of the Bible. This passage rejects or at least marginalizes the well-known view, which had repercussions in Hasidism, that the forefathers performed the commandments of the Torah long before its revelation at Sinai.181
A perusal of Kabbalistic and Hasidic literatures may, however, allow an understanding that somehow attenuates this tension. The ancient myths concerning the lives of Adam and of the forefathers, although containing many details that seem to be meaningless if understood as reflecting solely the choice and the fate of a certain specific individual, assume a more sublime significance if they are imagined as paradigmatic for later historical developments or, to use a better known term, as typological. The biblical sacred history was understood as reflecting higher processes.182
Especially revealing for the understanding of the special status of the Torah in the above passages are the divergences between R. Israel’s quote and the views addressed in Chapter 3, where the understanding of the infinite views of the Torah depends on the souls as shaped by the different worlds from which they emerge. If according to the theory of accommodation all the readers of the Torah are destined to understand it in a rather homogeneous manner, given the conception that it reflects one basic situation here below, according to the “absorbing” perspective each and every reader understands it differently.
The Hasidic concern with the revelation of the primordial Torah through the combination of letters has an interesting counterpart in a passage from R. Isaac Aizik Haver, an accomplished Kabbalist who compiled one of the most comprehensive compedia dealing with Kabbalistic views of the Torah. According to Haver, in its sources183 the Torah is “limitless and without measure, but when it descends to this lower world it reveals itself according to the combinations of letters and words, just as the letters are written on the white parchment, while they are black.”184 Thus, the white component of the Torah is reminiscent of the source and the hidden, whereas the black letters and their combinations represent the revealed aspects. Here it is obvious that the infinite and spiritual Torah becomes more corporeal by its descent. It is hard to imagine a more concise combination of the Neoplatonic model of accommodation and a combinatory model.
Let me return now to Scholem’s different evaluation of the views of R. Elijah of Smyrna and HYDA’, in which he regards Elijah’s mentioning of the “heap” as a radical thesis. The fact that the later Kabbalist argues that he is not acquainted with such a view is a plausible demonstration that indeed this view is not found in extant Jewish sources. After looking for years for a parallel for such a stand I have found only one case that may be relevant for our discussion. It is a very special Kabbalistic treatise written and printed long before R. Elijah was born, namely Reuchlin’s passage analyzed above.
Let me characterize these two sources. One is a Christian text that reflects, in my opinion, a now lost Jewish source apparently stemming from Abulafia’s school. The second is a lost manuscript that survived only because of the unparalleled erudition and curiosity of HYDA’. Why did those two sources remain on the margin of the Kabbalistic discourse, with possibly a minor impact on the view of R. Yehudah Leib of Yanov? I assume that the reason for this marginalization of the nonsemantic view of the primordial Torah is an uneasiness with the attribution of a semantic vacuity to the Torah letters. Although the view of the Torah as divine names does not offer an ordinary type of meaning either, the assumption in this case is that some form of semantic relationship nevertheless exists, even if God alone is cognizant of this supreme significance. Thus, in the vast majority of the above texts the normal semantics of the revealed Torah is but the garment of an even higher semantics, and the marginalized traditions assume the augmentation of the semantic cargo when the Torah letters become the ordered Torah. In other words, the more linguistic speculations of Sefer Yetzirah, when combined with nomian trends of thought, had to adopt some forms of meaning beyond the cosmogonic role of the combined letters. The concept of the Torah in so many cases absorbed the anomian vision of Sefer Yetzirah. Thus the Torah was identified with the 231 gates and assumed the role of the permuted letters of Sefer Yetzirah.
This succinct history of the exegetical technique of combination of letters in the context of the accommodation and mutability of the Torah has its main stages, which may help us understand something about the history of Kabbalah and perhaps beyond. The centrality of this exegetical technique in Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah and the circle of Kabbalists from which he emerged is evident beyond the texts adduced in this chapter and the previous one. This is also the case in Christian Kabbalah and in R. Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim and the writings of his followers. The last major stage in this history is Hasidism, which continued the views expounded in the first two schools. Does this preponderance of the combinatory method tell a greater story? The answer is not simple, for we have examined but a small portion of the discussions about tzerufei ’otiyyot, those dealing with the different changes related to the emergence and new revelation of the Torah. An insufficient spectrum of topics connected to this topic has been inspected. Nevertheless, I believe that a tentative suggestion should be advanced, one that will have to be corroborated by additional analyses related to the topics of accommodation and mutability.
This concept is absent in the many Kabbalistic schools that did not cultivate the exegetical technique of tzerufei ’otiyyot and the related views of Torah accommodation as described in the combinatory model. They include the Provencal and Geronese Kabbalah, the Castilian Kabbalah related to the Zoharic literature, the Lurianic Kabbalah—with the exception of the Sarugian branch—and most of the nineteenth-century Mitnaggedim.185 These more nomian forms of Jewish mysticism assume that the codified messages should be extracted from the canonical texts without altering their order in any substantial manner. Given that manipulations of Torah letters intending to create new words that would contribute to the discovery of new meanings was marginal in the nomian trends, the disclosure took the form of symbolic exegesis.
There are, nevertheless, three quite interesting cases in the nomian forms of Kabbalah which are pregnant with theosophical-theurgical thought: two classical Kabbalistic books, the early-fourteenth-century Sefer Tiqqunei Zohar and the late-fourteenth-century Sefer ha-Peliy’ah, and some of Ramhal’s views. These three cases adopted combinations of letters as a significant method of exegesis and may be described as serving as sources for anomian or even antinomian attitudes. I see this affinity between a much freer attitude toward the order of letters in the Bible and antinomian overtones as significant for more profound structures. It should also be pointed out that the Kabbalistic schools that adopted the combinatory approach were more inclined to revelatory experiences, as is obvious from the very literary framework of the two above-mentioned books and from Ramhal’s literary activity. This conceptual complex, emerging from the juxtaposition of flexible exegesis, of the changing text of the canonic, and of paranormal experiences, seems to inform more anomian forms of interpretations, which is not the case in other Kabbalistic schools.186