The different forms of Kabbalah demonstrate the existence of significant instances of linguocentric forms of mysticism. They not only emphasize the holiness of Hebrew language, in a way that is reminiscent of two important forms of Muslim and Hindu mysticism or of the importance of the text, as is the case in many kinds of mysticism, but also assume that it is within language and through the text—though not exclusively—that the mystical experience can be attained. Many authors whose writings constitute the mystical literature of Western Christianity envisioned the human soul and the introvert path as the major locus of the mystical experience and the technique of its attainment. Nature mysticism, religious or secular, prefers the extrovert path, as it sees the external world as the place of the mystical encounter. In many cases, God Himself is the space of His encountering man, and this type of mysticism can be viewed as theocentric. In the various forms of Kabbalah, there are numerous cases where performed language and texts are the main locus of the mystical encounter, in a manner reminiscent of Gadamer’s assertion that belonging takes place in language.1
However, unlike all other forms of mysticism, where the locus of the experience existed long before the mystical experience, the linguocentric and bibliocentric forms of mysticism start, in some cases, with the creation of the locus by the mystic himself, as a sine qua non of his mystical experience. This propensity assumes an active approach, because without human initiative the locus of the experience cannot even be shaped. The speaking man, not God—as in more theocentric types of religiosities—is the main bridge-builder. Language can be envisioned as an expression of the soul, of the subjective, which nevertheless takes place in nature, namely in space, and is intended, according to some views, to attract God within it. Viewed thus, linguocentric and bibliocentric mysticism is a more comprehensive approach than the other kinds of mysticism mentioned above. Unlike soul, nature, or God, which can be experienced and were often presented as moments of solitary experience, language- and text-oriented experiences have a prominently connective social role, and the type of mysticism I have described above assumes that God may be encountered precisely by means of the most social of human tools. If the written text, which has been crucial for generations of Kabbalists, has been viewed as an iconic representation of the divine, for some other Kabbalists and for many of the Hasidic masters it is precisely the tool for overcoming the distance between themselves and God, for reducing the importance of textual semantics that has caused a certain alienation, or verfremdung, to use Ricoeur’s term, by establishing the direct encounter by proclamation and manifestation. The move from a hypersemantic mysticism to a hyposemantic one, so clear in the transition from Kabbalah to Hasidism, is one of the reasons for the much greater diffusion of the latter than the former among the masses.
The arcanization of the canonical book in Judaism should be understood as a characteristic move within the broader framework of a linguocentric spirituality. This form of spirituality should be recognized as a category in itself, though similar to some forms of spirituality less known in the West.2 Too often, in my opinion, the academic requirement of allowing each type of spirituality its own modus operandi and modus existendi has been ignored by scholars; the history of the assumption that the letter kills the spirit not only is part of ancient and medieval Christian attitudes toward Judaism but sometimes creeps into scholarly books as well. So, for example, we read about the recurrence of the term “Torah” in the Heikhalot literature, “Too often we hear of the ‘book’ in which all the mysteries are written and which one should learn and not forget.”3
Indeed, the sacred book and its secrets often played a paramount role in Jewish spirituality, a role in some respects similar to that which the Christ and the mysteries of his via passion is played in Christianity and Christian mysticism. It seems that the biblical religion, with its emphasis on the exoteric, has produced at least three different religiosities that departed from this emphasis: the Christian one, revolving around mysteries; the Qumranic one, emphasizing eschatological secrets; and the rabbinic one, which includes an arcanization of the canonic texts. It seems that the Christian emphasis on mysteries and the Qumranic exegesis revolving around eschatological interpretations represent attempts to transcend the unconditional importance of the interpreted book by gravitating toward topics that are supposed to happen in the future, after the completion of biblical history. Mysteries, revealed in the life and death of the Christ as expressed in another canon, the New Testament on the one hand and eschatological sermons of the doresh ha-torah on the other, leave a more modest role to the variety of topics expressed by the text of the Hebrew Bible. The widespread refusal to indulge in detailed and public presentations of the secrets of the Torah in rabbinic circles encouraged each of the members of the elite to return to the canonical text in order to understand it with his own spiritual capacities and share his findings only with the few. Inspection of the medieval mystical literature of the Jews, which has strong esoteric proclivities, shows a shift in the meaning of the terms sod, raz, and seter, which received a much more mysterious significance in comparison to their ancient occurrences.4
The gist of many of the discussions above was that some medieval Jewish corpora, especially the mystical ones, were more prone to resist the impact of the logocentric Greek speculations by emphasizing the dense textuality of the sacred scriptures in their Hebrew original. I would prefer, therefore, not to insist on a simplistic synthetic nature of Kabbalistic literature but to suggest instead the creation of hierarchical organizations that allow the less logocentric elements a greater role than they have in philosophical corpora. Indeed, we may assume that biblical thought created more particularistic approaches, which inspired a predisposition not to adopt logocentric thought so easily, even in the Middle Ages. So, for example, we learn from the testimony of the late-twelfth-century bishop of Exeter, Bartholomew:
The chief cause of disagreement between ourselves and the Jews seems to me to be this: they take all the Old Testament literally, where they can find a literal sense, unless it gives manifest witness to Christ. Then they repudiate it, saying that it is not in the Hebrew Truth, that is in their books, or they refer it to some fable, as that they are still awaiting its fulfillment, or they escape by some other serpentine wile, when they feel themselves hard pressed. They will never accept allegory, except when they have no other way out. We interpret not only the words of Scriptures, but the things themselves, in a mystical sense, yet in such a way that the freedom of allegory may in no wise nullify, either history in the events, or proper understanding of the words, of Scriptures.5
The English bishop is correct insofar as the marginality of the allegorical mode in Jewish rabbinic literature is concerned. However, the resistance to allegory in Jewish writings started to diminish dramatically in exactly the period when the above passage was written. What seems fascinating about this quote is that it was composed at a watershed: the very beginning of the ascent of Jewish allegorical and mystical exegesis, and the beginning of the decline of Christian mystical exegesis, to judge from the history of Christian mysticism as surveyed in Bernard McGinn’s three volumes. McGinn’s approach, which put special emphasis on the hermeneutical aspects of Christian mysticism, can be read as follows: the first two tomes reflect the concerns of authors active from the beginning of Christianity to about 1200, who were mainly interested in exegesis, whereas the third, covering the period from 1200 to 1350, reflects a less sustained exegetical enterprise. In Christian mysticism, however, the move from the metaphorical understanding is not to a more literal one but to a more direct experience which owes less to the study of the minutiae of the sacred texts. I would say that starting from the ancient myth of the inspired nature of the translators of the Septuagint, which could allow the Greek text as important a role as the Hebrew original enjoyed in ancient times and continued to enjoy in medieval Jewish mysticism, the sanctity of the precise literary formulations continuously diminished. It survived only insofar as the Hebrew text is concerned, not because of the relatively late theory of Hebrew as a sacred language but because of the much earlier and stronger impact of the logocentric theories adopted by ancient and medieval Christian thinkers. It would be sufficient to compare Philo’s version of the story of the miraculous translation of the Bible into Greek to the story of an early-sixteenth-century Christian printer who denied the possibility of translating the fullness of meaning, dependent as it is on each and every letter and word of the original Hebrew.6
On the Jewish side we find the inverse move. The ancient literatures that may be described as mystical, the Heikhalot literature, and Sefer Yetzirah are not exegetical corpora, and although the first was concerned with the Torah and its multiplication and secrets, no commentary on the Torah emerged from these circles. From the beginning of the thirteenth century many mystical commentaries emerge at the same time in the Near East, under the impact of Sufi mysticism, in the circle of Maimonides’ descendants,7 in the Rhineland circle of Hasidei Ashkenaz, and somewhat later in the century in the various schools of Kabbalah in Spain and Italy, and these new exegetical trends had a lasting impact on many of the subsequent commentaries on the Bible. Thus, at least as regards the development of Jewish medieval and later forms of Jewish mysticism, the Bible and its interpretations move to the center of the spiritual concerns, as the performed ritualistic language constitutes techniques to reach mystical experiences as well as their locus. Interestingly, the expansion of the Jewish symbolic exegesis took place in a period when Christian theologians restricted the allegorical interpretation, as we saw in Chapter 10.
This recentralization of the Bible in both the philosophical and Kabbalistic circles is part of the struggle over the “authentic” secrets of the Torah between the competing elites. However, the various forms of competition over the meaning of those secrets only highlight the centrality of the canonical book. This issue is crucial from another point of view as well. Kabbalists and Hasidic masters become recluses only rarely in the history of Jewish mysticism. Their impact has much to do with the fact that among their major concerns were the special interpretations they offered of the Bible and the commandments, thus sharing with their community a vital common denominator. In lieu of a much stronger emphasis on the nature of the inner experiences in other forms of mysticism, it seems that Kabbalists and Hasidic masters formulated their religious life and much of their manner of expression in terms provided by the Bible as a main semantic reservoir.
In modern scholarship there are voices that attribute to biblical and rabbinic attitudes toward text and textuality a unique status in comparison to the Greek attitudes. The most articulate expressions of this trend are found in books by Susan Handelman, Jose Faur, and Shira Wolosky.8 The most extreme voices in the opposite direction are those of Isaac Baer and Harold Bloom, who speculated about the hypothetical centrality of Platonism for the emergence of the rabbinic attitude toward learning.9 There can be no doubt that most of the rabbinic corpus, committed to writing in milieus replete with Hellenistic thought and literature, should not be completely separated from their immediate intellectual environment, and this point has been made in a large number of studies, especially those of Saul Lieberman. Without denying the obvious, however, I see no reason to subscribe to either of the two extreme alternatives. My contention has been that the Kabbalistic concepts of hermeneutics reflect both the earlier Jewish attitudes revolving around the text and the adoption of more logocentric attitudes, especially during the Middle Ages. Let me attempt to integrate some of the topics discussed above into a more comprehensive picture.
On the side of the separatists, let me adduce a passage by Hans Jonas, concerning the uniqueness that he attributes to biblical thought as compared to philosophy: “There was an anti-metaphysical agent in the very nature of the biblical position that led to the erosion of classical metaphysics, and changed the whole character of philosophy … The biblical doctrine pitted contingency against necessity, particularity against universality, will against intellect. It secured a place for the contingent within philosophy, against the latter’s original bias.”10 Indeed, Jonas’s formulation is reflected in the emphasis some Kabbalists had put on the concrete and particular aspects of the text, namely its parasemantic facets, as we had seen in ample examples above.11 Those particularistic elements were mitigated, however, when they encountered Greek thought, in the specific forms it took in translations, commentaries, and syntheses produced in the Islamic and Christian worlds. Those approaches emphatically introduced more vertical and hierarchical schemes, which contributed to more instrumental approaches to the canonical texts. In some cases, like R. Abraham Abulafia’s hermeneutical scheme, the allegorical exegesis was presented as lower than the more hyper literalistic exegetical methods, and this may be also the case in the manner in which philosophically oriented interpretations were sublated by Kabbalistic methods, as we shall see below in the case of pardes, where the second method, remez, may stand for allegory.12 Moreover, as Frank Talmage suggested, the term haggadah, which appears in a Zoharic discussion dealing with ways of interpretation and is lower than the Kabbalistic method, stands for a form of rationalistic interpretation.13 How should we understand those syntheses?
Harry A. Wolfson suggested considering the history of European philosophy from late antiquity to Spinoza as a series of encounters between Greek philosophy and the sacred scriptures, starting with Philo and reverberating through the Middle Ages in different forms of syntheses.14 Looking back to some of the discussions above, we may describe Jewish medieval thought from the perspective of different forms of confrontation between the two, mitigating the resort to the idea of synthesis and instead adopting, along the lines of Gadamer’s and Derrida’s thought, a greater awareness of the creative tension between the two. The great impact of the combinations of letters on Jewish mysticism, on the one hand, and on seminal figures in European thought like Ramon Llull,15 Christian Kabbalists like Pico della Mirandola,16 Giordano Bruno,17 and their repercussions in Leib-niz18 and other European thinkers, on the other, deserve a separate study that will document in detail the accumulative impact of the infiltration of Kabbalistic material in the fabric of modern thought on language and text.
Our methodological assumption, which informed some of the passages above, is that significantly different corpora19 interacted substantially in medieval and Renaissance Europe. On the one hand, the arrival of some forms of Greek philosophy beginning in the eleventh century to Europe via Syrian, Arabic, and then Hebrew translations created the speculative systems that attempted to integrate the varieties of Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic, and some forms of Stoic and Pythagorean, speculation into theological systems that may be described as Jewish-Greek. From the second half of the fifteenth century, however, new corpora impinged on the medieval forms of speculation, owing mainly to the translations of Marsilio Ficino and a few others. Those corpora interacted with the older ones and were instrumental in the rather rapid dissolution of the medieval forms of thought.
The interactions between these corpora—religious, philosophical, mystical, and magical—involve hermeneutical moves that gradually transformed the intercorporal relations into intracorporal ones, thus creating a series of Jewish-Greek syntheses. I have attempted to point out the tensions between the logocentric and textocentric approaches in the high Middle Ages, which produced not only speculative writings but also systematic descriptions of hermeneutical rules. Later these corpora became influential in Renaissance culture and found their way into modern European culture through Renaissance influences and those of modern scholars of Kabbalah, like Adolph Frank in the nineteenth century, but more eminently through the writings of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem.
Let me turn again to modern implications of some of these discussions. The writings of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Harold Bloom, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and George Steiner, who resorted sporadically, or even systematically, to hermeneutical concepts found in Kabbalah, point to the emergence of a new awareness that hermeneutical patterns of the Jewish late antiquity, especially Midrash, and Middle Ages, especially Kabbalah, may contain significant food for reflection on the extremities the interpretation of sacred texts may reach even in a religious society.
Modern radical hermeneutics, as exemplified in Derrida’s deconstruction, should be seen as a phenomenon that both emerged as the result of modern trends in European philosophy and was inspired by models already in existence in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. It is difficult to strike a proper balance between the two sources, and it is not my intention even to attempt to treat such a delicate subject here. It is necessary to point out that in Derrida’s Dissemination a sentence by R. Abraham Abulafia dealing with the combination of letters as the special form of logic has been quoted verbatim. It runs, in the English translation, as follows: “The Kabbalah is not only summoned up here under the rubric of arithmosophy or science of the literal permutations … The science of letter combinations is the science of superior interior logic … it also cooperates with an Orphic explanation of the earth.”20 As we saw in Chapter 9, Abulafia’s statement about letter combinations is part of a confrontation between the Greek and Jewish forms of logic. Indeed, my analysis of Abulafia’s thought somehow confirms Derrida’s general assumption (based on Levinas’s writings) as to the reticence toward metaphysics in some forms of Judaism.21
Like the ecstatic Kabbalists, who strove to explain reality and not only the sacred texts, Derrida views Kabbalah as “an Orphic explanation of the earth.” Although this quote corroborates Abulafia’s double vision of Kabbalah as a higher philosophy and a mystical discipline, it includes a phrase that cannot be deduced from Abulafia, “an Orphic explanation,” which is related later in Derrida’s discussion with another form of Kabbalah, the Lurianic. Thus, Derrida was aware of the Kabbalistic technique of combination of letters, although we should be aware that he was also influenced, at least in Dissemination, by Stéphane Mallarmé and his view of Le Livre.22
Let me reflect on the possible impact of these discussions on the modern form of deconstructive hermeneutics. In Derrida’s description it is basically a semantic form, as he emphasizes the fluctuation of meaning of words in a given text rather than the instability of the text itself. To the best of my knowledge, the intertextual reading is a form of soft radicalism, as it put in relation texts that are much closer to each other than in intercorporal hermeneutics.23 Being non-harmonistic, Derridian radicalism is, because of its “différential” nature, soft in comparison to religious intercorporal hermeneutics, which believes that all the different corpora involved in the hermeneutical project share the same basic meaning, despite the apparent terminological discrepancies. This is the case in both Philonic and Maimonidean hermeneutics and in the Renaissance versions of the prisca theologia. Less concerned with the importance of a stable meaning—see Derrida’s crucial denial of presence—semantic radicalism is attenuated by the fluctuation that may be discerned in the different meanings of a text. To clarify what I mean: the greater the conceptual differences between the corpora that are imposed on each other, the more radical the hermeneutical presuppositions involved in the exegetical process.
So, for example, the introduction of a totally different meaning for the word ‘elohim (as “nature” by means of gematria)24 far beyond the semantic flexibility that disestablishes a permanent meaning of a given text, à la Derrida. The combination of semantic radicalism with deconstructive grammatical and linguistic radicalism, as exemplified above by the literary corpora of Abulafia and his followers—and pertinent examples may easily be multiplied—produced forms of deconstruction that are reminiscent of what modern scholars would call radical hermeneutics. Those scholars, however, were less concerned with the instability of the text as such, although Mallarmé’s Livre played an important role in some of Derrida’s discussions. The ecstatic Kabbalist challenges equally the structure of the text and its traditional meanings. Yet while modern deconstruction attempted to get rid of the former Archimedean points of metaphysics, theology, and authorial intention as anchors of and sources for meaning, it sometimes remained confronted with a relatively stable text that is the anchor or springboard for the whole hermeneutical project.25
The mystical forms of radicalism, however, are more aggressive than the modern form in their approach to the text, precisely because they not only accepted a certain type of metaphysics and the existence of a God, for example, but also assumed the possibility of free access to Him. By resorting to mystical techniques nearly identical with the exegetical ones described above,26 both R. Eleazar of Worms and R. Abraham Abulafia believed that they might enjoy, and indeed claimed to have enjoyed, mystical experiences, which presumably offered them the authority to “find out” the esoteric meanings of a text by resorting to the most eccentric of hermeneutical strategies imaginable. In fact, the actualization of the human spiritual potential that brings about the mystical experience is related to one’s ability to actualize the plethora of meanings, mostly esoteric, conceived to be dormant within the interpreted text.
At least insofar as Abulafia is concerned, this actualization of the intellect, which is often described as a union with the divine, does not take the form of the return to the origin, the repetition of a blissful situation, the retrieval of lost meanings—all these in the Platonic vein—but much more the perfection of the activity of the human intellect. It is not a repetition, a return, a reconstruction, but a breaking through of the intellectual faculties from the material and imaginary ones, conceived of as obstructing perfect intellection or union with the absolute spiritual. Undoing the regular ties between the linguistic components of the interpreted text is paralleled on the psychological level by untying the knots that connect the soul to matter. It is a simultaneous liberation of the intellect from the bonds of the potential meanings of the sacred scriptures and from routine as embodied in the traditional understandings of religion. From this point of view, interpretation involves existential as well as textual hermeneutics.
Moreover, as in forms of modern deconstruction that attempt to exploit all the linguistic potential of the text, Kabbalists too, as we have seen, argued that they prefer a detailed literal analysis in order to do justice to the minutiae of the text, unlike the more general and logocentric attitude of the philosophers, who were in search of philosophical allegorical readings. Abulafia, in his fourth way of interpretation, would see allegory as a licit manner of understanding the Bible at a certain stage of one’s spiritual development, and from this point of view he did not combat it. However, he definitively saw in the peculiar immersion in exercising linguistic exegetical techniques a higher spiritual achievement. From this perspective logo centrism was transcended by a linguocentric attitude, which nevertheless does not attempt, as in the case of other Kabbalists, to oppose this exegetical praxis categorically.
While traditional radicalism in Kabbalah was ready to deconstruct the text in order to find God by a more direct experience within the very performance of ritual language, modern deconstruction had first to kill God or transcendental meaning in order to divinize the text. Modern radicalism in the domain of metaphysics or theology—the Nietzschean statement of the death of God—introduced a pivotal new constant in culture: the text. Its infinite riches are actualized mainly by discovering the principle of the fluidity of meaning. Indeed, ecstatic Kabbalah seems to parallel forms of radicalism that distinguish modern deconstruction from other modern forms of hermeneutics. So, for example, both share the assumption of the fluidity of the text, as opposed to much more stable approaches to the text. There is a strong emphasis on the complete and intact text in some forms of modern hermeneutics; to paraphrase Paul Ricoeur, the status of the book is that of a screen between the author and the reader, while in the religious visions of the text the sacred book is the nexus between the Author and the mystical reader. Indeed, I assume that Ricoeur has expressed a quite modernistic understanding of textuality when he declared that “the book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication.”27 Unlike Derrida and Ricoeur, however, the ecstatic Kabbalist regards the sacred book as one of the most important modes of union and communion with a transcendent divine.
The deconstructive hermeneute, on the other hand, becomes the prophet of a text that is now more and more accessible to the ordinary reader but whose contents are conceptualized by scholars as more and more opaque. He is now conceived of as mediating not between God and the religious group but between the text, whose meaning becomes more and more remote, and the reader. Indeed, I think that what happened in the Derridian conception of the text is the dissolution of a strong ontological vision of the text, as represented by Kabbalah, and its transformation into a philosophy of a total absence, as we shall see also more below.
Modern deconstruction has turned its attention to the nature of the text as disassociated from its author but as strongly dependent on the reader. Following the cultural crises in the elites involved in the Nietzschean and Freudian revolutions, the instability of meaning has increasingly become a crucial issue, which betrays not only the fluid semantics of the interpreted texts and the eclipse of the author but also the flexible attitudes of readers. A destabilization of classical philology’s certainty in the possibility of ascertaining the authorial intention facilitated the emergence of more subtle, intricate, sometimes even oversophisticated discourses over the possibilities implied in the earlier discourses. This modern move toward the disclosure of the discrepancy between the poverty of the author and the discovery of the richness of language and text is quintessential for and inherent in the secularization of the attitude toward literature. The unstructured elements of language, which are enchained by creative literary processes, never subsume to the author but transcend his intentions by displaying a much greater spectrum of meanings than presumably he intended. It is a weak mind, genial as it may be, that attempts to enslave the variety of uncontrollable possibilities inherent in language as constituted by a long series of semantic shifts. This view of the secular text assumes a crisis in the former concept that focuses on the author, proposing instead a much greater interest in the contribution of the reader or, even more, the sophisticated interpreter. Readers and interpreters complete the meaning by bringing their own riches to the interpreted texts.
The secular attitude toward texts is a fundamentally democratic discourse. Sacred texts, however, almost always imply strong authors. Either the concept of God, or that of His prophets, or at least the authority of the ancient sages, supplies an authorship that provides a much firmer basis for the belief that the canonic texts in themselves represent higher forms of intelligence, if not absolute wisdom. It is this faith in the distinct superiority of the Author, or even in that of ancient authors over the modern reader (a reverberation of a medieval hierarchical structure of the universe, society, and intellects) that dominates the approach of a religious reader to his canonic texts. Assuming such a superior wisdom also means that it is hard to believe that an inferior reader, or even a large community of readers, will ever be able to exhaust all the intentions implied in the divine texts. Thus, it is not only the awareness of the riches of language, of its fluidity and ambiguities, that serves as the ground for ongoing interpretive projects, but also an assumption of the existence and pertinence of supernal, even infinite, forms of intelligence that in their original Greek and medieval systems are quintessential logocentric entities but were interpreted in ecstatic Kabbalah linguistically and as sources of linguistic revelations. It is not in history or society but in the atemporal superior reservoirs of knowledge that a religious reader will establish “his” innovative interpretations of a sacred text that stem from these reservoirs. Thus, it is a radical trust in the text, or more precisely in the plenitude, even semantic abundance, of its linguistic components, rather than a basic mistrust in its author as the generator of the text. This belief in the existence, omnipresence, and availability of the transcendent reservoir of meaning, the supernal Agent Intellect, which pulsates intellectual contents that may be captured by the well-prepared human intellects, is paramount for his system. Thus, the ecstatic Kabbalah is a vertical approach toward intellectual and mystical experiences and forms of exegesis, an issue that was discussed in some more detail in Chapter 11.
The horizontal intertextuality characteristic of recent secular approaches has replaced the vertical interchange between the reader and the subject of his belief. A modern reader reads, sometimes, in order to express himself. A religious reader is looking much more to be impressed. The former reading is analytical, dis-integrative; it subverts rather than integrates. Its agon is provoked by the self-imposition of historical relations as generative factors. On the other hand, it seems that the gist of most of the religious reader-situation is synthetic. It reflects the search for a higher order, which is to be internalized, imitated, or at least venerated.
The deconstructive approach attempts to establish itself in a space between Greek logo centrism and Jewish ethical openness toward the other, as expounded by Emmanuel Levinas. Being a philosophy of hesitation that deliberately refuses to choose between the two, Derrida’s deconstruction is critical toward aspects of both.28 Concerned with establishing a unique space from which a critical stance could be elaborated, this is a speculative project intended to create a much freer reader and interpreter. In Abulafian hermeneutics, another system that stands between the Jewish and Greek conceptualizations, there is a definitive propensity for accepting both while being critical of some aspects of the two attitudes toward reality and understanding each in the light of the other. So, for example, the supernal intellects and their influx here below, crucial topics in Abulafia’s world-view and mysticism, were understood in linguistic terms as speech or primordial speech, a very significant departure, though not a total divergence from Greek logocentrism.29
For the radical traditional hermeneute as exemplified by Abulafia’s exegetical methods, modern deconstruction, as put in practice, would be quite a modest intellectual enterprise, because the main purpose of the hermeneute is not to decipher the divine secrets of the Torah but to bring about the identification of his intellect with the Author Himself. The ecstatic Kabbalist escapes subscribing to the logocentric attitude of the Arabic and Jewish philosophers who influenced him by moving his own logos to the center and attempting to become the source of the ever-changing esoteric meanings.30
To be sure, the above discussion is not a call for the traditional forms of radicalism, nor an attempt to support modern theories of deconstruction by claiming that they have a much earlier pedigree. All have, in my opinion, their extremes of strong and weak points. I have attempted to point out only the moderate nature of modern radical hermeneutics by introducing another corpus for comparison, mainly the ecstatic-Kabbalistic one. Less concerned as I am to point out the conceptual or historical filiation between the medieval and the modern views (although I believe that I have been able to demonstrate them), I am much more interested in con-textualizing Derridian deconstruction within a European development. After all, in this book we have examined medieval texts composed in Germany, Spain, and Italy in the thirteenth century, and although they were composed in Hebrew, their main strategies transpired in several ways in Western languages, Latin and French, already in the sixteenth century. An approach that emphasized the pertinent contribution of texts that were in possible contact with the interpreted text, as de-construction is, may be interested in investigating the possible importance of corpora that were somehow available to the formulator of deconstruction.
I do not claim that modern deconstruction is a continuation, extension, or distortion of more radical Kabbalistic forms of deconstruction, but that given some developments in the critique of meaning—from the Nietzschean and Freudian perspectives and of metaphysics and theology from a variety of angles (including Nietzsche and Levinas), some Kabbalistic views attracted the attention of Derrida—as was the case with Harold Bloom’s literary theory—who basically should be situated within European philosophical-critical developments. Nevertheless, without attempting to transform ecstatic-Kabbalistic hermeneutics into a pioneer of modern deconstruction, I would assert that the fundamental situation of a confrontation between logocentric and textocentric modes of thinking is found already in the attempts of those Kabbalists who had to choose between the linguocentric mystical traditions31 and the newly introduced Greek logocentric thought within the intellectual horizons of some elites in European Judaism. As Abulafia put it, there are two paths: “the path of the Guide; and [the other] according to my own path, that is the path of Kabbalah … the paths of Kabbalah which are the secrets of Sefer Yetzirah.”32,33 Despite the divergences between the two, Abulafia nevertheless attempted to interpret the former in the light of the latter.34 This confrontation and its solution represent an important instance of the awareness of the divergences between the two and at the same time an attempt to overcome them. From the perspective of later developments in hermeneutics it is possible to describe some aspects of modern European thought as a contest between two modes of thought: one assuming the discovery of a truth that is independent of textuality, the other creating a dependence of various messages on a canonical text.
The bibliocentric nature of medieval and later Jewish mysticism should be addressed in the context of the elites’ vision of religion as conducive to experiences of plenitude. Moving the center of the exegetical and mystical experiences to mental and emotional processes related to an available and approachable book opens questions that had been answered in the earlier scholarship in a too definitive manner. My claim is that various forms of negativity nourish some of the modern approaches to the nature and function of the book in Jewish mysticism. Emblematic of the dominant attitude is a statement found in the last of Scholem’s Ten Non-Historical Theses, where he defined Kafka’s secular Kabbalah as reminiscent of “the strong glance of the canonical, the perfection that destroys.”35 I see in this, the very last sentence of his theses, the quintessence of a profound negativity, one that recognizes the perfection of the canonical as well as its destructiveness. I contend that perfection in the context of canonicity reflects the view of the Torah as perfect, as reflected in the verse from Psalms, whose mystical interpretations were discussed earlier in some detail.36 I read the glance as related to Kafka’s “Before the Law,” where the glimpse of the Law is emanating. Canonical, luminous, perfect as the Torah was for the Kabbalists and many other Jewish masters, according to Scholem it was conceived of as hardly attainable, even destructive. This contradiction between the conservative aspects of Scholem’s description of Kabbalah and its antinomian aspects has been duly pointed out by Harold Bloom, who even summarized one of Scholem’s theses as follows: “ ‘God Himself is the Torah’; so also Torah cannot be known.”37 Indeed, the third thesis claims—as Scholem did in some other instances—that the written Torah cannot be approached, while the oral Torah, which is identified with tradition, is wrapped in darkness.38 In both cases, forms of negativity are quite obvious. They have much to do with what Bloom calls Scholem’s revisionist description of Kabbalah, which is strongly influenced by both Kafka’s and the Sabbateans’ sorts of negativity,39 by his own search for catastrophes,40 and by his Gnostic leanings.41
A perusal of the different types of Kabbalistic literature as I know them does not, however, corroborate Scholem’s descriptions emphasizing the transgressive and negative aspects as either comprehensive or representative. I do not deny their existence, but assert it only in cases where I have specific and detailed reasons to do so, as I pointed out in Chapters 2 and 12, for example. Neither am I interested in negating their phenomenological specificity, and I quite understand the predilection and the attraction that scholars had and still have toward them.
Nevertheless, this academic proclivity for radical and anarchic elements does not mean that they are representative or that they are common in the general economy of Jewish mystical literature. I cannot engage here all the sources and problems involved in such a misreading of Kabbalah. Some of them have to do with the emphasis on the importance of negative theology adopted in academic descriptions of Kabbalah.42 In this context it suffices to remark that the paramount role played by expressions that are understood as icons of negativity in modern scholarship of Kabbalah—radicalism, paradox, dialectics, antinomianism, anarchism—merits a separate study and may indeed be related to themes stemming from Hegelian and Marxist thought that entered the intellectual apparatus of Scholem and thus the basic language of modern Kabbalah scholarship.
I would like only to adduce a few examples that further demonstrate what we have already seen in many passages adduced and analyzed in this book: the positive, constructive role that the concepts and study of the Torah played in Kabbalah and Hasidism, which include an apotheosis of human activity. The strong interpretive techniques adopted by Kabbalists indicate an activist approach, which has nothing to do with a “danger zone” imagined by Scholem as characteristic of the Kabbalistic vision of the Torah. I would say that the stronger the belief in the perfection of the Bible, the more it activated stronger exegetes who elicited stronger interpretations, which were part of creating experiences of plenitude that sometimes are described as the few realizing in the present the beatitude preserved for the many in the eschatological future. The contemplation and learning of the Torah was one of the paths for attaining what the Jewish mystic imagined to be the maximum religious perfection, and for the elite it would be hard to find examples of what Scholem described as “life in deferment.”43 Were I to reformulate Scholem’s thesis, I would opt for a vision of the “strong glance of canonical, a perfection that absorbs.”
The innovative techniques adopted in Kabbalistic hermeneutics are part of a profound transformation characteristic of some forms of Judaism, culminating in what Jacques Riviere calls “a kind of assault on the absolute”44 that changes the Jewish view of man as well as of language. Like many phenomena in modern literature, some forms of Kabbalah consist in an attempt to transmute reality through the power of words.45 Both activities are part of “a vast incantation towards the miracle.”46 Some of the Kabbalistic techniques are, in my opinion, much closer to Dadaist and Surrealistic visions of creative activity than they are to Kafka’s or Celan’s ambiguity and negativity.47 Kabbalists and the Hasidic masters did not wait in front of a sealed Law but initiated forms of religious activities thought capable of ensuring an experience of the divine. If Kafka chose a simpleton as the protagonist of his magisterial “Before the Law,” there is no reason to identify the passivity of someone who is an ’am ha-aretz to the much more constructive approaches of the Jewish elites.48 In other words, a vision of Kafka as representative of a secularized Kabbalah is based on a comparison of things that are incomparable.
If, however, we inspect the general thrust of the Kabbalistic attitude toward the Torah, we find a much more activist approach, which is incompatible with the passivity of Kafka’s protagonist. So, for example, according to one of the most influential among the Kabbalists, R. Moses Cordovero, it is man alone, not even angels, who is “able to add enigmas to the Torah, or to reveal any secret of its secrets, but man alone, whose soul is seizing in [or by] the Torah and becomes as a bucket by his soul, to draw the secrets of the Torah from its source in the sefirot … and the quintessence of the understanding of the Torah is found in the people of Israel, who will cause its descent by their soul, spirit, and higher soul from its source and will draw it from the pit of the depths of the secrets of the Torah, and this is the reason why each of the six hundred thousand souls of the people of Israel had, each of them, an inheritance in the Torah.”49 Another activistic contention is found in the same context, where the same Kabbalist claims that “everything is delivered to the deed of man, and according to his talent he will draw within them50 inestimable influx which cannot be described, all in accordance with the preponderance of the deed, because he acts in accordance with the Torah and the commandments, because of the seizure of the soul, spirit, higher soul of emanation, to Torah and commandment.”51
Cordovero is quite a traditional Kabbalist, a synthetic and systematic mind who summarizes many of the earlier impulses found in Kabbalistic literature, and thus he had an impact on later developments, more preeminently Hasidism. He presents no paradoxical or negative understandings of the Torah, but a series of Kabbalistic models that allow a much more positive and activist attitude toward the Bible. In place of the rather illusive role of the negative aspects attributed to the Torah, the different models—theurgical, magical, and ecstatic—contrived to build different understandings of the Torah, of its study and its interpretations, which only marginally hosted negative appreciations of the Torah. A presentation of the strong interpreter is well deserved by the view of the Besht’s grandson, R. Barukh of Medzibezh, who thus describes the study of the Torah:
The principle is that everyone has first to hear in his heart … and afterwards to study what the heart is hearing … God said ‘anokhiy, and it is incumbent on man to hear in his heart and afterwards in the Torah … They52 have seen what has been heard, namely they have seen in the Torah what they heard in their heart … He brings a blessing within the Torah and illumines within it, and this is the meaning of the Torah that is studied for its sake, to illumine in the Torah what he has heard in his heart … and if he did so, then the Torah will illumine in his soul, and this is the meaning of [the dictum] “the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Torah and Israel are one.”53
Over the centuries, some of the Jewish masters have heard much in their soul, apparently what they had first learned from books, and were able subsequently to illumine the Torah. Or, to resort to an expression by R. Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, the righteous are “drawing down, generation after generation, allusions and speeches, according to the need, and innovate a new meaning.”54 Indeed, the Bible ceased to be an ancient and revered book, but was a live document, whose revelations are still continuing, as the same Hasidic master put it, following Ha-Shelah: “The reason for our blessing of the Torah by [the formula] ‘He gives the Torah’ is to show that the Holy One, blessed be He, is still revealing the Torah as He did then, in antiquity, at the holy assembly, at Mount Sinai.”55
The feeling of the Hasidic master is that the revelation of the Torah was not only a historical event, the promulgation of a law, but a spiritual trigger that had continued to inform religious life ever since. This has been made clear by R. Yehudah Arieh Leib of Gur, who asserts that God “has given the Torah to the sons of Israel, and in addition to it He really implanted within us the power of the Torah, so that man will be able to innovate words of Torah and to combine the Torah letters.”56
The Kabbalistic and Hasidic forms of plenitude do not suit the Kafkaesque negativity, and I assume that this is also the case with Derrida’s emphasis on absence and indeterminate openness of the text, which are related to a limitless delay of the significant. If infinity is found in the fact of textuality, for Derrida it is mainly a matter of a fluidity that will never reach a stable meaning even for the one interpreter, so that we may assume a continuous process of relative frustration, in comparison with the renewed Kabbalistic readings, which assume an infinite number of stable meanings, each of them pertinent to one of the Israelites, as we saw in Chapter 3. For modern deconstruction, undecidability is the main form of encounter with the fluid text, and this undecidability creates a cumulative infinity. Skeptical as Derrida is that a finite object can incorporate infinity, he would resist the Kabbalistic claims of the positive infinite in the Torah in the way the Kabbalists understood it.
As Jonathan Smith has pointed out, the canon, one of the main concepts that have informed our discussions, should be understood against the background of two processes: closure, which defines the corpus that becomes canonical, and ingenuity, which is related to the exegesis that opens the closed text to new and particular situations.57 The emergence of the state of closure demands, especially in the case of groups active in many different religious, intellectual, historical, and social circumstances, efforts at adjustment, and this is one of the reasons for the proliferation of radical hermeneutics, as represented by such a diversity of eccentric exegetical methods. Their application prevented what has been called the closural reading, allowing, to resort to Derrida’s phrase, “an infinite and infinitely surprising reading.”58 But assuming, as some of the Kabbalists did, that they were infused by a primordial type of interpretation, they would not easily reject the closural reading as far as the individual is concerned, allowing to community a much more open type of reading. I would like, however, to compare modern deconstruction’s emphasis on the possibility of an infinity of readings to the Kabbalistic emphasis: the latter emerges in many cases from the assumption that the readers are assuming that some of the main features of a text are not noted in the text itself—the vowel signs, for example. Even more so when the combination of letters is involved. When doing so, the reader is coming with a certain semantic cargo that elicits a particular manipulation of the linguistic material. The Kabbalist, like all readers of the Torah scroll, operates with an unfinished text—indeed, with less unfinished texts when other books written in Hebrew are concerned. Because of his contribution to the shaping of the text, the Kabbalist brings a certain fugitive truth, which nevertheless is neither an undecidable reading nor an approach to the text as indeterminate.
Not so the modern deconstructive reader: for him the text is a given, and his experience of reading consists in a discovery of gaps, absences, and tensions inherent in the text. Like the author himself, the modern interpreter is caught within the fluxing net of language and textuality. The predetermined texts, appearing as a given to the modern reader, create the feeling that he is a prisoner of a huge comprehensive textual system that is overwhelming on one side and fluid on the other. Despite the belief in the absoluteness of the canonical text, the traditional readers who have been described above felt the liberty to innovate by approaching the interpreted texts by means of rather aggressive exegetical techniques. It seems that belief in a supreme author does not have to inhibit a rich reading of the sacred text but may allow exegetical radical moves that would otherwise be much more difficult. This type of religious imaginaire was, in my opinion, crucial for shaping the possibility of the strong reader, one who is so absorbed in the interpretive project that he would efface himself. World-absorbing and divine-absorbing concepts of texts were conceived by thinkers and interpreters who were already absorbed by the study of those texts.