I Study the Kabbalah, and Finally Become a Doctor
LET ME SPEAK AT SOME LENGTH about this divine science. “Kabbalah,” in its broadest sense, means tradition. It includes not only secret forms of knowledge that may not be taught publicly, but also a method for deriving new laws, from both the ones in the Holy Scripture and from the foundational laws that Moses is supposed to have communicated orally on Mount Sinai. In its narrower meaning, “Kabbalah” refers only to the tradition of occult sciences.1
These are divided into two groups: theoretical Kabbalah and practical Kabbalah. The former includes the doctrine of God, the properties that His manifold names express, the genesis of the world [127] through the different stages of His restricting of His own endlessly perfect Being, and the relation of all things to Him, the Highest Being. This last doctrine teaches how one can use the manifold names of God, which have special effects on and relationships to objects in nature, to affect these objects at will. The holy names are not simply regarded as arbitrary signs; rather they are treated as natural ones as well. Thus, everything done with such signs necessarily has an effect on the objects to which they refer.
Originally, the Kabbalah was apparently nothing but psychology, physics, ethics, politics, and the like presented through symbols and hieroglyphics in fables and allegories, the secret meanings of which were revealed only to those who had some aptitude for reading them.2 Over time, perhaps as a result of tumultuous events, the secret meanings were lost. The signs themselves, rather than their referents, became the focus. Yet the signs clearly had to signify something. And so people began to use their imaginative powers to recover secret meanings that had been lost long ago. [128] Students of the Kabbalah identified the remotest associations between signs and things, until the Kabbalah finally degenerated into the art of running wild with reason, or more precisely, into an art of building systematic knowledge on a foundation of idiosyncratic fantasies.3 The truly promising aspect of the Kabbalah’s aims, namely, to affect all of nature without limitations—along with the audacity and ceremony in its self-presentation—naturally had a great impact on zealous types whom sciences and, above all, philosophical principles had not enlightened.
The main work for anyone who wants to study the Kabbalah is the Zohar. It was written in a very high-flown style, in Syriac.4 All other Kabbalistic writings should be regarded as commentaries on, or selections from, the Zohar.
There are two main Kabbalistic systems: Rabbi Moses Cordovero’s and Rabbi Isaac Luria’s.5 The former is more real, in the sense that it draws more on reason. The latter, for its part, is more formal, in the sense that the structure of its system is more complete. The newer generation of Kabbalists [129] prefers the latter system to the former, because they see having no basis in reason as a positive virtue, a precondition for any authentic Kabbalah. Rabbi Cordavero’s major work is Pardes, or Paradise.6 Rabbi Luria produced only a few scattered writings, but his disciple Rabbi Hayyim Vital composed a large work under the title Etz Hayyim (The Tree of Life), which contains his teacher’s whole system. Jews deem this book so holy that they won’t permit it to be printed.7 Needless to say, I found Rabbi Moses’ Kabbalah to be more appealing than Rabbi Isaac’s. But this was not an opinion I was allowed to express.8
After this digression on the nature of the Kabbalah, let me now return to my story. Having learned that the local assistant rabbi or preacher was a Kabbalah expert, I made his acquaintance and sat in the seat next to his at the synagogue as steps toward reaching my goal. When I saw that he would read in a little [130] book after the prayers, always taking care to stash it away immediately afterward, I grew very curious about what it was.
After the preacher had gone home, I retrieved the book from its nook. I recognized it as a Kabbalistic work and decided to hold on to it. I would hide with it in a corner of the synagogue until everyone had left and the synagogue was closed, then creep out of my hiding place and read in my precious book for hours, without even thinking of food or drink, until, finally, the evening doorkeeper opened the synagogue.
The book was titled Sha’arei Kedusha or The Gates of Holiness.9 Leaving aside its fanatical and exaggerated elements, it contained in brief form the main doctrines of Kabbalistic psychology. I did with it what the Talmudists say Rabbi Meier, who had a heretic for a teacher, used to do: “If he found a pomegranate, he would eat the fruit and throw away the peel.”10 [131]
I finished the book in a few days. Instead of satisfying my curiosity, the experience intensified it. I wanted to read more books of this type. I was, however, too shy to tell the preacher, so I decided to write him a letter. I explained how much this holy knowledge appealed to me and fervently asked him to help me by providing me with Kabbalistic books.
Soon I received a very warm reply from the preacher. He praised my enthusiasm for the holy science, assuring me that such enthusiasm amidst so little encouragement was an obvious sign that my soul came from Olam Aziloth (the world of immediate divine emanation), unlike the souls of mere Talmudists, which have their origin in Olam Jezire (the world of creation).11 Furthermore, he promised me he would do everything in his power to supply me with books. [132]
Because the Kabbalah was his main pursuit at the time, he needed his Kabbalistic books close by, so he couldn’t lend them to me. But he did let me come to his house to study them whenever I pleased.
I could not have been happier. I gratefully accepted the preacher’s offer and practically lived at his house, poring over Kabbalistic books day and night.
Two notions, in particular, caused me the greatest difficulty. One was that of the Tree, the representation of divine emanations and their complex intertwining. The second was that of God’s beard, the hairs of which were categorized into many complex classes, each having its own unique characteristics, and each hair representing a special derivation of God’s grace. However much I tried, I couldn’t make any rational sense of this.
My constant presence turned out to be a serious inconvenience to the preacher. He had recently [133] married a very attractive young woman, and because his wretched little house consisted of just one room, which served as the living room, study, and bedroom, and because I would stay up all night, my transcendental interests frequently clashed with his earthly ones.
As a result, he began to devise a way to get rid of the aspiring Kabbalist. Once he said to me, “It must be a terrible inconvenience for you to spend your time here with me, away from your own home, on account of the books. In God’s name, you can take individual books to study as you please.”
I was happy to agree. Indeed, I took one book after another back to my house and studied them until I thought I had learned the entire Kabbalah. I was not content, though, with understanding its principles and multifarious systems. I also attempted to make proper use of them. There was no passage in the Holy [134] Scripture or Talmud whose secret meaning I couldn’t decipher by skillfully using Kabbalistic principles.
One book, titled Sha’arei Orah, was particularly helpful in this.12 The book enumerates the names of the ten Sefirot, the main subject of the Kabbalah, each having a hundred or more names. Thus, I was able to find in every word of a biblical verse or Talmudic passage the name of one Sefirah or another, and because I now knew the characteristics of each Sefirah and how they related to each other, I could easily derive a cumulative effect from the combination of names.
Let me illustrate this process with a brief example. I found that the name Jehova denotes the six highest Sefirot (not including the first three) as the person of the godhead generis masculini. The word Koh, meanwhile, signifies the Shekhinah (the “indwelling” of God in the world) or the person of the godhead generis feminini. The word amar, in turn, [135] refers to the uniting of genders, or sexual congress. I therefore interpreted the words Koh amar Jehova13 in the following way: Jehova unites with the Shekhinah, a reading that would be genuinely Kabbalistic. Because this passage is in the Holy Scripture, I thought to myself nothing less than that while I said the words, and kept their secret meaning in mind, an actual union of the divine married couple would take place, from which the whole world could expect a blessing. What can stop the debauchery of an imagination that isn’t held back by reason?
I didn’t find my way as easily in the Kabbalah Ma’asith, or practical Kabbalah, as I did in its theoretical counterpart. Though he didn’t boast of it publicly, the preacher did tell people in private that he was a master in this area, too. He made a special point of claiming to be: roeh weeno neroh (to see everything without being seen by others), i.e., the power to make himself invisible.
As a young man, I was particularly eager to learn this trick so that I could carry out certain acts [136] of mischief against my comrades without getting in trouble. I also devised a plan for keeping my malicious mother-in-law in check. I thus begged and pleaded with the preacher to share the secret, assuring him that I intended only to do good deeds and prevent evil ones. The preacher granted my wish, but he stipulated that I would have to go through preparatory exercises. I would have to fast for three straight days, performing several Ichudim on each day. These are Kabbalistic prayer formulas whose secret purpose is to bring about sexual unions in the intellectual world, which, in turn, are supposed to promote certain effects in the physical world.
Having eagerly carried out these preparations, I uttered the incantation that he had taught me and now firmly believed I was invisible. I immediately hurried off into the Beth Hamidras, or the Jewish academy, went up to one of my peers, and gave him a good slap across the face. He was a robust sort and repaid me [137] with interest. I didn’t understand how he could see me, for I had followed the preacher’s prescriptions with great precision. Still, I determined that I must have neglected something without realizing it, and so I decided to repeat the test. Only I didn’t want to risk having my ear boxed again. Instead, I went to the academy merely to observe my classmates. But as soon as I walked in, one of them approached me and showed me a difficult passage in the Talmud that he wanted me to explain. I stood there stunned and utterly disconsolate over my dashed hopes.
Afterward, I went back to the preacher and told him how my experiments had failed. He said, unblushingly and rather aggressively: “If you followed all my instructions, then the only explanation is that you are not suited for this cloaking of the visible body.” Deeply [138] saddened, I had to give up all hope of making myself invisible.
This thwarted hope was soon followed by another disappointment. In the preface to the Book of Raziel, which that angel is said to have given to our original father Adam (as he was being banished from paradise), I found the promise that whoever keeps the book in his house will be protected against fire.14 Yet when a fire broke out in the neighborhood not long afterward, my house, too, was burned, and the angel Raziel himself must have flown up to heaven in a chariot of fire.
Not satisfied with this surface-level knowledge of the Kabbalah, I wanted to penetrate into its spirit. Since I understood that this science, if it were worthy of the name, should contain nothing other than the secrets of nature—however cloaked in fables and allegories—I tried to uncover these secrets, and thereby deepen my knowledge to the level of rational knowledge. [139]
Back then, however, I could achieve this knowledge only in a very partial way, because I had very little idea about what science as such actually was. Nevertheless, by thinking things through on my own, I was able to come up with many ideas about how this science works. And so, for instance, I was quickly able to explain the first principle from which practitioners of Kabbalistic science commonly proceed.
Before the world was created, they say, the Divine Being occupied the whole of infinite space to the exclusion of all else. But then God wanted to create a world to reveal those of His properties that were intended for beings other than Himself. To this end, He withdrew into the midpoint of His perfection, whereupon He sent into the empty space He had thus created ten concentric circles of light. From these emerged various figures (Parzoffim) and gradations, all the way to the sensory world of the present moment.15
I couldn’t imagine how these words could be true if understood literally, as most Kabbalists [140] understand them.16 Nor could I imagine that there was time before the world was created, for I knew from my More Newochim that time is purely a modification of the world, and, consequently, inconceivable without it. I could not picture how God could occupy a space, even an infinite one, nor how He, an infinitely perfect Being, could restrict His own perfection in a circular way to His midpoint.17
Instead, I thought of all this as follows: God is not prior to the world in terms of time, but rather in accordance with His Being as a necessary condition of the world. All things outside of God are necessarily dependent on Him, in both their essence and their existence. Thus, the creation of the world can be conceived neither as bringing forth something out of nothing, nor as the formation of something independent of God, but only as a bringing forth out of God Himself. And because beings [141] are of different degrees of perfection, we can only suppose to explain their genesis as restrictions of different degrees of God’s Divine Being. Because this restriction must be conceived of as extending from the Infinite Being to materiality, we must imagine the beginning of the restriction figuratively: as the middle point (the lowest point) of infinity.
The Kabbalah is, in fact, nothing other than an extension of Spinozism,18 which explains not only the genesis of the world through the restriction of Divine Being but also traces the genesis of every kind of being and the relation of each to the others back to a particular property of God. As the ultimate subject and the ultimate cause of all beings, God is the Ensoph:19 the infinite, about which, taken as such, nothing can be predicated. Yet when it comes to the infinite Beings, positive properties are attributed to Him; the Kabbalists have reduced these to ten, which they call the ten Sefirot.
The Book of Pardes by Rabbi Moses Cordovero examines the [142] question of whether we should regard these Sefirot as the divinity itself. It is easy to see, however, that this investigation is no more difficult when carried out with respect to the divinity than with respect to any other being.
The ten circles made me think of the ten categories of Aristotle, which I knew from reading the above-mentioned More Newochim—the most universal predicates of things, without which nothing can be thought, etc.20 In the strictest sense, these categories are logical forms that refer not to a merely logical object, but rather to a real one, and without them that object cannot be conceived. They are grounded in the subject, but only through their relation to a real object do they become an object of consciousness. And thus, they represent the Sefirot, which, to be sure, belong to the Ensoph itself, but whose reality is revealed only through their particular relation to, and effect on, objects in nature, [143] and whose number can be variously determined from different perspectives.
By using this mode of explanation, I brought some unpleasantness upon myself. For the Kabbalists maintain that the Kabbalah is a divine science, not a human one. As a result, they also maintain that trying to understand its secrets in accordance with nature and reason debases it. The more rational my explanations became, the angrier the Kabbalists grew, for they believed that the purely divine was precisely that which made no rational sense.
And so I had to keep my interpretation to myself. I brought the work I wrote on these topics with me to Berlin, and I have preserved it as a monument of the human mind’s striving for perfection, regardless of all the obstacles placed in its way.
Yet I was still not satisfied. I wanted to encounter science in its natural [144] light, not cloaked in fables. I had already learned to read German, albeit quite poorly. But how was I supposed to find any German books in Lithuania?
Fortunately for me, I learned that the chief rabbi of S. had spent time in H. during his youth, where he had acquired German and gained some knowledge of philosophy and the sciences. I also found out that he still pursued philosophical and scientific knowledge, though in secret, and that he had a large library of German books.
I therefore decided to make a pilgrimage to this chief rabbi in S., so that I could beg him for a few books.21 Without any thought to transportation or travel costs (I was quite used to such trips, having once gone thirty miles on foot in order to look at a tenth-century Hebrew-peripatetic-philosophical book), and without a word to my family, I set off for S. in the middle of winter.
As soon as I arrived, I went to the chief rabbi, told him what I wanted, and pleaded with him to help me. He was more than a [145] little surprised, for in the thirty-one years since his return from Germany, not a single person had made a request of this kind. He promised to lend me several old German books. The most valuable of them was a book about optics and Sturm’s Physics.22
I was so grateful to this fine chief rabbi that I was at a loss for words. I packed a couple of the books away and headed home, delighted.
When I had read the books, it was as though my eyes had suddenly been opened. I thought I now held the key to all of nature’s secrets, because I knew how storms, dew, rain, and so forth came about. I looked down on everyone who lacked such knowledge, laughing at their prejudices and superstitions, and offering to disabuse them of their false ideas and illuminate their minds.
But I did not always succeed. I once tried to teach a Talmudist [146] that the earth is round, and that we have antipodes. He raised the objection that the people at the antipodes would fall off! I set about showing that bodies do not fall in a certain direction into empty space, but rather toward the center of the earth; our ideas of above and below really correspond to farther from or closer to this point. None of it helped. The Talmudist stuck to his position and insisted that my claims made no sense.
I went for a walk with several of my friends, and it so happened that a goat was lying in our path. I hit the goat several times with my walking stick; in response, my friends accused me of brutality. I shot back: “What is brutality? Do you think that the goat feels pain when I beat it with my stick? You are quite wrong. According to Sturm, who was a Cartesian, the goat is merely a machine.”23 [147]
My friends laughed heartily and said: “Can’t you hear the goat crying out when you beat it?” I replied: “Yes, of course, it makes noise, but when I beat a drum, it does, too.”
This answer astonished my friends, and soon the whole city had learned that my mind had gone soft, for I had argued that a goat was a drum.
The good chief rabbi of S. later sent me two medical books: Kulm’s Anatomical Tables24 and Voit’s Gaziopilatium.25 The latter is an excellent medical dictionary, which defines and applies in brief concepts from all areas of medicine. For every disease, one finds a definition, its cause, its symptoms, cures, and even proper prescriptions. The book was a real treasure for me. I studied it thoroughly, believing that I now had in my possession all of medical science, certainly enough to become a full-fledged doctor. [148]
Not wanting to content myself with theory, I resolved to make practical use of my knowledge. I visited patients and diagnosed illnesses and their causes from the symptoms and circumstances. By God, I even wrote out prescriptions. The whole thing was quite comical. If a patient told me a few of the symptoms he was feeling, I would diagnose the disease and then draw conclusions about the remaining symptoms. If the sick person then said he didn’t have those symptoms, I would stubbornly insist that they must be present as well.
ME: You have a headache.
PATIENT: No.
ME: But you must have a headache.
Because many symptoms are common to a number of illnesses, I often settled on a quid pro quo. I could never keep the prescriptions straight in my mind, which meant that when I wanted to prescribe something, I had to go home first and consult my Gaziopilatium. [149]
Finally, I began to concoct medicines following Voit’s guidelines. One can imagine how that went. At least it had the happy consequence of making me realize that I hadn’t grasped much of what goes into being a practicing doctor. [150]
1 Maimon’s account of Kabbalah was the most informed and untendentious account to appear in a European language up until that point.
2 Maimon draws upon Maimonides’ account of the allegorical transmission and subsequent loss of the mysteries of the Torah in Guide 1:71: 175–76. On Maimon’s theory of Jewish mysticism, see Moshe Idel, “On Solomon Maimon and Kabbalah,” Kabbalah 28 (2012).
3 Maimon’s account here of the degeneration of Kabbalah from the symbolic representation of natural truths to the free play of symbols now divorced from their original referents would seem to be an adaptation of Moses Mendelssohn’s theory of the origin of idolatry in hieroglyphics, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power in Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush with commentary by Alexander Altmann (University Press of New England, 1983), pp. 107–17. Cf. Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry, 168–70 and passim, which contains a comprehensive comparison between Mendelssohn’s and Maimon’s views on philosophy and Judaism.
4 That is, Aramaic, or rather a medieval Hebrew-Aramaic pastiche.
5 In Maimon’s spelling: “Kordawera” and “Loria.”
6 Pardes Rimonim [An Orchard of Pomegrnates] is a systematic exposition of the Kabbalah by the prominent Safed Kabbalist, Rabbi Moses Cordovero (1522–70), which Cordovero completed before the age of twenty-seven.
7 In fact, by 1792, three editions of Etz Hayyim had appeared in print over the previous decade. Maimon’s colleague, Isaac Satanow (1732–1804), was involved in the printing of one of these editions.
8 The classic twentieth-century account of these sixteenth-century figures is to be found in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1941), though subsequent scholarship, especially that of Moshe Idel, has significantly revised and complicated the picture Scholem drew. Maimon’s account is, yet again, brief but accurate and perhaps the first of its kind in German.
9 A major work of kabbalistic ethics by Rabbi Hayyim Vital.
10 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Hagiga, 15b.
11 Olam ha-Azilut is the highest of the four kabbalistics worlds, while Olam ha-Yetzira is the third world in this order.
12 The book was composed by Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla in thirteenth-century Spain, and Maimon was not alone in using it as a kind of dictionary or primer of kabbalistic symbolism; for an English translation, see Joseph Gikatilla, Gates of Light, trans. Avi Weinstein (New York: Harper Collins, 1994).
13 Literally, “Thus said God.”
14 A textbook of practical kabbala, or magic, which dates back to, at least, the twelfth century.
15 The last paragraph is succinct statement of the Kabbalistic doctrine of zimzum (divine self-limitation).
16 Maimon’s claim that most Kabbalists understood the zimzum literally is highly contentious.
17 Although he will later go into extraordinary detail in explicating Moses Maimonides’ twelfth-century philosophical classic Guide for the Perplexed, whose Hebrew title he transliterates as “More Newochim,” Maimon here simply assumes that the reader is already familiar with the work.
18 Maimon is here responding to Jacobi’s claim that “the Kabbalah is nothing but undeveloped or newly confused Spinozism” (Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings, 234).
19 Maimon had already endorsed the view of God as the material cause of the world (i.e., as the subject in which the world inheres) in his early Kabbalistic manuscript, Ma’ase Livnat ha-Sapir. See Melamed, “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism.”
20 For Aristotle’s original exposition of the ten categories, see Categories, 1b25–2a4. Maimonides does not enumerate the categories in his Guide of the Perplexed (More Newochim), however his contemporary translator Samuel Ibn Tibbon did in the “Explanation of Foreign Terms,” which was appended to his translation and included in the 1743 Jessnitz edition Maimon almost certainly read. In 1794, Maimon himself would publish a book on Aristotle’s Categories.
21 The nineteenth-century historian Joseph Fünn identified the enlightened Rabbi Maimon visited as Rabbi Shimon ben Mordekhai of Slonim, in Safah Le-Neemanim (Vilna, 1881), p. 94. (N.b.: Parenthetical aside about walking “thirty miles to look at a tenth-century Hebrew-peripatetic-philosophical book,” (italics added) is a characteristic pun. If it was truly a tenth-century work, it was unlikely to have been peripatetic, that is Aristotelian. Recently, Israel Bartal discovered the diary of Jeremey Bentham’s travels in Poland. The entry from December 9th, 1787 apparently describes the very same library of the Rabbi of Slonim. See Bartal, “Lovers of Books: Jeremy Bentham and Rabbi Samson ben Mordechai of Slonim,” in Chut Shel Chen: Shai le Chava Turniavsky (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Institute), Bartal, Galit Hassan-Rokem et. al. eds., pp. 207–26.
22 Probably, Johann Christoph Sturm, Kurzer Begriff der Physic oder Naturlehre, Hamburg 1713.
23 Sturm, Kurzer Begriff der Physic, 848. We are idebted to Florian Ehrensperger for this reference. Cf. Descartes’ letter to Henry More from Feb. 5th, 1649 in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, 365–66 (AT 5:276–78).
24 Johnann Adam Kulmus (1689–1745), Anatomische Tabellen (Danzig 1725).
25 Johann Jacob Woyt, Gazophylacium medico-physicum, Leipzig 1709.