While we are seeing, our eye is excluded from our field of vision. While we are thinking, our mind is excluded from our field of thought. While we are receiving a given world, our receptivity is excluded from the field of givens. Only in reflection does our eye see an eye, does our mind know a mind, does our receptivity receive itself as a given.

So, reflecting on Jacob’s Ladder:

The excluded Da’at d’Assiah is named Nefesh.

The excluded Da’at d’Yetzirah is named Ruach.

The excluded Da’at d’Beriah is named Neshamah.

The excluded Da’at d’Atzilut is named Chayah.

Nefesh receives the givens of Sefirot d’Assiyah in pshat comprehension.

Ruach receives the givens of Sefirot d’Yetzirah in remez participation.

Neshamah receives the givens of Sefirot d’Beriah in drash sourcehood, revealed from Ayin, ex nihilo.

Chayah receives the givens of Sefirot d’Atzilut in sod luminance.

While we are seeing, we focus on our given field of vision, but we are ambiently aware that this is only a part of what can be seen in the visible world. While we are thinking, we focus on our given field of thought, but we are ambiently aware that this is only a part of what can be thought in the intelligible world. While we are receiving a given world, we focus on our given field of revelations, but we are ambiently aware that this is only a partial disclosure of this given world, and worlds beyond this, to whom, in whom we belong.

Behind and beyond the excluded subject is more, infinitely more, absolutely more.

Lately, I have been reading Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives.

While I’ve been reading his writing, I haven’t gotten a sense of who is is as a person. Mainly I just knew his reputation as the successor of Scholem.

So I started digging around and found an inspiring video about him.

It is filled with amazing quotes, and I want to excerpt some of them here, to share them and to have them for later, when I need to quote Idel.

And if someone looks for only the constant, like theology, he doesn’t see the change, and doesn’t see what, in my opinion, people who live Judaism are thinking about.

And Kabbalah is the same.

They have a process, and this process is going on all the time. You don’t have a static topic. That’s a lesson that I learned. Yeah I’m studying the text, time and again, but I cannot study exactly the same because there are new texts coming. And new interpretations.

Can you imagine someone would say, I know science. I know literature. You will laugh. You’ll say, what is the meaning? What do you know? You know something.

With Kabbalah it is exactly the same. … I know better some forms of Kabbalah, less other forms of Kabbalah. And they are different. And I don’t attempt to … offer an answer which unifies.

Same thing happens today a lot in the popular Kabbalah. People are teaching and making millions by telling people what is Kabbalah, that we know. I am very far away from it. Meaning, I don’t attempt to simplify. Because that would be a betrayal of what I know.

What I am saying is, I don’t know Kabbalah.

There is no Kabbalah.

My experience of reading texts is that you should come with less questions to the text, and allow the text to speak to you. That’s what I call “freeing the text from the agenda of scholarship.”

I was in Romania all the time up to ’63. ’63 August I arrived here. When I came to Israel I didn’t know anything about Israel. I knew French. I couldn’t read Hebrew. I couldn’t read English. People were very welcoming.

There were also a lot of other shocks. For example, coming from a dull intellectual background of the Communists, I discovered books on yoga. I bought immediately. Whatever money I had, I bought books. Ten books on Hindu philosophy and yoga.

So, that was a huge discovery: the fact that you are free — intellectually free — that’s amazing. I mean, in Romania I knew there are things you don’t say. It’s dangerous to say. So something — meaning, very, very powerful. Later, I understood how powerful it was. To understand that you are free, it’s an amazing discovery.

First, my reading of the Hebrew Bible and Talmudic literature is a literature which is not theological.

Let me attempt to define theology. Normally theology is considered to be a systematic description — meaning, what is theo-logy? Logos? That’s… we discuss the abstract part of it. That is systematic. That’s coherent.

In the Bible it’s not so coherent. Jewish philosophers, or Kabbalists, infused in the observance of the commandments a variety of meanings. For them it was not robotical. It was to participate in the divine life, in the cosmic life, in the inner life, by the commandments.

So that seems to me to be the emphasis found in Kabbalah and not the theological.

Theology can exist in Kabbalah, but that is, how do you call it, subsidiary. It’s not absent — I don’t claim it’s absent — I claim it’s subsidiary.

Theology was not the dominant modus of thinking in the Bible and in Rabbinic Judaism. What was more important is: what do you do?

Since my emphasis is not so on the abstract part, the theological part, but much more on what those people did and how they lived — the rituals, the techniques, the experiences. That is to write not only about texts, about the past; you’re writing about personalities, living personalities, who had an impact on others.

I spoke with the Kabbalists. Things which was a little bit forbidden. I didn’t care.

I attempted to see how the text is performed.

I can see that the topics I’m dealing with are living topics.

I emphasize phenomenology because I believe that otherwise it’s not only dry, it’s not productive to write without it. For instance, I don’t believe there’s one, single good definition of ecstasy. Ecstatic experiences are part of something bigger.

…Look, I said to free the text from theology. Like not to be very simplistic, assuming that two different people reading the same text will have the same reaction. Texts are very complex, and people are seeing different issues, not because they have an agenda, but because they’re different from their character. I’m interested, by saying “free” to allow the surfacing of the complexity. Texts speak about the author, they speak about the period, they speak about the field. They speak about the audience.

From this complex melody everyone is listening to something different.

I believe it’s important to see all those different aspects of complexity and not to say “what’s important is what is the message,” as if there is one message encoded there.

The text is not a mailbox.

It is much more complex.

The language is changing. Even the person writing at the beginning of the book, is changing in comparison to what happened in the end.

That’s life.

I find this video liberating.

Every religion has its orthodoxy or orthodoxies.

But ultimately these orthodoxies are a formal consensus on matters beyond the institutions, just as current scientific orthodoxies are consensus on nature. What is considered true refers to realities that transcend knowledge.

If we believe — as I do — that religious dogma is a kind of truth about realities that transcend truth (especially objective, factual truth — we cannot approach these truths as closed and final — something passed down — an understanding to which we must conform ourselves.

History certainly confirms this. Only mythologized history is simple or coherent.

There is no simplicity or order in the past — not for us.

Our ancestors might have experienced meaning from which that we have become alienated. But we will never repossess that meaning by returning to past forms of life.

We must learn what we can from the past, to help us retrieve meaning from the future.

I love that Idel calls Kabbalah a “living topic”. I call it a subject. It is a medium of understanding, carrying messages (content) about realities that transcend it.

I just learned of a newish book by Idel called The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah.

This volume addresses the complex topic of the preeminent status of the divine feminine power, to be referred also as Female, within the theosophical structures of many important Kabbalists, Sabbatean believers, and Hasidic masters. This privileged status is part of a much broader vision of the Female as stemming from a very high root within the divine world, then She was emanated and constitutes the tenth, lower divine power, and even in this lower state She is sometimes conceived of governing this world and as equal to the divine Male. Finally, She is conceived of as returning to Her original place in special moments, the days of Sabbath, the Jewish Holidays or in the eschatological era. Her special dignity is sometime related to Her being the telos of creation, and as the first entity that emerged in the divine thought, which has been later on generated. In some cases, an uroboric theosophy links the Female Malkhut, directly to the first divine power, Keter. The author points to the possible impact of some of the Kabbalistic discussions on conceptualizations of the feminine in the Renaissance period.

I have quite a bit of negative feedback from Kabbalah experts on my latest dialectic Sefirot design. But the premise described above is precisely what that design is saying.

I think I will print it.

From Gershom Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”:

There is something in the Kabbalah like a transformative insight about which it remains doubtful if one might be able to signify it better than as magical or utopian. This insight discloses all worlds, even the secret of ain sof itself, to the place on which I stand. One need not deal with what is above and what is below, one need only (only!) see through the point where one stands oneself. For this transformative insight all worlds are, as one of the greatest Kabbalist has said, nothing but “names that are sketched on the paper of God’s essence.”

This seems to agree with the insight the seventh aphorism just induced in me.

The intuited truths I have struggled for decades to articulate clearly and coherently can be said with perfect clarity, coherence and luminosity in Kabbalistic language. But to ears who have not learned to hear it, this language is worse than foreign. It is the most senseless babble.

No. It is even worse than nonsense. It is meaning-sucking antisense that threatens reason. It is communicable insanity. It is a deadly mind virus, leaked from the inner laboratory of a secret laboratory, hidden under a ruin of a destroyed laboratory, concealed within a mirage of a long rebuilt laboratory. But the laboratory itself has escaped.

Yetzirah enworlds. Yetzirah is known only by its enworlding, and its enworlding is known only by its fruit: the givens of our “lived experience” and its consequent truth.

Empathy: Yetzeros.

Anything with graspable form, whether material thing, objective fact, or “subjective” phenomenon is of Assiyah.

Here “subjective” belong in quotes, because subject, properly understood, is entirely of Yetzirah. As a hand cannot grasp itself, as seeing is not itself visible, as hearing is not itself audible, the forming of Yetzirah is not itself a comprehensible form. (Comprehension cannot be comprehended, only existentially apprehended. But our apprehensions, reduced to events — if we are alert, receptive and diligent — can be understood in ways that open new possibilities of participatory knowing: Da’at d’Yetzirah.)

Beriah creates. Beriah does not form what is already here (or rather, more precisely, Beriah forms through/as Yetzirah.) Beriah creates finitude from its own infinity, which to us looks like something from nothing. Creation ex nihilo.

A profound event in Yetzirah rebirths us into a new world. We find ourselves reborn in a new rebirth of Malchut, a.k.a. Kingdom. This event allows Yetzirah to shine into the new life through Keter d’Assiyah, a.k.a. Crown, or if you prefer, Halo.

But multiple events of this kind demonstrates in the most undeniably immediate way that Yetzirah can enworld us myriad ways. What kind of reality is this that can bear forth entire worlds, each with its own shocking ontological novelties?

Shocking ontological novelty — inconceivable prior to its revelation, masked by oblivion — but thereafter impossible to re-obliviate — bringing forth new realities, new distinctions, new understandings that instantly recrystallize All in new brilliant clarity — from the depths of apparent Nothing! From Ayin.

Now — and only now — can we catch “sight” of Keter d’Yetzirah which opens the gates to the Kingdom of Malchut d’Beriah, from whom the brilliant halo of Keter d’Yetzirah, implodes forth. This is the ineclipsible light of exnihilism.