Category Archives: Religion

Language of reception

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Philosophy

I’ve returned to an old line thought this morning. I’m thinking about synesis, “together-being”.

In particular I’m focusing on one line from a post from last year, “Threefold Synesis”, where I expanded the sense of being from the initial two, to three, the first being:

“…the together-being of the object of experience. This object may be a perceived thing or a conceived idea.”

I’ve awkwardly defined “enception” as a psychic capacity to take (-ceive) some particular type of ontological given — a sensorily given perception or intellectually given concept. Without an adequate enception, a person is oblivious to what would otherwise be received in perception or conception. Instead of something, there is nothing given because nothing can be received, and there is only imperceptible, inconceivable nothingness.

I like reception language because it connects with Kabbalah.

From Etymonline:

Jewish mystic philosophy,” 1520s, also quabbalah, etc., from Medieval Latin cabbala, from Mishnaic Hebrew qabbalah “reception, received lore, tradition,” especially “tradition of mystical interpretation of the Old Testament,” from qibbel “to receive, admit, accept.” Compare Arabic qabala “he received, accepted.” Hence “any secret or esoteric science.

The world received by the language of Kabbalah is given as the enworldment of Malkhut.

As I said last week,

Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.

Confessions of a material misogynist

Biography, Design, Kabbalah, Letterpress

As a kid, I was a bad painter.

While painting, whenever a brush stroke offered me something interesting or beautiful to me, I would be slightly offended, because I hadn’t envisioned and ordered it myself, and then I’d go in and try to make it my own, snuff out whatever had been coming to life with my explicating brush. In Gen-X playground parlance, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”

And that, precisely, was what made my paintings bad and boring and dead to the eye. Good painting is precisely collaboration with the paint’s own ideas. It is a dance of activity and receptivity and reciprocity.

Each medium has its own optimal center of gravity, which is the heart of its own craft — what draws an artist to work in that medium, rather than in another.

So, I was much better suited to pen and ink. I listened better to what ink images suggested to me — maybe because those images emerged from materials more obedient to my hand’s will. These suggestions came from something that felt under my control. Paint defied control, and I was too materially misogynist to accept that kind of resistance. I wanted a nice submissive material, not a raging mood-swinging lunatic with a headful of intuitions of who-knows-what ambushing (ambrushing) me with her visions.

(Damn. Maybe I should try painting again!)

But all this is preface to another idea.

The same thing can happen with ideas — especially symbolic ideas with visual origins.

It is entirely possible to “have” thoughts with their own agency — ideas who can collaborate with you, or who might refuse to collaborate — or who can haunt, mock or reject you. Visually inspired ideas can sit, silently watching, waiting for you to wake up.

There is still the bad painter’s impulse in me. Something intellectually misogynistic in me wants to control my more autonomous ideas with explication — to hold them until they are clearly, explicitly understood — to not stop short at poetic opacity.

But is poetry really opaque? Maybe poetry is unclear because instead of transmitting ideas, or reflecting them, they emit living light of their their own. Poetic speech is autonomous speech.

I feel that this strange dialectic Sefirot I drew is trying to tell me all this.

She started out with someone else, but with me, she started intimating new truths.

I think I will print this new Sefirot.

The plate arrives today.

Some quotes I’ve quoted before:

Bob Dylan:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
But there are no truths outside
The gates of Eden

Nietzsche:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.

Latour, a good Mary-adoring Catholic boy:

We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing?

Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

Nietzsche, again:

Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices — you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!

A last sad reflection on the professional work I am trying to do.

I too love to play with materials, and they are some very strange materials.

The materials I love are perplexities — that soul-wracking migraine liminality, hovering like a heat mirage on the outer edges of intelligibility.

Organizational conflict, chaos, anomie, dysfunction generate collective perplexity. So this is where I go.

My job — though nobody knows it, or even knows how to know it — is to air-drop into perplexed organizations, figure out the lay of the land, waters, forests, and navigate my way out by finding new ways to understand — all the while mapping what I find.

Meanwhile, I am dodging both hostile and friendly fire. I am shouted at: “Show us where you are going! You are supposed to be an expert, so where is your map? What is your route? Show your turn by turn directions!”

Some clients figure it out, and become travel companions.

Some refuse to come along until you’ve shown them what can only be shown when the work has been done.

Some frag you in some muddy ditch somewhere on the edge of a frozen forest. “You are drawing a map as you navigate in places you don’t even know. Not only do you not have the answers, or a solution — you don’t even have questions. You don’t even know the problem!”

ack ack ack ack

One last quote, perhaps my most overquoted quote of all, Wittgenstein’s definition of a philosophical problem:

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

You cannot say this, so I do say it to anyone with ears that hear.

My life sucks, and it is glorious.

Key to Sefirot reference sheet

Kabbalah

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.

They had reasons, too

Ethics, History, Judaism, Politics

People also thought they had good reasons for hating Jewish people in 1933. And in 1821. And in 1894.

The reasons change.

The name for it can only be used once before it must be abandoned in disgrace, and a new one coined.

But the target is constant.

The justifications always look reasonable, or at least convincing from the inside, but they are obviously distorted when seen from outside that fact-bending, standard-doubling field.

The cycles start hot with resentment and hate intoxication. They mellow into thoughtless conformity. (“If every person I respect has this anti-judaism/anti-Jew/anti-Israel/anti-zionism attitude, it must be a respectable attitude to have.”)

People thought they had good reasons for hating zionists (or vaguely sympathizing with zionist-haters) in 2023-2025.

They will all want to pretend you resisted this. But, right now, in the present, I only know a few non-Jews with the humanity, moral integrity and intellectual honesty to look at this situation and say what it is. Everyone else tries to blur, qualify, equivocate, squirm into conformity with the illiberalism they are in bed with. They want to reserve their right to “criticize” so they can remain in good standing with their morally bankrupt peers.

I am observing this blurriness with the sharpest eyesight.

I am watching and learning.

I will never forget how each and every person in my life behaved in this crucial time.

Most do exactly what most people did in 1821, 1894 and 1933 did: Stand quietly on the sidelines trying to look exactly as indifferent as they truly are, harboring a lukewarm mixture of confused conflicting opinions in their loose minds.

Whatever they try to blur, they will never blur the sharp resolution of my memory and of my understanding.

Ten, no more, no less

Kabbalah, Letterpress

I sent off for three plates yesterday. The ultra-thick Crane’s Lettra I ordered is supposed to arrive day after tomorrow. I have studio time scheduled for the week after Christmas.

My first priority is the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet.

Another piece is the (extremely cool-looking) circular Sefirot (Iggulim), which depicts the ray of Divine Light (Kav) penetrating the bubble of finite Nothingness within Infinitude (Tzimtzum), shattering it. I tried a Hebrew-English version, but it looks better with just Hebrew, so that is what I am printing.

And finally, I may be printing a highly unorthodox and questionable — possibly heretical — Sefirot, of extremely suspect origin, which has been sternly rejected by every Kabbalah expert I’ve shown it to. I have found a way to bring it into better alignment with the tradition, though, through strategic use of parentheses, indicating non-sefirah status of some of the beings included in the symbol, bringing the number to yod.

My hope is that what seems unorthodox through the template of convention, might eventually turn out to be postorthodox.

But most notions like this are just wrong.

My guts, though, tell me it is right.

But contrary to mystical romantic prejudice, guts are quite capable of being wrong.

Isolated guts are as unreliable as isolated brains and isolated hearts and isolated hands.

Only when guts and brains and hearts and hands converse in conflictual mutual respect, and unite the whole self in sensus communis of heart, soul and strength — and then, together, a whole community of united bodies convene in conflictual mutual respect and unite in greater sensus communis of hearts, souls and strengths — and with this thoroughgoing imperfect oneness approach the perfect Oneness — now we have a fair chance at clear, meaningful, practical, sharable, common-sensical truth.

Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.

Who is Moshe Idel?

Kabbalah

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.

Sefirot reference sheet

Kabbalah, Letterpress

This is the latest version of my Sefirot reference sheet. I’ve made both layout and content refinements, and I’m close to ordering a plate and scheduling time in the letterpress studio. I may print this over the holidays.

Now that I think about it

Esoterism, Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

A broken faith is experienced by the faith-breaker as revelation of a new meaning with a new story.

One tells a revisionist story that invalidates the old story by which one lived. “I mistakenly believed x-story, but I can see now that y-story is true, and was true all along.”

Broken faith says: “Now that I think about it…” and proceeds to reverse hero and villain, angel and devil, love and hate, virtue and vice, sacred vow and vile enslavement — producing wave after wave of estrangement. Whoever was closest is cast out with the most violence.

A person of weak faith, who lacks social and relational structures to hold them in a steady psychic state is always teetering on the edge of betrayal. Whoever is friends with such a person on one day might meet only an enemy and a ghost the next.

And, by person, as always, I mean any cohesive psychic unit — an individual, a family, a sub-culture, a people, a nation, an inter-national class. Personhood is scalar.

Dialectic transcendence is a whole other kind of change. In it, oppositions are not simply reversed but sublated within higher-order truths. It is not just metanoia, it is t’shuvah.

Dialectic sefirot

Kabbalah, Letterpress

I got the idea for this Sefirot from whoever this is via whoever this is. I might have to letterpress it.

I made some changes to improve the aesthetics and to make the dialectic even denser.

(Note December 21, 2025: I have redrawn the dialectic Sefirot, using parentheses to losslessly bring this rendering into line with the greater tradition, by having no more and no less than ten Sefirot. While I’m appending this post, I also want to note that the “upward” superscending theosophic path is clearly an Apollinian one, and the “downward” subscending ecstatic path is a Dionysian one.)

The original image was designed to highlight the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic structure inherent in the Sefirot. The addition of the Kav penetrating directly into Malchut makes even more explicit the synthesis of the Iggulim and Yosher forms of the Sefirot in the original diagram.

A third synthesis occurs between Malkhut and Shekhinah, and (fourth) worse — possibly incorrectly — between Shekhinah and Keter. (These two might be an indirect expression of Moshe Idel’s idea that Kabbalah is a synthesis of antithetical theosophic and ecstatic traditions.)

Additionally, this diagram synthesizes the traditional vertical (higher-lower) conception of metaphysics with one that is eversive (inward-outward), by bending the verticality around the egoic center of Malkhut, from which all finite beings receive the givens of revelation.

I wonder if this image was influenced by having Berenice Abbott’s “Interference of Waves” as my desktop image for the last five years.

Berenice Abbott. Interference of Waves. 1958-61 | MoMA

Whyness, Whatness and Howness

Design, Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams, Trefoil

Intellection gives us supraformal absolute truth (of Beriah) toward/from the Absolute (of Atzilut) to which objectivity-forming subjects (Yetzirah) and objective truths (Assiyah) can be more or less faithful.

Of course, subjects can also be more or less faithful to material reality, and this determines their scope and degree of practical effectiveness.

The modern era has maximized the scope and degree of practical effectiveness in material reality. Its scope is maximized to total universality, and its degree of effectiveness is maximized to total control. It has traded off all considerations of intellection, to such a degree that few are aware of intellection as a possibility of knowing.

Even fewer actualize their intellective mode of knowing.

Fewer still coordinate intellective and rational knowing.

Fewest of all coordinate intellective, rational and practical knowing.

Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Intuiting-what knows what of is, knows what of can, knows what of ought.

Intuiting-how does how of can, does how of ought, does how of is.

Intuiting-why cares why of ought, cares why of is, cares why of can.

Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

Intuiting-what grounds fact, method and ideal, and without it, there is perplexity.

Intuiting-how grounds ability, grace and technique, and without it, there is faltering.

Intuiting-why grounds value, taste and purpose, and without it, there is indifference.

Every vital culture must converge Whyness, Whatness and Howness in its collective being. If it fails to do so, each member of its culture will suffer confused perplexity, ineffective faltering or depressed indifference. Or the culture will fragment into factions who maximize one or two and sacrifice the third.

Design at its best is a method for converging Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Unlike many professions it is not a collection of techniques (What-How) methodically deployed to achieve defined goals. Design discovers its goals as it works, and its most important goals are given to intellection as the Why of the work.

Christopher Costes is right: Design is the heir of magic.

Sacred study

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

I am thinking about sacred study in the context of Idel’s theory that kabbalah has two complementary foci: theosophic and ecstatic. My biased inclination is to understand theosophic kabbalah as centered on sacred study.

Study as religious practice

Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Religion

It is easy to confuse study about religious practice with sacred study — study that is itself religious practice.

This is especially true if one’s primary source of spiritual experience is other than sacred study.

One can pray or meditate or take drugs or just spontaneously enter an altered consciousness, and have extraordinary ecstatic experiences. But just as ordinary natural experiences can be interpreted in a multiple ways, each with its own validity and tradeoffs, these extraordinary supernatural experiences can be interpreted multiple ways. And all interpretations, whether natural or supernatural, belong to some specific faith, some specific subjectivity manifesting as its own form of objectivity.

Study as religious practice is an indirect conditioning of the subject of faith through the activity of interpretation, which is not only literal acceptance of the material, but literary “sense-making” construction (and deconstruction) experimentation, hermeneutic crystallization (and dissolution) and mystical influx.

The material studied can be texts or they can be firsthand experiences, ordinary or extraordinary. But in such study focus transcends the factual material, and concerns the subject manifested in the changing objectivities. The medium is the faith, and it is the message behind and beyond religious study. The material matters, too, but as substantiation and as a principle of acceptance and rejection of understandings.

If we approach our experiential materials this way, even our most ordinary experiences can be sacralized, infused with meaning. The significance of extraordinary experiences is that they can challenge our faiths, and invite change.

The danger of psychology, materialism and similarly literal faiths is that they equip us to explain away phenomena that invite transformation of faith.

Spiritual programs

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Half the people I know believe that religion as we have it today is sheer nonsense and that spirituality is a fanciful free-for-all — just psychological play done for the pleasure of it.

The other half thinks that religion is wisdom that was originally revealed whole, but subsequently lost — an ancient treasure squandered, that we must now recover, before something dire happens.

As always, I disagree with everyone.

I think religion is institutionalized spirituality, with all the advantages and disadvantages entailed by institutionalization. When I say institutionalization, I mean something more like scientific institutionalization, enabling systematic challenge, response and progress, more than what spiritual-but-not-religious haters of “institutionalized religion” mean.

Indeed, individuals dabbling unassisted in spiritual matters would be as advanced as individual physicists could accomplish — each working in isolation, starting from scratch with their own theories and homemade laboratories. Or imagine amateur physicists watching hours of YouTube videos about the history of natural philosophy and using them to launch their own programs of physics research.

I think religion and spirituality refer to realities that can be understood or misunderstood. I think these realities are not comprehensible in objective terms. They require different intellective modes that few of us engage when we “seek truth”.

An idea to entertain: different religions are analogous to the research programs of Imre Lakatos, with their own lifecycles of birth, ascent, flourishing, decline and dying out, and their own technological innovations, meaning, literally, technique systems, a.k.a. methodologies.

The resemblances among religions are due partly from borrowings across traditions (which is how a spiritual research program is preserved) but also because the truth they pursue is the same and these traditions only thrive and endure insofar as they succeed in that pursuit.

But that truth pursued is not essentially objective. That truth includes objectivity, but transcends objectivity, subjectivity and all distinctions between object and subject.

Eternal recurrence of the metatragedy

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah

I accidentally jumped ahead in Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives and stumbled upon a familiar and deeply significant drama.

Idel’s central claim is basically that Kabbalah has two distinct but related foci — a theosophist Apollinian focus, and an ecstatic Dionysian focus. These two foci stand in tense union with one another, exactly as they were (according to Nietzsche) in Greek tragedy. The two foci complement, but can, at times, seem to oppose one another.

But both together oppose something else — and this something else is philosophical rationalism. In Birth of Tragedy the rationalist was Socrates. In Idel’s metatragedy, the rationalist is Maimonides. I see the religion of Maimonidian excess as Reform Judaism (JewUU), a form of religiosity within-against which I have rebelled since age 10. This is what has me so charged up this morning.

I should have known my participation in Reform Judaism was doomed from the start when the head rabbi at my synagogue laughed and told me that a Unitarian-Universalist kid would find Reform Judaism very familiar.

I’ve always identified Hermes with the Apollo-Dionysus union — not because of any special affinity with either Apollo or Dionysus, but because Hermes is the god of divine conjunction (as symbolically expressed in Janus-faced boundary herms). Divine communication occurs not across distances, but through elimination of distance in ontological union.

Let us never forget that it was Hermes who bound and chained the benevolent but hubristic rationalist titan to the rock.

Perhaps this tragedy of vital intellection (toward transcendence) vs rationalist hubris of pure immanence recurs eternally.

In Judaism, Torah study is a form of worship.

Dreher, Slezkine, Idel smush-up

Judaism, Politics

Just days after I noticed how little I care about modernity, suddenly I care again!

I was reading an alarming article on Rod Dreher on the advanced state of decay and alienation among Zoomer right-wingers, that has recently come fully to light, but which was not only predictable, but explicitly, repeatedly predicted. Oh, I know. Progressivists claimed to be wise to this evil strain within the right from the very start, and used this to justify persecuting everything right of itself, including liberalism, in order to extirpate “fascism” before it could rise up and dominate. But by treating everyday normal people as abnormally vicious, it alienated the liberal middle — including myself — and set conditions for this self-fulfilling prophesy that it can now claim to have foreseen. We now have a split Overton — the window pane is cracked into two entirely incommensurable narratives, each controlled by its own illiberal, extreme pole — each antisemitic in its own style.

Dreher mentioned a book by Yuri Slezkine called The Jewish Century. One takeaway:

…the skills that Gentile culture forced Jews to develop by excluding them from society gave them what it took to prosper under modern conditions. In other words, our distant ancestors made them what they are … and today, some of us wish to punish the Jews for it. Put another way, the way our ancestors made them live made Jews especially adaptable to the modern world.

Jews, thanks mainly to Christian anti-Jewish policy, were subjected to conditions that eventually produced modernity. Jews “enjoyed” a head start, and developed skills needed to thrive in a nomadic cranial labor economy. Centuries later, when the rest of the world found themselves in the same unhappy conditions Jews had learned to manage, and needed an explanation and villain to blame for it, guess who played the eternal scapegoat.

Strange coincidence — I have been reading Moshe Idel the last few mornings. One of his core theses is that the history of Kabbalah is an interplay of two primary tendencies or trends. One is theosophic and nomian and the other is ecstatic and anomian. I immediately connected it with Nietzsche’s Apollinian and Dionysian framework for understanding tragedy, which was/is the fusion of the two. I have always viewed this Janus-face fusion as Hermes.

Yuri Slezkine called the Jewish people a Mercurial people as opposed to the Apollonian nationals who play fickle host. And then I came upon this passage in Idel:

A proper understanding of the last major Jewish school of mysticism, Hasidism, must take into consideration the merging of these two mainstreams, which had competed with each other for more than a millennium and a half: ecstasy and theurgy, or anthropocentrism and theocentrism. The result was a synthesis that, on the one hand, attenuated the theurgical-theosophical elements and, on the other, propagated ecstatic values even more than previously. Or, as we shall see in a passage from R. Meshullam Phoebus, classical Spanish and Lurianic Kabbalah were reinterpreted ecstatically. This emphasis on individual mystical experience may be one of the major explanations for the neutralization of nationalistic messianism in Hasidism. Although the aftermath of Sabbatianism could also have prompted interest in a more individualistic type of mysticism and redemption, we can envision the emergence of the Hasidic type of mysticism as part of the dissemination of religious values crucial for the ecstatic Kabbalistic model.

Idel and Slezkine merged in a terrible insight.

If Jews were the proto-moderns, and antinomian totalitarianism is a kind of disorder of modern shock — is it possible that Sabbatianism / Frankism was a proto-totalitarianism?

This is a super-sketchy, reckless, unsupported suggestion — not even a hypothesis. But I want to note it here as something possibly worth digging into later.

More on Scholem’s seventh aphorism

Kabbalah, Phenomenology

The following are three emails about Scholem’s seventh aphorism, and about Biale’s apparent misunderstanding of that aphorism. I’m posting them mostly for myself, because there is some good clear thinking here, if you know the context.

Email #1:

I think what you are saying is true, but I am not sure you are saying anything true that is not well known within Kabbalah.

Microcosmic/macrocosmic analogy is assumed by all Kabbalists. And one of the core struggles of Kabbalah is the incomprehensibility of its most essential and consequential insights. Scholem indicates this problem in his aphorisms, from multiple angles. Students of Kabbalah quickly learn to release the mundane expectation that they can cognitively grasp anything important beyond the objectivity of Assiyah. Beyond Assiyah only cognitively indirect methods of intellection work at all. I think even Biale knows these things, and the unreliability of his commentary comes from something else I haven’t yet pinned down.

Rereading Scholem, I do not believe he is denying the truth of Plotinus, but rather denying that emanationist accounts of the Olamot “do” what Kabbalah set out to do. A pat explanatory model — and worse, a model objectively graspable — replaces a within-outward, first-person experiential account of one’s layered and (cognitively) elusive relationship with the One. In other words, Scholem is making a procedural, not substantive objection.

So, the emanationist model may very well be true (that is where I have recently arrived), but accepting of it, without doing the spiritual and phenomenological work of arriving at it via actual participation and reflection cheats the Kabbalist of Kabbalah’s best fruits, which are not theoretical constructions, but influx of incomprehensible divine light. This gift is received precisely through doing the work of aware participation — not by reaching the conclusion and possessing the answer.
Ironically, my earlier rejection of emanationism came from having not completing this work for myself, and from not recognizing the links between my incomplete “everso” theme and Kabbalah.

Email #2:

To clarify, I think Biale’s commentary completely misconceives Aphorism 7. Biale does, in fact, seem to treat the problem as substantive doctrinal disagreement. In doing so, he flies off in the wrong direction and both obscures and accidentally demonstrates Scholem’s point. He treats Kabbalah as objective metaphysical information that can be more correct or less correct, or reach more correct or less correct conclusions. Ironically, this is precisely the “misfortune” Scholem is indicating in this aphorism. No wonder Biale calls the aphorism “obscure”. Its meaning is entirely eclipsed by Biale’s confinement to objectivist cognition!

Email #3:

Actually, maybe I can pin down Biale’s problem. 

To me, Biale seems a scholar with a lot of academic knowledge about Kabbalah, but who lacks Kabbalistic knowledge of academia’s objectivist limitations.

Objective knowledge — that is, knowledge of what is experienced and comprehended objectively — is effective only within Assiyah. But the entire point of Kabbalah is to transcend Assiyah. So if one tries to build systems of objective knowledge about Kabbalah, this knowledge might be true as far as it goes, but it is useless for progressing as a Kabbalist or for representing the most crucial insights Kabbalah offers.

Biale seems unaware of this truth — a truth of Beriah.

Neshamah Yisrael

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Neshamah – the dimension of self who abides in Beriah, the World of Creation – is the self who hears the still, quiet voice of revelation through the thunderous noise of objective spectacle.

Neshamah receives gifts of overwhelming meaning – both of creation and of revelation – ex nihilo.

Ex nihilo – from Nothing.

Nothingness is precisely the aperture through which incomprehensible meaning floods into the world from Beriah.

A gift of Beriah, once received, annihilates our naive misconception of nothingness.

Never again can we take nothingness at face value and confuse it with mere absence.

Never again can we experience nothingness without anticipation and hope.

Nothingness is Ayin, the divine naught who protects our eyes from the divine light of infinite intensity.

Ayin is the blessed blindness who shields us from what we are unprepared to witness.

We are oblivious to such realities, and to us they are nothing, until they become givens – gifts.

Meaning enters the world through Ayin.

Once we know this from the heart, in faith, we are exnihilists – we can no longer see nothingness without knowing how it conceals, and how it may, at any moment, reveal.

Shema, Neshamah Yisrael.

Eighth aphorism of Scholem

Kabbalah

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.

Missing Da’at

Kabbalah, Star

Why is Da’at missing from the classic Sefirot? Why is there an empty asterisk where a Sefirah should be? My tentative answer is: we ourselves occupy that position, and understand from it, in a way that is not itself understood for precisely the same reason we cannot see our own sight or hear our own hearing.

To really understand the Sefirot, we must harmoniously understand the whole Sefirot fourfoldedly (PaRDeS) … from our fourfoldedly whole strength-soul-heart-am / nefesh-ruach-neshema-chayah self … across the interlapping fourfold Assiyah-Yetzirah-Beriah-Atzilut Olamot.

The Sefirot, of course, is a symbol — an intellectual icon through whom we can approach the infinite via the finite. Were it ten-thousand- or ten-billion-fold more complex, it would still be a gross simplification.

The Sefirot is divine design: the optimal simplification.