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.
Category Archives: Religion
Now that I think about it
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
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.
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.
Whyness, Whatness and Howness
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.
Latest Kabbalah reference sheet
This will be my next letterpress project.
Sacred study
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Native tongue
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.
Exnihilist light
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.
Who shall I say is calling?
Below is a response to the fifth aphorism from Gershom Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”:
I (semi-ignorantly) intuit that Hegel’s dialectic rises only as far as Da’at d’Yetzirah. I suggest Yetzirah, because Hegel clearly leads his reader beyond Assiyah, by effecting changes in enworldment through Yetziratic (Yetz-erotic?) reunderstanding, thus demonstrating (for cooperative, receptive readers) how Yetzirah forms and reforms givenness of reality.
I (semi-knowingly) believe that Voegelin’s critique of Hegel, expressed in his own Platonic language, was this: Hegel’s understanding to this point is legitimate, but he is unable or (more likely) unwilling to intuit a supraintelligible world who manifests intelligibility but who transcends the intelligible. Thus Hegel barricades himself inside the intelligible world, and becomes prisoner and warden of a “mind [that] is its own place…”
But that self-consciousness is catastrophically insufficient if it is not crowned with the question of transcendence: from whom is the self-awareness given? Hegel’s Da’at d’Yetzirah was uncrowned and unperfected, so the entrance to Beriah was closed. (As was my own until very recently.)
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Metanoia is necessary but insufficient. We must re-pense and turn to our creator: Teshuvah. An uncrowned philosophy is a dream of misapotheosis.
My current understanding of Da’at is that it is a personal self-consciousness of one’s own being within a given Sefirot — a Sefirot becoming self-conscious within the center of one’s self.
- Da’at d’Assiyah answers to the nickname Nefesh.
- Da’at d’Yetzirah answers to the nickname Ruach.
- Da’at d’Beriah answers to the nickname Neshemah.
- Da’at d’Atzilut answers to the nickname Chayah.
When addressed by the Crown, we answer from fourfold Da’at: Hineini.
But who shall I say is calling?
A halo is a luminous tunnel within whom one holy face appears to another.
Fourfoldedly
When we understand fourfoldedly, we vivify ourselves fourfoldedly, and inhabit four-worlds-in-one.
Every halo is a tunnel… up the trunk of the Trees of Life…
…up the artery in the divine circulatory system (divine light flowing down, divine minerals flowing up)…
…up the spinal column of Adam Kadmon, encased in thirteen vertebrae.
Insight bombs
“It lies beyond the scope of this study to deal in a comprehensive manner with the issue of [y]… for a comprehensive study of this matter would require a separate study. But for present purposes, suffice it to say [x]…”
Whenever an author starts a sentence this way, I am on the edge of my seat, because I just know the author is winding up to deliver an insight bomb that I will be obsessive-compelled to put in my insane quotation wiki and/or letterpress print into pulpy paper.
To steal Jerry Seinfeld’s “why don’t we make the whole airplane out of the black box” joke, I would like a whole book made of matters requiring a whole book to study comprehensively.
(And this is exactly what Nietzsche and Borges did in their respective hyperfictional genres! Which is exactly why I adore them both. I read them with an ecstatic part of “myself” who feels entire unborn worlds within a sentence, word or letter.)