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.
Category Archives: Kabbalah
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.
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.
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.)
Kabbalistic exnihilism
Speaking in Kabbalist language, objective thought is confined to Assiyah.
Material and sensory objects are confined to Malkhut d’Assiyah; subjective objects to Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Gevurah and Chesed d’Assiyah; objective truth to Binah d’Assiyah; objectivity itself to Chokhmah d’Assiyah.
(Psychologism everts the relationship of subject and object. It is the futile attempt to grasp truths of Yetzirah in the inadequate terms of Assiyah. Psychologized religion is antireligion.)
Until one intuits the transcendent source of all the material and immaterial objects, one knows nothing of Yetzirah. Yetzirah can only be known by apperceptive participation in various modes of existence in Yetzirah. (This is the radical pluralism of hermeneutics.) Yetzirah is known solely by its fruits in Assiyah.
But the indirect experiencing of Yetzirah can open awareness to Beriah — but only if we learn how nothingness works. It is natural to know nothing of nothingness.
Once we catch Beriah in the act of creation ex nihilo, we become exnihilists.
The Great Tetrad
At the core of Kabbalah is a tetrad — a hierarchical tetrad, the tetrad — most compactly expressed in the Tetragrammaton — ???? — Yod – Hey (1) – Vav – Hey (2).
The Olamot, the four worlds — Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), Assiyah (Actualization) — correspond to each of these letters, as does our own selfhood across these four worlds — the distinctive kind of subjective presence and participation in each of the worlds. One very important kind of participation — increasingly important as one ascends from the actualizing world of Assiyah toward Atzilut — is modes of understanding, exemplified in four modes of understanding scripture, the hermeneutic tetrad PaRDeS. These definitions come from Nissan Dovid Dubov’s Inward Bound:
- Pshat – Simple interpretation corresponds to the world of Assiyah. (Hey 2)
- Remez – Allusionary interpretation corresponds to the world of Yetzirah. (Vav)
- Drush – Homiletical interpretation corresponds to the world of Beriah. (Hey 1)
- Sod – Secret/mystical interpretation corresponds to the world of Atzilut. (Yod)
At this point, I’d call these modes, respectively: factual, literary, revelatory, transformative.
The reason these hermeneutic modes matter to me, apart from the simple fact that hermeneutics is intrinsically fascinating, is that these modes of understanding are, I believe, our best and most tangible access to what otherwise might seem grand abstract speculations on unknowable metaphysical ultimates.
We “know” Yetzirah and its relationship to Assiyah because we have understood truths belonging to each, in a manner suited to each. We know how to read literary fiction and lose ourselves in its imaginary, vividly populated, poetic space, while bodily seated in an actual chair in an actual room. And when we have turned our attention from our book, stood up and looked around actual places, we have experienced how the mood, tone and coloration of our book clings to the world around us. Two parts of ourselves are activated together, and sometimes this feels like a restoration of inner integrity.
If you understand the experience of the scenario I just described, imagine taking this kind of experience as indicative of realities that elude the comprehending grip of factual knowledge.
Try to entertain the possibility that the materialism most educated people take for granted is only one possible mode of understanding, optimized for predicting and controlling the behavior of physical matter — but that this mode of understanding comes with tradeoffs, namely a loss of meaning and purpose. The cost of a materialist metaphysic is nihilism.
A materialist will conceptualize my scenario (of the experience of being absorbed in reading) physically and biologically. It will be all about evolution, organisms, societies, economies, brains, neurons, paper, ink, molecules, atoms, quarks, energy, etc., and, in doing so, they will close off myriad incommensurable modes of understanding. These modes of understanding, however, are the very channels that open us to feeling our belonging in creation. No amount of fairness or justice, affordance of dignity, acknowledgment of our various self-classification in this or that social identity can do anything to replace this lost meaning. And indulging in carnal or political pleasures or passions, provides only temporary relief, and eventually none at all. Addictions all terminate this way.
Placing material reality, and political realities in broader contexts of reality and ways of knowing, and giving each its own full due validity — science works, and justice is good! — allows us to develop higher selves who open us to the source of all meaning.
If we do not do this, we will become increasingly capable of controlling material reality, but increasingly alienated from who we are or why we should care about anything. We will rely on stimulating animal rage in order to even feel our own selfhood through that thick numbness that engulfs us. This is why I am one of the increasing numbers who advocate a return to religion, though I believe that many, perhaps most, of the loudest religion advocates are as clueless about religion as those who despise and oppose religion.
So, again, we know the Olamot, who are the various levels of emanation of the Absolute / One / Ein Sof by how we, ourselves, are present in them, and we know our presence through our participation — most tangibly through how we understand and the contents of our understanding. Our participation across the Olamot activates and unites our selves — highest to lowest — together and within their source, bathing our lives and worlds with meaning and light. So we know reality, ourselves and our relationship to God (in God’s own hierarchical Allness — ???? ) — all together, inseparably.
So:
- In Assiyah, Nefesh (vital soul) animates as the Pshat / factual mode of understanding. (Hey 2)
- In Yetzirah, Ruach (spirit) animates as the Remez / allusionary (literary) mode of understanding. (Vav)
- In Beriah, Neshema (breath of life) animates as the Drush / homiletic (revelatory) mode of understanding. (Hey 1)
- In Atzilut, Chayah (living one) animates as the Sod / mystical (transformative) mode of understanding.
One more related idea… A mistake I have been making is confusing the Sefirah/Sefirot associated with each world for the world itself. Or worse, the idea of the Sefirah, for the Sefirah, for the world.
The kinds of ideas beings like ourselves can have, ideas that are defined conceptual objects, belong only to the world of Assiyah. Actual, physical objects are confined to Malkhut in Assiyah, and the rest are mental or emotional objects.
When we try to think worlds above Assiyah, the best we can do is contemplate mental objects that imperfectly correspond to and transmit meaning from being beyond objective knowledge.
So, it is by conceptual objects of the Sefirot that we begin to understand higher worlds. By Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Gevurah and Chesed we can conceptually approximate and receive the superformal meanings of Yetzirah. By Binah, we can conceptually approximate and receive the meaning of Beriah. By Chokhmah we can conceptually approximate and receive the meaning of Assiyah. This is (I think) why we speak of Sefirot corresponding to or predominating among worlds.
In all of this, of course, I may very well be wrong, especially where I say, parenthetically, “I think”. I’m being cautious, where I am aware of a need for caution. I don’t know why I bother, though. Our deepest errors are never where we expect them.
All these understandings, of course, make me insanely happy, which always compels me to letterpress something beautiful and holy.
I’m thinking of a reference card, connecting the Tetragrammaton to the four Olamot, each linked to a Sefirot, to the levels of soul, to the hermeneutic modes of PaRDeS.
This is a first, rough, highly inadequate draft. I’m going to consult with a rabbi to ensure everything is correct, both the ideas and the Hebrew. And I’m going to work at improving and perfecting its beauty and clarity.
This is the deepest and fastest change in understanding I’ve experienced since 2011, when my world was inverted, razed and reconstituted by Bruno Latour.
I’m no longer a philosopher at all. I have great respect for objective knowing, even more for objective praxis, but both are positively dwarfed by my respect and love for what transcends objective truths and the realities we can know by objective means.
I’m no longer a philosopher. Perhaps I never was one. What I am is a Kabbalist, still novice.
Principle
The metaphysical use of the word principle has been unclear to me. So I went to etymonline and learned:
Principle – late 14c., “origin, source, beginning” (a sense now obsolete), also “rule of conduct; axiom, basic assumption; elemental aspect of a craft or discipline,” from Anglo-French principle, Old French principe “origin, cause, principle,” from Latin principium (plural principia) “a beginning, commencement, origin, first part,” in plural “foundation, elements,” from princeps (genitive principis) “first man, chief leader; ruler, sovereign,” noun use of adjective meaning “that takes first,” from primus “first” (see prime (adj.)) + root of capere “to take” (from PIE root *kap– “to grasp”).
primus “first” (see prime (adj.)) + root of capere “to take”.
Capere, again! The root of conception/conceive/concept, perception/perceive/percept, reception/receive____. . .
First-take, preceding all other taking.
Principle: receptivity precedes data.
We are given only what we can take.
Back to etymonline:
Kabbalah – “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.”
Kabbalah is learning to take what may be given — and given only if we cultivate capacity to receive.
Keter
I understand Keter as the awareness of transcendent oblivia around any holy finitude, a halo of charged infinite-moreness rippling around self-aware created being.
Seventh aphorism of Scholem
I have been very slowly reading Gershom Scholem’s mysterious “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”. This is the seventh:
As the actual misfortune of the Kabbalah (as with many nonindigenous forms of mysticism), one ought to consider the doctrine of emanation. The insights of the Kabbalah concern the structure of what exists. Nothing would be more disastrous than to confuse the connections of this structure with the doctrine of emanation. This confusion perverts its promising formulations in favor of the most comfortable and intellectually lazy of all theories. Cordovero would be much more at home as a phenomenologist than as a disciple of Plotinus. The attempt to construct the thought of the Kabbalists without the doctrine of emanation (and to think it through to the end) would have to pay the debt that a true disciple of Cordovero would incur, if one should ever exist. In the form of theosophical topography, which Kabbalistic teachings have assumed in the literature, its objective content remains inaccessible. The conflict between mystical nominalism and its light symbolism in Kabbalistic writings derives from the irreconcilable tension between the Kabbalists’ most significant intentions and their inability to help bring these to pure expression.
To evert subjectivity into object is — and I mean this as literally as I can mean anything — the original sin of religion. And to evert religion back to its proper relational (participatory) non-form is esoterism’s proper goal, within religion.
As I’ve said before, every subjectivity is an objectivity within which certain kinds of objects of experience (intentional objects) are taken (conveived, perceived, -ceived) as givens. Our subjects — both personal subjects (I, we) and academic subjects (subjects of study) — are finite manifestations within the infinite subject, God, who transcends not only every possible subjectivity and objectivity, but subjectivity and objectivity, per se. This is the most radical panentheism, the dialectical sublation of subject-object.
Radical panentheism is the hermetic androgyne, which today’s antireligious fundamentalists misread as gender fluidity, and cling to and enforce as sacrosanct doctrine.
Fundamentalism is the original sin taken to extremes. The fundamentalist is oblivious to the first-person garden, experiencing only the third-person objects of the garden. The foreground eclipses the divine background. Fundamentalists compulsively grasp at and mis-comprehend finite “holy” things instead cultivating awareness of who comprehends us even as we comprehend the myriad things of the world.
Twenty years ago I thought myself into social alienation. I learned that human beings need shared truth or they lose community. I’m thinking my way back to the same places now, but this time I have company. Scholem, Kaplan, Schaya, Idel…
My next sacred pamplet will be Everso.