Category Archives: The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

Letterpress, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

When I called the second edition of my Kabbalah reference sheet a “one-page book” I mostly meant it as a joke. As so often happens, however, this silly irony has become serious. I am thinking of it now as a book, and its title has become The Well-Tempered Kabbalah. I am continuing to work on it. I’ve corrected the English transliterations and now they are entirely and strictly consistent.

But I am also evolving the deeper meanings of the chart, and it is changing some of my fundamental understandings of Kabbalah. I am leaving my older change log intact, because it is a record of a thought process, and I want to show my work. Today’s most important change is so important that I am making a new start, with a new change log.

The change that changes everything is relabeling the last column. It was labeled “givenness”, but now it is labeled “truth”. The headers are now “world”, “self”, “truth” which is not only far more true, but also looks and reads better.

Here is why this is necessary: Givenness is one thing, but conveying and sharing that givenness is quite another.

Today I realize clearly and sharply that the world itself is the givenness. That is all the world as a distinct “thing” is — a mode of givenness vis-a-vis our finite self, specifically in the givenness of asiyah. From the givenness of atzilut the worlds are indivisibly one. And the perspective of The Well-Tempered Kabbalah is very strictly the snake’s-eye view of realities that transcend it. So if any column should be labeled “givenness” it would be the first one.

Truth is how a self conveys this givenness to itself in prayer, meditation or study (or all three at once!) or across selves in teaching and learning, pursuing and sometimes achieving a harmonious fourfold ironic richness. Daat, the omitted quasi-sefirah, is present in The Well-Tempered Kabbalah as a conspicuous nothingness of faculty, and this is why the letters of the tetragrammaton are carefully lined up with the missing daat in Jacob’s ladder in each of the rows.

And this is why Derash is of Beriah. There is no way to convey the givenness of Beriah apart from redescribing the entirety of Asiyah. The kind of subject-transcendent and object-transcendent revelation is revealed ex nihilo by neshamah to ruach as a new capacity for formation. In subjective-objective terms the revelation is pure potential — a “revelability” or “creatability” or “instaurability”. It is pure gestell, in which new gestalts are spontaneously given to nefesh in Malchut in Asiyah.

This is why converts speak of reborn self in a transfigured world. The trans of the transfiguring is, first, a new capacity for figuration from neshamah, second, a subjective doing of new figuration by ruach, and, finally an objective experiencing of a new comprehensive articulate order of gestalt objects — which is the content of the conversion.

I have been trying to articulate this reality for decades now — a reality in which I’ve intuitively participated as a designer — and, miraculously, Kabbalah has symbolic language capable of doing this reality full justice.

I’d have written a shorter book

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Letterpress, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

The internet has misattributed to Mark Twain a quotation: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” I first heard and anchored on it as “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I hadn’t the time.” To my ear, it has a nicer waltzier swing.

Ironically, none of the sources of this quote managed to say it as parsimoniously as the internet rock-tumbled version. Presumably, they hadn’t the time.

My first book took 16 years to write, and was nine pages long. My forthcoming book on Kabbalah has taken another six, and it will be one page long.

Nobody can accuse me of failing to write a shorter book because I hadn’t the time.

Well-tempered words

Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

I used a musical metaphor yesterday, conceived mid-thought, and today I’m appreciating its aptness. I mentioned well-tempered vocabulary, making an analogy (or anomalogy) with tempered scales to which harpsichords, pianos and most other keyboard instruments are tuned.

I have been looking for just the right set of English translations of Hebrew words for the sefirot and olamot and related ideas. I am also bringing some decades-old ideas to this work. I am pursuing internal harmony within the traditional framework but also across tradition to my own personal understanding, which, being a product of my own limit-bound finitude, certainly contains the usual scotomata, oblivia and eye-beams. Nothing lines up perfectly, but by looking at whole and part together, hearing chord and harmony in each meaning, they can be gathered in approximate inter-perfection.

My hope is that this sincere attempt at harmonious assimilation will coax my reason upward to be graciously met and tempered by intellection in descent, and that any work I do in this spirit will effect the same for anyone who tries to play golden ball with these words and ideas.

Perfection in such translation work is impossible. There are always trade-offs, audible disharmonies, humilities. Perfection is our holy asymptote, and it is not ours to have. The best we can do is give ourselves to this infinite perfection and play our finite part within it, at our finite, imperfect best.

Kabbalah prints v.2

Kabbalah, Letterpress, Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

I need to print revised editions of both the dialectic sefirot (which seems more true and important to me by the day), and the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet, for a mix of boring and interesting reasons.

The boring reason is transliterative consistency. My earlier prints had some minor inconsistencies that are bothering me. Da’at, Tif’eret and Netsach have been changed to Daat, Tiferet and Netzach. Assiyah has been changed to Asiyah.

More interesting are some refinements in alternative translations translations of sefirot.

  • Gevurah changes from “power” to “severity”.
  • Chesed changes from “love” to “kindness”.
  • Netzach changes from “eternity” to “overcoming”.
  • Hod changes from “splendor” to “glory”.
  • Malkhut changes from “kingdom” to “sovereignty”.

These changes are all still traditional, but make a better-tempered whole.

Most exciting though are the changes in the four worlds chart.

First, I made two intensely satisfying improvements to the column labels:

  • “subject” is now “self”.
  • “understanding” is now “givenness”.

In the rows, I re-tuned some of the language:

  • In Atzilut, Chayah changes from “life-essence” to “source”, and its givenness remains “mystical”.
  • In Beriah, Neshamah changes from “divine breath” to “intellect”, and its givenness changes from “interpretive” to “intellective”.
  • In Yetzirah, Ruach remains “spirit”, and its givenness changes from “allusive” to “figurative”.
  • In Asiyah, Nefesh changes from “vital soul” to “soul” and its givenness remains “literal”.

I plan to print this new sheet and live with it for a week or two before committing to plates.

This is starting to feel very much my own intimate understanding within my tradition, and it is becoming more starkly beautiful to me with each revision.

Update August 19, 2023: I was considering “lovingkindness” for Chesed. There are good arguments for it. Viewed from approximate absoluteness, as emanated from Binah, Chesed is, in fact, complete lovingkindness, from which Gevurah develops its complementary severity. But viewed from below, which is the perspective of this sheet, Gevurah can be excluded from Chesed, which is then mere kindness — the loveless niceness of unconditional mercy and tolerance — always toward some at the expense of others.