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.
