Kabbalah (16 page)
K A B B A L A H
12 Esther represents the Jewish feminine divine power, the
Shekhinah
.
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In Europe, the rift between science and the occult wid-ened, and the kabbalah was rejected by mainstream culture and thought and relegated to marginalized groups of esoterics and spiritualists. In the second half of the nineteenth century such a circle—the theosophical school of Madame Helena Blavatsky, which spread in Russia and western Europe—attained some influence. Similar groups abounded in France, Germany, and England. The writings of such groups derived a great deal from the esotericist writings of the Christian kabbalists, and became part of popular pseudoscientific culture. Some elements of the Christian kabbalah were included in some rituals of the Freemason movement, adding an aura of mystery and antiquity to its teachings. These writings also served as a basis, for instance, for the psychology of religion presented in some of Carl Gustav Jung’s writings, integrated with many other disparate elements, especially Hindu myths and alchemical traditions. This atmosphere also served as background for the rapid spread of the golem legend in the early decades of the twentieth century. A brief history of the subject should, therefore, be included here.
Hundreds of commentaries were written on the Sefer Yezira between the tenth century and the twentieth. Two of them— written in the early thirteenth century in Germany by writers who were unaware of the kabbalah, which at that time had only made its first strides in southern Europe—include a section that describes, in detail, how the theory of the alphabet presented in the ancient work can be utilized to create a living human being out of earth, breathing life into it by certain methods of reciting the Hebrew letters. A dozen medieval and early modern texts support the view that Abraham or another sage used the Sefer Yezira to create a human being. In modern times, this artificial creature was called golem, and it became one of the most popular and well-known “kabbalistic” characteristics in the twentieth century.
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The identification of the Sefer Yezira as a recipe for the creation of a human being is derived not from the Sefer Yezira itself, but from two opaque statements in the tractate Sanhedrin in the Babylonian Talmud. In one statement it is related that the early-fourth-century sage Rava created a person; in the second, two sages (of the same period) were studying “the laws of creation” and created a “triple calf ” that they ate for a celebra-tion. Some commentators identified these “laws of creation”
with the Sefer Yezira, thus presenting the possibility of view-ing the work as the basic laws that enabled Abraham to create a human being. When the kabbalists adopted the Sefer Yezira, creating such a being seemed to be inherent in kabbalistic tradition. It should be pointed out, however, that hardly a handful of the hundreds of kabbalists who dealt with the Sefer Yezira expressed such a view, and narratives about such an endeavor became popular only in modern times.
It seems that the background of the two sentences in the Talmud (no other reference to the “laws of creation” is found in the many thousands of pages of the Talmud and midrashim) is a subject completely remote from the Sefer Yezira. It is a question that scientists in ancient times and the Middle Ages debated: Is it possible to create life artificially? Many thinkers— among them some important Islamic philosophers—answered this question in the affirmative. This problem can be viewed as a purely scientific one, without any religious implications; in the same way that a man can build a house a man can create life. No doctrine of any religion gave this power to God alone.
In the same way, the practice is not necessarily magical, but was regarded as scientific. An Islamic story tells about Hay Ibn Yoqtan, a wondrous figure that was created by the forces of nature alone, by the sun and the wind shaping a figure out of earth. A Jewish scholar described the way a person can create life: Put a large stone on wet ground, and lift it several months later: thriving insects and worms will come to life under it. The talmudic sentences may have referred to this.
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The term “golem” became prevalent in folktales only in the modern period, when some scattered narratives about sages and kabbalists appeared on the margins of Jewish popular hagiographical literature. Several stories about such a creature appeared in eastern Europe, but the first ones, which connected it to Prague and its rabbi, were not written earlier than the end of the eighteenth century. Some German writers picked up the motif at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The subject became a center of attention only after the publication, in 1909, of a collection of fictional narratives by Judah Rosenberg. The stories told of the Prague rabbi MaHaRaL (an acronym for Our Teacher Rabbi Judah Loeb), who, in the second half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, created a golem in order to serve him and to protect the Czech Jews from their enemies. Rosenberg, who emigrated from Poland to Canada in the 1930s, believed himself to be the spiritual heir of the MaHaRaL, and he attributed the magical powers utilized by the Prague rabbi to Sefer Yezira and the kabbalah. Numerous writers embellished these stories and they were translated into many European languages, thus constituting a major best seller of Hebrew origins in twentieth-century European culture. Short stories, novels, plays, and operas were written in which the golem was the central hero, mostly between 1905 and 1925, in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and English. Like Frankenstein’s monster and, later, the robot, the golem is an assistant and a servant, sometimes a savior, but there is always the threat of his powers getting out of control and of him becoming dangerous to his creator and the surrounding community.
The phenomenon of the golem contributed meaningfully to the portrayal of the kabbalah as an esoteric, mysterious, and powerful compendium of ancient magic. It was replaced several decades later by another product of Prague—Karl Chapek’s robot, which was first presented in his 1921 play
RUR
. Frankenstein’s monster and the robot were portrayed as scientists’
creations, and their life force is electric current. The life force 107
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of the golem is the Hebrew alphabet, the secret name of God inserted under his tongue, or the word “truth,” one of God’s names, engraved on his forehead. (When the first Hebrew letter of “truth” is erased, it becomes “dead.”) The legend of the golem conformed to, and strengthened, the image of the kabbalah as doctrine that could bring great benefits, but one that also includes some sinister, dangerous elements.
Twentieth-Century Thinkers
Among the most important Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, there was one outstanding kabbalist in the traditional sense of the term. Rabbi Judah Ashlag, a Lurianic kabbalist, who worked in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the first half and the middle of the century, wrote an extensive commentary on all parts of the Zohar, presenting its teachings as being in harmony with those of Luria. His multivolume work includes the full translation of the Zohar to Hebrew. Other prominent thinkers did not present the kabbalah at the center of their published works. One of the most influential thinkers of the century, Rabbi Abraham Yitshak ha-Cohen Kook—who served as a chief rabbi of Palestine, under the British mandate, in the 1920s and the 1930s—presented in numerous works a new, revolutionary theology. This theology combined traditional orthodoxy with expectations of imminent redemption, for which, according to him, the Zionist endeavor is a vehicle. His language includes original terminology, expressed in intense poetic style. It is possible to interpret Rabbi Kook’s writings as an attempt to present Lurianic teachings without using particular kabbalistic terminology. He relied extensively on medieval and modern philosophers, but some of his readers find behind these the basic ideas of Lurianism.
It is possible to detect a somewhat similar approach in the work of the great orthodox thinker of American Judaism, Rabbi Dov Baer Soloveitchik of Boston. He presented a modern con-108
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ception of Judaism in the contemporary world, using the writings of Maimonides and modern philosophers as a starting point.
Some of his readers suggest that here, too, there is an attempt to present kabbalistic ideas in contemporary, nonkabbalistic terminology. The kabbalah, and especially Hasidism, served as sources for some of the teachings of Martin Buber, who became the best-known twentieth-century Jewish thinker among modern Jews and non-Jews. His anthologies of Hasidic teachings became very popular and were translated to all major European languages.
Since the 1970s, kabbalah became a central component of the fast-spreading New Age speculations and presentations. Numerous New Age works, mostly Christian, used the title “kabbalah” and claimed to possess secret knowledge derived from kabbalistic sources. The spread of the Internet in the last two decades has been particularly meaningful in this realm.
Hundreds of Internet sites are dedicated to New Age–style presentations of various worldviews that claim to be kabbalistic.
Most of them are Christian, but many of them are propagated by Jewish writers. Many of them serve groups and circles of adherents, spread all over the English-speaking world, and penetrating also German, French, and Italian popular culture. Most of the material on these sites is a combination of apocalyptic speculations, astrology, and alchemy; one of the central concepts attributed to the kabbalah is that of reincarnation of souls, and another is the cosmic harmony among the various aspects of the universe and the divine realm.
Some such trends assumed more systematic and structured expressions. Since the 1970s, an author who presented himself as Ze’ev ben Shimon Halevi has published a score of books dealing with various aspects of the kabbalah in London. Ze’ev ben Shimon Halevi is the pen name of Warren Kenton of Hampstead, who established several groups and circles who 109
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study his books in England. A more widespread organized phenomenon is the Center for the Study of Kabbalah, founded by Philip S. Berg in California in the 1970s, which is now a world-wide empire. Berg’s starting point was the writings of Rabbi Ashlag; he translated portions of his Zohar commentary and other works, which were followed by his own works. This center achieved wide popularity among different social groups; at its core are some orthodox rabbis who strive to teach the traditional Jewish way of life to secularized Jews, but its centers and study groups attract all kinds of seekers of spirituality, many of them Christians. Most of their teachings adhere to the prominent aspects of New Age attitudes. Its Hollywood center presents many celebrities as adherents, the best known among them is Madonna, who adopted the name Esther, one of the kabbalistic appella-tions of the
shekhinah,
thus representing a physical union between the Virgin and the Jewish feminine divine power.
These and similar phenomena placed the term “kabbalah”
in the center of the spiritual discourse in Western culture in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The meanings attributed to this term today are, in most cases, vastly different from those that prevailed in traditional kabbalah of the Middle Ages and early modern times. It is impossible at this early stage of these developing trends to present a balanced historical description. The kabbalah that appeared more than eight hundred years ago in medieval Europe and assumed various aspects and meanings throughout its history is still present, in dynamic and variegated forms, in the contemporary world.
Contemporary readers may meet the term “kabbalah” mostly in the following contexts; in each of them, the term conveys a different meaning:
1) In a scholarly-historical context, it is an important aspect of Jewish religious thought, which also includes 110
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many of the mystical phenomena in Judaism. The term “kabbalah” in this context appeared at the end of the twelfth century, in the Book Bahir and the Provence circle; reached its medieval peak in the Zohar; and was renovated and reinvigorated in Safed to become the dominant aspect of Jewish spirituality. Its ideas have been integrated with Jewish messianism and have motivated the Sabbatian and other movements, and its terminology is utilized today by the Hasidic movement. The key terms by which it is recognized are the system of ten
sefirot,
the divine tree, and the feminine power in the divine realm, the
shekhinah
.
2) In the context of European religious and intellectual history, the kabbalah is conceived as an ancient, mysterious, occult doctrine, preserved in Jewish texts and integrated into Christian theology and European philosophy and science by a Florentine school of Renais-sance thinkers. Between the end of the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, scores of prominent European scholars integrated it with esoteric speculations, science, and magic. It has been deeply associated with astrologi-cal, numerological, and alchemical speculations, and merged with the conceptions of a multilayered harmonious universe that characterize European modern esotericism.
3) The term “kabbalah” has been used often by esoteric circles of European spiritualists, theosophists, psycholo-gists, and occultists, from Madame Blavatsky to Carl Jung, who often identified it with magic in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.