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Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis
Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel
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Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis
Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel
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About This Book
Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis examines the centrality of "birth" in Jewish literature, gender theory, and psychoanalysis, thus challenging the centrality of death in Western culture and existential philosophy. In this groundbreaking study, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel discuss similarities between Biblical, Midrashic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic perceptions of birth, as well as its place in contemporary cultural and psychoanalytic discourse. In addition, this study shows how birth functions as a vital metaphor that has been foundational to art, philosophy, religion, and literature. Medieval Kabbalistic literature compared human birth to divine emanation, and presented human sexuality and procreation as a reflection of the sefirotic structure of the Godhead – an attempt, Kaniel claims, to marginalize the fear of death by linking the humane and divine acts of birth. This book sheds new light on the image of God as the "Great Mother" and the crucial role of the Shekhinah as a cosmic womb.
Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis won the Gorgias Prize and garnered significant appreciation from psychoanalytic therapists in clinical practice dealing with birth trauma, postpartum depression, and in early infancy distress.
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Chapter 1 The Existentialism of Birth
Action recuperated in advance in the light that should guide it – is perhaps the very definition of philosophy.1– Emmanuel Levinas
The discussion of birth poses special challenges in light of the long-standing philosophical traditions that focus on the meaning and centrality of death. From the philosophies of ancient Greece to twentieth-century existentialism, the progression toward death imparts meaning to our lives. Both religious and secular existentialism share an awareness of the end of life and of death’s overshadowing importance. The only certain datum that every living creature experiences and knows is its own death, as if to say: “I am finite, therefore I exist.” This chapter examines the tension between the centrality of death in western philosophy and Christian theology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the emphasis on birth and its spiritual significance in Judaism, as developed in ritual and ethics.
1 The Two Poles: Birth and Death
Birth, as the most meaningful human experience, is considered and processed throughout a person’s lifetime. It is the beginning and end of what was before we arrived in the world, and it is the preparation for what will be after we depart it.
In the Phaedo, Plato’s great master Socrates refuses his disciples’ offer to help him escape from prison. For Socrates, death is a means for attaining the eternity of the soul. To achieve this, the body must be rejected and its cessation ignored, in order to concentrate on what continues to exist for all eternity: the soul, the deathless spirit. His approach further validates death, for “those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead.”2
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s disciple Aristotle muses that we wish to invest our lives with meaning through death. Referring to the Athenian lawmaker Solon’s advice to Croesus, King of Lydia, he observes that life can be appreciated only in light of the circumstances of death.3
For Martin Heidegger, death marks “being-come-to-an-end,” and the existential terror that is inherent in the face of death gives man the freedom that comes from knowing the truth.4 Despite the differences between the fear of death depicted by Plato and the existentialist acknowledgment of death or the fear of it, we can discern the uninterrupted historical development that emphasizes the centrality of death in philosophical thought. Franz Rosenzweig, as well, begins his Star of Redemption with the dramatic proclamation that the substance of all philosophy can be summarized in the attempt to flee from the anxiety of death: “From death, it is from the fear of death that all cognition of the All begins.”5
The individual will continue to live with the fear of death, Rosenzweig states, since “in his fear of death he should – stay,” since “only that which is singular can die, and everything that is mortal is solitary.”6 While birth is an occurrence that requires two, in a dialogue between two bodies that are both intertwined and torn asunder from one another, with an intensity that has no equal, death is a single moment that touches what is beyond. Aspiring to die and realize the immortality of the soul, in the attempt to escape death, and in the constant awareness of the fear it instills, we must necessarily focus on death itself, that dark force (“fog”), “a pitiless something that cannot be excluded.”7
Notwithstanding these assertions, it is noteworthy that Rosenzweig is fluent in the entire western tradition but swims against the current, that is, in the opposite chronological direction, going from death to life. The final lines of the Star of Redemption read: “That which is always near, the nearest; not the last then, but the first […] But whither do the wings of the gate open? You do not know? INTO LIFE.”8 Rosenzweig’s magnum opus searches for “a philosophy of faith,” and seeks to understand the meaning of existence, in light of life. This is a pioneering attempt to propose a new philosophy, which draws our attention from the final and known pole to that of the beginning. Unlike “life” as an abstract and amorphous notion, however, birth is a concrete circumstance and moment, one that occurs within the body – the same body that, only individually, can die or live. The mythos of “birth” is an event that can be located on a temporal and spatial axis, at an Archimedean point that begins in the human body, which aspires to eternal life, arrives from within the infinite, and moves toward the finite. Human birth confirms the existence of God and proves that every one of us was created in His image. Not only were we born in the divine likeness, we come into the world as creatures capable of imparting life. As Yair Lorberbaum articulates, the human who gives birth replicates the image and countenance of God (see Gen. 1:26).9 The importance of the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” and the centrality of procreation reflect the paradox of the image of God that is embodied in the human countenance, for the divine eternal is supported by none other than the finite and transient.
Birth is a miracle because of its fleeting and unpredictable nature. We all die in similar fashion and with absolute equality (Song of Songs 3:19), but our births are completely unexperienced. Consequently, everyone who is born must declare: “The world was created for my sake.” From the moment of a person’s birth, his specific world is created especially for him. As the Mishnah explains: “Therefore but a single man was created in the world […] for man stamps many coins with the same seal and they are all alike; but the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed is He, has stamped every man with the seal of the first man, but none resembles the other. Therefore, everyone must say, ‘The world was created for my sake.’”10 The moment that life bursts forth is the expanse in which the person stands as “single” – unique – before God.
Despite this, the pole of death cannot easily be exchanged with that of birth. Poetry, literature, and philosophy teach that not only does death give meaning to life, but the totality of cardinal events that occur within life owes its import to death. Death gives meaning to longing, love, and desire; to the sense of missed opportunity; and to the preference of yearning over realization. It symbolizes the eternal, the unattainable. What then can the “existentialism of birth” offer the romantic consciousness, the force of which lies in the longings and lack with which it is so full, in the face of its partial and compromising reality?
Various schools in Jewish culture (like the eastern religions, which do this in a different manner) raise the revolutionary cry to centralize the present, to realize to the greatest degree possible what is, out of an understanding of the singular, one-time nature of each individual birth. Precisely because humans are born without their consent, each person must decipher the mystery of his birth. As the Mishnah states: “Without your consent you were born, without your consent you live, without your consent you will die, and without your consent you will in the future have to give an account and reckoning before the Supreme King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He” (M. Avot 4:22). The Rabbis offer an alternative to lack and longing through an awareness of necessity. They openly proclaim the relinquishment required of a living person, and the consent to accept the fundamental partiality of reality. Humans did not choose to live, and in consequence our births and lives are perceived as unique.
These rabbinic traditions can be seen as a development of pre-Socratic conceptions and the doctrine of Pythagoras, who argued that “being,” from the time that it exists, will never be able to return to “not being.” Birth is depicted as the moment at which a person passes from the realm of the hidden and latent “not being” – in which everything is possible – to that of “being,” with its restrictions and laws. Unlike, however, Parmenides, who postulated that “being” always was, with no possibility of alteration, the Rabbis maintain that “being” develops and continues to be born. The Zohar amplifies the notion of birth as continuous coming-into-being. In numerous expositions, birth reflects the parallel process of the descent of the individual soul to the world, and of the birth of the Sefirot and their descent from Ein-Sof (lit., “infinity,” a positive appellation for the Godhead) to reality in a process known as atzilut (“emanation”). Aware of the paradoxical necessity of our being born, the Zohar conveys how the souls descend from the “treasury of souls” in the womb of Binah (the Great Mother and upper womb) to the mundane world in a process both tragic and stirring. This is so because on its way down the soul is clothed in the body and in the kelipot (husks symbolizing the power of evil), precautionary measures, and prohibitions – the vessels which are to nourish it in this world:
So He hewed from His Throne all the souls destined to be placed within them, and He fashioned above a certain storehouse, where all the souls hewn from His Throne reside, and He called it Body of Souls. Why is it called Body of Souls? Rabbi Bo explained, “Because when all the souls depart this world, the blessed Holy One prepares for them the form of bodies – just as they were in this world – and places them in this storehouse.”11
The Kabbalists underline that God issues a personal invitation to the soul to leave its supernal place and enter the body designated for it. This is a medieval amplification of the “treasury of souls” imagery, which is mentioned in compositions such as Hazon Ezra, 2 Baruch, and the Babylonian Talmud, all of which were additionally influenced by Platonic conceptions regarding gilgul (“reincarnation”), the eternity of the soul, and the doctrine of anamnesis.12 In the description of the descent of the soul to the world, the Kabbalists express the anxieties bound up with birth, and correlate it with the process of expulsion and fall to a dark and threatening land, as stated in Zohar Hadash (46d–47a):
Come and see: When they were created, they were garbed in a holy, supernal form of luminosity in the Upper Garden of Eden, and in another holy form in the Lower Garden of Eden […] Two angels say to them, “The blessed Holy One said, ‘Go you forth from your land, from your birthplace, from the house of your father, to a land that I will show you’ (Genesis 12:1).” From your land – the Lower Garden of Eden. From the house of your father – the Upper Garden of Eden. To a land that I will show you – a dark, base land [the human body!]. They show him the entire Garden of Eden, and they show him palaces and houses, supernal chambers. Then they pluck him out of the Garden of Eden, traveling with him to hell, a pillar of cloud above his head accompanying him by day, a pillar of fire by night […] They take him farther, showing him all the compartments of hell, and they proclaim, “All humanity shall enter here, even those who are exempt.” […] Come and see: Whoever performs good deeds (positive commandments), each and every commandment that he performed soars upward and stands before the blessed Holy One […] But if you do not occupy yourself with Torah, and do not dedicate yourself and perform the Torah’s commandments, the blessed Holy One will abandon you […] After he was shown all this, and told all about it, one of the two angels – Good Impulse – says to him, “The blessed Holy One said to me that I should go with you, Evil Impulse and I. Swear to me that you will fulfill the entire Torah – to learn, to teach, to observe, and to perform.” He swears to him. Afterward he says, Go you forth, from your land, from your birthplace (Genesis 12:1), to a lowly body, as I have instructed you. At the point that he emerges from his mother’s womb, an angel seizes him by the neck – causing him to forget the Torah – and marks him on the mouth with his finger: “Do not forget the oath that you have sworn to me.”13
Unlike other instances in which the Zohar talks about sexuality and the body in a positive and empowering manner, this exposition emerges from a dualistic stance that is contemptuous of and negates the material, with a bifurcation between body and soul. The call to embrace the eternal nature of the Torah and thereby improve the soul’s fate relies upon harsh threats, such as the preview of Gehennom and meeting the “angel-slaughterer,” who seizes the man by the neck and forces him to fulfill God’s command...