Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah

New Insights and Scholarship

Frederick E. Greenspahn

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814733363
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

Over the past generation, scholars have devoted increasing attention to the diverse forms that Jewish mysticism has taken both in the past and today: what was once called “nonsense” by Jewish scholars has generated important research and attention both within the academy and beyond, as demonstrated by the popular fascination with figures such as Madonna and Demi Moore and the growing interest in spirituality.
In Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah, leading experts introduce the history of this scholarship as well as the most recent insights and debates that currently animate the field in a way that is accessible to a broad audience. From mystical outpourings in ancient Palestine to the Kabbalah Centre, and from attitudes towards gender to mystical contributions to Jewish messianic movements, this volume explores the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present day in an engaging style appropriate for students and non-specialists alike.

I
Jewish Mysticism Takes Shape

1
Ancient Jewish Mysticism

MICHAEL D. SWARTZ

A number of years ago I asked students in an introductory class on Jewish mysticism to define mysticism in their own words. One student ventured a particularly memorable definition. Mysticism, he suggested, was “stuff too weird to believe.” This statement was impressive not because it is a good definition of mysticism; rather, it exposes an underlying criterion that has often been used, consciously or unconsciously, to designate a given phenomenon as mystical. Modern, sophisticated scholars are sometimes prone to argue that a given literature should be characterized as mystical based precisely on this student’s criteria.¹

At the same time, the very strangeness of a phenomenon we call mystical can be valuable in helping us understand it. This student’s explanation of mysticism has a certain validity in that it reminds us that when we study a religion—especially an ancient one—we enter a different world. Entering that world changes our own familiar notions of what religion is supposed to be about. Indeed, this is one of the attractions of studying the literature of ancient Jewish mysticism.

The study of ancient Jewish mysticism, like most modern studies of Jewish mysticism, begins with Gershom Scholem’s masterpiece Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.² Although scholars had noticed this phenomenon since the 19th century, it was Scholem who brought it out of obscurity and argued that it was an essential part of Jewish history. According to Scholem, the first stage in the long, controversial history of Jewish mysticism was found in a type of visionary literature written at the time of the formation of classical rabbinic Judaism, when the foundation of what we now know as Judaism was being forged in the Mishnah and the Talmud. This is a fascinating possibility, because it means that Judaism during this period was far more diverse than we once thought.

Classical rabbinic Judaism developed in the wake of the trauma of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Its center of gravity is Torah, seen as an active process of reading, study, and debate. Torah is the mediating principle between God and Israel, between creation and revelation.

But in the past century scholars have discovered texts, not only from scrolls buried in the desert but also from the libraries of Europe and the Middle East, that tell the story of a different, though related, form of Jewish culture. This story is one of myth and magic, elements we do not often associate with the civilization of the rabbis. We call these texts the Hekhalot literature, after the heavenly “palaces” (hekhalot), that they describe, and we call the phenomenon merkavah mysticism, for the name of the divine throne that this literature seeks to describe. These texts tell stories of ancient rabbis who traveled through the seven layers of heaven, saw God on His glorious chariot-throne, and conjured angels that gave them great powers of wisdom and memory.³

Although Jewish mysticism is often equated with Kabbalah, Merkavah mysticism developed centuries before the Kabbalah and has little in common with it. Whereas the Kabbalah began in the 12th and 13th centuries in Provence and Spain, Merkavah mysticism developed in Palestine and Babylonia between the 3rd and 7th centuries. Whereas the Kabbalah is interested in the inner dynamics of the divine personality and the abstract and symbolic contemplation of the nature of God, Merkavah mysticism developed before the philosophical and spiritual concepts that shaped Kabbalah entered the mainstream of Jewish intellectual life. Hekhalot literature, in contrast, concerns the concrete vision of God and His retinue and the rituals for bringing angels down to earth.

Visions of God

The authors of the Hebrew Bible believed that it was possible to see God directly in anthropomorphic form.⁴ At Mt. Sinai, according to the Bible, Moses, Aaron, Aaron’s sons, and the seventy elders of Israel ascended the mountain and “saw the God of Israel; under His feet was a pavement of sapphire” (Exod. 24:9–11). In the book of Isaiah, the prophet sees God “seated on a high and lofty throne” (Isa. 6:1) in the Temple. On seeing God’s face, Isaiah fears for his life, perhaps acquainted with the tradition in Exodus 33:20 in which God tells Moses, “no one may see Me and live.” He is then purified by an attending angel. In chapters 1–3 of the book of Ezekiel, the prophet, who is on the banks of the river Chebar, sees God on a traveling throne borne by fiery beings.

These texts were the most foundational sources for the early Jewish visionary tradition that flourished in the rabbinic period. In postbiblical Jewish tradition, the heavenly throne came to be known as the merkavah. Descriptions of the merkavah and the angelic liturgy surrounding it inspired several texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, including a liturgical cycle known as the Songs for the Sabbath Sacrifice.⁵ The ancient rabbis had little doubt that the ancient Israelites had seen God in this way. According to one Midrash, “A maidservant saw at the Red Sea what Isaiah and Ezekiel did not see.”⁶ The Babylonian Talmud tells a story in which Rabbi Ishmael sees God sitting on His throne in the Temple.⁷

But these visions of God are initiated by God Himself, not by anyone who wanted to see God directly. In the apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple period, angels sometimes take biblical heroes such as Enoch on guided “tours of heaven,” showing them where they keep the snow and hail, where they keep the souls of the righteous, and other cosmic secrets.⁸ But rabbinic literature of the next several centuries shows little recognition of those traditions. At what point, then, did Jews think it was possible to ascend to heaven at will and see the heavenly hosts and the divine throne? This question is significant for the history of Jewish mysticism, for one essential element of Jewish mysticism is considered to be the human attempt to approach the sphere of the divine.⁹

Evidence for this idea from rabbinic literature itself is difficult to identify. The evidence most cited for this idea is a cryptic story in the Tosefta, a collection of traditions that supplemented the Mishnah. The second chapter of Mishnah

agigah identifies bodies of religious knowledge that may be imparted only in very exclusive circles of disciples, including Ezekiel’s vision of God. The Tosefta adds several details to these regulations. In the case of Ezekiel, the Tosefta tells a mysterious story about four famous rabbis of the second century CE:

Four entered the pardes: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, A

er, and Rabbi Akiba. One glimpsed and died, one glimpsed and went mad,¹⁰ one glimpsed and cut the shoots. And one went up safely and went down safely.

Ben Azzai glimpsed and died; about him scripture says: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His faithful ones” (Ps. 116:15). Ben Zoma glimpsed and went mad; about him scripture says: “If you find honey, eat only what you need, [lest you be sated with it and vomit it]” (Prov. 25:16). Elisha glimpsed and cut the shoots; about him scripture says: “Do not let your mouth cause your body to sin” (Eccles. 5:5). Rabbi Akiba went up safely and went down safely; about him scripture says: “Draw me after you, let us run; [the king has brought me to his chambers]” (Song 1:4).¹¹

From the early centuries of the rabbinic period to the present day, this enigmatic story has served as a kind of tabula rasa for our understanding of mystical and visionary dimensions of rabbinic civilization. One of the suppositions of these studies has been that if we can decipher this story we can determine if the early rabbis, the intellectuals responsible for Jewish law as we know it, were also mystics who cultivated visions of the divine throne and pursued ecstatic journeys through the heavens.¹² But the story provides precious few details.

We know a few facts about the story. The term pardes, an early loanword from Persian, means “orchard.” Each of the figures in the story is familiar from other rabbinic texts. Rabbi Akiba was one of the founders of the mishnaic tradition and a rabbinic hero, known by tradition as a “Scholar, Saint, and Martyr.”¹³ His colleagues, Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma, are the source of numerous teachings and stories. A

er, as the passage subsequently makes clear, is a term meaning “the other one” for Elisha ben Abuya, who was notorious in rabbinic literature for having been a prominent rabbi who became a heretic.¹⁴ But what is this pardes—a physical place, a metaphor of some sort, or a term for a spiritual state or supernatural location? What exactly did three of the four rabbis “glimpse”? Why did those three meet with tragic fates—assuming that “cutting the shoots” means some form of transgression?

Later rabbinic traditions are of little help in understanding the original meaning of this story. The Tosefta and the Palestinian Talmud follow the story with further stories that suggest only that the pardes, whether a real place or a metaphor for a kind of activity, is fraught with danger. At the same time, the story does not discourage the reader entirely from entering it. The story implies that if one is somehow like Rabbi Akiba, entry to the pardes is possible. But the variety of interpretations they offer suggest that the meaning of the passage was lost, even to the editors of the Tosefta.

A brief passage in the Babylonian Talmud (b.

ag. 14b) leads in a somewhat different direction. After quoting the pardes story, the Talmud relates:

Rabbi Akiba said to them, “When you arrive at the pure marble stones, do not say, ‘water, water,’ as it is said, ‘He who speaks untruth shall not stand before my eyes’” (Ps. 101:7).

It was Gershom Scholem who brought the pardes story to prominence by suggesting that it constituted valid historical evidence for early Jewish visionary practice.¹⁵ Scholem related Rabbi Akiba’s warning about the marble plates in the Babylonian Talmud to a similar passage found in Hekhalot literature. These remarkable texts describe journeys undertaken by early rabbis, such as Rabbi Akiba and especially his contemporary Rabbi Ishmael, through seven layers of heaven, known as hekhalot (“palaces” or “temples”), to the throne-room of God. The rabbis travel from palace to palace, warding off hostile angelic guardians at each of the gates, and finally reach the divine throne-room, where they see God Himself seated on his chariot-throne, the merkavah.

Earlier generations of scholars had argued that this literature was written in the early Middle Ages, well after the ancient rabbis, by marginal groups influenced by Islamic throne mysticism.¹⁶ Scholem showed, however, that the Hekhalot texts belonged to late antiquity. He further argued that this literature represents a window into the inner spiritual life of the central shapers of Rabbinic Judaism. A text called Hekhalot Zutarti describes a crucial moment when the traveler is invited to enter the sixth palace, whereupon it seems to him as if millions of waves of water are raining down on him. But those waves are an illusion, and it is only the marble plates with which the walls of the palace were covered.¹⁷ Scholem argued that this passage preserved the original meaning of Rabbi Akiba’s warning in the Babylonian Talmud’s version of the story and that ...