The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah

Moshe Idel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110597608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

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 sometime 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.

1Introduction – Theosophical Kabbalah: Complexity and Dynamism

The claim that a divine feminine power may occupy a privileged place in a series of Jewish theologies may come as surprise to some scholars. This is not a reiteration of the common assumption as to the existence of a divine feminine power, known generally by the name of Shekhinah, by now a well-known assumption in scholarship and broader circles. Neither is it a feminine theological approach, attempting to strike a new balance in Jewish thought. I emphasize the term “privileged,” as the texts that I analyze deal with the eminent status of the feminine power within the complex Kabbalistic theosophy that posits ten divine powers. A variety of readers may contest this claim. These include: those who believe in or assume an exclusive monotheism, implicitly of a masculine character, that is allegedly characteristic of Judaism; some scholars of Kabbalah, who attribute a humble role to a feminine power in the various theosophical systems, viewing it as the last and subordinated entity; and, finally, some adherents of a simplistic feminist approach to the question of gender topics in traditional societies as invariably androcentric.

The contents of this work may seem strange, marginal, or counter to clichéd ideas about Judaism that have been circulating in recent generations in scholarly and intellectual circles. Indeed, the ideas addressed below are not in consonance with the rational claims of “Enlightened” Jews or the all-encompassing vision of an androcentric imaginaire in put forth recent decades by scholarly followers of some sort of feminism.

This work may evoke disagreement among those who adhere to what I call exclusivist approaches. Some scholars embrace very broad pictures that, although dramatically different from one academic circle to another, envision some form of conceptual coherence, that is allegedly underlying one mode of Jewish thinking, whether rabbinic or Kabbalistic. Although no serious scholars, to be sure, will subscribe today to a monolithic reading of Judaism, they would, nevertheless, depict some of its religious schools as monolithic or homogeneous, especially with regard to the place and role of the divine Female.1 This is part of modern scholars’ search for unity in the topics they investigate. They hope to enhance their scholarly authority by discovering and critically analyzing undiscovered coherences and thus advance their role in academic, intellectual and social circles. The scholar may feel that he or she is fulfilling a task that is conceptually novel and even contributes to society.

Although scholars often employ sophisticated methods – and discussions about methodological issues abound in recent scholarship – their results, in many cases, are much less sophisticated. In many cases, they posit generalizations, which, they allege, are applicable uniformly to significant types of Jewish literatures. A new, academic Jewish elite thus ensures a scholarly career and eventually a place in society. By forging grand historical narratives or fascinating general or essentialist phenomenologies, some of them marginalize what I see as core aspects of Jewish religious life as imagined or as actually reflected in the literary corpora that scholars analyze. Let me distinguish between the anthropological approach and my own: I contend that by using the same tools, namely the philological, historical, and phenomenological, one may emphasize in a given literature the importance of ritual, namely, performative aspects more than the importance of the ideitic ones. Although observing the behavior of Kabbalists may facilitate an understanding of their literature, one does not need field research in order to discern the centrality attributed to rituals and customs in certain literature.2 In my opinion, the failure to ascribe a more significant role to the divine feminine power is correlated with an essentialist vision that also neglects the centrality of performance, as in many cases, religious rituals were supposedly devoted to the Female. This is the reason for a certain emphasis in this study not only on theosophical Kabbalists but also on rabbinic Judaism.

My work rests on the assumption that one can discern multiple voices not only in the religion that developed over millennia but also in writings of specific schools of thought such as theosophical Kabbalah. Those authors’ main concern was to strengthen a specific mode of religious behavior, one with which scholars often were unfamiliar. The new academic elites in Judaism offer a series of biased visions of this religion, as if they are representative, by dramatically shifting the focus. The performative religious life was subordinated to speculative preoccupations; the image of the corporate personality of the Jewish nation was diminished in favor of the individual one. Many scholars ignored an emphasis on “modest” ideals such as procreation or communal life of the past based on particularistic rituals in order to prioritize a mental or imaginal approach, which is more universal than particularistic. Seeking the “genius” and centrality of Judaism in the domain of abstract forms of thought, the advocates of these approaches forgot the human body and the role played by the community, and to a great extent, also the women. In a performative and communal religious modality, however, women can play a greater role than has been generally acknowledged thus far in scholarship. If the main issue is not multiplication of knowledge but procreation of bodies – and for the Kabbalists also of the corresponding souls – the balance between the roles of men and women, or the divine attributes of Male and Female, necessarily changes. The meaning of a basic theosophical aspect of Kabbalah changes dramatically depending on whether the ideal of Kabbalistic theosophy is the perfection of the divine system, which, as Gershom Scholem claimed, intrinsically contains both male and female in the structure, or it is procreation. He declared that the divine includes the “female as companion to the male, since both together are needed to constitute a perfect man.”3 It is the state of perfection of the theosophical system or of the supernal man that concerns some scholars.4

The picture becomes more complex when we add the national significance of the Female in theosophical Kabbalah, as She represents both the vicissitudes of the people of Israel and their redemption, thus introducing the imaginaire of national perfection, in addition to an interest in systemic perfection and procreation. Last but not least: being a median entity, She is often considered instrumental in revelations of secrets to Kabbalists, as we shall see at the beginning of chapter 7.

This work strives to contribute a complex picture that does justice to the multiple types of relationships among powers within the divine sphere. My methodology, less dependent on certain modern intellectual fashions, tries to shed light on the plurality of voices that informed Kabbalistic and Hasidic material, without ignoring the weird ones or harmonizing them by simplifications that betray stereotypes. In a search for theologies and intellectual systems that can be highlighted and categorized in scholarly terms, academics have marginalized many aspects of the prevalent mundane, concrete, performative, and thus particularistic dimensions of religious life in Judaism, which were also the concerns of most Kabbalists. Most traditional forms of Judaism situate performative religiosity at the center of attention, considering it more important in shaping religious identity than the theological aspects, which were more fluid, and secondary in this religion. A study of Judaism including Kabbalah that is theosologically oriented thus treats only a secondary dimension.

Even in the theosophical-theurgical main school of Kabbalah, a particular school and even an individual Kabbalist may adhere to several different theologies. As depictions of divine female elements represented a figment of human religious imagination – unlike the performative aspects of their life and relatively freer of theological inhibitions – Kabbalists could imagine them in diverse ways. The centrality of the feminine images in the main Kabbalistic schools is the result of the importance of the social-national unit and a search for continuity, attained by performative religious acts; it is less a matter of intellectual coherence, such as dominates Greek thought, for example, or later forms of philosophical religions. The evident multiple roles played by women evoked a more dynamic treatment than that of men; this was reflected also in the theosophical elaborations, which went far beyond the concrete data of social reality.

Human life, especially in more “developed” societies, entails complex relations with external factors: not only family, religious groups, and clans but also multiple professional engagements and participation in civil affairs. In each of these relationships, the individual plays different roles and displays different aspects of his or her personality. Women are naturally multifunctional. They regularly give birth, raise and nourish, and educate; a woman may earn money for the household, especially in a traditional Jewish society where the ideal was for the males to be scholars, all this in addition to being a sexual object. The masculine attitude toward her should certainly be more complex than reducing the male gaze to only one of her activities. On the most basic level, everyone is a daughter or a son, and most people are also husband and wife, father or mother, sister or brother, sometimes simultaneously, other times diachronically. Most people, males and females, thus encounter a variety of persons of the opposite sex, with whom they have diverse relationships, and, subsequently, they embrace more than one attitude to the opposite sex. In other words, an individual woman’s roles change over time and accrue a variety of functions with age; an appropriate understanding of the way they are conceived by others should admit this complexity. Complex situations may generate complex personalities, which have multiple perceptions of the eventually complex other, whether a man or a woman.

Prima facie, this is a commonplace, which need not be addressed in a scholarly discourse; yet, such observations are not totally superfluous. When dealing with the concept of the feminine components in a certain society and literature, or in a vast mystical literature, such as Kabbalistic literature, it is advisable to address very complex constellations of different ideas that vary even in the same culture from one generation to another. The diverse roles played by a mother, a wife, a daughter, or a grandmother are among the most basic experiences and situations in most human societies; although these roles differ, some of them may nevertheless coexist for some segments of a woman’s life. In reality, human identities shift with the years, as do others’ perceptions of them; for example, the perception of the other sex by an adolescent differs from that of a mature or an old person. This commonsense observation thus requires a more sophisticated scholarly approach that is dynamic and less fixed than in recent stereotypes. Kabbalists have been sensitive to this variety, sometime highlighting them by using different terms to account for those diverse functions.5

A concept of the feminine, as with many other general terms, includes a variety of aspects and attitudes, which preclude simplistic generalizations. Using multiple descriptions of the woman, as sister and mother, diachronically and synchronically, reflect her special roles, as is the case with some rabbinic depictions mentioned below or in Chaim Nachman Bialik’s famous poem, cited as an epigraph. Various, and sometimes disparate types of imagery, have been combined to depict the Shekhinah as consoling the poet. Moreover, in this case, Mother and Sister represent not only genetic family affinities but also the imagined role of the affective feminine in her consoling capacity.

Although some of those functions are part of the social imaginaire, known in scholarship as gender, many of them are biological facts, related to giving birth or sex. A given, for the time being, is that men and women are born from women. Because of this complexity, any unilateral depiction by scholars that focuses on only one attribute of femininity, in an effort to rationalize a less family- and nation-oriented modern situation, will thus be at best only partial and potentially misleading, as it will ignore, suppress, neglect or marginalize most of the diverse roles played by women. Religious documents that scholars utilize to reconstruct a particular culture’s approach to women reflect the variety of interpersonal affinities that constitute part of complex social structures. In addition, written documents, which encompass a variety of views found in Jewish culture, sometimes conflicting, and sometimes including conceptual schemes found in other cultures, are occasionally even more complex than social reality.

By taking in consideration the variety of her/ Her functions, acts, positions, and perceptions in Kabbalah, in some cases including creative misunderstandings of the past, an alternate history of the feminine will emerge that is not static, monolithic, mono-causal or unilinear but multifunctional.6 Comprehensive characterizations of human nature, masculine or feminine, or of other human categories, of vast literatures, and nomadic cultures that developed for millennia cannot be simple or one-sided and must include the variety of human experiences as a fundamental fact, in literature and in life. As in many other cases, facts – in our case the various discussions – do not easily submit to simple, abstract theories and any attempt at building an image of a “feminine character” that is allegedly representative of the views of all male Kabbalists, or even a significant majority, is as problematic as what ...