Just one more thing, I could recommend, also, Robert Alter’s “Necessary Angels” which is a really good take on Kafka, Benjamin and Schloem. I don’t know if possibly Schloem mentions the painting of Paul Klee Angelus Novus, in his book about his friendship with Benjamin. Alter kind of makes the story a “revealing of the origin of my title to this book” towards the end.

I. RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY AND MYSTICISM

The mystic operates within ahistorical orientation as they strive for transcendence – is this a positive or a negative? Some admire this and some condemn it as a fundamental weakness. Whichever the opinion may be – what is of interest to the history of religions is the mystic’s impact on the historical world, his conflict with the religious life of his day and of his community.

Certain Basic Facts Concerning Mysticism

1. Favored with an immediate and to him real, experience of the divine, of ultimate reality, or at least strives to attain such experience.

2. His experience may come through sudden illumination or may be the result of long and often elaborate preparations.

3. Symbols and Authority in Mysticism

From a historical point of view the mystical quest takes place within a prescribed tradition, where a religious authority has been recognized by the community for many years,

A mystic operates within the content of traditional institutions and authority, e.g.: a scale of values taken over from tradition, doctrines and dogmas in a given community, rites and rituals; different media invested in religious authority – a book or a person, a consensus of persons.

4. Conservative Toward Revolutionary
All mysticism has two contradictory or complementary aspects:
Mysticism has a conservative aspect and a revolutionary aspect, in that, the source of traditional authority while deeply respected acts as the catalyst or maybe germ for mystic revelation and because the mystical experience is by definition, indefinable, the individual mystic himself imposes a framework of conventional symbols and ideas upon it.

In a mystic’s understanding and interpretation, old values acquire new meaning without trying or awareness of doing anything new and may indeed lead him to question the authority he had prior supported. However, here Schloem says that “for the same experience, which in one case makes for a conservative attitude, can in another case foster a diametrically opposite attitude. A mystic may substitute his own opinion for that prescribed by authority. This accounts for the revolutionary character of certain mystics and of the groups which accept the symbols in which mystics of this type have communicated their experience.”

Authority looms large here. There must be an authority at the outset and on-going.

A prophet is not a mystic. Prophesy is considered to be union with the ‛active intellect’ or, with a divine emanation or stage of revelation. The theory of active intellect does suggest something of unio mystica though, not of the ultimate degree; i.e., to formlessness. A prophet receives a clear message and sometimes beholds an equally clear vision which he remembers clearly. His type of message lays claim to religious authority. In this it is fundamentally different from the mystical experience which moves toward incommunicable formlessness.

Robert certainly makes a very interesting observation.

Re: Tradition and Authority
There are also secular type mystics. He mentions Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Richard Burke, Edward Carpenter. The scientific and philosophical theories accepted by the author shape their interpretations of their experience just as the corresponding theories of Buddhists, Neoplatonists or Kabbalists

Whether or not a conflict arises depends on the historical climate and, maybe, the extent of the abrogation of traditional authority.

“The history of Catholic mysticism contains famous examples, and a historian of mysticism can derive little benefit from the attempts of the apologists to prove that two doctrines, one of which has been accepted by the Church, while the other has been condemned as heretical, only appear to be similar, but are in reality fundamentally different. This is illustrated by the history of quietist mysticism as originally formulated by its representatives in the Spanish Church that had changed when Madame Guyon was condemned; what had changed was the historical situation.”

“We find the same situation is Hasidism. When Israel Baal-Shem, the eighteenth-century founder of Polish Hasidism, put forward the mystical thesis that communion with God (devekuth) is more important than the study of books, it aroused considerable opposition and was cited in all the anti-Hasidic polemics as proof of the movement’s subversive and anti-Rabbinical tendencies, But the exact same theory had been advanced two hundred years before by a no lesser mystical authority, by Isaac Luria himself in Safed, without arousing the slightest antagonism. It was not the thesis that had changed, but the historical climate.”

Of course, part of the problem with Israel Baal-Shem is that he would be considered a lay mystic. Lay mystics are frowned upon. All Kabalhistic manuals quote Maimonides’ warning: ‛No one is worthy to enter Paradise [the realm of the mystic] who has not first taken his fill of bread and meat, i.e., the common fare of sober Rabbinical learning. Baal-Shem’s ‛knowledge’ in the traditional sense of the word was very meager; he had no teacher of flesh and blood to guide him on his way. The only spiritual guide he alluded to was the Prophet Ahijah of Shiloh, with whom he was in constant spiritual and visionary contact. His movement finally won the recognition of the traditional authority though, Schloem says, at the price of a compromise).

Another movement by lay mystics – the Sabbatians were unable to gain such recognition and were forced into open conflict with Rabbinical authority.

But if the mystic can stay within the bounds one can win the day. I said I would mention Paul, so I shall quote Schloem again:

“Paul is the most outstanding example known to us of a revolutionary Jewish mystic. Paul had a mystic experience which he interpreted in such a way that it shattered the traditional authority. He could not keep it in tact; but since he did not wish to forgo the authority of the Holy Scriptures as such, he was forced to declare that it was limited in time and hence abrogated. A purely mystical exegesis of old words replaced the original frame and provided the foundation of the new authority which he felt called upon to establish. This mystic’s clash with religious authority was clear and sharp. In a manner of speaking, Paul read the Old Testament ‛against the grain.’ The incredible violence with which he did so shows not only how incompatible his experience was with the meaning of the old books, but also how determined he was to preserve, if only by purely mystical exegesis, his bond with the sacred text. The result was the paradox that never ceases to amaze us when we read the Pauline Epistles: on the one had the Old Testament is preserved, on the other, its original meaning is completely set aside.”

So, there is so much to say here that I’m afraid I would be writing the whole book out, so, I am going to skip to section V and quote [my favorite part because it defines the Aleph]:

V.

“It seems to me that a statement which has come down to us from Rabbi Mendel Torum of Rymanóv (d. 1814), one of the great Hasidic saints, throws a striking light on this whole problem of the relationship between authority and mysticism. Let me try to interpret this statement. The revelation given to Israel on Mount Sinai is, as everyone knows, a sharply defined set of doctrines, a summons to the human community; its meaning is perfectly clear, and it is certainly not a mystical formula open to infinite interpretation. But what, the question arises, is the truly divine element in this revelation? The question is already discussed in the Talmud. When the children of Israel received the Ten Commandments, what could they actually hear, and what did they hear? Some maintained that all the Commandments were spoken to the children of Israel directly by the divine voice. Others said that only the first two Commandments: ‛I am the Lord they God’ and ‛Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ (Exod. 20, 2-3) were communicated directly. Then the people were overwhelmed, they could no longer endure the divine voice. Thus they had been obliged to receive the remaining Commandments through Moses. Moses alone was able to withstand the divine voice, and it was he who repeated in a human voice those statements of supreme authority that are the Ten Commandments.
The conception of Moses as interpreter of the divine voice for the people was developed much more radically by Maimonides, whose ideas Rabbi Mendel of Rymanób carried to their ultimate conclusion. In Rabbi Mendel’s view not even the first two Commandments were revealed directly to the whole people of Israel. All that Israel heard was the aleph of the word anokhi, ‛I.’ This strikes me as food for thought. For in Hebrew the consonant aleph represents nothing more than the position taken by the larynx when a word begins with a vowel. Thus the aleph may be said to denote the source off all articulate sound, and indeed the Kabbalists always regarded it as the spiritual root of all other letters, encompassing in its essence the whole alphabet and hence all other elements of human discourse. To hear the aleph is to hear next to nothing; it is the preparation for all audible language, but in itself conveys no determinate, specific meaning. Thus, with his daring statement that the actual revelation to Israel consisted only of the aleph, Rabbi Mendel transformed the revelation on Mount Sinai into a mystical revelation, pregnant with meaning, but without specific meaning. In order to become a foundation of religious authority, it had to be translated into human language and that is what Moses did. In this light every statement on which authority is grounded would become a human interpretation, however valid and exalted, of something that transcends it. Once in history a mystical experience was imparted to a whole nation and formed a bond between that nation and God. But the truly divine element in this revelation, the immense aleph, was not in itself sufficient to express the divine message, and in itself it was more than the community could bear. Only the prophet was empowered to communicate the meaning of this inarticulate voice to the community. It is mystical experience which conceives and gives birth to authority.

So to that extent we have a little of the introductory chapter. I want to mention one thing though about the process through which the mystic travels.

”Because mystical experience as such is formless, there is in principle no limit to the forms it can assume. At the beginning of their path, mystics tend to describe their experience in forms drawn from the world of perception. At later stages, corresponding to different levels of consciousness, the world of nature recedes, and these ‛natural’ forms are gradually replaced by specifically mystical structure. Nearly all the mystics known to us describe such structures as configurations of lights and sounds. At still later states, as the mystic’s experience progresses toward the ultimate formlessness, these structures dissolve in their turn. The symbols of the traditional religious authority play a prominent part in such structure. Only the most universal formal elements are the same in different forms of mysticism. For light and sound and even the name of God are merely symbolic representations of an ultimate reality which is unformed, amorphous. But these structures which are alternately broken down and built up in the course of the mystic’s development also reflect certain assumptions concerning the nature of reality, which originated in, and derived their authority from, philosophical traditions, and then surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) found confirmation in mystical experience. This applies even to assumptions that may strike us at utterly fantastic, such as certain ideas of the Kabbalists, or the Buddhists theory of the identity of the skandhas with the Buddha, no less than to the philosophico-theological hypotheses of Catholic mystics (concerning the Trinity for example), which all seem to be confirmed by mystical experience.

Next I plan to cover Chapter 2, The Meaning of the Torah.