In parallel fashion, the process by which the Kabbalists described as the emanating divine energy and divine light was also characterized as the unfolding of the divine language.
Divine attributes and sefiroth = hidden world under 10 aspects
Divine language = divine names and letters = operating with the 22 consonants of the Hebrew alphabet, in which the Torah is written, or, in which its secret essence was made communicable.
This parallel results in an analogy between Creation and Revelation, or, between the sefiroth and the divine language – “the process of Creation which proceeds from state to stage and is reflected in extra-divine worlds and in nature as well, is not necessarily different from the process that finds its expression in divine words and in the documents of Revelation, in which the divine language is thought to have been reflected.”
There is a necessary relationship between the mystical meaning of the Torah and the assumptions of its divine essence. It communicates something in human language, yes, but this is the most superficial of the various aspects under which it can be considered. It’s true nature is based upon 3 fundamental principles:
1. The principle of God’s name
2. The principle of Torah as an organism
3. The principle of the infinite meaning of the divine word.
Puzzlingly (to me) Schloem says the following of these principles: “Historically and presumably also psychologically, they do not all have the same origin.
————-
Robert, thanks for the great stuff!
Stephen, thanks for the Peter Schafer recommendation. I know he was an editor with the Christianity Today periodical.
I believe there is a musical component in Kabbalah or at least a kind of mystic tradition. I believe the word is Nigun.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Thanks for the links Jill. Music often makes explanations unnecessary.
Robert, I thank you for the articles. I downloaded them as PDFs and will read them. Anything titled “Imaginal Astronomical Discourse” is guaranteed to spark my interest. But Kabbalah scares me because it’s so vast. I think in the short term I will stick to Merkabah!
ps: A while back I bought one of those translation/distillation/introductions of portions of the Zohar thinking it would be the Jewish equivalent of a gnostic text. Jeepers!
Here we learn that “Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from ‘sapphire’—pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek σφαῖρα”.
Gershom Shloem’s parents were Jewish German who had left their “Jewishness” and had taken up the German culture. Schloem, along with Kafka and Benjamin who had similar upbringings, went searching for knowledge about their Jewish heritage. He was quite a scholar. Robert Alter writes of the three in his Necessary Angels and their shared interest in Jewish traditions and culture.
Thanks for the links Jill. Music often makes explanations unnecessary.
Thinking about your comment Stephen, I have just attached a couple more links. This from the Chabad site is more defining for in this particular tradition. It’s a little confounding to conduct a search on the site so I’m supplying the links here. (As sloppy as these links are, I haven’t been able to find what keeps my code from working: browser trouble? missing space?)
** you do not have permission to see this link **
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Stephen, why oh why would you want to believe your “spiritual journey or understanding is more advanced or correct than others” (definition found for “spiritual arrogance”).
I’m asking because you told me once in a private message that you would answer any questions about you that I asked. After all these years I feel as though I somewhat know you but that “ardent practice” doesn’t seem to fit.
Judith fear not, I was being ironical and a bit sarcastic. I have pretensions but not this. Believers often accuse non-believers of arrogance. I’ve always found this accusation rather odd since we are claiming a lack of knowledge. It is the believer who claims to be on initiate terms with the Almighty, privy to what the AllKnowing had for breakfast and moreover, what He wants us to have for breakfast. As Robert pointed out, certainty in these matters leads almost inevitably to a kind of “spiritual arrogance”. I am comfortable with having blank spaces on my map. I am excited by real mysteries and unwilling to settle for phony ones.
Actually what I find “scary” about Kabbalah is the amount of cultural information needed to be absorbed before I could have any real grasp of what is involved. There are so many threads of tradition, mythology, philosophy; leavened as always by good old human foolishness; I would despair of beginning a journey impossible to finish even if I spent what remains of my life devoted to it. Better for me to befriend someone making that journey and listen as they report their findings along the way.
This is why I enjoy threads like this one. Jill is going on a journey and sharing what she finds. No one can possibly master everything. We all need as much help as we can get.
What journey are you on, Judith? You may already have in your possession the very word the rest of us need to hear!
Thank you, Stephen.
Brought up by very devout grandparents in a small Virginia town where churches were a major part of life and then living in another small town where almost the first thing you are asked is which church you have joined, it’s a way of life for me to be a believer. At the same time I do not think anyone can know anything about God. I love Jesus. That is the extent of my Christianity now. I am repelled by the churches and by my beloved family and friends’ appalling beliefs. So, I have no words, Stephen, other than to say my faith in the God of Jesus is my most precious possession.
Definitions of time periods: (these are my own definitions taken from Wikipedia):
Hellenistic period – c. 323 – 30
(H)Aggadah – developed in the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods c 170 CE
Mishnah – c. 10-220 CE
Talmud – c. 70 – 500 CE
Theurgic – Songs of incantation
——————————————-
On The Principle of God’s Name
God’s Name: evolving from magical to mystical
In both the Hellenistic period and later the Torah was put to magical use by Jews and non-Jews. Magical names gleaned from the Torah by methods unintelligible to us for purposes of incantation. Certain late Talmudic and post Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic texts indicate the specific use such magical names allegedly taken from the Torah and the Book of Psalms were put. In one text, shimmushe torah literally, the Theurgic Uses of the Torah, the introduction “relates how Moses went up to heaven to receive the Torah, how he conversed with the angels, and how finally God gave him not only the Torah as we know it, but also the secret combinations of letters which represent another, esoteric aspect of the Torah.”
Nahmanides around 1200 in Spain/Provence writes, ‛We possess,’
an authentic tradition showing that the entire Torah consists of the names of God and that the words we read can be divided in a very different way, so as to form [esoteric] names . . .The statement in the Aggadah to the effect that the Torah was originally written with black fire on white fire obviously confirms our opinion that the writing was continuous, without division into words, which made it possible to read it either as a sequence of esoteric names [ ‛al derekh ha-shemoth] or in the traditional way as history and commandments. Thus the Torah as given Moses was divided into words in such a way as to be read as divine commandments. But at the same time he received the oral tradition, according to which it was to be read as a sequence of names. . .
(Which explains why the Masoretic tradition of precise copying is in place.)
The statement indicates the influence of the magical tradition which was far older than the Kabbalah. The Torah is not only made up of names of God but is as a whole the one great Name of God. This thesis is no longer magical but purely mystical. In this view, the Torah expresses the immensity of God’s power, which is concentrated in His ‛Name’, meaning,
“that in the Torah God has expressed His transcendent Being, or at least, the part that can be revealed to Creation and through Creation. Moreover, since, even in the ancient Aggadah the Torah was regarded as an instrument of Creation, through which the world came into existence, this new conception of the Torah must be regarded as an extension and mystical reinterpretation of the older conception”.
So, the Torah is the concentrated power of God Himself, as expressed in His Name.
Further, God looked into the Torah and created the world implying that the cosmos and all nature was already prefigured in the Torah so that God looking into the Torah could see it, though to us this aspect of the Torah remains concealed. In the minds of the Kabbalists, notions handed down in the Aggadic tradition fused into a single idea. The name contains power, but at the same time embraces laws and harmonious order which pervade and govern all existence.
To be continued.
(Further, God looked into the Torah and created the world implying that the cosmos and all nature was already prefigured in the Torah so that God looking into the Torah could see it, though to us this aspect of the Torah remains concealed. In the minds of the Kabbalists, notions handed down in the Aggadic tradition fused into a single idea. The name contains power, but at the same time embraces laws and harmonious order which pervade and govern all existence.
To be continued.)
That sounds a bit like replacing WORD with Torah in John 1.
Jill, sorry to interrupt the flow, but this seemed a good place to pass along this vid from Dr Justin Sledge at his Esoterica channel. He’s beginning an online seminar about Jewish Merkabah mysticism. Details in the vid. Anyone interested be sure to investigate the links included in the accompanying text. It contains the course syllabus, a nice bibliography and some quite interesting downloadable PDFs.
Hundreds of years prior to the rise of the Kabbalah, shaman-like rabbinic mystics were described as having made the terrifying and awe-inspiring descent into the Divine Palaces. There they met with and bypassed fearsome angels with magical codes, gained control over angelic powers, became transformed into beings of fire, gained vast wisdom and mounted the very throne of G!d to carefully measure the vast dimensions of the divine body, join in the heavenly liturgy or be transformed into beings of fire. These experiences and their praxes are recorded in about 50 manuscripts now known as the Hekhalot (lit. palaces) literature. Outside of specialists this late-classical form of (a)(de)scent mysticism is poorly understood and little appreciated. In this course, we will explore the foundations, social origins, myth-world, praxes and the afterlife of Merkavah Mysticism over the course of 12-14 weeks starting Sunday July 20th at 2pm EST a bit like the Agrippa seminar last year.
Course Syllabus – ** you do not have permission to see this link **…
Course Materials & Readings – ** you do not have permission to see this link **…
I’ve been through most of this material in my own reading but it will be very useful to listen to someone go through it systematically. Mr Unsystematic, that’s me!
Colin said: (Further, God looked into the Torah and created the world implying that the cosmos and all nature was already prefigured in the Torah so that God looking into the Torah could see it, though to us this aspect of the Torah remains concealed. In the minds of the Kabbalists, notions handed down in the Aggadic tradition fused into a single idea. The name contains power, but at the same time embraces laws and harmonious order which pervade and govern all existence.
To be continued.)
That sounds a bit like replacing WORD with Torah in John 1.
__________
CONTINUED
Yes, right. Yes, this seems similar to the Gospel of John [c. 90 CE?], The concept following Aggadah which states that ‛the Torah was created 2,000 years before the creation of the world,’ the Kabbalists thought of the Torah as pre-existential and preceding everything else in the world. “For the Kabbalists this ‛Creation of the Torah’ was the process by which the divine Name or the divine sefiroth . . . emanated from God’s hidden essence . . . the secret life of God is projected into the Torah.”
This is sometimes referred to in Kabbalistic literature of the 13th century as torah kedumah, the primordial Torah [KDM = before; ancient times, former times] and is sometimes identified with God’s hokhmah (sophia). “His ‛wisdom’ is the second emanation and manifestation, which sprang from the hidden nothingness”
The idea of the Torah as the Name of God was the starting point for certain other assertions. For example, Torah was identical with God’s wisdom, or, that it was a partial aspect. Schloem spends a little ink on Joseph Gikatila, a leading Spanish Kabbalist at the end of the 13th century who he says was no doubt familiar with the Zohar. He quotes Gikatila.
The whole Torah is a fabric of appellatives, kinnuyim – the generic term for the epithets of God, such as compassionate, great, merciful, venerable – and these epithets in turn are woven from the various names of God [such as El, Elohim, Shaddai]. But all these holy names are connected with the tetragrammaton YHWH and dependent upon it. Thus the entire Torah is ultimately woven from the tetragrammaton.
Schloem speculates Gikatila was influenced by his teacher Abraham Abulafia, a highly respected Kabbalist who said that
the basic elements, the name YHWH, the other names of God, and the appellatives, or <kinnuyim, or rather their consonants, went through several sets of permutations and combinations in accordance with the formulas set forth by the Talmudists, until at length they took the form of the Hebrew sentences of the Torah, as we read them now. The initiates, who know and understand these principles of permutations and combination, can proceed backward from the text and reconstruct the original texture of names. All these metamorphoses of names have a twofold function. They serve on the one had to give the Torah its aspect as a communication, a message of God to man, accessible to human understanding. On the other hand, they point to the secret operation of the divine power, recognizable only by the garment woven from the Holy Names when they serve certain specific purposes in the work of Creation.
[Q. So what is the ‛holy garment’? The Torah? And as a part of creation, by our following Torah, its pupose will be served? And who are these Talmudists and how do they fit it with Hilkiah who found the book of the law in Josiah’s reign?]
That this concept of a fabric woven of names provided no contribution to concrete exegesis did not trouble the Kabbalists. To them, God’s expressing Himself was of primary importance. Even if His utterance is far beyond human insight. Any specific ‛meaning’ that might be conveyed is of much less importance. “So considered, the Torah is an absolute and has primacy over all human interpretations, which, however deep they may penetrate, can only approximate the absolute ‛meaninglessness’ of the divine revelation.”
Certain Kabbalists went further, as Menahem Recanti [c. 1300] who, following the saying ascribed to Pirke Rabbi Eliezar III, “Before the world was created, only God and His Name existed,” Recanti said
they taught that the name here referred to was not only the tetragrammaton YHWH, but the totality of the manifestations of the divine power – this they said, was the mystical meaning of the true name of God. From here [[I think they should have stopped here. Can we back this thing up?]] it was only one more step to saying that God Himself is the Torah, ‛for the Torah is not something outside Him, and he is not outside the Torah.’* Recanti ascribes this quotation to the Kabbalists, and indeed a similar statement occurs in Gikatila’s work on the mystical foundations of the Commandments: ‛His Torah is in Him, and that is what the Kabbalists say, namely, that the Holy One, blessed be He, is in His Name and His Name is in Him, and that His Name is His Torah.’ Elsewhere in the same book he elucidates this statement, drawing upon an old formula from the hymns of the merkabah mystics: ‛It is an important principle that the ancients expressed in the words: “Thy Name is in Thee and in Thee is Thy Name.” For the letters of His Name are He Himself. Even though they move away from Him, they remain firmly rooted [literally: fly away and remain with him] He explains this by saying that the letters are the mystical body of God, while God, in a manner of speaking, is the soul of the letters.
*The statement God Himself is called Torah occurs also in the Zohar II, 60a.
This comparison between God and His Torah on the one hand and soul and body on the other leads to the second principle: Torah is a living organism.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)