Before we get to this Talmudic theme, I want to mention one more pardes four-fold idea connected to the principle of Torah as God’s name, because it will make the ideas in next section more clear. Anyway, in Book of the Rational Soul Moses de Leon in 1290 writes
Under the title Pardes I have written a book about the mystery of the four ways, which the title in itself denotes, insofar as it refers to the four who entered the pardes, which is nothing other than peshat, remez, derashah, and sod. In this book I have commented at length on these matters in connection with the mystery of the stories and facts related in the Torah, in order to show that they all refer in a mystical sense to eternal life and that there is nothing in the Torah that is not contained in the mystery of His Names.

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Traditionally, the number of nations inhabiting the earth is 70. The Talmud states that every commandment that is issued from God’s mouth in the Revelation of Mt. Sinai was divided could be heard in all 70 languages. Schloem sees a link between this statement and the seventy aspects appearing in a specific passage of a semi-mystical treatise of the early post-Talmudic period titled Alphabet of Rabbi Akiba ** you do not have permission to see this link **
It reads: All the treasures of wisdom were given over to the angelic prince of wisdom Seganzagael, and all were disclosed to Moses on Mount Sinai, so that during the forty days that he spent there he was instructed in the Torah in all seventy aspects of the seventy languages.
Later the languages component was dropped and the aspects component was picked up by the Zohar which makes liberal use of it.

The different aspects are the discoverable secrets contained in every word. Indeed, the highly esteemed Kabbalist of 12th c. Spain, Abraham bar Hiyya writes “Every letter and every word in every section of the Torah have a deep root in wisdom and contain a mystery from among the mysteries of [divine] understanding, the depths of which we cannot penetrate. God grant that we may know some little of this abundance.”

So, even though the traditional number of aspects is 70, the meanings of the holy texts cannot be exhausted in any finite number of lights and interpretations and the number 70 stands for the inexhaustible totality of the divine word. Not only that, the light and the mystery are one because the Hebrew word ‛or meaning ‛light’ and the Hebrew word raz meaning ‛mystery’ have the same numerical value of 207. In his meditations, the Kabbalist catches a ray, ‛light of the inexhaustible light.’

Now the meaning of the word zohar is radiance. According to Kabbalist Hayim Vital (d. 1620) ** you do not have permission to see this link **
sums up this notion, “The Torah, needs an outward garment of narratives, just as wine, if it is to keep, needs a jar. But it is always necessary to penetrate to the secret that lies beneath them”

Then comes the Palestinian school who flourished in 16th century Safed ** you do not have permission to see this link ** Safed started with the conception that the souls leaving Egypt, ultimately receiving the Torah at Sinai numbered 600,000. According to the laws of transmigration, and the distribution of sparks into which the soul disintegrates, these 600,000 souls are present in every generation of Israel.
Consequently, there are 600,000 aspects and meanings in the Torah. According to each one of these ways of explaining the Torah, the root* of a soul has been fashioned in Israel. In the Messianic age, every single man in Israel will read the Torah in accordance with the meaning peculiar to his root. And thus also is the Torah understood in Paradise.

Influenced by the Zohar the Safed Kabbablists developed the further idea that though only 340,000 letters are visible in the Torah, it is, in some mysterious way, made up of 600,000. Each individual in Israel possesses a letter in this mystical Torah to which his soul is attached, and he reads the Torah in the particular way predetermined by the upper root* of his in the Torah. Another, Menahem Azarieh of Fano, ** you do not have permission to see this link ** one of the great Italian Kabbablists (c. 1600) says in his treatise on the soul that the original tablets at Sinai contained 600,000 letters. The second set of tablets assumed its shorter form, which, however, thanks to a secret way of combining letters, still indicates the original number of 600,000 letters which form the mystical body of the Torah.

So, in sum of third principle category, we have the four-fold PARDES variations, the traditional number of 70 aspects or faces, the Torah as a garment over a body with a soul and the soul being the hidden meaning of the light shining through, and the 600,000 of the Safed School. Now, I just want to make a note here, that this particular section Schloem begins with the statement “ the third principle, which we can now proceed to discuss. This is the principle of the manifold, not to say infinite, meanings of the Torah.” However, in his listing of the three principles he lists the third principle as the “principle of the infinite meaning of the divine word.” So, I’m getting the impression here that there is more to say about the ‛infinite’ side of this principle.

Recall the three principles are – the principle of God’s name; the principle of the Torah as an organism; the principle of the infinite meaning of the divine word.
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* I connect these instances of ‘root’ to aid in understanding what’s being said here.
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Next, we take our principles, and from them we can form 2 questions.

Thanks for your interest BJH. Briefly, as I see it as described by Gershom Schloem in his book On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism.

The Torah as an organism I think is probably Schloem’s term, but he coins it as an expression for the presentation of how the Torah is seen through the eyes of Kabbalah thinkers as it developed over centuries, carrying along concepts taken from the merkabah mystics, and, especially the Zohar.

The Torah is the Name, the root of all things an absolute, but, as manifested in the Torah, it breaks down into the different parts of an organic being. Organs mostly I think. (The ancients, as you know, related the mind to bodily organs, especially the kidneys and the heart.) Each sefirah of the tree of the sefiroth will also be represented by bodily organs, and I believe the tree is the Torah broken down but a complete tree. A sefirah can also be feminine or masculine.

Interestingly, the Hebrew letters, yod, he, vav, he, or in English YHWH, have in Hebrew the numerical value 45, as does the word Adam.

Adam Kadmon is the Adam Increate, or, the not-created Adam, or primordial man. I’m thinking the Adam Increate is another way of expressing the En sof *  Adam Increate is the inner man, unity, as described by Schloem.

The whole of Kabbalah is very complicated given over how many centuries the ideas have evolved. And I’ll submit that on some of the finer details I get a little fuzzy, but that’s the overall picture as I can briefly sum up of what I’ve been able to glean out, and I trust this is solid.

* By the way, note that En sof  begins with the letter Alef in the Hebrew.

BJH1960 said

The Torah as an organism
The Torah is the Name, the root of all things an absolute

I love the idea of it being an organism.  Maybe it’s just the idea of the written word being alive.

  

Yes! Like a tree!

BJH, because you subscribe, you may be interested in Michael Carasik’s Bible Guy blog post on Genesis 2:16 discussing the Torah as it relates to the Tree of Life. It’s interesting material.

Well, don’t rush. It’s really  not particularly explicit in calling the Torah the Tree of Life. Maybe I spoke too soon to be that explicit. But its still an interesting series of posts. (By way of explanation, I’m just searching out a few ideas I have going around in my head about Genesis 1-3.)

I’d love to hear those ideas of yours. Perhaps, a new thread is in order?

Well, I’m not sure whether I really have ideas. I’ll have to let them develop. But what has sparked interest is this. .

In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann takes up the work started by C. G. Jung who began a study on, what he calls in the preface of Origins,  matriarachal symbolism. Its meaning “first dawned on” Jung “in his writings on the psychology of alchemy and the uroboros.”

As a symbol, the uroboros is a two-part whole- head and tail. Of the mind, uroborous symbolizes eternal on-going opposites, as birth and death, fruition and decay; also male and female but these in a transpersonal aspect. The symbol of the uroboros is a serpent/snake wrapped in an around, the shape of a ring which tail comes around to the snakes head. The snake is biting its tail. ** you do not have permission to see this link **

The symbol of the uroborus can be found in many cultures, if not all, and especially its appearance in ancient near eastern cultures was studied by Jung. He  considered it, as does Neumann, to be a mythological “archetype” or primordial image of unconscious mind.

I’ve just begun to read this book. I’ve read the first 100 pages and have now begun re-reading. Page 49 goes as follows.

In Ur and in Erech they found, in the lowest layer of excavations, primitive representations of very old cult images of the Mother Goddess with her child, both have the heads of snakes. The uroboric form of the oldest Mother Goddess is the snake, mistress of the earth, of the depths and the underworld, which is why the child who is still attached to her is a snake like herself. Both become humanized in the course of time, but retain the snake’s head. Then the lines of development diverge. The fully human end-figure, the human Madonna with the human child, has her forerunner in figures of the human mother with her companion snake in the form of a child or a phallus, as well as in figures of the human child with the big snake.

The uroboros as a ring-snake, for instance the Babylonian Tiamat and Chaos Serpent, or the Leviathan who, as the ocean, “twines his girdle of waves about the lands,” later divides, or is divided, into two.

When the Great Mother assumes human form, the masculine part of the uroboros — the snakelike phallus-demon-appears beside her as the residuum of the originally bisexual nature of the uroboros.

Now it is characteristic that the phallic youths, the vegetation deities, are not fertility deities only; as something sprung up from the earth, they are the vegetation itself. Their existence makes the earth fruitful, but as soon as they have reached maturity they must be killed, mown down and harvested. The Great Mother with the ear of corn, her corn son, it an archetype whose power extends as far as the mysteries of the Eleusis, the Christian Madonna, and the wheaten Host in which the wheaten body of the son is eaten. The youths who belong to the Great Mother are gods of spring who must be put to death in order to be lamented by the Great Mother and reborn.

What to think? Immediately Eve in the Garden of Eden of Genesis 3 came to my mind when I ran across this. Who hasn’t wondered how a serpent/snake came to appear. And to what purpose? And then Chapter 1 and the great Tiamat? I think this puts new light on the authors’ intentions in writing these first three chapters of the book of Genesis. To me, instead of being two radically different stories, at the least, we can see both stories can contradict those creation stories told of gods battling it out in the heavens; and each story has its very own purpose and show the authors’ own unique approach to understanding the place and purpose of men and women and their relationship with their fellows and their one God. 

Coincidentally, I’m about to start Genesis in Robert Alter’s translation.

I just re-read Chapter 3 and enjoyed it so much more than the first go through and I did enjoy the first go through.  I really like Alter’s work in all I’ve read of his.

Jill_L said

I so love his style and insights.

At the least balance out some of the analytical psychology The Origins is based on. . I’ve been seeing some criticism that C. G. Jung . . because of his not being an archeologist or anthropologist . .
  

Oh just a small correction. Should have said folklorist or anthropologist.  Makes sense.

So, in this book, (On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism) Schloem does tend to meander through his mind and speak according to what he finds there. His knowledge is vast and I’m quite certain he’s read all of these ancient texts he talks about. And you’ve probably patiently noted, I’m finding it very difficult to sum up and present a coherent post, be it this particular book or its subject. But let me share this bit from the book:

“I have spoken of the problem arising from the radical character of Jewish monotheism and of the danger that the concept of the one God cease to be a meaningful reflection of what is revealed in the fullness of man’s inwardness, and become a mere formal abstraction. But to the Kabbalish the unity of God is manifested from the first as a living, dynamic unity, rich in content. What to the Jewish theologians were mere attributes of God, are to the Kabbalist potencies*, hypostases*, stages in an intradivine life process*, and it is not for nothing that the images with which he describes God are first and foremost images pertaining to the organism. The tree that was originally planted by God becomes an image of God. It is by way of this tree that God’s energies flow into the process of Creation.”

 

*potency – (American Heritage) – inherent capacity for growth and development
*hypostasis – (American Heritage) – substance, essence, or underlying reality
*intradivine – (AI) – often involves concepts of spiritual or mystical experience that connect the divine with human understanding.

He goes on later to say,

“at the heart of the Kabbalah we have a myth of the one God as a conjunction of all the primordial powers of being and a myth of the Torah as an infinite symbol, in which all images and all names point to a process in which God communicates Himself.”

This brings to my mind a little of Spinozan thinking, as I understand it. I think it all points, though, to “inner man” at the very root, which is the first sefirah. So I would think in an almost humanistic sense. Making man the center of creation really. And man can have all these attributes of this tree of life, which is also the Torah. (A tree of death may be found in the final “judgment” or “lower mother” sefirah when she is demonically influenced.) And Schloem says: “The tree of God, which is the tree of the world but at the same time the tree of souls, is spoken of in other fragments of the Bahir.”

I have to include something else interesting he mentions in passing which is the formation of the tree is taken out of the “quarry of repentance”. This makes me ask whether the sefiroth are not each a “stone” from this quarry

The most prominent of the ancient books of Kabbalah are the Bahir and the Zohar.

I’m not finished with the book. I’m taking a little at a time and trying to piece together just where he is going with it.  He’ll reference a number of his own writings, as “I write in”  then the name of the book, such as, Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and the Origin of the Kabbalah. This one, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, is only part of a large body of work.