Kabbalah: New prospectives is the prizewinning new interpretation of Jewish mysticism. Moshe Idel emphasizes the need for a comparative and phenomenological approach to Kabbalah and its position in the history of religion. Idel provides fresh insights into the origins of Jewish mysticism, the relation between mystical and historical experience, and the impact of Jewish mysticism on western civilization.
“Idel’s book is studded with major insights, and innovative approaches to the entire history of Judaism, and mastery of it will be essential for all serious students of Jewish thought.”
Arthur Green, New York Times Book Review
“Moshe Idel’s original, scholarly, and stimulating study of Kabbalah contains the promise of a masterwork.”
Elie Wiesel
“Moshe Idel’s book can help the nonspecialized reader to reconsider the whole of Kabbalistic tradition in comparison with many aspects of contemporary thought.”
Umberto Eco
“There can be no dispute about the importance and originality of Idel’s work. Offering a wealth of complementary insights to Gershom Scholem and his school, it will command a great deal of attention and serious discussion.”
Alexander Altmann
Summary
This book represents a new interpretive approach to this little-known aspect of Jewish religious experience. The author argues that the Kabbalah appeared in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as a reaction to the decline of the ancient mystical traditions. This was brought about by the bold reinterpretation of Jewish esotericism provided by Maimonides, as well as his attempt to replace mystical traditions with philosophical interpretation. Thus, historical Kabbalah emerges as a result of the continuing effort to systematize the conflicting elements of theurgy, myth, and mysticism into a comprehensive response to the challenge posed by rationalism.
Idel offers an analysis of the two major orientations of Kabbalah: the theosophical-theurgical orientation and the ecstatic-prophetic orientation. The author does not provide an isolated approach of the two tendencies, but prefers a phenomenological one that discusses the meaning of the two models and their conditions of emergence, with particular attention to their evolution.
The aim of this paper is both to offer some personal comments of some texts that have remained inaccessible to G. Scholemann and to point out “some of the texts that the scholar has treated hastily” (pp. 43).
M. Idel uses key words such as: esotericism/e oterism, innovation/conservatism, theocentrism/ anthropocentrism, theurgy/unio mystica, philosophy/cabalah, mystical salvation of the individual/national eschatology; these key words are considered of equal importance to the spatial and temporal data that define each Kabbalistic text. The author examines early Jewish sources to emphasize both the concepts of Kabbalah and the mystical techniques it employs.
It can be seen that the first major model of Kabbalah, the theosophical-theurgical model, focuses on two fundamental themes: theosophy, which provides an elaborate theoretical framework of the divine world, and the ritual and concrete methods necessary to enter into union with the Deity. This union is necessary to establish a state of harmony. Thus it is that a new form of theocentric religiosity emerges, which tends to conceive of religious perfection as a means by which the practitioner exercises effective power over heavenly things without neglecting the needs of the human being.
The second major model of Kabbalah, the ecstatic model, is totally anthropocentric in that it conceives of the mystical experience of the practitioner as a summum bonum in itself, paying little attention to a possible influence of the mystical state on the internal harmony of the divine. The theurgical act, here, is delineated in the form of the continuous experience to which the practitioner is called upon to bring his contribution to unite the powers of the Divine; but let us not forget that this is also a theocentric technique. Although the act takes place in the mind of the practitioner, he or she must integrate the ten sephirot at their origin as shown in the letters of the Tetragrammaton.
In his analysis Idel considers that inner mental processes have the ability to activate divine powers through their reflection in human thoughts, which leads to a mode of internalization with the divine, a mystical union with the “imago dei” (image of God). Many of the examples involving Devekut are taken from early versions of the Provençal and Catalan Cabala, or from Isaac of Acre. This is a consequence of the declining interest in Devekut, the Spanish Kabbalah, in the second half of the thirteenth century. This trend also appears in the Sefer ha-Zohar, as well as in the works of Moses of Leon, Jo-seph Ghikatilla, Joseph of amadan, Joseph Angelino. Idel states that the
existence of such elaborate mystical techniques certifies that they were Jewish practitioners; a further argument is the fact that they not only described their mystical experiences, but also presented the techniques they had used. Thus, M. Idel analyzes two basic techniques that were used: nomic and a- omic. Nomic techniques refer to halakhic practices that will be deliberately observed by the Kabbalist. They are also called Pava a, one of its goals being Devekut. In other
words, omic indicates the inner spirituality of a halakhic path that becomes a mystical technique. A- omic practices are forms of mystical activity that do not involve halakhic ones, and in the late periods of Jewish mysticism, a-nomic practices formed the most esoteric part of Kabbalistic techniques. The a- omic practices are forms of mystical activity which do not imply the halakhic ones, and in the late periods of Jewish mysticism, the a-nomic practices have formed the most esoteric part of the Kabbalistic techniques. The scholar discusses four types of mystical tech- niques: weeping, and the ascent of the soul – which ilustrate the perpetuity of the Jewish tradition regardless of the theological doctrines which occurred over the centuries – and the combination of letters and contemplation of colors – which stand for the “the intensive techniques specific to the medieval period.
In theosophic Kabbalah there is also signaled the existence of dynamic and comple structures formed by divine powers called Sephirot, e plained in Sefer Yetzirah (the end of the thirteenth century). Sephirot designate manifestations which are part of the divine structure or are directly related to its essence, serving as instruments or vessels. There are ten Sephirot. Idel maintains that this divine anthropomorphic decade which was employed in the creation process was part of the ancient Jewish thought. The analysis of the concepts of Sephirot has as its starting point their understanding as both the essence of the Divinity without neglecting their interpretation as vessels in Sefer ha-Bahir, and as mode for the divine immanence due to a theory based on the e istence of ten inferior Sephirot which form “the world of Creation” which is identical to our world or directly connected to it. By further research on the theory according to which a determined mystical system focuses on inner experiences rather than on theurgic activity, Idel comes to the conclusion that the entities which need to be activated are no longer the divine Sephirot, but the spiritual human Sephirot.
Therefore the zoharic and lurianic super-structure is not understood as being integrated in man, but, on what David of Makov asserts, through man. According to asidic sources, Kabbalah represents a paradigm of the human psychic and of human activities, rather than a theosophic system. Still, M. Idel points out that the theosophic mystic aims at a clear understanding of the divine entities and the relations between these, by means of fulfilling the ritual deliberately, thus allowing the Kabbalist to transcend the mundane and to e perience the Divine. The link between the Divine and the worldly level may be explained by the theory of emanation: the world of human beings is understood as an inferior e tension of a super-mundane power. Kabbalistic theosophy emphasizes the transcendence of the major concepts which it dealt with, and the employment of the Kabbalistic ritual as the chief manner to abolish the gap between man and the Divine.
The emphasis laid on human activity is presented as an emotional state and not a comple theosophic-theurgic activity; this led to a change of orientation from an elite-based theurgy, which characterized Luria’s Kabbalah, to a popular one specific to asidic mysticism. Taking into account this change, Idel suggests the hypothesis of a wider dissemination of Kabbalah. This will allow us to state that instead of a mystical participation of the Kabbalist in the divine life, we are dealing with a mystical participation of the Divine in the human life.
When discussing the Kabbalistic methods of interpretation, Idel criticizes the fact that contemporary researchers have neglected and ignored the comple relations between the Kabbalist as interpreter and the divine te t, and thus suggesting as alternatives two di- rections in Kabbalah: there is on one hand its symbol- ism, which does not refer to mystical union, and on the other hand its mystical union, which operates as a non-symbolic language. When Kabbalah focuses on psychological processes, or when its theology is mostly oriented towards philosophy than theosophy, the role of symbol reduces e tremely. In Abraham Abulafia’s case, the symbol is completely removed.
Symbolism in Kabbalah may be regarded as a part of a thoroughgoing study for understanding the human activity which is oriented towards the upper world, rather then a revelation of the immovable significance intended on certain words. Idel distinguishes three stages of symbolism: the understanding of the theosophic-theurgic significance of the verse, attaining the human status, and establishing the divine harmony by fulfilling the commandments after one has reached human perfection.
This new way of interpreting Kabbalistic symbolism allows the Kabbalistic e egesis to cast relations in the human world on the inner structure of Divinity, thus offering us a representation of the dynamism in this field. Kabbalah is characterized by the importance shown to theosophy and to the theosophic processes, which is underlined by its symbolism.
Idel claims that in order to understand the higher structures and dynamics of Kabbalah, the practitioner is summoned to take his/her stand in the divine mystery by means of an imitation of these dynamics. The major role of symbolism is that of reflecting the theosophic structure.
Idel succeeds in this vast work in alternating phenomenology, the science of the text, history and psychology so that their blending should help the reader to consider in full the various aspects of the text and ideas in Kabbalah.
The outlook of the Romanian reader on Kabbalah, though quite poor as regarding the domain of the mystic, expands substantially by the amount and the novelty of the information put together in this major work of the scholar Idel, professor at the ebrew University of Jerusalem.
Relevant quotes
“there are two major trends in Kabbalah: the theosophical-theurgical and the ecstatic[…] The first tipe encompasses two central subjects: theosophy – a theory of the elaborate structure of the divine world – and the ritualistic and experiential way of relating to the divinity in order to induce a state of harmony. […] On the other hand, ecstatic Kabbalah is highly anthropocentric, envisioning the mystical experience of the individual as itself the summum bonum, regardless of the possible impact of this mystical status on the inner harmony of the Divine”
“…the Kabbalist was interested not in the perfected text whose author is dead and can no longer respond but in contact with the living Author for whom the text is an intermediary. Even when the pneuma was needed in order to better understand the Bible, the content of this deeper apprehension was, in many cases, a better insight into divine matters. According to the French philosopher, the death of the author is a condition for finalizing the text and rendering it into a static perfection, allowing for a “complete” relation. This request is based upon a rigid attitude toward the contents, which are to be approached when they can no longer change. It is an axiom of the Kabbalists that the sacred text is in an ongoing process of change, evidently a symptom of its inherent infinity and divinity. For them, Scripture is a way of overcoming the post-prophetic eclipse of revelation, an endeavor to recapture the presence of the Author and its nature; the biblical text produces a silent dialogue and eventually even union between Author and reader,..”
“the theurgical approach was part of the classical rabbinic conception of the commandments and could justifiabily be regarded as an important rationale from the mizvot that, inter alia, helped motivate the persistent observance of the commandments by Jews. This theocentric attitude assumed an “open” theology of theosophy, conditioned by the dynamics of human activity; centered on the halakhah, it was a strictly nomian system and, consequently, exoterically open to all Jews and therefore obligatory.”
page 208
“According to the Kabbalist, there are three levels of meaning in the Torah: the literal; the allegorical, which is the intermediary; and the divine or innermost meaning. The author of Sefer ha-Zeruf, like Abulafia, regarded the literal meaning as utterly negative, or even demonic, as it is here; no wonder that Abulafia’s hermeneutics culminated in a text-destroying exegesis that focused upon separate letters understood as divine names.”
