“The enlightened will shine like the Zohar [radiance or splendor] of the sky.” – Daniel 12:3
Following on the last blog which introduced Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, today we delve into perhaps the most important foundational text of this tradition, Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance), often called simply the Zohar. This multivolume opus was written (or at least mostly written) by a 13th century Castilian Jew, Moses de Leon, and reads like a novel while offering an alternative and intriguing exegesis of the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy).1 The main characters of the fictional narrative are a group of first century rabbis wandering Galilee who uncover deep meanings in the Bible through dialectic and from chance acquaintances met on the road. Unlike most texts, this Zohar aims to be obscure in order to induce the reader to decode the multiple layers of meaning within scripture in route to greater understanding.
The crux of Kabbalist doctrine is by way of a refutation of the inconsistency in Maimonides’ philosophical account, to wit, if God is in fact self-sufficient, perpetual perfection, then He receives no benefit from human obedience to divine law. Kabbalists refuse to concede human actions as superfluous and so reinterpret the purpose and significance of scripture. In their view since humans cannot stand the intense light of seeing or knowing God directly, God has revealed Himself in secret form; that is, the true subject of the Torah is God Himself.2 The Kabbalists extracts from the Old Testament a multifaceted God and cosmos arising via a primal explosion originating from a still higher reality called Ein Sof (the Infinite). Consequently God is fragmented from the beginning – particularly God’s male and female elements – and must be reunited through spiritual and moral acts by the faithful. In other words, obedience to the Biblical commandments serves a cosmos-sustaining role.3
God in this presentation differs from other Judaic images (such as Father or King) and is instead an aggregate of ten mythic potencies, characteristics, or entities called sefirot (the plural form of sefirah). These forces engage in a dynamic interplay that composes the Godhead, and which is diagramed in the Jacobs ladder-like pattern familiar to many readers (see next post). Their appearance is described elegantly by Daniel Matt:
“Within the hidden reaches of infinity, in a way that of necessity eludes human comprehension, there stirs a primal desire, the slightest rippling in the stillness of cosmic solitude. That desire (not a change,…but an aspect of reality that has been there forever) draws the infinite well of energy called Ein sof toward self-expression: a becoming manifest or a concretization that begins with the subtlest of steps, moves toward the emergence of ‘God’ as divine persona, manifests its spectrum of energies in the ‘fullness’ of the ten sefirot, and then spills over with plentitude to create all the ‘lower worlds’ including – as its very lowest manifestation – the material universe.”4
(continued next post)
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1Matt, Daniel C., The Zohar – Pritzker Edition. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2004. ISBN 0-8047-4747-4, page xxii.
2Ibid., page xxxix.
3Ibid., page xli.
4Ibid., page xlvi.
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