Ellen Haskell For Indiana University Borns Jewish Studies Program Faculty-Graduate Student Workshop Fall 2017 Countenancing God: Facial Revelation and Ritual in Sefer ha-Zohar Physiognomists were clearly wrong when they claimed that they could judge people based on the appearance of their faces. …However, the fact that physiognomists were wrong about many things does not automatically invalidate all of their claims. The same studies that prove that people cannot accurately do what physiognomists claimed was possible consistently show that they were, nevertheless, better than chance. Thus, physiognomists’ main claim—that the character is to some extent displayed on one’s face—seems to be correct (while being rather upsetting). –Michael Kosinski and Yilun Wang1 This image of a human includes all images, and all are included within it… This one, when they look at his outer face –a face that stands before eyes of the heart– they love it. –Sefer ha-Zohar 2:74a2 Introduction One of the many things that makes Sefer ha-Zohar, the multi-authored thirteenth- century Castilian work that became the canonical text of Kabbalah, so compelling is its ability to say and to not say at once.3 Long studied for its influential theology, in recent years the Zohar has begun to yield a wealth of knowledge about topics once thought largely absent from in its pages. Melila Hellner-Eshed’s A River Flows from Eden 1 Michael Kosinski and Yilun Wang, “Authors’ Note” accompanying the article “Deep Neural Networks are More Accurate than Humans at Detecting Sexual Orientation from Facial Images,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (forthcoming). The authors’ notes can be found at the following web address: docs.google.com/document/d/11oGZ1Ke3wK9E3BtOFfGfUQuuaSMR8AO2WfWH3aV ke6U/edit 2 The edition of Sefer ha-Zohar used in this study is Reuven Moshe Margaliot, ed., Sefer ha-Zohar al Hamishah Humshei Torah, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1999). Translations of biblical and Zoharic texts are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 3 For a list of sources regarding the Zohar’s composition, see note 55 below. Haskell Working Paper revealed the Zohar’s accounts of mystical experience. Hartley Lachter’s Kabbalistic Revolution explained Zoharic theology as empowering political discourse, while my own work Mystical Resistance uncovered the Zohar’s role in resistance to Christian domination. None of these topics is addressed plainly in the Zohar’s pages, yet each is an important aspect of the work as a whole. In this project, I turn to another under-exposed Zoharic topic: the Zohar’s teachings on the human face and face to face encounter. These teachings reveal how the kabbalists enlist their own bodies in the production of themselves as mystics– a process inextricably tied to their participation in ethical engagement. The Zohar’s teachings on the human face bring together two seemingly incompatible aspects of medieval Jewish thought. On the one hand, these teachings engage the most transcendent aspects of esoteric revelation, since the face is never simply a face but is always already a window on the divine in whose image the human is formed.4 In this sense, the kabbalists understand the face as a potential site of revelation– a revelation fully realized when the Zoharic companions encounter Shekhinah (the Divine Presence) in each other’s faces. On the other hand, the Zohar’s teachings on the face are tied inextricably to medieval physiognomy and its claim that faces and their features reveal individual character to those with the knowledge to interpret such signs. Physiognomy’s historical role in human subjugation justifiably categorizes it for contemporary readers as a dangerous pseudo-science that inspires unethical conduct. Indeed, the intent of the Kosinski and Wang study quoted above is to deter discrimination rooted in computerized physiognomic diagnoses of sexual orientation. Yet physiognomic interpretation, ritualized through religious practice, was also a critically important method for identifying and training kabbalistic practitioners. Tempting though it might be to separate facial revelation from physiognomic ritual, the Zohar clearly renders them inseparable. This interdependence is most clear in Zoharic narratives about the kabbalistic companions. Rabbi Abba, a sage whose face reveals Shekhinah and shines 4 See Yehuda Liebes, “Physiognomy in Kabbalah,” Pe’amim 104 (2005): 27; Moshe Idel, “Panim– On Facial Re-Presentations in Jewish Thought: Some Correlational Instances,” in On Interpretation in the Arts: Interdisciplinary Studies in Honor of Moshe Lazar, ed. Nurit Yaari , Assaph Book Series, ed. Eli Rozik (Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University, Israel: 2000), 22-23. Idel reflects on the face as revealing a “correlational theology” that associates the human with the divine. 2 Haskell Working Paper with esoteric knowledge, is also a physiognomist who performs miraculous facial healing.5 Rabbi Hiyya reveals Shekhinah’s face, interprets the faces of students and strangers, and conducts spiritual therapy through face to face encounter.6 In what follows, I argue that for the Zoharic kabbalists physiognomic discourse is ethical discourse. Divine revelation emerges from relations among individuals where ethical interaction is foregrounded, and the premier form of relation is the face to face encounter. Facial revelation cannot be detached from physiognomic ritual, because revelatory capability is dependent upon an individual’s moral character, and this worthiness –as well as the training that cultivates it– is for the kabbalists to a great extent physiognomically determined. Yet Zoharic physiognomy, as I will show, is not the same as other methods of physiognomy common to the medieval cultural environment. Instead, the Zohar draws on prior Jewish esoteric tradition and its own unique theology of cosmic dynamism to craft a physiognomy that calls for ethical action even as it recognizes the potential for moral subversion inherent in reading character from physical appearance. Facial gazing, face to face encounters, and the knowledge that emerges from them become premier Zoharic methods for ascribing sanctity and revelatory potential to daily life, cultivating a sense of the transcendent inherent in the familiar that is especially powerful because it is known and practiced through the kabbalists’ own bodies. Dynamic Face, Dynamic Cosmos In the Zohar, the human face is a powerful model for thinking about the self, the cosmos, and the self and cosmos in relation to each other. Social historians, anthropologists, and linguists long have observed that the human body is a complex structure well suited to modeling experiential ways of thinking about other complex structures such as ritual, social, technological, intellectual, and political fields of 5 Rabbi Abba additionally offers many teachings on divine and human faces throughout the Zohar. For examples, see Zohar 1:36b, 1:94a-b, 2:64b; 2:83a; 2:88a; 3:78a, 3:84a; 3:89b; 3:147a. For thoughts on Rabbi Abba’s shining face and facial radiance’s connection to Zoharic mystical experience, see Hellner-Eshed, 306-307. Facial illumination is beyond the scope of the current essay. 6 See Zohar 1:190a, 2:94b, 2:163b, and 3:45bff. In this paper I use “h” for the Hebrew letter het. 3 Haskell Working Paper knowledge and meaning.7 Scholars of medieval Judaism point to the body as a primary model for developing religious and political thought.8 Kabbalistic theology itself relies on the doctrine of imitatio dei, teaching that the human being as microcosm reflects the divine being as macrocosm, and that macrocosm and microcosm are dynamic and responsive to each other. The kabbalists inhabit a conceptual universe in which all that exists stands in relation. The human face is an ideal model for thinking about this dynamic, relational cosmology and its ethical implications, because the face itself is always already dynamic and relational. It is a familiarity that continually de-familirizes and re-familiarizes itself. Patrizia Magli has called the face a “perpetuum mobile” in which “the roles of its individual actors, such as the nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, all belong to the indefinite time of their action, to a fluctuating and unstructured logic, one based on the genesis and relationships between movement, stasis and variations in speed.”9 This inherent dynamism is amplified when one face encounters another, entering into a face to face relationship. For the kabbalists, God also is revealed in dynamic relations among sefirot that form part of a greater whole within the infinity of Ein Sof (Endless God), much as the face is composed of dynamic features.10 The face to face encounter, by evoking 7 For examples, see Victor Turner, 96, 142, 150; Michael Jackson 132-133; Lakoff and Johnson, 40; Paul Friedrich, 36. 8 According to Elliot Wolfson, despite medieval calls to escape the demands of the body, “the flesh continued to serve as the prima materia out of which ritual gestures, devotional symbols, and theological doctrines were fashioned.” Elliot Wolfson, “The Body in the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 95:3 (2005): 480. David Shyovitz notes that for medievals, “‘the body’ functioned simultaneously, and not always, consistently, in overlapping physical, political, and theological registers.” David. I. Shyovitz, A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 74.