Disenchantment and Enchantment of the

The Two of

The of and poetic imagery of the offer two different pathways to . Is it possible to embrace them both?

o this day,” wrote Mordecai Kaplan in 1937, “there is no Tintellectually formulated conception which has acquired authoritative recognition in Judaism as the only true idea of God. The inevitable conclusion to which we are led . . . is that the Jewish civilization cannot survive without the God-idea as an integral part of it, but it is in no need of having any specific formulation of that idea authoritative for all Jews.” {By JOEL HECKER

42 | Winter 2011 Disenchantment and Enchantment of the Universe /// Joel Hecker

In making his bold observation, Kaplan, the rabbinical school, I became enthralled by founder of the Reconstructionist movement, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, as it touched on one of Judaism’s fundamental offered a philosophical vision of God and of paradoxes: while the faith needs an idea of a ’s relationship to the universe, as well God in order to exist, this idea can be taken as a religiosity liberated from God’s relentlessly in many different directions. In our tradition, watchful eyes. Maimonides (1135-1204) staked the multiple forms in which God was described out territory that was sanitized of superstitious, all sought to construct a divinity who could magical, and fantastic beliefs. He made me feel convincingly command, love, communicate, that I could stand proudly, maintaining liberal reward and punish, as well as be present values while practicing a counter-cultural throughout all of reality. The different version of traditional Judaism. understandings of God may often appear to be contradictory, but their co-existence constitutes Judaism is unknowable an invigorating element in Judaism. without God and yet God remains unknowable. Two Sets of Stars At the same , while engaged in the “The Many Gods of Judaism” is the glibly intensive study of the laws of meat and milk blasphemous title I chose for an adult-education - interesting material, but not the stuff that course I once gave on different conceptions of makes for great theology - I began to read about God in Jewish . I aimed to demonstrate Kabbalah. The lushness of the kabbalistic that while God was a moving target, Jewish system - its view of God as immanent in the discourse about God is crucial. Ultimately, I created world, the masculine and feminine argued, Judaism is unknowable without God aspects of the Godhead, the notion that and yet God remains unknowable. Therefore, it human beings may influence and enhance the is left up to us to continue to posit models, using power of the Divine - served as a powerful language that reassures and yet strains our challenge and antidote to Maimonides’ often imagination, to strive for the Font of Existence cold intellectualism. that eludes comprehension. Several tensions emerge from the Medieval Jewish discourse has bequeathed consideration of the Maimonidean and us a rich legacy of debate and argumentation kabbalistic world-views. The first tension on the nature of God and its impact on our relates to God’s accessibility; that is, to what life and faith. In the , God-talk extent can we have an experience of God and was a serious endeavor. It went beyond pure the holy, and to what extent is God an ideal to theology and served as the basis of all talk of which we can direct ourselves while it remains holiness, purity, ethics, and the spiritual life. eternally elusive? The second tension has to do In the discussion that follows, I will contrast with religious symbols and metaphors: when we two very different medieval constructs of God: talk about holiness in this world, are we using the rationalist thought of Maimonides and the God-language in the course of religious practice, effervescent visions of Kabbalah. These two or are we talking about supernatural essences conceptions continue to serve as important that run like electrical currents through the poles for orienting ourselves to the abiding natural world? concern of thinking about God today. The answers that Maimonides and the At a certain point in my early adulthood, kabbalists offer to these questions are strikingly theological models that I had internalized different. The former aims for philosophical began to feel unsophisticated and stale. In clarity - a purity and simplicity of conception.

HAVRUTA | 43 The latter find the truth of divinity in lush For Maimonides, positing anything about imagery that morphs from one symbol- God is an act of theological hubris. He carefully cluster to another. The kabbalists, rejecting limits the occasions in which one might describe Maimonides’ radical insistence on God in language: during the reading of the , conceived of ten - divine or reciting rabbinically sanctioned , but emanations - which enable a bridging of the not beyond these. The Psalmist seems to have chasm between God and humanity. captured Maimonides’ idea precisely: “To You, If we hold both conceptions simultaneously God, silence is praise.” (Psalms 65:2) as separate theological constellations that For Maimonides, and for other rationalist occupy the same universe, we are forced medieval philosophers, the very notion of to adopt one of three possible approaches: divine perfection required that there be (1) accept them as contradictory systems no direct connection between God and the that occur in the flux of ; (2) material world - a world containing good things, harmonize them (just as kabbalists through to be sure, but also consisting of sickness and the centuries insisted that Maimonides death, mutability and mortality, corruption “converted” once he understood the truth of and cruelty. By insisting on God’s utter remove Jewish ); (3) recognize the values from our world of experience, God is liberated and deficits of each of these options, using from any diminishment and protected from both sets of stars for navigation. The third the banalities commonly ascribed to divinity of these options, I believe, is potentially the in popular religious proclamations. Describing most rewarding. God’s features, actions, or even His greatness, Maimonides’s God-talk emphasizes God’s then, becomes largely a pursuit of fantasy, absolute transcendence. For Maimonides, the appearing in Maimonidean eyes as petty, entire purpose of the Torah is to educate the literalistic, and childish. Jewish people in the knowledge that there is a God who is utterly transcendent, and that all anthropomorphic statements in the Torah Flames and Fringes are to be understood figuratively. As he states in the third of his famous Thirteen Principles The extreme extent to which Maimonides of faith, enumerated in his commentary on pushed his argument may well have played Tractate of the : a role in the abundance of imaginative and highly metaphorical modes of description of God in the kabbalistic literature produced later We are to believe that He is incorporeal, that in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the , His unity is neither potentially nor actually the canonical masterpiece of Kabbalah, the physical. None of the attributes of matter mystical companions of Shimon bar Yohai can be predicated of Him, neither motion, discuss two apparently contradictory verses nor rest, for example . . . That is why our from chapter 4 of Deuteronomy. Verse 24 reads: sages . . . said: “On high there is neither “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire, a sitting nor standing, neither want nor jealous God.” And yet, in verse 4, the Torah weariness” (BT 15a) . . . Whenever says: “You, cleaving to the Lord your God, are Scripture describes Him in corporeal terms alive every one of you today.” How can someone like walking, standing, sitting, speaking, cleave to a devouring fire? The Zohar expands and the like, it speaks metaphorically. Thus on the nature of the divine flame: our sages said, “The Torah speaks in human Language.” (BT Berakhot 31b) The word has been discussed among the Companions: There is a fire devouring fire,

44 | Winter 2011 Disenchantment and Enchantment of the Universe /// Joel Hecker

Maimonides, Sefer Hamadah (“Book of Knowledge”), illuminated manuscript, Spain, 14th century. The Jewish National & University Library, Shapell Family Digitization Project. devouring and consuming it, for there is fire radiant; the other, a light tinged with black fiercer than fire, as they have established. or blue. The white light is above, ascending But come and see: Whoever desires to unswervingly, while beneath it is the blue penetrate the wisdom of holy unification or black light, a throne for the white, which should contemplate the flame ascending rests upon it, each embracing the other, from a glowing ember or a burning candle. becoming one. This black light colored blue, For flame ascends only when grasped by below, is a throne of for the white - here coarse substance. Come and see! In a flame lies the mystery of the thread of blue. This ascending are two lights: one, a white light, blue-black throne is grasped by another

HAVRUTA | 45 substance below, so it can flame, arousing of connection to God, whether on the corner it to embrace the white light. Sometimes of one’s garment or at the base of the flame. this blue-black turns red, while the white In the zoharic imagination, the familiar ritual light above never wavers, constantly white. of tsitsit is tied to a divine mystery - the flame (Zohar 1:50b-51a, translated by Daniel Matt) that both embraces and devours.

Whereas Maimonides sought to divorce divinity from humanity, the kabbalists entwine The Divine in the Human the human and divine. Contemplating a For the medieval kabbalists, mitzvot are a way burning candle, they interpret the manifold of cleaving to the Divine. For Maimonides, colors and characteristics of the flame as by contrast, the religious commandment sources of mystical secrets. White, at the tip behaviorally conditions the practitioner to be of the flame, represents God’s lovingkindness, conscious of his or her spiritual and social goals. divinity’s purest and unchanging nature, stable In Maimonides’ austere religious vision, features illumination rising above fire’s destructive of religiosity such as holiness and purity do not potential. Red reflects the aspect of God signify aspects of the divine realm that have experienced as Judgment, fire’s potential been translated into the material world. That to burn unchecked. The blue and black, kind of transmutation from realm to realm consuming the wax of the candle, draw on would transgress the inviolability of God’s “another substance below,” the lower realms of transcendence. Holiness is not something that Creation. Miraculously, the nation of is one possesses, but rather that one strives for. able to cleave to the “devouring fire” - red-hot Accordingly, Maimonides contends that and annihilating - because of the ultimately the hereditary priestly classes - the Kohanim protective and illuminative qualities of the and Levites - are not necessarily holier than white flame. other Jews: Holiness is not Not only for the Tribe of Levi, but each and something that one every individual human being, whose possesses, but rather moves him and whose knowledge gives him understanding to set himself apart in order that one strives for. to stand before the Lord, to serve Him, to worship Him, and to know Him, who In this beautiful passage, the Zohar walks upright as God created him to do, links the imagery of the burning candle and releases himself from the yoke of the with the performance of mitzvot, religious many foolish considerations which trouble commandments. The “mystery of the thread people - such an individual is as sanctified of blue” refers to the ritual wearing of tsitsit, as the Holy of Holies, and his portion fringes. In Numbers 15, the are and inheritance shall be in God forever commanded to make “fringes in the borders of and ever. God shall grant him adequate their garments throughout their generations,” sustenance in this world, the same as He and to “put upon the fringe of the borders a had granted to the priests and to the Levites. thread of blue,” so that they “may look upon (, Laws of Sabbatical Year it, and remember all the commandments of and , 13:13). the Lord, and do them.” For the kabbalists, wearing the blue thread meant direct access The priests and Levites lost their superior to divinity, as the same blueness is the point socio-political status with the destruction of the

46 | Winter 2011 Disenchantment and Enchantment of the Universe /// Joel Hecker

Illustration of the Sefirot from Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae Solius Verae (“Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom”), by the Christian mystic , 1609. The Jewish National & University Library, Shapell Family Digitization Project.

Second Temple. Without a Temple, their cultic Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, commonly known positions have become symbolic. Maimonides as Rashbi, is the hero of the Zohar (and its transforms a lineage-based system into a alleged author.) He does not acquire his status meritocracy: what seemed to be metaphysically- through any exalted lineage; his holiness resides endowed positions have become behavioral within him by dint of his great kabbalistic goals. The office-bearers once perceived as God’s insight, his ability to plumb the mystical representatives now signify the religious virtue depths of the Torah, and his closeness to to which all worshippers should aspire. God. While the zoharic texts do not speak The kabbalists took a different tack, explicitly of the incarnation of God in human developing sophisticated descriptions of the form, they push in that direction, a position ways in which holiness comes down into the that would be anathema to Maimonides, world. Maimonides insists on a rigid separation and certainly, in his circles, would have been between God and humanity. The kabbalists cause for excommunication or worse. Rashbi strive to overcome the barriers on the way to is extolled throughout the Zohar as a paragon unification with Him. of humanity, the pinnacle of human ability to In the Zohar (2:94b), we read that Rabbi Yose manifest divinity in this world. greets Rabbi Hiyya (in Caesarea) and proclaims, In modern , Hasidim often feel an “How happy I am to see the face of aura surrounding their , men who have [the ]!” Elsewhere, Rabbi Elazar a legacy of mystical leadership, deep piety, encounters three other and declares and humility. These leaders carry real-world that they are called “the face of the Shekhinah,” political power as well, but the insularity, because “the Shekhinah is hidden within them. intense traditionalism, pronounced non- She is concealed and they are revealed.” (2:163b) conformity with Western beliefs, and practices In another story, “Rabbi Pinhas came forward of Hasidic communities make their foreignness and kissed Rabbi Shimon. He said, ‘Let us unapproachable to most Western Jews. In kiss the mouth of God, perfumed with the contrast, when the Dalai Lama appeared in New fragrances of its garden.’” (3:201b) York’s Central Park, hundreds of thousands of

HAVRUTA | 47 people attended - many Jews, one imagines, this way, Kabbalah imbues the world with among them. In his presence, according to enchantment. reports, one experiences a sense that the Dalai From the 18th century onward, it became Lama is endowed with something profound fashionable for “enlightened” people to and that he is liberated from human foibles imagine that religion would be outpaced by in a way that elicits admiration. His formal science and that the hard reality of human title, “His Holiness,” does not seem to faze the autonomy would emerge. Vestiges of the past, Western, liberal mindset, perhaps because including and , would be swept he has no political power and does not issue aside by the light of reason. The modern era religious directives. would be characterized by its disenchantment of the world, and, among Jewish thinkers, Maimonides would be the undisputed star of Enchantment and the new orientation towards Judaism. Maimonides rid the world of the mystical Disenchantment channels connecting God and humanity, The poetry of the Zohar uses a plethora of leaving human beings autonomous and images to induce an experience of God in the morally responsible for their own actions. world, but its shape-shifting lyricism confounds God’s radical otherness demands humility, our ability to fully grasp its subject. At the same inasmuch as it erases the cosmic significance time, Kabbalah grounds divinity in human of human behavior. Maimonides issues a experience and behavior. Human performance powerful warning, cautioning us to attend of commandments not only creates holiness to our own actions, to be reflective of how in the individual, but has an impact on the we are acting in the world, and to beware of divine realm. For example, in Sefer Ta’amei lurking narcissism. The disadvantage to this ha-Mitzvot (“The Book of Reasons for the approach is that God is utterly removed from Commandments”), the kabbalist Joseph of our existence, serving as a signpost, but not as a Hamadan discusses the significance of eating caring or supportive . The God of the , matzah on the of the Seder: who actively rewards right living, becomes largely illusory. Maimonides’s religion risks becoming, for the majority, abstract or elitist. According to the way of the kabbalah . . . The disenchantment that his teachings demand since that night is protected from agents of may free people of childish relationships with destruction, [we eat the matzah] in order to God, but in doing so they may give up on any uproot the agents of destruction and the evil relationship at all. inclination from the world, and in order to In sharp contradistinction, the world of the inculcate the good inclination in the body. kabbalists, in all its beauty and complexity, is The matzah symbolizes the Shekhinah so a veil through which the truth about God may that the blessed holy One will cause His be perceived by those who know how to look. Shekhinah to dwell there . . . Kabbalistic God-talk is aesthetically lush, in deference to the experience of God’s presence Statements like this assume a sympathy everywhere. In kabbalistic literature, symbols between the upper and lower domain - a pile upon each other trying to expand, rather symbiosis so strong that one region has an than contract, the realm of God’s blessing. immediate effect upon the other. This approach Kabbalah thus offers the possibility of to the commandments pervades the kabbalistic feeling intimately and broadly connected to system; indeed a significant proportion of the world at large. The potential for thinking kabbalistic writing deals with this topic. In environmentally becomes obvious. Community

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is strengthened when people recognize the and the Zohar in particular, provides. God’s latent image of God within the other. Yet the feminine presence, the Shekhinah, is described as dangers of such enchantment are precisely garden, earth, moon, apple orchard, field, rose, those against which Maimonides cautioned. throne, speech, blue light, Tree of Knowledge, Hubris looms large when one can imagine and . Her masculine counterpart oneself intimately connected to God. This God is characterized as fountain, sun, beauty, is so seemingly accessible that one runs the risk compassion, harmony, voice, white light, Tree of of fetishizing religious objects - attending more Life, and Written Torah. This sample of terms to the ritual or the object than to the holiness is a small fraction of a storehouse of symbols and ethics they are intended to inspire. that create word-pictures for contemplating Joel Hecker a divine reality. is Chair of the Hubris looms large In the end, both the kabbalists and Department of Maimonides want to know the unknowable. Modern Jewish when one can imagine In the Maimonidean view, one arrives at Civilization and oneself intimately true theological understanding through the Associate Professor of methodical stripping away of biblical and at the Reconstructionist connected to God. rabbinic embroidery of the unvarnished truth Rabbinical College. of God’s ultimate simplicity. In the Zohar, He is currently one overcomes the temptation to perceive this In Kabbalah, religious metaphors participate working on The world as the true reality through an overflow of Zohar: Pritzker so fully in the object they represent that images, the very multitude of which signifies Edition, Volume 11, they converge with it. The symbol becomes God’s ultimate mysteriousness. Language and a translation and embedded in its physical counterpart; thus symbols are not distancing mechanisms, but commentary on the the radiant face of a beloved friend may be rather invitations to action and experience: Zohar’s mystical perceived as the face of the Shekhinah, and homilies on the Song on a candle, creative biblical , kissing that friend is tantamount to kissing of Songs, Ruth, and wearing tsitsit. Kabbalah’s rich complex of Divinity itself. Skeptical views of religious Lamentations. associations offers a powerful balance for symbols, such as in the thought of Maimonides or Protestant , keep reminding the theological rectitude of Maimonides. At us that these symbols are stand-ins, not the the same time, Maimonides’ commitment to things themselves. what he would consider truth continues to Like Bertolt Brecht pulling back the curtain resonate today as a powerful counter-force to remind the audience that there are workers to the unfortunate enlistment of Kabbalah pulling the strings and moving the props, in support of xenophobia and misogyny, and Maimonides goes to great lengths to expose its appropriation by charlatans, harmless or metaphors at work, lest we confuse them for not. divine reality. God is not really a king or father; The enchanted kabbalistic world-view God does not actually speak or see; nor does provides religious incentive and speaks to a He have an outstretched hand. This is why level of religious experience that Maimonides’ Maimonides cautions against using God’s puritanical theology cannot. Keeping both sets praises in the liturgy as a springboard for any of aims in mind can help construct a living further discussion of divine traits. On the theology that is responsive to the lived religious one hand, his religious insists on life and the demands of intellectual integrity. a rigorous approach to reality; on the other, it For Jews in the 21st century, embracing the two can denude Judaism of its poetic pull. sets of God-talk enables honest self-reflection The poetry that I am referring to lies in the and responsibility, while allowing for the profusion of images that kabbalistic literature, seduction that only poetry can provide.

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