Jewish Mysticism A Sermon by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Temple Valley Beth Shalom Encino, CA March 1, 1974 (This is a transcription of an audio recording which can be found at www.schulweisinstitute.com) A Hasidic parable. A deaf man who walked down the hall, looked through the window and saw men flinging their arms wildly and shaking them themselves back and forth, and rolling their heads back and fro, perspiring, springing in the air, making all kinds of the grimaces and observing all these wild gestures. He concluded that this was indeed an assembly of madmen. Because he was deaf, he could not hear the music and so he took the dancing as insanity. There is a strangeness in Jewish mysticism. There is an oddness about it for most of us brought up in a pragmatic, rationalistic and utilitarian society. And you and I may not wish to dance its ritual choreography but the very least we can do is to understand the theology, which is the music of mysticism, to understand why it is that some people have this intensity and this passion and this concern for ritual and for liturgy. What does it mean that in the 16th century, Jews, your ancestors and mine, rose at midnight, dressed themselves in black, veiled their heads, removed their shoes, stood besides the door posts, placed ashes from the hearth upon the forehead of their heads, the place where they had placed the tefellin before, flung themselves upon the ground, cried, wept, sobbed, recited the Psalm 137 on rivers of of Babylon, there we sat, there, we cried how shall we sing the song of the Lord in an alien and strange land it. It is true that some thousand years, before Safid, thousand years before the 16th century, there was a Talmudist who said that the night is divided into three watchers, and at each watch, the Holy One roars like the lion. Woe unto me to have destroyed my house and burned my temple and sent my children into exile amongst the Gentiles. And with it, God cries and let's fall in His eyes two drops, which are like fires that fall into the sea. What does it mean that in the middle of the night, at midnight, there is the ritual which now spreads throughout the entire diaspora called Tikkun Chatzot, the repair of midnight? Or if for example you will take hold of any Luach, any Jewish calendar, you will find a little line usually once-a-month called Yom Kippur Katan, which means the minor Day of Atonement, and it is celebrated on the day before Rosh Chodesh, and the day before the new moon, and the day before the new month. And Jews who are of this mystic dimension will fast and will do penance. Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 1 How could it be that a people can make out of Rosh Chodesh, which is traditionally a day of celebration and joy, a day of mourning and repentance. Where does it come from? What does it mean that Hoshana Rabbah, the 7th day of Sukkot, is now transformed by Luria into a day of great severity, a day of judgment when it normally should be a day of great joy? And what does it mean that Jews stay up all night long before Hoshana Rabbah and the Jews stay up all night long, studying Torah on the eve before Shavuot. Stranger yet, at the very burial of the dead, there are ten men who dance around the grave and make a circle, and they recite Psalm 91 against the shedim, the demons, the klipot, and refuse to allow the sons and the daughters of the deceased to attend the corpse, refused to allow them to stand on the place of interment. There is such vitality in this Lurianic Kabbalah. Do you realize that Lecha Dodi and Shalom Alechem of course you know that. That Z'mirot comes from Luria of the 16th century. Do you realize that the idea of the Melava Malka, the idea of having the fourth meal to accompany the queen Sabbath comes from Lurianic Kabbalah? Do you realize that when the first Jewish born fast on the eve of Passover, Tenit Bechor is not an old, old ritual that comes from Luria? And do you realize that the recitation of the Eshet Chayil, the 31st chapter of the book of Proverbs on the Shabbat in the praise of the women comes from the Kabbalah. Now what does this mean? I want to go beneath the fasting and the celebration to understand the passion and the intensity of our ancestors. To understand the mystic mind, you have to understand it the cosmogony of the mystic. How it is that they understood how the world was created. The original theology, the way in which they understood God and man and Israel and history, because Lurianic Mysticism is the last religious movement that penetrated every single corner of the diaspora, Sephardic or Ashkenazic Jews, Jews from Poland, Jews from Turkey, all of them felt the impact of Luria. Now the central idea, the central myth of Luria grew out of the soil of the Spanish exile. This which occurred in the end of the 15th century, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and from Portugal was from the Holocaust of the Jews of the 15th century, a people long rooted in Hispanic culture; a people having produced poets, writers, philosophers, advisors to kings and to princess were now savagely uprooted, forcibly converted to Catholicism. Some were martyred at the Ortedefai. Some who chose to live, even to kneel at the altar and were willing to even hold the crucifix in their hands by compulsion, nevertheless, at night would crawl into the cellars where they would like light the Shabbat candles and at night, when no one heard, they thought, would recite the Shema Yisrael. This is terrible phenomenon, this uprooting of people, this expulsion, this exile, how could be explained? How do you explain the absurdity of the world, the cruelty, the Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 2 humiliation, the suffering, the degradation of this chosen people? And what good is it to read Maimonides or to read Sadgeh, to read all of the rationalists who are going to explain the world in terms of intelligence when the world is irrational? There has to be something else to explain why it is that God who is so omnipotent, so powerful can look at the destruction of innocence and laugh in the heavens. For the mystic of the 16th century, there is amending but in order to understand the meaning, you must not go only to the surface of analysis. You must not go to history. You must not go to the jotting edge of reality. You have to pierce into the inner reality of life. The roots of reality are buried in the soil of heaven. And unless you can understand it that history is born and shaped in the heavens, unless you understand what the Zohar puts, you will not understand the mystery of life. That what is below is above, that what is without is within, and that what is revealed can be hidden. Isaac Luria comes upon a remarkable theological inspiration and he breaks with the whole theory of the tradition of creation. In the early Kabbalah, in the Kabbalah of the 13th century and earlier than that, God is considered to have projected his creative power out of his self, very much likely Neoplatonic philosophers, God is emanating his goodness, God is like a fountain that flows over his goodness and fills the world with his presence. But for Luria, this explanation does not make sense. How could it be, if God is everywhere, if God fills the entire universe, if God is present everywhere, in every nook and every cranny, how could it be that there is a world? How can finite men and women live in the presence of the infinite? Or to put it much more simply, how if the world is full of God, is there so much evil, so much hate, so much destruction, so much fear and so much terror? “No” Luria said, “It is different.” And he speculated though speculation was of a kind of a mystical intuition that originally, the world was filled with God but God wanted there to be a world that could exist independent of him. And so he did something which is unheard of. He voluntarily withdrew into himself. He contracted, he concentrated himself. He withdrew himself, from himself into himself. God put himself into exile and he left a space empty, a vacuum, and that vacuum is the place where finite men will be able to live with the ideal of being able to come and to embrace God because of the function of all of life is for men to love God, and there cannot be any love unless there is a division, a separation, a distance between me and God, between the world and God. Here is some great mystic wisdom. You remember that according to the Kabbalah, men, Adam is originally born bisexual, he is male and female. And because he is male and female, and the male and female belong to each other as undifferentiated being out, man is lonely. Until God takes this androgynous, this bisexual being and splits them asunder into a male and female part, and then they can love each other because love requires separation, love requires distance.