Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [35]
From Philosophy to Kabbalah
The Kabbalists (and even if Maimonides may be termed a “mystic,” he surely was no Kabbalist) represent a related, but quite different, elite vision of Jewish spiritual life. They shared with the philosophers the quest for a pure and abstract notion of divinity. Both sought to discover within the seemingly naive biblical/rabbinic heritage a font of profound truth about the nature of reality and the inner relatedness of God, world, and soul. Both understood that this would be accomplished by interpretation of Scripture in a new key, uncovering an esoteric layer of meaning. Like the philosophers, the Kabbalists believed it to be within their power to lift the veils of illusion that imprison the unenlightened mind and discover this sublime truth within Scripture. “Out of the depths I call You, O Lord” (Ps. 130:1) for the Kabbalist no longer means that he longs for God to rescue him from the depths of human despair; rather, it means that he, the mystic, calls God forth from His own inner depths,37 those “places” in which divinity is hidden, and seeks to bring Him close. The person who was willing to walk the straight road of the disciplined religious life, including both the traditional commandments and the mental and devotional exercises prescribed by the particular school of thought, could achieve great gifts of insight, helping to redeem shekhinah from exile by restoring the divine presence to the lower world. While formally both Maimonidean philosopher and Kabbalist might have needed to claim that it was God who bestowed the gift of prophecy or enlightenment, they were united in their understanding that most of the journey to God was one of inward human training, the struggle to purify the mind and spirit.
The intimacy with God attained by such a process is not at all the same intimacy as that of the highly personal relationship with the Other that we discussed above. Here we are talking about absorption within an all-encompassing oneness of Being rather than the grace of being favored by the smiling countenance of the divine Beloved. The Maimonidean sought to align his mind perfectly with the Aristotelian Active Intellect, in order to attain the overflow of the divine mind into his, thus filling him with truth. The Kabbalist, through devotion to very specific esoteric forms of contemplation, sought to have shekhinah overflow with bounteous love, embracing him, drawing his soul “upward,” and energizing the divine cosmos as a whole. There is an important difference between these two; it is only the Kabbalist, influenced by older and more mythic forms of religion, who sees his devotion affecting God and the cosmic order, not just his own soul. The Maimonidean would be quite horrified by such a claim. Yet the differences between them turn out to be quite subtle, shaded as they are by the fact that philosophers and mystics too are shaped by the contours of biblical and rabbinic imagery, which neither is willing to leave behind. The “Root of Roots” of the Aristotelian and the eyn sof (“the Endless”) of the Kabbalist are supposedly not to be seen in personified terms. To do so would be to betray the most essential teachings of these schools of thought. Yet the works of both schools are replete with violations of that seemingly strictly held principle.38 And surely the quest that leads one toward them is described quite passionately, either as fire within the soul or in the erotic language of the Song of Songs.
The Kabbalists resolved this tension between the abstract nature of God and the colorful and passionate religious life by describing a second aspect of divinity in which the endless and indescribable eyn sof reveals itself to contain ten sefirot (“numbers,” stations, or stages of divine self-manifestation), which are filled with all the color, imagery, and mythic/erotic nuance