Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [44]
For Jews, this process leads first to Torah. The sacred text of Judaism has to be reread to convey this singular message. But how could one even imagine this? On the face of it, Torah seems to be a very this-worldly document, filled with human stories, laws, commandments, and not a word about God alone existing. The transformative effort is indeed a massive one. Every word of Torah, every letter, even the vowel points and the musical notations, has been taken by the Kabbalists to point to the hidden inner realm of the sefirot, a symbolic accounting of how multiplicity in all its forms emerged (and continues to emerge, in each moment) from the mysterious and unknown One. That is Kabbalah's essential truth. The “world of the sefirot” is a mediating realm between the One and the many, a network of chambers through which the simple energy of the One is constantly radiated into myriad diverse forms. Torah too is such a mediating realm, standing (and flowing) between the One, beyond language, and the human community, constituted by speech. Hence it is given the role of transforming our consciousness through its own transformation into the mystical mode, something that seems quite far from it (as from us!) on first encounter.
The seekers of former generations, especially those living in the three great ages of Jewish mystical creativity (thirteenth-century Spain, sixteenth-century Safed, and Eastern European Hasidism of the late eighteenth century), so fully inhabited the language of tradition that it seemed completely natural to them to appropriate it in this way. It was, you might say, their only garment, and they fully and quite unselfconsciously adapted it to serve their own spiritual needs. For the Spanish Kabbalists it was obvious that a particular ritual prescribed in the Torah effected the union of divine “male” and “female,” opening the upper (I would say “inner”) channels so that the infinite energies could flow through them and constantly renew all of life. They understood prayer as a way of “returning all things to their root” in the highest of divine realms. All of these exercises are hierarchical expressions, later shaped into endless refinements and gradations, of the assertion that all things are one with their Source and can be restored to it. Any perud, or separation, from the One (whether taken as real or illusory) is to be overcome by the spiritual efforts of the pious (read: the Kabbalists), who are constantly reinfusing all of being with the energy of the One. This is in effect a new Judaism created by the mystics, who saw their own task as one of clearing cosmic channels and bringing about “unifications” between hidden divine realms. The Safed Kabbalists, especially the followers of Isaac Luria, endlessly sought to identify these channels and formulate specific remedies for the clearing of each. While the channels are described in ontological terms and are thought of as actually existing in the “upper” realms, there was a parallel claim that the same exercises offered a purification of the devotee's own soul and inner life. Hasidism stands fully within this tradition. It turned most of its interest to the inner human channels, changing cosmic activism into a devotional psychology, a way of transforming the inner life. As a popular religious movement, it taught that God can be worshipped— and God-consciousness attained—through the most ordinary human activities. But the Hasidic tsaddik is still depicted as the “channel” through which divine blessing flows into the world.1 This flow of blessing is nothing other than shefa’, the lifeblood of the constant renewal of being, without which nothing could exist. As it comes into the world, it blesses all, especially the community surrounding